September 15, 2021
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. Th�y, 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. Th�y 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. Th�y 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.
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