Finding a Place on the Prairie: Bich Minh Nguyen's Pioneer Girl

"Wagon Wheel" by David Hepworth is licensed under CC by 2.0

Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen is the story of Lee Lien, a second generation Vietnamese-American, who is obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie books. For Lee, the Little House books are more than a great series, but also a way for her to come to terms with her own nomadic childhood and uncertain sense of self. Like Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lee's childhood and adolescence was punctuated by frequent moves from one mid-western town to another. In Lee's case, she and her brother criss-crossed the mid-west with her mother and grandfather who supported the family by managing a series of Chinese buffet restaurants.

Some of the strongest sections of the book come in Lee's descriptions of her many childhood moves and the seemingly identical restaurants that her family manages. Nguyen skilfully interweaves a sense of dislocation, as well as the subtle, and not so subtle, layers of racism experienced by Lee and her family. Lee underscores the irony that her Vietnamese mother and grandfather run generic Chinese restaurants catering to a clientele that isn't particularly interested in the difference. The restaurant that Lee's family owns at the end of the story finds a degree of success, in part, by developing their own recipes for banh mi and jettisoning the orientalized script that characterizes so many Chinese menus.

Likewise, Lee must find her own identity in this story, and this, unsurprisingly, is not a straightforward question for her. She is unmoored in multiple ways: her second-generation immigrant identity in a rented apartment in a mid-western town leaves her with no clear sense of home; she has recently finished a PhD program, but has no job--in part, her adviser suggests, because she wrote a dissertation on Edith Wharton rather than on ethnic lit; and, for many reasons, she can't connect with either her mother or her brother.

As an escape from these various crises, she becomes intrigued by the possible connection between her family and Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, who may have visited Lee's family's restaurant in Vietnam and left behind a gold pin. As the story progresses, this connection reveals other connections: between Lee's constantly-moving childhood and Laura's, as well as Rose's vexed relationship with her mother and Lee's own family situation.

To some extent, this novel is most effective at the upper registers. What I mean is that Nguyen has created a compelling main character, and the broad brushstrokes of Lee's experience present an absorbing view of an individual and of her family's experience as immigrants. What didn't work quite as well for me were some of the machinations of the plot: the brother's anger at the family, the family friend who may or may not have helped them out at various points, and the search for Rose's grandson. As a reader, I didn't care as much about those elements as about Lee's narration of her lived experience. For me, it was enough that Lee was obsessed with Rose and wanted to find out more of her story by reading her letters and diaries and visiting places where her she lived. While Lee's interest in Rose made little sense to her family, it made perfect sense within the logic of this narrative.