Beth Nguyen

From the award-winning author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, a powerful memoir of a mother-daughter relationship fragmented by war and resettlement. At the end of the Vietnam War, when Beth Nguyen was eight months old, she and her father, sister, grandmother, and uncles fled Saigon for America. Beth’s mother stayed—or was left—behind, and they did not meet again until Beth was nineteen. Over the course of her adult life, she and her mother have spent less than twenty-four hours together. Owner of a Lonely Heart is a memoir about parenthood, absence, and the condition of being a refugee: the story of Beth’s relationship with her mother. Framed by a handful of visits over the course of many years—sometimes brief, sometimes interrupted, sometimes with her mother alone and sometimes with her sister—Beth tells a coming-of-age story that spans her own Midwestern childhood, her first meeting with her mother, and becoming a parent herself. Vivid and illuminating, Owner of a Lonely Heart is a deeply personal story of family, connection, and belonging: as a daughter, a mother, and as a Vietnamese refugee in America.

A Memoir

Owner of a Lonely Heart

karina

Sometimes all I want is this: to be in the same room, at the same time, together. A brief thing I can know as true. At such time, in darkness, I can’t help thinking about how far our bodies have traveled, will travel. What we go through to get here, to remain, to stay. Sometimes I feel like I’m just shoring up these moments of being a mother. Like it’s insurance, because to be a mother is to be in a vague, permanent state of fear of loss. So, just in case, I want them to know I was there. Here. I wanted to be. I never wanted to leave. 

Owner of a Lonely Heart quotes

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