The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood

#34
Title: The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood
Author: Kien Nguyen
Publisher: Back Bay
Year: 2001/2002
Genre: Memoir
343 pages
+ Viscerally disturbing and well-told
- A bit more interiority would be interesting, though perhaps neither culturally appropriate nor an accurate reflection of the author's experience
A wrenching narrative of an Amerasian boy's life in post-1975 Vietnam. Kien Nguyen's mother was a banker with two half-white children when Saigon fell to the Northern communists. The family suffered on several accounts: Generally, as South Vietnamese who were suspected of not supporting the North, and hence were presumed to be allied with the U.S.-backed puppet government; as obvious capitalists; as a mixed-ethnicity family; and because Kien's mother had not married her children's fathers.

The book is an almost unrelentingly depressing and horrifying account of poverty, oppression, and discrimination in post-war Vietnam. Though flat at times (like many war narratives by then-children), it was sufficiently disturbing that I had to take breaks while reading. Ultimately, after many beatings, a rape by his mother's ex-boyfriend, starvation, thwarted escapes, and prison, Kien has a chance to leave Vietnam, but first perpetuates the cycle of violence and oppression.

A good companion piece to Truong Nhu Tang's A Viet Cong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath and Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (I'll be re-reading Pham in the next few months, so watch for a review). As it turns out, Nguyen's first novel, The Tapestries, has been sitting in my stack of books to read as well.