A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is a 1993 short story collection by Robert Olen Butler.
The stories all revolve around a theme, namely: the experiences of the South Vietnamese diaspora after The Vietnam War. Specifically, the protagonists of Butler's stories are South Vietnamese refugees who resettled in the state of Louisiana (most of them in the Versailles
neighborhood of New Orleans) in the months and years following the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War in April 1975. Butler's characters run the social gamut from prostitutes to wealthy businessmen. All, however, are Vietnamese, and all must navigate this strange new land of America while still dealing with the past and their feelings about losing the war.
Tropes:
- Buxom Beauty Standard The narrator of "Preparation" is helping prepare the body of her old friend Thuy for burial, after Thuy died of cancer. But the narrator can't stop thinking about how jealous she was of Thuy, who was much better looking, and specifically had great breasts that all the young men used to look at.
- Call-Back: In "Mr. Green" the narrator remembers how her mother taught her to wring the neck of birds that were headed for the dinner table. At the end the narrator does this with her late grandfather's irritating parrot Mr. Green.
- Collector of the Strange: The narrator of "Relic" has bought one of John Lennon's shoes...not just any shoe, but supposedly one of the two shoes that Lennon was wearing when he was murdered. He describes himself as "a special collector of things."
- Epistolary Novel: "In the Clearing" is, in its entirety, a letter from a man in America to the son he's never met. The man was swept away with the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, and didn't realize the boat he was on was leaving the country until it was too late.
- Finger-Tenting: Doctor Joseph, the voodoo witch doctor that the narrator consults in "Love", "tented his fingers" when considering what to do to hex the man who's romancing the narrator's wife. Doctor Joseph is, of course, a con artist.
- The Generation Gap: In "Crickets" a Vietnamese man tries to get his completely Americanized son interested in the Vietnamese boys' game of fighting crickets. The boy is completely indifferent and his father is disappointed.
- Ghost Story: "A Ghost Story" is about Miss Linh, the ghost of a dead young woman, who has a habit of saving soldiers from moral peril—and then eating them.
- Head-Turning Beauty: The narrator's wife in "Love" was distractingly good-looking and had a habit of walking around with the top two buttons of her blouse open while all the men gawked. The narrator remembers how boys on motorcycles had a habit of running into Fruit Carts because they were distracted, looking at his wife.
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: The narrator of "Love" describes a Vietnamese fast-food restaurant called "Bun Bo Xao", which actually means "Sautéed Beef with Noodles". The narrator finds this insulting.
- An Immigrant's Tale: All of them, as all the stories are told by Vietnamese who have been exiled to America, and each story finds a protagonist attempting to adapt to the culture of their homeland.
- Named Like My Name: "Ted", the narrator of "Crickets" is embarrassed that his actual name is Thieu—and specifically that he shares his name with President Nguyen Van Thieu, president of South Vietnam for eight years, and a corrupt autocrat whom the Vietnamese refugee community blames for losing the war.
- Narrative Profanity Filter: Lt. Binh from "In the Clearing", apparently an educated sort, does not think much of the old myth about the dragon who married the fairy princess and fathered the people of Vietnam."Is this the dragon who slept with the fairy?", he demanded, though the actual words he used at that moment of my own true history were much harsher.
- Narrator: Every story is told in the first person singular, by a character involved.
- Peking Duck Christmas: "Snow" is about a Vietnamese woman working as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, who gives a man an order of chicken on Christmas Eve. She's surprised to hear that he doesn't celebrate Christmas, because he's Jewish. She thought all Americans celebrated Christmas and reflects on how Vietnamese celebrate every holiday no matter what their religion is.
- Present Tense Narrative: "Fairy Tale", about a Vietnamese woman getting by as a stripper and prostitute who finds true love with one of her johns, is told in present tense.
- Scatterbrained Senior: "The Trip Back" involves a man bringing his wife's grandfather, who has just come from Vietnam, home from the airport. They are horrified to discover that the old man has fallen deep into dementia and doesn't even remember his granddaughter.
- That Cloud Looks Like...: In "The American Couple" a Vietnamese couple go sight-seeing with an American veteran of the war and his wife. The two husbands engage in a "war game" that soon devolves into a fight. As the two men brawl, the Vietnamese wife looks over at the white woman, and finds her looking up at the clouds, completely ignoring their idiot husbands.Eileen: This one is the head of a pony.
- Title Drop: Almost every story has the title mentioned somewhere. The first story, "Open Door", refers to the U.S. Army's "open door" program in which defectors from the North were welcomed with open arms.
- Title Drop Chapter: The last story is called "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain". A very old man, near a hundred, has visions of Ho Chi Minh. The old man and Ho were roommates when they were working together in a restaurant in Paris in 1918.
- Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: The narrator of "Love" describes himself as a "wimp" and "not a handsome man", who happens to be married to an extremely good-looking woman because it was an Arranged Marriage between families. He describes it "this great blessing and this great curse," in that she's gorgeous, but he's forever worried about other men making moves on his wife.
