The Refugees

Professor Khanh calls his wife by the wrong name for the first time at a wedding reception. He was recently diagnosed with a memory disorder; it was the first time in 40 years of marriage that Mrs. Khanh saw him cry. They met in Vung Tau, the Vietnamese city the French called Cap Saint Jacques when he was 33 and she was 19. Her father arranged their marriage.

The band starts playing “I’d Love You to Want Me,” a song the professor misremembers dancing to with Mrs. Khanh before their children were born. He mistakenly calls her Yen. Mrs. Khanh is taken aback when he wants to dance, something she cannot remember ever doing. She makes him sit back down.

Professor Khanh insists on driving home. He takes a wrong turn, passing by the community college he taught at for 20 years. Unable to find a job in his field in America, Professor Khanh took a job teaching Vietnamese. With a pang she almost does not recognize as jealousy, Mrs. Khanh wonders if Yen was a former student of his. Professor Khanh brakes suddenly, asking Mrs. Khanh why she did not tell him they were going the wrong way.

The next morning, Professor Khanh is mortified when Mrs. Khanh tells him of his slip-ups of the previous night. Their son, Vinh, who goes by Kevin, arrives with a knock-off Picasso painting he bought in Vietnam. He claims a study has shown that Picasso is stimulating for people with his father’s condition. Vinh was a rebellious teenager—he eloped with an American girl he dated in high school shortly after graduating—but he is now a nurse who loves bodybuilding.

Vinh tries to convince his mother to retire from her library job to help out Professor Khanh. She is upset by this and by his suggestion that her children could hire a Mexican gardener to help out with the garden she had always maintained alone. She wonders if Vinh and his five siblings remember the dangerous journey as refugees aboard a boat in the Pacific. She had maintained her composure, even as her children cried from dehydration, to emphasize the importance of decorum. The eyes of the woman in the painting unnerve Mrs. Khanh. She removes it from the wall later that day.

As Professor Khanh’s condition deteriorates, Mrs. Khanh feels ashamed of the dread she feels upon leaving her part-time job at the library. She marks out directions in the house for Professor Khanh to find the bathroom and complete other basic tasks. The professor hires a handyman to install iron bars on the windows so he cannot sneak out at night.

Professor Khanh sporadically acts in uncharacteristic ways, offering romantic gestures he had never done before. One day, after returning for a walk with a rose, he once again mistakenly calls Mrs. Khanh Yen. Mrs. Khanh feels a flash of anger, but the professor forgets he even bought the rose by the end of dinner. They look at a postcard from their daughter working in Munich, a reminder of their former plans to travel the world after retirement.

After professor Khanh falls asleep, Mrs. Khanh goes to his library. She searches for mentions of “Yen” in his memory book; finding none, she writes in an imitation of his handwriting, “To­day I called my wife by the name of Yen[…]This mis­take must not be re­peat­ed” (83).

As Professor Khanh continues to call Mrs. Khanh Yen over and over again, she jealously speculates about who Yen might be. Professor Khanh snaps at her for the first time in their marriage when she walks in on him naked from the waist down, scrubbing his pants. As her husband’s memory deteriorates, Mrs. Khanh listens to the stories he recollects and begins to doubt her own memory.

Mrs. Khanh tells little to her children except for Vinh, whom she knows will relay whatever she says to his siblings. Vinh is always doing something else while they talk. She admits to herself that while she loves Vinh, she does not like him very much. She still refuses to quit her job, even though taking care of her husband takes a great toll on her.

By October, Professor Khanh can no longer concentrate enough to read aloud, a habit he started only recently. Mrs. Khanh reads to him instead, stopping when Professor Khanh recounts memories whose details she cannot remember. When he calls her Yen again, she snaps at him that her name is Sa. They rarely ever refer to each other by their first names, and Mrs. Khanh feels like she’s introducing herself to a stranger. When Professor Khanh falls asleep that night, she reads his journal. He wrote, in his rapidly declining handwriting, “Matters worsening. Today she insisted I call her by another name. Must keep a closer eye on her[…]for she may not know who she is anymore” (88). She shuts the book. Professor Khanh is so still that he could be dead; she almost wishes he was.

In the end, Mrs. Khanh is forced to retire. Her coworkers, not knowing Professor Khanh’s condition, give her travel books as a parting gift. When she returns home from her retirement party, Professor Khanh is missing. Feeling guilty that she did not listen to Vinh and hire a caretaker, she searches the neighborhood, only to return to find Professor Khanh shelving her new travel books. Watching him, she acknowledges that she isn’t the person he loved.

Professor Khanh panics when he sees Mrs. Khanh: He does not recognize her. She tells him that she is Yen, and he calms down. She selects a story to read to him, and she resolves to read to him every day until the end.