I go hunting for the ghosts, something I can do without ever leaving home. As they haunt our country, so do we haunt theirs. They are pallid creatures, more frightened of us than we are of them. That is why we see these shades so rarely, and why we must seek them out. The talismans on my desk, a tattered pair of shorts and a ragged T-shirt, clean and dry, neatly pressed, remind me that my mother was right. 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. (Black-Eyed Women)I want to start my review of The Refugees with a cynical observation: Following closely on the heels of the deservedly-lauded The Sympathizer, these eight stories aren't new material; written over the past twenty years, each story was previously published elsewhere and this collection smacks of a delighted publisher saying to author Viet Thanh Nguyen, “That Sympathizer was an unexpected success, what else have you got that we can use to capitalise on your momentum?” Even the change in title – this was, apparently, originally intended to be released as “I'd Love You to Want Me” (the title of one of my favourite stories in the volume) – and just maybe that was switched to “The Refugees” in order to capitalise on interest in issues within the current American political climate. My cynical observation isn't meant as a criticism however – Why shouldn't an author or a publisher try to sell more books? – but I do want to draw attention to the specificity of the title “The Refugees”: So many of the reviews I'm reading are discussing the “immigration experience”, and that feels off the mark; refugees are a very specific subset of the immigration story, and within that subset, the Vietnamese “Boat People” had a very specific experience that eerily chimes with the experience of today's Syrian refugees (escaping danger and starvation on a perilous boat voyage, arriving in countries that don't want them, relegated to squalid encampments, from where they hope to find a safe third country that will take them); these aren't the scrappy immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island with a suitcase full of homemade garlic sausage and greenbacks sewn into their jacket linings; immigrant =/= refugee. Not only are refugees more desperate than your regular channel immigrants, but as they may not even have wanted to leave their country of origin, they are often more attached to and haunted by their pasts. This book is intriguingly filled with such hauntings, yet not every story deals with refugees; hence my slight cynicism.
The opening story, Black-Eyed Women (as quoted above), is such a strong beginning: a former refugee is now living in California with her mother, working as a ghost-writer on other people's projects (of which her mother approves since where they came from, writers who signed their work invited trouble). Not only is she is a ghost-writer, but it would appear she is being haunted by actual ghosts (the kind that can talk and interact and leave cold puddles on the floor). I was so shocked by this family's escape from Vietnam story, that that's all I'm going to say about that, but here are a couple others (as recalled by a longtime resident of California and a new transplant):
She wondered if he remembered their escape from Vung Tau on a rickety fishing trawler, overloaded with his five siblings and sixty strangers, three years after the war's end. After the fourth day at sea, he and the rest of the children, bleached by the sun, were crying for water, even though there was none to offer but the sea's. Nevertheless, she had washed their faces and combed their hair every morning, using salt water and spit. She was teaching them that decorum mattered, even now, and that their mother's fear wasn't so strong that it could prevent her from loving them.(I'd Love You to Want Me)And:
As he lay on his cot and listened to children playing hide-and-seek in the alleys between the tents, he 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. He tried to forget what he'd discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake. (The Other Man)Everything about The War Years felt like it could have been a chapter in The Sympathizer (which isn't a complaint since it has a strong storyline about the differing experiences/loyalties of Vietnamese refugees in California, with a hefty and satisfying emotional payoff). But not every story is specifically about refugees. The main character of The Transplant is a second generation Mexican-American who, “had trouble distinguishing one nationality of Asian names from another. He was also afflicted with a related, and very common, astigmatism wherein all Asians appeared the same.” And The Americans features an African-American man – a former bomber pilot during the Vietnam War – who visits the daughter who went to Vietnam as a teacher, partially to atone for her father's sins:
Almost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God's eyes, man's hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere. But seen up close, from this height, the countryside was so poor that the poverty was neither picturesque nor pastoral: tin-roofed shacks with dirt floors, a man pulling up the leg of his shorts to urinate on a wall, laborers wearing slippers as they pushed wheelbarrows full of brick.Someone Else Besides You also features a character – the ex-wife of a refugee – who went to Vietnam in order to better understand her former spouse, and the final story, Fatherland, brings everything full circle: The grown daughter who had fled Vietnam with her mother and siblings returns to visit her father and his second family, revealing that neither side is as it seems (while “Vivian” might have exaggerated her accomplishments in America, the tourist-focused Vietnam she finds is a pastiche meant to meet American expectations).
In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.I've given just a bare overview of the stories, but I want to stress that they are very well-constructed and satisfying works. Most cover themes – about family and history and hope for the future – that are universal to all of us. Much is touching and much is thought-provoking; all any reader would want from a story collection.
