Editors Reads Verdict
The Refugees collects eight stories written across two decades, and the range of perspective and register is remarkable — ghost stories, realist family drama, the comedy of cultural collision, the tragedy of memory. Nguyen writes Vietnamese-American experience with an authority and tenderness that his novel's fury occasionally displaces.
What We Loved
- The range of register — from ghost story to realist family drama — demonstrates Nguyen's full technical range
- The Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American perspectives feel fully inhabited rather than explained for outsiders
- Individual stories like 'I'd Love You to Want Me' and 'The Americans' are among his finest writing
Minor Drawbacks
- The collection's two-decade span means some earlier stories feel less polished than the work that followed The Sympathizer
- Short story collections inevitably produce uneven investment — some stories land harder than others
Key Takeaways
- → Displacement does not end at the border — refugees carry their ghosts, their languages, and their losses with them
- → The second generation inherits trauma without inheriting the context to understand it
- → Identity between cultures is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited
| Author | Viet Thanh Nguyen |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Grove Press |
| Pages | 209 |
| Published | February 7, 2017 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Short Stories, Vietnamese-American Literature |
The Refugees Review
Viet Thanh Nguyen spent two decades writing the eight stories that make up The Refugees, publishing them in literary journals long before his debut novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. The collection finally appeared in 2017, and it offers something his novel’s sustained fury does not always make room for: intimacy. These are quiet, precise stories about lives caught between worlds.
The collection moves through a wide range of experiences. There are ghost stories — most memorably in the opening “Black-Eyed Women,” where a Vietnamese-American ghostwriter is visited by the brother who died on the boat that brought her family to America. There are the comedies of cultural collision, the tragedy of memory’s failures, and the particular grief of those who left Vietnam and those who stayed. Nguyen’s eye for the small negotiations of immigrant life — the compromises, the silences, the things that cannot be translated — is as precise here as anywhere in his work.
Several stories are outstanding by any measure. “I’d Love You to Want Me” follows an elderly professor with dementia whose wife discovers he has been calling her by another woman’s name — and her decision about what to do with this knowledge is one of the collection’s most quietly devastating moments. “The Americans” pairs a retired American airforce officer visiting his daughter in Vietnam with the Vietnamese she has built her life among, and the comedy and discomfort of that juxtaposition is handled with real delicacy. “War Years” captures the suffocating loyalties of a Vietnamese immigrant community in California, where the past is never safely past.
As a collection, The Refugees is uneven in the way all collections are — the earliest stories show their age, and not every piece achieves the compression the best ones manage. But at its strongest, this is Nguyen working at a different register than The Sympathizer: less furious, more tender, and in some ways more quietly devastating for it.
Our rating: 4/5
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Refugees" about?
Eight stories exploring the lives of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants caught between cultures — the ghost-haunted, the displaced, the American-born, and those who never made it out — drawn from two decades of Nguyen's work.
What are the key takeaways from "The Refugees"?
Displacement does not end at the border — refugees carry their ghosts, their languages, and their losses with them The second generation inherits trauma without inheriting the context to understand it Identity between cultures is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited
Is "The Refugees" worth reading?
The Refugees collects eight stories written across two decades, and the range of perspective and register is remarkable — ghost stories, realist family drama, the comedy of cultural collision, the tragedy of memory. Nguyen writes Vietnamese-American experience with an authority and tenderness that his novel's fury occasionally displaces.
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