Soldier, Lily, Peace and Pearls

Description

Short Synopsis of Soldier, Lily, Peace and PearlsThe novel begins in 1994 with the decision of Dr. Han Thieu, who is terminally ill with cancer, to secretly take her own life. She does this in the belief that it will spare her family the impact of her drawn-out death. The chapter alludes to the main characters in the novel and to the traumas that her family has already undergone. Her daughter Minh Chau is one of the three protagonists in the novel.The novel then goes back to April 1975 when the communist forces in Cambodia and South Vietnam take power. The lives of the eight-year-old Vietnamese-Chinese boy, Quan Phoc, in Phnom Penh and of Han Thieu’s two-year-old daughter Minh Chau in Saigon change radically when the two cities fall to the Communists. The Khmer Rouge send Quan’s family to a collective farm in the distant countryside. Quan’s father is worked and starved to death and his mother is brutally raped to death. Quan and his sister, Hue, survive the farm thanks to Quan’s ability to endear himself to the Khmer Rouge guards. Minh Chau’s family attempts unsuccessfully to flee Saigon. Her father, a South Vietnamese army officer is sent to a re-education camp and the rest of the family is imprisoned. Quan and sister are liberated from the farm when the Vietnamese army invades Cambodia in 1978. Traveling down the Mekong River, they try to escape Indochina by sea. Near death, they are rescued by a boat of Vietnamese refugees heading to Malaysia.After Dr. Han Thieu saves the life of a senior Communist official, the Thieu family are also given a chance to escape by sea. During the voyage, five-year-old Minh Chau is faced with the moral dilemma of saving her sister, An, from death, at the expense of the life of a neighbour and friend. This leaves her emotionally scarred. In Pulau Bidong camp in Malaysia, the Thieu family adopts Quan and Hue, and Quan is assigned the role to protect the girls in the family. When Quan is forced to kill Dahan, a drunken Malaysian camp guard, in order to save Minh Chau and his sister Hue, his chances for re-settlement in Canada with the Thieu family are dashed. The Thieu family go to Quebec City with the hope that the Canadian authorities will later accept Quan despite the killing of the guard. The Pulau Bidong chapters are marked by touching anecdotes of interaction between the camp’s children, the mystery of Chinese traditional medicine and swift action scenes as Quan defends the young girls from Dahan.In Canada, Mathieu Hibou, a soft-spoken university student from New Carlisle, Quebec is asked by his cousin, Marie-Christine, who was a friend of Han Thieu in Saigon, to help the Thieu family integrate into Canadian society. Mathieu devotes himself to the family and helps Han re-certify as a doctor in Canada. The Quebec chapters are a combination of humourous anecdotes about the discovery by Minh Chau and An of their new country. It is also a touching exposé about the hardships and success of Boat People in Canada. Denied entry to Canada, Quan and his sister escape to Bangkok where to survive, Quan becomes part of a Chinese Triad, smuggling drugs into Europe. When the Triad sends Quan five years later to Canada on a mission to check out the possibility of smuggling heroin into the USA via Canada, he is discovered in Montreal by Minh Chau and her father, Voang. Voang convinces Quan to abandon his life of crime and re-join the family in Quebec City. The Triad is outraged when Quan suddenly disappears and relentlessly attempts to find him. For one year, Quan escapes discovery by the Triad, but eventually he is forced to flee Quebec to protect the Thieu family. This breaks Minh Chau’s heart, who then as a young adolescent rebels against her family whom she feels did not protect Quan.In the meantime, Mathieu Hibou has fallen in love with a beautiful Rwandan student, Denise Hazikimana. They marry in New Carlisle, his hometown in the Gaspé Peninisula, with the blessing of his “adopted” Vietnamese family. Minh Chau, one of the flower girls, offers the couple a very symbolic gift. The couple moves then to Denise’s native Rwanda where Mathieu works in agricultural development and Denise becomes a noted TV commentator. In 1994, Mathieu, on a trip to Montreal, arrives just after Han Thieu has committed suicide. Then political chaos strikes Rwanda where Denise, a Tutsi, and their son Étienne have remained behind. Mathieu returns to Kigali to discover that his wife and son have vanished, and Hutu extremists are systematically exterminating Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The death of Han Thieu sends her daughter, Minh Chau, into a deep depression. Her father, Voang, decides that only Quan can bring his daughter out of this depression. He finds Quan, hiding out in British Columbia, and convinces him to return to Montreal to save Minh Chau. When Quan returns, Minh Chau, now 22, throws herself at him and becomes his lover.Mathieu, devastated by the murder of his family, leaves Africa to work for UNDP in the Gaza Strip. Tragedy strikes again when his employee and potential partner, Salwa, is killed after a suicide bomber attacks an Israeli roadblock. Several years pass. Mathieu returns to Canada to work for the development agency of the Canadian government, CIDA. There he finds that Minh Chau, whom he has not seen for many years, is one of his new colleagues. Quan has abandoned Minh Chau the previous year in a jealous fit. Mathieu, now 50, and Minh Chau, 35, resume the friendship from many years ago, and in time, love fills the void in both their lives. The sudden illness of Minh Chau’s father draws them even closer. They consummate their love just before Quan returns from Paris to see his adopted father and to attempt to reconcile with Minh Chau. Quan is discovered by his arch-enemy in the Triad, Tao Tsao, when he visits Voang in the hospital. In a mix-up, Voang is kidnapped instead of Quan. Mathieu tries to save Voang, but is too taken captive. Quan then decides to save Voang and Mathieu by sacrificing his own life.The novel ends in a life-affirming epilogue set in an idyllic park in Saigon.Soldier, Lily, Peace and Pearls is a novel about how human beings confront personal traumas differently throughout their lives, strengthen their personalities in different ways, and experience kindness as the noblest of human actions. It is also a story of love and personal growth—a voyage on troubled waters, with each seeing the others at times from a distance and then in the closest of relationships.The novel is suitable for a general readership, particularly readers attracted to the contemporary history of Vietnam, Cambodia, Canada and Rwanda and to issues of moral dilemma and philosophies of life. It is also romance fiction with the strengthening of mutual attraction culminating in passionate love scenes. At the same time, there are several humourous and entertaining anecdotes in the early chapters when Minh Chau and Quan are still children.