Brothers and Ghosts by Khuê Phạm

 

Publisher: Scribe

On Sale Date:  July 2, 2024

Pages: 272

I reviewed a digital review copy from the publisher

Brothers and Ghosts is a novel about a thirty year old woman, Kiều, who lives in Berlin, Germany, is a journalist and has Vietnamese roots. She feels she lives between cultures, and likes she belongs to both and to neither one at the same time. She calls herself Kim in daily life because it is easier to pronounce in German society. She doesn't really know her family back in Vietnam as their parents rarely talk about it.This all changes when she gets a private facebook message from her uncle Sơn, who lives in California, and who tells her that his mother, the mother of Kiều's father too, is dying very soon. Kiều's father Minh and Sơn are brother's but became estranged when both took other sides in the war; Minh supported the Vietcong, while Sơn supported the Americans.

Together with her family, Kiều travels with her parents to California to prepare for the funeral. Meanwhile Kiều tells about the past of Minh and Sơn, about their past in Vietnam, and what moved them to settle in Germany and California, in her father's case on a  university scholarship to study in Berlin to become a doctor, where during that same time he met Kiều's mother. During his study, German students at his university,, news of the My Lai massacre radicalises Minh who joins a wider group of anti-war protestors, which is seen by fellow Vietnamese students, who report him and fellow student Hoa to the communist Vietnamese  authorities for anti-government actions. In the same years, Sơn fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon, where he settles in California's Little Saigon neighborhood and becomes a sucessfull business owner.

Kiều’s time in California with her own and estranged family makes her think over her ties to Vietnam and Vietnamese culture.

Brothers and Ghost is a short but very original and interesting book about a women who lives between two cultures and finding out about her parents past and who she is. The book is semi-autobiographical and loosely based on her own and her family's past. I really liked the storyline and the style of writing the author chose. I also liked that the story moved between the past and the present, and that you see the point of view of Kiều as well as her father's and uncle's point of view, and how their journey from Vietnam was for them during a time of war, and how they succeeded in their new home countries. The parts that took place in the present time, during Kiều's stay in California a bit thin, and I also though that the ending of the book was very abrubt. But further on, I liked every part of this book!