Published in Germany in 2021 and hailed as the first novel about the Vietnamese diaspora, Brothers and Ghosts by Khuê Phạm belongs to a new wave of German literature that shows how culturally diverse the country has become since the late 1960s — an era when there were very few Vietnamese living in West and East Germany. Translated into English by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey — Phạm’s debut novel reverberates in clear, dispassionate prose that belies its complex subject matter.
Like the translated text that embodies a mediated reality, the author’s deliberately distancing narrative approach works well in surveying the Vietnam War’s far-reaching consequences. It’s no accident that Wo Auch Immer Ihr Seid — the novel’s German title means “Wherever You May Be,” thus conveying an exploratory, open-ended perspective. Incorporating her family history, eyewitness accounts, and academic research, Phạm, a journalist by training, deftly illustrates how notions such as nation, identity, gender, and sexuality are continually contested and redefined over time. Showing the struggles of her characters through three linked narratives, that of Kiều — a second-generation Berliner, her parents’, and her paternal uncle Sơn’s — a Vietnamese refugee now living in Southern California, Phạm’s novel encapsulates a 50-year saga of Cold War geopolitics that still impacts the present.
Unlike many immigrant novels featuring economically disadvantaged characters, Kiều, the novel’s first-person narrator, is a 30-year-old journalist from an upper-middle-class family in Berlin. Her parents, who came to West Germany in 1968 as students from South Vietnam, have managed to successfully integrate into German society thanks to the country’s socially progressive agenda. Yet, there are cracks within this exemplary assimilation model — the most telling is that Kiều does not wish to own her birth name. Besides the obvious reference to The Tale of Kiều — Nguyễn Du’s 19th century epic poem about an ill-fated courtesan considered to be synonymous with Vietnamese identity — the word kiều literally means “immigrant,” or “other,” whereas Kim, the name Kiều prefers to be known, means “golden” and “up to date,” in other words, someone materially successful but without a past.
Wishing to be unconditionally accepted as a native-born German — which she is — Kiều often resists having to explain her origin. The “Where are you from” question, which comes up frequently during her daily interactions, challenges Kiều’s carefully constructed identity as it persists in seeing her as an unassimilated other — someone genetically bound by her parents’ “small and unusual” milieu, rather than being liberated by the “big and universal” German world.
The issue of allegiance is also a conundrum that has long beset her parents, Minh and Hoa, who, as once-youthful emissaries from a war-ridden country, were burdened by family and national expectations. It was generally understood that once Minh and Hoa graduated from a progressive Western university, they would return to South Vietnam to improve their family members’ socioeconomic status and contribute their efforts toward nation-building, especially in deterring Communist expansion. But galvanized by the My Lai massacre committed by the U.S. Army in March 1968, Minh and Hoa instead became anti-war activists who saw American intervention in South Vietnam as morally reprehensible. Despite acting on their conscience, at the height of the war, they were seen as traitors by their families and the South Vietnamese government.
As Kiều gains a deeper understanding of her family history, she also encounters the problem of perspective that’s intrinsically tied to representation. Whose view of the Vietnam War elicits more sympathy or understanding? Should Kiều side with the relatives on her father’s side who suffered harsh discrimination and economic deprivation as vanquished Southerners after the war, or with her parents, who opposed the war while living in safety and comfort away from the homeland? While her father Minh believes he “can only see the shape of things when [looking] at them from a distance,” Kiều’s grandmother accuses him of being either “naïve or too blind by ideology” in trying to read Vietnam while living thousands of miles away. After her grandmother’s death following years of no contact, Kiều wonders if geographical distance can also morph into emotional distance and facile misconceptions.
Interestingly, temporal distance seems to provide second-generation Vietnamese-German such as Kiều, and by extension, the author, a nuanced yet neutral view of history that affirmatively resists allegiance to either the Communist North’s or the American-backed South Vietnam’s ideological position. The recurring theme of temporal distance and refracted reality — of coming upon revelations after years have passed — is evidenced via multiple retellings of past events, by epistolary means, diary entries, or oral interpretations of past motives by characters in the novel.
On the one hand, this relayed narrative method seems to encourage an objective view of a formerly traumatic event — as Kiều (whose name also means bridge) explains how she can still maintain her composure after hearing her late grandmother’s startling revelation read aloud from the latter’s last will and testament, as she “hardly knew [her] grandmother, and never loved her; I’m not beset by questions as to whether she lied to me or betrayed my trust.” On the other hand, Kiều’s statement can be read as an acknowledgment of irretrievable loss when temporal distance renders once-festering traumas into artifacts and blood relatives into ghosts. In gaining a more nuanced, holistic view of history, we also give up our familial allegiances. The novel, like a tightrope walker, is poignantly poised above the open abyss.
Thúy Đinh is a freelance critic and literary translator. Her work can be found at thuydinhwriter.com. She tweets @ThuyTBDinh.