Aftershocks

Mia Alvar
NYT Syndicate
Fiction supposedly"gives voice" to its characters, but what can it do for those who would rather not speak? In Viet Thanh Nguyen's superb new collection, The Refugees, men and women displaced from wartime Saigon and resettled in California don't say much about the journey, having practiced many versions of silence ” from state censorship to language barriers ” along the way. To illustrate their plight, Nguyen homes in on their bodies rather than their words, so that a more accurate description of what the book does is"give flesh" to characters at risk of fading from memory, sometimes their own. The nameless narrator of Black-Eyed Women, which opens the book, has borne traumas so unspeakable as to reduce her to a spectral shadow of herself ” an ironic advantage, in her work as a ghostwriter of disaster memoirs. Less convenient is the actual ghost of her dead brother, whose visit after 25 years calls forth memories of the trans-Pacific voyage only one of them survived. But after touching his fatal wounds, doubting-Thomas-style, the narrator shifts from disappearing into her clients' dramas toward fleshing out her own.
Likewise, in The Other Man, body language is as loud as the refugee story gets. Arriving in San Francisco in 1975, the abject Liem walks"with eyes downcast, as if searching for pennies." Air travel has impaired him:"The lingering pressure in his ears bewildered him further, making it hard for him to understand the PA system's distorted English." When his hosts, Parrish and Marcus, reveal that they're lovers, the bombshell strikes Liem on a visceral level, sending"a nervous tremor through his gut," and resonating more deeply than he'll admit aloud:"The small hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck stiffened as they'd done before whenever another boy, deliberately or by chance, had brushed his elbow, sometimes his knee." Soon Parrish leaves town on business; and Liem's body, home alone with Marcus, manages to convey what his voice, in still-halting English, cannot.
The aches and pains of migration become especially literal in the bodies of aging refugees. A professor afflicted with dementia in I'd Love You to Want Me starts to call his wife of 40 years by a stranger's name. How does she reintroduce herself to the husband for whom she has long replaced official names with"endearments like Anh, for him, or Em, for her"? It's a heartbreaking variation on the couple's return visit to Vietnam, decades after the Communist regime renamed their former street, and Saigon itself. Other characters reckon with liver transplants and broken hips, sleeping pills and Salonpas, their flesh revealing personal and political stresses that escape speech.
As concerned with the aftershocks of war as with war itself,"The Refugees" mostly elides grisly scenes like the bombings, killings, rapes and tortures that fill Nguyen's spectacular Pulitzer-winning debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015). Here in free-market America ”"where possessions counted for everything," the ghostwriter in Black-Eyed Women muses ” violence tends to strike wealth and personal property instead. Mrs Hoa, a seamstress in another story, hits up her grocer for political donations, threatening a boycott if she's denied. Nguyen stages the confrontation in the language of military surveillance and"counterattack," with echoes of a harrowing home invasion from earlier in the story. Car theft prefigures vandalism elsewhere, when a veteran tries to mend his son's marriage using tactics he learned as a paratrooper. Collateral damage, it seems, can extend from the battlefield to the suburban strip mall.
If at times I found myself missing the playful, voice-driven punch of The Sympathizer, it's a tribute to Nguyen's range that these eight stories cast a quieter, but no less devastating, spell. The collection's subtle, attentive prose and straightforward narrative style perfectly suit the low-profile civilian lives it explores (the only military personnel here have long retired). With the volume turned down, we lean in more closely, listening beyond what the refugees say to step into their skins.