The Refugees

This essay was initially published in the Fi­nan­cial Times (UK) Life & Arts sec­tion.

Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote this essay to contradict the implicit bias in American culture that the refugee identity is at odds with the American identity and to reinforce the truth that all refugees are human. Thanh immigrated to the United States as a refugee from the Vietnam War when he was four years old. He recounts the chaotic flight to Saigon and is grateful to have been young enough not to carry trauma. His brother, who was 10 at the time, has traumatic memories of dead paratroopers in the trees.

In America, Nguyen learned “that in the United States, land of the fa­bled Amer­i­can dream, it is un-Amer­i­can to be a ref­u­gee. The ref­u­gee embodies fear, fail­ure, and flight” (145). Refugees represent the fact that anyone can lose everything. Nguyen writes that though he was young when he immigrated, he is scarred from his experience because he was taken from his parents to live with a sponsor family.

The US accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees from South Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries as “proof that the US was pay­ing its debt to its South Vi­et­nam­ese al­lies, and the ref­u­gees be­came reminders that life un­der com­mun­ism was hor­ri­ble” (146).