The Refugees

Arthur Arellano meets Louis Vu at Brodard’s Vietnamese restaurant in Orange County, California. Louis introduced Arthur to Vietnamese food, and Arthur has grown a real taste for it. Arthur allows Louis to stash his stock of bootleg, high-fashion products in his garage as a way of repaying a debt to Louis’s father. Arthur, however, feels conflicted about swindling people. As he listens to Louis’s philosophical justifications for his trade, he has the nagging feeling he is forgetting something.

Arthur’s life fell apart due to his gambling addiction. His wife, Norma, left him after he gambled away their bungalow in Huntington Beach. Shortly after, Arthur was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis, which meant he needed a liver transplant. His illness brought Norma back to him. Before his transplant, Arthur fantasized about being a better person after the surgery. He initially wanted to know about the person whose liver he would receive, but he ultimately decided to leave the air of mystery intact. A chance error by the hospital a year after Arthur’s life-saving surgery revealed that Arthur’s new liver came from Men Vu, an elderly Vietnamese man who was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Arthur, unaccustomed to Asian ethnic surnames, assumed Men must have been Chinese.