Book Review: Out of the Dragon’s Mouth
Out of the Dragon’s Mouth. Joyce Burns Zeiss, Flux Publishing, March 8, 2015. Paperback and E-book editions. 240 pages.
Out of the Dragon’s Mouth begins with the powerful image of fourteen-year-old Mai huddled in the crowded hold of a fishing boat, covered in darkness “like a burial shroud” as the boat edges past Vietnam into international waters. Soon Mai and her nineteen-year-old Uncle Hiep arrive at a refugee camp on an island off the coast of Malaysia, where they must wait in limbo for the Red Cross to arrange for them to travel to join other relatives in America.
Out of the Dragon’s Mouth is an ambitious and often impassioned novel; Joyce Burns Zeiss’s deep commitment to sympathetically conveying an important and often overlooked story is clear.
The author’s note at the back explains that Zeiss and her family helped to resettle a Chinese Cambodian refugee family in 1979, and she has made multiple trips to work and volunteer at refugee camps in Africa. Additionally, Zeiss drew on the specific experiences of a friend who, like Mai, fled Vietnam as a teenager in a fishing trawler on the South China Sea. April 30, 2015, marked the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and Zeiss’s novel makes a strong attempt to bring life, interest, and compassion to the aftermath of the war, a subject that may be very unfamiliar to some teenage readers. In particular, as stories of refugees remain a consistent but sometimes underreported presence in the news, many of the themes of the book—Mai’s conflicted feelings about leaving her home and her hopes for a better life (and a chance to resume her education) in America—feel contemporary and resonant.
Zeiss’s writing is strong on evocative detail, creating a vivid picture of both the island’s physical features and the beats of life in the refugee camp, from waiting in line for food to the knitting circle formed by some of the teenage girls and young women. Throughout the book, descriptions of water serve as an ongoing motif, whether Mai is trying to sleep to the sound of the waves gently lapping on the beach, or attempting to cross the island in a pounding storm to reach the Red Cross hospital. Particularly in the latter half of the book, when some of the dynamics of Mai’s different relationships with people she encounters in the camp are allowed to unfold more slowly, the cultural and familial dynamics are explored with a lighter hand, relying more on atmosphere and the intuition of readers to glean the unspoken beliefs and fears.
Although—or perhaps because—Zeiss has drawn her story so carefully and respectfully from the details provided by her friend, there are places where the narration sometimes feels too distant or restrained. Mai’s emotions can appear surprisingly muted, or filtered through a narrative voice that explores her thoughts—often themselves digressing to give exposition or cultural references—without a sense of adolescent or dramatic intensity. In some ways, supporting characters—particularly Mai’s Uncle Hiep, friend Lan, and cousin Minh seem both more complex and more convincing than the precisely modulated descriptions of Mai’s internal monologues. Also, some of Mai’s reactions vary so broadly in terms of both her personal maturity and her ability to convincingly observe and interpret what is happening around her. While this may not be completely unrealistic for a young adolescent in a traumatic situation, it doesn’t always come across effectively in the storytelling. There are moments, particularly in her shyly developing friendship with a half-American boy in the refugee camp, where her innocence is conveyed with great sensitivity, but at other times, the narration becomes heavy-handed and occasionally stilted.
The novel’s ending feels a bit abrupt, particularly after events in the last quarter of the book that seem to represent some profound shifts in Mai’s self-reliance, although Zeiss’s blog seems to indicate that a sequel is planned, which will presumably cover Mai’s adjustment to life in Chicago, and perhaps an opportunity for Zeiss to extend Mai’s character with some more visceral emotion and more active choices. But while Out of the Dragon’s Mouth occasionally feels a bit too cautious, the depth of the details and the treatment of an underrepresented historical episode, especially in young adult literature, make it an intriguing choice for readers and educators looking to explore these powerful and relevant themes.