Boat Baby, Memoirs & Vietnamese Representation

A somewhat distracted book review of Vicky Nguyen's memoir; reflecting on the difference between memoir and autobiography, and my experiences and thoughts around Vietnamese representation

Feb 28, 2025

I recently got to read an advanced reader’s copy of Boat Baby by Vicky Nguyen on NetGalley. Honestly, I had just finished reading the three books I had been almost simultaneously granted early access to that I had told myself to give NetGalley requests a break, but when I saw the title and the picture of baby Vicky on the cover, I knew I had to read her memoir.

My mom was a boat person, and I’ve been hungrily consuming as much as I can about various Vietnamese refugee and Vietnamese/American experiences ever since my mom passed over a decade ago. The early years following her death, I was in a weirdly accepting place with my grief. My trauma therapist recently helped me to see how the many miles I ran around the Charles River following my mom’s death might have helped me to process a lot of what I was feeling back then. But as the years between when my mom was alive and my present began to grow, I found myself drifting back towards a longing for her and Vietnamese culture.

In addition to seeking out Vietnamese/American stories, I’ve also been working on an idea for a horror story that I would like to include characters that are Vietnamese Wasian like myself, and Korean like my husband’s family, so I have been consuming Korean/American texts too. Since both Vietnam and Korea have war-torn histories, reading stories and memoirs of people that have been occupied, colonized, or that have attempted escape can be rather heavy, so I have been trying to also read stories that help me to breathe. As a result of all these erratic reading goals, I’ve been reading Lan Cao’s, Monkey Bridge, and I also listened to Youngmi Mayer’s memoir, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying in the same timeframe that I read Boat Baby.

Boat Baby releases on April 1, 2025 and chronicles the story of Nguyen’s life from when she is born in Vietnam, to when her family manages to escape with her as an infant to a refugee camp, and ultimately they make it to the west coast of America, spending time in Oregon until ultimately settling in California for much of Nguyen’s formative years. In college, Nguyen discovers her interest and talent for TV news reporting. After working in various local markets, eventually Nguyen finds herself on a team of investigative reporters, which seems to set her on a path that brings her to becoming an NBC news anchor and correspondent, working for The Today Show.

In I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, Mayer, a standup comedian, demonstrates her inherent humor as she illuminates her family culture and history, her experiences (many of which are traumatic), and her perspective as a biracial Korean and White person, a “Wasian,” growing up in South Korea and Saipan, and eventually moving to the States in her early 20s.

And finally, Monkey Bridge is a novel published in 1997 written by Lan Cao, who escaped South Vietnam in 1975. She is an author, lawyer, and a professor. And after looking up her history on Wikipedia, I will hazard a guess that a lot of what Cao includes in her novel is likely inspired by her real life, since the main character, Mai, is flown out of Saigon in 1975 and lives in Connecticut until moving to Virginia with her mother, who arrives from Vietnam later on. I haven’t finished reading Monkey Bridge yet, but Mai, the main character, is currently on her way to an interview with Mt. Holyoke, and it says that Cao graduated from Mt. Holyoke in 1983. So – there’s that. But the back of the book describes succinctly that it is “an extraordinary novel that charts the mysterious terrain of the Vietnamese American experience in the aftermath of war”.

Listening to two memoirs simultaneously was causing my brain to think a lot about the style of memoirs and my expectations of them. Mayer’s writing was so good that I knew I had to purchase a hard copy of her memoir so that I could go back and revisit passages and moments and process them more slowly than I do when I’m listening. In contrast, I found myself being extra critical in the early chapters of Nguyen’s memoir.

I’ve listened to and read a decent number of memoirs and autobiographies at this point, including:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing by Maya Angelou
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
Like a Mother by Angela Garbes (and not exactly a memoir also by her, Essential Labor)
Sigh, Gone by Phuc Tran
The Unwanted by Kien Nguyen
A Well Trained Wife by Tia Levings
Educated by Tara Westover

All of these blew me away. Sure, they all seemed to chronologically cover the events of their authors’ lives (what memoirs and autobiographies do), but they all also seemed to have certain angles, edges, and attitudes that resulted in themes and motifs that stuck with me as I was immersed in very illustrative writing. In all of the memoirs listed above, I felt like I was literally in the room or in the mind of the authors as they replayed the moments of their lives. With Nguyen’s Boat Baby, I could picture what was happening, but in most of the chapters it felt more like she was telling me about what happened rather than inviting me into the room to witness and see for myself.

Is this style of memoir writing effective? Does it matter? Is it just personal preference?

The Vietnamese American Dream

Early on in Monkey Bridge, a teenage Mai reflects on the American view of Vietnamese refugees. She thinks, “My mother’s voice churned inside my head… ‘They’d jump at the chance to send us all back. Nomads, that’s what we’ve all become.’ … We were, after all, a ragtag accumulation of unwanted, an awkward reminder of a war the whole country was trying to forget” (15). A common theme for me since my mom died is feeling imposter syndrome over my Vietnamese-ness. She was the bedrock of my Vietnamese identity, and the matriarch of her family in the U.S. She kept us altogether and she kept the culture pulsing through our collective veins. With her in my life to fight with me daily, restrict me from doing normal American teenage things, to take me to temple, to drag me along to my aunts’ homes any time she felt like it, to speak Vietnamese daily into the backdrop of my life even though I didn’t understand it – I was Vietnamese, there was no question about it. But without her, I’ve felt more and more as if I’m made out of whatever fabric might make up an invisibility cloak, something translucent and able to shift its appearance to reflect its surroundings, allowing me to disappear.

So now, I often question myself when it comes to acknowledging my Vietnamese/Asian identity, and I especially second guess myself when I am thinking about how this identity impacts my experiences.

When I read the above lines in Monkey Bridge, I couldn’t help but wonder if being Vietnamese in America is an odd experience because of the Vietnam War, because it is a war that America lost, that America had very mixed feelings about, and that America mostly wants to forget unless it is honoring the stories of war veterans. If we are the awkward reminder of something the country is trying to forget, then is the country trying to unsee, or not acknowledge, the fact that we’re Vietnamese at all?

And if this is how I was raised - to only see the positives – to only see the model minority in my “hardworking relatives that never took a dime of government support and succeeded in the American Dream” – to never have learned about the model minority myth – was I raised to overlook my Vietnamese identity if parts of it weren’t celebratory? I felt that I saw some of this in Nguyen’s experiences as she grew from a young child into a young woman, while her parents worked various blue collar jobs in order to survive and make a life in America. I might be projecting myself into her pages, or it’s possible that she and I both share the experience of growing up in families that upheld and focused on Vietnamese refugees succeeding at the “American Dream,” completely unaware of the myth of meritocracy.

Since the advanced reader copy of Boat Baby requested no quoting of the text until the final version is published, I can’t and won’t quote the text, but Nguyen does point out at one point something along the lines of understanding that people living through war, or escaping war, or that are refugees of war have one focus/purpose - and that is to survive. When survival consumes your focus and is the only priority, there's no space to consider, do, or think about the overall morality and legality of your choices and actions. You just put one foot in front of the other and literally do what you need to do to stay alive. So, with these ideas mentioned at some point in her memoir, I gave grace for certain moments that may have oozed with a certain level of financial or class privilege.

News Reporting Style or Emotional Distance?

Nguyen’s style of writing felt a lot like TV news reporting, which sat on the page to me like “this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” as I moved from one chapter to the next. Although I could see moments of illustrated conversation and inner thoughts sprinkled here and there, most of the time I felt as though I was sitting across from Nguyen and she was recounting what happened, what she thought, and how she felt, instead of illustrating it. It was more “telling” than “showing.”

Beyond the writing style, the character development and choice of scenes to include also added to the distance I felt from Nguyen’s experiences. The people consistently mentioned are Nguyen, her high school sweetheart and husband, Brian, and both of her parents. Otherwise, characters are mentioned as they are relevant to the moment in time being covered in each chapter, but they don’t really come up again. While Vicky serves as the throughline for the first half of her book, the second half all seems to stem from her developing career as a news reporter. This made me feel as if I was being shown Nguyen’s path to success in her career as a news reporter, something she doesn't figure out until 50% of the way into her book.

Nguyen alludes to many things that would carry great emotional depth via the dynamics of her family and close friends as she comes of age and begins her career, but I found these quick allusions to be highly distracting. The brief mentions of how close she is to her sister in law, or a comment made by one of her closest friends left me thinking, “wait, they’re your best friends?!? You haven’t mentioned them at all!!!”. I would turn back to prior chapters to see if I had glazed over an introduction of another person in Nguyen’s life. At one point she mentions that her sister in law was her maid of honor at her wedding, and this sent my mind on a tangent wondering about why Nguyen didn’t include a chapter on Brian’s proposal to her and/or their wedding, since she seemed to include a chapter for each milestone one might encounter as a refugee, an adolescent, a college student, and a career woman. Brian is also a fixture she establishes in her life from her childhood, since they first meet as friends.

I feel uncomfortably judgmental of some of these choices, but as a person, I tend to be open about my own vulnerabilities with others. I don’t think it’s fair of me to expect that same openness of everyone, especially of Nguyen. Perhaps I could relate to a lot of what Nguyen went through growing up in Santa Rosa, a predominantly white area in Northern California, and I wanted to emotionally connect with her experiences even more. Or perhaps it’s a missed opportunity, or distracting verbiage for me – to call her book a memoir.

These thoughts actually brought me to consider if there is a difference between an autobiography and a memoir, since the prior memoirs I read all seemed to have an angle through which they were looking back on their lives. And, what Google brought to me is this distinction:

An autobiography chronicles the events of a person’s entire life, told by them
A memoir chronicles the events of a certain time period, or “reflects upon a string of themed occurrences” in a person’s life

So, perhaps I was misled with the description of Boat Baby as a memoir, because it reads more like an autobiography.

How can we talk about Trauma and “The American Dream”?

Here’s the challenge - what brought me to read Nguyen’s memoir was the picture of her on the cover, and the title, Boat Baby. Those details primed me to expect a memoir that looks at the impact of the refugee experiences on Nguyen’s life. But what I read seemed to fit the story arc of immigrants pursuing and succeeding at the American Dream. Should this invalidate Nguyen’s book? Her experiences? Or can the point be that not every war refugee needs to think about, articulate, and share about hard and traumatic experiences in the same way? What’s traumatic for some may not be traumatic for others.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Sympathizer, recently posted on Instagram: “...so much of immigrant literature, despite bringing attention to the racial, cultural and economic difficulties that immigrants face, also ultimately affirms an American Dream that is sometimes lofty and aspirational, and at other times a mask for the structural inequities of a settler colonial state”.

(source: instagram.com/@viet.thanh.nguyen.writer )

Did Vicky Nguyen and her parents just achieve the American Dream of financial security and career success? Is her memoir masking the “structural inequities of a settler colonial state”?

In fact, for me, this conundrum is what stopped me (and my parents) from really understanding the complex mess of my childhood and adolescence. Not wanting to think about race, or culture, or what being a war refugee might have done to impact the way my mother mothered, I dismissed the challenges of my coming of age as symptoms of typical teenage angst and “overprotective, traditional Asian parenting”.

I grew up with many privileges. My mother was the only one of her siblings to marry someone that wasn’t Vietnamese, bringing literal whiteness into my DNA, and raising us in an assimilated household. She and one of her brothers became software engineers, while her other refugee sisters became the owners of their own hair and nail salons. I grew up in financial security, in a safe and quiet suburb, with a mother who could stay home and take care of her children and home. It’s the white picket fence American Dream. What could I have had to complain about? To be ungrateful for?

In my Harvard College interview, which was an interview that I didn’t realize wasn’t just a formality given to every applicant — my parents and I had no idea or guidance about the college application process, let alone with Ivy League schools — in my interview, my interviewer asked me if I had ever faced adversity in my life. Nervous and with a limited vocabulary, I asked her how she defined adversity. I can’t remember exactly her response, but I imagine it had something to do with exceptional challenges that I may have faced in my life. I don’t think I had much to say, because I was raised to only focus on the positives and the privilege (which wasn’t called “privilege,” but things to be grateful for). I didn’t think that I had experienced any exceptional challenges, I was just a troubled, boy-crazy teenage girl fighting with her mom all the time. Isn’t that what teenage girls do?

Towards the end of my interview, I do remember my interviewer telling me very clearly that this was the space to share if there were any reasons that my grades were lower than they should be. I remember shaking my head, no. I remember thinking that my grades were my responsibility, they were what I had earned of my own effort and merits.

Years later, I came to realize that that was the opportunity to explain how my mother could fly into irrational fits of rage where the only way to let off steam would be to attack and restrict me. To take away my computer privileges, to refuse to allow me to use the printer to print an essay, to not allow me out of the house to do research, or study with a group.

How could I, an eighteen year old with parents that didn’t even know to think about how the differences in their lives and cultures might leave knowledge gaps none of us knew needed to be filled, have known that what I needed to own was that I was a parentified child?

How could I have known that my mother was likely suffering from CPTSD and other mental health issues as a result of being a war refugee, and that this manifested in an unstable and confusing environment that wasn’t exactly psychologically safe for me?

If I didn’t know these things, how could I have articulated them as examples of adversity to my interviewer?

How could I have known that I needed to explain how even though I grew up in a wealthy suburb with parents that had white collar engineering jobs, I was parenting my younger sister, myself, and my psychologically troubled mother? That my dad’s philosophy was to treat me as an adult, too. It was the naive and innocent blind leading the blind. And we were blind because we only focused on the positive spin on the narrative of “The American Dream”. It was lying by omission.

The positive spin on my experiences of adversity was that they made me mature and capable. While these things may have been true, my loss of personal autonomy and self awareness also came along with them.

Realizing these things now gives me the perspective to see that I did, even in the mess of my adolescence, get a Harvard interview! And I have also come to realize the perception and kindness of my interviewer that I didn’t understand back then. But I didn’t get in, and I have no idea what my interviewer thought of me. Maybe she viewed me as a quieter, unsure, wandering young girl.

#MeToo and Asian Representation in the Media

Nguyen experiences a number of unpleasant men to work with as a news reporter over the course of her career. One she describes as kind of lazy, only willing to do the bare minimum, while another is sexually harassing her and other women, but these things only feel relevant to Nguyen’s memoir because of when they took place: when Nguyen is young and eager with energy as she begins her career, and when #MeToo becomes a movement.

The chapters move so quickly that they could suggest a somewhat admirable attitude of just moving on and not letting it get to you too much, but I wonder how these moments could have been retold had Nguyen opened up a little bit more about what she was feeling or had thought about if there was more to these men than just taking advantage of women. (Note that I do consider it to be important to focus on Nguyen’s journey over giving disproportionate airtime to the male experiences here, but the brevity of each chapter made me wonder if something was missing).

I had to wonder if the first guy that was unhelpful to Nguyen, doing the bare minimum, might have had some other reasons as to why he was so uncooperative working with her. She described him as in his mid ‘30s. He could have been going through his own stuff. As a person in their mid ‘30s… that is exhausted with three young children… and making sense of my career and life transitions… I can attest to the fact that there is a lot going on for people in their mid ‘30s that I know my young-gun-about-to-enter-college stepbrother may not understand and simply view as apathy. It’s also possible that this mid ‘30s doing the bare minimum guy might have viewed Nguyen a certain way since there were so few Asian American women reporters he was probably working with ,or even aware of, at that time. Maybe he was frustrated by other administrative or managerial decisions. Maybe he secretly wanted to do a different kind of cinematography or camerawork. There are many possibilities, but he was only illustrated to be a two-dimensional character trope.

Similarly, the second guy Nguyen describes as inappropriate sadly fits the archetypical description of a man sexually harassing a woman in the workplace. Even if Nguyen’s re-telling of that moment feels all too familiar and straightforward, I can appreciate the moment in solidarity with other victims of sexual harassment and improper workplace conduct. I also find myself acknowledging how hard it can be to write about the uglier, more uncomfortable, and traumatic moments of our lives as well. Not to mention the many careers of women that have been broken because they did speak up about their experiences. I also acknowledge how challenging I find it to write about myself, my decision making, and my thoughts in such a way that others might find admirable or be proud of. In some Asian cultures, it can be hard for elders to give praise, and hard for children to then receive praise. It can be an uncomfortable process. Humility is a virtue. So might that have been a factor here, too?

Nguyen’s re-telling of these experiences had me very thoughtful. I was reflecting on how judgmental I was being and reminded that I don’t think it’s fair of me to judge how she is telling the stories of her life with the responsibility of Vietnamese representation on her shoulders. Although, perhaps it is appropriate to critique the writing and storytelling of a memoir, separate of the representation lens. That’s tricky to do.

I personally wished that Nguyen could have opened up a little bit more, or slowed down to illustrate some moments, or that she had included some research to educate about context for the moments that do illustrate inequities. Given the memoirs that I have read, I found myself longing for Nguyen to open up her story beyond her eyes and thoughts beyond the perspective she seemed to have at the time of each chapter, of each moment of her memories. But I don’t know the requirements given by publishers, editors, etc. Also, just because I want to immerse myself in understanding and thinking about the impact of systemic oppression, and war/imperialism/colonization on Asians, Asian Americans, and BIPOC, not every Asian/American or BIPOC may want to do this, or it may even be a barrier to entry for someone to engage with a book that thrusts them into this world or conversations. So I found myself considering the weight of responsibility on Asian/Americans in the media when it comes to representation.

Why it’s important to tell as many diverse stories as possible

This has come up a lot, and concrete references are escaping me on what this “might be called,” but I know that when it comes to representations of minorities in media, it is impossible to please everyone. And that impossibility is often lost on consumers. I think “Asians are not a monolith” is a phrase I’ve heard so much it sometimes loses the weight of its meaning, but it’s true. It’s just not possible for one person, one book, one story to be representative of all peoples of a given race, nationality, or culture. That’s why we need as many people to tell their stories as we can, so that we can have diverse representation. I don’t expect to identify with every Asian character or person depicted in the media, nor do I expect them to be perfect. Although I caught myself falling into this trap while reading Nguyen’s memoir.

I noticed some of my Asian American friends and family falling into this trap when watching Jenn Tran’s season of The Bachelorette. The expectations for how she should behave and act, as a representative for all Asian Americans seemed high. I heard so many judgmental comments about her as we would watch:

“She’s too bubbly.”

“I don’t like her voice.”

“Wow, she’s making out with every guy.”

All I wanted to do was scream and defend her! Just let her be!!

I have some quips with the producers of Jenn’s season of The Bachelorette, because I feel that they either knowingly or unknowingly edited her into some damaging Vietnamese stereotypes.

I haven’t actually watched and measured, but I could feel while watching her season of The Bachelorette that the amount of airtime they were giving her makeout sessions with nearly every contestant was much longer than what I had watched of past bachelorettes. In past seasons, a bachelorette would begin to kiss or makeout with a contestant, and the camera would cut away as they started to kiss more. For Jenn’s season, the cut would bring us into a scene of Jenn a moment before she would start making out with someone and it would linger there for a good 30-60 seconds after. Checking my instincts, you can see in this clip where she first kisses Sam, that they continue to cut back to her and Sam making out over the course of a few minutes. They were depicting her as a sex object.

Literally they take the time to not only get, but also to include and show multiple angles of her making out… lying down, with the contestants. GAH! I wouldn’t be so bothered by this if it weren’t for the fact that these moments seem to be edited out for other bachelorettes in recent years.

This was already rubbing me the wrong way since I could sense the difference, but what made it even worse was when I noticed that they were not touching up her makeup during her talking-head reflections/interviews after these makeout sessions!! Her lipstick or gloss was always visibly rubbed off and messy, she looked like she had just been intensely making out with someone. She looked tousled and sloppy. In past Bachelorette seasons? The women always look as though their makeup was just touched up right before they sat down to reflect! This is problematic because the editors and producers were depicting Jenn as a sex object. We can thank Full Metal Jacket and all of the insensitive “me love you long time” comments for perhaps solidifying the insensitivity towards the damaging stereotype of Asian women, and especially Vietnamese women, as sex objects.

Anyways, I digress.

Noticing my harsh judgments as I read Boat Baby, I took a step back. I started to think about who the target audience for this memoir might be. I realized that my mom would’ve been able to read Nguyen’s memoir, and would have been able to engage with it and love it. She wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the language of something like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She would have gotten lost. I also thought that Nguyen’s memoir would be a wonderful one to offer to middle grade students or freshmen and sophomores, since it addresses traumatic moments and events, but without traumatically illustrating them. Once I had donned this mindset, I started to view Nguyen’s style in a way that reminded me of my own aunties and uncles. Even when I was speaking with my own uncle recently, asking him for stories of my mother, I found myself dancing around the topic of the Hue Massacre, and even the way he talked about it was vague and matter of fact. I also started to think about how Nguyen’s experience adds to the mosaic of Vietnamese refugee experiences in America, and why it’s important to exist as it does.

By the final pages of her memoir, I appreciated the touches on many moments of her life. I also Googled her to see her in action, and it warmed my heart to see her speaking and reporting!

Mixed Media Reads

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