By Gwen E. Kirby
I feel keen anticipation and anxiety when I start a book that has set itself A Challenge. Will the author pull off a magic trick or will The Challenge become a gimmick? Will it add a new dimension to the characters’ stories or will it become an intellectual exercise, A Challenge for the sake of itself?
In Daughters of the New Year (Hanover Square Press, 2022), E. M. Tran tells the story of the Vietnamese-immigrant Trung family through its women, beginning in present-day New Orleans and moving backward in time through Hurricane Katrina to the fall of Saigon, the French occupation of Vietnam, and finally to fragments of an almost mythic past. The novel is a beautiful example of when A Challenge—here, telling a story backward—can give new depths to classic themes. Tran’s exploration of legacy, family, and cultural memory is complicated and shows us how the past refuses to offer up answers even when we have imaginative access to it.
When the book opens, the three present-day Trung sisters are living in New Orleans and want, to varying degrees, to feel connected to their family’s origins in Vietnam. The middle daughter visits Vietnam as a contestant on a Bachelor-like show, and the producers don’t hire a translator for her date, assuming wrongly that she is fluent. In the next section, the youngest of the daughters, Trieu, visits a Vietnamese New Year festival and finds herself an outsider: “In some ways, it was her fault for thinking belonging was a birthright.” They struggle with the feeling that if only they were fluent, if only they had been raised more Vietnamese or more American, if only for that something which they cannot articulate, they would belong instead of being caught between cultures.
The novel’s structure would seem to suggest that that something can be found in the past; why else write a book that moves backward instead of forward to search for the answer? And that is often the simplified promise of the past: that we can know our parents through their stories about their childhoods and we can understand how our parents were hurt so that we can understand how they have hurt us and how we have then hurt them back. We think that by examining the past we will get to the bottom of something or, at the very least, we will find a bottom. What Tran shows is that there is no bottom. She sets up an increasingly heartbreaking series of pageants: first the Bachelor-esque TV show, then the cruel $2.00 Beauty Queen, and finally the Miss Saigon pageant, which the reader has been primed to be curious about since the beginning of the book. The novel could have easily ended with the revelation of the events of the third, original pageant, a satisfying conclusion that would have given the reader the same pattern resolution as any time-forward novel. But Tran refuses the reader that feeling of completing an arc, of arriving at an answer. We are swept past the original pageant, further and further into a past as unpredictable and unknowable as any future. Again, there is no bottom.
For me, reading this book required letting go of the word past almost entirely and thinking of time instead as a series of presents that impact one another while at the same time being impenetrable even to the people who experienced them. There is a scene in the novel when two of the Trung sisters, Nhi and Trieu, are taking a bath and their uncle is secretly watching them. One sister doesn’t realize it is happening: “Trieu remained entrapped in her own mind,” while the other, Nhi, “thought about this moment throughout her life and replayed it over the years, trying to puzzle out why they didn’t scream or rush to cover up . . . The older she got, the more she forgot the reasons of her youth.” The sisters have the same experience, side-by-side, and yet even in that moment their perceptions of it are separate from each other and, quickly, distanced from themselves. Nhi doesn’t know what her sister is thinking and, soon, she will not even know what she was thinking. And the book will not go on to make meaning around this event. Instead, we will turn the page and the violation will be gone, the action suddenly in the future, the characters instantly unburdened. This is a fascinating aspect of the book. The characters gain lightness rather than weight, hope rather than cynicism and wisdom, while at the same time the weight, cynicism, and wisdom never leave the text; they simply transfer to the mothers and aunts who appear in the story, who in a few sections are themselves hopeful girls again. This book challenged me to think about time and meaning-making in new ways and will reward any reader who undertakes the journey.
Gwen E. Kirby is the author of the debut collection Shit Cassandra Saw. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Her stories appear in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere.
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