Having arrived in the U.S. as an infant, Nguyen felt uncomfortable identifying as a refugee, a label often steeped in shame. Motherhood gave her the chance to re-evaluate her distinct identities.

Beth Nguyen On the Divisions She’ll Never Bridge ... Yet she concedes that it’s likely her children will one day read it to make sense of a past in which they were merely infants.

Parenting is in some ways a similar journey. We don’t know how things will turn out with our children. We just know that each passing day marks a moment we can never return to. How do families make ...

Beth Nguyen, creative writing professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is speaking at St. Lawrence University Thursday as part of the school's visiting writers' series.

Beth Nguyen has spent less than 24 hours with her mother. Alongside her dad, sister, grandmother, and uncles, she fled Vietnam a day before the fall of Saigon in 1975. At the time, Nguyen was 8 months ...

Beth Nguyen’s new memoir tells of coming to terms with her experience as a refugee when her mother was left behind in Vietnam during the American war. Nguyen was only 8 months old when she came ...

In “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” Beth Nguyen writes about being a refugee, feeling like an imposter as both American and Vietnamese, and being separated from her mom for 11 years. The ocean current ...

I n her powerful second memoir, Owner of a Lonely Heart, Beth Nguyen writes of the isolation she felt while growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in a mostly white town in Michigan. In 1975, when she ...