Banyan Moon

“The ocean. So beautiful and unpredictable. It reminded her, in some ways, of Ann’s father. In her mind, she saw the flash of an ashtray flying through the air. A muslin blanket falling too rapidly to the ground. There was no safety in the ocean, or in love.”

To Hương, the ocean provides an image of Ann’s father’s unpredictability and danger. Haunted by the Past, Hương sees both love and the ocean as dangerous things to be avoided at all costs.

“Over the past few days, there’s been a new alienation of my body, a sense of clumsiness, nausea.”

The bodily alienation Ann feels as a result of her pregnancy echoes the cultural alienation she feels among Noah’s friends and family.

“I watch her turning away from me, and it is then that my mind shuffles to take in her words. The knowing flutters gently inside me at first, a bird brushing against a screen window. And then, it hammers, thumping insistently, begging to be let in. I lose my breath. Vaguely, I feel my hand reaching toward someone, something solid. But there’s only air.”

After Noah’s mother briefly mentions morning sickness at the party, Ann’s sense of cultural alienation connects to her physical alienation triggering the reveal that she’s pregnant. She feels adrift at her realization, like she has nothing to hold on to, not even the certainty of her own body.

“I think of how much the word ‘Mẹ’ resembles ‘me’ when written out. Two different languages, that same connectedness, stretching across the miles.”

“Mẹ” is the Vietnamese word for “mom,” but it is almost identical to the English word “me.” The similarities between the two words are indicative of the sometimes-painful similarities between Hương and Minh, emphasizing the challenges of mother-daughter relationships.

“Grief is a lake of perilously thin ice. You never know when you’ll fall through it, or when you will fight your way back to the surface.”

Just as Hương sees the metaphorical danger of water as something connected to her past relationship with Vinh, Ann experiences her grief over Minh’s death as something that she can drown in. For both Ann and Hương, water takes on a dangerous connotation.

“And in the Banyan House, we have formed our own ouroboros, snakes swallowing each other until we forget which body is ours, which soul belongs here, and which is meant to have departed.”

Many passages in Banyan Moon hint at the way that Minh, Hương, and Ann have blurred the lines between their separate identities. Though they are individuals with separate personalities, the tense relationship between Minh and Hương is repeated in the relationship between Hương and Ann. The cyclical challenges of mother-daughter relationships repeat with each generation.

“Later that day, I sign up for a swim class at the local Y, one for adults like me who skipped this essential part of their upbringing. If I am going to survive a world without my mother, I have to learn a new way to move through it.”

After Minh’s death, Hương feels adrift in the world and afraid of facing its dangers without her mother. She wants to learn how to swim in order to overcome her fear of the ocean, which in turn means overcoming her fear of the past.

“‘Why does it have to be blame for you all the time, Ann?’ she asks. ‘Can’t you just accept that some bad things happened?’

‘Some things are preventable, Mom. We have to take responsibility for the past.’”

While Hương simply wants to acknowledge the pain in the past, Ann is more accusatory. She sees events in the past as having specific root causes, and wants her mother to take responsibility for her actions.

“Through her, I understood that another mother’s horror could touch us in the darkest of places, even a world away.”

Minh’s mother’s grief over the deaths of children as a result of the Vietnam War teaches Minh that there is a universality to the love that a mother feels for her child. A mother loves not just her own child but all children as her own, especially during times of war.

“Not all stories have to be neat. Some can be messy and unfinished, and we can let other people pick the line up for us. Let’s just try, Ann.”

Though Ann and Hương both grapple with the challenges of their mother-daughter relationship, Hương wants to move forward. She does not want to continue being haunted by the past and acknowledges that even if relationships are messy and complicated, she and Ann both need to try to fix things between them.

“In my mind, I thought of the two events together, the slap and the death, like his passing was a punishment for my poor approximation of motherhood.”

Minh sees slapping Hương as the cause for Xuân’s death and is continually haunted by this feeling of guilt. This guilt colors her relationship with Hương for the rest of her life and is something that she never fully resolves.

“I spent my whole life running, but now I’m seized with a new, reckless desire to explore the hidden spaces I thought I knew so well.”

Ann confronts her past by refusing to keep running from it. She wants to rediscover the Banyan House and learn more about her grandmother in the hopes of recontextualizing many of the things in her past that hurt her.

“But still, when they looked at me, they saw dirt. You know that look someone gives you, like they’re smelling something off? It was like I couldn’t get clean enough for them.”

Ann reflects on meeting Noah’s parents for the first time and the way that they made her feel. Her relationship with Noah’s parents contributes to the novel’s thematic exploration of Immigration and Cultural Alienation.

“‘His mom loved gushing about how exotic I was, like I was a fruit she found in the market,’ I continue. ‘Something her friends hadn’t tasted. She seemed proud of Noah for having expanded their palates with me, or something. I was consumed by them.’”

Ann feels that Noah’s parents see her as something unclean yet also exotic—something that makes them unique by proximity—exemplifying the double-edged sword of racism. Ann feels as if they wanted to devour her as much as they wanted to push her away.

“A healing house, far away from others, big and sprawling and shaded by great trees that afforded their own protection. We would never have to lean on our stories to save us. We’d never need saving at all. Our roots would lift from the earth and carry us someplace where the dread would not pull us down.”

Minh imagines a future where she and her children could be safe from harm. In this imagined future, they have a house that protects them, like the banyan tree in the folktale about Chú Cuội, foreshadowing the reality of life in the Banyan House.

“It’s easy to imagine she’s still there, cutting oranges in the kitchen or out back with her chili plants. Like, if I put her death out of my mind, I think she’s just in another room. About to walk in.”

Ann has a hard time accepting that her grandmother is really gone, especially because the Banyan House is so full of memories. Minh haunts the house so effectively that it feels like she is still alive, just out of sight in another room.

“My life, and Ann’s, beaded through every bit of the house, our hair woven into the plumbing, our skin cells shed into the floors. Inseparable. If the house were a living thing, it would have rejected Phước, for his cool practicality, his disregard for what Mẹ would have wanted.”

Hương recognizes that, metaphorically, the Banyan House represents an amalgamation of her, Ann, and Minh. The women of the Tran family are the house personified, and Phước has never been part of that relationship because of his disdain for the women in his family.

“Did I always cherish her, though, as I was meant to? No, not by a mile. But do I now? My heart has grown larger, inconceivably, since my mother’s death. Now it’s large enough to hold all of us, including Kumquat. Including myself.”

For much of Ann’s life, Hương has been haunted by the thought that she somehow denied Ann a “real” family with both a mother and father. Over the course of her character arc, she finds ways to forgive herself and to love herself and therefore her daughter as she always should have.

“Maybe I had been waiting all my life for a second chance, reclaiming all I had missed from Hương’s childhood in her progeny. Now I know that to be an unfair wish. To steal from another to heal oneself—the sign of true selfishness. But back then, I was ignorant and impulsive.”

Minh acknowledges the ways her actions have negatively impacted her relationship with Hương. This acknowledgement is painful, as it has only come after Minh’s death: She can never say these words out loud to her daughter.

“Maybe then she would understand how love cannot possibly be simple, or easy, despite all the adages to the contrary. When we choose to chisel pieces of our heart away to offer to another person, we must always make decisions. What flaws will we lift to the light? And which will we bury, in the hopes of protecting ourselves and others?”

Thai utilizes Minh’s posthumous point of view to add nuance to the novel’s discussion of the challenges of mother-daughter relationships. Minh wishes that she could tell Ann everything about her life so that her granddaughter could fully understand that life and love are infinitely complicated things. She sees her life now as the result of a series of choices that everyone has to make. She wishes she could share her wisdom with Ann.

“‘My mother,’ she says, ‘stole you from me. You were supposed to be my child. Mine. And ever since you were born, she saw you as her second chance.’”

The challenges of mother-daughter relationships in the Tran family reach a climax with this fight between Ann and Hương. Hương finally reveals to Ann the source of tension between herself and Minh. Though this fight is painful for Hương, Ann, and Minh’s ghost, it is a major moment of healing for the Tran women.

“So many men hoping to fix the house. Fix us.”

Through Ann’s perspective, Thai once again conflates the Banyan House with the Tran women themselves to highlight the gendered power dynamics at play in their lives. Noah and Wes both mention wanting to fix up the house, just like Phước wants to gut and renovate it. None of the men ever ask what Ann and Hương want.

“I see Banyan House for what it is: a home for women, a shaggy, worn, and vicious protector of the bruised, the tender. We grew up in that house, and in turn, it grew inward on us. It could tolerate no less than our full devotion, even in death. And when we began not to need it, it crumbled. A mirage that could not sustain itself without pain.”

Like the banyan tree in the folktale about Chú Cuội, the Banyan House was at first a place of healing for the Tran women. However, Minh comes to see that unlike Chú Cuội, Hương and Ann have to let the Banyan House go. It catches fire just when they have emotionally separated from it, as though their presence was holding it up.