Em : Kim Thúy

 

While I was reading Kim’s Em [2020], I was finding a sheer similarity between divided Vietnamese and Bengalese and other likely deadly fractured lands and men all over the world as a result of rapturous colonialism in the modern period. Surprisingly, the time period was also, coincidentally, the same from early fifties to late sixties when both Vietnam and united Pakistan were going through the same struggle and sufferings in quest of independence from the chronic oppression.

[DESIRES]

 “Certainly, bullets kill, but so, perhaps, does desire.”

I can’t help but accept it as a truism. Yes! It is our darkest desire that brings all the evil over the world.

 [COOLIES]

 I didn't read any other literature based on India -China's indentured labor in European and Latin American countries. History refuses to accept the truth about indentured labor but it was indirectly like African slavery.

 Tâm, Alexandre, and Mai are examples of Hegelian historical and Marxist dialectical materialism where the hero and anti-hero are in love forever.

 [POINTS OF VIEWS]

 "The Americans speak of the “Vietnam War,” the Vietnamese of the “American War.” This distinction is perhaps what explains the cause of that war."

 I have been thinking about the deep but detrimental impacts of perspectives on human history. It's all about the problems of other sides, not about us. Always suffering from the innocence complex.

 [OPERATION BABYLIFT]

 The mixed racial children were airlifted but I wonder what happened with our own war children during the independence war in 1971. Has Pakistan taken any responsibility on those issues?

 [EVACUATION WITH WINDS]

 "...people were climbing one by one up the ladder to the hovering helicopter, with the help of an American official"

 The world knows how it feels when they see the same or say more grossing scene of air lifting in Afghanistan evacuation, the fallen man from the wheel made of natural latex.

 [BLONDE]

  ". . . It was in Montreal too that she stopped visiting the hairdresser every month and no longer played the role of the blonde ingenue Brigitte Bardot, the discreet blonde Ingrid Bergman, the icy blonde Grace Kelly"

 What a coincidence! I have watched Brigitte Bardot starring Godard’s Contempt [1963] and Ingrid Bergman casted Hitchcock’s Spellbound [1945] from the selection of Cannes classics film list this year.

The brief boxes of each short narratives with thematic titles consisting of personal diaries, flash narratives and journalistic nugget. When I come to read a novel, I like it to be convincingly a fictional nature, and I have a tendency to avoid the mixture of non-fiction in it. But, Em feels a diverse and overpowering in this narrative style.

 

Em [2021]

Em [2020]

Kim Thúy,

Trans by Sheila Fischman

French, Canada