I really enjoyed attending the discussion about The Refugees at this week’s Rose Café. What I really appreciated was how everyone shared how they identified with the characters or situations in Nyugen’s short stories. The discussants were a diverse group, yet still, whatever the background, history, or present struggle of the immigrants and refugees in Nyugen’s story, multiple members of the group could articulate how their stories overlapped with those of the immigrants and refugees. What I found particularly powerful to watch was how from that point of common identification with some aspect of the human experience, we all begin to appreciate where these stories differed from our own or recognize what was unique about them. I think that the discussion as well as Nguyen’s writing really revealed how powerful individual stories can be. They enable us to learn from the perspectives of people with experiences and backgrounds that sharply differ from our own and urge us to recognize how one’s life is enriched by being exposed to or bonding with those who are different from ourselves while simultaneously encouraging us to consider what aspects of our story or our spirit are the same.
As I was sitting at this Rose Café and enjoying listening to people share both their own stories and their reactions to the stories of the refugees and immigrants, I kept thinking about how much better the world would be if everyone took time to listen and respond to each other’s stories. Particularly in the United States, where anti-immigrant rhetoric is figuring prominently in public discourse, immigrants and refugees are unjustly represented as undifferentiated, potentially threatening “others.” They are thought about as statistics, not as human beings with stories. I believe that if individuals not only grasp that the political decisions made will impact not an undifferentiated or hypothetical mass but individuals with aspirations, challenges, strengths, and regrets but also strive to listen to and understand those stories, the manner in which they talk about and understand issues of immigration will necessarily change.