Nguyen's journey from victim to advocate

IN 2013, Amanda Nguyen was a senior at Harvard University, a high achiever whose parents had fled the communist takeover of Vietnam. She aspired to join the CIA or NASA, and her postgraduation job applications were in process when one night, after a fraternity party, she was raped. The experience shattered her.

- Amanda Nguyen

A decade later, Nguyen has emerged as a role model. Her accomplishments include founding the civil rights organization Rise, a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, being named a 2022 Time Woman of the Year and becoming an astronaut. This month, she is scheduled to join five other women, including pop star Katy Perry, television host Gayle King and journalist Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos’s fiancée, on a Blue Origin flight into space. (Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

How Nguyen put herself and her life back together forms the backbone of her new book, Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope. (Nguyen narrates part of the story as a conversation with herself at various ages, including her 5-year-old self; hence the title, Saving Five.)

The book's first line - “I go back to the place I was raped” - is both a public declaration of a life-changing trauma and also a hint that we are about to enter a series of returns. The narrative loops again and again around events and memories like an orbiting planet, veering closer and farther away but never quite touching the book’s precipitating event.