Build Your House Around My Body

Set against more than half a century of Vietnamese history, the novel interweaves multiple timelines and characters connected by a haunted rubber plantation in the Central Highlands town of Ia Kare, a supernatural smoke entity, and the fates of two missing women.

In June 2010, Winnie, a twenty-two-year-old Vietnamese American woman, arrives alone in Saigon with almost nothing: a passport, two changes of clothes, and a nearly empty suitcase. She hopes Vietnam will give her life something worth keeping. She moves in with her devout great-aunt and takes a job teaching English at a language academy, where she is spectacularly incompetent. Dr. Sang, a Vietnamese American doctor and old family friend contacted through her brother Thien, warns her cryptically to be careful that nothing finds her.

The narrative jumps to March 2011, the day Winnie disappears. Long, her boyfriend, returns to their shared house in District 6 to find her gone. Her suitcase and passport remain under the bed, and her phone buzzes in a discarded dress pocket. Long refuses to report her missing because he dreads encountering his estranged older brother, Tan Phan, a police captain. In a toolbox he discovers a coil of blood-streaked aluminum wire he has never seen before.

The novel reaches back eighteen years to introduce the trio at the story's heart. In the Ia Kare cemetery, three children, Binh, a fearless girl with a husky voice, and two brothers, the narrow-eyed Tan and the wide-eyed Long, encounter a strange man in a cowboy hat. Binh tries to extort him, but the man counters with a bet: He can show them something terrifying enough to make them scream. He inhales smoke from joss paper burned as offerings for the dead, and his jaw unhinges grotesquely as dark smoke pours from his gaping mouth. Tan and Long flee, but Binh stands firm. The incident fractures the trio's bond, the boys' shame at running creating a rift they can never discuss.

The man is the Fortune Teller, born Jean-François Auffret, the mixed-race son of a French woman and an incarcerated Khmer man. In 1945, at about age ten, he is abandoned overnight in a Highland forest during the Japanese coup against the French colonial government. A sentient copper-colored smoke entity forces itself inside his body, granting him supernatural abilities, including the power to transform into a creature of living cloud.

The rubber plantation bordering Ia Kare has its own dark origin. In 1949, two former French prison guards, Gaspard Renaud and Jean-Pierre Courcoul, plant the trees. Their neighbor Louis "l'Anguille" Lejeune, a lecherous coffee planter, employs a young cook, Odile, whose unusual pale golden eyes captivate Gaspard. After France's defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Gaspard steals a treasured possession of Louis's and burns it in the plantation before setting himself on fire; Jean-Pierre follows him into the flames. The plantation is immediately infested with cobras, and Louis, venturing in, is bitten by a two-headed snake and dies.

In 1986, Old Ma, the wealthiest man in Ia Kare, summons the Fortune Teller after his fifteen-year-old daughter vanishes into the plantation. Odile, now elderly, possesses a "special sight" that allows her eyes to leave her body, though each use poisons her. She has located the girl but kept silent, partly out of pity for someone fleeing her father's abuse. The Fortune Teller transforms into smoke, finds the girl encircled by the two-headed cobra, and carries her through the air to safety. The girl later gives birth in secret; Old Ma refuses to acknowledge the child, who is adopted by a childless couple. That child is Binh.

Years later, a pepper farmer named Field Rat Ma reports a haunting at the same family's house, and the Fortune Teller returns to investigate. Field Rat attacks him and ties him to a tree as a sacrifice, but the Fortune Teller unleashes his smoke, which consumes Field Rat. First Assistant, the Fortune Teller's clairvoyant employee, flees Ia Kare with Field Rat's wife, Mrs. Ma, who is Old Ma's daughter.

In Winnie's timeline, events spiral after her great-aunt evicts her. Her insomnia worsens, and a reckless night out ends with her waking in a windowless club room, told she was likely drugged. At the Saigon Zoo, she presses her hand against the vivarium housing the two-headed cobra, desperate to trade places with the caged animal. She runs into a rainstorm and follows what appears to be a snake through a gutter to Long's house. Long finds her drenched and bleeding in the alley and takes her in. She lets him believe she was harmed and settles into the house, discovering she physically cannot leave alone. During a Lunar New Year trip to Ia Kare, she meets Long's grandmother, a sharp-witted woman with unusual pale golden eyes who warns her about the cobras in the rubber forest.

The novel's other major thread traces the trio's disintegration. At seventeen, Tan warns Long that Binh belongs to him. On Long's last night before university, Binh kisses Tan in the cemetery, tells him she never wants to see him again, and runs into the rubber plantation, the one place neither brother dares follow. Two years before the disappearance, Tan recruits Binh to catch cobras for Dr. Sang's drug operation. When the two-headed cobra bites Binh, Tan refuses to take her to the nearest hospital, fearing his employers will discover her involvement. He drops her barely breathing body into the well, retrieves her, buries her beneath the shack's floor, and sets the building ablaze. The smoke turns red.

After the disappearance, Tan learns that a vengeful spirit using Binh's childhood nickname, Bé Lì, is hunting him across Saigon, attacking policemen who share his name. Binh's ghost eventually corners him in his apartment, recounting his three crimes against her: drowning, burning, and burying. She kills him.

Meanwhile, a small dog carrying something supernatural has traveled south from the Highlands toward Saigon. Five weeks after returning from Ia Kare, Winnie rescues the caged, muzzled dog from outside a restaurant. The dog speaks in a low, husky voice, introducing herself as Bé Lì, which Winnie hears as "Belly." Belly proposes they switch bodies: When she touches Winnie's skin, Winnie's consciousness pours into the dog while Belly inhabits Winnie's body with ferocious new strength. Belly has spent two years tracking Tan from the Highlands. Their transformations escalate: Belly's fingers elongate into claws, and she swallows a xe ôm (motorbike taxi) driver whole. Winnie is expelled into a bodiless state, and Belly tells her to start with something small. Winnie enters a passing rat, finding her new body exquisite.

Three days after the disappearance, Long wakes to find someone who appears to be Winnie. She leads him to the coastal city of Vung Tau. On a deserted shore, she speaks in a voice entirely unlike Winnie's. She produces two dried squid Long bought for Binh six years ago, flicks one to the dog, and wades into the surf with the other. The dead squid swells in the water to the size of a human body. She embraces Winnie's body one final time, pulls the squid skin over herself, and vanishes beneath the surface.

The final chapter, set three years later, shifts to a first-person narrator: Yen, revealed to be Mrs. Ma, Old Ma's daughter. Yen is now in a relationship with First Assistant, who has inherited the Fortune Teller's role. Winnie's American parents have hired the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co. to find their daughter. At a lighthouse above Vung Tau, they spot an old, round-bellied dog tied to an ice cream cart, its tail smacking the ground when it sees Yen. First Assistant tightens her hand on Yen's, and together they walk toward it.