E.M.Tran Explores Vietnamese American Heritage in 'Daughters of the New Year'

In her debut novel, Daughters of the New Year, E.M. Tran tells the stories of three Vietnamese-American sisters whose mother emigrated from Vietnam to the United States after the Fall of Saigon. Remarkably, Tran’s novel is also told in reverse, starting in 2016 and going back to the 1970’s, spanning four decades. “It starts in 2016, pretty much present-day New Orleans, really it starts in Vietnam, but in the U.S., the first part of the book is of the U.S. and New Orleans, and as you go further into the book, each chapter moves backwards in time so we go farther and farther back. It follows a Vietnamese-American family in New Orleans…and it focuses on the mother, Xuan, and her three daughters, Trac, Nhi, and Trieu, and as you move backwards in the timeline, we see the characters live through major historic events, like Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Fall of Saigon, and then also alongside those big events, we see them go through major personal events, like the loss of a parent or being bullied at school, and then as you move farther and farther back, we meet grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, and great-great-grandmothers… until finally we end with these Vietnamese women warriors, Lady Trieu and the Trung sisters who were the original inspiration, the impetus, for my writing of the book.”

While the family structure in the story is similar to her own, Tran points out that Daughters of the New Year is a fictionalized, heightened version of her family and her own personal experiences. To create tension, she included additional characters, added more conflict, and changed what really happened. “What I’d like to say is like, really the truth is that all the characters are really some version of me or some projection of my anxieties or my experiences…If it were a version of my sister, or my sisters, then it would be like that but turned up to a thousand, like increasing the intensity of who those people are.” Additionally, she wanted to change the conventional immigrant experience for her characters. Rather than preserving the traditions from their homeland while integrating into their new country, as many foreigners do, this family becomes fully immersed in American culture. Tran explained, “I wanted the family to be outside of the community…I wanted to do something different. I wanted the reader to ask, ‘What happens when the characters aren’t accepted fully in either,’ right? When they don’t have a place of refuge, and they kind of have to create their own way outside of it. I’m really interested in thinking about in-between spaces and making those in-between spaces really extreme.”