{"id":3343,"date":"2017-02-17T00:00:38","date_gmt":"2017-02-17T08:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/?p=3343"},"modified":"2017-05-17T12:38:02","modified_gmt":"2017-05-17T19:38:02","slug":"minneapolis-star-tribune-refugees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/minneapolis-star-tribune-refugees","title":{"rendered":"Star Tribune: The Refugees"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Zelman reviews <\/em>The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen for the Minneapolis Star Tribune<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Uprooted populations, filling enclaves in First World cities or subsisting for years in refugee camps around the world. Scapegoats for joblessness and terror, people leaving scenes of violence in their home countries. Images in the media of suffering that lose their ability to shock.<\/p>\n

With tenderness and intimacy, with softly shaded ironies, Viet Thanh Nguyen personalizes a group of Vietnamese-Americans living on the West Coast in his story collection, \u201cThe Refugees.\u201d The older folks are exiled from their Fatherland and culture by the forces of history; the younger stranded between the ghost-ridden silence of their parents\u2019 generation and the promise of American plenitude that they themselves can\u2019t seem to grasp.<\/p>\n

Nguyen\u2019s first story, \u201cBlack-Eyed Women,\u201d opens the door to the horror the refugees faced trying to escape the Communists by sea. Most of the story, though, is set decades later, as a murdered brother returns to the family, telling his surviving sister, \u201cYou died, too \u2026 You just don\u2019t know it.\u201d For this middle-aged woman, as for most of Nguyen\u2019s characters, the act of survival is the never-ending need to forget, to transcend the ghosts.<\/p>\n

If the past is irretrievable but haunting, the present is just confusing. Identity for all of Nguyen\u2019s characters appears to be a flimsy thing, mutable and often accidental. In one story a character named Louis Vu (Louis Vuitton?) sells knockoff luxury goods, and in another, a professor suffering from Alzheimer\u2019s calls his wife by another woman\u2019s name (a former wife?). We read about a sad-sack gambler who receives a liver transplant and heaps gratitude upon a man who might possibly be the donor\u2019s son.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, \u201cThe Refugees\u201d is full of complicated family dynamics, cultural rifts and surprising resolutions. \u201cThe Americans\u201d offers the reader a family vacation: a black Vietnam vet (Carver) and his Japanese wife travel to Vietnam to visit their daughter, who is teaching English to poor people, and her Vietnamese boyfriend. The concluding story, \u201cFatherland,\u201d narrates a meeting between a Vietnamese girl and her identically named half-sister from Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

Nguyen offers flashes of the ferocity and vigor that characterized the older generation before their flight from Saigon. In \u201cSomeone Else Besides You\u201d a widowed father \u2014 an ex-military man of action \u2014 moves in with his divorced son, determined to repair his son\u2019s marriage through violence. And in \u201cWar Years,\u201d a young narrator helplessly watches the escalation of a feud between his iron-willed mother and another refugee, sorry for \u201cthe accumulation of everything I could do nothing about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nguyen won a Pulitzer Prize last year for his novel \u201cThe Sympathizer,\u201d and he is a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his nonfiction book, \u201cNothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.\u201d<\/p>\n

The nine unpredictable and moving stories that make up \u201cThe Refugees\u201d are a remarkable achievement, portraits of people living in a phantom zone called America. I found that I was unable to read more than one story a day \u2014 they so filled my mind.<\/p>\n

\n

Tom Zelman<\/strong> teaches English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Zelman reviews The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Uprooted populations, filling enclaves in First World cities or subsisting for years in refugee camps around the world. Scapegoats for joblessness and terror, people leaving scenes of violence in their home countries. Images in the media of suffering that lose their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3345,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[208],"tags":[131,538,304,537,10],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStar Tribune: The Refugees - Viet Thanh Nguyen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Tom Zelman reviews The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/minneapolis-star-tribune-refugees\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Viet\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/minneapolis-star-tribune-refugees\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/minneapolis-star-tribune-refugees\",\"name\":\"Star Tribune: The Refugees - 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