Before the fall of Saigon in 1975, when Kien Nguyen was a young boy growing up in a Vietnamese coastal village, one of his favorite pastimes was listening to his grandfather's stories. Dan Nguyen would spin those tales while sitting in front of an ornate tapestry. Occasionally, the elder Nguyen would refer to a section that showed a young boy sitting by himself in a bustling village, holding a little fish.
"He would point to it and say, 'See, this is me,'" says Kien Nguyen. "And I never thought much about it. But since I got (the tapestry) again, I realized that all these people around him are turning their backs away from him. He was very much a lonely child, and I related to that."
The tapestry was Dan Nguyen's own handiwork. Today, it is one of Kien Nguyen's most cherished mementos, and the inspiration for his debut novel, "The Tapestries." The story of a young boy who grows up to become an embroiderer in the court of the last king of Vietnam, the novel weaves fiction with Kien Nguyen's legacy: his grandfather's adventures as a young boy.
"Since he often told me this story in the form of a fairy tale, I decided that I would go back and find that root," says Nguyen, who wrote about his own life in "The Unwanted."
The story of his experiences growing up as the son of an American businessman and a Vietnamese woman who was a banker, "The Unwanted" describes the alienation and discrimination Kien Nguyen endured in Vietnam as an "Amerasian."
"After the fall of Saigon, we were ostracized because the hatred for Americans was overwhelming," Nguyen says. "To the South Vietnamese, we were the main reminder of the American abandonment of the country."
"The Unwanted," Nguyen says, exorcised some of the demons from his past. But that process left a "hole inside me," he says. He longed to find his own history but preferred to shun his father, who had abandoned the family in Vietnam. Instead, he turned to his mother's side and embraced his grandfather's recollections and those from his childhood growing up in Nhatrang, a coastal area that sometimes is called the Mediterranean of Vietnam.
One of those memories was particularly pleasant. When Dan Nguyen was a young boy, his grandmother would give him a penny every day. He had two choices: go to the town's theater to watch mid-afternoon reruns of "I Love Lucy," or go to the market to pay to hear a storyteller.
Nguyen would choose the second option.
"He would tell stories by everyone from Victor Hugo to Guy de Maupassant, the great novelists," Kien Nguyen says. "He would remember every story by heart, and he would stop at the cliffhanger. You would have to come back the next day, and you had to have another penny to fork out."
Nguyen evidently absorbed the narrative skills of his grandfather and the storyteller. "The Tapestries" is finely told tale about Dan Nguyen's life as the son of a wealthy fisherman, the servant of a powerful magistrate and, finally, his appointment to the court of Lady Thuc, mother of the last Vietnamese king, Bao Dai, as an embroiderer.
Nguyen says it was rare for men to have such a skill; most of the embroiderers in Vietnam were nuns. But Dan Nguyen's talents went beyond his gender's uniqueness.
"What my grandfather did was redefine that art," he says. "He was almost like a rebellious artist. He did portraits, he did scenes, and he didn't have a pattern drawn on the canvas prior to the actual embroidery. Everything was in his mind, and he made it three-dimensional. He was considered a rare artist in his time, and the queen loved his paintings very much."
In "The Tapestries," Nguyen attempted to mimic his grandfather's art. He wanted to take the stories he remembered hearing and sew them together like a collection of fine fabrics, making them into a quilt made of words that tells a fantastic story.
There is another trait Nguyen says he shares more closely with his grandfather. When he was trying to piece together the novel, he was troubled by his grandfather's stories about a woman named Ven. In "The Tapestries," she is forced to marry Dan Nguyen when he is only 7, and she is in her early 20s.
Kien Nguyen approached his mother one day and asked her to clarify the story.
"She listened to me for a while, and then she said, 'You know, your grandfather told you this story, but he exaggerated, too,'" he says, laughing. "I thought it was kind of cute, because when we go back to our memories, we tend to romanticize everything. So I kept it as that, and I let my imagination go."
| "The Tapestries" |
