Viet Thanh Nguyen: History Imprinted in the Body

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.


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