historical fiction and social history of Vietnam during and after the vicious atrocities, trauma, and civil upheaval of war. ( )

Back when Ms Thuy won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her debut novel Ru she was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize. All of the authors of the shortlisted books were interviewed for the Prize Gala (remember when lots of people gathered for those occasions) she explained that her writing process was to jot down thoughts as they came into her head even when she was driving in traffic. She lives in Montreal and I have driven in Montreal traffic so I can see that she might have a considerable amount of time to write but I still marvel that she can pull all that into a novel.
This book follows a number of people from South Vietnam who fled after the Communists were successful in the Vietnam War. Some of the characters were adults and so they probably understood how their lives would proceed if they stayed in Vietnam and they made the choice to seek a better future elsewhere. But the title character and a boy called Louis were still children. In fact the girl called Em Hong was still an infant. She was one of the children transported to the US under Operation Babylift and she was raised by a Caucasian couple in Savannah Georgia who called her Emma-Jade. She certainly didn’t make her own choice to leave Vietnam. As an orphan of mixed Vietnamese and white heritage it is probably true that she would have faced discrimination if she had stayed in Vietnam but we’ll never really know. Louis was the son of a black soldier and so would definitely have stood out in post-war Vietnam. In a way he was luckier than Em because he ended up in Guam where he was adopted by Tam and Isaac. Tam is perhaps the central character of this book as most of the others are connected to her. Tam was herself a biracial Vietnamese although she was born while the French were still in power in Vietnam. Her father (Alexandre) was the French manager of a rubber plantation who decided to sexually assault one of his servants (Mai) who had actually come to the plantation to destroy it. Against all probabilities the two fell in love and had Tam. Soon though the insurrection against the French came to the plantation. Tam’s parents were killed but she was saved by her nanny. Her nanny was from My Lai and took Tam back there to live. Anyone who heard the news from Vietnam during the war is familiar with the village of My Lai. Maybe younger readers won’t feel the dread I felt when I read that village name and they are lucky to be oblivious to that dreadful history. Tam survives the massacre and ends up in Saigon where she earns a living by becoming a prostitute. In the fall of Saigon she is airlifted to Guam where she meets Isaac when she becomes his translator. Isaac is from Montreal and is researching the impact of displacement on the Vietnamese exiles. He fell instantly in love with Tam. When the family returns to Montreal Tam sets up a nail salon and the one salon expands into a string of them across North America and then into an international business. Louis works for the business and it is while he is on a business trip that he meets Em. They become a couple and at some point realize that they knew each other in Saigon. In fact Louis took care of Em when she was a newborn abandoned in the slum area where Louis lived much as Louis himself had been cared for by people when he was abandoned there.
Children being cared for by non-biological people is certainly a major theme of this book. One example: “I see Emma-Jade and Louis lying on the ground their heads under the pink granite bench that had been their common home the place where Emma-Jade had landed after the rickshaw driver had taken her away with him. That day the explosion in the open-air bar facing the park had wounded many and killed one a rickshaw driver who had gone to return a briefcase left behind by a soldier client.”
Another theme would be that warfare brings out the worst but sometimes also the best in people. Tam was rescued from My Lai by an American helicopter pilot who saw movement amongst a pile of corpses. And yet that pile of corpses was the result of an order by an American to leave no survivors so babies and women and old people were all massacred.
This is the second book I have read this month that mentions Operation Babylift. Earlier this month i read two separate books that each had crows as a major component. I wonder what the next instance of literary synchronicity will be. ( )

this is like little snippets of fiction prose poetry intermixed with some nonfiction history about the war in vietnam and some specific things that happened there. this was hard to listen to (the author's accent is strong and i had to slow it down at first to make sure i understood her, but also i think i am better suited to slowly read and absorb this sort of content) and i think i would have connected with it more if i'd read it rather than listened to it, even though it's the author reading it herself.

"The Americans speak of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese of the American War. This distinction is perhaps what explains the cause of that war."

I loved this book. The plot and characters are impactful, and the structure of the book and writing are the epitome of ″write short.″ On one level the book is the story of Tam, Emma-Jade, and Louis, three orphans who survived the Vietnam War, the fall of Saigon, and relocation abroad. On the other hand it is the history of Vietnam told in miniature. It is also a reflection of the difficulty of writing truth, especially historical truth:

I′m going to tell you the truth, some true stories at least, but only partially, incompletely, more or less. Because it′s impossible for me to re-create the blue nuances in the sky just as Rob, the marine, was reading a letter from his lover, while at the same time the rebel, Vinh, was writing to his own lover during a brief lull, a moment of deceptive calm. Was it a Mayan and azure blue, or a French and cerulean blue? When Private John discovered the list of insurgents hidden in a pot of manioc flour, how many kilos were there? Had the flour just been milled? What was the temperature of the water when Monsieur Út was thrown into the well before being burned alive by Sergeant Peter′s flame-thrower? Did Monsieur Út weigh half as much as Peter, or two-thirds? Was it the itching of his mosquito bites that so unsettled Peter?

This is the second paragraph of the novel. Already the author has raised questions about the loaded difficulty in deciding which details to include in a story and how that choosing effects the truth of the narrative. She has also provided several different situations and viewpoints, all with their own individual truths and contexts. Because each chapter is only a page or two long, every sentence, every word is important. A character may only have a few paragraphs to reveal themselves, so their description and actions take on layered and textured meaning. If a novel could be a haiku, this would be it. Highly recommended. ( )

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 the word em is the homonym of the verb aimer, "to love" in French in the imperative; aime.
A genesis of truth.

Em, by Kim Thuy, consists of interlocking stories with many characters who move in and out throughout the story. The novel begins on a rubber plantation in Vietnam, moving to the village of Mai Lai and the massacre; the difficult life of the many children left behind by soldiers; followed by the end of the war and Operation Babylift including the first ill-fated attempt that ended in tragedy and the second successful flight; and finally ends with the lives of the orphans in America. Em is a very short book but it is a beautiful, often heart-rending, and powerful tale of truth, love, history, and the too often unacknowledged consequences of war.

Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review ( )