Fred Marchant

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A Review of Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees, edited by Laren McClung

from my review:

In this anthology of writings by the descendants of Vietnam War veterans and refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Sympathizer, offers an essay in which he recalls his arrival in the United States. He was four years old and had been sent with his parents to a refugee camp in Pennsylvania. As a condition of the resettlement, the boy first had to be taken away “to live with a white family.” Although he was eventually reunited with his own mother and father, Nguyen declares that the experience of being separated from them “remains an invisible brand stamped between my shoulder blades.” He writes that he has spent his life “trying to see that brand, to make sense of it, to rework it into words that I can speak to myself, that I can share with others.” This meaning-making process is at the heart of the writings collected in Inheriting the War.

Read the whole review at Harvard Review Online.

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