Family photo
Kimarlee Nguyen, Writer Who Explored Cambodian Roots, Dies at 33
Ms. Nguyen’s writing career was budding; she was also an inspiring teacher of first generation Americans. She died of the coronavirus.
By Penelope Green
April 15, 2020

Kimarlee Nguyen’s writing was as restrained as the Cambodian elders she conjured in her fiction, short stories that sketched precarious, haunted lives in a chilly new country.

But her personality was as exuberant as the rugby she played at Vassar, with a team so determined, said Kiese Laymon, a novelist and her creative writing professor there, that the players would regularly come to class concussed.

“Most people are reserved in their personality, but in their writing everything busts out,” Mr. Laymon said. “Kim was the opposite. She would tell stories so it appeared that nothing had happened. But, oh, man, so much was happening.

“You know sort of immediately the kids that are going to make themselves into writers,” she added. “Kids with relentless imagination and uber desire to revise. Kim had all of that, but also had, as she would say, honest stuff for her people.”

Ms. Nguyen’s work was imprinted with her parents’ experience living under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. Her mother’s family had lived in a refugee camp in Thailand for three years before coming to the United States in 1982, eventually settling in Revere, Mass., where Ms. Nguyen grew up.

She died of the novel coronavirus on April 5, on the way to the hospital in nearby Everett, her cousin Tina Yeng said. She was 33.
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Ms. Nguyen was born on May 6, 1986. For the last six years, she taught English at Brooklyn Latin in New York, an academically rigorous public high school with a classical liberal arts curriculum and a diverse student body.

She was passionate about anime, Harry Potter and her students, whom she mentored with fierceness, humor and scented stickers; after hours, they crowded her classroom.

Ms. Nguyen earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Vassar in 2008 and a master of fine arts degree from Long Island University Brooklyn in 2016. Her writing has appeared in PANK, Hyphen Magazine and The Adroit Journal; she has had numerous fellowships and residencies and was at work on a novel, “Lion’s Tooth,” about a Cambodian-American family living in Cambridge, Mass.

She is survived by her brother, Steaven Nguyen; her mother, Vy Yeng; and her father, Hai Van Nguyen.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/obit ... virus.html

To young =/

Underlying condition seems to be obesity.

(7500 kids under 5 years old die from malnutrition everyday... The world is fcked. )

CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Thu Apr 16, 2020 9:39 am Kimarlee Nguyen, Writer Who Explored Cambodian Roots, Dies at 33
Ms. Nguyen’s writing career was budding; she was also an inspiring teacher of first generation Americans. She died of the coronavirus.

But her personality was as exuberant as the rugby she played at Vassar, with a team so determined, said Kiese Laymon, a novelist and her creative writing professor there, that the players would regularly come to class concussed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/obit ... virus.html

Reminds me of my childhood. Fortunately Rugby isn’t as reckless anymore and that stuff is being taken more seriously these days.

In memoriam.

Vassar Missed Connection #0001 – In memory of Kimarlee Nguyen
By Kimberly Nguyen
Posted on April 10, 2020 in Opinions

My Vassar email is my missed connection. It is not unlike other Vassar emails— assigned to me by jamming the first two letters of my first name into my last name and adding “@vassar.edu”. But my Vassar email is special because I am not its first owner.

A few months into my freshman year, I opened my spam inbox and saw a floodgate of spam emails addressed to someone named “Kimarlee.” I remember chuckling. Either my phone was spying on me to sell my data and grossly misinterpreted my name to ad companies now soliciting me, or a store associate misheard me when I agreed to receive their marketing emails. I was used to having my last name butchered, but I never thought my first name would give anyone trouble.

But a small voice in the back of my head told me it might be more than that—that I should look further into it, just in case. Just in case there was a Kimarlee Nguyen out there that this special offer was really trying to reach. So I opened a new browser window and typed in “Kimarlee Nguyen.”

I had been on the fence about my English major I knew for weeks. (I promise this aside is relevant). I wanted so badly to become a career poet. English 101 was my favorite class, and I knew that I would love every moment of studying to become a writer. But I had questions. Could I make money? Would my parents be happy with my choice? I was, I thought, an insignificant daughter of refugees who grew up in a corner of the midwestern. Would the world even care what I had to say?

All the search results for “Kimarlee Nguyen” were links to literary magazines and journals. I combed through each one. It turned out that Kimarlee Nguyen was a real, separate person. We also shared so much more than just a similar-sounding name. She, like me, came from a refugee background. She did indeed attend Vassar College, and she graduated in 2008. Like me, she was a writer. I felt as if a door had been opened for me, that fate had brought us together in the most beautiful way. Kimarlee’s existence answered so many of the questions I had spent hours doubting myself over. I declared my English major two weeks later. And now, four years later, I have poems forthcoming in two different journals so far this year. My connection to Kimarlee feels full circle.

Kimarlee was a silent guiding force throughout my writing career. She was the version of myself I wanted to become. There were always moments I doubted myself. I doubted my voice and the power of the stories I had to tell. Writing about trauma was not easy, but always something I knew I wanted to do. When these doubts overwhelmed me, when I really didn’t believe in my ability to tell a compelling story or peoples’ willingness to listen to what I had to say, I would type Kimarlee’s name into Google and read her again and again. Kimarlee’s writing saved me. She soothed me through bad workshops and bad writing advice. I asked myself each time: If she could do it, why not I?

After years of silently idolizing Kimarlee, I finally found an opportunity to meet her. Kimarlee was supposed to be on a panel of Cambodian-American writers later this month. I planned to attend this event, to connect with the writer who I was unusually close to and tell her about our email connection and all the parts of our story we shared. The event was canceled due to COVID-19, but I didn’t worry. I figured it would be rescheduled, that I would get another chance to meet Kimarlee at a safer time. But I have just learned that Kimarlee has passed away due to COVID-19. I will never get to meet my soul twin.

I don’t know how to grieve a person I only knew through a shared inbox. In my family, we always talk about those who go first. As the oldest immigrant daughter, I have always been the one who is supposed to go first, the one who endures difficulties to pave paths for my younger siblings. It is a duty I was born to fulfill, and that always left me wondering: who is there to go first for me? I will always view receiving Kimarlee’s old Vassar email as a gift to me from my ancestors, that she, for me, is the one who went first. Whenever I felt lost, Kimarlee was like a star I could align myself to.

I think often about the odds. What are the odds that I was assigned a duplicate email? What are the odds it happened to be someone whose name almost sounds like mine? What are the odds that she and I had a similar background, that we would both become writers? What are the odds that a spam bot kept firing to a deactivated email address that always bounced back? Until one day it didn’t? What are the odds of this connection? I often think: I am a product of these small odds. Moments like this remind me of how beautiful this world is, that it can bring together people under the most unlikely of circumstances.
https://miscellanynews.org/2020/04/10/o ... ee-nguyen/