Four new memoirs find strength, wisdom and humor in struggles

Beth Nguyen’s new memoir tells of coming to terms with her experience as a refugee when her mother was left behind in Vietnam during the American war. Nguyen was only 8 months old when she came to America with her father and sister. Though her mother eventually settled in Boston, Nguyen wouldn’t meet her until age 19, and the hole carved into her life by the absence was permanent. Once she became a mother herself, Nguyen was more curious about those years in Vietnam, when her mother was left alone. The “lonely heart” of this book is enveloped in walls upon walls of silence. “Once you are gone, it gets easier to stay gone.” After short visits, Nguyen writes, “I am always leaving my mother.” Parallels with the loss of that relationship appear in the act of parenting itself. “To be a mother is to be in a vague, permanent state of fear of loss.”

Nguyen, to some, is also in a constant state of foreignness. A White boyfriend’s family, in a deeply misguided overture, took her to see “Miss Saigon” in Chicago, a modernization of the opera “Madama Butterfly,” the story of a Vietnamese woman who is “a sex object, and everything about her life, her body, her story, is disposable.” Even Nguyen’s given name, Bich, is an entry wound. “Your name is what? people would say. How do you spell that? Sometimes they would laugh in my face,” she writes. “Years later, it was not the thrill I thought it was supposed to be to see my name in print.” But as Nguyen puts these experiences into writing, a healing recognition occurs, most movingly through her children, who are able to see and validate things she cannot. “We do not outrun our origins,” she writes. “If we don’t contend, they will contend with us.” (Scribner, $27)

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