Poured Over: Beth Nguyen on Owner of a Lonely Heart

By Jenna Seery / July 13, 2023 at 6:00 am

“That to me is part of the joy … of memoir, which is — it is all about looking back.”

Beth Nguyen’s Owner of a Lonely Heart is a memoir about motherhood, loss and coming-of-age while navigating the refugee experience, told with a vivid and powerful voice. Nguyen joins us to talk about the feeling of writing nonfiction, the importance of names, generational impacts on the way we view life and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. We end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Jamie and Marc.   

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.   

Featured Books (Episode):
Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen
Heavy by Kiese Laymon
The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed by Viet Thang Nguyen
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Beth Nguyen, this book, I cannot wait for you guys to experience this book. It is a memoir. And I’m going to give you the world’s worst ear worm because that gave me the world’s worst ear worm. It’s Owner of a Lonely Heart and you know, if you want to go listen to some Yes, right now, you can do that too. But more importantly, we’re going to be talking about the language of motherhood and refugee status and all sorts of stuff. And names, man, we’re going to talk a lot about names. But that’s really good to see you. Thank you for Thank you. Thank you for being on the show.

Beth Nguyen
Oh, thank you for having me here.

So I feel like you have been working on this book for a while, some pieces of the book have been published previously. But this memoir as a whole. I just I feel like you’ve been walking around, even as you wrote, you know, Short Girls, and even as Pioneer Girl came out. This really feels like a direct descendant from Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.

Yes, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner was my first book. And that was a memoir that was published 15 years ago.

I did that math. And I did not like that math. I was like, what do you mean, this book is 15 years old, I don’t understand.

It was sort of it still is sort of horrifying to think that that long ago. But the sort of follow up to it, to me was thinking about how we change all the time as people and as writers. So I was carrying this book Owner of a Lonely Heart in my mind, and every time I turned to it, I would change it and revise it because I had, you know, become a slightly different person, after a year of living, this book became about a little bit more about time, and about the strangeness of dealing with time. And part of it is during the pandemic, which is also very weird in terms of our relationship with time.

And I think too, I mean, books are really such a great way to experience shifts in time, like, think about a novel, right, that’s the exact kind of purpose of the book is to watch the evolution of time. So the idea of doing a memoir, and you do you do go back to your childhood, you came to the States as a teeny, tiny baby. And honestly, have no memory of living anywhere else. But when we’re Asian American, lots of people have lots of feelings about our identities and what other means, and we’re kind of, you know, on the front lines of that, but one of the things I’ve always loved about reading you is that you really wanted to be part of your community in Michigan, right, like Toll House cookies, and Twinkies, and like all of it. And it’s such a different approach, right to what some people think of is immigrant writing. And I’m like, well, it’s not immigrant writing, it’s American writing, because you’re American. And I kind of want to start there, because the language doesn’t always serve us. And you have some very clever ways of dealing with it in this new book.

I grew up feeling so American, at the same time that I grew up feeling, not American, because my family had come to the United States as refugees when I was a baby. But I also felt very non-American, because people would always perceive me as being a not American, they would always think of me as being Asian. And so it was a strange place to live in the Midwest, growing up, you know, feeling one way but being perceived in another way. And that was the 1980s, which was a very assimilationist time to be growing up. And all the messages were just fit in fit in. It’s a very different landscape now. And so for me, it’s a lot of reckoning with that mode of growing up, versus what we know now.

I mean, also the 80s, the Japanese were doing very well financially. So they were buying a lot of real estate in the United States. There were a lot of car companies coming to the states, and opening factories, you know, Japanese companies were buying American companies, and it was all a little complicated. And then of course, we have Vincent Chin and his murder, and that sets off a whole new trail. And it is, I mean, technically, a long time ago, and yeah, we are moving forward. But kind of still feels like yesterday in a lot of ways when we see these repeats, right? Like we just saw it with COVID. And the whole idea of this China virus, and it’s like, Hi, sorry, what? It’s been a wild few years. But when did you really start thinking this needed to be a book? I mean, it’s one thing to write an essay here or there, you’re clearly doing a lot of research, you’re also teaching. Like you have a lot going on, and yet this book is still constructing itself in the midst of all this change.

I think everything you were just saying about how Asian Americans are perceived and how that language, racism against Asians kind of goes away, but it comes back quickly. Those were things that have been in my mind, absolutely for all these years. And while I was writing sort of separate essays, I was thinking about how they would become a book. And I didn’t really know, actually, I just sort of was like, I know this is going to be something, but I don’t know what it is yet. And I couldn’t make it happen. And I’m not somebody who thinks that you can actually make the narrative happen. I feel like you I mean, technically you can. But I think in nonfiction, sometimes it’s there or it’s not there. And we have to sort of figure our way through it. And, for me, it was during the pandemic that I failed. And it was quite late in the editing process and the revision process, where I was thinking about what is what is the thing that’s on my mind that I have been essentially avoiding? Because, you know, writing nonfiction is about, you know, a lot of it is about avoidance. For real, a lot of writing, I guess, in general is avoidance. The thing that I was avoiding, it sort of was a realization that over the course of my adult life, you know, my conscious life, that I had spent less than 24 hours total with my mother.

Yeah. And you’re a mom now. Right? You’re I mean, your boys are in the double digits, but not high. You’re still actively momming. They are not fully running around doing their own field trips. So you are super in mom mode. But that’s also a big part of this book. And you’re sort of reconciling being a mom with not and your stepmother was around. And, you know, clearly she appears in this book, and she’s appeared in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and whatnot, but it’s such a primal relationship. Right? And I mean, countless books have been written countless books will be written about the mother daughter relationship. And I just kind of want to start there, because I think I didn’t realize when I was reading, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner a million years ago, because 15 years, holy crap. I didn’t realize she was your stepmom somehow and like you talk about her. And I’m just like, oh, I guess in Texas, whatever. But like you had your family, right? Yeah. So can we talk about your mom? And how you guys ended up separated? Because I was so deep in the story that I didn’t process your stepmom being your stepmom.

Yeah, the probably the, one of the central stories of my life is the fact that when my family, when we left Vietnam as refugees, and that my mother stayed in Vietnam, she didn’t come with us. And so I ended up not meeting her until I was 19 years old. I grew up with a stepmom, who she’s always been basically always been my stepmom since I was three, I call her mom and I, she was my mom and there was my grandmother there. So I didn’t lack mother figures. And I was always well taken care of in terms of having mothers, I had a very strong and I still have a very strong relationship with my stepmom. I call her mom always had. And, you know, at the same time, I think when I was reading, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, I was not getting that it was 15 years ago, I was ready to write about my birth mother, biological mother, and the fact that I just didn’t really have her in my life. She’s in there, you know, she’s in that book. It is part of the, of the whole book. But she’s not the central figure, the central concern. And it’s been very fascinating for me in terms of the whole writing process of vulnerable on the heart to figure out that process of what we are actually ready to write about. Okay, and how that is part of craft as well, is figuring that out, what, what am I supposed to write now? What am I supposed to maybe hold on for later. Because, you know, we’re not actually writing a confessional or we shouldn’t be, we’re trying to understand, and we’re not always prepared, or ready to understand at every moment in our reading process.

So you mentioned a few minutes ago that it was really late into the process on this book that you are, in fact, in very late stage edits. And suddenly you understand what is happening here. Can we talk about that shift from what you had, we don’t have to go into like obvious details and whatnot, because also, there’s so much that happens for you, to you with you in this book that I really would like to stay spoiler free, but I love the idea that somehow you know, right when you’ve got the thing and you’re working on this thing, and then suddenly this thing needs to shift, no matter how late it is. So can we talk about that process?

Yeah, it was I was writing an email about the manuscript to my agent, and it was seriously while I was writing an email, it occurred to me. And I wrote to her and I said, I just realized that during this, I just realized that, you know, over the course of my life, I basically spent less than 24 hours with my mother. And that became this conversation that made me realized this is the narrative arc of the book. Okay. Okay, that was now my task to recount those hours that I had spent with my mother.

I have to say, hearing you say that and having read the book, I’m like, wait a minute, that it’s such a strong spine. That the idea of you figuring it out sort of late in the game is wild to me. I’m just like, well, of course, why wouldn’t you like? It’s that organic? You know, it’s really, I mean, it’s kind of fun to hear this because I do think, like, there’s that moment where there’s a moment where your mom is at Foxwoods. And I was like, Of all the places, okay, I got it. Now what I was expecting like, you know, Mom was, you know, off doing something but Foxwoods.

Sometimes you just have to go to Foxwoods.

Apparently, yes. There are buses, there are buses from both New York and Boston. For that set to do. And it’s funny, you have a point, your older sister on shows up in this book again, too. She has a moment though, where she asked you. And I’m paraphrasing her poorly for a second. But she hasn’t gotten where she asked, she’s like, Why do you keep chasing this? Why do you keep trying? And you’re like, well, I suppose I shouldn’t have to put you in my narrative. Which is what’s making me think about you because you and your sister are close, like you have a nice relationship, like all of this stuff. And yet, you’re like, Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t, maybe you aren’t part of this narrative. And I love that moment, because you guys share so much, right? And here, you are finally saying, huh? Okay, so does that change the writing too, though, I mean, when you realize that, you do have to put yourself a little bit more out there than you might have otherwise chosen to do. I mean, you really can’t drag your sister in as much, maybe.

It is a very strange thing, writing nonfiction, because you’re not just writing about yourself, you’re actually writing lots of people all the time. And so every writer of nonfiction has a different approach in terms of getting permission or running work by other people talking to them about and I think that that sort of ethical process is important. You know, I gave this manuscript to my sister to read before it was published. And we’ve talked about it and everything. And it’s important to me, because we’re close, and she’s the person who’s had the same experiences. But at the same time, yes, like, I can’t make someone be part of the narrative when they don’t want to. So that was a big, sort of global thought process I had about the book. That’s I don’t really use people’s names. In the book, I deliberately. And I was using a lot of phrasing, like I, you know, I think, or I recall, I remember, purposely to sort of call attention to the fact that this is crazy. Looking back is not easy. And it’s not necessarily accurate. Like what I think now is not what I thought 15 years ago.

I have a younger brother, and occasionally he and I will do the do you remember, and there have been times where I’m like, Dude, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And he’ll do the same to me. I’m like, what? You don’t remember that? And I’m like, nope. Like, same idea. Yeah, exactly. Same parents, same house, same high school, even just a few years apart, like, no, yeah, I got nothing.

Because the perspective is so individual, right. So my perspective on, you know, how I grew up is completely different from my sister’s perspective in her experience. And it’s, it is a strange reckoning. I think that nonfiction writers, maybe all writers have to have to understand that the only perspective we can really go with is our own.

It’s a weird way to create intimacy with the reader to have to put yourself out there the way you do when you’re writing a memoir. I mean, even when you’re saying I think I recall, it’s still on you. The onus is still on you, right? The onus is on you to create the voice. The onus is on you to connect with the reader, the reader is always going to bring their own opinion, and their own experience to what they’re reading, right and it’s your life. I mean, that’s gotta be a little trippy.

That is the, that is the peril of writing nonfiction and why we do it is like another issue but everyone’s doing it, you know, like everyone is writing nonfiction. And I love teaching it. It’s probably my favorite thing to teach. Because it is transformative over and over. Like I love, of course, I love to teach fiction and I love writing fiction especially. But the transformation that can happen when we give ourselves permission, somebody else gives us permission just to say what actually happened.

Yeah, shame is part of your story. I mean, you have some stuff that you’re talking about that you definitely did not have language for previously, or your perspective has shifted. And, you know, part of that is the cultural stuff that we bring to parenthood and motherhood. What have you and part of that is also like, where do you fit in terms of a class structure? Right? Like, I mean, your parents had some struggles early on. Although it sounds like your dad has finally gotten the floorings in the house, right? Like your dad is a handy dude. But also, you know, I’m also kind of fond of your dad even though I’ve never met him because I have the same taste in, your dad and I have the same taste in movies. Like I have not watched the Rambo movies, like I do have, there’s a line in the sand but like you’re writing about Die Hard Three? And I’m like, yep, seen that more than once. Like actively watched, not accidentally found it on a plane, like actively watched.

You chose to watch Die Hard three?

We got it, we got to do what we got to do. But I mean, it becomes a language for your dad, right? Those movies become a language for your dad and you’re struggling sort of with your dad’s place in the world, your dad struggling with his place in the world, right? Like how do I make a living? How do I take care of my family? How do I and action movies actually made things a little easier for him? And I just I think that’s a really great, generous moment for you guys to have like, here you are saying, well, I went back and watched Paper Moon and oh, yeah, it doesn’t hold. Like these things that we revisit, right? Where we think, Oh, I know exactly where this is going. And it’s like, actually, maybe I just want to watch Die Hard Three.

Right. That to me is part of the joy strangest wonder of memoir, which is, it is all about looking back. And sort of taking ourselves to task and thinking about, Oh, who was I at age, you know, 15 or 18, or 25, with my relationships with my family. And then thinking about it from the perspective of now, the writer Phillip Lopate, talks a lot about his a great essay about double perspective. And it’s a concept I use a lot of my classes in the sense that even when we’re writing, we’re always inhabiting two selves, the now self, writing, and then the former self. And that was something that I was thinking about a lot. When I was reading this book of how to be in the place I am right now, actively looking back trying to understand or herself and who my dad was and who my family members were back then and how when the more I looked back, the more I realized, yeah, okay, we behave badly, many times there’s a lot of dysfunction. There’s a lot of trauma that we couldn’t express except through anger. But I can understand that now. I didn’t understand that them, but I can understand that. Now. That is something that I need to understand.

What are some of the other essays you use in your nonfiction class? Because that that Lopate essay is, you know, I think a cornerstone for a lot of people’s classwork. But I mean, you said it’s really liberating to help your students get to that point where they can just speak the truth, right. And sometimes it’s funny, and sometimes it’s not. And it’s a lot. How do you work that through? Because I mean, you’ve been teaching for a really long time.

I have been teaching a long time. It’s like thinking about my first book being published 15 years ago, I don’t almost want to count how many years, but it’s always enjoyable. Everyone’s always reading something fresh and interesting that to me, it’s part of the fun of nonfiction, because everyone has their story. I kind of think nonfiction is a way to push against, you know, AI and ChatGPT. I mean, yeah, we could have, we could have that bots write our story. But why would we want that? We want actually, and I think people need to take, you know, the sense of agency over their own words in the way they describe their own lives.

Agency and also just genuine point of view, like, I use AI when we’re doing transcripts for the show, because, you know, it’s a tool, but, yeah, in terms of storytelling, it’s, you know, it’s like when you read something that you know, has soul and something that doesn’t, and some writers are very cold and very contained. And that’s great. And that’s what they do. And sometimes people are trying to they don’t quite have the control that it takes, right. Yeah, to deliver that kind of POV. And then they’re just people who are just, you know, giant, messy hearts, which in its own way can be a relief and somebody I was harder to do than the very, very controlled stuff. So that finding that POV, like, it’s when you’re a reader, and you know, when you see it, I’m assuming it’s like when you’re a writer, you know it when it, you just know it when you see it.

And that’s true in teaching. I mean, one of the books I like to teach is Heavy by Kiese Laymon.

I love that book. I love that book.

It’s such an important book. And it teaches so brilliantly as well, because students really see the power of that perspective. And also the epistolary form of, okay, I’m going to address this, and what is involved and using that particular structure, and how it’s not how the story is not all about content. Because sometimes people just want to say, Oh, this is what happened, this is awful, what happened. But it’s not all about that a lot of it is how we write our own story.

I’m risking a little bit of duplication, because you sort of answered this earlier, but I’m still kind of curious, was the structural change the biggest surprise for you? Or did you just suddenly realize that you were just in an entirely different place as you were writing? Even the first draft of this book? I mean, again, we’re talking about a 15 year gap with a novel and a short story collection in between your memoirs, right? So is there something you took from writing Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, that you needed, for Owner of a Lonely Heart, are they just two separate pieces, because they’re two separate moments in your existence.

I think of these books is completely different because I wrote them in very different ways. And I felt like I was being so kind of careful with Stealing Buddha’s Dinner. And with this book Owner of a Lonely Heart, because I wrote quite a bit of a revised so intently during the pandemic lockdown. A lot of it was kind of fueled by the sense of, I don’t care anymore about anything, I’m just going to do whatever the hell I want. That means I’m just going to write whatever a lot. And I’m just, I’m at home. And time is, you know, amorphous, I’m just going to write this as I want to write this kind of for myself, which I’ve never done before. And it was kind of liberating, not to have a real reason for writing it.

Okay. But even with the even with Pioneer Girl, the novel and the story collection, Short Girls, you didn’t feel like you were just doing the work for you. I mean, I can see how a memoir feels really different, intellectually as the writer, but I’m having a moment where I’m like, Yeah, but with fiction, don’t you have a little more freedom? I mean, you’re kind of making it all up as you go, right?

Yeah, but see from my relationship with fiction with novels is that when I’m writing them, or when I need, I need them to have a purpose. I’m not going to write a novel or story that’s just for me it put it away. I know that, we’ll do that. That’s great. But I feel like that is more my relationship with nonfiction, which is I’m I have written many nonfiction pieces that no one will ever see. And no one says they, frankly, but I needed to write them for whatever reason, in order to get somewhere else.

That I absolutely get. How do you see the evolution of your own work?

The evolution of my nonfiction is related to the evolution of memoir in the United States. Like 15-20 years ago, the way a memoir was read or written and thought about is so different from the way it is today, the drive for a confession and narrative, that was, I think of that as kind of 20 years ago, in a way. And we’ve already been thinking so much about, you know, crafts and ethics and permission, and research and citation and all the things that, that people really think about more now, because we can think of them, our work more as essayistic. You know. And so I think that that evolution has been really important for me to think about how, when we write nonfiction, we’re also writing about the writing of nonfiction. We are engaging with that act of looking back and remembering, which is powerful, you know, which is me thinking about my relationship with my mother is I hope readers also thinking about, wow, how is my relationship with my mother or the mother figures in my life? How has that changed? You know, how have I been the one changing,

Which in a way brings me to refugee and that word, I frequently use it sort of, in ways that other people would consider out of context, right? Like, I mean, I’ll joke about being a refugee from New England. It’s like, It’s a huge part of who I am. And you know, I have spent tons of time there, but I’m not going to be living there full time, again, as far as I can tell, and it’s partially It’s a joke and it’s partially a poke. You know, because the way we use the word refugee, and how we intended to mean and the ways it changes and whatnot, and you literally though, went to, your first stop was a US camp in Guam. A refugee camp in Guam, and then you ended up in Arkansas.

We were. We went first to a refugee camp in the Philippines. And Guam, and then in Arkansas.

And I mean, and then ultimately, in Michigan, which became home and said it this book, or is it Stealing Buddha’s Dinner where your dad had a choice of like California, Arkansas, and Michigan and your grandmother was like, No, I once knew someone whose child went to college in Michigan. So that’s where we’re going was that?

That’s how we ended up in Michigan. I mean, I could have ended up in California.

Grandma was like, nope. And you and I both come from families where grandmas they get to drive. Grandmas drive, great grandmas drive. I come from a very long line. On both sides of my family. Actually, were, you know, my grandmas and my great grandmas had something to say.

Which yes, you know, it turned out that my grandmother made all the significant decisions that govern our lives where we live, you know what my birthday was? All those major decisions, my grandmother.

But I love that for you. I mean, it makes for a great read. It really does. Learning who your grandmother really is. And I mean, she really, she did save you guys. She really like the idea that she was the one who was like, we have to go, we can’t wait anymore where you really have to go. It seems like your dad took that much more seriously than anything, any of his brothers or his friends were saying? Yeah, like it really was your grandmother saying, No, we have to leave.

Yeah. So I think about this a lot. You know, the urgency of it sounds like if somebody said that to would you believe them? Would you know? Would you be like okay, let’s leave our country, and not have any idea where we’re going. And because I was a baby, I don’t have any experience of what they went through. I always have felt kind of like a secondhand refugee. I wonder why, like, I have the recollections of it, but not the experience. I think that is part of what it means to be the sort of Gen X one and a half generation immigrant refugee that I am, is knowing but not knowing. And that sort of, in between space. I feel like it’s just like, well, that’s where I am. That’s where I have always been sort of in between, like, middle child, you know, sitting in the middle seat in the backseat of the car. That’s where I am. And it gives you the chance, though, to look in every direction. Forward and back at the same time.

Yeah, I’m just thinking about this, as you said it, I think if my grandmother, if my mother’s mother said it, yeah, I think it’d be out the door. And there, there are certain people were just like, yeah, and then I’ve got other people in my life where I’m like, not so much. I love you, but I think you’re overreacting. The whole thing about refugee status, right? It’s a label that gets applied. It is in some ways dehumanizing that you become sort of the word that frustrates me. Right. Like, have you ever read Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I love that book. And she kind of gets to the heart of the thing where she’s like, well, you know, what do you expect? Like, we’re all traumatized. I just I do wish more people would read this.

Refugee is a complicated word that for a lot of people is suffused with shame. And being very self conscious about that status. I mean, for a long time, I never said I was a refugee, I would say I was an immigrant would save me a lot of trouble. It saved me a lot of questions. The idea of immigrant is very quote unquote, normal in the United States. Refugee is not it is outside it is pointing blame.

The idea to that you have to choose a word to define your own experience, because other people might be uncomfortable, is still really wild to me. And I think that’s yeah, like, I mean, I, I was born in Boston. And, you know, it’s just there are certain assumptions that I always made even as a child and maybe they weren’t always right and sometimes I had to lead with my chin a little bit before I discovered that but it’s bringing me to your choice about your name, right, like you have written three other books under your birth name and you know, anyone can go buy them and it’s not like a secret or anything else, but you chose a new byline for this book, and I totally get why you did it. But I really do want to talk about it with you. And I sort of all of this has been leading up to this. I mean, I obviously have not chosen to do what you did, right? Like people spell my name 1000 times a day, which is kind of funny, because it’s not that difficult but Beth. And I also part of me is kind of giggling a little bit, because my parents apparently almost named me, Elizabeth. And then decided at the last minute, they were like, man, now that’s, I’m pretty sure it would have been a Liz not a back, you understand where I’m going with this? It’s just, it’s like the universal name, right? Like it’s one of those names where everyone knows someone in a generation, who has some derivative of either Margaret or Elizabeth, as a name that can we talk about the decision you made to change not just your byline, but in a way, that piece of your identity?

Yeah, I had always wanted to change my name. The earliest moments of being a child going to school, you know, first roll call, you know, I would love to change my name. But I was never allowed to. And I think more than not being allowed to, I was always told that it was a bad thing to even consider that it was a betrayal of culture and heritage, just deal with it. So I did. I mean, I published books enter my birth name, but it didn’t fix anything for me, like I was never comfortable with it. And so it was a long process of deciding what I was going to do for myself versus what I was going to do. And changing my name to Beth was something I was not doing for other people. I was doing that for myself. And it was not to make other people comfortable, it was to make myself comfortable. So I wouldn’t have to explain things to people, which I would have to do all the time. And I could just be anonymous, which is really my favorite thing, to go unnoticed. So that nobody is like asking me all these follow up questions about like, who I am or where I’m from. I just don’t get those question with Beth. And life is absolutely easier. And I know that a lot of people think that it’s kind of a cop out. But I think of it as a choice, a deliberate, personal choice to give myself some space and freedom.

But I think ultimately it comes back to what’s your name. My mother went by Irene for a number of years. Like, oh, you are not in Irene. And one of my Taiwanese uncles chose Nelson. As I’m also well, I’m also sort of dating them because you can tell like when they were choosing their names, right. And now everyone goes by their name name, but I you know, it’s like, I remember someone coming up to me after my mother’s memorial service and saying, well, your mother’s name was always Chicago to me. And I’m like, I know you think that’s a cute joke. But dude, you’re joking about my dead mother’s name. Can we not do that? It was wild. It is so wild what people think is okay to say, you know, oh, yeah, wild circumstances. And I was like, Hi. Hi. Do I even remember who you are? And why are you making a joke about my dead mother’s name.

I have heard some of the some absolutely horrible things about my own game about other people’s names, the people do feel free to have all their opinions about it. I kind of think so a theory, a little personal theory. So in the future, in the future, people will just change their names anytime they want. And because when I think about it, I think it’s really strange, actually, that we keep a name that somebody else gave us when we were, you know, babies, and we stick with it, because we’re used to it. What if we don’t like those names? What if we just never feel like, I’m like Irene? Or Nelson? What’s the harm of choosing another name? What if we chose five or six different names over life? You know, I might outgrow Beth and want to be somebody else. If I had chosen when I was, you know, nine years old, I’d be Tiffany.

With an I or a Y

Oh, with a Y.

You know, I had to ask him I’m you know, I had to ask when we’re nine we do not make great decisions.

Exactly. Change that again. Because it definitely don’t fit like a Tiffany right now. Maybe Tiffany with an I.

But yeah, names man, like names.

People always say they don’t matter, but they actually do.

They do. They do. I mean, it’s how you experience the world. Like I mean, honestly, I can be sitting in jury duty, hear the pause I’m like, Yeah, that’s I think you’re looking for me and they’re like, Yeah, I guess I am.

I got really good at that, knowing exactly when someone was talking to me, but they didn’t want to say my name.

Yes, you get good. You get really good at figuring out how to navigate this space.

It’s an incredibly fraught issue because it gets to our feelings about our families, our origins, our sense of obligation to other people, what we accept for ourselves what we want for ourselves.

When you say obligation, or you’re talking about family obligation, what obligation.

Family obligations and cultural obligation.

Well, that was one of the things too, when I was reading Owner of a Lonely Heart, you said, people who are giving you guff about changing your name, weren’t really Vietnamese Americans. But it was people outside of the community who were saying, I would never do that. And I’m thinking, well, you don’t actually have to, like, this is just not something that, you know, I’m delighted when a guy like Hua Hsu can write under his own byline for The New Yorker, like that just pleases me to no end, because it wouldn’t have been that long ago that maybe he would have felt like he had to write under Henry or something. You know, I mean, people make choices all the time, I just think it would be great. If you know, we could make those choices. People didn’t necessarily feel like they had to weigh in. Yeah, you and I are talking about it, but you understand what I’m saying. It’s just like, wait, you get an opinion?

And, you know, the opinion that somebody has about my name, they can just keep it to themselves?

That’s a whole separate conversation.

But historically, in my experience, they don’t. And I think it’s extremely recently that there has been, you know, a widespread sense of consciousness about the respect that we should give to people’s names and pronouncing them correctly. And not asking people to go by initials or whatever, and just really having a sense of like, okay, this is your name, I’m going to pronounce it the way you pronounce it and call you what you want to be called and that is the way it should be without commentary.

Would you ever bother doing the paperwork, though, to change your name legally?

No it’s too much paperwork.

Yeah, that’s, that’s what I’ve heard is, it’s just an outrageous amount of paperwork.

Yeah, I wouldn’t. And also, I don’t, I don’t just like my name, or anything. I actually love having a pen name. And it’s many, many, many writers have pen names. I’m always learning about new ones. And it’s always fascinating to be like, Oh, that person’s name was actually something else. I love it.

Yeah, I can think you know, because when people dial into zooms, it’s like, Oh, Hi, what’s your name? Names matter

It really, really does what I think it’s good for people to be able to take control over that, to decide what their name is going to be and what they should be called. And it’s very easy for the rest of us to just learn it and respect it.

Yeah, right. It’s really not that hard. But speaking of names, can we talk about some of the writers who’ve made you Beth Nguyen writer? Because it’s a cool list. It’s a really cool list. I mean, we got to start with Laura Ingalls Wilder, right. You know, I’m gonna make you talk about a tiny bit.

The difficult thing, getting older, is looking back at the books that actually, you know, determined you as a person. Do I say, how messed up they were?

Yeah. Oh, come on, Harriet the Spy.

There was a formative book, Harriet the Spy, a formative book.

Same. Absolutely. But you know, at the same time, and like the racism in the Laura Ingalls Wilder, or like, I wanted to sod house really badly. And now I go back and look at those books. And I’m like, Oh, we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

And it is important to look back and to think about, oh, what we didn’t know. And that’s it. I think that is part of the process of writing and thinking and just being a better person is acknowledging what we didn’t know. And figuring out all the ways that we were influenced, perhaps negatively. Pretty much, you know, all of all the things I read when I was young, anybody would say that the problematic, of course they are. They weren’t like many, many years ago. But we can still learn from them. One. And we can also sharpen our perspective, context, and what it means to change our minds. I think I feel like giving ourselves that space to change our minds is underrated.

Yeah, we’re not carved from stone. We’re just not carved in stone. But I am going to keep coming back to this. Let’s talk about other writers.

I loved the Ramona Quimby books. Yeah, they’re not they’re not I mean, they actually there’s still quite a bit problematic in there. But that that’s problematic in most books, but one of the most interesting shifts for me was realizing that I was identifying less with the children and more with the parents.

Oh that’s trippy.

And then I wait a minute, I’m not Ramona anymore. I’m the sad mom. But probably I mean, I mean, undoubtedly the most important book for me and I think for a lot of Asian American writers is The Woman Warrior. The innovations in that book are still every bit as exciting and relevant today as they were back then. So that was a really important book to me. And a lot of the literature that I read was, was fiction are things like, I think a lot about The Age of Innocence. But it’s a really important book, to me, Howards End, is a really significant book, in terms of like my thinking about characterization, and emotion. And so I think, sometimes, like, there’s a sense of restraint, emotional restraint, and Owner of a Lonely Heart, that is very subtle. It’s not, you know, wildly emotional, I really wanted to keep that emotion to just like, behind a sort of translucent fence, I guess, so that you could feel it but not, you know, be overcome by it. Having said that, though, people keep telling me that they’re crying a lot when they read this book.

I can see that; I can totally see that. The beauty of Owner of a Lonely Heart I think, too, is this universal? Who am I? Where am I? Where did I come from? What are the words to describe myself? Like, this is stuff that everyone wrestles with. Right? Whether or not you have, you know, a mom, mom or mother? Like, I do think, you know, there’s a tendency sometimes for folks to say, well, I don’t share a lot like you. And I get to have a different conversation, right? Because even though we’re not the exact same kind of Asian American, right, we’re both, like there is some overlap when you’re Asian American. But there’s so much more here. Like there’s a level obviously, if you’re Asian American, there’s a level if you’re not, and I think there’s something to be said for that. Right. I mean, I at least I mean, as a reader, for me, I just, I believe that there are lots of different things happening in this book for lots of different kinds of reading.

I mean, I hope so. Because when I think about my most favorite books, or the books that I reread the most, I think about how little I have in common with those characters. I mean, nothing common with anybody. Not at all, but I feel very connected to them. Yeah. And I mean, I would say you’re saying this, you know, about having an open heart. I was seeing that about one of the questions that drove this book, and my mind was, what is wrong with me? Like, why am I behind that?

You are so Gen X. You are so Gen X.

Yes. Okay, I am Gen X,

This is a good thing. This is not a bad thing. But I am having a moment where I’m like…

I’m proud to be Gen X. And it’s not like I can do anything about it. But the condition of being Gen X is that, you know, there’s like a there’s like a lot of self-hatred. And there’s a constant, looking back and wondering, what did we live through?

You know, okay, so here’s the thing. I remember reading that in the book, and I remember thinking, well, it wasn’t so much self hatred for me as it was I was raised by wolves, like total straight up very pretty wolves, but raised by wolves. I mean, the stuff that like, like, the stuff that we were allowed to do when we were small, like, there’s just no way there is no way that a millennial parent is going to let their kids, know what I mean, when I think of all of the times, like we would just, especially in the summer, like if we didn’t have something to do you like you go out and you play until we had a bell. That was like, when we could come. We’d go outside, go around. Like, I mean, raised by wolves completely. I’m like, hi.

I mean, because of that, I do feel that Gen X people have a different relationship of you, but time a different concept. Because we knew what life was like, before it was we were so monitored, and so time would could stretch out. And it could also, you know, collapse in different ways. Yeah. And so I feel like we have that in us. And then because there’s such a huge gulf between how we lived before technology, like our storytelling is changed and different. So it’s like, now it’s like you know, I’m not that old. I feel like but I feel like I’m like gather around kids when I tell you about how I used to go to a payphone to check my messages for my landline phone.

Yeah, it’s trippy. Really like when I think back on it because we are sort of the last generation who straddled, you know, we had no native technology, we had a phone on the wall. And in our house, we had a pantry that my brother and I would use as a phone booth. And there was always constantly a phone cord running into them. I was just like, please, can I just get into the pantry?

We also though did not have the language. We didn’t have the language to no one ever said talked about trauma. For instance, we didn’t talk about racism, we didn’t talk about any of that stuff. We just experienced it all without knowing how to say what it was or what it felt like. And so now, you know, I’m looking back at my former self and being like, Oh, look at all the feelings. She went through it she couldn’t name and she just didn’t keep it all to herself. Like, in the book I talked about having to go watch Miss Saigon.

Yeah, yeah,

How horrible it was, but I didn’t know about it. So I just kept it to myself, all these years.

And I’m just gonna say, as a person who is technically Eurasian, you can play Eurasian without Scotch taping your eyelids or painting your skin yellow. I just, it’s possible. I’m just, I’m all for artistic expression. But really, you know, there are Eurasians, who, you know, maybe not look fully Asian, and you don’t have to use scotch tape and yellow cosmetics. And I swear, that’s just an aesthetic choice that maybe people don’t need to make. I remember seeing that. And people were like, I mean, I didn’t, please I will totally admit, I have not seen Miss Saigon. And I’m good. Thanks. I’m good. Yeah, you don’t need to see a piece of art or I just, I don’t, I’m good. But the way that was covered, and it was like, well, here’s this artistic choice, and here’s this venerated actor making an artistic choice. And I’m, like, even adolescent me was judging him. And in fact, I continue to judge him to this day, and not favorably. Because really, I mean, it’s like, you can be an actor and use words. And you can do all sorts of stuff that doesn’t involve, you know, cosmetics and tape in awkward places. What is with the scotch tape, like, let’s not do that. There’s a lot. There’s a lot and it’s 238 pages. This is not a huge, it is a compressed book, but you cover a lot of ground.

I you know, that probably would be another book that really is a source of inspiration for me is Julie Otsuka’s novel When the Emperor Was Divine.

I love that book.

I love how every sentence is so clear, and perfect and precise. And it’s a very compressed book.

Have you had a chance to read The Swimmers?

I love all of her work.

I mean, her Yeah, it’s all it’s all amazing. But The Swimmers too where she does that shift when you get out of the pool, and you’re spending more time with Alice? And I think she does that in three sentences.

It’s genius. And I mean, I feel very moved by that. And those mean, her style was because I’ve read all her work, I think it is very emotionally important to me. I love this idea of trying to capture feeling and time in as compressed away as possible, and as few words as possible. So every time I revise the words you would get, I would pare down more and more and be like, Okay, I don’t need this quarter, even when the whole book was done. And I hadn’t read the whole thing for the audio version, how to do that, it was so painful. Because I kept realizing all the words that I could have cut. I just really needed more, it went through so many rounds of edits, so many. Maybe I could have just kept going until it was shorter and shorter. I’m sure that’s, you know, strange, obsessive thinking. But I really wanted to get into that space of just, you know, intense, you know, in a tense moment and sentence,

It works really, really well, in this book, like without a doubt, it really, really works. I think it’s not just for the intensity that you just described, but also honestly for the intimacy. Sometimes it’s easy to maintain a distance if you’ve got a lot more on the page in front of you, where you can just sort of step back and be like, Oh, that’s a very pretty sentence. And I love pretty, I’m good with pretty sentences. But sometimes you need to let the things speak for itself. And especially when we didn’t have the language for the emotion or the experience. Like it’s even more important to be able to have that experience and that emotion over to the reader. And just be like yeah, actually no. Do you think you know what it was like, but by the way, let’s see, we’ll see where it goes. And also, there’s a whole other conversation to be had about the legacy of the Vietnam War, which feels like at this point it was a million years ago. And, you know, we’re taping this after Daniel Ellsberg has just died. And like you, and I definitely grew up in the shadow of that not just as an intellectual exercise or historical moment, but there was a lot of, you know, day to day reality. For us, as tiny Americans who looked the way we did, it was a lot, a lot, it was a lot.

A lot of the reality, I think, for Asian Americans, of this generation, was listening and observing, but not feeling like it was okay to add to the conversation just yet, because it didn’t feel safe. Yeah. And I think for a lot of my life, I just didn’t feel safe, speaking up or saying, you know, whatever I needed to say, not that I necessarily thought that violence would happen, although that’s certainly possible. But that, I thought that no one was listening, whatever I would have to say would never matter. As an example, just recently, I was on a train. I took them on a train trip from, you know, to the up to the Grand Canyon. And this person, photographer came to the train, tried taking everyone’s pictures, family pictures, couples pictures, but she didn’t take one of me and my kids. It was fascinating, because I didn’t say anything. And I just sat there. I was like, I wonder if she’s going to offer to take our picture because she took offered to take. And at some point, I was like, she’s not. I know, she’s not going to say anything. And she didn’t, she just kind of went by. And then the conductor came by and was talking to everybody about, you know, where are you getting, you know, what are you going to do when you get off the train and blah, blah, and she didn’t talk to us either. And so Wow, there are times I can still feel, you know, completely invisible, and, you know, unheard. And I can just sit here and not be anybody in somebody else’s, you know, imagination or line of vision.

And you can also write a book.

Meanwhile, it’s all in my mind.

No, no, no, no, no, no, because I mean, I did take sort of a slightly opposite tack to you. And I, like I said, I lead with my chin a lot, especially when I was younger. I had things to say about history. It was worth it. I like I can’t even like I’m just kind of laughing about some of the stuff that maybe I got myself into. Because you know what, it was always worth it even in the moment when I thought I probably shouldn’t.

I wish I had.

I just I think we have; I think we each have to choose sort of what we’re physically comfortable with. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all for the kind of stuff that we’re talking about. But I think if you have something to say, sometimes you can do it. And other times you can’t, and we just have to keep trying. I think that’s ultimately, we have to keep trying, we just have to get through.

And realizing like what, what we need to do in a moment. Because for years I just thought of myself as somebody who was just not strong enough, you know, just not just like not a strong person. I can’t I’m not doing enough. I’m not doing what I should be doing because I don’t have the strength. But I think that maybe it was just a different form of strength. That’s what I’m trying to think of it as now.

I think also, we wouldn’t have gotten this book if that had been true. I think you don’t put everything out in the world the way you do in this book, right? If you’re just kind of hanging out in the corner going, huh? I think I’ll write a book sometime. It’s a theory. It’s just a theory.

No, that’s a good point, actually very good point.

I mean, you could have written a novel where everything is very thinly disguised. And not to say that isn’t its own journey writing that kind of book too. I mean, there are people autofiction is not an easy thing to do. But you did ultimately say here’s my life. And this is where the change has happened. And this is what the difference is and it’s pretty great read.

I mean, writing is so hard. It is so difficult and to return to over and over again. Every time I read somebody else’s work. I’m just in awe, thinking about how much time and work they put into it. And what a gift it is to get to read somebody else’s, you know, thoughts and the choices, of the linguistic choices that they made.

Language matters. Yeah, language matters.

So I mean to you to participate in it is just a joy actually.

Alright, that seems like a really good place to end and of course, I knew this would happen and we’re bumping up against time because that’s just what happens here and also I can’t stop staring at your Keanu pillow. And I’m afraidthat I’m just gonna keep thinking about your Keanu pillow because that is awesome. That is every office should have a Keanu pillow. Beth Nguyen, thank you so much Owner of a Lonely Heart is out now.

Thank you.