IF I HAD TWO LIVES

A woman raised in a Vietnamese military camp must reclaim her
identity in this debut novel.

In 1997, when she’s 7, the unnamed narrator is taken to a
military camp where her mother, a reform-minded energy consultant, is hiding
from her political enemies. There, the girl forms relationships that will shape
the rest of her life. Her mother, engrossed in her mission of bringing
electricity to Vietnam, alternately ignores her and berates her. A young
soldier assigned to protect the mother and daughter offers the girl emotional
support and a nurturing, stable presence. But the girl’s most intense
relationship is with a friend she refers to only as “the little girl,” who is
being sexually abused by her father. The narrator happily participates in her
friend’s fantasies: “My life depended on whatever imagined role the little girl
gave me.” But a rift forms between the girls when the narrator, now 13, is
abruptly whisked to the U.S. In 2012, the narrator works in a cafe in New York
and constructs facsimiles of her past relationships: She follows a man who
reminds her of her soldier, moves into his apartment building, and befriends
him. And she falls into an intense, erotically tinged relationship with a woman
named Lilah. “I stared at [Lilah’s] back, her narrow and boyish hips, and
wondered what the little girl might look like as a woman.” The narrator agrees
to become a surrogate mother for Lilah and her husband, Jon, a decision that
ultimately leads her back to Vietnam to confront her past. The novel is an
exploration of the way people co-opt others for their own ends, and it’s
satisfying when the narrator finally gains clarity on the way her life has been
warped to reinforce fantasies, both her own and other people’s. But the story
is filled with clumsy melodrama, with the prose trending a deep, bewildering
purple: “The acme of all love was abandonment, the only point at which we would
fulfill the promise of immortality, to persist in our love for those who are
absent, into oblivion.”

An intriguing premise marred by awkward pacing and an
overwrought style.