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The Refugees, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press, 207 pages) At the age of 4, Viet Thanh Nguyen fled from the Viet Cong invasion of his hometown of Ban Me Thuot with his mother and brother. They trekked over 10 miles through trees that bore the bodies of dead paratroopers, and they clamored for a spot on a boat to Saigon to reunite with Nguyen’s father. Little over a month later, the family sought escape from Vietnam entirely and became four of 150,000 Vietnamese refugees who were accepted into the United States in 1975. Though the passage of time has softened some of his young memories, Nguyen deftly integrates the emotional weight of his family’s reallife refugee experiences into each fictional character of The Refugees. The book opens with two epigraphs that illustrate how painful memories are the ones that seem to transcend time, haunting as if they were ghosts. Nguyen carries the ghost metaphor (perhaps a little heavy-handedly) into the first story, “Black-Eyed Women.” The narrator is a ghostwriter who is haunted not only by her past, but also by her dead brother’s corporeal ghost. While she tries to figure out why her brother’s spirit appears to her many years and miles away from his death (her mother determines that he had to swim from Vietnam to California, which is why he drips tangible puddles onto the floor), the ghostwriter is forced to relive the violent circumstances of his demise. Though she and her mother survived the trek to the United States, her brother tells her, “You died too…. You just don’t know it,” because her life as a 13-year-old girl ended on that boat ride. Contrast that with the 13-year-old boy in “War Years” who was largely raised in America: His primary concerns are getting his parents to sell TV dinners in their grocery store and receiving an allowance. (He gets neither.) His perspective of the Communist takeover of Vietnam is shaped through Western media such as Newsweek and World News Tonight, plus what little his parents and neighbors are willing to tell him. His parents believe the Viet Cong were evil because they didn’t believe in money or God, but now that the war is over, they don’t think they should donate their hard-earned pennies to fighting Communism anymore. He is startled to hear a raw admittance of personal devastation from the war when his
prim neighbor admits her husband and sons all went missing in action. He cannot fathom an appropriate response beyond, “Sorry.” Nguyen proves to be an expert storyteller as he alternates between first- and third-person perspectives, male and female voices, and old and young narrators. He captures a sense of place whether it’s among the haggling grocery store shoppers in San Jose or the tourist explorations of long-abandoned war tunnels in Saigon. Though the magical realism and literal ghosts are promptly dropped after the first story, the theme of inauspicious memories is carried throughout. The collective memory of the Vietnam War haunts all these characters through several decades in both countries, ensnaring their individual identities within their shared cultural identity. Interestingly, the concept of identity is most explicitly discussed by characters who are not Vietnamese at all. In “The Transplant,” a Chinese man who was born in Vietnam admits that it’s easier for him to pretend to be Vietnamese, for how can he claim a Chinese identity when he has never been to China? This can easily be transposed onto the narratives of the American-born children of Vietnamese refugees; what do they know of the war and the country their parents fled? Then “The Americans” tells the story of a black American veteran of the Vietnam War and his Japanese wife visiting their daughter Claire, who is teaching English in Vietnam. Claire claims she feels more at home in a foreign country than she ever did as a biracial woman in the United States. She could not reconcile the two halves of her identity in the country she grew up in, but she could fully explore her potential in a starkly new environment. Following on the heels of Nguyen’s 2016 Pulitzer prize for fiction for The Sympathizer, this next work of fiction does not disappoint. Though each of the short stories were previously published over the last 20 years, the compilation into one volume makes for a seamless and compelling read. The publication could not have been better timed as America grapples with its complex relationships with refugees in the wake of the travel ban for Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Nguyen invites empathy for refugees of the past, present and future. A — Katherine Ouellette