With our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia less than a month away, I am thinking about all that the country of Vietnam has meant to those of us who came of age during the Vietnam War. I have mixed feelings: guilty sympathy for the Vietnamese people combined with a second-hand, sympathetic revulsion for the hostile environment encountered by U. S. military deployed there.
More recently, I have been curious about the experience of the Vietnamese refugees who were so hastily plucked from their homeland at the fall of Saigon and had to start their lives over in the U.S. I have read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s brilliant novel The Sympathizer (Pulitzer Prize 2016), discovering in its pages a vibrant Vietnamese immigrant community and the prejudices they encountered here.
This month, I have been reading Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen, a memoir that recounts similar struggles from a more personal point of view. Beth Nguyen was brought to the U.S. by her father and grandmother as an infant. Her mother was left behind but came to the U.S. herself years later. Nguyen writes with painful honesty about the challenges of a life with too many parts to reconcile.
Despite teachers who could never pronounce her name, she achieves academic success, but the moves and upward mobility add more layers of separation to a life that began with the traumatic separation from her mother.
She recounts their attempts to establish a relationship too late and with too little time. She confesses that she learned the Vietnamese word for mother in a college Vietnamese-language class, and that she has never called her mother by her Vietnamese names.
