La crociata dei folli. Esilio e memoria in "War Years" di Viet Thanh Nguyen

This essay reconstructs in detail the historical events underlying Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story “War Years,” taken from the collection "The Refugees" (2017), and his debut novel, "The Sympathizer" (2015), awarded with the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016. In “War Years”, Viet Thanh Nguyen gives life to a fictionalized version of the so-called Homeland Restoration movement (Y T. Nguyen 2018), a wide array of anticommunist fronts born out of the ashes of the South Vietnamese military in the wake of the 1975 defeat. These fronts were responsible for various and unsuccessful attempts to infiltrate the motherland with the aim of overthrowing Hanoi’s rule across the 1980s. The initial section of this article is thus conceived as a historical review/analysis, based on a sample of sources drawn from the press of the time, shored up by academic contributions. The second part investigates how and to what extent these facts and events inform Nguyen’s novel and short story. The essay examines the dual narrative strategy (realism vs. satire) through which the author fictionalizes the story of the Homeland Restoration movement across the two texts: while the novel reframes this little-known story as a quasi-surreal narrative, “War Years” investigates the impact of the Homeland Restoration movement on the daily life of Vietnamese refugees in Reagan-era San José, thus giving back humanity to figures and characters traditionally excluded from canonical Vietnam War narratives. Furthermore, the aim of the essay is to demonstrate how the references to American history (the Civil War, Native American genocide, etc.), present both in “War Years” and The Sympathizer, are to be read as textual clues that highlight how refugees can adopt the founding myths of host countries to the point of unconsciously replicating their dynamics.