As I write this, I’m coming off a weekend where my dog has had diarrhea for nearly 48 hours straight (and counting), having not slept more than 3 hours the past 3 nights, and taking her out every 2 hours to avoid clean ups in the apartment. It’s been one of the least fun weekends in recent memory, complete with a torrential rainstorm all day Saturday, that, at the very least, washed away her diarrhea from the grass. Being generous, I'm operating at like 20% right now.
I say this, not just to excuse any spelling or grammatical errors, but because it reminded me how incredibly frustrating it is to deal with a problem you can’t solve. I did get her to an emergency vet, got some medication that’s helping her eat a bit and sleep better, but this weekend was wrought with sleep deprivation and frustration. It's helped me realize that one of the many things that Thao Thai does so well with Banyan Moon is show what it’s like to be in the vice of problems that you can’t control.
Maybe it’s something inseparable from generational relationships. We only know a fraction of what our parents have been through. We’ve seen their mistakes, but usually not the efforts they made to improve on the job their parents did. More than we care to admit, they’ve been where we are, and at the same time, nobody truly knows you like yourself. It’s two faces looking at each other in a mirror, both thinking they are the one who truly knows.
Banyan Moon leaves me with a very similar feeling that The Joy Luck Club left in me, doing an impeccable job of showing you that there’s always something more you don’t know about someone, even someone as close as a parent or a child. There’s always some distance that requires empathy and grace to cross.
What I think I loved most about Banyan Moon is the hope that it holds for crossing that distance that can feel insurmountable, or at least not letting the distance grow until the other side fades across the horizon. It tackles themes through a specific cultural lens that are so universal, that a trio of Vietnamese women through the generations feels as close to me as my own family. We deal with so many similar problems, trying to carve out a slightly better life for our children than we got, and it’s a problem that our parents faced and their parents before them. It’s a link that ties us all together.
Thao Thai walks a tightrope through this story, and I have to say that I haven’t read a book with such a satisfying ending in quite a long time. Out of the many many fractured possible endings, for me, the one Thao Thai weaves is the perfect one.
Many, many sentences in this book are fantastic, but this one sticks out, succinctly describing in 25 words what humans have struggled with communicating and understanding for thousands of years:
“Not all stories have to be neat. Some can be messy and unfinished, and we can let other people pick up the line for us.”