asianamlitfans | Aug. 15th, 2014

This week, I listened to the audiobook recording of Bich Minh Nguyen's Pioneer Girl (Viking, 2014; Dreamscape Media, 2014), narrated by Bernadette Dunne. Earlier this year, stephenhongsohn also reviewed the novel. I agree with

stephenhongsohn's comment that this novel interestingly stakes a claim for Vietnamese American literature as part of a broader American literary history.

pioneer

Pioneer Girl focuses on Lee Lien, a second-generation Vietnamese American woman who has just completed a PhD in American literature with a dissertation on Edith Wharton, whose novels explored early twentieth century New York high society. Throughout this story, Nguyen draws out tensions and resonances between canonical/traditional/white America and Vietnamese America but especially in inserting Lee's family into the history of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie as emblems of the myth of the American frontier. What is fascinating is that the Little House books were already always a nostalgic look back at frontier/settler life when they were published in the twentieth century, and they continue to serve as a touchstone for many Americans of an idealized frontier past, both through the books and the popular television series based on the books in the 1970s and early 1980s.

At the heart of this novel is a pin/brooch that her family owns. Its history is what potentially links her family to the Little House. I am curious how much this speculative history stuff is real (or at least how much of the archival documents the novel identifies are real, if not the interpretations). The story goes that Lee's grandfather owned a cafe in Vietnam during the war. An older white American woman by the name of Rose visited the cafe for an extended period of time, chatting with him often. When she left, she left behind the pin, which Lee's grandfather kept. The pin became a kind of heirloom, held by Lee's mother and eventually taken by Lee as part of her family history.

The novel takes on kind of a literary mystery quality, with Lee visiting various libraries and museums to find documentation of Rose's visit to Vietnam, perhaps mention of her grandfather and his cafe. As she searches out clues of her family's presence in the lives of the iconic Ingalls/Wilder/Lane family, she negotiates her own family's dramas. As in Short Girls, Nguyen provides plenty of exploration of sibling dynamics in an immigrant family, something that she does really well as an added layer to the usual considerations of intergenerational (parent-child) conflict in these types of stories. The novel is also on the lighter/more humorous side in some ways though it is not as funny as Short Girls. I do agree with some other online reviews of the novel, though, that I kept expecting more to happen in Lee's quest to find out about the pin, Rose Wilder Lane's connection to her family, and so on.

A couple of other reviews of the book:

BookDragon (interestingly, Terry Hong found the fake Asian accents problematic in this audiobook, but I didn't notice it that much in comparison to the bad accents in Mambo in Chinatown)