The best thing about this novel, is that it a migration-Vietnamese American diaspora story, without being too overtly so. The focus of the story is more character driven, than migration or cultural differences or migrant angst/mistreatment driven. The chapters are each headed with a name – Minh, the grandmother; Huong, the daughter; Ann, the granddaughter. The chapters told from each of these 3 women’s perspectives fill in the story for the reader gradually, developing the past and some of their secrets. Although the plot development is acceptable, the voices of the characters are completely indistinguishable, except maybe Minh’s is a little testier – maybe intended to be feisty – but Huong and Ann especially, may as well be interchangeable.
Minh comes to the US escaping the problems in 1960s Vietnam, and settled in Florida. She has two children, Houng and Phuoc (a son). Her beloved husband. Xuan, dies young, and Minh brings up the two children on her own. She lives in the Banyam House, in Florida, which exerts a strong pull on the family, and is written clearly intended to be a character in its own right:
But then the Banyam House greets me with its lofty, threatening, patrician air. It’s a mixture of Spanish and Colonial styles, as if the architect couldn’t decide which to commit to. The columns are stately, but the faded pink exterior is even shabbier than I remember, and it was never well maintained to begin with. I can see spots of mildew creeping up the sides, and overgrown brambles patterned along the doors and windows. And out back, looming beyond the house, is that old banyam tree, old and spindly, with branches that grow downward, sweeping the dirt like the hem of an antique gown (p50).
However central the Banyam House is to the novel, however, the descriptions are somehow lacking being vague and lacking detail, so it is difficult to get a sense of what this house even looks like. There is a Banyam tree with a fairy tale associated to it, for the cultural flavour again probably, though it is not a very interesting or inspiring fairy tale.
This is a novel about women, intergenerational, tightly knit. It is about mother-daughter relationships and estrangements. The timeline is roughly about 9 months, the duration of Ann’s pregnancy to delivery, but of course there are a lot of flashbacks over decades. Growing up in the US, Huong makes a poor marriage to a 2nd generation Vietnamese American, and when her husband is violent, eventually she goes back to live with her mother in the Banyam House. Ann is brought up by Minh as much as Huong, and there is a powerful rapport between grandmother and granddaughter. Huong’s only child, Ann, quarrels with her mother and moves away from Florida and the Banyam House. When the novel begins, Ann is with her rich, handsome, landed boyfriend, Noah, but she feels out of place because his family do not hold her in high regard. She learns of his infidelity the same evening as she learns of her beloved grandmother, Minh’s death.
Ann makes an instant decision to return to Banyam House, leaving Noah, not sharing the news of her pregnancy, and not even letting him know where Banyam House is. Noah had been perfect in her eyes before, the life with him was what she aspired to, he had treated her well, showered her with many rich gifts and luxuries, been kind and loving, but had an affair with an old school friend. In one of the novel’s odd contradictions, Ann seems to flip suddenly from Noah being the centre of her life and her world, to disdaining him.
I’ve spent the past few days sorting through my dead grandmother’s things, and Noah has slipped from my mind, like a marble I don’t remember liking all that much. Out of my pocket, rolling on the ground for someone else to pick up. A week ago, the thought of Noah dating someone else, bringing her to our house and introducing her to his parents, would have felt like the end of the world. I would have sobbed for days, Now I’m a shade from indifferent. Relieved, even. Does this make me utterly heartless? (p77-78).
The author clearly thinks Ann is justified because of her bereavement,
It’s just that my grief is laser-focused right now. Everything else feels secondary (p78).
But that is poor explanation for Ann’s callousness; if she had genuinely loved Noah, would she have totally ceased to care for his well-being just because she lost someone she loved deeply?
The novel is unsatisfactory in such contradictions, which are insufficient explanation for key actions and pivotal life decisions by the characters. For example, Huong who is so independent, so capable of making a life for Ann without her husband whom she knows didn’t amount to much, supposedly kept wanting the stereotyped picture perfect family: “I was straining so hard to build what I thought she deserved, that fairy-tale life, where a mom and a dad are sitting together at dinner, eyes dancing over the table as they smile at their child” (p64). But Huong is not a conventional or cliched woman, so why would she have hankered after such a mundanity? And why would this have driven her to such extremes to end up quarrelling with her daughter?
For most part, the novel focuses on the characters and their feelings, rather than on the fact they are Vietnamese American, which is a good thing. Their heritage and culture still shapes them, but not in a reductive manner. There are still the not entirely necessary but flavour-imparting Vietnamese words thrown in like a surface sprinkle – characters calling each other con, or anh, eating chao. More authentically, the grandmother being called Ba Ngoai, the mother being called Me, but these are mere gestures, the cultural heritage does not appear to run particularly deep. Thai does attempt to reflect, to tease out the nuances of living cross-cultures, but the way it is written is a little confused – opaque if you want to be kind about it – and not articulate enough. For example, there is an attempt to reflect on the title, Me, and how it comes across to the native English speaker:
’There, con,’ she’d say. ‘Me will make it better.’ I think of how much the word ‘Me’ resembles ‘me’ when written out. Two different languages, that same connectedness, stretching across the miles (p45-46)
– and so what? What same connectedness, and what is stretching out across the miles?
All this said, for all that the writing lacks the sharpness of originality and the clarity of the natural writer, the novel is an easy, pleasant read. The women characters are strong – the men are almost all quite inadequate – there is a powerful bond between Minh, Huong, and Ann, which is interesting. There are moments of good writing, but only glimmers, for most part, the writing needs a lot more work. But it is still very praiseworthy that the novel has used the immigrant-diasporic story as a backdrop, without making it deterministic. In all, flawed, but I am not sorry to have read it.
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