EM

A constellation of connected characters provides a snapshot of Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora in North America from French colonization to life after the war.

Thúy, who was born in Vietnam and lives in Quebec, delivers a series of interconnected vignettes in her new novel. The book is in conversation with a drawing by Quebecois artist Louis Boudreault that appears toward the end of the text and shows a box with many threads attached. The characters—a French rubber plantation owner and the girl he takes from the fields to be his wife, their daughter, her nanny, and an outwardly expanding roster of other people—embody the overlapping, connected threads in the painting. The book starts with an explanation of the title: “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.” In the narrative, small movements have large effects; love is both healing and misguided. Thúy moves the reader from a rubber plantation to the village of My Lai; from Charlie Company’s massacre to Operation Babylift and the experiences of orphans adopted by American families; from Saigon to nail salons and the cancer-causing chemicals found at both rubber plantations and salons. Characters appear and reappear as the threads weave together in economical but potent prose. Thúy troubles the line between fiction and nonfiction and their different ideas of truth: “In this book, truth is fragmented, incomplete, unfinished, in both time and space.” The book is human-focused and not a historical account; in the end, it feels like a work of visual and literary art at once.

A brief, moving meditation on the nature of truth, memory, humanity, and violence: a powerful work of art.