Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Refugees, 9780802126399, hardback, Grove Press, no German edition yet

With his novel “The Sympathizers” Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

I have always been interested in Vietnam, one of the most beautiful countries I ever had the pleasure visiting.  My generation still recalls the Vietnam War vividly, the boat people and the wave of Vietnamese refugees coming to the US and Western countries.  “The Sympathizers” is still sitting on my reading list but I just downloaded and read his recently released collection of literary short stories, “The Refugees”.

These short stories written over a longer time period of time give an excellent portrait of Vietnamese refugee life in the US. But they apply to feelings all refugees share, especially those born in their parents adopted country struggling with the scars immigration left on their family history.  

These are multi-facetted stories about everyday life such as that of the refugee who is given a new home in the apartment of a gay couple in San Francisco of the Seventies and the culture shock he suffers.  A Vietnamese women, whose husband is suffering from dementia, is extremely irritated when he starts calling her by another woman’s name, more tenderly than ever, clearly the lover he left behind.  Disturbing to me was the story of a man who has returned to former Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, where he has given the children of his new family with his former mistress and now second wife exactly the same names as the family he left behind in the US. And the bully of an ex-military man who is visiting his bi-racial daughter who is now living in Vietnam working for a charity organization, where they run into the same conflicts dividing them already in the US.  The sense of struggle of having two identities runs like a thread through all these keenly observed, beautifully crafted stories.