The Refugees is a collection of eight short stories made cohesive by the fact the protagonists are Vietnamese refugees and their immediate families. 

The stories are diverse and extremely powerful. The writing is simple, but not simplistic. It's economical, without fancy language flourishes, yet it packs a punch. The characters are complex, their stories, more often than not, heartbreaking. 

There are so many layers, so many unexpected situations, and circumstances. There is a lot to take away from each story.

I can't rave enough about this book. It's exquisite, poignant and compelling. And so current. 

I need to get my hands on The Sympathizer , because I'm so impressed with Thanh Nguyen's writing, I need to read his Pulitzer-winning novel. 

A must read!

The Refugees

The Refugees is a collection of stunning short stories about the hopes, dreams and aspirations of people who leave one country to live in another. 

I really would implore people to pick this book up and give it a chance. It really is one of the most beautifully thought provoking and inspiring books I've ever had the privilege of reading. 

I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of this book, with thanks to Netgalley and the publisher. 5*+++

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30358505-the-refugees" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The Refugees" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1470284522m/30358505.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30358505-the-refugees">The Refugees</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/282390.Viet_Thanh_Nguyen">Viet Thanh Nguyen</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1847033850">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
I really enjoyed this book of short stories about Vietnamese refugees and their lives here in America, and some parts taking place in Vietnam.<br /><br />This was both dark, and sometimes funny, and all of them about love and family.<br /><br />My favorite was "I'd love you to want me", but they were all very good. <br /><br />Thank you to NetGalley, Grove Atlantic, and Viet Thanh Nguyen for the ARC.
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In these stories about Vietnamese refugees, Vietnamese Americans, Vietnamese perspectives of America, and American perspectives of Vietnam, Nguyen covers a lot of ground. These are relevant, important stories to read in this tumultuous time in history, as we prepare to swear into the highest office in the land a man who is staunchly against helping refugees like we see in this collection. These characters live through unbelievable horror and then must adjust to life in a foreign country, raising children who cannot understand the terror their parents lived through. As a white woman in the States, I have never experienced even an ounce of what refugees (both the fictional ones found in The Refugees and real-life ones today) endure to survive in a world that shuffles them place to place because we deny them safety and sanctuary. That’s what makes these stories so powerful, to me, because it’s a history lesson, a lesson in modern politics, and a lesson of empathy, all at once.

While the writing never awed me, this was a well-rounded collection that easily kept me turning pages. It’s a good, solid collection, and as always, these are the voices we need to be reading, more than ever, heading into 2017.

I haven't read this author's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, 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 .

This is such an exciting time in American literature that we can enjoy the gorgeous language and careful craftsmanship of really very fine short stories and novels in English in the American tradition but from traditionally silent participants in our nation’s pageant: immigrants and people of color. These voices began speaking up some time ago, but if you looked at the award lists until recently, people of color weren’t often on them. That has changed, and right now, before cultures become indistinguishable from one another in the wealth churn, the special character and individual voice of different groups is our bounty to reap.

Nguyen just wows me with his capture of the immigrant experience from so many different directions in this collection of stories. Not only is his language clear and expressive and to the point, his stories are rounded and fulfilling. They tell us something, like dispatches from a new world.

A section called “The War Years” has a story that is not actually about the war we usually think of. We’re in L.A., in Little Saigon, in a grocery store where we breathe in the smell the dried cuttlefish and star anise in the crowded aisles. Father (Ba), mother (Ma), and Long (do I need to say?), a thirteen-year-old for whom school, even summer school, felt like a vacation, worked at the store every day, even Sundays after Mass. 

Ma is the real deal: waking everyone up in the mornings, keeping house, making meals, counting cash. She owns seven pastel outfits, and with makeup and a squirt of scent (gardenia), she is ready to man the cash register. We hear the scratch of her nylons as she rubs one ankle against the other. She knows the margins on every item in the store, even the 50-lb bags of rice in the loft above kitchenware. 

Mrs. Hao visits the store regularly to ask for contributions to “fight the Communists,” but Ma thinks that fight is over. She follows Mrs. Hao home one day to confront her and discovers a fight that is all too real.

The story is so richly told, its depths just keep churning up new insights. And yet it is not alone. “The Transplant” introduces us to Arthur Arellano, a man with several overlapping and reflexive problems—problems which influence each other. Despite “transplant” bringing to mind “immigrant,” in this story the word has a more literal meaning. 

The characters in all these stories have complex problems, complex attachments, complex lives. In “Someone Else Besides You,” a thirty-three-year-old man lives with his father after his own divorce, but his widower father, despite his own proclivities for mistresses, is constantly urging his son to pursue the former wife. See what I mean? Complex.

One story, “The Americans,” depicts a twenty-six-year-old woman who has been teaching English in Vietnam for two years already, living in a town that also hosts a nonprofit engaged in demining. She invites her parents to visit, to meet her boyfriend, to see her housing, her life. The email inviting them is addressed to Mom and Dad, but James Carver, recently retired as a commercial airline pilot, knows it is mostly meant for her mother, who dreams about Vietnam's “bucolic” countryside. “He knew next to nothing about Vietnam except what it looked like at forty thousand feet.”

Nguyen conveys the silent, withheld anger and confusion that men can often exhibit: an inarticulateness that keeps them angry without them even knowing exactly why. James was so proud when his son graduated from Air Force Academy, but he marks his own decline from that moment: he felt he was growing stupider rather than wiser as he aged. That was just the moment that the torch passed, and it is a new world, not his own. If he could but speak his fears, he’d find he was not alone: the world could still be his, he’d just be sharing it.

His daughter Claire is just like daughters anywhere, thinking they know more than they do, speaking and acting so carelessly, so casually hurtful.
“Although she empathized with vast masses of people she had never met, total strangers who regarded her as a stranger and would kill her without hesitation given the chance, she did not extend any such feeling to him.”
Being a parent is tough stuff. One has to have the hide of a rhinoceros.

The technical skill manifest in this story is breathtaking. We are never explicitly told the man is black, married to a Japanese woman while stationed on Okinawa. Their children have grown up loved by their parents, but confused about their identities and disparaged by their schoolmates. James has endured a lifetime of confusion, including his job flying a bomber jet. Unspoken, unresolved resentment is the minefield. 

Nguyen’s stories are feasts of insight, generously shared. We’re lucky folk, to have such a talent writing for us. The Sympathizer, Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel out last year, was a big novel is every sense. He shows us here he can write engaging, enduring short fiction, and his nonfiction, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, has likewise garnered critical attention. Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He has received residencies, fellowships, honors, awards, and grants from a wide range of admiring and grateful organizations.

Refugees are a big American business--not the hosting of refugees, which is carried on by dedicated church and non-profit organizations across the country--but, since the 1960s, the creating of refugees by various military adventures overseas.

The current crop of refugees, streaming into Europe and dribbling into the US, are from war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan. In previous generations, the country has seen streams of 1990s-era Kurds and Haitians, 1980s-era Salvadorans and Nicaraguans, all dating back to the 1970s, when Vietnamese--loyal to the United States during the decade-long war in their country--sought refuge away from the re-education camps and oppression of their now-communist country.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's book uses the definite "the" to describe refugees, even though the tales told within are all of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans, they experiences the book charts provide a look at what later refugee migrations--and their progeny--did and will experience in their new, American homes. Indeed, Nguyen dedicates this collection of short stories "for all refugees, everywhere."

Nguyen's stories follow an interesting arc, from escape to return. The opening story, "Black-Eyed Women" is a ghost story that reveals a terrible loss during a seaborne escape from Vietnam. The final story, "Fatherland," reunites an American-born Vietnamese-American woman with her father and his second family back in the home country. This last, full-circle story was my favorite, cutting well through a generation of myths that Vietnamese tell themselves about Americans and Americans portray about themselves.

(The latter isn't just a Vietnamese thing. It's universal. I met a distant German cousin earlier this year who told me, "When I was growing up, I imagined that a family member had gone to America and grown fabulously wealthy." I had grown up imagining that there must be a castle in the Fatherland with my family's name on it! We were both, obviously, wrong.)

A recurring theme of the book is broken marriages, often caused by the escape from the mother country. Refugees create new families in America yet remain connected emotionally and financially to relatives/families in the old country. The children of separation struggle to build relationships in a generation of transition, not-quite Vietnamese, not-quite American. 

Nguyen's scope is focused on the Vietnamese diaspora in America, but his themes are universal. Looking up from this book to see news on TV of the current wave of refugees, I couldn't help but appreciate its relevance and foresight.

Special thanks to NetGalley and First Grove Atlantic for providing me with an advanced galley in exchange for an honest review.

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