Posts

Showing posts with the label THE REFUGEES

THE REFUGEES

Image
Fiction Born in Vietnam, made in America THE REFUGEES By Viet Thanh Nguyen 224 pp. Grove Press Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan The Refugees is an excellent collection of short stories Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote before his 2015 Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Sympathizer . All eight stories were previously published in lit magazines between 2007 and 2011.  Nguyen writes with compassion about people caught in the middle.  We may encounter them when we get our nails done or shop in small Asian specialty markets. They are the people who live their lives half in one culture and half in another.  He knows what it is to be an outsider and yet a part of a new country. In 1975 he and his family were part of the mass exodus of some two million refugees fleeing Vietnam when communists took control of the country. He describes himself as “born in Vietnam and made in America.”  An epigraph in the front of the book quotes Roberto BolaƱo’s Antwerp : “I wrote this book for the ghos...