Litstack Recs | The Refugees – Stories & The Orphan Master’s Son

by Lauren Alwan

The Refugees: Stories, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Image result for the refugees viet thanh nguyen

If you’re a fan of The Sympathizer, the debut novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016, you’ll find much of what you loved in the author’s second book, a collection of short stories. Where The Sympathizer explores the effects of the Vietnamese War and the experience of refugees’ displacement through the taut voice of its unnamed narrator, the stories in The Refugees is a broader look at the nuances of displacement and belonging.

While the characters in these stories appear to lead quieter lives than The Sympathizer’s unnamed double-agent, the conflict for these characters is no less powerful. Nguyen’s obsessions—identity, family loyalty, dislocation, memory—drive these nine stories. Memories of Vietnam and the ghost of her brother haunts a young woman who aptly earns her living as a ghostwriter. A boy and his parents, living in 1970s San Jose and running a market, grapple with the change that confronts them when a family friend pressures them to donate funds to fight the Communists in Vietnam. A new arrival in San Francisco is sponsored by a gay couple, and finds his new life has a startling openness and freedom. Each story here shimmers with Nguyen’s emotional and political insights in prose that is precise, vivid, and elegiac. In the opening story, “Black-Eyed Women,” the sister who’s haunted by her brother’s ghost says to him, “Looking back…I could see that we had passed our youth in a haunted country.”

The tensions between American-born and native Vietnamese come into contrast, too. In one of the most striking stories, “Fatherland,” an eldest daughter named Phong, whose father left Vietnam for the U.S., discovers he had begun a new family there, and given his three children the same names as his children back in Vietnam. When her eponymous half-sister comes to visit in Saigon, she appears to be the ideal of American success, spending money on elaborate dinners, gifts, and outings for her second family. Except the American Phuong has endowed herself with a foreign name, Vivien:

Phuong knew instantly why her sister had taken upon herself a foreign name, and whose name it must have been: Vivien Leigh, star of Gone With the Wind, her father’s favorite film, as he had once told her in passing. Phuong had seen the film on a pirated videotape, and was seduced immediately by the glamour, beauty, and sadness of Scarlett O’Hara, heroine and embodiment of the doomed South. Was it too much to suppose that the ruined Confederacy, with its tragic sense of itself, bore more than a passing similarity to her father’s defeated southern Republic and its resentful remnants?

The analogy of the defeated southern Republic and GWTW’s doomed South, is among the many surprising and perceptive connections Nguyen makes in these stories. There are echoes of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories, Interpreter of Maladies, another debut collection (that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000), by a writer whose voice, like Nguyen’s, looks at the tensions between homeland, and the experience of diaspora, through portrayals of unforgettable characters.

Pre-order Nguyen’s sequel to the The Sympathizer, The Committed here, and read about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s being named the first Asian American member of the Pulitzer Prize Committee.

—Lauren Alwan

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