Empathy
By Hoa Pham
ISBN 9781913380618
Reviewed by JUDITHH HUANG
In Empathy, a speculative fiction novel that blends some of the most potent concerns in our post-pandemic world, Hoa Pham has created a dystopia in which unethical medical experiments involving human cloning and mass pharmaceutical control are not just practiced but accepted as a given. In this paranoia-soaked novel, we follow two young women, Vuong in Vietnam and My in Germany, in interlacing narratives centred around their experience of Empathy, the latest psychotropic drug permeating the party scene in the nightclubs of Berlin.
Vuong is one of five clones (termed “multiples” in the novel’s parlance) brought up by the shadowy Department in Vietnam. One of two multiples living in Vietnam, she is also employed by the Department as a psychology researcher. When we first meet her, she is meeting the other Vietnam-based multiple, Lien, who has been kept in far more deprived circumstances and who has just murdered her foster father for killing and eating pigs. With this bang of an opening we are plunged into a world of clandestine government operatives, Hui circles that may have ties to Cold War spy agencies, and international conspiracies involving mood-altering drugs.
Meanwhile, My meets Truong in Berlin, a bad boy complete with ponytail and dragon tattoo, and predictably falls for him when he gives her Empathy at a nightclub. These two narratives are intriguing enough to propel the reader through the book to uncover the conspiracy behind Empathy, the secret of its origins and the purpose for its distribution. To this reader, one of the most compelling themes of the book was the authenticity of emotion. Hoa Pham depicts the delicate line between real and synthetic emotion in her characters’ minds with a deft hand. This is especially resonant to me, as my experience with taking psychiatric drugs has meant a constant questioning of the authenticity of my emotions. In the book, emotional responses are affected by Empathy the drug as well as the “organic” Empathy that courses through the veins of the five multiples, leading to an ecstatic sense of connection as well as discomfort at the blurred lines of consent. The line between mental health and illness under the influence of Empathy, and the question of whether My’s paranoia is justified, is also a thread that runs through the book.
Closely related to this is the push and pull between individualism and group identity, perhaps best understood in the multiples. Separated at age five, Vuong and Lien in Vietnam, Geraldine in Australia and Khanh and Giang in Aotearoa/New Zealand have an insatiable longing for each other, a longing which eclipses their various romantic partnerships. Khanh and Giang were raised as a pair, and share an extraordinary bond. When the question becomes whether the distilled essence of this bond, the drug Empathy, can lead to world peace through the sublimation of individual identity, even the multiples, who have been raised their whole lives as laboratory experiment subjects, seem to favour the use of Empathy to control the population.
The multiples themselves present an interesting “quintuplet study” of what happens when identical clones are raised in laboratory conditions in Asia versus the West, with two of them brought up in Asia while the other three were brought up in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Geraldine, the Australian multiple, and Khanh and Giang, the “twins” brought up in Aotearoa, move with greater privilege and self-assurance than the Vietnamese multiples, being assured of the rights of their citizenships even though they are still clearly highly manipulated test subjects. The implications that unethical experiments are “outsourced” to poorer countries with fewer legal safeguards, and that democracies enshrine certain individual rights better, are clear.
But even Vuong notes that, when all five are linked through their natural Empathy, “the majority would get their way” (p 163) because of how overwhelming their influence is with the heightened connection – perhaps in itself a critique of majority rule in a democracy.
Where the novel succeeds most is in conveying the paranoia, control and surveillance that test subjects in a government program live under. Human clones raised as lab rats for life in a developing country where not too much scrutiny is paid seems eerily plausible in our world. Hoa Pham creates an atmosphere of oppressive control in details like Vuong being shocked at Lien’s statement, “We don’t talk about the past here. We talk about the future, what we’re going to become.” The Department mantra coming from Lien’s mouth without a hint of irony frightened me.
(p8)
This atmosphere is again present in the jokes that are more than jokes, which reveal anxieties about rumoured horrors: the “running joke that they did interrogations on the higher levels. At least, we thought it was a joke.” (p32) These small details of hearing government slogans parroted back even by the Department’s victims, and the gallows-humour jokes that are a coping mechanism in the face of unscrupulous authorities, are familiar to me as someone who grew up in another tightly-controlled Southeast Asian country, Singapore, and deeply relatable.
The double-edged sword of Empathy in the novel (and empathy in our world) is revealed in the fact that too much empathy leads to the murder of the foster father in the first chapter, as Lien thinks of the pigs raised in that household as “we” as well – i.e. she identifies with them as much as with her fellow multiples. “You can’t show the same empathy to animals as humans and survive. Not in Viet Nam, anyway.” (p11) Can too much empathy become a problem? Does it lead to weakness, or even violence? And if it can lead to world peace, is that at too great a cost to individual liberty and autonomy? These are the questions that Hoa Pham presents us with. But does she succeed in exploring them?
Empathy has a page-turning quality, but perhaps suffers from its fast pacing. Certain revelations can feel rushed, without enough development to make them feel real. In particular, My’s motivation is a little lacking and her decision to undertake certain drastic actions in aid of Truong’s drug ring was not believable, given that she is not pressed for money and doesn’t trust Truong.
A later plot twist that relies on My being an unreliable narrator is also both too telegraphed and unconvincing, and the final chapter, which brings Vuong’s entire narrative and the reality of more than half the cast into question, is also disappointing in relying on the trope of mental illness leading to delusions, and undermines the compelling themes that Hoa Pham built in the world of the book.
The Department, the main antagonist of the book, also seems ubiquitous without ever feeling like a real threat, as the main characters manage to undertake many actions without significant barriers. The Department’s omniscient and omnipresent nature is certainly unsettling, and feeds into the paranoid atmosphere, but it never actually rises to the level of an existential threat.
Hoa Pham’s prose is workmanlike, functioning like Orwell’s window-pane, but occasionally veers into the lyrical, especially when describing the experience of being inside a multiple’s head and thinking as “we”. However, sometimes when plot developments are introduced in the default matter-of-fact voice, the tone and abruptness blunts their impact. As a result, this is an action-packed novel, very rapidly paced and lacking in description or space to digest the implications of certain plot points.
The book also touches on the proliferation of conspiracy theories and vaccine paranoia in the wake of the pandemic, particularly when the multiples seek to go public with their existence only to have the only channels open to their story be conspiracy sites. However, while this is touched on, not much is made of the point. Thus Empathy is a post-pandemic novel that acknowledges the rifts in culture since the culture wars over conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers, and fake news without really endorsing any side.
Hoa Pham also centres the Vietnamese diaspora experience in the book, with parents’ Hui circles as networks, My dating a fellow Vietnamese-German Truong but being questioned by her mother if his family was from the North or the South, and a particularly poignant mother-daughter relationship where My wishes for Empathy-like closeness with a mother who barely communicates about her life and is hardly seen between her shifts at work. My’s bisexuality is also introduced in a matter-of-fact way, although her romances are, again, a bit rushed. This queer representation without any angst or fanfare is much appreciated.
Upon closing the book, this reader is left with a deep sense of unease. A lot of emotions are attributed to Empathy, whether in the veins of the multiples or induced through the heart-shaped drugs. But in empathizing with these characters, some of whom may or may not be entirely imaginary, what settles in is a sense of helplessness in the face of the shadowy powers that be. Perhaps that is the prevailing sentiment in the world after the ravages of the pandemic, with its lockdowns, near-mandatory vaccines and dystopian slogans. If so, then Empathy has distilled that sense of helplessness into a pill. Would you take it?
JUDITH HUANG is an Australian-based Singaporean author, poet, literary and science fiction translator, composer, musician, serial-arts-collective-founder, Web 1.0 entrepreneur and VR creator @ www.judithhuang.com. Her first novel, Sofia and the Utopia Machine, was shortlisted for the EBFP 2017 and Singapore Book Awards 2019. A three-time winner of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award, Judith graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in English and American Literature and Language and taught creative and academic writing at the Harvard Writing Center and Yale-NUS College. She has published original work in Prairie Schooner, Asia Literary Review, Portside Review, Creatrix, The South China Morning Post, The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, QLRS and Cha as well as being a founding member of the Spittoon Collective and magazine in China, which currently has branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi’an, Dali, Tucson (AZ, USA) and Gothenburg (Sweden).