The Tapestries (43 page)
Kien Nguyen was born in 1967 in Nhatrang, South Vietnam, to a Vietnamese mother and an American father. He left Vietnam in 1985 through the United Nations' Orderly Departure Program. After spending time in a refugee camp in the Philippines, Nguyen arrived in the United States. He now lives in New York City. His first book,
The Unwanted,
was a memoir about his childhood in Vietnam. For more information, visit the author's web site at
www.kiennguyen.us
.
A novel by
Kien Nguyen
A Reading Group Guide
A profile of the author of
The Tapestries
Kien Nguyen talks with John Habich of the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
When he was eight years old, Kien Nguyen watched from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon as the helicopter coming to lift his family to safety exploded in midair. His mother's mansion was looted and seized by the Communists. At thirteen, he nearly drowned trying to escape Vietnam with a group of boat people, and spent two months in a prison cell after he was washed up on the beach at Cam Ranh Bay.
He moved to New York City a week after arriving in the United States in 1985, with no mastery of English. Unable to find a job after he finished college five years later, he eked out a living on the streets by drawing $2 portraits. A psychic who became his sponsor sent him to dental school and set him up in a posh practice just off Central Park.
“It was an American dream come true for me, a refugee,” said Kien in the garden of the S0H0 townhouse he shares with his sponsor. Yet he gave it up to write books. “I was only gambling with my life,” he said. “I have done that before.”
To vanquish his nightmares, he chronicled his young years in the acclaimed 2001 memoir
The Unwanted.
His first novel,
The Tapestries,
draws from the harrowing youth of his grandfather, an embroiderer in Vietnam's imperial court. It was a selection of the Talking Volumes book club, a public service project to build community through reading, founded by the
Star Tribune,
Minnesota Public Radio, and the Loft Literary Center.
Kien's grandfather, who died the day before Kien's family left Vietnam, used to play the sixteen-stringed lute called a
dang tranh
and three-stringed
dang bao
and relate anecdotes of his life. The foundation of
The Tapestries
is found in those stories: about his father being a pirate; about his arranged marriage, as a boy, to a woman about twenty years older so she'd have to take care of him without being paid; about falling in love with the daughter of his family's blood enemy. “They loved each other immensely,” said Kien. “That was the love I was looking for, and I think it formed me a little bit, too.”
The court of Vietnam's final emperor hired Kien's grandfather to make embroideries because of his dramatic three-dimensional style of pictorial stitchery. “The faces would come out of the canvas and look at you,” said Kien. He had asked his younger brother to retrieve a particular piece of needlework when he returned recently to Vietnam. Kien has been unwelcome there since
The Unwanted
painted its Communist regime as heartlessly self-interested.
“It was a little boat, a sampan, in the middle of the water, which was very turbulent; you see slanted rain cut through the canvas. There was a man and a woman on that boat on that stormy night and the woman was bare-breasted and holding a child. She had really long hair, and he was guiding the sampan to shore,” said Kien. His grandfather told him the characters represented himself, his wife, and their son, Kien's uncle. The artwork had almost completely disintegrated.
Kien's memory of his ancestor's tales also had holes in it, which he filled with his imagination. Veering from classic Vietnamese literature, which he described as poetic, slow-moving, and ornately styled, he filled the book with action and adventure. He also tried to paint the myriad beauties of Vietnam, which for most Americans are obscured by memories of war.
His surprising metaphors and word choices owe partly to the fact that English is not his first language, surmised Judy Clain, the senior editor at Little, Brown who helped him shape both his books.
The publishing house is marketing
The Tapestries
both to readers who love stories set in foreign cultures, such as those by Amy Tan, Manil Suri, and Arundhati Roy, and to Asian-American communities. Hundreds of Vietnamese-Americans have showed up at promotional events for
The Tapestries
in Texas and California, Clain said.
Part of the enthusiasm may be credited to Kien's girlfriend of two and a half years, Kathleen Buoi, who owns the
Viet Tides
newspaper and Little Saigon Radio in California's Orange County. She has pushed Kien's career with everything from coffee mugs to backpacks. She is the daughter of Nhat Tien, an eminent Vietnamese novelist whose works Kien learned in school, and who has served as his mentor for the past few years.
Kien is Vietnamese-American not only through immigration but through parentage: His father was a U.S. serviceman who shipped out when his son was too young to remember.
The Unwanted
abounds in anecdotes of the taunting prejudice he faced as a mixed-race child, albeit not as bad as the “burnt rice” offspring of black U.S. soldiers. He sees the abandonment of Vietnam's Amerasian children as one of the saddest stories of the twentieth century, and one of the least known.
Nhat Tien's novel
Singing in a Cage
—whose central character is an Amerasian girl growing up in an orphanage—is a modern classic in Vietnam. But until
The Unwanted,
Kien said, “you heard the horrible, horrible stories about their suffering but nobody had actually put it into a book.” He gets many letters and e-mail dispatches from other Amerasians, and Tien has translated
The Unwanted
into Vietnamese.
Kien described seeing a mixed-race family during the publication party for
The Unwanted
at Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center: a Caucasian man who looked like a doctor with his Asian wife and their children. “Their boy, about fourteen years old, was a reflection of me at that age,” said Kien.
“He asked his dad if he could have some ice cream and they brought out this huge sundae and I got really sad, because that was the family that I wanted. And then I looked at the family I had created for myself and thought, ‘This is my life. You appreciate what you have.’”
Although his search for his birth father yielded only a returned letter marked “address unknown,” he and his brother found a father figure in Frank Andrews, the psychic he met twelve years ago.
Kien writes every day, starting early in the morning. For fear that writer's block might set in, he tries not to take many breaks, except for his daily run with his big black dog, Star; he is training for his third New York Marathon. He has lunch in midafternoon, takes a quick nap, and then watches “really nondescript, mindless TV” to clear his mind before resuming writing. He then works until he is exhausted, usually in the wee hours.
Kien has not given up dentistry entirely: He spends one day a week in the office of a Vietnamese-American friend, working with underprivileged children for free. He was recently hired by his alma mater, New York University, to teach children's dentistry. “One false move and a child will be afraid of dentists for life,” he said.
But he vastly prefers working with his imagination to dentistry. As a dentist, “you work in a tiny little area and most of the people are afraid of you,” he said. “It's a very lonely world.” As a writer, he said, “I live each day feeling very, very full,” growing in understanding of his characters, and of people in general.
His work helps him understand his own origins, as well. Said Clain: “After the memoir came out, I asked if he would ever go back to Vietnam. He said he had too many bad memories. With this novel, that's kind of what he's done. Fiction is a way for him of returning and exploring Vietnam.”
That's not to say he has any second thoughts about his new homeland. “Coming to America was the only dream I wanted,” he said. “The rest of my life is just a bonus. I'm always trying to expand my versatility, and this is such a great country for that. If I wanted to write a screenplay, I have a chance. If I wanted to go back to school to be an MBA, I have that chance, also. There's a lot of opportunity out there for everybody.”
John Habich's profile of Kien Nguyen originally appeared in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
on November 24, 2002. Reprinted with permission.
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. Discuss the tension between duty and personal choice in
The Tapestries.
To what extent did the characters have control over the way they lived their lives? Discuss the role of fate in the lives of the novel's principal characters.
2. Did you learn something new about Vietnam and its history from reading
The Tapestries?
Did you sense a conflict between the forces of history and the forces of modernism? Could you foresee a source of future conflicts in Vietnamese society after reading this novel?
3. Discuss the romantic relationships in the novel—Ven and Big Con, Dan and Tai May, Dan's mother and her gardener. What was the role of loyalty in these relationships? Can you identify modern as well as traditional elements in each relationship?
4. Who was your favorite character in
The Tapestries,
and why? Which characters were the most dynamic? the most passive? the most complex?
5. How did the author's use of metaphors and other figures of speech influence your experience of the story? How did the author's depiction of weather and landscape contribute to the novel's mood and tone?
6. What is the significance of Ven's disfigurement at the hands of Magistrate Toan? Do you think it reflects the position of women in Vietnamese society in the era portrayed in the novel? Do you think that the position of Vietnamese women has changed since that time?
7. Were you surprised by the details of food and daily life that are presented in the novel? In what way were these details important to the story? Discuss the differences in the lives of the wealthy and the poor.
8. Did you perceive certain characters to be representative of the historic culture of Vietnam? Did others appear more modern? Sometimes the characters in
The Tapestries
make choices based on traditional values that could be hard for a Western reader to comprehend. Identify some of the critical choices that altered characters' lives. Did the author succeed in making these choices understandable to you?
9. Who was the bigger villain—Magistrate Toan or Lady Yen? Who did more harm to Dan and the other characters in the story? Was Dan truly obligated to kill Magistrate Toan because of the family legacy?
10. Kien Nguyen has stated that
The Tapestries
was inspired by the story of his grandfather's life. Which parts of the novel do you think were factual, and which parts do you think were fictional? Are these distinctions important to you?
The Unwanted
A Memoir of Childhood
“Nguyen writes with a voice of innocence that takes us into the heart and spirit of one person's underserved and tragic childhood.”
—Carol Memmott,
USA Today
“
A
remarkable tale of survival at all costs.”
—Julie K. L. Dam,
People
“
A
gripping literary memoir…. So much happens that is beyond the imagination of American readers untested by war on the home front that it is best to suspend disbelief and simply listen to Kien Nguyen's bold and eloquent voice.”
—Cheri Register,
Ruminator Review
“Compelling…. A haunting story.”
—Laura Ciolkowski,
Washington Post Book World
“Heart-rending.…A harrowing account of what life was like for Kien Nguyen and his family in those nightmare years.”
—Merle Rubin,
Los Angeles Times
“Vivid and compelling.…A gripping, emotionally raw story.…It deserves a place with the best memoirs of immigration and exile.”
—Richard C. Kagan,
Minneapolis Star Tribune
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—Edward Stern,
Independent on Sunday
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Simple Recipes
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—Janice P. Nimura,
New York Times Book Review