Nguyen evokes a world of death-haunted precarity. Illustration by Jun Cen

Consider the distinctions between the words “expat,” “immigrant,” “refugee.” “Expat” suggests a cosmopolitan spirit and resources that allow mobility; to be an “immigrant” suggests some measure of need. A “refugee” is, by definition, desperate: he has been displaced from his home, has been rendered stateless, has few or no resources. The expat retains an identity as he retains his citizenship, his privileges; the refugee loses his identity amid the anonymity of many others like him. In the way that enslaved persons are truncated by the term “slaves,” defined by their condition, there’s a loss of identity in the category term “refugees.” It might seem to be more humane, and accurate, to give someone who is forced to seek refuge a more expansive designation: “displaced person.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen, one of our great chroniclers of displacement, appears to value the term “refugee” precisely for the punitive violence it betrays. Born in 1971, he is, by self-description, the son of Vietnamese refugees, and he has been a refugee himself; he has married a refugee, a fellow-writer named Lan Duong. In the acknowledgments of “The Refugees” (Grove), his beautiful and heartrending new story collection, he speaks of his son, Ellison: “By the time this book is published, he will be nearly the age I was when I became a refugee.”

It is hardly surprising that the refugee is obsessed with identity, both personal and ethnic. He is likely to be highly sensitive to others’ interpretations of him and of his “minority” culture. And so his peripheral status confers certain advantages, for he is in a position to see what others do not. As Nguyen has recounted, in an afterword to his début novel, “The Sympathizer” (2015), “I watched ‘Apocalypse Now’ and saw American sailors massacre a sampan full of civilians and Martin Sheen shoot a wounded woman in cold blood. I watched ‘Platoon’ and heard the audience cheering and clapping when the Americans killed Vietnamese soldiers. These scenes . . . left me shaking with rage.”

Thrilling in its virtuosity, as in its masterly exploitation of the espionage-thriller genre, “The Sympathizer” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and has come to be considered one of the greatest of Vietnam War novels. The book’s (unnamed) narrator speaks in an audaciously postmodernist voice, echoing not only Vladimir Nabokov and Ralph Ellison but the Dostoyevsky of “Notes from the Underground”:

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of the minor talents, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess.

The speaker is indeed a spy: he was, in the Republic of Vietnam, a Communist mole on the staff of a South Vietnamese general, before being evacuated from Saigon and taking refuge in post-Vietnam War America.

His confession is fraught with irony and his history is tragicomic; unlike the refugees of “The Refugees,” he regards himself with the distance of self-loathing, for he has participated in assassinations while following orders. Obsessed with “universal and timeless” questions, he is the epitome of twentieth-century man: “What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others? And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing?”

The stories in “The Refugees,” too, feature protagonists who are poised between the past of a devastated homeland, Vietnam, and an affluent, adopted country, the United States. The book takes one of its epigraphs from James Fenton’s “A German Requiem”:

It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life.

To survive, for the refugee, is to be buffeted between the grief-suffused admonition to remember the losses of the homeland and the self-protective counter-admonition to “forget,” the effort of which will be enormous and lifelong.

Ordinary existence, to the death-haunted, is populated by ghosts. These are not ideas of ghosts, or poetic metaphors. These are ghosts who leave behind damp carpets and the brine-soaked clothing in which, twenty-five years before, they drowned while escaping a war-torn homeland. They are family ghosts: a fifteen-year-old boy, for instance, who had traded his life to save a sister threatened with kidnapping and rape by pirates. “These fishermen resembled our fathers and brothers, sinewy and brown, except that they wielded machetes and machine guns,” we read in the almost unbearably moving opening story, “Black-Eyed Women.”

The story’s narrator is herself a “ghost writer,” taking on projects to which her name is never attached. As her refugee mother has warned, “In our homeland . . . there was a reporter who said the government tortured the people in prison. So the government does to him exactly what he said they did to others. . . . That’s what happens to writers who put their names on things.” Even in America, there is fear within the refugee community, fear of the young men among them “who had learned about violence from growing up in wartime.” Looking back, the ghostwriter can see that the Vietnam where she spent her childhood was a “haunted country,” but that her American adolescence is haunted, as well, with “tales of woe”: “proof of what my mother said, that we did not belong here. In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.”

In “War Years,” set in an urban Vietnamese-refugee community in the United States, in 1983, a family’s well-being is menaced not by white Americans but by fellow-refugees, diehard anti-Communists who request a “donation” from Vietnamese merchants to fund an obvious lost cause: an uprising in Vietnam. It is typical of Nguyen’s subtlety, however, that the presumed extortion is on behalf of a sincere, if misbegotten, venture involving the sewing of uniforms for South Vietnamese soldiers by a woman, Mrs. Hoa, who has been deranged by grief over the loss of her husband and two sons in the war that had ended a decade before: