A refugee’s lonely heart

“When I became a mother, I became a refugee,” writes Beth Nguyen, a gifted novelist whose stories come alive with Vietnamese American characters wrestling with the double consciousness familiar to all immigrants. In Owner of a Lonely Heart, her second memoir, she reflects on an incident that defined her before she knew herself. When she was eight months old, her father fled Vietnam with his daughters the day before Saigon fell (or as some would say, was liberated). They escaped with Nguyen’s uncles and grandmother but without her mother. For most of her life, Nguyen wondered whether her mother was left or chose to stay behind.

This memoir is a deep dive into the void of a mother’s absence and the silence surrounding it—a void that only intensifies when Nguyen becomes a mother herself and embraces her identity as a refugee. Nguyen invites readers into those private reflections and through the beauty of her writing helps us sit in the brilliance of that darkness.

Owner of a Lonely Heart is about journeys toward unknown destinations. Refugees only know that they cannot stay; choosing where they will go is rarely an option. Parenting is in some ways a similar journey. We don’t know how things will turn out with our children. We just know that each passing day marks a moment we can never return to.