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Viet Thanh NguyenA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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).
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
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