By Justine Trinh
Gothic literature has long been a defining part of the English literary canon since the advent of the English major and thus, a mandatory prerequisite for anyone studying English literature. While I entered my own English program with the full intention of pursuing a concentration in Asian American literature, I was still required to take Gothic literature before I could read and analyze the texts I really wanted to. I understood the importance of Dracula and Frankenstein, but I also recognized the works chosen in these classes often prioritized the white perspective with little space for people of color. When people of color were included, they were either cast as the help or villainized as savage barbarians, consequently portraying stereotypes and caricatures. This framing demonized people of color and implied these communities did not experience the same problems as Jane Eyre or Victor Frankenstein. Thao Thai’s debut novel, Banyan Moon, rectifies this dominant narrative by infusing gothic elements in a modern setting while making space for Vietnamese culture and beliefs.
Ann Tran has the supposed “good” life–a college education and a lake house with a white professor boyfriend, Noah. Noah is the right kind of white: he comes from old money, and this privilege affords them invitations to fancy parties with champagne. Meanwhile, Ann’s Vietnamese family escaped communist Vietnam, allowing her opportunities to attain this “good” life. The cracks of this façade, however, become increasingly clear when Noah admits that he had an affair, Ann finds out she is pregnant, and her grandmother, Minh, dies. All of a sudden, she isn’t living the perfect life anymore.
Ann returns to her hometown in Florida where her estranged mother, Hương, still resides. Following her passing, Minh leaves Hương and Ann the Banyan House, a dilapidated manor that was Ann’s childhood home. Interwoven throughout the novel is Minh’s story starting from when she was a teenager in love to a newly immigrated single mother in the United States who is attempting to make a better life for her children.
Banyan Moon seamlessly blends elements of the gothic genre into the Vietnamese American novel. Ghosts are prevalent in Vietnamese culture and literature (to name a couple recent works: “Black-Eyed Woman” in Viet Thanh Nguyens’s The Refugees and She is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran), and Minh’s ghost haunts the narrative as she watches her daughter and granddaughter from the other side but cannot interact with them. Simultaneously, the Banyan House carries long-buried secrets that have not been uttered for decades yet continue to haunt the family regardless of whether those secret keepers are still alive to hide them. These secrets are like ghosts, as both entities can neither speak nor interact with the living, but those left behind can still feel their presence. While these secrets were originally meant to protect, they result in misunderstandings and hurt feelings which fester over time as they remain unrevealed. Secrets and ghosts also play into the Gothic idea of the “uncanny,” which refers to making the familiar unfamiliar. Ann comes to realize that the caring grandma of her childhood is not the same grandmother she gets to know after her death. Like most of us, Ann will never know who her grandmother was before she herself was a mother or before she had to make the hard choices she had to make to survive in a war-torn Vietnam or as a single mother in America. It is these choices that result in the many secrets around the family. Similarly, the crumbling house Ann returns to is not the same home she left with the discovery of a couple proverbial skeletons in the closet.
I could not put down Banyan Moon from start to finish. Months later, I continue to think about it in regard to family and secrets. I really appreciated Thai’s attention to detail and her beautifully crafted narrative that explores family conflict and the intimacy of those relationships. She offers an honest critique of the complexities that family presents for all of us, but these complexities are heightened with the trauma of war. As a result, we often struggle to understand the generations before us without considering who they were before the secrets accumulated. Banyan Moon was my pick for Soapberry Review’s “Best Asian American Books of 2023,” and I continue to stand by that choice.
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.