Davis psychiatrist wrote this novel to confront mental health stigma in Asian communities

Growing up in Honolulu, Elizabeth Nguyen’s parents avoided discussing why they had left their native land.

Nguyen, a Davis-based psychiatrist, is the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who fled the country after the Vietnam War ended. Her father Khang Nguyen had gone to Washington D.C. shortly before the fall of Saigon in April 1975 to study economic policies when he learned that if he returned to Vietnam, he could be sent to a reeducation camp.

He made arrangements to get his family to Hawaii where they had relatives. His wife Kim Nguyen and a neighbor got through airport security in Vietnam by bribing a guard with jewelry.

Elizabeth Nguyen, who was born in 1980, grew up always feeling hungry to learn more about why her parents had left Vietnam and what emotional impact the decision had on them. And there was another topic her parents struggled to discuss: Multiple people she was related to had bipolar disorder.

To tell the story of her family’s experiences and reduce stigma around mental illness for Asian Americans, Nguyen wrote a fictionalized novel published in December called “Aloha Vietnam.”

“I know in the Asian American community, mental illness is even more stigmatized than even the general population,” Nguyen said. “It was really a desire to kind of make it safe for the community to talk about it.”

What the book consists of and the timing for it

Nguyen, who completed a psychiatric residency at UC Davis and is now in private practice, wrote an early draft of “Aloha Vietnam” around 2016-17 before letting it rest for several years. Following her father’s death in April 2022, she was motivated to finally publish the book.

She published through The Unbound Press which is based in the United Kingdom and is, according to its website, “committed to working with female authors whose writing activates a feeling of deep connection and transformation in others.”

Nguyen said her book is 50% fiction, the genre she chose for the sake of creativity and to keep the book from being a memoir. But much of “Aloha Vietnam” is inspired by real experiences, with Nguyen saying she had multiple family members with bipolar disorder “whose identities they want to keep protected.”

The story’s protagonist is Anh, a Vietnamese American girl living in Honolulu in the early 1990s whose life begins to change after she experiences her first manic episode.

The timeline of the book spans non-linearly from the family’s early days in Hawaii in 1979 to Anh’s time as a college student in the Sacramento area in the 1990s. Chapters alternate in narration between Anh, her bewildered but loyal mother Xuan and infinitely patient child psychiatrist Lois Tanaka.

Nguyen’s gotten to know many Asian immigrants or first generation clients through her psychiatric career, which has included time with the Asian Pacific Community Counseling clinic in Sacramento. Some of the people she met there factor into a stretch late in her book. Hospital and therapy scenes are drawn from her clinical work, too.

In her career, Nguyen said she has had children come to her “wishing their parents understood more” about mental health.

“But I also have parents, immigrant parents who know that something is wrong even though they don’t know what it is and are asking for guidance,” Nguyen said.

At one point early in the book, while her daughter is under psychiatric hold, Xuan goes to talk with a local Buddhist monk named Thầy.

“I start sobbing again, this time with both sadness and relief,” Xuan narrates. “Thay has told me that it is not my fault that Anh is sick. I have felt guilty that it is my bad karma that has brought this upon Anh, that if I hadn’t brought our family to America, we wouldn’t be in this situation right now.”

The struggles to confront mental illness or rough life experience aren’t unique to Vietnamese refugees.

One of Nguyen’s mentors, Sacramento-based child psychiatrist Harry Wang was born in Taipei in 1950 to parents who had fled mainland China. “They fought the Japanese and then they fought the communists, then they escaped to Taiwan,” Wang said.

Wang’s family emigrated to America when he was a year old, though discussions about the past didn’t necessarily become easier with time.

“My mother, who lived longer than my father, really had a hard time just talking about the trauma,” Wang said.

He added that an uncle who remained in China until the 1980s had “a horrible, horrible time” through the course of the Cultural Revolution and resisted discussing his experience thereafter, staying silent for days.

Nguyen’s book comes at an interesting time, though, where many people of Asian descent have been acknowledging both discrimination and mental health issues.

Wang pointed to data from the 2020 Healthy Minds Study, which showed 25 percent of Asian American Pacific Islander students reporting COVID-19-related discrimination. Two-thirds of that number met criteria associated with a significant mental health disorder.

While Nguyen began writing her book several years before the pandemic, she said she’d always known that Asian American families didn’t discuss mental illness and that there was shame and silent suffering without proper resources to get help.

“It felt like a real opportunity to share not only my family’s story to decrease stigma but to share my knowledge as a psychiatrist as to convey information, to open the window for other Asian families to be like, ‘We can talk about this, we can seek help,’” Nguyen said.

How people around Nguyen are reacting to the book

Nguyen’s been speaking in recent months at different venues around the region, including Capital Books on K Street in Sacramento which has “Aloha Vietnam” for sale. Her work was recently named one of the best indie books of 2023 by the Independent Book Publishing Professionals group and is resonating with people in her personal and professional network.

Wang said he’s a big fan of “Aloha Vietnam,” saying there aren’t that many portrayals of Asian Pacific Islander adolescents experiencing mental health challenges. “The more you hear and read about struggles, it can help people who have similar struggles to know that they’re not alone and that they can get help,” Wang said.

Another of Nguyen’s mentors, retired psychiatrist Malia McCarthy also enjoyed the book, saying, “I think it’s a really hopeful example to people.”

Elaine Head and her husband Vietnam War veteran Bruce Logan co-wrote the 2013 book “Back to Vietnam: Tours of the Heart” and traveled with Elizabeth Nguyen, her two children and her mother during a recent trip to the country. “I think she’s found a method, a very strong way to tell a complex story,” said Head, who lives with her husband in Canada.

Nguyen didn’t let her family know she was writing the book until she published it.

Her mother Kim Nguyen, 74, who still lives in Honolulu, said she read her daughter’s book “very fast” and that she’s working with a family friend to have it translated into Vietnamese. She’s hopeful about how “Aloha Vietnam” might help other Vietnamese people. She also noted her own experience being around someone with bipolar disorder.

“It’s a totally new disorder,” Kim Nguyen said. “Maybe it’s not new, but you don’t get used to (seeing) that kind of disorder in our country.”

More info

Book title: “Aloha Vietnam”

Author: Elizabeth Nguyen

Pages: 229

Publisher: The Unbound Press

How to buy locally: $18.99 at Capital Books, with free bookmark with purchase