The Refugees in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 22, 2018 Lindsey Z rated it liked it

*3.5 stars*

"In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories."

The title of this collection of short stories is both clever and a bit deceitful. It's clever in that Nguyen re-imagines what it means to be a refugee, deceitful in that the book is not a collection of what you might think are traditional refugee stories. Refugee camps and harrowing journeys aboard boats to cross into new territory exist only in fleeting memories and moments in this colle *3.5 stars*

"In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories."

The title of this collection of short stories is both clever and a bit deceitful. It's clever in that Nguyen re-imagines what it means to be a refugee, deceitful in that the book is not a collection of what you might think are traditional refugee stories. Refugee camps and harrowing journeys aboard boats to cross into new territory exist only in fleeting memories and moments in this collection. Instead, Nguyen has written a collection of stories about the Vietnamese diaspora. Yes, the thread is that many of the characters in these stories have either been refugees themselves or were born from parents who were refugees, but Nguyen so profoundly reminds us that being a refugee isn't only about living in a camp or escaping a hostile political environment; it's about being a human and all that comes along with it: shaping identity, falling in love, falling out of love, raising a family, making your way in a new world, and longing for deeper connections with people and culture. Nguyen is a clean, deft writer and I enjoyed his writing style a lot. Some of the stories were more memorable to me than others (as is usually the case with short story collections). I loved the story about the son/brother who died and comes back as a ghost; the story about a Vietnamese refugee who stays with a gay couple in San Francisco and discovers that he, too, is gay; and the story about a transplant mix up. However, there wasn't one story that entirely blew me away that I think everyone should read. The collection was often subtle and simple, but that felt intentional to me, like Nguyen was proclaiming that a short story collection about refugees doesn't have to be so emotionally fraught or full of tragedy. The characters in his stories are people just living out their lives, often times without much fuss. Nothing is overworked here. Some of the stories weren't as hard hitting as I would have liked them to be and most of Nguyen's stories start in medias res, so it usually took me a number of pages to orient myself to the characters and their relationships. Nguyen also has a bit of an anti-Communist bent which wasn't a turn off to me at all but did provoke me to look up information about Communism in Vietnam and the Vietnam War. At the very least, I learned so much more about the Vietnamese diaspora than I had ever known before; at the very best, I was impressed with Nguyen's writing style and approach to telling a multifaceted story about what it's like to be a Vietnamese refugee in all senses of the word by dismantling the myopic ideas of refugeeism that run rampant in the media and our current national zeitgeist. I'm intrigued enough by him as a writer to put The Sympathizer, his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, on my TBR. ...more

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Nov 29, 2022 Bogdan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: asian-flavor

It was much easier for me to read these stories versus The Sympathizer as the format forced the author to come to a much faster conclusion. I liked the way he writes and the characters which he creates, thus I enjoyed these short stories collection. ...more

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