By Justine Trinh
Around this time last year in my review of Loan Le’s A Pho Love Story, I asked, “Does authenticity matter within a novel?” Although I struggled to come up with a definitive answer, I ultimately settled on no, because inaccuracies can be overlooked if the overall plot is strong, and not everyone necessarily shares the same experience. The Vietnamese American experience Le describes in her novel, as inaccurate it was, was not my experience, but it might be similar to someone else’s. However, as I was reading Carolyn Huynh’s debut novel, The Fortunes of Jaded Women, I could feel the electric force of recognition when I saw my own experiences represented in a recognizable way.
The Fortunes of Jaded Women follows the Dương family, cursed after their ancestor Oanh ran off with the love of her life, leaving her husband and marriage behind. Oanh’s vengeful mother-in-law refuses to let such a transgression go and climbs to the high mountains to entreat a witch to put a curse on Oanh to only ever have daughters and so that none of her descendants will find true happiness or love. Consequently, generation after generation, members of the Dương family only have daughters and are miserable. The family resettles from Vietnam to Orange County, California, but after a disagreement a decade ago, the family is estranged from one another. The title represents how jaded they have become from the inability to escape their curse and how it is passed on, much like Oanh’s jade necklace, from mother to daughter, thus they are jaded women. However, Oanh’s current descendent, Mai Nguyễn, receives a prophecy from her psychic that the family will experience a death, a marriage, and the birth of a son, that will finally reunite the family. In order for this to happen though, Mai must make amends with her daughters, her sisters, and her mother or she stands to lose everything she hopes to gain. She will no longer have a relationship with her daughters (who do not want anything to do with her due to her overbearing nature), her sisters (who blame her for their current estrangement with their mother), and her own mother.
Raised in Little Saigon, Huynh is able to capture the intricacy and nuances of this ethnic enclave. Little Saigon is stitched together from many distinct neighborhoods, and these places at first glance seem disparate, from the many supermarkets, to the many more to-go restaurants, to the home temples and nail salons nestled in neighboring neighborhoods. Yet Huynh is able to interweave these pieces together coherently. She portrays her hometown in many different lights. While she portrays Little Saigon in a nostalgic light such as choosing some of her favorite neighborhood places such as Kim Su Seafood Restaurant, she also shows the seedier parts which is illustrated by the Vietnamese bikini coffee shops, while incorporating more known local staples such as Bánh Mì & Chè Cali, Phước Lộc Thọ, and Mile Square Park. Huynh’s homage to these places goes beyond surface level name-dropping—she is attentive to the heterogeneous nature of Little Saigon; she never sensationalizes. The Vietnamese bikini coffee shops may come as a shock to the average person, but Huynh describes it through a mundane lens treating it as an everyday business because at the end of the day, that is exactly what it is—a business.
Just like the women of Little Saigon, Huynh’s jaded women display a range of complexities and nuances. By switching point of views between different generations, Huynh tackles a range of issues from intergenerational trauma to Asian daughter guilt with levity and humor in an attempt to heal from these wounds. Each woman has a big personality which can be a bit much sometimes, but they display emotions genuinely. For example, Mai constantly brags that her second daughter, Thủy, is John Cho’s dermatologist, but she goes out of her way to set up Thủy with someone who she considers more acceptable. While Mai wants the best for her daughters, they find her attempts overbearing. Additionally, while Huynh utilizes elements of slapstick comedy, the focus of the humor is never to ridicule or mock, but rather to point out some of the lengths these women go to such when Mai flies all the way to Hawaii every year to get her fortune told (the psychic is based on real-life psychic Lan Vo in Hawaii) only to spend a lot of the time talking about her fears for her daughters. While there is humor in the situation and the superstitious nature of Vietnamese culture, Huynh never portrays them as crazy but rather commonplace.
Additionally, Huynh illustrates the complicated, multilayered relationships within a Vietnamese American family affected by displacement. The novel moves away from a Vietnam War and resettlement narrative that other Vietnamese American novels employ (such as Mango and Peppercorns, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, or The Best We Could Do). While the war is not the focal point of the novel, it still remains in the periphery to call attention to the war and its aftermath. For example, Mai’s older half-sister, Kim Lương, was thought to be dead, only to show up fifteen years later at the family’s doorstep. This is reminiscent of the many Vietnamese families that were separated or thought dead only to be reunited years later even though the family unit had moved on. Huynh shows how the war affects the characters in terms of trauma and displacement but she also does not linger, choosing to focus on the interpersonal relationships between the jaded women.
Huynh crafts her Little Saigon with such attentive care that it is recognizable to those who are more familiar with the area while providing a genuine description for those who are not. In addition, her use of humor to approach heavy topics makes The Fortunes of Jaded Women distinct from other Vietnamese American texts. This is much needed and made the novel an enjoyable read.
The Fortunes of Jaded Women is available from Astoria Bookshop, Bookshop, City Lights Bookstore, Loyalty Bookstore, Skylight Books, and Vroman’s 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.