A brief note at the beginning of Lucky Ticket indicates that this collection of stories was written ‘based on interviews with Vietnamese refugees around the world’. But there is more in Joey Bui’s debut collection of stories than this note implies: multilayered perspectives from many parts of the world, from Zanzibar to Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Washington DC and Kathmandu, cis and queer characters, women and men, from all of these places and more.

Just under half of the twelve stories are set in Vietnam, all in the south. They are stories of those who stayed, mostly. And occasionally of those who came back. The opening story, ‘Lucky Ticket’, plunges the reader into the world of Kiet, an expansive, mercurial, legless veteran of war (yes, that war, however you prefer to name it, and not from the winning side), scraping an honest living selling lottery tickets on the pavement in Ho Chi Minh City in the early 2000s. Kiet is the momentary holder of the lucky lottery ticket that gives the collection its name—handed to him, wordlessly, by a passing Asian woman with yellow hair, ‘bright like the sun’—before it is snatched away by chance, or his own carelessness. Later in the story, after several lurching twists of fate, he happens to meet Phuoc, the son of a former comrade-in-arms, who is back visiting from the United States. Phuoc asks Kiet why he chose to stay, why he never took the H1 visa offered by the US under the Orderly Departure Program. Kiet struggles to explain himself, and how he couldn’t bear to ask anyone for help. How everything just moved on. And how everything, every seeming good fortune, will have its price. ‘So many people pass me on the street. How can I explain myself to each one? I have been alive so long like this, it isn’t good for me to ask myself, “What if things were different?”’

• Tags: David Payne, Issue 20, Joey Bui, Vietnam