Always Someone Leaving

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One day before the fall of Saigon, an infant Beth Nguyen was carried by her father out of the country and toward a new life in the United States. But her mother stayed — “or was left behind in Saigon. For many years, I wouldn’t know which phrasing was more true,” Nguyen writes in her new memoir, Owner of a Lonely Heart. In the next decades, Nguyen would see her mother only a half-dozen times, for clipped conversations that did little to answer her questions about their pasts.

Those questions became all the more urgent when Nguyen had children. “One morning, not long after my second child was born, I got up from a night of broken sleep with a sentence in my mind. I wrote it down: When I became a mother, I became a refugee,” she writes. “It took a long time to make sense of it: how inhabiting motherhood has made, Nguyen recounts the songs she listened to as her family settled into the rhythms of another new life, in a new house, in Michigan — and felt a restlessness among her siblings and within herself that would drive them in such different ways.

Our new house was supposed to be in the country, ten miles west of Grand Rapids. It sat off a stretch of divided highway dotted with former farmhouses and new industrial parks. To get to our house we had to turn down a long driveway that narrowed past a brook and a small scummy pond banded by willow trees. The house, anchored by a central A-frame and dark brown shingles, had a cottage look that my stepmom had always admired. Crissy, it turned out, felt the same. She couldn’t sneak out of the house so easily anymore, and Eddie didn’t have a car. She went to elaborate lengths to see him, recruiting her friends to be her sleepover alibi, her after-school activities alibi. She was always getting friends to drive her home.