By Justine Trinh
Owner of a Lonely Heart is Beth Nguyen’s second memoir. Her first memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, is a coming-of-age story in which Nguyen discusses what it is like to grow up as a Vietnamese refugee in America using food as a framing device. Although she touches on similar topics in her second memoir, the focal point of Owner of a Lonely Heart is her relationship with her birth mother which only occupied a chapter of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner. However, from the publication of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner in 2008 to Owner of a Lonely Heart’s in 2023, many things have changed: Nguyen became a mother herself and met her birth mother for the first time; her grandmother who raised her also passed away. Within this narrative, Nguyen has grown up from the Vietnamese American girl who wants to assimilate to a mother who is coming to terms with her refugee identity.
Nguyen’s relationship with her birth mother is complex, as it is the result of circumstance rather than choice. When she was eight months old, Nguyen and her paternal family fled Vietnam at the end of the war and immigrated to the United States, but because her father and mother were not married or living together and time was of the essence, her mother was left behind. When Nguyen is three years old, her father marries another woman, and her stepmother becomes Nguyen’s maternal figure along with Nguyen’s grandmother, Noi. It is only later when Nguyen is ten that her mother immigrates to the United States, but she does not meet her mother until she is nineteen. The memoir chronicles Nguyen’s brief and limited interactions with her mother and Nguyen’s grappling with her absence.
Throughout the memoir, Nguyen discusses her relationship with the ideas of motherhood and refugee as concepts imbued with expectations and assumptions. It is only through becoming a mother does Nguyen come to terms with her own refugee identity. The refugee identity carries a connotation of shame because it represents loss and transgresses the normative. Refugees no longer belong to their home nation, nor are they welcomed in their new nation. Nguyen echoes these sentiments when she states, “Every day in the United States is a loss when you know that starting over is on someone else’s terms.” The refugee identity is an unwanted one that must be shed as Nguyen discusses her discomfort with it and at times rejects it (“I grew up in Michigan, in a mostly white town in the 1980s, pretending not to be a refugee”). However, after her second son is born, she writes this sentence while still deprived of sleep: “When I became a mother, I became a refugee.” It is only through becoming a mother is she able to come to terms with being a refugee, and she is able to challenge the normative constructions of motherhood and the refugee identity as both are identities in flux.
In terms of motherhood, Nguyen illustrates the constraints of the word “mom/mother” because it does not fully encompass her relationship with the people in her life. In real life, she does not call her birth mother “mom” but rather her stepmother “mom” because her stepmother is the one who raised her since she was three years old. But for the memoir, Nguyen calls her stepmother “her stepmom” and her birth mother “her mother” to distinguish between the two women. The word “mom/mother” carries connotations of care; to mother someone means to raise them with care and affection. In Old English, to mother also meant to give birth to that very child, and in the societal imagination, the person who gives birth and does the mothering is generally thought to be the same person. Yet for Nguyen, those people are separate, and as a result, “mom/mother” fails to describe both women simultaneously which necessitates a distinction within the book despite Nguyen and her family being used to the verbal construction of using “Mom and Dad” and “mother” in the same sentence. This is not to diminish her mother’s contributions as she displays maternal love different from Western societal demands. Initially, Nguyen is bothered by what she perceives as lack of effort on her mother’s part such as when she travels to Boston for her mother to meet her son and her mother is not there to greet them. Rather, she arranges an envelope of money for her half-sister to deliver in her stead. But later, Nguyen recognizes that her mother expresses love differently, as she waited years to see her daughters again while understanding Nguyen and her sister had maternal figures in her life. The word “mom/mother” also fails to recognize other forms of mothering and family as her stepmother was not the only woman to raise her, but also her grandmother.
Nguyen also shows that the refugee identity is something that does not go away even decades after one’s arrival in their new nation and must constantly be negotiated. This is most evident with her name. Her previous books were published under her given name, Bich Minh Nguyen, while Owner of a Lonely Heart is published under Beth Nguyen. Nguyen discusses her discomfort with her name as it highlights her difference and makes her visible and foreign in an America where Anglicized names are preferred. While her name is a representation of her heritage and ethnicity, it also illustrates the continued racism as she notes another writer making fun of her name. Other (white) people have complimented her name as interesting and unique, yet these statements highlight how her name is different and ignore the constant racism she has to live with that they often do not have to encounter. While Nguyen has come to accept her refugee identity that she previously rejected her whole life, her choice of name illustrates that it is constantly in flux and shifting as “assimilation requires a constant form of gaslighting that we do to ourselves.”
As I was reading through this book (along with Stealing Buddha’s Dinner), I saw some of my own Vietnamese American experience being represented in Nguyen’s work though she experienced some of these things decades before I was born. When she writes about her name, it reminded me of when my fourth-grade teacher made fun of my Vietnamese/middle name and as a result, I often omit it in fear of it happening again.
This is not to say every Vietnamese American experience is the same, but rather to advocate for more coming-of-age books like Nguyen’s. Growing up, I wish I had books like hers to help navigate some of my own feelings of being a child of refugees in an America that still struggles to accept us. After all, how much of ourselves do we see represented through popular mainstream media and how much of it do we internalize? Nguyen writes in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, “The Ingallses [From the Little House of the Prairie Series] were the epitome of American.” This statement clearly distinguishes who is American and who is not, but perhaps it is time to expand the idea of who belongs.
A note on the title: As I was writing this review, I mistyped and forgot the “m” in motherhood resulting in otherhood. I immediately corrected this mistake, but it made me think of the connection Nguyen is making between mothers and refugees, how her relationship with motherhood parallels that of refugees and the othering that goes along with it (otherhood), how both identities are shifting and in flux. I thought the name “M/Otherhood” perfectly encapsulates these concepts, and decided to incorporate it as the title.
Owner of a Lonely Heart is available from Blue Cypress Books, Bookshop, City Lights Books, Sandmeyer’s Bookstore, Unabridged Bookstore, and Vroman’s Bookstore.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.