Title: Pioneer Girl Author: Bich Minh Nguyen
Published: January 27, 2015
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 296
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Bich Minh Nguyen’s previous books—the acclaimed memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the American Book Award–winning novel Short Girls—established her talents as a writer of keen cultural observation. In Pioneer Girl, Nguyen entwines the Asian American experience with the escapist pleasures of literature, in a dazzling mystery about the origins of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic Little House on the Prairie.
Lee Lien has long dodged her Vietnamese family’s rigid expectations by immersing herself in books. But now, jobless with a PhD in literature, she is back at home, working in her family’s restaurant under her mother’s hypercritical gaze—until an heirloom from their past sends Lee on a search for clues that may lead back to Wilder herself, transforming strangers’ lives as well as her own.
I honestly thought Pioneer Girl was nonfiction; I really did. Somehow the very clear “a novel” printed on the front cover of the book escaped me completely. Imagine my surprise to find that, though this book has all the trappings of a memoir, Bich Minh Nguyen actually telling a quite made-up story. It took me a little while to realize that, but once it did, my approach and perspective in reading this book shifted dramatically.
Because, what I thought was going to be an investigative look into Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life was more of a comparison, a parallel, between one Vietnamese immigrant woman’s life and that of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Nguyen draws comparisons between the two stories that capture something of the American spirit, regardless of race or century, and it’s a really interesting way to look at things, once I quite liked.
Of course, my favorite aspects of Pioneer Girl were the commentary on how the Little House books are so drastically different from the realities of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life. That’s always been a point of extreme interest to me, and I thought the author did a good job of speaking to that without turning this into an info-dumpy recapping of how sanitized the Little House books really were.
However, Laura Ingalls is not the protagonist of this book. Lee Lien, a recently graduated PhD student, is. Without a tenure-track teaching position (or really any teaching position at all), she winds up living with her mother and grandfather, Vietnamese immigrants who’ve recently opened their own cafe after years of wandering around the Midwest. She rediscovers a gold pin in her mother’s jewelry box that as a child she thought bore remarkable significance to one that Almanzo Wilder reportedly gave as a gift to his fiancée, Laura Ingalls. And from there, Lee sets off on a “literary mystery”, delving deep into Rose Wilder Lane’s life, going from Iowa to Missouri to California in search of the truth.
Pioneer Girl is very much a novel of discovery and identity, and I think Nguyen handled the dual storylines (Lee’s and Rose’s) very well. Though seemingly as unalike as possible, both women have much in common, and the author intertwines their narrative threads with a lot of skill and believability. Though I must admit to being sad and more than a bit disappointed that Rose Wilder Lane never did leave a family heirloom on a cafe table in Saigon, or had a son out of wedlock that she adopted out. Pioneer Girl, with its pseudo-memoir narrative, tells such a good tale that the reader really wants it to be true, even if it’s mostly made-up.
For me, Pioneer Girl was a cleverly-written and insightful book that bridges the gap between fiction and nonfiction, and draws surprising comparisons between two very disparate American subcultures. Bich Minh Nguyen did an excellent job with the novel altogether, and I think Pioneer Girl not only cements my appreciation for Laura Ingalls Wilder, but also gives me new contexts to view her legacy in.
