The Refugees

Starred review from December 19, 2016
Each searing tale in Nguyen’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning The Sympathizer is a pressure cooker of unease, simmering with unresolved issues of memory and identity for the Vietnamese whose lives were disrupted by the “American War.” In “Black-Eyed Woman,” a writer is visited by the ghost of her teenage brother, who was murdered trying to save her from Thai pirates while fleeing the Vietcong. “War Years” is about a family of Vietnamese grocers in San Jose, Calif., challenged by another refugee to donate money to rebels still fighting the Communists back home. When an armed intruder invades the family’s home, the piercing irony is that their youngest son thinks it’s safe to open the door because the man is white. In “The Transplant,” Arthur Arellano is the recipient of a new liver from Men Vu, a Vietnamese man killed in a hit-and-run, whose son befriends him, then makes him complicit in his shady business selling fake designer goods. The most disturbing story is “Fatherland,” in which a man names his second set of children in Vietnam after his first set, who have fled to America with his first wife. When the American Phuong (now Vivien) visits her sister Phuong in Vietnam, Vivien reveals she is not the doctor her mother boasted she was. It is clear that author Nguyen believes the Vietnamese Phuong, more self-aware and resolute, is better off than her American doppelganger. Nguyen is not here to sympathize—“always resent, never relent,” as the anti-Communist exiles proclaimed in The Sympathizer—but to challenge the experience of white America as the invisible norm. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates.

Starred review from November 15, 2016
A collection of stories, most set amid the Vietnamese exile communities of California, by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer (2015)."We had passed our youth in a haunted country," declares the narrator of the opening story, a ghostwriter who quite literally finds himself writing about ghosts. One in particular is the ghost of his brother, lost somewhere in the chaos of the Vietnam War, who has somehow managed to swim across the ocean to find his family and is now dripping in their hallway. He is not the only ghost: there are other civilians, the eviscerated Korean lieutenant blown apart in a treetop, the unfortunate black GI, "the exposed half-moon of his brain glistening above the water," and the Japanese private from another war--so many ghosts, so much horror. Some of the living are not much better off. There is, for example, the Madame Thieu-like operator who works the merchants of a refugee shopping district, demanding what amounts to protection money and darkly hinting that they might be accused of being Communists if they do not pay up; she nurses a terrible grief, but that does not make her any less criminal. And then there is the 30-something divorce, torn between cultures, who cannot seem to find himself in the midst of all the expectations others hold for him but is still enraged when others disappoint him in turn. Nguyen's slice-of-life approach is precise without being clinical, archly humorous without being condescending, and full of understanding; many of the stories might have been written by a modern Flaubert, if that master had spent time in San Jose or Ho Chi Minh City. Nguyen is the foremost literary interpreter of the Vietnamese experience in America, to be sure. But his stories, excellent from start to finish, transcend ethnic boundaries to speak to human universals.

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September 1, 2016

Nguyen's The Sympathizer won six prizes (including the Pulitzer) and was a finalist for four, which must be some sort of record. In this second work of fiction, a story collection whose earliest entry dates from 1997, the characters include a young Vietnamese refugee adjusting to living with two gay men in San Francisco and a woman who's come to Ho Chi Minh City from America, leaving her younger half-sister dismayed at what she herself can never have or do.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2016

Although publishing ten months after Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, this collection precedes his novel by decades (the earliest entry dates from 1997). In a pre-Pulitzer interview [ow.ly/qXus3057v1g], Nguyen credits a 15-year experience "characterized by drudgery and despair, laced with a few bright moments when the stories were published or won awards" as the labor necessary to produce his stupendous Sympathizer. These eight stories encompass migration, loss, and disconnect as characters navigate and stumble through memories, experiences, and perceived realities. Two siblings reconnect in "Black-Eyed Women" decades after their deadly boat escape from Vietnam. The children of refugees serve as both witnesses and enablers to their dislocated parents in "War Years," "Someone Else Besides You," and "Fatherland." Unlikely connections haunt two of the most resonating stories: an aging man with dementia begins to call his wife by someone else's name in "I'd Love You To Want Me," while an organ recipient meets the donor's family in "The Transplant." VERDICT For Nguyen groupies desperate for future titles, Refugees is a highly gratifying interlude. For short fiction fans of other extraordinary, between-culture collections such as Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, Nguyen won't disappoint. Either way, highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.