“Fatherland” was first published in the Spring 2011 issue of Narrative. It was collected in The Refugees (2017). It is currently most readily available in The Refugees (Grove).

I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's “Fatherland” shortly after I returned from my first official visit to Laos, the birth country of my mother and father, and the land of my buried ancestors. Nguyen's short story was published in 2011, four years before the publication of his Pulitzer-Prize winning first novel, The Sympathizer. “Fatherland” was originally published in Narrative, where it was the prize winner of the winter fiction contest. The story is a great study of Nguyen's style as a writer (his poised prose, worldly characters), his vast knowledge of Western art and film (his understanding of colonial cultural productions), and his ideas and perspectives on the Vietnamese-American and Vietnamese-Vietnamese relationship (his focus on humanity in times of war and of the peace of its aftermath). The story is narrated by Phuong, a young woman growing up in Saigon, her older half-sister from America with the same name—although she calls herself Vivien after the star of Gone with the Wind—and their father, a once-powerful man who now lives as a tour guide of the past. “Fatherland” is a study of identity: who we are, how we present ourselves, and who we wish to be. As a woman whose own life's circumstances have been shaped by the Vietnam War, the same war that resulted in the separation of the characters of Nguyen's short story, although a war fought in a neighboring country, I was interested in learning how fiction might be useful for the experiences I'd just gone through in Laos.

In order to enter Laos and stay safely within the country, I could not go back as I was, a Hmong-American writer struggling to make ends meet, a writer whose work centers on and emerges from the travesties of the war in Laos.