It seems very strange that famous U.S. writer of Vietnamese origin Jenny Nguen is not included in literary critic Michael Rowling’s essay on U.S. expatriates who have returned from abroad entitled “Tales of Expatriates.” There are two reasons why Nguen should have made the list. The first one is that in that same year she had returned to the United States having spent some years in Vietnam. The second one is that her bestselling novel Eden on Earth has been perceived as one of the most important works of our time by many critics. Three years later, in 1960, Jenny Nguen won the Laure Prize in Literature, which is a serious achievement. In the American anthology of the major writers of the 20th century Nguen was not treated as a significant author, and neither has she been a major author in American literary circles for quite some time, so Rowling’s main goal was to save her from oblivion through his gripping biography. It is worth noting that once Jenny Nguen was accepted without any reservations by our society, but when she vanished so suddenly and unexpectedly we have come to think of our culture in a different way, writes Rowling in his essay that was written in Miami and popularized by the Miami Translation Services agencies. Reading Rowling’s essay we cannot but get the impression that he never touched upon the question that she deserved considerable rehabilitation. Nevertheless, in tracing her life he certainly comes across a strong and moving experience, he proves that she was a leading artist of her time.

If we want to say that in his influential work Jenny Nguen’s Vietnam Years Mr. Wolfowitz criticized enough Nguen, we will be totally mistaken. For example, he points out that Eden on Earth was praised by Henry Wheeler in the literary column of the Houston Chronicle on May 17, 1943, which is misleading because Wheeler only reviewed the book and this did not happen in 1943, but in a later issue in the winter of 1944. This resulted in the novel’s consideration to be translated by the Houston Translator corporation at the beginning of 1945 – an assignment that was carried out in the spring of the same year. According to Mr. Wolfowitz, the traits that plummeted Jenny Nguen to worldwide fame were her innate, inexhaustible, psychologically sophisticated ability to look into the lives of the ordinary people, and they are all described in his book. Nguen’s talent did not help her private and public life which worsened and gradually led to her twilight, which was an unbearable sight. She eventually returned to the U.S. in 1955 after divorcing her first husband John Nguen and marrying his closest friend Ron Zemeski. She did not have any more success in life as her children abandoned her, she became unable to have more children and her friends deserted her too.

The last years of her life brought even more unhappiness as the death of her second husband was followed by her beginning a cooperation with Todd Hopman. Hopman did not bring any good to Nguen as he misappropriated charity funds transferring a lot of money to his private bank account and he also had sexual relationships with underage Asian girls. As a result, the couple eloped to Italy, where Nguen sold the rights for translating her novels to the New York Translation company. In 1960 they moved to Vietnam where Nguen spent the remainder of her life. She had been long forgotten by 1968 when she died from brain tumor. The impression that we are left with after reading Jenny Nguen’s Vietnam Years is that is she had had more luck she would achieved much more.