Bu Justine Trinh
“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.”
Kim Thúy begins her novel, em, with this explanation as she approaches colonization and the Vietnam War through a lens of love. In the common imagination, colonization and war are dominated by images and descriptions of violence –Viet Thanh Nguyen goes as far to blatantly call the former incestuous pedophilia in The Committed (“Your father was a colonizer and a pedophile, which go hand in hand. Colonization is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all int he holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission!”), but Thúy takes a different approach that ultimately reaches the same conclusion, one that is just as subversive since love and its many forms go hand in hand with colonization.
Although the cover summary claims that Vietnamese orphans Emma Jade and Louis are the focal point of the novel (and in a sense, they are), the story begins before them in order to explore how Emma Jade and Louis come into being, and how their identities are formed. Starting with the later years of French colonization, Emma Jade’s grandmother, Mai, falls in love with her French employer, Alexandre, which results in the birth of Tam, Emma Jade’s mother. Through a series of short vignettes, the audience is forced to reckon with the power dynamics between Mai and Alexandre, and how love underpins their interactions. Originally, teenage Mai comes to Alexandre’s rubber plantation to sabotage it for the love of her country before falling in love with the colonizer, which Thúy likens to Stockholm Syndrome.
Alexandre, on the other hand, seeks out the comfort of his con gai, both to ease his growing fears of death and to display his dominant power over them. Con gai has multiple meanings; in Vietnamese, it means girl or daughter, but during French colonization, it meant concubine. Thúy subtly brings to light the connection between colonization and incestuous pedophilia. The fact these vignettes take place at a rubber factory strengthens this fact: Rubber is one of Vietnam’s main industrial crops that was developed by French colonialists. While rubber was used for the growing automobile industry, rubber is also used for condoms. In a war context, condoms are produced and used to protect soldiers from sexually transmitted infections, and Tam later becomes a sex worker to survive. These instances place love and desire within the colonial project.
Thúy covers multiple events that happened during the war and the aftermath such as the My Lai Massacre and Operation Ranch Hand, but in each series of vignettes, she emphasizes the marginalized Vietnamese experience. When discussing the body count (in war, body count refers to the total number of people killed), Thúy points out the contradiction, asking, “why there are only round figures on one side (North Vietnam and South Vietnam) and exact numbers on the other (America), and above all why no list include the number of orphans; of widows; of aborted dreams; of broken hearts.” Within an American context, the focus is on the American soldier’s body, but Thúy recenters the narrative onto the Vietnamese bodies that were affected by American decisions. In her discussion of Operation Ranch Hand, which was not limited to just Agent Orange, but Agent Green, Pink, Purple, Blue, and White, Thúy introduces these agents as the herbicides that cause Tam’s cancer, rather than the herbicides that caused Vietnam veterans’ cancer. She also discusses future repercussions by bringing the audience’s focus to a child watching the rainbow herbicides and how their future children will have congenital deformities as a result from Operation Ranch Hand. These victims are not included within the official body counts and are thus dehumanized, for they do not hold the same value in comparison to the Vietnam veterans who continue to receive disability compensation for their exposure to Agent Orange.
Thúy performs this act of re-centering the Vietnamese again with her discussion of the My Lai massacre. Within the official records, survivor voices are noticeably absent. The Library of Congress has made the hearing and investigation report available to the public, but both of these documents prioritize American servicemen’s voices. The hearing consists of 895 pages of servicemen testimony which Thúy pulls from and succulently summarizes below as:
“I was ordered to kill anything that moves.”
“Civilians?”
“Yes.”
“Old people?”
“Yes.”
“Women?”
“Yes, women.”
“Babies?”
“Babies.”
When Vietnamese voices do appear in the United States official investigation report, they manifest as a short rundown of official Vietnamese reports of the incident that is provided to an all-American committee to hear and read about. However, within the novel, it is servicemen who are nameless and unattended to recenter the narrative the back on the victims in an effort to humanize them. The mention of My Lai conjures images of violence and nameless corpses within the U.S. consciousness, but when Thúy first mentions My Lai, there are no associations of such an event to show that the victims were people who had lives before the massacre. These people did not exist in a vacuum for photographic evidential consumption for the American public. Thúy gives a possible backstory to who these civilians, old people, women, and babies might have been through her characters. Tam, who is a student at Lycée in Đà Lạt, visits My Lai with her Nanny, who adopts her after her parents’ death. The Nanny’s son/Tam’s adoptive older brother just had a baby, and the women come to celebrate the joyous event the day before the massacre. By describing this scene of possibility, Thúy gives these victims lives that are filled with love before American intervention. The idea of love becomes twisted when the soldiers come, as one of them is ordered to “take care of them (the Nanny and her family).” Take care of them in our everyday vernacular implies tender feelings that are involved with providing care. A mother takes care of her child. A nanny visits to take care of her son and new grandson. Yet the soldier that is given that order is not under the same obligation to provide such tenderness. With a stone cold heart, he takes care of them by closing his eyes and emptying his machine gun; his only justification is that he spared the family from further suffering.
Thúy’s novel attends to the Vietnamese body that has been neglected and dehumanized. Her work is a labor of love as she inserts the Vietnamese people within the Western narrative as evidenced by her imagined conversation with Tim O’Brien, an American novelist known for his works about the Vietnam War. For the longest time, the official narrative was dominated with stories from the American perspectives that portrayed the Vietnamese as one dimensional. Thúy gives value to these lives and shows that they are more than just victims, sex workers, or enemy soldiers. At the same time, she explores the connection between love and war/colonization. Towards the end of the novel, she ponders how different the body counts would have been if love had been a factor in the strategies and battles. If her analysis on love proves anything, it would have been vastly different.
em is available from Bookshop, Green Apple Books, Loyalty Bookstore, Magers & Quinn Booksellers, Vroman’s Bookstore, and Waucoma Bookstore.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.