Less about the more familiar Vietnam War with the Americans, it instead concentrates on French colonization, World War II, and the start of the war with the French in the 1950s. Kupersmith is a beautiful writer and weaves the story of Winnie’s disappearance into a larger narrative that spans more than eighty years of Vietnamese history. Soon Winnie makes the ultimate escape in Vietnam when she disappears. Early in Violet Kupersmith’s new novel, Build Your House Around My Body, Winnie spots a banyan tree outside an old temple in Saigon and hopes she, too, can become like a banyan, “to encase Old Winnie completely in its cage-like lattice of roots and then let her wither away inside.” There’s nothing particular she’s trying to escape from, but rather she hopes to find a home in which she won’t stand out or feel alone, as she had as the fourth child-and youngest by many years-of a Vietnamese immigrant father and white American mother in their Maryland suburb. Winnie Nguyen moves to Saigon in 2010 to teach English, but also to become a more resilient, stronger version of her biracial American self.
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