Michelle Nhung Le

Posted on: 8/4/2022

Weaving together eight short stories of characters from all walks of life yet all bound to Vietnam in one way or another, “The Refugees” encompasses how living, internalizing and inheriting the refugee experience alter the essence of life for refugees and people whose lives they touch. The collection’s variety defies any easy stereotype that equates refugees fleeing a war-torn Vietnam with the notion of masses who lack individualism. The tales told can be as heart-wrenching as “War Years”, depicting the son of a family escaping Vietnam when he was too young to remember, who has grown caught between two cultures: the Vietnamese culture of his family, and the American culture of his classmates he was more attracted to. The narratives also tackle a more difficult and horrific facet of being a refugee, alluding to a harrowing refugee trip across the ocean that characters risked their lives for in “I’d love you to want me”.

I recalled my first time reading “The Refugees” a few years back, zealously jumping on the bandwagon amidst the hype we Vietnamese built around Viet Thanh Nguyen. Understandably so - he earned us the literary representation we longed for. At the time, the refugee experience remained a much foreign concept that I, a Vietnamese living the whole life in my own country, was ignorant to and barely resonated with. No sooner had I moved abroad alone did I find myself in the pages of “The Refugees”, exposed, acknowledged and sympathized with. My destination Singapore was a more westernized state that bore nothing similar to what I left behind in Vietnam, be it friends, school, ideas or culture. So yes, I’m admittedly biased to say the relatively mundane lives of a ghostwriter, a wife, a queer young man, separate sisters, a boy and an ex-soldier arrested my attention and incessantly tested my tear duct tolerance. Yet as conflicting as this sounds, you don’t need to become one to feel the struggles of these refugees; let Nguyen’s exquisite storytelling, pregnant with emotional fervor and tinged with melancholy blur the boundaries between your world and theirs.

“The Refugees” stands for ideas bigger than my yet-privileged immigrant experience, in the wake of a world too occupied plunging forward it leaves behind the people displaced by its unceasing strife. The book steered from the omnipresent politicalization of the immigration crisis, instead chose to highlight the humane aspects pervading every interaction of people it affected. Nguyen encourages readers to step back, to see refugees and asylum-seekers, not as numbers and figures plaguing media coverage, but as vulnerable human beings, who lost their sense of belonging to attempts of assimilation, torn between a haunting past and an uncertain future, held captive by loneliness and isolation.

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