Matt Pin, the narrator of All the Broken Pieces, is a seventh-grade boy born in Vietnam during the Vietnam War to a Vietnamese mother and an American father. When Matt was nearly 10, his mother gave her son to the American soldiers airlifting Vietnamese children out of Saigon, hoping he would find a better life in America. Matt has been adopted by a loving American family with their own young son, but he still feels torn between his Vietnamese past and his American present. At one point, a character refers to Matt as “a Vietnamese kid, / the one who reminds everyone / of the place they all want to forget” (189). Throughout the novel, Matt must work to overcome the label of “Vietnamese kid,” instead embracing both his memories of Vietnam and his present life in America to craft his own identity.

As All the Broken Pieces opens, Matt says that while he does remember Vietnam, he “remember[s] little” (3). In fact, Matt’s memories are like the “broken pieces” of the novel’s title, flashes of “fear and fog […] smoke and death” (3) that he experiences mostly in nightmares. While Matt briefly refers to his birth mother by name, he generally speaks of her as “she” and “her.