Owner of a Lonely Heart: A Memoir by Beth Nguyen is about a woman coming to terms with her relationship with her family, her identity, and what it means to be a refugee. At the end of the Vietnam War, Beth Nguyen was eight months old when she and her family fled Saigon for America. Beth’s entire family went to America except her mother. Beth didn’t reconnect with her mother until she was nineteen years old. Over the course of her adult life, Beth and her mother have spent less than twenty-four hours together.
When I first started this memoir, I thought it was going to be about Beth and her relationship with her mother. However, it turns out to be more than that plus it had a lot of random and “incomplete” stories thrown in. For example, in one of the first chapters, Beth talks about one of her earliest visits to see her mother and she portrays it in one way but then in a later chapter she mentions she wasn’t completely honest and she didn’t share the full background on that visit. I didn’t understand why she didn’t give those details when she first mentioned the visit. Beth would rehash a particular visit a few times and sometimes, she would get repetitive with the details. It felt like the story was dragging with the repetitive and sometimes, mundane details.
As the book progresses, she talks about the relationship she has with her family, her Vietnamese identity, and being a mother. At times, I felt like the memoir was all over the place and I couldn’t understand the point that Beth was trying to make. Towards the end, I was a bit over the book. I wish we found out more details on why her father thought it was okay to leave Beth’s mother behind, but he kept in contact with her. It didn’t seem like there was any malice between Beth’s father and mother. It felt like that most of Beth’s interaction with her mother was bland and without emotion. I didn’t feel connection between the two and why we should care about their relationship or even root for them.
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