In Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope, Amanda Nguyen recounts her painful but ultimately triumphant trajectory from experiencing assault as a college student to co-drafting the Sexual Assault Survivor’s Rights Act that passed unanimously in U.S. Congress in 2016.
As a Harvard undergrad in 2013, Nguyen is more focused on preparing for her dream job at NASA than on campus activism. All that changes after she is raped by a fellow student, and gets firsthand experience in how the American legal system leaves survivors adrift. At the hospital just after the assault, she is asked if she wants her rape kit filed anonymously. Confused and traumatized, she says yes. Still in school and hoping to secure a job before committing to a yearslong legal battle, Nguyen eventually learns that anonymous kits are destroyed by the state of Massachusetts after six months, unless an arduous extension process is undertaken semiannually. Her life becomes an increasingly unsustainable balance of a nonprofit day job, CIA and NASA job interviews, and a slew of paperwork and meetings required to preserve the kit in order to allow the possibility, one day, of pursuing charges against the rapist.
“The worst thing that happened to me wasn’t being raped,” Nguyen writes. “It was being betrayed by America’s criminal justice system.” Tired of the miles of red tape and labor required to keep her anonymous “Jane Doe” rape kit from being destroyed, Nguyen puts her astronaut dreams on hold and teams up with Harvard Law faculty, feminists and fellow assault survivors to create a bill of rights that would keep others from undergoing the same suffering.
Nguyen’s tenacity requires healing, though, both from her assault and from the hardships of her childhood in an unsafe home. Woven throughout her memoir is a modern fantasy tale in which her adult self and her younger selves (named by their ages 5, 10, 15 and 22) must journey through the stages of grief in order to confront both their own pain and that of their flawed parents.
This intimate, grit-infused true story is a testament to the power of honesty in the face of great challenges. In just over 200 pages of briskly paced personal narrative, Nguyen launches clear and exacting critiques of a culture of victim-blaming and the often-insurmountable red tape that delays or precludes justice and allows serial assailants to continue harm. Nguyen powerfully demonstrates how she used her energy and connections to launch systemic change, both in Congress and in the creation of a social coalition.
In a time where disenfranchisement and suffering may feel increasingly inevitable, it’s vital to witness and embrace the possibility of a better world. With Saving Five, Nguyen insists you join her in doing so.
