Kien Nguyen

Put this down last week, half read, to complete another book. Reached a passage that makes me think I've read this book before (although I have no recent details if I have). Suspect that I'm not going to pick this book up again to finish.[return][return]What I read was reasonable, although not completely engaging. A 7 year old boy, married to a much older woman, witnessess the death of his father, and in order to protect him in plain sight, his wife places him in the service of the man who killed his father. 9 years later, the warlord's daughter is to be married off to someone else, but Mouse is in love with her....… (mer)

Viscerally disturbing and well-told
- A bit more interiority would be interesting, though perhaps neither culturally appropriate nor an accurate reflection of the author's experience
A wrenching narrative of an Amerasian boy's life in post-1975 Vietnam. Kien Nguyen's mother was a banker with two half-white children when Saigon fell to the Northern communists. The family suffered on several accounts: Generally, as South Vietnamese who were suspected of not supporting the North, and hence were presumed to be allied with the U.S.-backed puppet government; as obvious capitalists; as a mixed-ethnicity family; and because Kien's mother had not married her children's fathers.

The book is an almost unrelentingly depressing and horrifying account of poverty, oppression, and discrimination in post-war Vietnam. Though flat at times (like many war narratives by then-children), it was sufficiently disturbing that I had to take breaks while reading. Ultimately, after many beatings, a rape by his mother's ex-boyfriend, starvation, thwarted escapes, and prison, Kien has a chance to leave Vietnam, but first perpetuates the cycle of violence and oppression.

A good companion piece to Truong Nhu Tang's A Viet Cong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath and Andrew X. Pham's [b:Catfish and Mandala|4370|Catfish and Mandala A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam|Andrew X. Pham|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165429578s/4370.jpg|8039]: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (I'll be re-reading Pham in the next few months, so watch for a review). As it turns out, Nguyen's first novel, The Tapestries, has been sitting in my stack of books to read as well.

… (mer)

Mir gefiel das Buch wirklich gut! Es erzählt die (wahre) Geschichte des Großvaters des Autors. Der siebenjährige Dan wächst Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts in einer reichen Familie in Vietnam auf. Er wird mit der 20-jährigen Ven verheiratet, die seine Eltern vor allem zum Arbeiten brauchen. Doch als Intrigen dazu führen, dass seine Familie alles verliert und sich nur Dan und Ven retten können, ändert sich alles. Was mir sehr ans Herz ging war, neben vielem anderen, die Beziehung zwischen Dan und Ven und überhaupt die Person der Ven. Ich dachte zuerst, das Buch sei wieder irgendso eine kitschige Asien-Story. Aber nein: Es ist eine wunderbare Geschichte, die mich wirklich in Bann zog. Freilich blieb der Kitsch nicht aus, aber mir gefiel das Buch sehr. Auch die Nebenfiguren waren sehr gut dargestellt. Außerdem gefiel mir Vietnam als Handlungsort, denn über dieses Land weiß ich abgesehn von den schrecklichen Dingen des Vietnamkriegs sehr wenig.… (mer)