The Vietnamese author of three critical acclaimed books: "The Unwanted", a memoir, "The Tapestries" and "Le Colonial".

Kiên Nguyễn (pronounced Key-en When) grew up an outsider in his native land. His once wealthy family, thrust into poverty at the dawn of a new political regime, lived among neighbors who treated them as pariahs, unwelcome remnants the colonialist past. Kien himself, a child of mixed race (his father was American), was among the most unwanted. Told with a stark, poetic brilliance, Kien`s account of his early years—from the fall of Saigon, when at age eight he watched the last U.S. Army helicopter leave without him and his family, to his eventual escape—is a work of profound emotional resonance, at once harrowing and inspiring. The Unwanted unforgettably records a universal human experience played out in extreme circumstances: the forging of an identity, a life.