Rewriting Biraciality and War in Kien Nguyen's The Unwanted

Abstract

Although biculturality has been well documented in Vietnamese American fiction, Kien Nguyen’s The Unwanted: A Memoir is the first autobiography to document the biracial experience of growing up Amerasian under communist rule in post-1975 Vietnam. Neither victim nor perpetrator in a war practically erased from the pages of The Unwanted, Kien depicts his biraciality as a struggle to separate the personal from the political. His status as a biracial individual remains tied to an intrapersonal war between the ambivalent figure of his south Vietnamese mother and her parasitic boyfriend. Although set in the aftermath of violent armed conflict between North Vietnam and the United States, Nguyen’s memoir casts the south Vietnamese as the deviant ones who perpetuate intrafamilial violence and xenophobia. Drawing upon the burgeoning field of trauma studies, this article argues how it is only by leaving Vietnam and narrating the trauma of his racialized body that Kien is able to end his struggle for self-determination and reclaim a sense of agency.