Uncharted Book

In The Refugees Nguyen gives voice to hopes and expectations of people forced to leave one country for another, and the rifts in identity, loyalties, romantic relationships, and family ties that accompany relocation. From the culture shock of a young Vietnamese man relocated to bohemian San Fransisco, to the heartache of a woman whose dementia-suffering husband starts to confuse her with a former lover, the stories vividly capture the emotions and numerous hardships of migration.

A collection of eight different stories, The Refugees is a creative collection of shared experiences of a country devastated by war. The captivating writing invites you to meet the characters, not just in the present but their past as well. We are greeted by the ghost, their families, the culture, Vietnam, and the implications of the war on their lives. The stories aren’t connected by common characters but by common experiences of the characters who survived the war in Vietnam and found their way to America. That is not the focus of every story, not just being in America as refugees: but about the universal themes of finding one’s identity, coming to terms with the past and family dynamics.

On the page before the title page Nguyen quotes from two sources in his Preface, Roberto Bolano’s introduction to Antwerp “I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time.” And a small piece of James Fenton’s poem A German Requiem ”It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life.” These two quotes really do set the tone and atmosphere for these eight stories. A promise of a better life, the ghosts left behind, but who never really leave, the memories, the struggles to feel accepted and part of this new life.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and came to the United States as a refugee in 1975. He grew up in some rougher parts of California during his childhood, but would eventually go to college and become a University professor at the University of Southern California. An accomplished writer with numerous books, including The Sympathizer which won The Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and many other awards.

I would gladly use this book in a classroom. It covers an important topic, the Vietnam War, but in an indirect way that doesn’t shout at you preaching against war. It also tackles other important topics such as, immigration, culture, government ideology, and family dynamics. The characters are very different, but still relatable in so many different ways. Each and every one of them is human like the reader, the only difference being that their path to America was indefinitely more difficult than any American-born reader.