In 1992, Robert Olen Butler published "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain" - a collection of sixteen short stories and one novella. Each story tells of a different person or family from Vietnam.

The collection includes the following tales:

• A North Vietnamese Communist who defected and decided to work for the Americans after the Viet Cong murdered his family.
• A family reunited with the wife's grandfather, discovering that the grandfather has no recollection of his granddaughter.
• The ghost of Ho Chi Minh visits a dying old man. The two worked together in their youth, and they talk of their political struggles and the fate of their country.
• As a spy for the Americans during the war, a husband had unlimited power to exact revenge on his enemies. He longs for this power in America when he suspects his wife of infidelity.

- An encounter with a demonic ghost who saves people only to devour them later.

Although there is no continuity between the stories, they share some common threads. All but one story is told from the point of view of a native Vietnamese (an American living in Vietnam narrates the final story); and most of the characters have immigrated from Vietnam to Louisiana, where they attempt to assimilate into American society while retaining some of their Vietnamese identity and customs.

Butler does a good job contrasting Eastern and Western cultures, as well as the struggles immigrants face in navigating those differences.