09 February 2009
Finding Allies in Books
By Bich Minh Nguyen
Bich Minh Nguyen was an infant when her family fled Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon in 1975. Her first book, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, about growing up in a Vietnamese household in the American Midwest, won the PEN/Jerard Award in 2005. Her book Short Girls will be published in 2009. Nguyen teaches creative nonfiction, fiction, and Asian-American literature at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Growing up as a Vietnamese American in a small, predominantly white town in Michigan, I found my closest friends and allies in books. They provided an escape from the daily effort of trying to negotiate a culture at home with a culture outside the home. They also provided lessons and signposts: I learned early on that to get by and to get ahead in this country, I needed to attain all the language I could. So I read everything I could find: magazines, the backs of cereal boxes, instruction manuals, and, most of all, books from the library. Being a fairly literal-minded kid, I decided that reading English literature would teach me the most about the English language. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and the Brontës were among the first “grown-up” writers I read and fell in love with. Their ways of using character, plot, dialogue, imagery, and sentence structure stay with me today and influence my own shaping of these elements in fiction and nonfiction. They also led me to and made me fall in love with the “classics” — everything from Greek tragedies to Edith Wharton to William Faulkner.
It wasn’t until I started college and started taking a broad range of literature courses that I realized how many points of view existed out there — and that maybe it was even possible to write about my own experiences as a Vietnamese American. A world-changing book for me was Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, subtitled “Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.” One reason writers read constantly is to gain possibilities from other texts, to learn from them what language and ideas can do. The Woman Warrior opened many possibilities for me; it gave me incredible insight into issues of identity and race, and it showed me that I could write from my own voice. From Kingston, I began reading what seemed to me a new and expanding world of literature by Asian-American and immigrant writers, including Gish Jen, Chang-rae Lee, Jessica Hagedorn, Hisaye Yamamoto, Bharati Mukherjee, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Junot Díaz. These writers’ works, along with the classics, continue to provide fresh inspiration for me, and they remind me that literature can illuminate the connections between past and present and bridge cultures toward a more complicated understanding of the human and literary experiences.
