The Refugees

Thomas wants to meet his father’s girlfriend, Mimi, for the first time, so he uses the excuse of having to use her restroom when he drops his father off at her apartment. Thomas’s mother died of an aneurysm at age 53, and Mimi is the first of his father’s many mistresses and girlfriends that he has seen in person. Thomas’s father, Mr. P, is a broad-chested, muscular man who does not think of the narrator as a grown man because he does not have children at age 33. He was a paratrooper in the Vietnam war. Mimi, a middle-aged Vietnamese woman, is anxious to get to know Thomas, but Mr. P wants him to leave. He tells him to pick him up in the morning (Mr. P’s car was recently stolen), and he shuts the door in his son’s face.

Thomas calls his ex-wife, Sam, but gets her answering machine. Sam is a high school math teacher who is popular with her students. The narrator’s father is a guidance counselor and also popular. The narrator works as a customer service representative for a medical company by day and as a security guard at a high-rise building near UCLA by night.

Thomas’s job as a night watchman is perfect for him since he developed insomnia when his mother died of an aneurysm and Sam left him a year ago. Mimi had told him she wanted to have children with him, but Thomas was not ready. He worried he would turn out to be like his father, who raised Thomas and his four siblings like a drill sergeant. His loneliness caused him to ask his father if he wanted to move in with him; Thomas had not expected Mr. P to say yes.

After his shift and only two hours of sleep, Thomas goes to pick up Mr. P at Mimi’s apartment. His father is in the shower, so Mimi makes him some coffee. She details the many women she knows who would like to be with a man like Thomas, who is “neither too American nor too Vietnamese” (113). Mr. P gets out of the shower, and he and Thomas leave.

Stuck in traffic, Mr. P berates Thomas for gaining weight and smoking. He asks how he plans to get Sam back if he does not take care of himself and tells him he gives up too easily. He warns, “‘Don’t be an id­i­ot. You were only half a man be­fore you met her, and you’re back to be­ing half a man now’” (114). When he says Thomas should have never let Sam go, Thomas begins to cry. Mr. P goes silent, and they both remember Thomas’s mother’s funeral. When he stops crying, Mr. P decides he needs to do something about Thomas. The phrase “do something” reminds Thomas of when Mr. P beat up the father of a kid who called Thomas a racial slur in school.

They pick up a rental car downtown, and Mr. P takes Thomas to his barber in Chinatown. The barber cuts Thomas’s hair too short. Mr. P drives them to Sam’s place in La Cienega, where she moved after the divorce. Thomas thinks it is a bad idea. This is the extent of Mr. P’s plan to “do something” about Thomas. When Sam opens the door, surprised to see him, they see plainly that she is pregnant. She is annoyed they did not call, but she invites them in.

To Thomas and Mr. P’s surprise, Sam had gone backpacking in Vietnam the summer before. Mr. P is adamant that he will never return to Vietnam; he does not trust what the communist government will do to him. When Sam is in the bathroom, Thomas inspects the house’s décor, surprised that she kept most of the decorations and mementos they had purchased together.

Sam describes her trip to Vietnam; Mr. P is pleased, despite himself, seeing Sam’s pictures of places he had only read about because the war had prevented him from traveling. Thomas and Sam get into an argument when Thomas asks if the man in one of the photographs is the baby’s father. Sam tells him to never come back.

When they leave, Mr. P suddenly tells Thomas to stop and turn off the car’s lights. Thomas does as he says. Mr. P gets out, slashes the tires of Sam’s car, and smashes the windshield. When he gets back in, Thomas calls him crazy. Mr. P says Sam will blame it on the Black people in the neighborhood.

Thomas confronts his father about this. Mr. P tells him everything he has ever done has been because he knows what is right and wrong. He says that Thomas does not know the difference between right and wrong. Thomas asks Mr. P if cheating on his mother was right. Mr. P sighs and says he never loved Thomas’s mother. He respected her, but their marriage was arranged by his father; Mr. P loved another woman.

Mr. P pulled a muscle in his neck while vandalizing Sam’s car. Thomas helps him into bed and massages his neck with eucalyptus oil. When Mr. P falls asleep, Thomas hangs up his shirt and sees his mother’s wig, which he felt compelled to keep after her death.

Mr. P’s car is found the next day. He goes to retrieve it with Mimi while Thomas is asleep between shifts. Thomas tells Mimi that his father is going to cheat on her. She replies, “Tell me some­thing […] Aren’t there times when you’d ra­ther be someone else be­sides you?’” (124).

Thomas is awoken by Sam pounding on his door at seven in the morning two days later. She confronts him about her car. Timidly, he offers her a wad of money he had withdrawn, intending to bring it to her. Thomas is transfixed by her pregnant belly. Kneeling in front of her, he says that he can be the baby’s father. She asks if he knows what he is saying or doing; he does not. They hear Mr. P creep to his door to eavesdrop. The three wait for what is to come.