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"The Unwanted"
By Kien Nguyen
Little, Brown, 320 pp, $24.95

Books about war can capture the hellish toll of battle on the people who fight them and the innocents caught in the conflict, but they rarely capture the fate of those left behind in the aftermath of battle. In the case of the war in Vietnam, many of the stories of human tragedy and heroism were made even more poignant because of their racial overtones.

Kien Nguyen's "The Unwanted," a memoir of his family's years in South Vietnam following the end of the war, is a heart-rending book that captures the hardship of life in a country that most Americans only know as the place we finally vacated in 1975 after more than a decade of futile fighting.

Nguyen's book, which he wrote originally as a sort of therapy to purge his mind of disturbing memories, not only explains what day-to-day life there was like but also brings the post-war trauma to a human level.

Nguyen's mother was a wealthy socialite in Nhatrang, a small city where she owned a bank. Nguyen's earliest memories are of his glamorous mother entertaining guests at their mansion. She's a haughty and often unlikable woman, given to mood swings between loving her sons Kien and Jimmy, and raging at them, in part because of their mixed-race heritage. Kien's father was am American civil engineer working in Vietnam who hired his mother as a translator and then returned to the US; Jimmy's father was a GI stationed in Vietnam during the war - not an uncommon fact, with as many as 50,000 Amerasian children stuck in Vietnam after the departure of US troops.

Between his mother's capitalist history and Kien and Jimmy's blond hair and curls, the family was due for a hard fall of their own after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.

"The Unwanted" follows the fall and eventual rise of the Nguyens through an incredible series of dashed hopes and demoralizing turns of fate. The family can't get out of Saigon with the final helicopter loads of refugees departing off the roof of the US embassy building, and has to return to Nhatrang. There, they find to their dismay that their gardener has become the local community leader. He cheats them out of their mansion for use as a government office, and banishes them to a country estate to live next to Kien's aunt's family, who hates and taunts them unmercifully.

Nguyen horrifically but calmly chronicles the humiliation they suffer for being "counterrevolutionaries" and for being of mixed race in unflinching, often quite poetic prose. In one passage, he describes meeting up with a family friend during the days following the arrival of the Communists:

"The Mrs. Dang who greeted us was not her usual vociferous self, but a subdued, hollowed-out incarnation. Her eyes were red and swollen. Her hands fidgeted on a tiny, wrinkled piece of tissue, peeling it off now and again from the corners. Her hair was a bird's nest, sticking out stubbornly all over her scalp. There was a brownish stain of some sort across her breasts like a wicked hand, cynically groping her every time she moved."

The litany of horrible, heart-breaking events that Kien and his family suffers as they become dirt-poor and struggle to survive is an emotional roller-coaster for a reader today; it's hard to imagine what it must have been like to live through such experiences.

When he was 14, Nguyen made an ill-fated escape attempt with a boatload of other refugees, and was caught, tortured and imprisoned.

"I lost all sense of time. Where darkness ruled, day and night was obsolete. I pressed my face against the wall, preferring to inhale its dampness instead of the odor of thirty desperate people. Insects crawled all over me. Some stood at the entrance of my nostril, but I made no effort to push them away. Strangely, my awareness of their presence seemed to keep me from losing my mind."

The one thing you don't get from Nguyen's telling is his passage into manhood. Because so much of the book is about a child - he was 8 when the war ended and his family's hellish journey began -- we're caught off-guard at the end. There's also a somewhat clumsy narrative jump that deals with his mother's conniving boyfriend Lam, who is one of Kien's tormenters.

But the story's a breathtaking read, all the way through to the point where Kien and his family manage to legally exit Vietnam through a US-Vietnam agreement in 1985 that allowed Amerasians and their families to seek refuge outside the country. Nguyen writes eloquently of the different kind of torture he faces at this point: the mountain of paperwork and documentation required, the bureaucracy he faces, and finally, on the eve of their departure, the ongoing corruption rampant in the Communist government.

Still, it's a wonderful moment when he and his family travel to Saigon to be screened for the Orderly Departure program.

"When my family's name was called, we ran to meet our interviewer at the foot of a staircase. She was a black woman, dressed in a dark blue business suit, as beautiful and alien as a colored porcelain doll. Her perfume hung in the air like the smell of a black rose in my uncle's garden after the rain. A Vietnamese translator stayed a few steps behind her. After a simple greeting and handshakes, they took us upstairs.

"As soon as she opened the door to her office and invited us in, a blast of cold wind from the air conditioner swallowed me in its gentle, westernized embrace. I took in a deep breath, and suddenly, America was inside my lungs. Next to me, my mother began to cry."

This moving passage is close to the end of Nguyen's epic travails, but amazingly, there are more roadblocks, false hopes, and yes, even more tragedy before the final page, where Kien and his family stride across the tarmac to the plane that would take them away from Vietnam and on to freedom, first in a refugee camp in the Philippines, and then on to the US.

Kien Nguyen is a dentist today practicing in New York City, and a damn fine writer. A movie of the book's already in the works, and I hope it does justice to Nguyen's telling.

But there's so much still left untold, I also hope someday he finds the time to tell the story of his arrival in the US, and the difficulties he must have faced with his family once they finally arrived in the country he'd dreamed about for so long.

This review was published in the Rocky Mountain News, February, 2001.