Summary
Narrated from ten-year-old protagonist Kim Hà’s first-person perspective, Inside Out & Back Again begins in Saigon, Vietnam. It is 1975, the Year of the Cat. To celebrate Tết, the lunar new year, Hà’s family eats sugary lotus seeds and rice cakes and wears new clothes; everyone must smile. Hà is learning how to embroider and raise her papaya tree. Her mother says one of Hà’s brothers must wake early to bless the house, because only male feet bring luck. While her mother sleeps, Hà wakes earlier than everyone and taps her big toe on the tile floor. Hà’s mother visits the I Ching Teller of Fate; he predicts their lives will twist inside out. The war is coming closer to their home.
Hà comments on her name: she was named after the Golden River, where her mother and father once strolled in the evenings. Hà’s brothers tease her for her name. Hà’s mother says they tease her because they love her. Her brother Khôi, four years older than Hà, spotted the first white blossom on her papaya tree. Brother Vū, at eighteen, could see higher and spotted a baby papaya. Her brother Quang is oldest at 21.
In mid-February, Hà says goodbye to her best friend, TiTi. TiTi cries as she and her family drive away in their rabbit-shaped car. Khôi holds Hà’s hand as she cries. He says TiTi’s family is heading to Vūng Tâu, where rich people go to flee Vietnam on cruise ships. Hà is glad their family has become poor because it means they can stay.
In March Hà’s mother makes an alter, offering fruit and incense and chants for Hà’s father’s return. Nine years earlier he left on a navy mission and was captured. After she chants, Hà’s mother locks his portrait away, unable to bear looking at his forever-young eyes. Her mother works as a secretary in a navy office, while at night she makes baby clothes for seamstresses to sell at the market. Hardly anyone buys them, because people can barely afford food anymore. Khôi gets mad at their mother for taking his hen’s eggs. He thinks they should be putting them under heat lamps in hopes of hatching more chicks. Their mother apologizes, and says she wouldn’t have eaten it if the prices of eggs, along with everything, hadn’t gone up so much.
In Miss Xinh’s class, Fridays are dedicated to current events. The news has been bleak lately: Communists have gotten closer to Saigon, prices have gone up since American soldiers left, and bombs can be heard in the night. Fridays will now be for happy news, of which no one has any to share.
Hà takes afternoon and Saturday classes, so in the mornings Hà shops at the market, buying pork, water spinach, and tofu. She feels smart by purchasing slightly less than her mother requested and spending the money saved on toast coconut, fried dough, and mung bean cookies. Hà’s tree sprouts two more papayas. She anticipates eating them in thrilling chews. Everything Hà knows about her father comes from details her mother lets slip: he loved stewed eels, pastries, and his children.
Quang races home and turns on the TV. A South Vietnam pilot bombed the presidential palace that afternoon. The news says the pilot had been a Communist spy. Communists captured Hà’s father, so she wonders why a pilot would choose their side. Quang says, “One cannot justify war unless each side flaunts its own blind conviction.” Hà doesn’t understand the tangled words he learned in university.
For Hà’s birthday this year, her mother can only afford banana tapioca and her favorite black sesame candy. Hà asks for stories: her mother speaks of how she grew up in the North, where her grandmother’s land was vast and her only duties were looking pretty and writing poetry. Betrothed to Hà’s father at five, her mother married at sixteen due to cultural changes after Ho Chi Minh took power. Houses and land were taken by the state, the country was divided in half, and Hà’s parents moved south to escape Communism. While Hà’s mother waited for her family to follow, migration between north and south was prohibited. At this point in the story, Hà’s mother weeps. For her birthday, Hà wishes that her father would come home and remove her mother’s worries.
Analysis
For readers familiar with the Vietnam War, Inside Out & Back Again begins with a note of dramatic irony: it is 1975, the year the war ended, yet the protagonist Hà is unaware that her city, Saigon, will soon fall to the Communist forces of North Vietnam. In this way, the author introduces the theme of warfare and the conflict that sets Hà’s story in motion.
As the family moves through the routine rituals of the lunar new year and their daily lives, the war draws closer to home. Hà’s best friend TiTi’s wealthier family has the means to flee in advance of the fall of Saigon. Hà is left to observe how prices escalate in the wake of the withdrawal of American forces in 1973.
However, despite the air of desperation, Hà is not anxious: too young to fully understand the societal disintegration around her, she pays as much attention to the war as to her own material reality. While food prices have been going up, Hà adapts by figuring out how to buy slightly less food for the family in order to procure her favorite treats, which becomes a dominant motif.
Due to a lack of money and resources, Hà’s mother isn’t able to provide the usual abundance for Hà’s birthday. In lieu of material gifts, Hà asks for stories. Her family history is greatly affected by the history of Vietnamese warfare itself: Hà’s mother’s family was divided after the country was split between the communist North and noncommunist South.
The opening of the book also introduces Hà’s absent father. After going to war, he has been missing for nine years, captured by Communists in the North. Hà expects that he will return, based on her mother’s daily prayers for his return. Having grown up her entire life with him gone, Hà has adapted to living with the idea of her father. Hà’s adaptability under duress will prove necessary for the rest of the book’s turbulent events.
