This is by Khue Pham. It's her debut novel, and it was published in 2021. I read the original German version, but an English version appeared in 2024 (and featured on Words Without Borders, which was how I came to know about it). Unusually, I think the evocative English title (Brothers and Ghosts) is better than the rather generic original.

Our lead, Kieu, is 30, and she's a journalist. Her parents left Viet Nam in 1968 to study in Germany, and she was born and lives in Berlin. She opens by explaining that her name is problematic: She can't pronounce it; Germans can't grasp it; and Vietnamese struggle with her accent. When she's 16, she changes her name to Kim; when she's 20, she has her passport altered as well.

And it's a good anecdote to open with, because it says so much about this Vietnamese-German woman. She now speaks little Vietnamese, and is in all respects more comfortable in German culture than in the culture her parents, Minh and Hoa, grew up in. She has never shown any interest in their history. And neither, to be fair, have they shown any interest in telling her. They're more interested in warning their children not to stand out, to conform, and to work to be accepted. Kieu has often found herself wishing that she had a family that hadn't had to BECOME German, but simply already WAS German. Assimilating is so effortful... The family has "learnt" to do Christmas, for example, in the same way they learnt German grammar -- "as something you do to be part of this country". So, going back to the family for Christmas is not only going home, it's going back to the childhood feeling of being always out of place.

Symptomatically, she has never dated a Vietnamese. Her current, rather casual boyfriend is the 40-year-old Dorian, and she took to him initially because he doesn't ask about her origins... She dislikes the "where do you come from?" question. It's not that it's necessarily motivated by racism, but it instantly communicates that she's different, and always will be. It makes her into an exotic, and that's absolutely not what she wants to be.



This stasis is interrupted when California-based branch of the family contacts their Berlin relations to say that Minh's mother is dying. They're all strangers to Kieu. She met the Californians once, 15 years previously, when both sets of family happened to be in Viet Nam at the same time. But they've never visited. When she asks her mother if there is some rift, her mother tells her that Minh's family are "difficult". It's better if they all just get on with their own lives, she says: "We send money, we don't have to visit them in California as well."

However, this death, along with grandma's request for a will-reading that involves everyone, mean that Kieu and her parents (the other two siblings worm their way out of it) go to California, and finally spend time with their rellies.

She's still feeling like a fish out of water -- even more so because she has now found out she's unexpectedly pregnant, a circumstance she keeps quiet about -- but Kieu starts to get used to being Vietnamese. A little bit, anyway...

She still finds the culture difficult. Why is everyone so reticent? Why the half-hug, in which you just dangle your arms in someone's direction? Why the constant interest in her plans for marriage and children? But she wonders what it would have been like to grow up in this big Vietnamese community in Little Saigon, where Vietnamese language and culture are part of the everyday routine. As she starts to absorb bits and pieces of the family's experience, she realizes the "where do you come from?" question is also pointing back at her... It's articulating the need to search for all those who went before her, and left their traces visibly and invisibly on the path towards the present.

Woven through this very believable account of identity crisis are the stories of Minh (now an esteemed heart surgeon), and Son (his brother). Pham uses these two life-stories to illuminate some of the complexity of the Viet Nam war, and the tensions it introduced into the family.


The rest of the photos in this post are from Nha Trang and Hoi An, 2003

Minh and his four siblings grew up in Saigon. Their father was in the South Vietnamese army; and a tailoring business had made them reasonably prosperous. In 1968, Minh is sent to Germany to learn medicine. He will come back, his father reasons, open a clinic, and employ the rest of the family.

Minh struggles a little to adapt to the German language and culture. Hoa, whom he meets there, and will eventually marry, seems more adaptable.

Most interesting, however, is the way his political understanding gradually develops. He meets German students who are interested in Viet Nam, and initially thinks they're all on the wrong side... He's horrified when he sees the flag they're flying: "The flag of the communist Viet Cong who were terrorizing his country." (By way of contrast, Kieu is surprised that the Vietnamese community in California are flying the South Vietnamese flag... "In Little Saigon the defeated South Vietnam obviously lives on.")

But, sensitized by Hoa -- who was aware of the My Lai massacre long before the general public were, and whose activism eventually leads the South Vietnamese government to stop her scholarship, and threaten her with hard labour if she returns -- he starts to study the war through the eyes of the German press. He begins writing letters, organizing demonstrations, setting up an association, making speeches, and chanting Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh with the rest of them... He's now completely on the other side. And he's never felt so at home in Germany. He's sought out by people who want to know about what's going on in Viet Nam.

Word of this gets back to his parents, who can't understand why he's messing about interfering in politics -- or why he's decided to marry. His mother responds particularly brutally to the latter issues. She folds the photo of Hoa he has sent her, and puts it back in the envelope: "She's not good enough for you."



Son, meanwhile, is determined to escape. Having failed to make it out when the North Vietnamese arrive in Saigon, the family experiences at first hand the life of the defeated. They lose the money they had in the bank. They burn their photo album because there are too many pictures of dad as a South Vietnamese soldier, and they burn his uniform. Nevertheless, he is sent to a reeducation camp. School changes for Son. Teachers come across as indoctrinated. Groups that are supposed to be guarding the revolution seem more concerned with harassing others. People disappear. Books are burnt. Maths exercises feature heroic partisans and dead "puppet soldiers".

Son's friend Mai (whom he subsequently marries) is from the north, and her father is some big cheese responsible for the security of Saigon. The two modify their own views as they learn from the other's:

-- We fought for YOU! We sacrificed so much so that the country could be reunified.
-- You fought against us, and now you want to subjugate us! It was the Americans who fought for us.
-- The Americans occupied you, and squeezed you like a lemon.
-- The Americans were there for us till the end!
-- Oh really? ... I heard that at the end they ran away crying like little girls.

Eventually, they decide to flee, and pay a people smuggler to take them overland. It's all very risky, and sure enough, they're stopped by rogue Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Mai is abducted, and Son has to return to Saigon to seek Mai's father's help. Eventually, they try again, and end up in a Thai resettlement camp. Eventually an American contact helps them resettle in California. We're told that Son is now a Trump-supporter: "Now THERE'S someone who loves his country!"



But that's getting ahead of ourselves. When Minh and Hoa return to Viet Nam in 1980, still with the intention of settling there permanently, they find a changed world. Minh won't abandon his communist ideals easily. It's early days, he says. But Mum is having none of that. At this point, both her husband and Son are missing; there's not even enough to eat. "The land we knew doesn't exist any more," she tells him. "Wake up, Minh!... Many people look at our country from the outside, and don't understand how things are... Everybody here who still wants to make something out of his life is trying to flee."

While the couple are there (and Mum makes life hell for Hoa, in true mother-in-law fashion), they all go to see Mai's father (he's the one who tells them about the camp in Thailand). It's then that Minh learns Son had asked him for sponsorship to go to Germany, but his letters had gone to the wrong address. And it's the wrong address, because Minh had not given his family his new one, because he hadn't wanted to talk to them about his marriage...

An unfortunate mistake, he says. But for his mother, it's more than a mistake: Why didn't he come up with the idea of bringing Son to Germany himself? Why was Son forced to flee? You didn't say anything, says Minh; you told me everything was all right. But he must have known that's what families say, all the more so when the mail is censored... He must have suspected something was wrong... It was just easier not to know.

In Mai's father's view, Minh has plain betrayed his brother. Trying to make amends, Minh says he will apply to bring Son to Germany. But their American contact has, in the meantime, stepped in.

So that's where the rift came from... From then on, Minh sent money, but otherwise did not communicate.

Pham does a fine job of describing this big, painful knot of changed politics and changed circumstances, and the unspoken needs and wrong expectations that fed into it. Families... Always a mess...

But there's a final bombshell to come, when the relatives are gathered to read the will. Grandma, in the letter she wrote before dementia set in, explains that she lied when she told her children their father had died in the reeducation camp... He was still alive when they left, still working on the soul-destroying task of digging up the bones of fallen North Vietnamese soldiers. But she wants her children to go to America with a clear conscience: "You were supposed to have a better life than we did. How would that have been possible if I'd told the truth?"

The finale of the novel is Kieu's decision to stay in America for a while. Having started to piece together her family's history, she wants to find out more. A friend encourages her: "What are you afraid of? That you'll find something that explains who you are?"



***

There are some 185,000 Vietnamese citizens or Germans of Vietnamese descent in Germany. Some came to the DDR as contract workers; some came as students, or later, as refugees.

Pham (a journalist by profession) talked to experts and eye-witnesses in the course of her research. But she also conducted extensive interviews with her relatives, and the novel's descriptions of war and attempts to escape are close to what really happened to her family members. Her uncle actually did go through the bizarre experiences the novel attributes to Uncle Son; and Minh is based on Pham's father, who was sent to Germany to study, like the character in the book, after the Tet Offensive.

And Pham herself, like her lead protagonist, was born in Berlin, the child of Vietnamese migrants. She too was initially uninterested in her roots, and struggled to pronounce her Vietnamese given name...

The eye-witnesses she interviews were helpful. But beyond a certain point, she hit a wall of silence: "'Many people did not want to talk about the extent of the suffering during the war, and the period of political and social upheaval under communist rule. We did not talk about what happened in the Vietnam War in my family either,' Pham remembers. Some of her family went hungry, and family members risked their lives to leave Vietnam. 'I had not heard these shocking stories before.' They only came to light when she systematically began to ask her relatives about that time."



It's another reminder of the difficulties of accessing the past -- which is never actually past, all the more so if it involves trauma and/or divergent allegiances. Thuy Dinh has some really perceptive comments on this:

"As Kieu 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?... After her grandmother’s death following years of no contact, Kieu wonders if geographical distance can also morph into emotional distance and facile misconceptions.

"Interestingly, temporal distance seems to provide second-generation Vietnamese-Germans such as Kieu, 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 Kieu (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 [because she wasn't personally affected]... On the other hand, Kieu’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."

Connected, yet not connected... You can imagine it must have been gruelling. In her Acknowledgements, Pham says: "Working on this book often seemed to me like an endless journey through unknown territory."



***

I guess my only question about Wherever You May Be was whether the feminist element added a layer too many of complication... In one sense, it needs to be there. In Kieu's eyes, at least, the somewhat sorry lot of women is bound up with the Vietnameseness she rejects. She hates the traditional, kitschy songs, for example, and the way their idea of love always equates to self-sacrifice.

She is decidedly ambivalent about her pregnancy, particularly given Dorian's luke-warm reaction. She has already told us: "I never wanted to become a mother, because to me there's nothing worse than the general demand for women to have children in order to fulfill their destiny." And when she's announcing the news to Dorian, she hears something timid in her tone: "You see, it's starting already," she thinks, "No soon are you pregnant than you're in the weaker position."

But part and parcel of this is her utter rejection of the way Hoa did motherhood (which completely buries her career, and all the political energy we saw in her early life). Hoa, with her passionate desire to see her daughter a wife and mother, is her own worst advert. Her dearest wish is for her children to make it in life; their happiness is her happiness, and she just can't imagine happiness without children.

The character of Lee, meanwhile (a Vietnamese-American woman, originally named Ly Ly), offers a very different identity model, one which Kieu finds very attractive. Lesbian, feisty, outspoken, and very clued into contemporary Vietnamese culture, Lee is someone Kieu can happily bracket herself together with as "we".

This was an interesting strand, and attitudes to women are obviously part of any cultural identity, but I wondered whether this angle was slightly overloading what was already a very busy plot.

All in all, though, I found this a great read. A digestible but very moving study of transgenerational trauma, political allegiance, family dynamics, and the search for identity. And she has cunningly left room for a sequel...