Book Review: Salted Plums by Alison Hồng Nguyễn Lihalakha

Amazon.com: Salted Plums: A Memoir of Culture and Identity eBook :  Lihalakha, Alison Hong Nguyen : Kindle Store

Alison Hồng Nguyễn Lihalakha’s Salted Plums holds up a mirror to the experience of Vietnamese people whose diaspora took a detour away from the common direct route to California. 

My diasporic narrative cuts through Dayton, Ohio, before landing in Fountain Valley, California. So when I learned of Lihalakha’s memoir that catalogs her journey through both Florida and Kansas, I was intrigued. Most memoirs I have encountered by diasporic Vietnamese authors chart a course, generally speaking, from Saigon to Little Saigon. But Lihalakha’s is different.

I feel as though I am living right alongside her, discovering facets of her life and personality the ways she once did. The reader can only see the literary present, and this creates a certain kind of mystique. Although there is the knowledge that Lihalakha will one day marry and have children, it isn’t difficult to suspend disbelief when she writes about her crushes and boyfriends of adolescence. This feature of the memoir makes it easy to understand, and easy to relate to.

Despite following a chronological method, Lihalakha reserves details of her family’s diaspora until the very end of the memoir. This strategy is compelling. Surely, Lihalakha had heard about her diasporic narrative since she and her family stepped foot on American soil. But we do not get real detail, a refutation of false details that were once told to her, until the last chapter. Lihalakha’s personal journey that spans the memoir, whether she is conscious of it or not, orbits around acceptance of and learning about her Vietnamese heritage. It is fitting that the text culminates in a crescendo of cultural knowledge, then. She is finally, right up to the writing of her memoir, able to understand and appreciate where she comes from, and lets it inform her work and her life.

Lihalakha does not shy away from truth. I felt as if this memoir had been pulled from my angsty elementary school diaries; they spoke to the way many Vietnamese families operate in America, the complicated nature of an immigrant parent’s love, and the realities of internalized racism. 

Lihalakha’s father passed away during her early childhood, so much of the memoir details her interactions with her mother and her mother’s struggle in raising seven children as a single parent. Their relationship is onerous at times, but both parties are given proper explanation for their actions. For Lihalakha, a resentment for her minority status and her general teenage angst explains her outbursts. For her mother, the loss of her partner and the trauma of her refugee experience explains her abuse, both physical and emotional. 

A poignant scene that conveyed the realities of growing up with minority parents recounts Lihalakha waiting for her mother to pick her up from school. Her mother is late and Lihalakha’s young mind daydreams about a loving and equal conversation between mother and daughter. Instead the two “sat in silence,” Lihalakha believing the silence better than criticism her mother may expend on her.  

The thickness of this moment is felt through the text; there is an understanding that this special kind of weighted silence is something to be thankful for. Lihalakha displays feelings like these, ones wherein the negativity stems from a place that doesn’t feel justified, in full view. Her contentious relationship with her mother–swaying from anger to understanding, resentment to sympathy–is explained with a bluntness that is difficult to achieve. What I once thought could only be explored in poetry or poetic prose, Lihalakha names in blunt prose; in that naming, she validates the very real difficulty of accepting the reasons for parental abuse without excusing them.

As a child, Lihalakha has no means for understanding her ethnic and racial differences; she expresses moments of joy, moments before she “realized that what [she was] doing was different or odd …. Without feeling any self-consciousness.” These early childhood moments are a cherished tick on the timeline of life. The expression of existence that can arise when one is not bogged down by societal expectations is liberating. Remembering these moments through Lihalakha’s words is bittersweet, as very soon after, her liberation turns into self-pity and the pressures of assimilation. She offers a transparent look at the reasoning of her adolescence and young adulthood: “Having American friends made me American, too.” Lihalakha deliberately incorporates rather embarrassing moments of internalized racism and her journeys in overcoming it. She displays a self-consciousness that is refreshing, not trying to explain away her past, but rather take responsibility for it and note the ways in which she has grown. 

Lihalakha’s Salted Plums is packed full of experiences and memories that blend together to create a beautiful and universal look into the Vietnamese diasporic narrative.

Salted Plums
by Alison Hồng Nguyễn Lihalakha
Kahana Press, $14.95


Melina Kritikopoulos is a mixed-race writer and journalist of Greek and Vietnamese descent. She is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley where she works for The Daily Californian. She produces and hosts the podcast Poetic Pontification, highlighting poets of the East Bay Area.

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