Banyan Moon

Hương is Banyan Moon’s second narrator and protagonist. Like Ann and Minh, her arc is primarily concerned with healing and moving forward in her difficult relationships with the other women in her family. Hương feels like Minh overstepped in her role as a grandmother to Ann, leaving Hương on the sidelines. She does not understand why Minh was able to love Ann more easily than Minh ever loved her. As a result, Hương’s relationship with Ann is colored by jealousy and resentment. Hương never addresses this with Minh before her death, and it is only when she eventually reconciles with Ann that she also heals her relationship with her mother. Becoming a grandmother helps her better understand Minh’s perspective.

Hương’s secret about Vinh’s murder is another stumbling block in her relationship with Ann. The secret weighs on Hương, not just because she is hiding something from her daughter, but because she feels like she robbed Ann of “an intact family” (69). She imagines a possible future in which she had not killed Vinh and Vinh became a good father and a kind husband, although deep down she knows that this future was never possible. She feels deep guilt for her part in killing Vinh, even many years after the fact. At the end of the book, Hương decides to keep her secret rather than admit the truth to Ann. She does not want to make Ann complicit in her crime, even though it has been over two decades. Her choice to keep the secret and start fresh in her relationship with Ann reflects the internal healing from wounds of her past and a release of the guilt that has held her hostage emotionally.

Learning how to swim symbolizes Hương’s choice to work through the fear and trauma of her past rather than perpetuating it in a new generation with baby Bính. Hương connects the simultaneous danger and attraction of the ocean with her feelings for Vinh: Though she was charmed and intrigued by him at first, she soon came to realize that he was volatile and unpredictable. By conquering her fear of the ocean, Hương is able to overcome her fear of the past and commit to a better future. When she saves herself from almost drowning in the rip current, she emerges from the ocean reborn, ready to try again. 

Minh is the matriarch and third narrator of Banyan Moon. She is strong and cunning, and she loves both her daughter and granddaughter fiercely, despite having a complicated relationship with Hương. Death does not stop Minh from looking out for her family, and she haunts the Banyan House as a ghost until Hương and Ann have healed their relationship. Minh’s relationship with Hương mirrors Hương’s relationship with Ann, reflecting the cyclical nature of intergenerational trauma. Both women keep secrets about their daughters’ fathers. They both feel a painful sense of guilt and distance tempered by their fierce love for their children. Minh is never able to completely reconcile with Hương in her lifetime, but in her death and afterlife, she paves the way for Hương and Ann to reconcile their own relationship. 

Through the flashbacks to her life in Vietnam, Minh becomes a more fully developed character. Neither Hương nor Ann was able to see her as a whole person because they were too focused on their own perspectives. Minh reveals her feelings of intense guilt over Xuân’s death though it was not her fault. She sees Xuân’s death as her punishment for slapping Hương. When Crystal reveals to Ann that it was Minh who broke up their friendship, Ann is eventually able to see her grandmother as a complete person with flaws. Through this discovery, and the flashbacks to Minh’s past, Minh becomes free from both Ann’s idealized version and Hương’s cynical version of her.

Wes and Crystal—both figures from Ann’s teenage years—serve as foils whose actions push Ann to reckon with the blind spots in her perspective on her mother and grandmother. Wes is Ann’s high school boyfriend, and when the two reconnect, Ann sees a possible future with him. This future is hazy at first, especially because she is not sure where she and Noah stand, but as the book progresses, Ann begins to see more clearly what a life with Wes would look like. Wes offers the narrative the perspective of the absent father, pointing to the key sources of guilt and trauma in Minh and Hương’s past. Wes has not seen his own son in five years. Ann initially views Wes through an idealized lens (similar to her perspective on Minh), ignoring Wes’s flaws as a father and preferring to see him as a good person because he is kind to her and assures her that she will be a good mother. When Crystal implies that Wes abused his ex-wife, it pushes Ann to examine the way she has also constructed an idealized view of Minh. In the end, Wes chooses to go to California to try and make up for lost time with his son. 

Crystal King functions as a foil to Ann by providing key information that forces Ann to view both Wes and Minh as whole and flawed people. Crystal and Ann were once close, but Ann chose to leave Florida and build a new life, while Crystal married a man she met in high school and stayed in her hometown. Crystal and Ann stopped talking in their senior year. Ann never knew the truth about why Crystal stopped being her friend. By explaining that the rift in their friendship was Minh’s doing, Crystal plays a vital role in helping Ann come to terms with Minh as a complete person. Her perspective shows Ann that loving someone does not mean idealizing them, but rather accepting them and all their flaws.

Noah is Ann’s long-term boyfriend and the father of her baby. He comes from a wealthy family and works as a college professor. At the beginning of Banyan Moon, he is preoccupied with writing his first novel about ancient Greece. Although Noah initially seems like a perfect boyfriend, his willful ignorance makes him complicit in his parents’ racism toward Ann, highlighting the cultural alienation Ann experiences as a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant. He also cheats on Ann with an ex-girlfriend, which he characterizes as a mistake that happened “just a few times” (50) instead of taking responsibility for his actions. For most of his character arc, he attempts to convince Ann to take him back, persistently texting and calling Ann when she goes back to Florida after Minh’s death, though he does respect her space when she asks for it.

At the end of the novel, Noah finally accepts that he and Ann are not going to get back together. Although he is hurt and disappointed that she is not willing to try again, he does not turn angry or resentful toward Ann, and instead commits to being a good father to their son. He and Ann both leave their relationship in a good place. They forgive each other and are united in their love for baby Bình. Ann knows that Noah will be a good father even if he does not live with them. Rather than inheriting and perpetuating the guilt that plagued her mother, Ann feels free from the responsibility to create a nuclear family for her child, but she still has the benefits of a co-parent and a supportive (platonic) partner to help her raise baby Bình.

Hương dates several men over the course of her life in an attempt to give Ann the traditional nuclear family she believed to be necessary for a good life. She married Vinh when she was young, only six months after their initial meeting. Vinh was handsome and charming at first, but after they married, Hương saw his true colors. She initially stayed with him, partly because she still believed that it might be possible for the two of them to create a nuclear family. He became violent and unpredictable, and Hương knows that if Minh had not killed him, he would have eventually killed her and possibly Ann. Vinh is a deeply unhappy man unsatisfied with his life, which he copes with by lashing out and blaming others around him. Despite her negative experiences with Vinh, Hương still feels the pull to give Ann a father figure. She married Gary when Ann was in high school, but Gary was very unkind to Ann. The relationship ultimately fell apart. When Ann returns to the Banyan House, Hương is dating a man named Duke, but little is said about him. The pattern of her relationships suggests the way in which Hương is Being Haunted by the Past and her repeated attempts to right its wrongs.

After Hương escapes the riptide, a swimmer named Cliff asks her out on a date. Although she finds him attractive, she rejects him, saying that she is not in the right frame of mind to be dating—a significant shift for her character. She has overcome her fear of the sea and moved on from her memories of the past. In doing so, she has pulled herself out of the cycle of dating men in the hopes of achieving an intact family, recognizing that she and Ann are already intact, already enough in and of themselves. For Hương, the solution is not to find the right man to finally heal from the trauma of her relationship with Vinh and to give Ann a father but to prioritize herself for once. By surviving a riptide, she’s finally able to view herself as she truly is: a survivor.

Xuân and Bình are the fathers of Minh’s children, Phước and Hương. Minh and Bình’s brief summer affair initially made Minh feel loved, but ultimately showed her that Bình did not care about her. He pressured her into sleeping with him, though he had no intention of marrying her. Although Minh went through with the affair knowing, at least on some level, that Bình would not marry her, her life became much more complicated when she realized that she was pregnant. Despite the inconsistent and often unkind way that Bình treated her, Minh keeps the photograph of him for the rest of her life as a reminder of her first love. 

Xuân saved Minh from the shame of a pregnancy out of wedlock. He was the opposite of Bình, in both looks and personality. While Bình was handsome and charming, Xuân was not particularly good-looking, but he was steady and immensely kind. Xuân did not judge Minh for her pregnancy and insisted that they get married quickly so that no one would suspect the child was anyone’s but his. Minh knew that he loved her more than she loved him, and on Xuân’s deathbed, he told her that he was hers forever, even if she never loved him. Minh was haunted by his last words throughout her life. When Minh’s spirit is finally ready to move on, it is Xuân she sees waiting for her. She sees love in his eyes and finally realizes that she did love Xuân all along.