I can summarize The Refugees with just one word: obsessive.
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen is a book with eight separate short stories that explores the fates of Vietnamese refugees in the US, and they all have been obsessed with the past: The past of the war. The past of the captivity in the renovation camps. The past of asylum and crossing the sea. The past of the early days going to the US.
According to Viet Thanh Nguyen, obsession is what happens to us when we choose to live a better but lonely life in another country and what we go looking for. In the author’s opinion, the past becomes a part of our soul and creates our identity in the future. In this series, the obsession and the past combine. This combination helps us understand and shape the present. In this book, that combination all comes from the experiences about finding another country to escape Vietnam war. And these experiences become the mental injures which every character never forgets. The mental injuries which the refugees have to suffer, such as the pain when they witness their family are killed by pirates, are the most fundamental experience of human beings. Through this book, every character suffers their own injuries, and nobody can move on from them to live peacefully in the present.
The series begins with a true ghost story and ends with a ghost story in the author’s mind. The whole context is a short stories depicting haunting characters and broken relationships, which are told by carefully selected words that make it impossible for the reader to forget after closing the book. After the Vietnam war, Vietnamese government tries to find and kill all Vietnameses who used to work for the US government in the war. These Vietnameses have no choice except for leaving the place they call “home” their whole life to go to the US. It is a type of betrayal to Vietnamese. No one understand they had no choice except leaving. Therefore, they accepted losing the love of their relatives and, moreover, they accepted giving up their reputation.
The refugees must give up everything they have and face a lot of threats to exist in another nation, such as illegal working, or working without payment, staying a resident’s house and always being scared to force returning to home country, some of them were taken to the refugee camp and could die anytime because of infectious diseases. Many people are still alive, but many individuals lost their lives. After dying, they become ghosts with many unfinished dreams about the opportunities to return to their home country. This became their obsession with ghosts, which don’t harm but threaten anyone. They are the ghosts of the haunting away in the near death, which is about a better life in their hometown in Vietnam with their Vietnamese relatives, not in another country where they have to bet their life to come. Therefore, these ghosts “visit” their family once a night and ask people to not forget them. Sometimes, they tell stories about how they die when trying to come overseas, then they cry because they never have a chance to say sorry to Vietnam. With living people, their obsession is the depiction about the conflict between tradition and modernity. Since the day they left Vietnam to become refugees, they worked to create their new lives with new jobs and new relationships. But the memories about Vietnamese traditions and their old life in Vietnam, with its customs and cultures, never disappear in their mind. However, their children, who were born in the US, never know and understand Vietnamese traditional backgrounds, although their parents try to tell them many stories about the home country and what they experienced. Therefore, parents and their children are never on the same page. They always have conflicts about traditional Vietnamese culture, how the Vietnamese value the sanity, while their children feel comfortable with the frantic parties in many bars and clubs. And so on, just the refugees feel nostalgic about their Vietnam—a country they never return to until they die.
In some stories in this book, the parents recall memories about crossing over, and their son did not want to remember the sad things beyond the border. From the stories about family and country, the whole series was like a knife that cuts our hearts when the desire to forget all the things that belong to the home country of the refugees is impossible. The rest of their family, who still stayed in the home country, is full of humiliation and pain. They’re all ghosts of their own.
The series let us know that refugees differ from immigrants. The refugees were desperate, stateless, undocumented, and they were “forced to leave” from their homeland through a historical movement. Immigrants have nationalities, they have assets, and they leave voluntarily. Refugees therefore often also have mental injuries such as…. Refugees are obsessed with their own identity.
Refugees have moved away from their homeland, but in their mind, they never forget where they came from. They’re here, but they’re also not here. They are economically successful, and they could have a position in society where they can be admired and highly appreciated. Some of them become professors, some of them become business women, but their mind never stopped thinking about “home”—Vietnam.
They are ghosts. Even when their bodies are dead, their souls are still stuck in another nation and are never able to return to Vietnam. The moment they realized they achieved success in the US was the moment they realized they lost “home” completely. Are they still Vietnamese or not? They cannot answer.
With masterful culture, subtle observations, and profound psychological analyses, Nguyen Thanh Viet leads the reader through deep memories in the hearts of refugees. The stories in The Refugees series are written about Vietnamese refugees, but the messages and the grim fate of the refugees the author implies in his series can be found in any country. It is probably the reason why the author wrote in the first page of The Refugees, “For all refugees, everywhere.”