I’ve been searching for a quote — just one, a simple sentence that speaks to truth — to explain what it means to be a refugee, to be among the millions of people whose voices we so rarely hear.
I found it in the writing of Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and author of the novels The Sympathizer (2015) and The Committed (2021), the short story collection The Refugees (2017), the memoir A Man of Two Faces (2023), the essay collection To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other (April 2025), and several other works. Like me, Nguyen grew up a refugee.
Nguyen is chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and a featured author and speaker at this weekend’s Santa Fe International Literary Festival.
In March 1975, when Nguyen was 4, he and his mother and 10-year-old brother fled Buôn Ma Thu.ôt, Nguyen’s hometown, in the Central Highlands after the northern Vietnamese army invaded. Nguyen’s father was in Saigon and his mother had no way of contacting him. She had to leave her 16-year-old adopted daughter behind to guard their home. They fled on foot and later by boat. His father reunited with them on a larger ship, and they stopped at several American military bases in the Philippines and Guam, only to land in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania.
There’s a universality to the refugee experience: the urgency of the escape; the secrecy; the fear; the journey, by foot, train, boat, and sometimes plane; the camp and life under canvas, or if you’re lucky, under a solid roof; displacement to another country, or a series of other countries; a government that decides for you and your loved ones; then, if you’re doubly lucky, a home in a new city, where everything is new and different and is not really “home.” Then there’s the poverty, the language barriers, and the search for work.
There’s also heartache and confusion and loss. So much loss. And then, if triply lucky, the reconstruction and reimagining of a different life, and the adjustment to it, at least in the case of the refugee child, if the child is young enough to digest what happened.
I found the one quote that encompasses it all in The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, a 2018 anthology of pieces by refugee writers that Nguyen edited and for which he wrote the introductory essay.
“These displaced persons [refugees] are mostly unwanted where they fled from,” Nguyen writes, “unwanted where they are, in refugee camps; and unwanted where they want to go. They have fled under arduous conditions; they have lost friends, family members, homes, and countries; they are detained in refugee camps in often subhuman conditions, with no clear end to the stay and no definitive exit; they are often threatened with deportation to their countries of origin.”
Nguyen writes his personal experience to a point — he was a child, after all, when his family had to flee, and he does not remember everything. But what makes his work so poignant, whether he’s writing fiction or nonfiction, is not only its particularity but also its extraordinary universality.
My country of origin was not torn by war at the time my family escaped to the West but rather by authoritarianism and military rule. And yet, Nguyen’s writing, which famously speaks to the experiences of Vietnamese refugees and to people who suffered the trauma of the war in Vietnam, speaks — line after line, without material or geographic details — to my own experience and that of my people.
In a Zoom interview with Pasatiempo, Nguyen addresses a dictum that English-language writers are told time and time again and that limits more than liberates a writer’s practice: Write what you know.
“I think it is true,” Nguyen says. “Write about what you know. But the way this has been interpreted and put out there has been so narrow in its conception that it’s not helpful in a lot of ways.
“I think our particular experiences as individuals, whatever those happen to be, are what we [writers] draw from,” he adds. “That’s not necessarily the same as our identity, whatever your [ethnic or other] identity happens to be. People, perhaps misguidedly, believe that to write what one knows only relates to external reality: I am X so I should only write about X.”
Nguyen mentions writer Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), who was Polish and didn’t become fluent in English until his early 20s, and yet who wrote — in English — about experiences in colonial Africa that had nothing to do with Poland or Polish identity.
“I’m assuming that what he knew,” Nguyen says, “was something about humans: the human character, the human experience. That is actually what we should be writing about.”
Nguyen gave a talk I attended at Boston University during the school’s annual Ha Jin Lecture. It was a few months after I had moved to the U.S. from Hong Kong and a few months before the pandemic.
His lecture was about the act and importance of writing refugee stories. Among the many ideas and tips he shared with my fellow MFA classmates and others in the audience was that writers of non-English cultural origins should never explain ourselves. We should never explain or translate non-English words or terms or cultural concepts that readers are not familiar with or may not understand right off the bat. Only do so if the explanation is part of the story as an entity, or of the plot development, or of the character’s development.
Nguyen remembers the lecture.
“When I was a boy in San Jose, California, I’d go to the public library and read extensively, and no one ever explained anything in those books I read,” he says. “When I was reading Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy or William Thackeray or Balzac or Joseph Conrad, there were no explanations. These writers just assumed that their readers would understand what they were talking about. And I think that that is a completely fair expectation.
“Those of us who grow up as minorities in any situation are used to not having things translated to us,” he continues. “We’re just forced to survive. And that is actually also the condition for how good art, at least, is made. I don’t think artists should be translating their work. And so, if we, who are so-called minorities, are expected to not have translation given to us, why should we have to translate for others?”
In his introductory essay in The Displaced anthology, Nguyen writes that refugees are also likely to be the unremembered. Our responsibility as writers — perhaps even more so now — who were born elsewhere and belong to ethnic minorities and who also happen to be refugees or immigrants, is simply to write.
He adds that there may be no distinction between being a writer who is a refugee and one who was a refugee. “I was a refugee, although no one would mistake me for being a refugee now,” he writes. “Because of this, I insist on being called a refugee, since the temptation to pretend that I am not a refugee is strong. It would be so much easier to call myself an immigrant, to pass myself off as belonging to a category of migratory humanity that is less controversial, less demanding, and less threatening than the refugee.”
