If viewers watch Vicky Nguyen on “NBC Nightly News,” they’ll see a polished, sharp, and capable Asian American anchor. If they lean on stereotypes, audiences could assume she’s the product of “Tiger parents,” who pushed her to achieve at all costs. However, as acclaimed author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explained in a TED Talk, “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” Nguyen’s story shatters what we often imagine about the experience of those in the Asian Diaspora.

In her new memoir, Boat Baby, Nguyen chronicles how she went from Vietnamese refugee to American broadcaster. Starting with her parents’ experiences during and just after the Vietnam War, Nguyen recounts how, when she was under a year old, her mother and father smuggled themselves onto a boat, evaded pirates, and fled Vietnam. Sponsored by a church in Eugene, Oregon, the Nguyens came to the United States and pursued prosperity with an intense, almost otherworldly fervor.

The saga of the family’s journey — punctuated by moments of lightness (baby Vicky playing on the beach at a refugee camp) and despair (the murder of her uncle) — is a page-turner. Nguyen’s father goes from business venture to business venture, sometimes soaring and sometimes losing everything, including the family home. Her parents’ hustle and their unwavering support of their only child are the book’s bright spots.

Unfortunately, while Mom and Dad are a blast to read about, Nguyen herself is just a little too perfect. She’s conventionally attractive, ambitious, and health-conscious. She cheers in high school — performing stunts more dangerous than her parents might’ve known — and goes into broadcasting post-college. Sure, she isn’t a great reporter at first, but she practices and gets better. (When she moves from California to Orlando for her first big news-anchor job, her father packs her little car as if it were a game of life-size Tetris and then ships it to her because it’s cheaper than renting a moving van.) She even marries her high-school sweetheart, who goes on to become a doctor.

Often, the best memoirs are about people who are a big mess. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, for example, all feature authors willing to reveal the less-than-heroic parts of themselves, which makes them significantly more compelling to read. Even Laurie Woolever’s recent Care and Feeding is far more riveting for its candor than for its mentions of famous people. (Woolever was an assistant to the late Anthony Bourdain.) While Nguyen does a decent job making her parents into characters — and it’s easy to admire how much she loves them — she herself is a bit too golden and reliable a narrator.

Boat Baby had the potential to show us the nuts and bolts of life in TV journalism, especially from the perspective of a person of color. While it does give the reader bits of this — including anecdotes about the long hours, an account of being harassed by a cameraman, and a reflection on why it’s especially hard for Asian women (an “overrepresented” minority) to get gigs in the industry — we must wade through 80 pages of Nguyen’s rather bland adolescence and college years to get to the newsroom.

Admittedly, I’m probably not Nguyen’s target audience. While I read about 20 memoirs a year, only a fraction are by or about celebrities or those close to them. If I was a big reader of books like Prince Harry’s Spare or Katie Couric’s Going There, this one would fall nicely into that same niche. If nothing else, Boat Baby offers an orderly escape during a time of chaos.

It could also be argued that the memoir’s lack of divisiveness is an asset. In our current moment, when refugees are targeted, demonized, and even violently and illegally removed from the country, its mild voice is a reminder that those coming to the U.S. are not villains or victims, nor are they a monolith. Instead, Vicky Nguyen is a testament to the power of the American Dream and the value and diversity of those who pursue it.

Gretchen Lida is an essayist and an equestrian. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. She is a contributing writer at Horse Network and the Independent, and host of “HN Reads,” a podcast about horse books. She lives in Chicago.