Living through a world war is obviously a traumatic experience, as is a land war with international stakeholders being fought in your own back yard. But in Line Papin’s The Girl Before Her, the displacement and challenge to personal identity from those conflicts stands alongside the trauma of being plucked from your homeland.
In the early 1960s, Vietnam is still recovering from the aftershocks of World War II and warily watching the simmering conflicts that would become the Vietnam War. Still, a teenage girl named Bà finds love in her young teacher, Trang. As the simmer becomes a boil, they marry and have three daughters who are all given names beginning with H. Miraculously, the family of five all makes it through the war, and in the years of reconstruction that followed, they built thriving lives for themselves. As young adults, the three sisters each found love. Some of these partners were welcomed into the family with open arms. The second daughter’s choice of a Frenchman, though, was heavily questioned: what if his love isn’t true, and what if he wants to move back to France?
For a while, both questions seemed moot. The couple had two children and the whole family lived close together in multigenerational bliss. When the younger child, Line, is ten, the family abruptly gives away the family cat, packs up, and leaves for the airport. Line thinks they’re going on vacation, though is puzzled why her family members and nanny are crying as they leave. As reality sets in that the little family has moved to France to be closer to Line’s father’s family, Line struggles to adjust to the new culture and define herself outside of her native Vietnam. Childhood transitions to adolescence and Line’s internal dissonance metastasizes into an all-encompassing malaise that almost takes her life.
From the bare summary, Line’s predicament in this work of auto-fiction (that is might seem like the problem of a snowflake—her mother and grandparents and great-grandparents withstood war at their doorstep, and this weak little Millennial is hospitalized for feeling like she doesn’t fit in? The Girl Before Her, however, holds far more nuance. War is violence and trauma, and the vast majority of its victims are innocents who have done nothing to court it. Violence and trauma, though, as Papin describes it, can also come from being taken away from the only home a person has known and taken halfway around the world without knowing why. Particularly in the years before social media and video chatting, or even international messaging, were widely available, book-Line experiences displacement as total, if more comfortable, than any at the hands of war. Further complicating the matter is her mother’s trauma lingering from war, as well as Line’s total ignorance of the move and the sense of something like betrayal upon learning the truth.
“The girl grew up alone,” Papin writes. “How does war, exile, and fear stop someone from hugging their own child? I’m not angry about it anymore, I’m not asking for anything when I say this, I just need to tell you: It hurts, Mom, it hurts so much. Why did we have to leave all those people? Why did I have to lose all that love? I keep asking these questions like a repeated sigh.”
As a work of auto-fiction—that is, nonfiction hiding under a thin veil of fictional liberties—this book feels less like a narrative than it does someone trying to work out where they’ve come from and how they ended up in their present place and as their present selves. Bà and Trang’s meeting and early struggles, the stories of the three sisters, and reflections of Bà’s online activism in her old age hardly center Line’s experience, nor are they presented in a way that makes them feel like cause and effect, or the people in them like side characters in Line’s story. Rather, they feel like explorations and explanations of the people who would shape Line’s life both on-screen and off. Through it all, the reader is a ghost over Papin’s shoulder as she turns herself, and her family, inside and out in search of answers.
I found that voyeuristic experience as thought-provoking as Papin’s intimate look at life in Vietnam during three very different eras. Through every page of spare prose, rendered in a lovely way through a translation from French by Adriana Hunter and Ly Lan Dill, I found myself thinking about the relationships that have shaped me, and the trauma that shaped those relatives. None of us have just fallen out of a coconut tree, and events that happen long ago or far away from our bobbing boats can rock or capsize us still. Yet, as The Girl Before Her also shows us, there can be healing no matter how great those waves are.
Ring Reads 