How do you follow up a debut novel that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? The answer is, you don't - at least, not with another novel. University of Southern California professor, and multiple award winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen returned to his first love, the writing of short stories, and followed up his debut novel's success with a collection of short stories that he called The Refugees, and as the title suggests, each story focuses on a person, or a family, who at some time travelled to America as Vietnamese refugees.
Each of the eight stories tells the tale of a somewhat dysfunctional family, but despite the dysfunction, each is bound together in love, however unusually it may seem to present itself. Many of the protagonists in the stories are not given a name, as if the author prefers them to be identified by or judged by the content of the character or the situation that they have found themselves in. Many of these un-named protagonists are surrounded by peripheral characters who are given names.
The book's central theme of family, and of the condition of being a refugee, appears in every story, but there are sub-themes as well, including the difficulties encountered by refugees and the tendency of refugee communities to stay resolutely within themselves The yearning to become Americanized is also seen in most of the characters in the individual stories. Each story also contains the influence of ghosts; only one is actually a ghost story, per se, but in each of the individual stories the characters have ghosts from their past who return either literally or metaphorically to affect their lives in the present.
Critics gave the collection extremely favorable reviews, remarking that the stories were not only fictional accounts of refugee lives, but also documentary pieces on the challenges that refugees were facing as they began their new lives on purpose or by accident of circumstance. The collection was given the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature in 2017.
