It can be difficult within the span of a short story to tell a complete story with fully formed characters but this collection of short stories does that, showcasing a series of snapshots of Vietnamese refugees who have settled in America. The stories concentrate on families, those torn apart by the war and those struggling to live between the past and the present. The writing is simple but powerful and sometimes poignant as in one story where a woman caring for her husband with dementia has to accept that he calls her by another woman’s name. For me “The Ghostwriter” was the most powerful story, where a woman who ghostwrites novels for people who have survived traumatic events meets and talks to the ghost of her own brother who died on the boat from Vietnam. The stories are often intense but never too gloomy or without hope and sometimes sprinkled with humour. They also remind us that being a refugee is not just about resettling in a new country with nothing but the clothes you are wearing but about assimilatating into a new culture while keeping the old one close and trying to raise the next generation to honour the past as well as the future.

"You have to understand, no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land."
From the poem "Home" by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire


Reading this highly gratifying collection of stories felt incredibly auspicious, although not necessarily in a good way. At a moment when the level of people seeking asylum worldwide is at an all time high, author Viet Thanh Nguyen sheds light into what moves people to abandon everything they know, put their lives at risk by braving treacherous journeys and face the stigma of becoming stateless immigrants. 

Although written from very diverse points of view, the nine stories included on The Refugees revolve around people who fled Vietnam during and after the Vietnam war, and who eventually settled down in several communities of expats in California. 

Nguyen's writing is both stirring and powerful but he's careful not to come across as too heavy-handed or overly dramatic. I appreciate the subtlety he uses to describe the sense of loss and disorientation that never completely abandons those who are forced to leave behind their home countries. 

I thought the quality of the collection was pretty consistent, but there was one story that particularly resonated with me. In “I’d Love You to Want Me", an aging couple faces the devastating effects of dementia. The husband has recently started calling his wife by another woman’s name, a name the wife doesn't recognize. The pain and challenges she confronts as a result are told with a great deal of empathy and compassion.

Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam in 1975, himself came as a refugee to the United States along with his family in 1974. In an Op-Ed column published by The New York Times last year, Nguyen reflects in what he sees as the differences between how we regard (regular) immigrants and refugees:
"Immigrants, as troubling as they are to some people, are an integral part of what the American Dream is supposed to be. They're understandable to a considerable number of Americans. Refugees are different. Refugees have been displaced by war or natural disaster or political catastrophes, and they are much more threatening because they are reminders to people that all the comforts that we take for granted can be taken away in just a moment. 
Immigrants are more reassuring than refugees because there is an end point to their story; however they arrive, whether they are documented or not, their desires for a new life can be absorbed into the American dream or into the European narrative of civilization. By contrast, refugees are the zombies of the world, the undead who rise from dying states to march or swim toward our borders in endless waves"

Like it happens in many diasporas, they way these characters choose to connect with the old country creates, at times, a chasm between many in their communities. While some want to move on and put their haunting memories behind, others can't seem to move away from the ghosts of the past.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of June 2016 the number of refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people around the world topped 65 million. That's 1 in every 113 people on the planet. 

The Refugees is an illuminating collection of stories that beautifully examines the pain, sense of loss and stigma that follow refugees everywhere. And yes, Mr. Nguyen your timing was indeed impeccable.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's short story collection The Refugees is very strong, smart, and affecting, centered on the Vietnamese experience but shifting between characters and perspectives to interact with the nation's history, people, and culture in fresh and surprising ways: a Vietnamese man reeling from his divorce and attempting to close a gap with his distant, disapproving father; a former American military man visiting his daughter in the country he fought in; a girl in her family living in modern Ho Chi Minh City, she and her siblings named after her fathers first family that fled as refugees.  Nguyen does an excellent job of varying style, tone, and composition for each story, so each has a unique perspective to offer and never feels redundant to what's come before.  The (slight downside) is that it doesn't always feel like a collection birthed as whole, but rather separate parts coming together in one volume.  And indeed, in the copyright page, one can see that various versions of these stories appeared in journals and magazines over the course of a few years.  Of the 8 stories included, I thought 4 were fabulous, 2 very well done on the whole, and 2 a bit weaker and perhaps a bit out of place in terms of caliber of storytelling and collective relevance.  It's that tangible lack of a collective intent or thrust that pegged this read at 4 stars as opposed to 5, and short story collections can be trickier to review.  But ultimately I really enjoyed the vast majority of Nguyen's The Refugees and admired the prose and was entertained and informed, even if it didn't quite come together cohesively enough for it to be spectacular for me, it was more than solid. And while I did not enjoy Nguyen's The Sympathizer on my first attempt reading it, my response to his writing here makes me want to give that Pulitzer Prize winner another shot.

Standout stories: "Black Eyed Woman", "The War Years", "I'd Love You to Want Me", "Fatherland"

I recommended this book as part of LitHub's Books to Read in February feature:

http://lithub.com/16-books-to-read-this-february/

"As a follow up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizers, Viet Thanh Nguyen brings us The Refugees, a glittering and well-observed novel about the lives of refugees as they migrate between two worlds. We meet a young Vietnamese refugee who comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, a woman who learns of her dying husband’s mistress, and a Vietnamese girl who reunites with her Americanized sister. At a time when the American federal government is questioning more than ever the value of refugees’ lives, this book is not only a moving read—it’s utterly necessary."

I don't know if I could have picked a more perfect time to read (and review) The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen. With the current political climate in America, as well as a pending visit home to see my own Vietnamese mother, these stories hit home in more ways than one.

Vietnam is some place that is familiar to me, despite me never having visited. I grew up seeing those airmail envelopes arriving once a month, to then having 13 additional family members sharing a house to now my youngest sister living in my mother's home country. This collection of stories, to me, is reading the stories of my family. These are stories of immigration and hardship. These are the stories that apply to all hard working, IMMIGRANTS, from every country. This is the America that I'm here for, these are the Americans that I'm proud to be part of.

Viet Thanh Nguyen has been praised for The Sympathizer as well as this book and for good reason. He's a rising star in the lit world and to me, he's one of the stars of contemporary Vietnamese writers.

I received this book via NetGalley in exchange for this review.

Terrific topical exploration of the refugee experience.  Short stories collections are wonderful to dip in and out of but this short book is one I read in a gulp.  Nguyen's language and writing elevate these tales of Vietnamese immigrants.  Thanks to netgalley for the ARC.  This is well worth your time.

The stories in this book are moving and emotional and they stick with you for a long time.  These 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 predict that Nguyen will remembered as one of the best writers of our time.

I am not a fan of short stories.  About the time I get invested in the characters the story ends.  And it's so hard for much to happen in such a short number of pages.  Like looking at a photo instead of a video.  That said, I had enjoyed The Sympathizer and jumped at a chance to get an advance copy of this book.  The writing here is good and you get a real feel for time, place and person.  The stories cover the various aspects of assimilation of the refugees into American life.  These are not happy stories.  The unhappiness of being forced out of their homeland permeates all the characters.  The absence of knowledge about their adopted home weighs on them.  My problem with many of the stories is that they end abruptly.  You turn a page thinking anxious to know what now and there is nothing.  Just the start of another story.  

Of all the stories, my favorite was I Want You to Want Me.  A wife taking care of a husband with Alzheimer's has to accept him beginning to call her by another woman’s name, a name she doesn't recognize at all. And he insists they've done things for which she has no memory.  Here, Nguyen perfectly captures all the questions that go through her head.  

I'm giving this three stars.  But to be honest, I think my unwillingness to give it a higher rating comes back down to my dislike for the format.  If you are a fan of short stories, I think you'll like these.  But if you're not a fan of the short format, I don't think these stories will change your mind.

My thanks to netgalley and Grove Press for an advance copy of this book.

**I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

In little over two years, Viet Thanh Nguyen has emerged as a leading figure in the literary world, winning the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his astounding crime/immigrant/Vietnam War thriller The Sympathizer and getting shortlisted for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Choice award in non-fiction for Nothing Ever Dies (which is an academic book intended to accompany The Sympathizer).

Nguyen has also been serving as the cultural critic at large for the Los Angeles Times, writing about literature and politics through a biting radical lens (which is refreshing when the literary world tends to be rather bland and liberal, even in these dark times of Trump.

For someone who has had his pulse on American cultural and political life, it is both fortuitous and fitting that Nguyen's new short story collection entitled The Refugees, dedicated to "all refugees",is being released in the shadow of Trump's draconian ban on refugees from seven Muslim countries.

The Refugees is a collection of eight short stories, offering insights into various refugee experiences, mostly focused on the Vietnamese diaspora that emigrated from South East Asia in the years after the end of the American war in the region. Nguyen touches on themes of regret and loss, of trying to outrun the experiences and memories that turned one into a refugee, of the political cultures that transposed themselves from home country to new home, and the struggles that refugees experience in their new countries, both of survival and dealing with expectations from those they left behind.

As with The Sympathizer, Nguyen's writing drives the forcefulness of his stories. He writes thoughtful sentences that layer on top of each other to create both atmosphere and mood but also complexity, making the reader dig deep into the text to understand the motivations and actions of his characters. The stories he gives us are painful and somber, yet also with a touch of outlandish humour he pulled off so well in his previous novel.

As the current US Administration seeks to vilify the refugee populations that were products of American imperial adventures, Nguyen's collection is both powerful and necessary. We need to hear the painful pasts that have driven people to leave their homes and families, to understand and empathize with their experiences and appreciate the stakes they (and humanity) face if we ignore them and further marginalize them.

For this reason alone, I urge you all to pick up the book. It's a quick and easy read, yet will give you the energy to keep on struggling for the rights of refugees now and in the future.

I think it was clearly well written, but much like with his novel, The Sympathizer, I had a hard time following the threads of the stories.  It's the stream-of-consciousness thing that I can rarely wrap my head around and, while it doesn't change the greatness of the writing, it takes the story down a  notch for me.  The first few stories in this kept me captivated, but overall, I just don't think he's a writer for me.

THE REFUGEES, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s collection of eight excellent short stories centers around lives of those uprooted from Vietnam, often desperately, and transplanted in America. These stories bring ghosts with them, even in the author’s acknowledgments. “The Black-Eyes Women," the powerful first story is explicit in ghosts lost to brutality, veiling the ghost of the unspeakable past in a “nameless blue boat.” The ghostwriter, a young woman in her early thirties, lives in the silence of writing and the unhealed scars of the past. As one character says in his grief, “The dead move on…But the living, we just stay here.” The eight stories’ characters, unfolding with a subtle restraint and the author’s superb timing, are varied in all the ways people and relationships in cultures are. There is the “Vietnamese soul” present in each story, in the tales of escaping in war’s upheaval, fraying bonds in families between their worlds in two countries, revisiting the old country, and making new lives in a land where one feels a "stranger in a strange land." But this is not a collection with boundaries of history’s rights and wrongs, political victories, and war’s global history. This is a world of relationships, fathers and children, wives and husbands, refugees with refugees in a different country that frightens, jars, and alters them. At times tales based on immigration carry an inherent glow of a nearly mythical homeland and the jangling new country, even with its own benefits. Not here. This writer knows well his characters and their ghosts - ghosts of the dead, the living, the failed dreams, the slipping away of those before our eyes, the weakening bonds, and disappointed expectations. Often, the stories are about what we all face in life – love, loss, death, illness. 

We live in a time now where “the other” – refugee – is a flashpoint word. These stories bring us inside the refugee’s mind, world, memories, pain, daily life, and fears. The ghosts remain, but the presence of “the other” does not, even when the character is less than ethical or not likeable. That is the talent of an exceptional writer, who writes of the young child far removed from the scarred landscape of ghosts, who finds anyone deprived of seeing Star Wars feels “the country in which he lived surely needed a revolution.” This is not “the other.” The loyalty of a wife to a husband slipping away. The tenderness of a father and daughter bond rising out of the dust of discord. While we may not have their ghosts, they are us, and we are them. The writer gives us that, and we need it desperately right now. Today.

An exceptional, marvelous, memorable book of stories. I hope there will be more collections of short stories by this Pulitzer Prize winning author.

Thank you to NetGalley, Grove Press and Viet Thanh Nguyen for the ARC.

The refugees is a collection of stories about Vietnamese refugees. Their ghosts, fears, peculiarities, and idiosyncrasies. The book highlights aspects of the Vietnamese culture such as music, food, relationship dynamics, and values. It also highlights how refugees sometimes struggle with the differences between in culture between their homeland and their adopted home. Some of the stories are funny, but I found none of them outstanding or remarkable enough to leave a lasting impression. The writing is great, the stories creatively told, but I just couldn't connect with the book... I'm not sure what to make of it.

I requested The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen because although I didn’t read his first novel The Sympathizer, it was so highly regarded that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on his latest work. The Refugees is a collection of eight short stories featuring the voice of Vietnamese refugees who are navigating their new country and those who were left behind in Ho Chi Minh City.

In all honesty, I couldn’t bring myself to finish this book. Although I really enjoyed and admired Nguyen’s writing style, I really struggled to connect with the experiences that characters were enduring. My knowledge of the Vietnam War does not extend much further that whatever we learned in eighth grade history class, so I think my ignorance of what the Vietnamese people truly experienced prevented me from being captivated by this novel. Furthermore, as a reader, I struggle with the lack of continuity and cohesiveness in collections of short stories. As strange as it may sound, I find it very challenging to keep having to reset every few dozen pages and open my heart to new characters, only to have them disappear so quickly. That being said, The Refugees is definitely a novel I would return to after I brushed up on my history because Nguyen did a remarkable job in creating depth and giving warmth to the characters he introduced in such a confined space.

Despite my high hopes for this novel, The Refugees fell quite short for me. However, for those of you out there who loved The Sympathizer and have a strong understanding of the impact of the Vietnam War, I think you will be very impressed with it. Nguyen writes with a whimsical style that is very impressive, however the overall context of the short stories failed to draw me in.

Such timely stories that are so very well written about Vietnamese refugees and their lives. A great reminder that this country was made of immigrants, refugees being the most vulnerable and impactful. It's so important for the country's future to have open borders for folks like these described in this work.  

Politics aside, the writing is impeccable and the stories are very engaging.  I highly recommend this book!

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 received an ARC via NetGalley.

This collection of short stories showcases various aspects of immigration with an assortment of Vietnamese characters. I liked the many faces of diaspora and problems of cultural identity that came through in these stories, and the writing style was nice, as well. Choosing a story with slight magical realism elements as the first one in the book threw me off, though, as I thought this would be a recurring theme throughout. Also, in some of the stories, the titular "refugee" topic is not apparent at all - those were still good stories, but maybe more fit for a different collection. Overall, though, this is a great read.

I personally could not get past Nguyen's fourth story. I enjoyed the stories, and they were definitely simple enough for a reader 14+ to interpret and understand. 
The first story details a ghost-writer of stories for others: a writer of memoirs for *other people*. The irony is not lost that the author, nameless but female, is also but a shell of her former self. Having lost her brother to violence suffered at sea, it seems she too hast lost herself. This story was an interesting look at ghosts, both living and lost.
The 2nd story follows Liem, who from his arrival is misunderstood (can't even pronounce his name correctly!). He stays with Parrish and Marcus, two homoexual men living in San Francisco during the 1970s. Liem gets a job and tries to understand himself as a member of the United States. This story provided complex look at refugees, the families they leave behind, and one's own understanding of his sexuality.
"War Years"--story 3--details the early eighties and the thirteen year old narrator's family struggles. His parents own a grocery shop and they are confronted by an area woman seeking money to help the resistance against Communists in Vietnam. The narrative showcases typical teen conflicts of conscience but also the extra layers of hardship for many immigrants: money, politics, and loyalties to love and land. Of the four I read, this one was my favorite. 
The fourth story was my least favorite, "The Transplant." Not only was it more confusing than the others, but I failed to see the theme the author was attempting to impart on readers. 
Overall, I feel this book would be an excellent selection for a non-Western literature course, as it offers perspective on current affairs as well as past.

I'm not a short story reader. Or am I? Every year for the past four years a collection of short stories has made my "Top Ten Litpicks" of the year. The Refugees is definitely a contender for this year. I thought this collection of 8 stories was really something special. The stories are not really linked but they are definitely cohesive - each one dealing with a Vietnamese refugee. My favorites: a man who receives a new liver and goes out of his way to find the donor's family. A young man, divorced and now living with his father, lets his father make some big life decisions on his behalf. I don't know. They were all good. 4.5 stars, possibly rounded up depending on what else the year may bring.

II wanted nothing more than to devour The Refugees in one go as a famished person at a feast. The Refugees paints vivid portraits of individuals making their lives in a new country while having one foot firmly planted in their hometowns. All the characters masterfully wrought by Nguyen live and struggle with their pasts as they navigate relationships with their families and friends. They are human and haunted in and by the choices they've made and those that were made for them.

This is a series of 8 short stories about Vietnamese refugees in the United States and their families. One of the stories is about a Vietnamese couple where the college professor husband is suffering from Alzheimer's.  Another story is of couple operates a grocery store in the New Saigon section  of a California city. A couple stories are about the children of Vietnamese women who married American soldiers. There is a story of a wealthy Vietnamese man whose first wife and children fled to the US when he was imprisoned and "reeducated" . One story is about a young male refugee sponsored by a gay man who lived with a partner in San Francisco. Another tale is about a Vietnamese gangster. Then there is the story about ghosts of people who died fleeing the war in Viet Nam. 

Each of these well written stories gives the reader a different insight into what life was like in Viet Nam that forced these people to flee and how the experiences formed them.  Each short story was previously published by the author in a periodical or journal.