History, Refugees, Trauma

The Hidden Scars All Refugees Carry

September 12, 2016

By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Image credit: Gracey Zhang

Image credit: Gracey Zhang

The following oped by Viet Thanh Nguyen was originally published by The New York Times. It was also published on the website, diacritics.org, on Sept 12, 2016. http://diacritics.org/2016/09/the-hidden-scars-all-refugees-carry/

Many people have characterized my novel, “The Sympathizer,” as an immigrant story, and me as an immigrant. No. My novel is a war story and I am not an immigrant. I am a refugee who, like many others, has never ceased being a refugee in some corner of my mind.

Immigrants are more reassuring than refugees because there is an endpoint to their story; however they arrive, whether they are documented or not, their desires for a new life can be absorbed into the American dream or into the European narrative of civilization.

By contrast, refugees are the zombies of the world, the undead who rise from dying states to march or swim toward our borders in endless waves. An estimated 60 million such stateless people exist, 1 in every 122 people alive today. If they formed their own country, it would be the world’s 24th largest — bigger than South Africa, Spain, Iraq or Canada.

My memories of becoming a refugee are fragments of a dream, hallucinatory and unreliable. Soldiers bouncing me on their knees, a tank rumbling through the streets, a crowded barge of desperate people fleeing Vietnam.

I have no guarantee these images are true. They date from the early 1970s, when I lived in the country synonymous with war. I wonder if the fact that I cannot stand the taste of milk today has to do with being a 4-­year-­old boy on that barge, sipping from milk a stranger shared with my family.

Perhaps this is how history becomes imprinted in the body, how fear becomes a reflex, how memory becomes a matter of taste and feeling.

My real memories began soon after we arrived at the refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa., in the summer of 1975. Only those refugees with sponsors could leave the camp. But no sponsor would take our family of four, so my parents went to one home, my 10­-year-­old brother went to another and I went to a third. My separation from my parents lasted only a few months, but it felt much longer. This forced separation, what my childhood self experienced as abandonment, remains an invisible brand stamped between my shoulder blades.

A few years later we moved across the country. My parents, merchants in their homeland, had no desire to do the menial work expected of them in Harrisburg, Pa., where we had settled.

Instead, they opened a grocery store in a depressed area of downtown San Jose, working 12­ to 14­-hour days, seven days a week, except for Christmas Day, Easter and New Year’s Day. They became successful, at the cost of being shot in an armed robbery.

Today, when many Americans think of Vietnamese­-Americans as a success story, we forget that the majority of Americans in 1975 did not want to accept Vietnamese refugees. (A sign hung in the window of a store near my parents’ grocery: “Another American forced out of business by the Vietnamese.”) For a country that prides itself on the American dream, refugees are simply un­-American, despite the fact that some of the original English settlers of this country, the Puritans, were religious refugees.

Today, Syrian refugees face a similar reaction. To some Europeans, these refugees seem un­-European for reasons of culture, religion and language. And in Europe and the United States, the attacks in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, Calif., and Orlando, Fla., have people fearing that Syrian refugees could be Islamic radicals, forgetting that those refugees are some of the first victims of the Islamic State.

Because those judgments have been rendered on many who have been cast out or who have fled, it is important for those of us who were refugees to remind the world of what our experiences mean.

I was — I am — the lucky kind of refugee who was carried along by his parents and who had no memory of the crossing. For people like my parents and the Syrians today, their voyages across land and sea are far more perilous than the ones undertaken by astronauts or Christopher Columbus. To those watching news reports, the refugees may be threatening or pitiful, but in reality, they are nothing less than heroic.

They will remain scarred by their history. It is understandable that some do not want to speak of their scars and might want to pretend that they are not refugees. It is more glamorous to be an exile, more comprehensible to be an immigrant, more desirable to be an expatriate. The need to belong can change refugees themselves both consciously and unconsciously, as has happened to me and others. A Vietnamese colleague of mine once jokingly referred to his journey from “refugee to bourgeoisie.” When I told him I, too, was a refugee, he stopped joking and said, “You don’t look like one.”

He was right. We can be invisible even to one another. But it is precisely because I do not look like a refugee that I have to proclaim being one, even when those of us who were refugees would rather forget that there was a time when the world thought us to be less than human.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel “The Sympathizer” won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His short story collection “The Refugees” comes out in February.

A version of this op­ed appears in print on September 3, 2016, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: The Hidden Scars All Refugees Carry.

Comments:

Leave a Comment

Lang Ea

November 8, 2017 • 1:47 PM

wow! This a so true…I can personally relate to this. very talented writer….Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Lang Ea
visual Aritst based in New Zealand (Cambodian refugee)

Derek Buitron

March 8, 2020 • 11:02 PM

This was a fantastic piece! I love how you talked about the American Dream and connected that to your family’s success as business owners. It really grounds their experience and makes you realize that such victories mean so much more when you take into account the violence that migrants and refugees face not only on their journeys to new places but also in their experiences upon arrival.

Angelica Torres

March 10, 2020 • 1:34 PM

For me this was really satisfying to read because I always saw and thought of immigrants and Refugees as the same thing, when they actually go through really different experiences.

Brandon Najera

March 12, 2020 • 12:53 PM

I really enjoyed reading this piece because for me it goes to show how many of our families and experiences are shaped as a result of what happened in the past. It even shows how history repeats itself by showing how once Vietnamese refugees weren’t accepted to how Syrian refugees are now the target of that xenophobia. I appreciate the many connections made because it makes you wonder to what extent of what happened in the past is passed from generation to generation.

Nayeli Hernandez

March 12, 2020 • 3:06 PM

This is an interesting read on the different scars and trauma that refugees experience in their difference from immigrants.

Ryan Phung

March 13, 2020 • 12:48 AM

Nice article from an amazing writer, I loved the brief discussion on the physicality of history and memory, which is something that’s been discussed in many Asian-American novels that deal with the past. I think that your point made about making your voice as a refugee extra loud for all the refugees who rightfully are unwilling to speak about their scars is super poignant.

Haneen Mohamed

March 17, 2020 • 6:53 PM

I really like the parallels drawn between Syria and Vietnam. I believe that while it is important not to homogenize the refugee experience, there are many collective forms of struggle that refugees all around the world face. Of these would be how scars tend to linger and transcend time and generation. I also like that it is asserted that the refugee experience is deeply distinct from the experiences of people who migrated elsewhere, but were not necessarily fleeing war and persecution.

Marisa Garcia Perez

March 17, 2020 • 9:56 PM

Thank you for sharing this, I found it very insightful because the experiences that refugees and immigrants face are very distinct at times. People often do not recognize this, but I think it was very valuable to share this experience. Also, I appreciated how you connected both histories (Syrian and Vietnamese) together.

Stephanie Luong

February 19, 2021 • 3:44 PM

This was a really eye-opening piece. I love how you compared refugees to zombies because it shows the lifelessness of these people after a war. In a sense they are just a corpse with no soul because of the loss of their homeland. Your work also highlights the juxtaposition of the contrasting idea of the American dream being open to everyone.

Diana Calderon

February 27, 2022 • 1:27 PM

Thank you for sharing your experiences, it was a vulnerable and beautiful writing. I think it is important that you mention how refugees are simply un-American because of their direct connection with violent US military interventions and actions.

Gabriela Esquivel

March 7, 2022 • 9:13 AM

Wow, Viet your piece was incredibly moving and eye-opening. I found your comparison of refugees and zombies to be the perfect metaphor for the effect of wars on people and their home countries. Overall, thank you for sharing how you have come about understanding your identity.

Eugene Vang

June 3, 2022 • 8:51 PM

I am so grateful that I came across this piece by Viet Thanh Nguyen. As the child of Hmoob refugees, there were many connections that I made while reading about the lived experiences and struggles that Viet describes. It brought memories to the stories that my family members particularly my father and grandma would share with me and continue to share about their experiences of uncertainty and fear while crossing rivers, oceans, and borders to seek and find refuge. When Viet mentions how “history becomes imprinted in the body” I instantly thought about intergenerational trauma that is embodied and felt throughout many generations as a result of war, violence, loss, and forced displacement. As Viet concludes, there is such power in proclaiming and holding onto our identities and lived experiences and speaking truth to power as ways to exist and resist. I am inspired to also proclaim who I am and turn to my roots to share who I am.

Leave a Comment:

We moderate comments in this section, so your comment may not appear right away. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *