It is
heartwarming to discover a sense of familiarity and kinship in somebody who has a different background, and this is what happened to me every time I came
across Beth Nguyen’s descriptions of her grandmother.
“My
grandmother Noi has been gone for almost fifteen years. I use the word gone
because somehow it makes more sense to me than the word dead.” My
understanding of her words did not need any more explanations, but I still
welcomed her wish to clarify her statement.
“I know
she is gone, but, at the same time, I do not feel that she has left us. The
feeling of who she was to me—safety, care, generosity-- stays with me.”
These mesmerizing moments of connection threw
me into a delightful journey of introspection and reflection. There is more, of
course, about Noi, so I will let you explore those passages yourself from her
book Owner of a Lonely Heart.
Noi was fifty-five years old when she migrated
to the United States of America from Vietnam. She left Vietnam in the summer of
1975. Beth Nguyen was only eight months old when they moved to the United
States of America as a way to survive the war. Her father and uncles migrated
with them.
They had to leave because her dad and uncles had been in the South Vietnamese military. The end of the war meant reeducation camps for them, or something even worse. Beth's mother, on the other hand, was left behind in Vietnam and would move to the United States years later. Beth would grow up in America without her mother, but she would have a step-mother instead…
Owner
of A Lonely Heart is a memoir about Beth's childhood and youth and about
motherhood. It plunges into the depths of what has been unsaid for so long.
She explores
the experience of growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as a refugee and an
immigrant. Beth belonged to a family of newcomers, and she carried their
fear within her. The fear of not knowing what most people were supposed to
know. The fear of not knowing the slang, the words, the habits that shaped what
the mainstream considered what it means to be “American.” She illustrates this
reality with several examples.
“Always there was a sense of not knowing how
things were supposed to be done. Who would even think to tell us? In your first
experience of winter and snow, how would you know what to do with an iced-over
windshield? In a pre-internet world, how would you know there was a thing
called a scraper?”
As a
girl the fear she carried inside herself propelled her toward the library,
where she found a refuge in the books she read, in the stories she sought, in
the knowledge of the language she obsessed over since she was little.
The world around her was hostile. If her
family asked questions in stores, people would just stare. They may tell you “to
go where you came from all the time, as if you could, and they looked at you as
the enemy because they did not understand the war, and to them all Vietnamese
were the same.”
The
narrative she heard about the war came from “white people and their movies,
their gaze, their versions, their depictions of Vietnamese bodies as disposable
sites of violence and blame determined the stories that most Americans knew.”
How is
it possible to be a person when one is subjected to the violence of prejudices,
stereotypes and misconceptions? She somehow grew up with a social message she
could not ignore: “If you’re Asian in America, you’ll always be regarded as
foreign, at least a little bit suspect, a possible carrier of diseases and
viruses. For those of us who grew up here it’s nearly impossible to avoid the
effects of these views.”
When
the COVID pandemic hit the United States of America, the effects of these
prejudices erupted in full force. The politicians in charge referred to the
COVID virus as the “Chinese flu” and blamed immigrants from China. As a result
of this hateful message, hate crimes against Asian people proliferated. For
example, a white man murdered eight people, six of them were Asian women at
three spas in Atlanta. Elders were being shoved on the streets. Asians were
being punched and attacked on sidewalks and subways.
Many
years earlier, Beth Nguyen had endured a very unpleasant, traumatizing
experience she shares in Owner of a Lonely Heart in which she exposes
the trauma of being humiliated because of the demeaning stereotypes that
fetishize and degrade Asian women; and I dare say this is not unique to Asian
women. I am well aware of a similar disrespect toward Latina women, but let’s focus
on this specific experience to underscore the reverberations of such an
experience.
When Beth Nguyen was a teenager, she was
invited to the theater to watch a musical performance in New York city with her
white boyfriend and his step-mother and dad. The name of the performance was Miss
Saigon. Beth was not prepared for what she had to deal with. In Miss
Saigon a Vietnamese woman falls in love with an American soldier who
eventually ditches her for another woman. He married the Vietnamese woman
first, and they had a child, but he ends up leaving her to marry another woman
in America. In the story the Vietnamese woman was depicted as some sort of
sexual, disposable object to satisfy him. When she was no longer convenient for
the story, the plot made her commit suicide; the man ends up raising the kid
with his respectable new American wife. As a teenager Beth was not able to put
into words the humiliation she experienced when she watched the performance.
The humiliation led to helpless tears.
Her
reflection on this makes it clear, “Like everyone in America, I had seen plenty
of racist Asian stereotypes in movies and shows; mocking accents; jokes about
eating dogs. But it was much worse when it was live, right in front of me, the
reduction of Vietnamese characters into sexualized women and evil men speaking
in broken English.”
This made me think about the experiences of
children and teenagers in America going through similar experiences today when
they watch television or movies that do exactly that. They follow a pattern of
degrading other human beings due to their background, making false assumptions
about who they are, what they think or about how they feel. (I do not watch
television, but the few times I did so in the past I noticed the tendency to
put people into boxes and to judge them based on their ethnic background).
One aspect of the book that I did not like is
her tendency to refer to “whiteness” as if it were some sort of culture and
race. There is no such thing. Whiteness is not a human race; it is not a
culture either. It was not her intention, of course, but it is a sort of trap
nonetheless to refer to it that way.
Owner of a Lonely Heart can be an invitation to embrace diversity without holding onto stereotypes and prejudices, but "traps" can emerge anywhere…I appreciate the title of the book: Owner of a Lonely Heart. It encapsulates so much about being an immigrant in the United States of America.
In
my humble opinion true diversity means giving space to people to be authentic. It means opening ourselves to see others with fresh eyes, irrespective of their
background. This can lead to meaningful friendships and interactions. True
authenticity leads to new perspectives of understanding, and it may help us to
find that we have more in common than we think.
I highly recommend Beth Nguyen’s book and I
will be exploring more of her works.
Many of
the books I read for My Writing Life are from public libraries and little free libraries. Owner
of a Lonely Heart, on the other hand, is one I purchased last December from
a small independent book store. I will be passing it on by dropping it in a
little free library. (You may be the lucky one to find it!)
Today
is World Migratory Bird Day, so celebrate by being aware of the needs of
migratory birds. Turn off any unnecessary outdoor lights at night. Leave
some clean water for them in case they need it...
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