'Banyan Moon' by Thao Thai tackles the immigrant experience

In Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” the narrator notes that “in Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nho.” Framed as a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother, Vuong’s semi-autobiographical novel is a cascading meditation on inheritance. The narrator, Little Dog, grapples with memories both loving and freighted with violence passed on from his mother and grandmother. As with his collections of poetry, Vuong’s writing seems at once a way of honoring the lives of his ancestors — knitting them closer together — and a way of wedging them further apart.

For the characters of “Banyan Moon,” a debut novel by the Vietnamese American writer Thao Thai, nho also proves to be a double-barreled proposition. The multigenerational saga circles around the lives of the Tran women, moving from 1960s Vietnam to present-day Florida, where the two younger members — mother Huong and daughter Ann — have been uneasily united after the passing of grandmother Minh, a refugee of the Vietnam War. For Ann especially, Minh’s death feels sharp: The family matriarch effectively mothered her into adulthood, as Huong was often absent, working several jobs to support them.

Banyan House, the imposing Florida childhood home of both Huong and Ann, plays a pivotal role in bringing these women back together. When the novel begins, Ann is living with her tenure-track professor boyfriend in Michigan. She discovers she’s pregnant — and that her boyfriend has been unfaithful. The realization sends her into an existential spiral, so she decides to take up temporary residence at Banyan House, where she’s joined by her estranged mother. Much to their surprise, mother and daughter have been made joint owners of the house and its land, per Minh’s will. In the fresh absence of Minh, who historically served as a mediator between them, Huong and Ann must contend not only with the changes in each other wrought by the separation of years but with Huong’s son Phuoc — a Rolex-wearing businessman who is incensed that he did not inherit more than Minh’s savings — and a dragon’s hoard of secrets about missing fathers and lovers, which the house yields up ever so slowly.

Banyan trees, which give the house its name, are also called strangler figs. “They’re called that because they smother other trees,” Ann notes. “Homicidal, sentient trees” is how another character jokingly refers to them. The image makes for a neat — perhaps too neat — metaphor for the tentacular reach of memories passed down the maternal line. As one character glosses: “I come from a tribe of women who are ravaged and joyous, loud, raging, tied to our own convoluted histories. We are a knot of branches, mud-speckled and ever-searching.”

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These lines are delivered by Ann, but it’s an observation that could as easily have been made by her mother or grandmother; the confluence of voices is both a strength and weakness of this poetic, often radiant novel. Each chapter is narrated by a different woman — or spirit, in the case of the deceased Minh — but Minh, Huong and Ann don’t always feel fully individuated as characters. Living with her White boyfriend and his WASP parents, Ann starts to chafe at her “ill-fitting cashmere life”; in a later chapter, the ghost of Minh, hovering above the fray, observes her descendants watching a TV commercial where a woman with a “cashmere voice” holds up a ring. The sympathetic attunement among these women is perhaps intentional — an “invisible string” between the living and the dead — but sustained across several chapters, it occasionally erodes their singularity.

The fungibility of characters owes something to the book’s fairy-tale-like quality; Thai often blends the mundane and the magical, from the book’s title, derived from a Vietnamese fable, to descriptions that liken characters to witches. Yet, for all its nods to mystical realms, the book is strongest when it latches onto the visceral beauty of the everyday. A daughter recalls “the rare cube of her [mother’s] affection, slipped to us when we least expected”; “Fury sizzles away, a drop of sweat on hot concrete.”

Thai has said that she wrote the novel “from a place of questioning, not only of my own identity as a mother, but of the strong line of women who came before me, each stepping onto the same path with their own burdens, their own dreams. I wanted to discover the ways that decisions refract across generations, shaping not only our current relationships, but all the ones to come.” The book certainly has the heft of a story that’s been gestating for years — an intimate account of one family’s planting of roots in American soil and the sacrifices great and small that each member makes along the way.

Rhoda Feng writes about theater and books for the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, Frieze and Vogue.

Banyan Moon

By Thao Thai

Mariner. 334 pp. $30

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