A RICH EXPLORATION OF HUMAN IDENTITY
With US President Donald 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.
It’s notable that Nguyen, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 2015 novel The Sympathizer, doesn’t linger on the horror stories that pepper his protagonists’ pasts.
The first two stories in the collection offer snapshots of fear, violence and destruction: “Black-Eyed Woman” details a pirate attack on the ramshackle boat the protagonist and her family crossed the Pacific in that cost her brother his life; while in “The Other Man” Liem, now living with a host couple in San Francisco, “tried to forget the people who had clutched at the air as they fell into the river, some knocked down in the scramble, others shot in the back by desperate soldiers clearing a way for their own escape”, when he fled the slaughtering Communists in Saigon. “He tried to forget what he’d discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was a stake.”
In both these stories, however, such memories don’t denote the true trauma.
Meanwhile, in “The Other Man” it is Liem’s deep-felt estrangement from his father, not his more obvious topographical dislocation, that lies at the heart of the story.
Interwoven with the particular sorrow of displacement and exile are examples of universal suffering: a woman losing her husband to his advancing dementia, each time he calls her by another woman’s name a new wound; or a man crippled by his divorce who realises too late the life he wanted.
There are also stories told from the other side. In “The Americans” questions of belonging and empathy are examined through the prism of a retired AfricanAmerican airman visiting Vietnam with his wife and daughter.