Bookish Brews Snapshot
Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen
It’s an epic family tale, spanning 26 years that tells of how the family grows, falls apart, and grapples with what it means to be Vietnamese in New Orleans.
✒️ Debut Author ❤️🩹 Trauma and Healing 😭 Emotional 🌳 Family Focused
- Genre: Historical Fiction
Book Review
Breathtakingly beautiful, lyrical, stunning, devastating, important
I found Things We Lost to the Water a day before this book was published, through Loan Le on twitter. Considering A Pho Love Story was one of my favorites among the books I’ve reviewed recently, I immediately requested to read it. I didn’t even look into it past the fact that it goes into the immigrant experience of a Vietnamese family. Let me tell you that it did not disappoint. This story was incredible. I soaked in every moment of it with deep emotion and appreciation that this book exists.
Things We Lost to the Water follows a mother and her two sons who escape from Vietnam and make it to New Orleans. It’s an epic family tale, spanning 26 years that tells of how the family grows, falls apart, and grapples with what it means to be Vietnamese in New Orleans.
It’s hard to put into words how great this book was. It’s full of so many small experiences and feelings that to mention every thing would be too much. The book dives into the deep complexities of being forced to leave Vietnam and start a new life for yourself in a new country. A country that doesn’t care about you, but that you find yourself, inevitably, assimilating into. It shows us the feeling of longing for a place and a people you’ve never been through the sons, and the repercussions of wanting to shield your children from your trauma from the mother.
By following each of the three family members, and jumping between point of views so quickly, it constantly reminds us that these deep, intricate, and complicated experiences of the characters are echoed in similar and different tales for many more families and people. Every moment I thought I was getting close to a specific character, we’d switch narratives or move through the years. It was the moments that stayed with me. The book is the story of Huong, Ben and Tuan, but it was so much more. It was experiences shared by many people. It was the confusion of losing a father you didn’t know. It’s not knowing if you can trust your Chinese neighbors in America, because China occupied Vietnam before France did. It’s losing someone who couldn’t make it on the boat themselves.
As someone who’s father also fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, this book was wildly important for me to read. I love that a book like this exists for a person like me to be able to learn and understand more of the intricacies of my family’s experience. I related a lot to Ben, being angry at a father he didn’t even know, and spending time being lost and trying to fit into an entirely white world. But most of all, having to learn about his own family history through books, and facts, and knowledge. Never quite connecting as much as you need to in order to understand yourself. I’m honestly still in awe that a book like this exists for a person like me to read. I am so grateful to Eric Nguyen for writing a powerful book that somehow found it’s way into my hands. Thank you.
Things Lost to the Water is a beautifully epic family tale of a Vietnamese family in New Orleans learning to start fresh, and trying and failing to heal personal and generational wounds. It was wildly important to me, and I can’t even believe that it found its way into my hands. But I am so grateful that it has.
