Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sympathizer,” goes silent for a moment. It sounds, briefly, as if there’s a faulty connection over a phone call from Los Angeles, where he lives.

But Nguyen has stopped talking in mid-sentence, his voice catching. He is trembling, unexpectedly it seems even to himself, as he speaks on the variety of experiences he read about as editor of the new and necessary book, “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives” (Abrams; $25).

“What surprised me is that these stories nevertheless share so much in common,” Nguyen says. “Whether we’re speaking of someone fleeing from Hungary as a Jew in the 1950s or whether we’re speaking about someone who is a Hmong refugee born in a Thai refugee camp in the 1970s, there’s so much ... so much pain.”

Prominent refugee writers present a constellation of stories from across the world, spanning decades, in “The Displaced”: personal narratives of their journeys, memories they struggle to piece together, essays rebuking the political rhetoric surrounding the global crisis that amounts to 22.5 million displaced worldwide, according to the United Nations. Together, the stories share similar threads of loss and adjustment, of the confusion of identity, of wounds that heal and those that don’t, of the scars that remain.

“This Is What the Journey Does,” by the Ethiopian-born writer Maaza Mengiste, provides a harrowing and powerful account of her spotting another African refugee in Italy and witnessing the disintegration of humanity that comes at the cost of leaving home in search of basic human safety. In “The Ungrateful Refugee,” Iranian American writer Dina Nayeri interrogates the expectations we place on refugees and what human obligation means in the face of the crisis.

“Even though I no longer look like a refugee, and I’m no longer technically a refugee, I never ceased being a refugee,” Nguyen says, referring to a piece in the book written by the Ukrainian British writer Marina Lewycka, who begins questioning her status of belonging in Britain following Brexit. “That emotional history is right there waiting to be uncovered.”

Indeed, Nguyen, who grew up in San Jose after he became a refugee as a child when his family fled during the Vietnam War, says this before choking up again.

“I’ve been getting weepy a lot recently. I think simply because I hear stories from people,” he says, pausing to gather himself. “And I have to think about what they’ve been through.”

As a writer, he must cultivate empathy for these stories, must feel them himself, Nguyen says before expressing frustration at the lack of such empathy at large surrounding the refugee crisis.

“It’s a basic refusal of humanity and a conservation of humanity ‘just for us.’”

For these writers, voicing their experiences is an assertion of humanity, especially as, Nguyen notes, the stories of refugees historically are rarely told by the refugees themselves. The very act of calling themselves refugees, as opposed to immigrants, is a political statement. Immigrants, at the very least, are a part of the American mythology, but refugees represent the unclean and unwanted.

That distinction often failed to be made even with Nguyen’s “The Sympathizer,” about a North Vietnamese spy undercover in the U.S.

“People completely misunderstood the novel because they could just slap the immigrant label on it and that automatically allows them to fall into the language of the American dream,” he says. “And the whole point of ‘The Sympathizer’ is to foreground refugees’ war experiences and to criticize that American dream.”

With “The Displaced,” there is no mistaking the reality here. These are refugees. These are their stories.

“The work of witnesses remains important,” Nguyen says. “We have to keep talking about these kinds of things to make sure that these stories continue to be out there.”

Nguyen discusses the new book, alongside its contributors Thi Bui and Meron Hadero, on Wednesday, June 6, at City Lights Booksellers.

Brandon Yu is a Bay Area freelance writer.

Book events

Viet Thanh Nguyen: 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 6. City Lights, 261 Columbus Ave., S.F. www.citylights.com

Nikole Hannah-Jones: The investigative reporter and founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting speaks with Alexis Madrigal at City Arts & Lectures. 7:30 p.m. Monday, June 4. Nourse Theater. 275 Hayes St., S.F. www.cityarts.net

Creative Minds: Vietnamese Writers of the Diaspora: Viet Thanh Nguyen hosts an evening featuring Vietnamese writers of the diaspora. 6 p.m. Saturday, June 9. $6-$12. San Jose Museum of Art. 110 S. Market St., San Jose. https://sjmusart.org