In “Brothers and Ghosts,” a Vietnamese Diaspora Family Cannot Escape Their Generational Wounds

At the beginning of Khuê Phạm’s debut novel Brothers and Ghosts, translated by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey, the narrator makes a confession: “I don’t know how to pronounce my own name.” It’s not something you hear often and something unimaginable for many. But for Kiều, the young Vietnamese German writer at the center of Phạm’s adroit novel, it’s the effect of a lifetime of trying to assimilate into German society. She was born in Germany, after all, and there is no reason not to be like any other German (that is, white Germans). She goes by Kim and keeps her Vietnamese heritage at bay.

But once her grandmother dies, leaving a will, Kiều and her family are urged to visit their American relatives to reveal their inheritance. In California, it would be the first time she’s around so many other Vietnamese people in a very long time. The experience forces her to confront not only her heritage but her family history.

In many ways, Kiều’s story is very familiar to children of immigrants. My birth name, for instance, is Phong, and though it wasn’t any of my decision, my parents legally changed it before I started school to something more “American.” Likewise, I spent most of my teen years trying to fit into mainstream American culture.

But Phạm goes beyond the theme of the individual’s cultural loss. Brothers and Ghosts is a novel about how a family ends up scattered around the world. While it might be easy to lay blame on war and history—indeed, that is a large part of Kiều’s situation—Phạm highlights the inner works of family and its members, the ways they protect or deceive one another, the ways they disappoint us, they ways they support us, and ultimately, what we inherit from them.

I had a chance to talk to Khuê Phạm via Zoom about her novel, growing up as a child of immigrants, and the meaning of family.

Eric Nguyen: Brothers and Ghosts follows the stories of three family members. You have Kiều, her father Minh, and her uncle Sơn. Why did you choose to tell this story through three characters?

Khuê Phạm: I experimented a bit with the number of characters and how I wanted to tell the story. Originally, I wanted to tell the story of the two brothers who end up on different sides of the political division line because that’s a conflict I know from my own family and I have always been intrigued by it. However, when I started writing, I showed the first drafts to my agent and publisher and they felt that the person who’s narrating the story was Kiều, that she’s very important to build a bridge to readers who may not know the conflict in Vietnam very well. Kiều belongs to the second generation; she grows up between east and west, and at the beginning of the story, she’s very naive. She doesn’t know anything about the history of her family or indeed the history of Vietnam, perhaps like the reader. So, she became a narrative tool to uncover the different layers of her family’s journey. 

EN: All your characters are in a way outsiders. Kiều’s Vietnamese German, but she lives in a very white society. You have Minh, who’s an outsider in his own family since he left in the middle of the war for Germany. And then there’s Sơn, who is deemed a traitor once Saigon falls and the Communists take over. Why was it important to have these outsiders be the path through your novel?

KP: They are all outsiders for those very reasons that you described, but they’re not outsiders to me. The experiences they have are normal and worth telling. Contemporary German readers, and I guess many American readers, will not be familiar with the fact that there are indeed quite a number of second generation [Vietnamese diasporic] writers nowadays. But I do feel that this outsider perspective says a lot about mainstream society and I too have often felt a bit as an outsider growing up in Germany. It’s a perspective that feels very familiar to me. Writing a book is a chance to bring people into the center that are sometimes on the margins. 

When the book came out in Germany, a lot of Germans told me they could identify with the story even though they have a very different cultural background. The family dynamics, the generational conflicts, the battles for opinions and values, that is something that everybody knows about and it’s a very universal experience. 

EN: I saw myself in your book, too, especially Kiều. Brothers and Ghosts is very much a story about Kiều trying to find her roots. At the beginning, she doesn’t even know how to pronounce her name correctly, and it’s not until her family takes a trip to the US that she’s forced to face her family’s history and culture, despite having spent most of her life running away from that as she tries to assimilate into German culture. She uses a non-Vietnamese name, Kim, for example. Why do you think we—especially immigrants and children of immigrants—why do you think we run away from our history and culture?

KP: I have seen this happen over and over again to children of immigrants who grew up in a different country, this pressure to assimilate, this pressure to become normal, to become like everybody else around them, the feeling that it’s so much cooler to be German or American or French than Vietnamese. This internal cultural and racial hierarchy, even children seem to pick up so easily. I can even see it with my 4-year-old son, and I don’t condemn it because I know that feeling very well. 

Looking at the German context, I would say that at the time when I grew up in Berlin in the 90s, the climate in Germany was very difficult. There was xenophobic undertone in Germany because it was the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. East and West were kind of somehow coming together. Germany as a country was trying to assimilate into each other, you could say.

There were a lot of tensions that translated into racist attacks. There have been a lot of high-profile racist attacks on asylum seekers. At that time, growing up in Germany, I felt this constant sense of distrust. People would always ask me, “where are you from?” And I would say, “I’m from Berlin,” because I was born in Berlin and I had a German passport and I speak German so much better than my crappy Vietnamese. Yet people wouldn’t believe me. They would always say “No, but where are you really from?”

This nagging question gave me the sense that somehow, I would always be so different and I would never be accepted. It made me quite angry and I think it made me quite angry at my Vietnamese heritage. 

Now it’s very different. Luckily the country has become much more tolerant. Also, I’m much older and I’m able to hold that thought in my head, that I am German and Vietnamese, and maybe that leads to some sort of a third identity. Not only is it an additional culture that I possess, but also additional struggles within me that power my writing. I feel now that all the things I felt were very difficult also is part of who I am.

EN: I’m going to take this next question from your book. At one point Kiều asks, “how much does it take to understand where you come from?” How would you answer that question?

KP: I am still trying to understand where I come from. I wrote this book because I feel that you cannot really understand yourself if you don’t understand your family. Kiều engaging with her family and going to California and spending time with her relatives, she moves outside of her comfort zone into a zone that is unfamiliar and scary to her. She doesn’t speak Vietnamese very well. She feels that somehow this shouldn’t have anything to do with her, that her family is holding her back. But the more she engages, the more she realizes that a lot of things, a lot of her own mannerisms, a lot of her own values are shaped by the values of her family.

Perhaps even some of the traumas that her family has gone through in the aftermath of war and due to immigration and making it in life, the way they’re dealing with their past is by not looking at it. And she’s doing the same. The dark experiences of being a refugee, of being in a country at war, they’re covered in silence, but somehow that silence is passed on from one generation to the next. We have it in us, we just don’t really know how to name it or how to find it. 

EN: Your main character is named after Kiều from the classic Vietnamese epic poem, The Tale of Kiều. In the poem, Kiều sacrifices herself to save her father and brother from prison. Reading your book, I couldn’t help but think of all the women who appear in your novel who sacrifice themselves or go through hardships for their family. You call it “the art of suffering.” There’s Minh’s mother who still works to take care of her family after the war is over and her husband is at reeducation camp. There’s Kiều’s mother who gave up a life of activism to raise her children. 

But there’s a different type female character in Brothers and Ghosts as well. We’re introduced to Kiều’s aunt in Vietnam after the war, where she’s evolving to be this strong-willed woman. Then later, we meet another character, Lee, a Vietnamese American lesbian, who’s very outwardly rebellious. Do you see feminism as changing between different cultures and generations? And what do we do with that?

KP: I’ve been thinking about what it would mean for me to live in Vietnam, and there are two things that I always feel would prevent me from being happy there. One is I don’t think I could be happy as a writer because there’s no press freedom or freedom of speech. And the second is the fact that I’m a woman and I always feel that the role given to women by society, and that is shaped by Confucian values as described to The Tale of Kiều, keeps them small and turn them into servants to their families and husbands and older sons. They fulfill their role, they don’t make demands, they suffer in silence. 

At the same time, the Vietnamese women I know, and this is I think probably very contrary to Western cliches, are very strong. They have this kind of subordinate role, but they’re strong-minded. They’re so hardworking, they go to work, they raise their children, they do the household chores, they take care of the money at home. They’re so tough, that’s something that’s often overlooked. 

I guess my way of feminism is influenced by having grown up in the west and being very self-determined. But I do feel I actually have an additional layer of feminism due to the fact that I’m Vietnamese. As a woman of color, you have to set your determination even higher because you’re dealing with a world of white people. I have this question to overcome my cultural background. Then there’s the second world that I’m dealing with, which is the world of men. So as an Asian woman, people have a lot of assumptions about me, and that often leads to people like me being underestimated.

I think people like me have to be much tougher to raise their voice and make themselves heard. My female characters are testament to that. On one hand, you may underestimate them when you first see them, but when you look deeper, you realize how strong they are.

EN: Along with the theme of sacrificing oneself for family, your book also touches on obligation to family and duties to the family. These affect how they act and, at the end, the secrets they keep. Why do you think obligation and duty are such powerful concepts in your characters’ lives? In our lives?

KP: It’s such a Vietnamese experience. You grow up somehow knowing that you need to fulfill certain duties in your family, and you grow up with this feeling that you need to fulfill your parents’ expectations and that sense that they’ve made a lot of sacrifices so you can have a better life. Isn’t that one of the key components of being a kid in a Vietnamese family? Of course, in that kind of family, obligation is something that’s very stifling. It’s probably very stifling to a lot of kids in Vietnam, but especially to Vietnamese kids growing up in the West, because we see other families, other kids who don’t have that sense of obligation or crazy expectations from their parents. We see that and we long for that freedom. We long for that easy life they have. It looks so much better than in our families.

I’m critical of some of the very strict ways that Vietnamese and perhaps Asian families raise their kids. As a mother myself now, I do feel that it’s good to show love to your children. I do feel it’s good to praise them, say they did great, rather than always piling one expectation on top of another. But I also now understand my parents loved me as much as anybody else did, but they had different other ways of expressing their love.

They also learn it from their own parents, this very authoritarian, strict, harsh way. And again, it’s something that has defined me and that’s why I wanted to show it.

In my book, I show how Kiều struggles with it. This is one of the reasons why she rejects her Vietnamese heritage because it burdens her so much. But then later, she also comes to almost admire or at least respect the strong values that lie behind it when you do sacrifice yourself for the family. 

I’m also a bit more ambiguous now about this sense of familial obligation. When I look at my family or other Vietnamese families, I do feel that the bond is quite strong. In my own family, I feel that I can always rely on them; there are things I never would need to discuss with them, and it’s perhaps a bit different from what I’ve seen in some German families. We expect a lot from each other, but we also take care. I feel that the part of taking care should be stronger than the part of the expectation. 

EN: Yeah. There are two sides to it. You could see familial obligation as something burdensome, oppressive, but on the other hand, showing your obligation and duty to your family is a type of love language. But is there happiness in obligation and duty? 

KP: I notice within myself a strong sense of wanting to give something back to my family. Somehow, it’s important for me to fulfill that. What you can do as a second-generation person is to define for yourself what you want to give back. Maybe that’s the way to do it. Not to take on the burden that is placed upon you, but to follow that instinct within you, to find your individual way of satisfying it. 

Happiness is always best when you do it your own way and not the way that your parents taught you.

I have my own kid now, he’s four. When I look at him, I want him to know where he comes from, but I don’t want him to be burdened by it. He doesn’t have to speak the language, he doesn’t have to perform a certain role, he just needs to know that he’s special. That’s all I want.