The Refugees
Books | Fiction / Asian American
4
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Viet Thanh Nguyen
“Beautiful and heartrending” fiction set in Vietnam and America from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker) In these powerful stories, written over a period of twenty years and set in both Vietnam and America, Viet Thanh Nguyen paints a vivid portrait of the experiences of people leading lives between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. This incisive collection by the National Book Award finalist and celebrated author of The Committed gives voice to the hopes and expectations of people making life-changing decisions to leave one country for another, and the rifts in identity, loyalties, romantic relationships, and family that accompany relocation. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her with a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of migration. “Terrific.” —Chicago Tribune “An important and incisive book.” —The Washington Post “An urgent, wonderful collection.” —NPR
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Author
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Pages
201
Publisher
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published Date
2017-02-07
ISBN
0802189350 9780802189356
Community ReviewsSee all
"Viet Thanh Nguyen was 4 years old when his family fled Vietnam to the United States in 1975. Though he has spent almost all of his life in America, his award winning fiction and nonfiction is steeped in the memories of that refugee experience, and of the struggle to make a new life in a strange country. <br/><br/>Nguyen’s most recent work of fiction, <I>The Refugees</I>, is a collection of short stories , each exploring different aspects of the Vietnamese exile experience: loneliness, trauma, the lack of communication across generations. A young woman is visited by the ghost of the older brother who saved her life during their escape; when she asks him why she lived and he died he replies, “You died too…You just don’t know it”. An elderly woman learns to accept her husband’s worsening dementia; when their son pressures them to be “ready for the worst, his refugee father replies tersely, “We’ve seen so much worse than you. We’re ready for anything”.<br/><br/>And in a surprising twist, Carver, an African American Vietnam vet, and his Japanese American wife Michiko visit their daughter Claire, who has moved to Vietnam “to do some good and make up for some of the things you’ve done”. Hurt and angered, Carver realizes that<br/><br/><I>…although she empathized with vast masses of people she had never met, total strangers who regarded her as a stranger and who would kill her without hesitation given the chance, she did not extend any such feelings to him.</I><br/><br/>Claire has exiled herself from her home and family, but for Carver being the Black veteran of an unpopular and perhaps immoral war is its own form of exile.<br/><br/>A deeply moving and rich collection, exploring different aspects of the Vietnamese refugee experience.<br/><br/><br/>"
Lesley Williams