Books
Khuê Pham (translated by Daryl Lindsey and Charles Hawley)
Brothers and Ghosts
After the death of a grandmother she didn’t know, the narrator of Brothers and Ghosts ponders the question: how much does it take to understand where you come from?
This is the quiet, beating heart of the loosely autobiographical debut novel by Vietnamese–German journalist Khuê Phạm. Its narrator straddles the life of a 30-year-old Berliner and that of the eldest daughter of Vietnamese migrants. She hides her Vietnamese name, Kiều – a name she cannot pronounce – behind the more palatable Western name of Kim. Her daily life is filled with awkwardness and shame: she is an outsider in the only home she knows, while also cut off from her own roots.
Torn between her displaced Vietnamese heritage and what she yearns for “a family that didn’t have to become German because it already was”, Kiều pays the price of self-erasure to fit in: “For every German word I gained, I shed a Vietnamese one.” Determined to disown her Vietnamese heritage, she knows nothing of her family’s history but unspoken tension and buried trauma.
Kiều is forced to reckon with her family’s past following a sudden message from a distant uncle. She learns that her father’s mother is dead, but she feels nothing. She instead does what she feels is her duty and accompanies her parents to visit their relatives in California.
Splicing Kiều’s journey to meet her estranged family with scenes from the youths of her father and uncle in the 1960s and ’70s, Phạm braids together three stories: Kiều’s identity crisis, the tale of her father Minh’s journey from medical student to political activist in Germany, and the plight of her uncle, Sơn, who was left behind in Saigon to survive the chaos of war and communism.
Minh, as the eldest son who bears the hopes and dreams of his family on his shoulders, strikes out on his own to study medicine in Germany, determined to return to Vietnam and open a hospital. In Berlin, beyond the shock of German winters and cold meats and bread for dinner, he encounters student activists who are outraged at the war in his home country. Swept up in the movement’s momentum, Minh finds himself more and more alienated from the family he left in Saigon.
Sơn, one of the younger siblings left behind, lives on the peripheries of war until it arrives at his family’s doorstep. He must learn how to survive the new Vietnam that has destroyed the one he knew. His story is one of grit and fortitude in the face of the painful upheaval of waking up to the destruction of home.
Exploring how the vicissitudes of history cast a pair of brothers across geographical and ideological divides, Phạm spins an intergenerational tale that searches for answers to the question of identity that plagues second generation immigrants – why am I this way and not another? How much do I owe those who came before me? What makes me who I am?
In sunny California, where a vibrant Vietnamese community allows space to be both Vietnamese and American, Kiều wonders who she would be if she had been born there, instead of Germany. Her search for identity in inherited exile is infused with the uneasy expectations that fill the chasm between her own upbringing and that of her parents, whose lives have been shaped by a war she cannot fathom.
Brothers and Ghosts is an elegant exploration of what it means to grow up in a home that does not belong to you and to inherit the emotional and cultural vacuum created by the catastrophe and trauma of war. Phạm’s carefully considered sentences come alive in Minh and Sơn’s stories. Through the choices that shape their separate lives, she offers glimpses of the harrowing reality of war, the bravery and sacrifice it takes to live through the unthinkable and the legacy these deep scars leave on their descendants.
The novel shies away from fully confronting these horrors, instead relegating the suffering of the past to the margins of its protagonist’s journey to self-discovery. In its final pages, I found myself wanting to delve deeper into the lives that were distorted by the grand arc of history and the familial bonds that managed to endure.
As her journey to the United States draws to a close, Kiều’s search for answers to the ever-jarring question that haunts second generation immigrants – “Where are you from?” – is reframed. Instead of triggering a spiral of shame, she realises she has the choice to approach it “not as a question that can only be answered with the name of some country of origin, but as a search for all those who came before me and left their visible and invisible traces along the path to the present”.
In Brothers and Ghosts, these invisible traces – the historical stories that shape our own – haunt the present and limit the narrator’s sense of self. How much does it take to understand where we come from? The novel’s revelation is not in finding solid answers to this question but in showing the stories we inherit need not be shackles that diminish us. Rather, Kiều suggests, there is always the opportunity to shake off this haunting and start anew.
Scribe, 272pp, $29.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 31, 2024 as "Brothers and Ghosts".
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