The Refugees

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  “This is weird,” Vivien had said, hunching her shoulders from the cold as she stood before a miniature version of London’s Tower Bridge. It was in front of this bridge that Vivien and her father posed for the photograph, not far from the frozen pyramids of Egypt and the rimy Sphinx. While Phuong aimed Vivien’s camera, father and daughter wrapped their arms around each other’s waists. Phuong had taken the picture mechanically, not paying much attention to the small digital image after it flashed up on the camera’s screen. But now, holding the photograph as she sat on the stool, she could focus on its details. With their hoods over their heads, only her father’s and sister’s pale, triangular faces were visible, two white petals floating on lily pads of neon green. In the Ice Lantern’s glow, her sister’s face looked more like her father’s than her own, the symmetry rendering clear what Phuong could now say. Their father loved Vivien more than her.

  The photograph ignited easily when Phuong lit it with a match. After she dropped the photo into the bucket, she watched it curl up and shrivel, remembering how Vivien had approached her after she took the picture and tried to make amends. “I never thought I’d say this here,” Vivien said, smiling as she clasped Phuong’s hand, “but I’m cold.” Even a month later, Phuong could feel the chilliness, and how she had shivered and turned away toward Egypt’s crystalline sand. She fed the fire with more photos and their heat warmed her, two dozen others disappearing until only one was left, of Vivien and Phuong at the airport on the morning of Vivien’s departure, Vivien with her arm around Phuong’s shoulder and flashing a V sign with her fingers.

  Unlike her sister, Phuong was not smiling. Their father had forced her to wear an ao dai for Vivien’s departure, and she looked serious and grim in its silk confines. Hers was the expression that older people of an earlier generation usually adopted as they stood before the camera, picture-taking a rare and ceremonious occasion reserved for weddings and funerals. The photograph flared when she touched it with fire, Vivien’s features melting before her own, their faces vanishing in flame. After the last embers from this photograph and the others had died, Phuong rose and scattered their ashes. She was about to turn and enter the house when a gust of wind surged down the alley, catching the ashes and blowing them away. A flurry rose above the neighboring roofs, and she couldn’t help pausing to admire for a moment the clear and depthless sky into which the ashes vanished, an inverted blue bowl of the finest crystal, covering the whole of Saigon as far as her eyes could see.

  Acknowledgments

  hanks to the editors who first printed these stories.

  Thanks to all the wonderful people at my publisher, Grove Atlantic, most especially Peter Blackstock, who said these stories were good enough.

  Thanks to my father and mother, Joseph and Linda. Refugees in 1954 and again in 1975, they are the most courageous people I know. They saved my life.

  Thanks to my older brother, Tung, the original refugee success story. Seven years after arriving in the United States, he went to Harvard. He sets a high standard.

  Thanks to Lan Duong, my fellow refugee, writer, and partner. A reader of my every word, she has shared both the suffering and the joy.

  Thanks to our son, Ellison, for reminding me of childhood. By the time this book is published, he will be nearly the age that I was when I became a refugee.