The Refugees

I haven't read this author's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, [book:The Sympathizer|23168277], so I was glad to have the opportunity to read this short volume of stories to get a feel for his writing and now I will for sure read it. The author immediately with captivating writing invites you to meet not just the characters in the present, but we learn about their pasts as well . We meet the ghosts, their families, the culture, the country of of their birth - Vietnam , and inevitably the undercurrent of the war's impact on their lives . The stories are not connected by common characters but yet these stories are connected by the common experience of the characters who survived the war in Vietnam and have found their way to America . However, that is not the focus of every story . It is not just about being in America as refugees, but about universal themes of finding one's identity, coming to terms with the past, facing dementia, family dynamics.

I was really taken by the writing of these eight distinct stories. I enjoyed all of them but my favorites were "Black-eyed Women", about a ghostwriter remembering her traumatic past as she meets the ghost of her brother, who died trying to protect her as the family was making an escape from Vietnam on a small boat and " I'd Love You to Want Me", a touchingly beautiful and sad story about loss of memory and the rediscovery of love. "The Americans" brought back to mind a time I remember with the divergent views of a father, a pilot in the Vietnam war and his daughter- reflecting the differences that we felt in this country about the war and about the returning soldiers. But yet this was also about relationships and familial love .

I don't mean to be facetious, but one of the main reasons I don't connect very well with short stories is that they are just too short . Not long enough to know the characters, sometimes not long enough to get the story, what the author is trying to say . This was not the case here . I highly recommended this well written collection of stories that I found to be moving and impactful and full of the human experience.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Grove Press through both Edelweiss and NetGalley .

While this collection of short stories didn't resonate with me as a whole, there were a handful of really great stories.  This has been my experience with collections a lot recently, so I wasn't too disappointed.

I think my favorite of these stories would be the story about the ghostwriter and his actual ghost brother. It was so easy to empathize with the characters, and with the added mystery of his dead brother it made for quite the haunting tale. :) 

My other favorites included the story about the gay men and the refugee, I liked to see the inclusion of LGBTQA+ characters a lot.   I also enjoyed the story about the husband with dementia, it was both heartbreaking and beautiful to read. 

In the end I gave this collection 3 stars on Goodreads. Overall it was pretty good, and you might enjoy it too. 

Viet Thanh Nguyen has been on my "to read" list for quite some time after hearing about the success of The Sympathizer (winner of several awards including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction). This beautifully written compilation left me amazed and anxious to read The Sympathizer.

This collection of stories explores immigration, family, love, and identity while straddling two worlds
– the homeland, and the adopted homeland. These stories explore the hardships of immigration, of the aspirations and dreams of those that immigrate, and of the relationships and desires that define us all. Filled with figurative and literal ghosts of the past, each story stands alone, yet is tied to the others thematically, and through the strength of the writing.

The finely written prose in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection titled, The Refugees, demands that readers focus close attention on the human beings in these stories, people who are just like us. In a time period during which many people have conflated illegal immigrants with refugees, it can be helpful for anyone to explore the lives of people who were welcomed into the United States from the devastating experiences that disrupted their lives in Vietnam during the war. These stories explore displacement from many different perspectives, especially the struggle of coming to terms with the life left behind and the struggle to adjust to a new place that is not yet home.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

This is a collection of 8 short stories by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen. After reading these, I'm now much more inclined to pick up his winning debut The Sympathizer. I can honestly say I enjoyed all the stories in this compilation. All of them are about the experience of leaving one country for another, but each story was unique. They are about culture and identity but I really loved how they examined relationships - between parents and children, husbands and wives, between siblings - with great insight. My favorite was "I'd love you to want me", which was about a devoted wife whose husband was suffering from Alzheimer's. Some humorous, some deeply moving, all written skillfully but in a simple manner, i.e. few words and yet still managing to create a vivid sense of place and complex characters. Definitely recommended.

I read Mr. Nguyen's first book "The Sympathizer" and learned quite a bit about Vietnamese history so I was intrigued to read this second release. It was much easier to relate to some of the stories in this book than it was to the former, by offering the dynamic of several stories rather then the single plotline it was much easier for most people to find a relatable story to themselves. It was also the various cast of characters in this edition which made the viewpoint of his home country more widely accessible to not only Vietnamese but Americans and those who were once Vietnamese citizens. There were many heartbreakingly true stories but there were also stories of redemption and hope which make it a very well balanced book. Above all, the author has yet again proven apt at pointing out the nuanced subtleties of the people and their behavior that we may have overlooked. Not every author can make you see through the eyes of his characters as I have been able to see this author do. I am looking for to his next release.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2015 novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize in Literature. His new book is Refugees, short stories that explore the refugee experience and are informed by his own family history.

After the Communist take over of Viet Nam in 1975 Nguyen's family was part of the 3 million who fled the country; 800,000 refugees left by boat. They endured days at sea, pirate attacks, and suffered from lack of water and food. Under Communism, those who remained faced persecution and imprisonment in reeducation camps. Nguyen's family was settled in a Pennsylvania refugee camp. They eventually moving to Harrisburg, PA then relocated to San Jose, CA, where they started a Vietnamese grocery.

These stories are deeply moving. People are haunted by the past, uncomfortable in new cultures. Their very appearance makes them stand out as different.

The narrator in Black-Eyed Woman comes from a family haunted by ghosts. She finds it ironic that she has made a career as a ghost-writer. She is visited by her brother's ghost who has come because she has tried to forget the past, but she can't forget the horror of war and what happened on the blue boat that altered their lives forever. In a few pages and flashes of memories we understand the refugee experience and the cost of survival.

The Other Man is about Liem who in 1975 arrives in San Francisco to meet his sponsors, a gay couple. He dreads telling his story one more time, and has created a 'short' version. The letters between Liem and his parents project happy, idealized versions of their lives. Liem considers how he will send postcards, photos of Chinatown New Years, and talk about his friends. His parents write that the family has been re-educated and, forgiven, have donated their homes to the revolution. Neither are able to be truthful.

The teenage girl in War Years pushes her traditional parents to sell American foods in their grocery where they sell Jasmine rice and star anise, fish sauce and red chilies, rock sugar, tripe and chicken hearts. Her mother has resisted Mrs Hoa's pressure to contribute to a fund for the guerrilla army made of former South Vietnamese soldiers who are planning a revolution to resurrect the Republic of the South--Until she sees what Mrs. Hoa's life is like and understands what she has sacrificed.

Arthur's garage is filled with knock-off high-end merchandise. In The Transplant, Arthur is duped by a grifter pretending to be his liver donor.

I'd Love You to Want Me concerns aging Professor Khanh whose memory is slipping to an alternative reality where he married his true love instead of going through the arranged marriage to the dutiful wife who now cares for him.

The Americans considers identity and the search for home from another angle. African American James Carver served in Viet Nam. His Japanese wife insists they visit his daughter Claire who lives in Vietnam. James only knowledge of the country was from forty thousand feet as he flew over on bombing missions. He can't understand why his daughter has chosen to live in a backwater village to teach. Claire can't make him understand how she never felt accepted in the States, did not fit into any pigeon-hold of race, and how she needed to make restitution for the damage he had wrecked on the country during the war.

A divorced son moves in with his elderly father in Someone Else Besides You. The son had watched his father's infidelities to his arranged marriage wife. Concerned he will turn out like his dad, he has resisted his wife's desire to have a child. The father interferes, trying to get the kids back together; They learn the wife is not only pregnant, but she had visited their homeland of Vietnam.

Mr. Ly has two families in Fatherland-- the first wife who took their children and immigrated to the United States, and the replacement wife and children all named for his first children. When his eldest daughter comes to visit from the US, the younger daughter with the same name hopes her sister will sponsor her to come to America. The father had been a capitalist, and at war's end was sent to a labor camp where confessions were extracted as part of his re-education. The truth of their history and life is revealed, impacting the family dynamics.

As a genealogist I am always aware of how I got to 'here.' I think of my grandparents and great-grandparents and eighth great-grandparents. They moved across Europe, leaving their war-torn homeland and fleeing war and religious persecution. Drawn to the promise of America, they crossed the ocean, searched for new communities that would accept them, and made my life possible. We are all descended from refugees.

I am glad to have read these stories, especially in light of the world refugee crisis today and the current administration's push against acceptance of refugees.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection, THE REFUGEES, could not be more timely --- or timeless. The deft hand that brought us the searing, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel THE SYMPATHIZER returns with eight tales of disparate refugees. As in his previous work, Nguyen handles the subject matter with empathy and sociopolitical awareness. He pairs brutally authentic realism with lyric narratives to ultimately resonate with haunting truth.

This is not a war novel, and unlike THE SYMPATHIZER, these are not, at least explicitly, war stories. Instead, each story is an intimate portrait of the fallout of war, spanning different stages of aftermath in Vietnam or America.

The act of becoming and living as a refugee is a deeply complex, fraught one, now as much as ever --- and Nguyen does dedicate the book to “all refugees, everywhere.” The identity of refugee speaks to the liminality of place and belonging: someone who has been forced out of what was once home, narrative, community and expectation, who now must create themselves in a rawly new environment, one that almost inevitably rejects them in some capacity.

The memories of what was once home and the consciousness of what is now occurring within that home to create the demographic of its refugees linger with the refugee while they are forced to learn the scripts of their new culture. They no longer belong to their country of origin, and yet they cannot escape its stigma or the memories of its influence. They may be met with pity or fear, or worse. They also may find themselves welcomed, but may then discover that, though they can wear their place of refuge like a shield against the terrors from which they fled, it suits them ill-fittingly, and the niche they try to carve out for themselves jabs them in ways they couldn’t have expected. These are the experiences that Nguyen evokes, intimately, in excellent renditions of the short story form.

A young woman’s brother had committed an act of ultimate sacrifice as they embarked on the treacherous sea journey towards safety. Decades later, she does not know what to say to his ghost. A young man flees Vietnam and experiences culture shock with his liberal San Francisco sponsor and the man’s boyfriend --- not because the situation is uncomfortable, but because he begins to learn new truths about himself that he does not yet know what to make of. A wife slowly discovers the painful reality about her husband’s distant past as his memories blur and he begins to call her by the wrong name. His mind is too far gone to recognize his own cruelty.

These stories are unified by their gentle poignancy and their investigations into shifting identity: expectations, adaptations and holding onto what has not yet been taken. Few other works have endeavored to focus on refugees with the focused lens of short story, and Nguyen’s rendition is haunting, beautiful and urgent.

Reviewed by Maya Gittelman

This collection of short stories deserves more than just a skimpy desultory look or glance. There is something a lot more global than just anecdotic stories about various Vietnamese refugees in the USA. They are like the smoldering tip of God’s cigarette just before God lowers it onto your skin, into your flesh, just before God lowers it onto the flesh of your newborn baby, or is it going to be its eyes, in front of you, tied up as you are to some unmovable post and your baby hanging from one leg tied up to a beam. These stories are going to be the best ever answer to any ban on immigrants for any reason whatsoever. Refugees are the responsibility of the USA since the USA bombed and destroyed so much in Vietnam, both north and south. We could widen it to all colonial and imperialistic powers, France, Great Britain, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Russia and a few others. They are directly responsible for the flow of migrants that have occurred over the last seventy years or even more. At times these migrations were forced deportation of the colonized or previously colonized people. Just accept to be deported to exploitation and segregation in the motherland to be allowed to survive and help your family survive in the colony or ex-colony. There is always a backlash in history after any crime against humanity and the invasion of countries like Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria, and who knows which one tomorrow, is a crime against humanity.

The Vietnam war (and the Indochina war before) is a constant reference in this book and you will not be able to understand the tremendous pain in these characters if you forget about it. And what’s more that war (with the other one in the background) was useless, defeated, absurd. The west has been engaged in all kinds of wars in colonies, ex-colonies and other countries in the third world as they call it. Where are the victories? The Falklands (with an English ship sunk by a French missile); Granada; Panama. And then where? The defeats or the non-victories: Korea; Vietnam (and Indochina before); Algeria; Suez; the independence for ALL colonies, except some small islands in the Caribbean Sea, or in the Indian Ocean, or in the southern Pacific Ocean, and a couple in South America. For how long anyway? The assassination of Mosaddegh has led to the mess of today in Iran. The assassination of Lumumba has led to the mess of today in Congo. The bringing down of Saddam Hussein has led to the mess of today in Iraq and Syria. The bringing down of the Talibans has led to the mess of today in Afghanistan. And look at Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and a few other ex-colonies. We manipulated the Arab Spring and look at what it has led to, both the Arab Spring and our manipulation of it. And look at the mess in Libya where we decided to bring down Gadhafi.

This collection of short stories looks at this mess from and through the point of view of some Vietnamese refugees who fled Vietnam either after the French Indochina war or after the takeover of Saigon by the Communists. Quite a few surviving boat people who have managed by pure luck to go through the ocean, the thirst, the hunger, the pirates, the human traffickers, etc. The first story will give you a taste of a boat full of boat people being taken over by pirates: looted first and then all girls taken away probably to bring new flesh to the prostitution rings in some countries like Thailand. At the same time there was a nice young teenager (twelve mind you) and he will be used by all the pirates after killing his elder brother who tried to protect him and before leaving, the boy well used but still alive. Imagine the mess. All that in front of his parents.

And some in the USA organize extortion rings to get money from those who have managed to get to something in the Vietnamese communities, to open a profitable store or commerce or service. Pay for some fictitious, fantasized guerrilla warfare unit being trained in Thailand to free the Vietnamese motherland. And on that traffic families of eight to twelve people live very decently. That extortion money does not even go where it is supposed to go. And no one will go to the police mind you.

And then you have these importers of counterfeited goods who have to find some kind of place to store them away since they cannot open any official store: a garage in the home of some Vietnamese chap they can hold by the tail with some charade about being the son of the old man who donated his liver to him. And at the same time the family business of that man is employing a lot of illegal undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. So a little bit of blackmail on top of it and the underground business can go on. Assuming that it remains discreet.

And the poignant old professor who is being invaded by Alzheimer and starts calling his wife Yen. The jealousy at first and a very slow understanding that the professor is losing his short memory and only keeps his very distant memory, and thus the woman he is living with becomes the girl friend he may have had and he remembers from when he was a teenager, his high school crush for example. And in such a situation there is no guilt, no conscience, no unfaithfulness, just loss of memory and Alzheimer patients have to be “flattered” in their ranting.

And what about the black pilot who bombed Vietnam from his base in Japan and married a Japanese women and whose daughter decides to go to Vietnam to teach something useful to make up for the crimes of her father’s and she falls in love with a Vietnamese young man and she “becomes” Vietnamese. Imagine the visit of her parents to her in the small place where she works and lives in what is seen by the father as some kind of treacherous act against him and his past that he is not able to criticize since he would have to accept the criminal dimension of his military period. How many people, children, women, pregnant women have his bombs killed?

And what about a young man who is lost in front of the impossible rootless life he has with a mother who was chosen by his father’s father in an arranged marriage. She is dead now but there was no love lost or wasted in that couple and family. And the father had affairs all his life and is having one more after his wife’s death and that girlfriend, the widow of a senator, does not even realize that man will cheat on her because he cannot but cheat. And the son was married but his wife, Sam, wanted a child and he was not sure he wanted one, lost as he was in his rootless family. So the wife goes away and gets a quick divorce and the young man finds out a few months later that she is pregnant. She had managed him so that he made her pregnant without him knowing. Easy, isn’t it, in these days of pills that you can just forget and condoms that are not used in a married couple that lives that kind of pill-taking ritual.

The last story is the most surprising. It is centered on a girl Phuong and her parents, plus two brothers. The mother is the father’s second wife because his first wife left with the first three children while the father, a shoe factory owner, was being reeducated after the fall of Saigon. He named the second batch of three children with the same names as the first batch. The story becomes fascinating when the first daughter, the daughter of the exiled mother called Vivien in their Chicago context, announces her visit. You can imagine the brutality of the confrontation of the fate of a refugee in the USA who lives the hard life of a poor working class girl who is spending her severance allowance from the job she has been fired from, to visit her father just for some nostalgic and slightly perverse reason; with the would-be refugee-dream of the Vietnamese daughter, Phuong, who only dreams of going to the USA, in her poor conditions of little means, crowded apartment, nearly compulsory, at least unescapable, jobs, and other limitations due to the poverty of the country that invest in tourism to make western tourists more or less cry or empathize on the lot of Vietcong soldiers who won the war by living in underground tunnels. Claustrophobia in these tunnels and agoraphobia when coming out in some public place not recommended. The end of the story will leave you puzzled. Is Phuong getting rid of her emigration dream or is she deciding to do it on her own and with no help from her half-sister in Chicago who had anyway said she could not get bothered with a sister in her very precarious financial situation.

That’s the type of feeling and experience the famous travel ban executive orders were playing with as if it were just some superficial and valueless anecdotic folklore. There is such a lack of empathy in a man like Trump that this book should be treated by us like a bible of the world of tomorrow that will have to accept and recognize the reality of our past and present, and particularly that our past crimes require some sharing because we have to repair and because sharing should always have been the basic human value, not humanoid motto for the rich.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

I really enjoyed this book of short stories about refugees from Vietnam or those in some way effected by it. The stories in this book are moving and emotional and they stick with you for a long time. That is not to say that all of the stories are serious, though. There are enough funny parts in it while still being thought-provoking. From the very first story, in which a young girl meets with the ghost of her deceased brother, to the last, in which a young woman meets her older half-sister whom she is named after and whom she suspects is loved more by her father than she is, the stories spoke to me. Though the stories were short, I still felt connected to the characters. I was truly wowed by this book and Nguyen's writing style and I look forward to reading more by this author in the future.

I received an advance copy of this book in order to review it. All opinions are honest and my own.

The Refugees is a collection of short stories, in the style of James Joyce or Colm Toibin–short snippets of life without a lot of context before or after. (Take that Joyce comparison with a grain of salt…I hate Joyce, but loved this. Style comparison, not author comparison.) Nguyen explores refugees of both country and soul. Every story features a Vietnamese character–while some characters have left Vietnam, others are returning–and all are experiencing some major upheaval in their life. It seems as if Nguyen doesn’t just mean “refugee” in the strict traveling sense, but also that the person is literally leaving one life for another.

Because this is a collection of short stories, know that there is no transition or connection between them besides the common refugee theme. They are written in first-person narrative, and to read them all back to back can sometimes be jarring to someone who doesn’t normally read this style. I am used to flowing right through chapters, so I probably should have read one story a day instead of doing this book all at once, to give myself a chance to separate each from the story before. That isn’t so much a flaw with the book, however, as with myself.

Regardless, I am thrilled with The Refugees, and if I could go back and choose a book from MCO, I’d still choose this one.

I first read the Sympathizer which was a labyrinthine journey in itself. I'm impressed with Nguyen's breadth in being able to encompass so many different protagonists. It was strange being pulled in and unceremoniously jerked out of reach story. (Especially because, uh, at first I thought this was one larger novel that mixed in the different perspectives.. lol. I had to read the two stories with the understanding they wouldn't be expanded on later).

Anyway, short stories are really hard to write and each one was satisfying. The themes are universal but there's always a tie back to Vietnam. So well done.

So beautiful - in a quiet, heartbreaking way. This is possibly my favorite book of 2017, and my second favorite book of all time. Olive Kitteridge was the only other novel that came close to having this effect. Each time I finished story, I came back to the present, transformed and humbled. I have this memory of finishing a story on the subway one morning. I raised my head, looked at the faces around me in the subway and found something in me that wasn't there before. The word "refugee" is a charged one in our day, and this slim collection is so timely. Should be required reading for everyone in the US. Beautiful writing, no praise will do it justice. Rare emotional resonance.

I've never quite liked the idea that fiction humanizes the individuals described in a book. This is often said especially about people from places unfamiliar to a book's potential readers, and it's a bromide made from the same recipe that also says that fiction teaches us about the rest of the world. Instead I think that fiction reminds us not of the humanity of the people described in a book, but that fiction may awaken, or revive, an often buried sense of humanity in ourselves.
If there's a question whether others are really truly human, and we have to be reminded of that humanity, then we - as readers - have a problem that needs to be fixed. Viet Thanh Nguyen's powerful and haunting short story collection, The Refugees, brings into our lives the immigrants and refugees that have arrived in this country over the last few decades, and have substantially contributed to making it great. But Nguyen is not in the business of making some quantitative argument of how important immigrants are to this country, or why we should care.
Most of his characters are refugees from Vietnam who Who made often terrible choices and rest life and occasionally a sense of their own morality and escaping from Vietnam and finally being granted asylum in the United States in the 1970s. They range from a recently arrived young refugee adopted into the charitable home of two San Franciscans, to a woman whose husband seems to slowly lose his memory and starts mistaking her for another lover, questioning whether she herself might have been deceived about earlier choices, to a younger woman whose half-sister returns from the United States promising optimism and hope but delivering a truth that is starkly different. I have a distinct sense of the smells, sounds, and especially the light that suffuses these stories largely set in California, but some also in Vietnam.
Spend a few hours reading The Refugees. (Believe me, it will do more for you than following CNN and Twitter.) By plunging into a world made up of ambiguous moral, romantic and political choices, you will emerge reawakened to your own sense of humanity. In our current political climate, when charity toward immigrants and refugees seems to be in short supply, and when the number of stateless people ranges upwards of 65 million in the world, such a reminder is useful. Nguyen did not write this book with the Trump administration in mind. But it is now even more timely, in addition to being a incredibly immersive creation of fully realized, complex characters and their worlds.
Fiction, as Kafka memorably put it, is the ax to break open the frozen see inside us. I take this to mean that fiction is not intended to remind us of the humanity of others, but to rekindle our own innate yet often buried sense that we share the world with everyone, always anew.

Short stories about Vietnamese refugees and their lives in America. The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975. The early Vietnamese immigrants into America were refugee boat people. Today over 1.3 million Vietnamese Americans reside in America, more than half of them in the states of California and Texas. Enjoyed reading this slim collection.

Good. Not great. There weren't any page jumping moments for me in this collection of stories and some of them had abrupt endings, like the author decided he had written for too long. The writing is fluent and eloquent, but the stories are not dynamic, lacking in memorability. With short stories you have to get right to it, and some of these stories kind of meandered at their beginnings, making it tough to have a grand finish, because there was no middle. Is there enough here to justify reading the book in it's entirety? A tough question to answer, but I lean towards yay, even though the brilliant sparks are sorely missing.

This book is a series of eight short stories. They are stories of pain, loss and memories. These are fictional stories of Vietnamese refugees in the US and how they adjusted, or not, to life in another country. One family sees ghosts and talks about what ifs: "If we hadn't had a war," she said that night, her wistfulness drawing me closer, "we'd be like the Koreans now. Saigon would be Seoul, your father alive, you married with children, me a retired housewife, not a manicurist."

"We would come outside after the bombing, you holding my hand while we stood blinking in the sun."
"But I guess oil was to be found in every part of the world, just like anger and sorrow."

Viet Thanh Nguyen was interviewed on CSPAN talking about his books and it is available on their website, booktv.org
I rate it 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4, out of 5 stars. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me this book

I would like to thank NetGalley and Grove Atlantic and Grove Press for an ARC of "The Refugees" by Viet Thanh Nguyen for my honest review. The genre of this novel is fiction, possibly historical fiction. This novel is composed of eight short stories written by the author. All the stories reflect Vietnamese life in American or in the homeland. I find that it is difficult to review a book with many stories. Some of the stories had no written conclusion or seemed to be open for interpretation. The author writes of family, love, immigration, homosexuals,mistresses, feelings of identity, and cultural differences. There also seems to be a feeling of pride that seems to be important. I found that the stories were interesting and the descriptions were graphic. I would recommend this book to those who enjoy reading short descriptive cultural stories.

Like The Sympathizer, the author displays a crisp writing style in this collection of short stories. For me, though, the short story format wasn't particularly compelling. But it was a quick read that didn't require a concentrated effort to complete. For these reasons, I can only give the book 3 stars.

Following up his 2015 novel, The Sympathizer which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Viet Thanh Nguyen has gathered together a collection of his short stories for The Refugees.

Nguyen quotes from two sources in his Preface, Roberto Bolano’s introduction to Antwerp

"I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time."

And a small piece of James Fenton’s poem A German Requiem

”It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life.

These two quotes really do set the tone and atmosphere for these eight stories. Each of these stories is unique from the others, but there is a awareness of the common thread running through them all. The shared experience of these Vietnamese refugees who left their homeland to move to an environment promising a new beginning with a new life. A promise of a better life. The ghosts left behind, but who never really leave. The memories. The struggles to feel accepted and part of this new life. Cultural differences. Language differences.

While I enjoyed all of these, the first story Black-Eye Woman was my favourite with the following two The Other Man and War Years were close behind. All are worth reading – these eight stories cover a wide range of experiences and emotions, each story presents a unique situation and a unique refugee experience.

Incredibly moving.

Recommended.

After reading The sympathizer, I was looking forward to read this book and I was not disappointed because, as a matter of fact, I think the author is even better at writing short stories than novels, but as I read only this two books I cannot really say.
The deep meaning of living abroad, far from one's country, in a different culture, what does really mean loss, all subjects that are developed by this stories and gives us a lot of food for thoughts. Remarkable.

Dopo aver letto The Sympathizer non vedevo lora di leggere questi racconti e non sono sicuramente rimasta delusa, in quanto, secondo me ma é ingiusto dirlo, l'autore é piú bravo con le storie brevi rispetto ai romanzi, anche se ho letto solo 2 sue opere. Il significato piú profondo di vivere in un paese che non é il nostro, il concetto di cultura differente, cosa significa veramente perdere la propria patria e tanti altri concetti, vengono affrontate in queste storie che danno sicuramente molto da pensare. Libro notevole per molti versi.

Anyone interested in short stories should read The Refugees. And people who have no idea how good short stories can be should read it, too. These stories are on the highest level of literature with fully developed characters, intense atmospheres and historic detail seamlessly woven in. I am extremely impressed, and as a former writer of short stories (some published), I marvel at the way each of these stories creates a world of its own. I know how difficult short story writing can be. The masterful craft that went into these stories is undeniable.

this short story collection is poignant, emotional, and entirely relevant to today. the variety of stories explores a breadth of identities, backgrounds, and memories associated with both the refugee experience and navigating a new identity. you'll want to read this again and I'm looking forward to that as I move onto the next stage of my life.

I always feel let down by short stories, they generally feel like unfinished stories to me. Each one of these stories were complete and even if I didn’t read what happened to Thomas and Sam I knew they’d be okay, or not, and I was okay with that.

I loved Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and was very eager to read The Refugees, his new collection of short stories coming out in February. It did not disappoint. There are eight stories with the common theme of refugees to America and from America, most from Vietnam. In the story featuring a Latino man as the focus, he has a liver transplant from a Vietnamese donor whose family he seeks out.

Nguyen is a beautiful writer whose prose glows with passion and empathy. These stories are all deeply human. The first, “Black-Eyed Women” is a haunting ghost story, a young woman visited by her brother who died on the boat as they fled Vietnam, who swam for years to cross the Pacific to see her. I was entranced by this story, so loving, so humane, and so heartbreaking with deep pain and sorrow.

My best friend and I read “War Years” aloud to each other, enjoying the recollection of his strict parents, their hard-working ethic and strict economy that left no room for an allowance. When he asked for one, his father produced a list of lifetime expenses to date, not counting emotional aggravation. It was a lesson for him in compassion.

“I’d Love You to Want Me” is the story of an aging couple. He’s calling her by another woman’s name, someone she does not know. It is a story common to so many families, the growing incapacity and loss of memory of aging partners or parents. It is a story of commitment.

I loved The Refugees. Every story is excellent, even the weakest story, “The Transplant” is a good story that drew me in. I just thought it got lost toward the end. I did not feel much sympathy for the characters, even the poor fellow with a liver transplant.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a magical writer. He creates a strong sense of place, you can feel the heat and sweat trickling between shoulder blades. He understands people and he feels deep compassion for them. His stories are full of heart. I loved The Sympathizer and loved The Refugees. I look forward to reading his next, his next, and the next after that.

I received an advance e-galley from the publisher through Edelweiss.

This is a great follow up to the spectacular Sympathizer. Each story is incisive, humorous and delivers a punch that I keep thinking about. I read this over two days - I kept wanting to go on the the next story. Really gives you a sense of what it is to be a refugee cut from so many different angles.

This book of exquisite short stories is a collection of varied characters and themes. The stories are moving, sad, haunting, enlightening, and memorable. The writer's wonderful skill at writing brings the stories to life with detailed descriptions and realistic characters.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book!

Reading this book brought so many memories of my own family. The stories they have told me of escaping war and their own struggles. It touch a nerve in me that I will never fully be able to comprehend what my family went through. Thanks for making me appreciate and grateful not only for what my family did but for all refugees who sacrificed their own lives & dreams for the betterment of their children.

This is, quite possibly, the best collection of short stories I've ever read. My only complaint is that I'd get super interested and invested right as the story was ending. I often wanted more! But the writing is so good, and the topic is fascinating. Great collection all around.

Not all stories about refugees but all relevant to Vietnam. I enjoyed reading it. It is useful to read "The Sympathizer" if you do not know the subtle issues about how people from Vietnam came to the U.S. after the war, but still revealing about the subculture in the United States.

These are stories of strangers in strange lands, some strangled by the past, others reading for the future. Deeply touching, they reflect the struggle all of us endure in establishing our identities.

Viet Thanh Nguyen draws unforgettable pictures of refugees who have arrived and lived in different circumstances. His grasp of the culture shock of immigrating is firm, as is his understanding of generational differences between young and old refugees. An unforgettable book.

This is, quite possibly, the best collection of short stories I've ever read. My only complaint is that I'd get super interested and invested right as the story was ending. I often wanted more! But the writing is so good, and the topic is fascinating. Great collection all around.

Not all stories about refugees but all relevant to Vietnam. I enjoyed reading it. It is useful to read "The Sympathizer" if you do not know the subtle issues about how people from Vietnam came to the U.S. after the war, but still revealing about the subculture in the United States.

These are stories of strangers in strange lands, some strangled by the past, others reading for the future. Deeply touching, they reflect the struggle all of us endure in establishing our identities.

Viet Thanh Nguyen draws unforgettable pictures of refugees who have arrived and lived in different circumstances. His grasp of the culture shock of immigrating is firm, as is his understanding of generational differences between young and old refugees. An unforgettable book.

I was fortunate in winning an advanced copy of Viet Thanh Nguyen's stories from Goodreads. Being of a age to be familiar with and touched by the Vietnam war, they were an interesting glimpse into the culture involved in that upheaval in our history. I enjoyed them tremendously and look forward to reading The Sympathizer. This is a very talented writer.