Book recalls burdens, bias after Saigon falls.

-------------------------------- The Unwanted: A Memoir By: Kien Nguyen Publisher: Little Bown and Co., 323 pages, $24.95. Review: This gripping, emotionally raw memoir of an Amerasian child's experences in Vietnam and his eventual move to the United States - strikes universal chords, reminding readers that aAmerica is a country of refugees, exiles and immigrants. --------------------------------

Book Review.
Special to the Star Tribune. April 29, 2001.

It was inevitable: The new generation of books and memoirs on the Vietnam War are being written by Vietnamese who were born during the war and lived through the early conquest of South Vietnam.
But Kien Nguyen's "The Unwanted: A Memoir" is even more significant. It is the gripping, emotionally raw story of one of the 50,000 or more Amerasian children left in a racist Vietnam to fend for themselves. These "half breeds" - a term of abuse the author heard throughout his childhood - lived lives of derision and rejection. Many committed suicide, starved to death from neglect, or lived in despair in the dark nooks and crannies of Vietnamese society.
Born in 1967 from a union between an American civil engineer and a Vietnamese teenager, Kien records his life under the bureaucratic weight of an intolerant Communist government. His father left Vietnam after giving money to his mother. Another American fathered Kien's younger brother, Jimmie, and also provided the family with monetary compensation. This catapulted them into the middle class - complete with a mansion and a swimming pool. During the fall of Saigon in 1975, his family was stranded on the roof of the American Embassy.
Ten years later, after many struggles, the family obtained visas to live in the United States. Kien became a dentist, and at age 33 published this memoir.
The tale of his life from 1975 until 1985 is a highly charged, episodic account of oppression, betrayal and escape. Each chapter introduces a new and unexpected twist that shocks the reader. Throughout his descriptions of family traumas, violence, vengeful acts, aborted escapes, incarceration in a reeducation camp, and the sexual and economic corruption of Vietnamese society - both communist and non-communist- is the theme of being an outcast, an "unwanted" semi-human being.
Kien's depiction of everyday life is vivid and compelling. His mother tried unsuccessfully to cover up her children's shame: "Without warning, she swooped over… and seized us with her sharp fingernails, as if she were catching a fowl in its cage. Ignoring our frightened cries, she pulled us along the cold ground into the bathroom. As we kecked and screamed, she poured the dark liquid over us and marinated our blond heads (with black dye)…. Her roughness as she tugged at our hair and her silence burned a panic in us."
This memoir has no heroes or heroines. It is about the struggle to survive in a society that has been blistered by war, hatred and revenge. There is only one moment of humor and one moment of a deep expression of love and compassion. The rest is a story about how difficult it is to diminish the will to survive.
The final chapters describing Kien's departure from Vietnam will bring tears to many and will remind some of how they or their families fled homelands to come to the United States. Kien's story deserves a place with the best memoirs of immigration and exile.