Even after forty-one years here, she wore American citizenship with discomfort, like a pair of shoes half a size too small. The shoes could fit, yes, but every step reminded her she should not be wearing them, that she should be wearing something else.
E.M. Tran confronts erasure, of one’s family history and culture. Her parents left behind a Vietnam that no longer exists, surviving through the dangerous collapse of Saigon. E.M. Tran grew up with parents who didn’t reveal much about their past before coming to America and the silence that they held about the subject came from a place of pain. You would do well to read the author’s note. Certainly, the adolescent self-absorption she talks about is common to most children, not seeing our parents as people with struggles outside our own, but for children of refugees it’s much harder to absorb facts of lineage. Generally, the extended family is divided, living in another country and speaking a different language. Civil war, trauma, it’s not something easily expressed nor understood. How do you get anyone, let alone a parent, to talk about losing the life they had before? What words can express the feelings of losing your country or how you molded yourself to fit into another? Tran’s novel is a penance of sorts, she tells us so in her author’s note. A means to shape her family history into some sort of recognizable form.
Xuan Trung calls her three daughters’ the night before Lunar New Year, a tradition of hers, to give them their horoscope. She has diligently studied from a book and Zodiac calendar with moon phases she bought from a Vietnamese bookstore in New Orleans. She calls them in their birth order, just like in a zodiac origin story, feeling herself akin to the Jade Emperor. She sees her three children as being the animals in the myth who fight their way to be first in heaven. Trac, Nhi and Trieu aren’t interested in their mother’s prophecies any more than they are in learning how to cook Vietnamese dishes, despite Xuan’s insistence. Xuan consults the yearly horoscopes out of love and care with the hopes of thwarting off danger, disaster, financial ruin, and to avoid missing out on opportunities. If only her children understood. She has given up so many things in her life, even the beauty pageant she won in Vietnam, and when she and Cuong moved into their only home in America, she bought a cheap trophy as a reminder, leaving it to sit on her fireplace mantel. There is a gleam of pride to what life was like before, when she was a beauty queen.
Eldest daughter Trac, born in the year of the goat, is a lawyer working long hours and fearful of never measuring up. A dutiful Vietnamese daughter would marry a successful man, produce healthy children, but she doesn’t want those traditional trappings. Their father, Cuong, feels disappointed that his girls have grown up as American children not caring about being Vietnamese, blaming himself for providing them with all the American opportunities. He pushes things on them they don’t want, good intentions or not. What Trac wants is Belinda, but she is too afraid to admit this. Nhi, year of the tiger, is in Vietnam, a contestant on a bachelor dating show, which is beginning to feel very contrived when she is chosen for the solo date. She thinks a lot about what it means to be an Asian in the industry. Youngest, Trieu, is the writer in the family feeling it may be the thing to make her feel equal to her successful, older sisters. She is embarrassed to realize how far away she is from her Vietnamese roots, no longer fluent as she was as a child. According to her mother, she used to speak Vietnamese perfectly well, but Trieu can’t say if this is fact or fiction. Her recollections aren’t strong, and she wants to understand more about her culture, even if at times her mother’s fantasies about what being a dragon means, that Trieu should be naturally good a many creative endeavors), can feel like a curse. This family has faced the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, war,
Xuan’s youth is shared in Part II, with her mother Tien’s worries, also a woman who relies on fortune telling, divination. Xuan too felt she couldn’t live up to her own mother’s expectations, demands. Tien certainly doesn’t think beauty pageants are worth anything, in fact, she views them as a waste of time, but she sees bigger troubles on the horizon. Could Tien have been right? This is the point in the story where the women in the family line reaches into the past, as far back as 226 AD. It is a brave and harrowing telling of their lives. They are all connected but the opportunities Xuan’s daughters have are things the women who came before them could never imagine. It is a novel that asks what we owe our ancestors, our parents, how culture or erasing it molds us, and why those who came before us, the very people who made us, sometimes avoid sharing the memories of the past. Is it a necessary evil to shed your former identity to fit into your new country? It was interesting reading about the mythology and beliefs, easy to understand how deeply embedded they can become and how hurtful your children’s dismissal of such things can feel. The book also measures how it feels to be torn between two cultures for children of refugees and immigrants. Good read.
Published October 11, 2022
Harlequin Trade Publishing
Hanover Square Press
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