Beth Nguyen has spent less than 24 hours with her mother. Alongside her dad, sister, grandmother, and uncles, she fled Vietnam a day before the fall of Saigon in 1975. At the time, Nguyen was 8 months old. Her mom was left behind. They settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Years later, her mom left Vietnam and settled in Boston when Nguyen was 19.
Nguyen tells the story of her first hours with her mom and her experiences as a refugee in the memoir “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” In it, she also describes what it feels like to be an imposter — both as an American and Vietnamese, and a daughter.
The move to Grand Rapids created a childhood full of cultural confusion for Nguyen, which as she describes, was very conservative and very white.
“Back then, we didn't talk about things like race and racism, and we didn't talk about cultural differences in any kind of nuanced way,” she tells KCRW. “My childhood was filled with a lot of silence and a sense of just not knowing what was the correct way to live.”
As a kid, all Nguyen could think about were the differences between her and her classmates.
“Why does my life look so different from my white friends at school? I definitely grew up in a time where comparison was the rule of the day. Back then, people told us outright to assimilate … to fit in and just become somebody else.”
Further complicating her sense of identity: She and her sister didn’t have birth certificates with their actual birth dates on them, forcing them to choose when they wanted to celebrate. They didn’t learn their true birth dates for decades.
“There was this idea in the background that we could choose a birthday. We could choose when to celebrate. And that was scary in a weird way because it further set us apart from all of our friends who were U.S.-born citizens.”
Nguyen’s given name, Bich, also made her a target of relentless teasing by her classmates. But when she had kids, she decided to experiment with a new name to make their lives easier.
“I realized, ‘Okay, so now I have to pass this on to my kids that are going to have to eventually tell people their parents' names and spell them.’ And I thought, ‘I cannot make my kids go through this level of self-consciousness.’ And so I had this whole process in my mind about names and how strange it is that other people get to decide what we are called.”
In high school, Nguyen had a white American boyfriend named Evan, whose mom became a sort of maternal figure and helped teach her about American culture.
“She saw that I had all these questions about how she had lived and what white behavior was like, and what white culture was like, and I wanted to learn. I wanted an inside view of what it was like to be somebody else.”
Meanwhile, Nguyen started compartmentalizing the different parts of her life to deal with feeling like an outsider. She purposely hid her inner turmoil.
“When I was at home, I was at home. When I was at school, I was at school. And those were different personas. And I just needed to keep them separate, so that I could have a sense of privacy and self. I was so afraid of everybody knowing what a mess I actually was.”
Meeting mom
Growing up, Nguyen and her sister rarely talked about their mom. But questions about her and their short-lived moments together constantly swirled.
So when Nguyen finally met her mom when she was in college, she felt apprehensive — unsure of what to expect — and full of questions.
“It turned out to be kind of ordinary. It was not dramatic. It was not filled with tears. It was kind of mundane,” Nguyen says.
She adds, “She looked like me. I looked like her. And yet, I had no idea who she was and I had no great feeling for her either, because we weren't actually mother and daughter.”
Today, the two have only gotten together about half a dozen times since that first interaction. And over the years, Nguyen says many of her questions have gone largely unanswered, or she’s gotten answers that felt completely unsatisfying.
But she accepts that there are parts of her mother she might never know.
“It is frustrating for me in a narrative way. But at the same time, I feel that her sense of self and her sense of privacy, her sense of her own story — those things are way more important than my curiosity.”
Now, as a mother herself, Nguyen says she’s modeled her relationship with her kids after her grandmother and her stepmom, who her dad married a few years after arriving in Grand Rapids.
“'I’m raising my kids in a way that I wasn't raised very consciously. And one of those things I'm doing is talking to them a lot. It's challenging for me because I have internalized the idea of, ‘Oh, if something is a tough subject, just don't talk about it.’ So I actually have to say, ‘Okay, we're gonna talk about these things. We're going to talk about all the tough subjects and try to undo those internalized silences.’”