Book Review: ‘Saving Five,’ by Amanda Nguyen

SAVING FIVE: A Memoir of Hope, by Amanda Nguyen

There is a phrase that recurs at key points throughout Amanda Nguyen’s powerful memoir of activism and recovery, “Saving Five.” The first time we see it, it’s in the message she writes and tapes to her computer shortly after her rape on the Harvard campus: “Never never never give up.”

In the days after the life-altering assault, it seems impossible to restore her shattered self. “When will I stop feeling this way — like my insides are lacerated?” writes Nguyen. “Like my spirit is irreparably broken?”

Nguyen’s narrative cuts back and forth in time, from her childhood growing up with a violently abusive father, to the landmark moment in 2016 when the Survivors’ Bill of Rights Act was passed in Washington, to the vantage point of the adult Amanda, who eventually becomes an astronaut. Throughout, the author’s central task is to bring her disparate selves back into a coherent whole.

Nguyen uses two distinct registers for her parallel tales of personal recovery and political activism. In chapters such as “How to Survive the Immediate Aftermath of a Rape: A Guide,” she presents a rigorously factual narration. By including hospital reports, medicines dispensed (such as anti-H.I.V. pills) and other clinical details, Nguyen conveys the chilly bureaucracy that surrounds victims. Though she recognizes its good intentions, this legal scaffolding immediately seems to depersonalize Nguyen, adding to her sense of self-erasure.

This tension is embodied in her “rape kit,” which contains the sample collected within hours of her attack — both a literal repository of evidence and a tangible reminder of the constant question of whether to press charges against her unnamed attacker (a fellow student). Still in the thick of shock, the college senior must make decisions that will affect her future forever.

When she later pores over the 65-page dossier the hospital has given her, she learns that the state of Massachusetts will destroy her kit after six months if she does not proceed, even though the statute of limitations on sexual assault is 15 years. The contradiction outrages Nguyen — “I feel powerless, invisible, betrayed a second time” — and this is the fire that eventually drives her activist journey. “How can a dried-up leaf smooth itself back to life? It can’t. But it can transform,” she writes. “With the right heat, even a leaf can become a spark.”

While navigating these bewildering legalities, Nguyen faces the immediate challenge of fighting back from the brink: Among the statistics she cites is the fact that a third of women who have been raped contemplate suicide. Nguyen must complete her senior year and pursue job applications — for work either at NASA, she hopes, or at the C.I.A., for which she is being recruited. More than once Nguyen considers her brutal dilemma: a career, or the pursuit of justice?

Nguyen’s other, alternating narration is the poignant and imaginative journey she takes as a 30-year-old woman, accompanied by versions of herself at 5, 15 and 22. These conversations may seem at first like a therapeutic exercise, but reclaiming her younger selves becomes a necessary rescue. “So here I am, running away to find my mind or perhaps to lose it,” she writes. “A place I go within myself. My interior world.”

Together, her quartet of Amandas embark on a mythic adventure through the five stages of grief. On each stop (an arid desert, a flashing lighthouse by the sea, a junk ship near a harbor) the girls plumb memory: One Amanda describes the time her father broke her wrist the night before she was due to leave for college; another unearths the traumatic escapes her father and mother separately made as refugees after the fall of Saigon.

Through these stories Nguyen finds empathy not just for the beaten child she was, seeking comfort in gazing at the stars (which led to her lifelong interest in space), but even for her enabling mother and enraged, controlling father. It is harrowing to learn that after Nguyen arrived in Cambridge, traveling straight from a Los Angeles emergency room, her father followed her; the university issued a restraining order against him. “Harvard was my first real home, but one that I couldn’t leave because I would not be protected outside its walls.” That her safe place (she never returned to California on breaks or holidays) became the site of such horror compounded Nguyen’s trauma.

Restoring even painful memories allows Nguyen to finally find some peace, as does the success of her drive for national legislation. (In 2019 she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her work.)

It is sobering to realize that the rape survival memoir has become its own genre; readers may think of Chanel Miller’s remarkable “Know My Name” as they read Nguyen’s. But as with accounts of grief, each writer’s story is vivid and necessary. Nguyen’s original contribution will, as its title promises, give both survivors and non-survivors some sense of hope for justice — and, now more than ever, such hope is essential.

SAVING FIVE: A Memoir of Hope | By Amanda Nguyen | AUWA | 214 pp. | $27