Seventeen-year-old Jade Nguyen reluctantly spends her summer before college in the villa with Ba, her father, who has been renovating the place into a bed-and-breakfast. At the center of She is a Haunting is Nhà Hoa, or “Flower House”, a 1920s villa built by French colonizers in Đà Lạt, and abandoned by the French and Americans after the Vietnam War. Like the song, author Trang Thang Tran makes multiple meanings of a house, with an eerie twist. Nationalistically, the house can also symbolize the nation of Vietnam, the last line referring to the mountains and the sea. It can also represent a home, the relationships within a family. The house in the song can be a literal, physical house. The song roughly translates to “This house is our house / With hard work, our ancestors built it / Descendants must steward it / Year after year upon this homeland.” It’s a song that pays homage to our ancestors, and enthusiastically takes up the duty to preserve the fruits of their sacrifices. My mother was passing on a joyful song that she and other kids clapped along to in her childhood days in Vietnam. While reading She is a Haunting, Trang Thanh Tran’s debut novel, I recalled a short song that my mother taught me as a kid: She is a Haunting, Trang Thanh Tran, Bloomsbury YA, 2023.
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