HER: THE FLAME TREE

Characters grapple with the shifting power structures of 20th-century Vietnam in Ha’s novel.

Minh Tánh, a Vietnamese-American graduate student and writer, follows a lead about the adopted daughter of an elderly imperial eunuch serving the Vietnamese emperor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He travels to Vietnam to meet Miss Phương Bộ, an aging woman who now lives a simple rural life, but who was born as a consequence of colonialism and conflict; she is half-French and half-Vietnamese, with no knowledge of her birth family. Her adoptive father, Bộ, was once the grand eunuch for the emperor, residing in the Purple Forbidden City, well-connected among the servants and concubines. When Phượng is a young woman, Jonathan Edward, an American working with the South Vietnamese, seeks her out in search of family connections to his dead lover, also a French and Vietnamese woman, who had an identical phoenix necklace to Phượng’s. As she begins to push her father for answers, both Phượng and the reader reckon with the deep, ongoing wounds Vietnam has suffered due to colonialism and war. The author’s narrative switches frequently in perspective and time, toggling between Bộ’s time in the palace, Phượng’s childhood before the Vietnam War, and Minh’s excavation of Phượng’s memories. Through these time jumps, readers see how quickly Vietnam’s social and political structure changed in the 20th century, and how citizens of all classes suffered. Ha evokes a visceral image of Vietnam even as much of the text is rendered in dialogue; the country can hold both flocks of parrots “preening their plumage and eating in a frenzy that the ground was a canvas of colors—blue, green and red” and “shreds of flesh and clothing…skewered on branches.”

A vivid study of a country’s fraught history and how its people struggled to make sense of it.