The word em refers to the little brother or little sister in a family; or the younger of two friends; or the woman in a couple. I like to think that the word em is the homonym of the verb aimer, “to love,” in French, in the imperative: aime.
There is a painting reproduced in Em by the Quebecois artist Louis Boudreault (an image used on the cover of the novel’s original French language release) that depicts a cardboard box with many threads coming out of its flaps; the threads twisted and tangled hopelessly together. Author Kim Thúy writes, “If I knew how to end a conversation, if I could distinguish true truths, personal truths from instinctive truths, I would have disentangled the threads for you before tying them up or arranging them so that the story of this book would be clear between us.” If that sounds a little confusing, it’s clearly by design: Em has the feeling of nonfiction — of a biographical investigation into the history of some specific people who survived the Vietnam War; where they came from and where they ended up — and chapters follow a thread of connection from one character to another and another; twisting back and entangling with people we’ve met earlier. And because this format has the feeling of real and messy life, and because Thúy includes information from the historical record, everything about this novel feels true; which is horrifying in the wartime details and often uplifting, as in the care that orphans would show to one another on the streets of Saigon (“In every conflict zone, good steals in and edges its way right into the cracks of evil.”) This is not a long work, the chapters are short and waste no words, and I believed every bit of it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The Americans speak of the “Vietnam War,” the Vietnamese of the “American War.” This distinction is perhaps what explains the cause of that war.
The novel begins on a rubber plantation in what was once known as Indochina, with a white overseer falling in love with the young girl he plucked from the fields to share his bed. The daughter who was born of this union, Tâm, “grew up between Alexandre’s privilege and power, and the shame of Mai’s betrayal of her patriotic cause”. Orphaned when her parents found themselves trapped between rival warring camps, I was actually relieved to read that Tâm’s nurse smuggled her to Saigon and enrolled the girl in school, settling in to normal life. But when the nurse’s first grandchild is born, and Tâm accompanies her back to their old village of My Lai to celebrate his first month of life, they are present when Charlie Company shows up:
The night before, Tâm had lain down a child; the next day, she awoke with no family. She went from artless laughter to the silence of adults whose tongues have been cut out. In four hours, her long, girlish tresses were undone, as she faced the spectre of scalped heads.
Threads twist and tangle and the story visits with orphans in Saigon, with the tragedy associated with Operation Babylift, with half-American orphans being adopted in the States, with these refugees finding one another, and falling in love, and some of them, opening nail salons. (Fun fact: Half of the women who have had nail salon manicures have received them at a salon operated by a Vietnamese refugee. Less fun fact: Those Vietnamese refugees who didn’t contract cancer from the Agent Orange and other defoliants sprayed on their childhood homes probably developed cancer from exposure to the carcinogenic components of nail polish.) But no matter what life brings, how could anyone forget such a traumatising childhood?
Tâm can describe in detail how the soldiers slipped the ace of spades into their helmet straps, sleeves rolled up above their elbows, the cuffs of their pant legs tucked into their boots. On the other hand, she remembers no soldier’s face. Maybe war machines don’t have a human face.
Em isn’t a book of history — it’s a book of people and connections — and although I couldn’t personally say what started the Vietnamese War (or, the American War if one prefers), Thúy presumes some such knowledge on the part of the reader. In the end, though, I got the sense that Thúy was writing for her own community; to remind the Vietnamese people, wherever they find themselves, that although global events had once set the north and south against one another, in the lead up to the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, they would be better served remembering how interwoven their threads remain:
This fiftieth anniversary will confirm in all likelihood that memory is a faculty of forgetfulness. It forgets that all Vietnamese, no matter where they live, descend from a love story between a woman of the immortal race of fairies and a man of the blood of dragons. It forgets that their country was surrounded by barbed wire that transformed it into an arena and that they found themselves adversaries, forced to fight each other. Memory forgets the distant hands that pulled the strings and the triggers. It only remembers the blows, the aching pain of those blows that bruised roots, snapped ancestral bonds, and destroyed the family of immortals.
Again, this novel is quite short, the chapters like snapshots, but I found it incredibly impactful. It may not be to everyone’s tastes, but I have long been a fan of Kim Thúy and Em is a valuable piece in the overall puzzle of her work. Loved it.
