The Refugees
Viet Than Nguyen*, 2017
Grove/Atlantic
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802126399
Summary
A collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family.
With the coruscating gaze that informed his Pulitizer Prize winning The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice in The Refugees to lives led between two worlds—the adopted homeland and the country of birth.
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 for 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…
Viet Than Nguyen's stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration.
The second piece of fiction by a major new voice in American letters, The Refugees is a beautifully written and sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another, and the relationships and desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives. (From the publisher.)
*(Pronounced "n-gwen.")
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Buon Me Thuot, Vietnam
• Raised—Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; San Jose, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize; Edgar Award (see more below)
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Viet Than Nguyen (Pronounced "n-gwen.") was born in Buon Me Thuot, Vietnam. He came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family and was initially settled in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, one of four such camps for Vietnamese refugees. From there, he moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he lived until 1978.
Seeking better economic opportunities, his parents moved to San Jose, California, and opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores in the city. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, San Jose had not yet been transformed by the Silicon Valley economy, and was in many ways a rough place to live, at least in the downtown area where Viet’s parents worked. He commemorates this time in his short story “The War Years” (TriQuarterly 135/136, 2009).
Education and teaching
Viet attended St. Patrick School and Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose. After high school, he briefly attended UC Riverside and UCLA before settling on UC Berkeley, where he graduated with degrees in English and ethnic studies. He stayed at Berkeley, earning his Ph.D. in English.
After getting his degree, Viet moved to Los Angeles for a teaching position at the University of Southern California, and has been there ever since.
Writing
Viet's short fiction has been published in Manoa, Best New American Voices 2007, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross-Cultural Collision and Connection, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, Chicago Tribune, and Gulf Coast, where his story won the 2007 Fiction Prize.
He has written a collection of short stories and an academic book called Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, which is the critical bookend to a creative project whose fictional bookend is The Sympathizer (2015). Nothing Ever Dies examines how the so-called Vietnam War has been remembered by many countries and people, from the US to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and South Korea, across literature, film, art, museums, memorials, and monuments.
Recognition
2016 - Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
2016 - Winner, Edgar Award for Best First Novel
2016 - Winner, Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
2015 - Winner, Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
2015-16 - Winner, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature (Adult Fiction)
2016 - Finalist, PEN/Faulkner Award
2016 - Finalist, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
(Author bio adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Short stories are strange things: somber, intense, and abrupt—they lack the luxurious pacing of a novel, the sense of life unfolding over the span of 400 or 800 pages. In a story everything is compressed, every word matters, and every action reaches for metaphorical standing. It practically cries out "proceed with care!" READ MORE.
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers
Fiction supposedly "gives voice" to its characters, but what can it do for those who would rather not speak? In Viet Thanh Nguyen's superb new collection, The Refugees, men and women displaced from wartime Saigon and resettled in California don't say much about the journey, having practiced many versions of silence—from state censorship to language barriers—along the way. To illustrate their plight, Nguyen homes in on their bodies rather than their words, so that a more accurate description of what the book does is "give flesh" to characters at risk of fading from memory, sometimes their own…If at times I found myself missing the playful, voice-driven punch of The Sympathizer, it's a tribute to Nguyen's range that these eight stories cast a quieter, but no less devastating, spell. The collection's subtle, attentive prose and straightforward narrative style perfectly suit the low-profile civilian lives it explores…With the volume turned down, we lean in more closely, listening beyond what the refugees say to step into their skins.
Mia Alvar - New York Times Book Review
[An] accomplished collection.… With anger but not despair, with reconciliation but not unrealistic hope, and with genuine humour that is not used to diminish anyone, Nguyen has breathed life into many unforgettable characters, and given us a timely book focusing, in the words of Willa Cather, on "the slow working out of fate in people of allied sentiment and allied blood."
Guardian (UK)
With President Trump’s recent attempt to ban refugees from entering America, the quiet but impressively moving tales dissecting the Vietnamese experience in California in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees are a powerful antidote to all the fear mongering and lies out there.… A rich exploration of human identity, family ties and love and loss, never has a short story collection been timelier.
Independent (UK)
The Refugees is as impeccably written as it is timed.… This is an important and incisive book written by a major writer with firsthand knowledge of the human rights drama exploding on the international stage—and the talent to give us inroads toward understanding it.… It is refreshing and essential to have this work from a writer who knows and feels the terrain on an intellectual, emotional and cellular level—it shows.… An exquisite book.
Washington Post
The Refugees arrives right on time.… In The Refugees, such figures aren’t, contra Trump, an undifferentiated, threatening mass. They are complicatedly human and deserving our care and empathy.… In our moment, to look faithfully and empathetically at the scars made by dislocation, to bear witness to the past pain and present vulnerability such scars speak of, is itself a political act. So, too, is Nguyen’s dedication: "For all refugees, everywhere."
Boston Globe
A terrific new book of short stories.… Nguyen is an exceptional storyteller who packs an enormous amount of information and images into a short work.… Nguyen’s vision of the Vietnamese migration to the United States and its impact on the nation is complex. His message is not Pollyannaish or demonizing.… Nguyen’s message, instead, is that they are people, like all of us, with complicated lives and histories.
Chicago Tribune
The Refugees showcases the same astute and penetrating intelligence that characterized [Nguyen’s] Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer.… Nguyen is an expert on prickly family dynamicsv.… He can also be a sly humorist.… The Refugees confirms Nguyen as an agile, trenchant writer, able to inhabit a number of contrary points of view. And it whets your appetite for his next novel.
Seattle Times
At a time when paranoia about refugees and migrants has reached a new high in America and perhaps the world, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first collection of short stories, The Refugees, adds a necessary voice humanizing this group of demonized people.… These eight works celebrate the art of telling stories as an act of resilience and survival .… A beautifully written collection, filled with empathy and insight into the lives of people who have too often been erased from the larger American media landscape.
Dallas Morning News
A beautiful collection that deftly illustrates the experiences of the kinds of people our country has, until recently, welcomed with open arms (UK). It’s hard not to feel for Nguyen’s characters.… But Nguyen never asks the reader to pity them; he wants us only to see them as human beings. And because of his wonderful writing, it’s impossible not to do so. It’s an urgent, wonderful collection that proves that fiction can be more than mere storytelling—it can bear witness to the lives of people who we can’t afford to forget.
NPR Books
Tragically good timing.… A short-story collection mostly plumbing the experience of boat-bound Vietnamese who escaped to California.… But there are others of different nationalities, alienated not from a nation but from love or home, and displaced in subtler ways.… Ultimately, Nguyen enlarges empathy, the high ideal of literature and the enemy of hate and fear.
New York Magazine
The 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner returns with a beautifully crafted collection that explores the netherworld of Vietnamese refugees, whose lives and cultural dislocation he dissects with precision and grace.
Oprah Magazine
(Starred review.) Each searing tale.…a pressure cooker of unease, simmering with unresolved issues of memory and identity.… Nguyen is not here to sympathize...but to challenge the experience of white America as the invisible norm.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Refugees is a highly gratifying interlude.… Nguyen won't disappoint.… [H]ighly recommended. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Each intimate, supple, and heartrending story is unique in its particulars even as all are works of piercing clarity, poignant emotional nuance, and searing insights into the trauma of war and the long chill of exile, the assault on identity and the resilience of the self, and the fragility and preciousness of memories.
Booklist
Nguyen's slice-of-life approach is precise without being clinical, archly humorous without being condescending, and full of understanding.… [His] stories, excellent from start to finish, transcend ethnic boundaries to speak to human universals.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for The Refugees…then take off on your own:
GENERAL
1. In most of these stories, the primary characters are refugees from Vietnam to America. One way to discuss them is to ask what other ways it is possible to be a refugee, not only in terms of geography and nationality, but in a more personal way?
BLACK EYED WOMAN
1. The unnamed daughter of the story asks us, "Was it ironic, then, that I made a living from being a ghost writer?" Of course it is…but why?
2. When the narrator bemoans the fact that she, not her brother, was the one who got to live, her brother replies, "You died, too. You just don't know it." What does he mean?
3. Do you believe in ghosts?
LIEM'S PLAN
1.What does the title refer to—what is Liem's plan?
2. What do you think of Marcus? When Liem tells him he was too worried about getting a seat on the crowded bus to tell his parents he loved them, Marcus assures him, "that's all in the past. The best way you can help them now is by helping yourself." Is Marcus correct? Liem thinks his response is a very American way of thinking. Why does he think so? What do you think: is the response from Marcus typically American? If so, is that good or bad?
3. At the story's end, after reading his parents' letter, Liem peers out through the window at two men walking by. What is he thinking? And what is the significance of the fact that after the men had passed, "he was still standing with his hand pressed to the window," wondering if anyone was watching him?
THE WAR YEARS
1. The first phrase of the opening sentence recalls the time Mrs. Hoa "broke into our lives." Why "broke"? What does that particular word suggest? Why not the summer that "we met Mrs. Hoa" or that "she came into our lives"?
2. Why does the narrator's mother end up giving Mrs. Hoa money?
THE TRANSPLANT
1. Talk about the irony of the title and the fact that Arthur received a new kidney from a Vietnamese immigrant?
2. Consider, too, the hundreds of boxes of knock-off merchandise "transplanted" to Arthur's garage.
I'D LOVE YOU TO WANT ME
1. Why is the wife known only as Mrs. Khanh; we're not given her first name. Why is that?
2. How do memories of the family's escape from Vietnam affect Mrs. Khanh, even years later?
3. In what way is Mrs. Khanh a refugee in her marriage?
THE AMERICANS
!. Why is this story, about an American-born man and his daughter, included in a collection about Vietnamese refugees who have settled in America? Who is the refugee in the story?
2. How differently do James Carver and his daughter Claire view Vietnam? What has made James so angry; what is he angry about? What does James come to realize by the end, and why does he cry?
SOMEONE ELSE BESIDES YOU
1. Do Sam and his ex-wife have any future together? Is this their final goodbye?
2. What is the significance of the title? To whom does it refer?
FATHER LAND
1. Why does Vivien misrepresent herself? Had she not confessed to Phuong, would her lies have made any difference; would they have done any harm?
2. Vivien tells Phuong that she lacks respect for their father. Why?
3. Later, Phuong studies one of the photos she took of Vivien and her father; she is certain that her father prefers Vivien over his other children. Why does she think so? Do you think she is correct?
4. Why does Phuong burn the photos at the end? What is the significance of the ashes vanishing into the sky—"an inverted blue bowl of the finest crystal, covering the whole of Saigon as far as her eyes could see"?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)