Book review: Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen
All her life, Lee Lien has
heard the story: her grandfather once ran a café in Saigon, and one day an
American journalist named Rose walked in. Rose was a surprisingly old woman,
covering the Vietnam War at a time when few American women were in the country.
She and Lee’s grandfather became friends, and Rose left behind a small gold
pin. . .
Years later, Lee is an adult
who was raised in the American Midwest and now has a Ph.D. in English
Literature. She’s also jobless, so has returned to her mother’s house in the
Chicago suburbs to work at the family’s Vietnamese café. Restless and wilting
under family tensions, Lee one day remembers the gold pin left behind by the
mysterious Rose. And Lee remembers that the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder
was a journalist named Rose, who covered the Vietnam War in her old age. . .
This novel is part literary
mystery, part family drama; it’s a look at the second-generation Asian-American
immigrant experience through a fresh and surprising lens. I love the parallels
which writer Nguyen has found between the Ingalls’ family experience and Lee’s.
Like Charles Ingalls, Lee’s mother has a restless drive to always be moving on to
the next thing, the next town, the better opportunity (which, for her, has been
running a series of Chinese buffet restaurants throughout the Midwest). Lee
herself, as comes clear through the novel, has inherited something of that same
restlessness, even as her desire to move to new places goes against the
traditional values which would have her stick close to her family.
As Lee hunts down the mystery
of Rose’s gold pin, sleuthing in library archives and tracing Rose’s path
across America, the narrative picks up speed and I found myself flipping pages
late into the night. But for me, it’s the focus on Lee’s own family which was
most compelling. Nguyen has a keen eye for those family silences, the awkward
tensions between generations that so often exist in recent immigrant families.
And although the family in this story has a background very different from my
own. . . there are still points of commonality in the Asian-American
experience, and I felt those points keenly. I love the emotional honesty of
Nguyen’s book: there are no easy reconciliations here, no Hallmark moments.
It’s an honesty extended to the examination of Ingalls mythology and the Little House in the Prairie series
itself, which of course is also emblematic of America’s pioneer past mythology.
This is a compelling and sensitive twining of narratives, telling an American
story in a new way.
Comments
Post a Comment