The story of Vietnamese independence begins not with Ho Chi Minh's victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu, nor with the Fall of Saigon and the reunification of the country in 1975, but two thousand years earlier, with two sisters from a tiny kingdom by the Red River. The story is both familiar and fresh, about a people — united under a federation of city states and led by charismatic revolutionaries —deciding to wage war against their colonizers.
In Phong Nguyen's indelible rendering, Bronze Drum resurrects an early segment of Vietnamese history that both evokes and subverts the founding myth of the United States. The revolutionaries in this story are not white men expounding on the principles of individual liberty while ignoring the harsh realities of slavery, but clear-eyed Southeast Asian women who understand the cost of war and the fraught legacy of peace. The sisters' short-lived quest for independence actually brings on nine centuries of direct Chinese rule, but also heralds Vietnam's spirit of resistance that persists through the millennia.
