THE REFUGEES

Fiction

Born in Vietnam, made in America

THE REFUGEES
By Viet Thanh Nguyen

224 pp. Grove Press

Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan

The Refugees is an excellent collection of short stories Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote before his 2015 Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Sympathizer. All eight stories were previously published in lit magazines between 2007 and 2011. 

Nguyen writes with compassion about people caught in the middle.  We may encounter them when we get our nails done or shop in small Asian specialty markets. They are the people who live their lives half in one culture and half in another. 

He knows what it is to be an outsider and yet a part of a new country. In 1975 he and his family were part of the mass exodus of some two million refugees fleeing Vietnam when communists took control of the country. He describes himself as “born in Vietnam and made in America.” 

An epigraph in the front of the book quotes Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp: “I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they are outside of time, are the only ones with time.”  

Indeed, the first short story, “Black-eyed Woman,” is about a ghost, but not the spine-chilling sort. This one is a son, a brother, who comes all the way across the world to stand soaking wet in the hallway of his family’s house in America. He seeks resolution. His sister, oddly, is a ghostwriter by profession, a person who is “resigned to being one of those authors whose names do not appear on books.”  After they recount their horrific flight by boat, the threats and tragedies they faced with each other, I was not so sure the sister wasn’t a ghost herself. 

“The Other Man” is the story of a teen refugee, Liem, who is greeted by his host family at the LA airport, two men who tell him they have a "special relationship." Confusion reigns for days as he tries to figure out whether to take this as fact or an odd American expression. His experience fitting into a gay household happens in a most unexpected way. 

There are characters whose husbands begin to suffer the effects of dementia, calling his wife by the name of an old mistress; a young American woman who works in a Vietnamese NGO and falls in love with a native man, much to her father’s disappointment. They are told with humor, sadness, and profound understanding.

But one of my favorites is the “The War Years.” This one captures so much of what it must be like to be the second generation of immigrants. The narrator, as is often the case with these stories of Nguyen’s, is an unnamed young boy who is dragged hither and yon by his mother. The reader senses America viewed from behind his mother’s skirts. He attends school, where he speaks English all day. Then he goes to his parent's store, The New Saigon Market, where he stocks and prices cans after school. As he enters the store, we are enveloped in the scents, sounds, and culture of another world. It is a loud world with the sounds of haggling and gossip. The boy, sensing his mother is very angry, sneaks through the aisles of fish sauce, chili powders, star anise, pots, and pans, to hear one Mrs. Hoa asking his mother for money. Much needed funds, she says, to support the South Vietnamese guerrillas in Thailand who plan to fight the communists. Is this extortion or does the woman really fundraise for the cause? The mother and young boy track down this woman to confront her. I wondered if this wasn’t the short story that Nguyen spun into the incredible novel that won him the Pulitzer. 

One of Nguyen’s characters laments that his American adolescence was filled with tales of woe; proof, he says, that his mother was right. “We did not belong here in a country where possessions counted for everything. We had no belongings except our stories.” He has given us eight good ones, speaking for those who often cloak their emotions to fit into the world they were forced to adopt. This book and The Sympathizer seem particularly important to read as the world deals with a new mass migration, those fleeing violence and ruin in Africa and the Middle East. Not always comfortable reading, but enlightening.