A novel of the emotional intricacies of trauma and exile, from the author of international bestselling Ru.
Em is a story steeped in history, about those most impacted by violence and their later accomplishments. Written in Kim Thúy's trademark style, near to prose poetry, Em reveals her fascination with connection. In many ways, Em is perhaps Kim Thúy's most personal book, the one in which she trusts her readers enough to share with them not only the pervasive love she feels but also the rage and the horror at what she and so many other children of the Vietnam War had to live through.
Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Em is not a romance in any usual sense of the word, but it is a word whose homonym — aimer, to love — resonates on every page, a book powered by love in the larger sense. A portrait of Vietnamese identity emerges that is wholly remarkable, honed in wartime violence that borders on genocide, and then by the ingenuity, sheer grit and intelligence of Vietnamese-Americans, Vietnamese-Canadians and other Vietnamese former refugees who go on to build some of the most powerful small business empires in the world.
Through the linked destinies of characters connected by birth and destiny, the novel zigzags between the rubber plantations of Indochina; daily life in Saigon during the war as people find ways to survive and help each other; Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War; and today's global nail polish and nail salon industry, largely driven by former Vietnamese refugees—and everything in between. Here are human lives shaped both by unspeakable trauma and also the beautiful sacrifices of those who made sure at least some of these children survived.
Finalist for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Finalist for the 2021 New Academy Prize in Literature
Winner of the Prix du Grand Public—Salon du livre de Montréal
Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
Winner of the Grand Prix RTL-Lire
Below, you’ll find excerpt from Em by Kim Thúy, translated from the French by Sheila Fischman. Em is a love story of sorts, steeped in history, about those most impacted by violence. Written in Kim Thúy's trademark style, near to prose poetry, Em reveals her fascination with connection. In many ways, Em is perhaps Kim Thúy's most personal book, the one in which she trusts her readers enough to share with them not only the pervasive love she feels but also the rage and the horror at what she and so many other children of the Vietnam War had to live through.
The paperback edition of Em publishes on August 25, 2026.
A genesis of truth
War, again. In every conflict zone, good steals in and edges its way right into the cracks of evil. Treason complements heroism, love flirts with abandonment. The enemies advance towards one another, all with the same goal: to triumph. In this shared exercise, what is human shows itself to be at once strong, mad, cowardly, great, crude, innocent, ignorant, devout, cruel, courageous . . . That is the reason for war. Again.
I’m going to tell you the truth, some true stories at least, but only partially, incompletely, more or less. Because it’s impossible for me to re-create the blue nuances in the sky just as Rob, the marine, was reading a letter from his lover, while at the same time the rebel, Vinh, was writing to his own love during a brief lull, a moment of deceptive calm. Was it a Mayan and azure blue, or a French and cerulean blue? When Private John discovered the list of insurgents hidden in a pot of manioc flour, how many kilos were there? Had the flour just been milled?
What was the temperature of the water when Monsieur Út was thrown into the well before being burned alive by Sergeant Peter’s flame-thrower? Did Monsieur Út weigh half as much as Peter, or two-thirds? Was it the itching of his mosquito bites that so unsettled Peter?
For nights at a time, I tried to imagine Travis’s walk, Hoa’s shyness, Nick’s fear, Tuân’s despair, the bullet wounds of some and the victories of others in the forest, in the city, in the rain, in the mud. Every night, to the rhythm of ice cubes dropping into their container in the freezer, my research assaulted me with the know-ledge that my imagination would never be able to grasp the whole reality. In one testimony, a soldier remembers seeing the enemy running full speed towards a tank, carrying on his shoulder an M67 rifle, 1.3 metres long and weighing seventeen kilos. Facing that soldier was a man ready to die in order to kill his enemies, ready to kill while dying, ready to let death triumph. How to imagine such selflessness, such unconditional commitment to a cause?
How to contemplate that a woman might carry her two small children into the jungle over hundreds of kilometres, tying the first to a branch in order to protect him from wild animals while she moved off with the second, tied him up in turn, and went back to the first child to repeat the journey with him? Yet this woman described her trek to me in her ninety-two-year-old combatant’s voice. Despite our six hours of conversation, there are still a thousand details I lack. I forgot to ask her where she got the ropes, and if her sons still bear marks on their bodies from being tied up. Who knows if these memories have not been erased to leave behind only one, the taste of wild tubers she chewed into mush to feed to her children? Who knows . . .
If your heart shudders on reading these stories of fore-seeable madness, unimagined love, or everyday heroism, know that the whole truth would very probably have provoked in you either respiratory failure or euphoria. In this book, truth is fragmented, incomplete, unfinished, in both time and space. Then is it still the truth? I’ll let you reply in a way that relates to your own story, your own truth. Meanwhile, I promise you in the words that follow a certain ordering of the emotions, along with feelings whose disarray cannot be denied.
Rubber
White gold flows from wounds inflicted on rubber trees. For centuries, the Maya, the Aztecs, the peoples of the Amazon, collected this liquid and used it to make shoes, waterproof fabric, and rubber balls. When European explorers discovered this material, they first used it to manufacture elastic that would hold up their garters. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the demand increased at the meteoric speed with which automobiles multiplied, transforming the landscape. The need then became so great and so demanding that synthetic latex, a material that meets seventy percent of our current needs, had to be produced. Despite all the efforts made in lab-oratories, only pure latex, whose name of caoutchouc in French means “the tears (caa) of the tree (ochu),” can withstand the acceleration, the pressure, and the thermal range imposed on airplane tires and the joints in a space shuttle. The more humanity succeeds in accelerating its rhythm, the more it requires a latex produced naturally, at the speed of Earth’s rotation around the sun, in accord with lunar eclipses.
Thanks to its elasticity, its resistance, and its impermeability, natural latex swathes our extremities like a second skin in order to protect us from the consequences of desire. During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the following year, the rate of infections contracted sexually by the troops grew from less than four percent to more than seventy-five percent, which later led, during the First World War, to the German government’s giving high priority to the production of condoms to protect its soldiers, even though there was a serious shortage of rubber.
Certainly, bullets kill, but so, perhaps, does desire.
A novel of the emotional intricacies of trauma and exile, from the author of international bestselling Ru.
Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Em is not a romance in any usual sense of the word, but it is a word whose homonym — aimer, to love — resonates on every page, a book powered by love in the larger sense. A portrait of Vietnamese identity emerges that is wholly remarkable, honed in wartime violence that borders on genocide, and then by the ingenuity, sheer grit and intelligence of Vietnamese-Americans, Vietnamese-Canadians and other Vietnamese former refugees who go on to build some of the most powerful small business empires in the world.
Through the linked destinies of characters connected by birth and destiny, the novel zigzags between the rubber plantations of Indochina; daily life in Saigon during the war as people find ways to survive and help each other; Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War; and today’s global nail polish and nail salon industry, largely driven by former Vietnamese refugees—and everything in between. Here are human lives shaped both by unspeakable trauma and also the beautiful sacrifices of those who made sure at least some of these children survived.
Born in Saigon in 1968, Kim Thúy left Vietnam with the boat people when she was 10 and settled in Quebec with her family. As well as being a writer, she has degrees in translation and law and has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer and restaurant owner. Her debut novel, Ru, was published in 2009 and became a bestseller in Quebec and in France, garnering several prestigious literary awards, including a Governor General's Award in 2010. Translation rights have been sold in twenty-eight languages. She has also written À toi (Yours), with Pascal Janovjak, Mãn and Vi--in addition to a cookbook, Le Secret des Vietnamiennes (Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen).