The Refugees

The Refugees

• Genre: Fiction; short story collection
• Originally Published: 2017
• Reading Level/Interest: College/Adult
• Structure/Length: 8 short stories, 2 essays; approx. 224 pages; approx. 5 hours, 5 minutes on audio
• Protagonist/Central Conflict: The Refugees showcases a variety of character perspectives in stories ranging from a young Vietnamese refugee to a woman whose husband has dementia to two sisters from different worlds. Viet Thanh Nguyen offers a collection with common motifs of identity, love, and family with the hardships of immigration.
• Potential Sensitivity Issues: Murder; sexual assault; dementia; death of a parent; abandonment; homophobia; racism; xenophobia        

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Author

• Bio: Born in 1971; Vietnamese American professor and novelist; born in Vietnam in 1971 to North Vietnamese refugees who moved south; family fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon in 1975; graduated from the University of California, Berkley, with a BA in English and Ethnic Studies; earned his PhD in English from Berkeley in 1997; Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California; debut novel The Sympathizer won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016; was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017; is a regular op-ed columnist for The New York Times and writes about immigration, refugees, politics, and South East Asia; cultural critic-at-large for The Los Angeles Times; editor of diaCRITICS, a blog for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network
• Other Works: Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002); The Sympathizer (2015); Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016); Chicken of the Sea (2019); The Committed (2021)
• Awards: Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Honor (2017)

CENTRAL THEMES connected and noted throughout this Teaching Unit:

• Intergenerational Conflict
• Haunted by Trauma: PTSD and Narrative Exposure Therapy
• Aging and Loss of Agency

STUDY OBJECTIVES: In accomplishing the components of this Unit, students will:

• Develop an understanding of the historical and social contexts related to the war in Vietnam that incite the speakers’ narratives regarding the lived experiences of refugees.
• Analyze paired texts and other brief resources to make connections via the text’s themes of Intergenerational Conflict and Haunted by Trauma: PTSD and Narrative Exposure Therapy.
• Draft and present a research paper that demonstrates an understanding of the variety of experiences in the US for diasporic communities, based on textual details.