Kien Nguyen grew up an outsider in his native land. His once prosperous family, thrust into poverty at the dawn of a new political regime, lived among neighbors who treated them as an unwelcome remnant of 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, Kiens account of his early yearsfrom 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 escapeis 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.