AGAINST THE WILD WIND

In this memoir, a woman recounts her Vietnamese mother’s lifelong struggles and their fraught relationship.

Nguyen-Utgaard’s mother’s name was Nhã Tiên. Her own Vietnamese name is Mây Hạ. And the family’s fortunes were inextricably bound up with beautiful Vietnam’s sad history. The author’s parents were well-known singers and actors in Hanoi. Then, after World War II, they became revolutionaries in the fight to oust the French, colonizers since the 19th century. And, of course, the rebels succeeded in 1954 only to realize that the French were replaced—at least in the north—by Ho Chi Minh’s communism, a political system that the family loathed. Nhã Tiên and her children escaped to the south, and she did not see her husband for 36 years. The marriage was past saving; her husband (Nguyen-Utgaard’s father), Miên, was a shattered man. Just before the fall of Saigon, Nhã Tiên and her brood escaped to California (“Little Saigon” in Orange County). They returned to their homeland a couple of times, but the Vietnam they knew was lost forever. The author found Hanoi “covertly threatening and vaguely unwelcoming.” Still, their obsession with the country never subsided, and Nhã Tiên remained profoundly unhappy and spiritually homeless for the rest of her life. And then it gradually emerged that she had been bipolar for years. Nguyen-Utgaard is a passionate and talented writer with, frankly, a lot to be fervent about: This material is wrenching through and through, and readers will wonder how the family members survived. The simple answer is that they were incredibly tough. But that does not mean that they emerged unscathed and were not scarred for life (Nhã Tiên lived to be 98 years old). Most of the absorbing volume is devoted to Nhã Tiên’s story, but then readers focus on Nguyen-Utgaard, the dutiful daughter, and her evolution. The last of the book chronicles the Sturm und Drang of Nhã Tiên’s last decades, with her daughter commuting regularly between Minnesota and California and trying to atone for she knew not what. While this part seems overlong, the author still delivers some intriguing details about her difficult journey.

A well-written, engrossing history of a family, a country, and two women’s challenges.