Unwanted: A Memoir

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
There was no need for discussion or debate about this memoir among the Discover reading group. Each reader weighed in with exactly the same response. "Wow! What a book!" Kien Nguyen's memoir invites comparison, but we couldn't find a memoir worthy of it. His story of life as a "half-breed" (the result of the pairing of his Vietnamese mother and an American G.I.) who falls under the rule of the Vietcong in the mid-1970s is revealed in one truly hellish scene after the next. From the early chapters, where Kien describes his icy mother's perfect red fingernails digging into his arms as she faces their plight, Kien is adrift in a sea of misunderstanding. He watches from the roof of the U.S. Embassy as his hopes for escape are dashed: "The chopper twirled in midair, like a sick sparrow...before it plunged down to the quarterdeck below and exploded into flame." Happily, Kien's story doesn't end in shame, but in victory -- ten years later. For he has written this heartbreaking memoir from his new home in America. It is impossible to read Kien's story and not be moved by the plight of these children -- victims of poor judgment in a crazy day and age, and of horrific acts of ostracism. You will applaud (as we did) the courage and resilience of a survivor like Kien, who has blessed us with this very important work. (Spring 2001 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Kien Nguyen grew up an outsider in his native land. His once prosperous family, thrust into poverty at the dawn of a new political regime, lived among neighbors who treated them as an unwelcome remnant of the colonialist past. Kien himself, a child of mixed race (his father was American), was among the most unwanted.Told with a stark, poetic brilliance, Kien's account of his early years-from the fall of Saigon, when at age eight he watched the last U.S. Army helicopter leave without him and his family, to his eventual escape-is a work of profound emotional resonance, at once harrowing and inspiring. The Unwanted unforgettably records a universal human experience played out in extreme circumstances: the forging of an identity, a life.

Author Biography: Kien Nguyen was born in Nhatrang, South Vietnam, in 1967 to a Vietnamese mother and an American father. He left Vietnam in 1985 through the United Nations' Orderly Departure Program. After spending time in a refugee camp in the Philippines, Nguyen arrived in the United States. He is now a dentist in New York City.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

...a powerful, compelling memoir of an Amerasian boy's experience in Communist Vietnam...ultimately, his tale is one of extraordinary courage...beautifully written and inspirational...

Washington Post Book World

...provides an often compelling look at the personal effects of Vietnam's political social revolutions...

Ruminator Review

Readers will be surprised by the cinematic beauty of this gripping literary memoir...a bold and eloquent voice...

Book Magazine

Nguyen was born in 1967 to a wealthy Vietnamese mother and an American GI. This memoir, set in a Vietnam where all personal history is political, is less inspired by than obsessed with the past. After the fall of Saigon, the noticeably different child and his family struggled with poverty, bitter relatives and Vietnam's vicious, totalitarian bureaucracy. "No matter how hard I tried, I could not escape my unfavorable past," Nguyen writes, referring to his congenital status as a "reactionary." There are fundamental flaws in the author's story, which culminates with his immigration to America: the too-perfect recollections, the weakness for melodrama, the lack of self-consciousness when mixing narrative and truth. There are hundreds of pages of elaborate dialogue that read like an Oliver Stone screenplay. It makes sense that this powerfully imagined, coming-of-age-in-communist-Vietnam story has already been optioned to a film company. The memoir, which has the moral economy and clockwork plot of a Dickens novel, is often gorgeously overwritten. The experience of reading it is more cinematic than literary. —Jeff Ousborne

Publishers Weekly

The son of a wealthy Vietnamese woman and an American businessman, Nguyen was nearly eight when Saigon fell to the Vietcong. For the next decade he and his family endured hardships brought on by the privileged lives they had enjoyed under the capitalist regime. Although his writing lacks the lyricism of recent memoirs like The Liar's Club or Angela's Ashes, Nguyen's voice is clear and strong, and he is adept at capturing both the broad sweep of life under the Vietcong and the peculiarities of growing up in a colorful and emotionally dysfunctional family during a jarring and vicious revolution. Perhaps the most engaging aspect of his memoir is its portrayal of the ironies that ensue when the old order collapses and the social hierarchy is turned upside down. At one point, Nguyen's mother, imperious and a virulent snob, is called before the newly installed communist leadership only to encounter her former gardener, a man she barely acknowledged before the revolution but who now has the power to strip her of all she owns. For the most part, though, this memoir reminds us of life's many undeserved injustices. Nguyen and his half-brother, Jimmy, who is also Amerasian, pay a particularly high price for the accident of their genealogy, enduring the scorn of their countrymen, especially the communists. At 18, the author and his family emigrated to the United States, where he now works as a dentist. With the purely personal goal of "healing" himself, Nguyen concludes by hoping that his narrative will also help other Amerasians born during the Vietnam War mourn their "lost childhoods." Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information. Read all 8 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

A haunting memoir￯﾿ﾽdestined to become a literary classic￯﾿ﾽmesmerizing prose￯﾿ﾽ — (Douglas Brinkley, Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies, Professor of History at the University of New Orleans)