The Refugees

By 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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9780802189356

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees, the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies and Race and Resistance, and editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. He teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

Book preview

BLACK-EYED WOMEN

Fame would strike someone, usually the kind that healthy-minded people would not wish upon themselves, such as being kidnapped and kept prisoner for years, suffering humiliation in a sex scandal, or surviving something typically fatal. These survivors needed someone to help write their memoirs, and their agents might eventually come across me. At least your name’s not on anything, my mother once said. When I mentioned that I would not mind being thanked in the acknowledgments, she said, Let me tell you a story. It would be the first time I heard this story, but not the last. In our homeland, she went on, there was a reporter who said the government tortured the people in prison. So the government does to him exactly what he said they did to others. They send him away and no one ever sees him again. That’s what happens to writers who put their names on things.

By the time Victor Devoto chose me, I had resigned myself to being one of those writers whose names did not appear on book covers. His agent had given him a book that I had ghostwritten, its ostensible author the father of a boy who had shot and killed several people at his school. I identify with the father’s guilt, Victor said to me. He was the sole survivor of an airplane crash, one hundred and seventy-three others having perished, including his wife and children. What was left of him appeared on all the talk shows, his body there but not much else. The voice was a soft monotone, and the eyes, on the occasions when they looked up, seemed to hold within them the silhouettes of mournful people. His publisher said that it was urgent that he finish his story while audiences still remembered the tragedy, and this was my preoccupation on the day my dead brother returned to me.

My mother woke me while it was still dark outside and said, Don’t be afraid.

Through my open door, the light from the hallway stung. Why would I be afraid?

When she said my brother’s name, I did not think of my brother. He had died long ago. I closed my eyes and said I did not know anyone by that name, but she persisted. He’s here to see us, she said, stripping off my covers and tugging at me until I rose, eyes half-shut. She was sixty-three, moderately forgetful, and when she led me to the living room and cried out, I was not surprised. He was right here, she said, kneeling by her floral armchair as she felt the carpet. It’s wet. She crawled to the front door in her cotton pajamas, following the trail. When I touched the carpet, it was damp. For a moment I twitched in belief, and the silence of the house at four in the morning felt ominous. Then I noticed the sound of rainwater in the gutters, and the fear that had gripped my neck relaxed its hold. My mother must have opened the door, gotten drenched, then come back inside. I knelt by her as she crouched next to the door, her hand on the knob, and said, You’re imagining things.

I know what I saw. Brushing my hand off her shoulder, she stood up, anger illuminating her dark eyes. He walked. He talked. He wanted to see you.

Then where is he, Ma? I don’t see anyone.

Of course you don’t. She sighed, as if I were the one unable to grasp the obvious. He’s a ghost, isn’t he?

Ever since my father died a few years ago, my mother and I lived together politely. We shared a passion for words, but I preferred the silence of writing while she loved to talk. She constantly fed me gossip and stories, the only kind I enjoyed concerning my father back when he was a man I did not know, young and happy. Then came stories of terror like the one about the reporter, the moral being that life, like the police, enjoys beating people now and again. Finally there was her favorite kind, the ghost story, of which she knew many, some firsthand.

Aunt Six died of a heart attack at seventy-six, she told me once, twice, or perhaps three times, repetition being her habit. I never took her stories seriously. She lived in Vung Tau and we were in Nha Trang. I was bringing dinner to the table when I saw Aunt Six sitting there in her nightgown. Her long gray hair, which she usually wore in a chignon, was loose and fell over her shoulders and in her face. I almost dropped the dishes. When I asked her what she was doing here, she just smiled. She stood up, kissed me, and turned me toward the kitchen. When I turned around again to see her, she was gone. It was her ghost. Uncle confirmed it when I called. She had passed away that morning, in her own bed.

Aunt Six died a good death, according to my mother, at home and with family, her ghost simply making the rounds to say farewell. My mother repeated her aunt’s story while we sat at the kitchen table the morning she claimed to have seen my brother, her son. I had brewed her a pot of green tea and taken her temperature despite her protests, the result being, as she had predicted, normal. Waving the thermometer at me, she said he must have disappeared because he was tired. After all, he had just completed a journey of thousands of miles across the Pacific.

So how did he get here?

He swam. She gave me a pitying look. That’s why he was wet.

He was an excellent swimmer, I said, humoring her. What did he look like?

Exactly the same.

It’s been twenty-five years. He hasn’t changed at all?

They always look exactly the same as when you last saw them.

I remembered how he looked the last time, and any humor that I felt vanished. The stunned look on his face, the open eyes that did not flinch even with the splintered board of the boat’s deck pressing against his cheek—I did not want to see him again, assuming there was something or someone to see. After my mother left for her shift at the salon, I tried to go back to sleep but could not. His eyes stared at me whenever I closed my own. Only now was I conscious of not having remembered him for months. I had long struggled to forget him, but just by turning a corner in the world or in my mind I could run into him, my best friend. From as far back as I can recall, I could hear his voice outside our house, calling my name. That was my signal to follow him down our village’s lanes and pathways, through jackfruit and mango groves to the dikes and fields, dodging shattered palm trees and bomb craters. At the time, this was a normal childhood.

Looking back, however, I could see that we had passed our youth in a haunted country. Our father had been drafted, and we feared that he would never return. Before he left, he had dug a bomb shelter next to our home, a sandbagged bunker whose roof was braced by timber. Even though it was hot and airless, dank with the odor of the earth and alive with the movement of worms, we often went there to play as little children. When we were older, we went to study and tell stories. I was the best student in my school, excellent enough for my teacher to teach me English after hours, lessons I shared with my brother. He, in turn, told me tall tales, folklore, and rumors. When airplanes shrieked overhead and we huddled with my mother in the bunker, he whispered ghost stories into my ear to distract me. Except, he insisted, they were not ghost stories. They were historical accounts from reliable sources, the ancient crones who chewed betel nut and spat its red juice while squatting on their haunches in the market, tending coal stoves or overseeing baskets of wares. Our land’s confirmed residents, they said, included the upper half of a Korean lieutenant, launched by a mine into the branches of a rubber tree; a scalped black American floating in the creek not far from his downed helicopter, his eyes and the exposed half-moon of his brain glistening above the water; and a decapitated Japanese private groping through cassava shrubbery for his head. These invaders came to conquer our land and now would never go home, the old ladies said, cackling and exposing lacquered teeth, or so my brother told me. I shivered with delight in the gloom, hearing those black-eyed women with my own ears, and it seemed to me that I would never tell stories like those.

Was it ironic, then, that I made a living from being a ghostwriter? I posed the question to myself as I lay in bed in the middle of the day, but the women with their black eyes and black teeth heard me. You call what you have a life? Their teeth clacked as they laughed at me. I pulled the covers up to my nose, the way I used to do in my early years in America, when creatures not only lurked in the hallway but also roamed outside. My mother and father always peeked through the living room curtains before answering any knock, afraid of our young countrymen, boys who had learned about violence from growing up in wartime. Don’t open the door for someone you don’t know, my mother warned me, once, twice, three times. We don’t want to end up like that family tied down at gunpoint. They burned the baby with cigarettes until the mother showed them where she hid her money. My American adolescence was filled with tales of woe like this, all of them proof of what my mother said, that we did not belong here. In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.

When knocking woke me, it was dark outside. My watch said 6:35 in the evening. The knock came again, gentle, tentative. Despite myself, I knew who it was. I had locked the bedroom door just in case, and now I pulled the covers over my head, my heart beating fast. I willed him to go away, but when he started rattling the doorknob, I knew I had no choice but to rise. The fine hairs of my body stood at attention with me as I watched the doorknob tremble with the pressure of his grip. I reminded myself that he had given up his life for me. The least I could do was open the door.

He was bloated and pale, hair feathery, skin dark, clad in black shorts and a ragged gray T-shirt, arms and legs bony. The last time I had seen him, he was taller by a head; now our situations were reversed. When he said my name, his voice was hoarse and raspy, not at all like his adolescent alto. His eyes, though, were the same, curious, as were his lips, slightly parted, always prepared to speak. A purple bruise with undertones of black gleamed on his left temple, but the blood I remembered was gone, washed away, I suppose, by salt water and storms. Even though it was not raining, he was water-soaked. I could smell the sea on him, and worse, I could smell the boat, rancid with human sweat and excreta.

When he said my name, I trembled, but this was a ghost of someone whom I loved and would never harm, the kind of ghost who, my mother had said, would not harm me. Come in, I said, which seemed to me the bravest thing I could say. Unmoved, he looked at the carpet on which he was dripping water. When I brought him a clean T-shirt and shorts, along with a towel, he looked at me expectantly until I turned around and let him change. The clothes were my smallest but still a size too large for him, the shorts extending to his knees, the T-shirt voluminous. I motioned him in, and this time he obeyed, sitting on my rumpled bed. He refused to meet my gaze, seemingly more fearful of me than I was of him. While he was still fifteen I was thirty-eight, no longer an exuberant tomboy, reluctant to talk unless I had a purpose, as was the case when I interviewed Victor. Being an author, even one of the third or fourth rank, involved an etiquette I could live up to. But what does one say to a ghost, except to ask why he was here? I was afraid of the answer, so instead I said, What took you so long?

He looked at my bare toes with their bare nails. Perhaps he sensed that I was not good with children. Motherhood was too intimate for me, as were relationships lasting more than one night.

You had to swim. It takes a long time to go so far, doesn’t it?

Yes. His mouth remained open, as if he wanted to say more but was uncertain of what to say or how to say it. Perhaps this apparition was the first consequence of what my mother considered my unnatural nature, childless and single. Perhaps he was not a figment of my imagination but a symptom of something wrong, like the cancer that killed my father. His was also a good death, according to my mother, surrounded by family at home, not like what happened to her son and, nearly, to me. Panic surged from that bottomless well within myself that I had sealed with concrete, and I was relieved to hear the front door opening. Mother will want to see you, I said. Wait here. I’ll be right back.

When we returned, we found only his wet clothes and the wet towel. She held up the gray T-shirt, the same as he had worn on the blue boat with the red eyes.

Now you know, my mother said. Never turn your back on a ghost.

The black shorts and gray T-shirt stank of brine and were heavy with more than just water. When I carried them to the kitchen, the weight of the clothes in my hands was the weight of evidence. I had seen him wear these clothes on dozens of occasions. I remembered them when the shorts were not black with grime but still pristine blue, when the shirt was not gray and ragged but white and neat. Do you believe now? my mother said, lifting the lid of the washing machine. I hesitated. Some people say that faith burns inside them, but my newfound faith was chilling to me. Yes, I said. I believe.

The machine hummed in the background as we sat for dinner at the kitchen table, the air anointed with star anise and ginger. That’s how come it took him so many years, my mother said, blowing onto her hot soup. Nothing had ever daunted her appetite or dented her cast-iron stomach, not even the events on the boat or the apparition of her son. He swam the entire distance.

Aunt Six lived hundreds of miles away and you saw her the same day.

Ghosts don’t live by our rules. Each ghost is different. Good ghosts, bad ghosts, happy ghosts, sad ghosts. Ghosts of people who die when they’re old, when they’re young, when they’re small. You think baby ghosts behave the same as grandfather ghosts?

I knew nothing about ghosts. I had not believed in ghosts and neither did anyone else I knew except for my mother and Victor, who himself seemed spectral, the heat of grief rendering him pale and nearly translucent, his only color coming from a burst of uncombed red hair. Even with him the otherworldly came up only twice, once on the phone and once in his living room. Nothing had been touched since the day his family left for the airport, not even the sorrowful dust. I had the impression that the windows had not been opened since that day, as if he wanted to preserve the depleted air that his wife and children had breathed before they suffered their bad deaths, so far from home. The dead move on, he had said, coiled in his armchair, hands between his thighs. But the living, we just stay here.

These words opened his last chapter, the one I worked on after my mother went to sleep and I descended into the bright basement, illuminated with fluorescent tubes. I wrote one sentence, then paused to listen for a knock or steps on the stairway. My rhythm through the night was established, a few lines followed by a wait for something that did not come, the next day more of the same. The conclusion of Victor’s memoir was in sight when my mother came home from the nail salon with shopping bags from Chinatown, one full of groceries, the other with underwear, a pair of pajamas, blue jeans, a denim jacket, a pack of socks, knit gloves, a baseball cap. After stacking them next to his dried

Reviews for The Refugees

[forsanolim · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm really hesitant to give this a rating because I haven't really been in a mental space recently where I think it's that possible for me to take a lot of joy in reading. So while this book didn't do all that much for me, I think that that is in every way presumably a reflection of me at this moment and not of the book's merits. I really mainly read it because it was a short book that let me tick off a couple monthly challenges.So what was this book about? It's a short story collection that centers broadly around Vietnam and the experiences of immigrants. Most of the main characters are Vietnamese, and most of the stories take place in the US. There are definite themes of identity, the experience of immigration, and the repercussions of history.

[shannonrose4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An eloquent and detailed collection of aspirations and dreams tells of those torn between two worlds, the country and family left behind in trade for a distant place of hope and desires fulfilled. Each chapter is an experience of memory suffused with subtle moments that will leave you breathless.

[thesmellofbooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Each of these stories seems perfect in its own way. The people are built up slowly in our understanding, permitting their deeply unloveable traits to move alongside their heartbreaking humanity. They are beautiful, triumphant in the tiny ways that life offers, tragic. I am grateful, moved, and brought closer to my own interior--both its sadness and its peace. So glad I read this book.

[msf59 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.”“Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.”“I came to understand that in the United States, land of the fabled dream, it is un-American to be a refugee.”This is an excellent story collection, that deals with the Vietnamese refugee experience, loosely based on the author's own life. It also focuses on parent-child relationships. I read and enjoyed his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer and I am glad to see, he is equally adept at short fiction.

[flydodofly · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Something about it was too predictable and too smooth, felt like I have read it before.

[itchyfeetreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I came into this collection expecting to read some moving stories of refugees; the reasons why a person might leave their country and the impact of those memories as they forge a new life. This collection does contain those stories and I did find them exceedingly moving with several turns of phrase and images staying with me on completion of the book. However Nguyen has created something significantly more layered than my initial expectations. The relationships he has created between his characters are deep and complex and effectively present not only a different lens to view the challenges facing his characters as they create a new sense of identify which reflects both Vietnamese and American experiences. The distance and tension between generations is also a reoccurring theme. In “the Other Man” a newly arrived refugee , grappling with a cavalcade of new experiences in 1970s San Francisco struggles to write to his father, in “Someone else besides you” the narrator struggles to build a relationship with his newly widowed father. Whilst not my favourite stories I particularly valued the inclusion of “The Americans” and “Fatherland”. In the former we hear about the story of a young American woman who is teaching English in Vietnam, who struggles to explain to her father her connection to the country and her recognition of his involvement there during the war. In the latter a Vietnamese family are visited by the patriarch’s daughter from his first marriage who has grown up in the States. Both offer a different perspective of being a stranger in another country and I think add an extra depth to the collection. My absolute favourite however was “I’d love you to want me” which is a heartbreaking story of a woman whose faith in her marriage is rocked as her husband’s dementia worsens and he starts to refer to her by another woman’s name. I will certainly be looking for more of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s work in the future.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A quick read, audio was 5 hours long, read by the author Viet Thanh Nguyen. This a group of short stories about the Vietnamese, immigrant, refugee experience. The stories are varied and interesting. The author is a good narrator. Rating: 3.65

[alanteder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Wide Swath of StoriesNguyen covers a wide terrain of the Vietnamese immigrant/refugee experience with this collection of stories written over a 10-year period. There are stories looking back at escape ("Black-Eyed Woman"), stories of arrival ("The Other Man"), stories of childhood in a new land ("War Years"), stories of work and experience ("The Transplant"), stories of love & aging ("I'd Love You To Want Me" & "Someone Else Besides You") and stories of return to the homeland ("The Americans" & "Fatherland"). They are roughly arranged in that sort of logical order as well, making an appropriate complete cycle. A very well-done short-story selection.

[jan6coco6day · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Refugees have existed as long as people have formed communities of "insiders" and "outsiders" and created conflict. By their very nature, refugee stories--huge swaths of history--don't get recorded. So every time we see a heavy period of refugee activity, we have to redefine the word "refugee." This is almost Nguyen's life's work. He explores all the different ways in which people can be physical, global, economic, political, emotional, and spiritual refugees. Thoughts characters have in one story form the theme of another story. These stories are absolutely essential to defining "refugee" in our cultural lexicon.

[wagner5sarah35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This collection of short stories highlights the various struggles faced by those who settle in a foreign land. The barriers of culture loom large in this book - the culture shock one man experiences when living with a gay couple, the man who becomes embroiled in a scheme to sell counterfeit luxury goods, the mother who lies about her achievements to convince the family back home that everything is better where she is. Thought-provoking reading and very worthwhile.

[brangwinn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this book while in Viet Nam. The short stories gave me a glimpse of what life is like for people who have had to leave their homeland. I enjoyed the humor as well as the emotions so clearly expressed in the actions and words of the characters. I liked this book even more than The Sympathizes.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

[Viet Thanh Nguyen has written a collection of short stories called The Refugees and it's really good. While each of the stories touches on being a refugee or outsider, each is completely different from the others. And they are all really good. It's a slender book, and Nguyen clearly chose to only publish his very best. This is a much more accessible book than The Sympathizer, with Nguyen's emphasis remaining on the flawed humanity of each character. A woman is frustrated by her son's insistence that she give up the part-time library job she loves to be home with her ailing husband, a young man arrives in San Francisco to discover that his sponsor is an older gay man, a man receives an organ transplant and feels a sense of obligation to the donor's son, the young son of shop owners watches as his mother refuses to give into to blackmail.

[wildrequiem · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful introduction to Viet Thanh Nguyen's writing. His slice-of-life writing style is plain, as I've heard many people say, but still manages to evoke powerful emotions. Every story in this collection is top-notch quality, and they're all incredibly diverse in their own ways. I've found myself reading more and more Vietnamese fiction this year, and all these short stories succeed in giving me an even more multi-faceted look at Vietnamese history and its people.

[girlwellread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A special thank you to Edelweiss and Grove Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Viet Thanh Nguyen has been on my "to read" list for quite some time after hearing about the success of The Sympathizer (winner of several awards including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction). This beautifully written compilation left me amazed and anxious to read The Sympathizer.

This collection of stories explores immigration, family, love, and identity while straddling two worlds
– the homeland, and the adopted homeland. These stories explore the hardships of immigration, of the aspirations and dreams of those that immigrate, and of the relationships and desires that define us all. Filled with figurative and literal ghosts of the past, each story stands alone, yet is tied to the others thematically, and through the strength of the writing.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The eight stories collected here were published over a twenty year period. So there is an understandable variance in style, subtlety, and impact. The initial story, “Black Eyed Women,” is both the most recent and by far the best. That bodes well since it suggests that Nguyen is developing as a writer, but it means that the remainder of the book can come across as a slight disappointment after that first story. Better would be to see these more straight up, less challenging stories, as necessary stepping stones to something almost startling. And to be fair, none of the earlier stories are poor. Just weaker by comparison.Each of the stories involves Vietnamese refugees at some point. Nguyen moves easily between male and female protagonists as well as young and old. He appears to be a writer testing his craft. Again, this is something that improves over time. In some stories, the reader doesn’t realized the gender of the protagonist until a few pages in. And there is a sameness of tone across the stories, with the possible exception of the opening story. In all, this is a useful collection in order to get a view on where Nguyen has been the past twenty years. But I think the next twenty years will be much more exciting.Gently recommended.

[charl08-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating short stories exploring the experiences of Vietnamese migrants. Some are haunted by those they left behind, others successfully negotiating real estate to claim the American dream. My favourite story is the last where a young woman travels to Vietnam to meet her father and his new family, who he has named after the three children who fled to America with his first wife.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I know that short story collections are usually a hard sell, but I'm going out on a limb and saying this one will. Viet Thanh Nguyen's THE REFUGEES is a sterling bunch of stories, eight of them, and not a bad one in the whole barrel. And I'm not surprised, because I've already read Nguyen's novel, THE SYMPATHIZER, which won the Pulitzer. Some of these stories were written ten or more years ago, but they already displayed the writing chops that were so evident in the prize-winning novel. And some of them, like "The War Years," with its widow sewing uniforms in a California barrio for a Vietnamese army that will rise again to defeat the Communists; or the former Vietnamese airborne officer who bullies and dominates his divorced son in "Someone Else Besides You," also show the early seeds that became THE SYMPATHIZER.A favorite of mine is "The Americans," which gives us Carver, a black 69 year-old former B-52 pilot who once bombed North Vietnam, back in Vietnam decades later with his Japanese wife to visit their adult daughter who, Carver feels, will never understand how his life has been. In Carver, "now retired, limping out his sixties," Nguyen captures perfectly the helpless, sometimes bitter feeling of growing old, of accelerating months and years, of "time ruthlessly thinning out the once-dense herd of his memories." But Carver still can remember the wonder of his flying years, how -"Almost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming ever more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God's eyes ... the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere."Nguyen also artfully conveys the uglier aspects of poverty too, as Carver travels through the Vietnamese countryside and observes -"... tin-roofed shacks with dirt floors, a man pulling up the leg of his shorts to urinate on a wall... the air thick with blasts of soot from passing trucks, the rot of buffalo dung, the fermentation of the local cuisine that he found briny and nauseating."This is wonderful writing. And Nguyen understands, I think, that writing itself is a kind of reaching for immortality, an idea he expresses perfectly in the closing lines of his opening story of refugee ghosts and ghost writers, "Black-eyed Women" - "Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts."These are hauntingly beautiful, wise stories, made to be read and remembered. My highest recommendation.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

[teachlz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I would like to thank NetGalley and Grove Atlantic and Grove Press for an ARC of "The Refugees" by Viet Thankh Nguyen for my honest review. The genre of this novel is fiction, possibly historical fiction. This novel is composed of eight short stories written by the author. All the stories reflect Vietnamese life in American or in the homeland. I find that it is difficult to review a book with many stories. Some of the stories had no written conclusion or seemed to be open for interpretation. The author writes of family, love, immigration, homosexuals,mistresses, feelings of identity, and cultural differences. There also seems to be a feeling of pride that seems to be important. I found that the stories were interesting and the descriptions were graphic. I would recommend this book to those who enjoy reading short descriptive cultural stories.

[pet12-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a collection of 8 short stories by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen. After reading these, I'm now much more inclined to pick up his winning debut The Sympathizer. I can honestly say I enjoyed all the stories in this compilation. All of them are about the experience of leaving one country for another, but each story was unique. They are about culture and identity but I really loved how they examined relationships - between parents and children, husbands and wives, between siblings - with great insight. My favorite was "I'd love you to want me", which was about a devoted wife whose husband was suffering from Alzheimer's. Some humorous, some deeply moving, all written skillfully but in a simple manner, i.e. few words and yet still managing to create a vivid sense of place and complex characters. Definitely recommended.I received an ARC via NetGalley.

[bowedbookshelf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is such an exciting time in American literature that we can enjoy the gorgeous language and careful craftsmanship of really very fine short stories and novels in English in the American tradition but from traditionally silent participants in our nation’s pageant: immigrants and people of color. These voices began speaking up some time ago, but if you looked at the award lists until recently, people of color weren’t often on them. That has changed, and right now, before cultures become indistinguishable from one another in the wealth churn, the special character and individual voice of different groups is our bounty to reap.Nguyen just wows me with his capture of the immigrant experience from so many different directions in this collection of stories. Not only is his language clear and expressive and to the point, his stories are rounded and fulfilling. They tell us something, like dispatches from a new world.A section called “The War Years” has a story that is not actually about the war we usually think of. We’re in L.A., in Little Saigon, in a grocery store where we breathe in the smell the dried cuttlefish and star anise in the crowded aisles. Father (Ba), mother (Ma), and Long (do I need to say?), a thirteen-year-old for whom school, even summer school, felt like a vacation, worked at the store every day, even Sundays after Mass. Ma is the real deal: waking everyone up in the mornings, keeping house, making meals, counting cash. She owns seven pastel outfits, and with makeup and a squirt of scent (gardenia), she is ready to man the cash register. We hear the scratch of her nylons as she rubs one ankle against the other. She knows the margins on every item in the store, even the 50-lb bags of rice in the loft above kitchenware. Mrs. Hao visits the store regularly to ask for contributions to “fight the Communists,” but Ma thinks that fight is over. She follows Mrs. Hao home one day to confront her and discovers a fight that is all too real.The story is so richly told, its depths just keep churning up new insights. And yet it is not alone. “The Transplant” introduces us to Arthur Arellano, a man with several overlapping and reflexive problems—problems which influence each other. Despite “transplant” bringing to mind “immigrant,” in this story the word has a more literal meaning. The characters in all these stories have complex problems, complex attachments, complex lives. In “Someone Else Besides You,” a thirty-three-year-old man lives with his father after his own divorce, but his widower father, despite his own proclivities for mistresses, is constantly urging his son to pursue the former wife. See what I mean? Complex.One story, “The Americans,” depicts a twenty-six-year-old woman who has been teaching English in Vietnam for two years already, living in a town that also hosts a nonprofit engaged in demining. She invites her parents to visit, to meet her boyfriend, to see her housing, her life. The email inviting them is addressed to Mom and Dad, but James Carver, recently retired as a commercial airline pilot, knows it is mostly meant for her mother, who dreams about Vietnam's “bucolic” countryside. “He knew next to nothing about Vietnam except what it looked like at forty thousand feet.”Nguyen conveys the silent, withheld anger and confusion that men can often exhibit: an inarticulateness that keeps them angry without them even knowing exactly why. James was so proud when his son graduated from Air Force Academy, but he marks his own decline from that moment: he felt he was growing stupider rather than wiser as he aged. That was just the moment that the torch passed, and it is a new world, not his own. If he could but speak his fears, he’d find he was not alone: the world could still be his, he’d just be sharing it.His daughter Claire is just like daughters anywhere, thinking they know more than they do, speaking and acting so carelessly, so casually hurtful.“Although she empathized with vast masses of people she had never met, total strangers who regarded her as a stranger and would kill her without hesitation given the chance, she did not extend any such feeling to him.”Being a parent is tough stuff. One has to have the hide of a rhinoceros.The technical skill manifest in this story is breathtaking. We are never explicitly told the man is black, married to a Japanese woman while stationed on Okinawa. Their children have grown up loved by their parents, but confused about their identities and disparaged by their schoolmates. James has endured a lifetime of confusion, including his job flying a bomber jet. Unspoken, unresolved resentment is the minefield. Nguyen’s stories are feasts of insight, generously shared. We’re lucky folk, to have such a talent writing for us. The Sympathizer, Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel out last year, was a big novel is every sense. He shows us here he can write engaging, enduring short fiction, and his nonfiction, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, has likewise garnered critical attention. Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He has received residencies, fellowships, honors, awards, and grants from a wide range of admiring and grateful organizations.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love short stories. They seem to be incredibly difficult to write, to put everything in just a few pages and connect to the reader as well. Done well, I find them incredible and that was one of the first things I noticed when I started reading this collection, the writing is fantastic. Excellent writing itself makes me want to trust the writer, puts me at ease, surely he knows what he is doing, he writes so well? Then the content, the situations presented have to draw one in, present a complete picture, make me want to continue reading. These did that too, and brilliantly.The stories in this collection have a common theme, as the title suggests they are refugees from Vietnam whom have made their way to the United States. They are all very good but two in particular I keep thinking about. One is War Room, a young boy, twelve years old is our narrator, his parents now own a grocery store and he must work there every day after school. He tells the story of a woman coming to the store to collect money to send to those fighting the Communists in Viet Nam, how his mother reacts and how and why her viewpoint changes as the story progresses.The second is I want you to want me, about a family with young children who escaped from Vietnam and have had a fairly successful life. The woman is our narrator, she works at her local library, a job she loves, go figure, but her husband is slowly sinking into Alzheimer disease and she is his main caretaker. What propels this story is that he begins to call her a different name, a name she has never heard of before, and the women begins to believe he had a life she knew nothing about. Taut and perceptive, this story is one that impressed itself in my mind. Don't quite know why.I have never read the much awarded novel, The Sympathizer, by this author, but will now make it a point to do so. The last book I finished in 2016 and it was a very good one.ARC from publisher.Publishes February 7th.