Good timing, even better writing
The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen Grove Press
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new collection of stories, The Refugees, is as impeccably written as it is timed. The book, a followup to Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, is dedicated to “all refugees, everywhere.”
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.
There is no effort to avoid the identity of “refugee” — this book interrogates the term on political and spiritual levels, and the results are saturated with pain, memory and beauty.
The protagonists of Nguyen’s stories are haunted by past lives and the dead. In the first, BlackEyed Women, the narrator and her mother are visited by her brother’s unblinking adolescent ghost, who wears the mildewed shorts he’d worn the day he died on an overcrowded boat.
“Looking back,” the narrator thinks, “I could see that we had passed our youth in a haunted country.” She recalls stories from the “ancient crones who chewed betel nut and spat its red juice while squatting on their haunches in the market,” and who spun stories about the dead. She cries for “the other girls who had vanished and never come back, including myself.”
Towns are altered by war, relatives by time. In some stories, decades pass between letters home to Vietnam, as in Fatherland. There is a thorny dissonance between past and present. The living protagonists are often forced to carry traumatic visions with them as they try to make their way in a new country.
It seems painful to remember life as a refugee, but unwise to forget it. “I had not forgotten our nameless blue boat,” the narrator of the first story says, “and it had not forgotten me.” She could recall its scent, “rancid with human sweat and excreta.”
Nguyen is skilled at making us feel the disorientation and alienation of these characters navigating displacement. The narrator in The Other Man is “anxiously scanning the strange faces” as he lands in San Francisco, weary, unsettled by the traffic and the plaintive sound of radio jingles.
He’s even aware of a different quality of light, which “differed from the tropical glare he’d always known.”
The Refugees is a surprisingly sensual book, despite operating in difficult political and emotional terrain. Nguyen crafts sentences with an eye toward physicality and a keen awareness of bodies and their urges. A brother saves his sister by rendering her androgynous, slashing her long hair with a machete, binding her breasts with the fabric from a ripped T-shirt.
In an era where writers and readers debate who gets to write what, 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. Nguyen offers stories of aftermath, but also of complexity. He gives us human beings weary of pity and tired of sharing rehearsed stories that make them seem like “one more anonymous young refugee.”