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- [00:02]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
You're listening to DraftKings Network.
- [00:12]
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- [00:18]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
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- [00:21]
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Viet Thanh Nguyen
Strayer University is certified to operate in.
- [00:35]
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- [01:11]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Martha listens to her favorite band all the time. In the car, gym, even sleeping. So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live. She saved so much she got her seat close enough to actually see and them sort of. You were made to scream from the front row. We were made to quietly save you. More Expedia made to travel. Savings vary and subject to availability. Flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.
- [01:57]
Interviewer Dan
Welcome again to South Beach Session. We have got a teacher. We're going to learn something here today and a Pulitzer Prize winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen is with us. And you can go to vietwin.info if you want. His works that include a book that is now out and the book that you won the Pulitzer Prize with with your debut novel the Sympathizer. You're somebody Refugee is sort of part of your identity publicly. So thank you for joining us. Interesting times in America. I'm being diplomatic now. I can't imagine you're experiencing what it is that you're witnessing. But right before we turned on the cameras, you were talking about how similar Cubans and Vietnamese people are. What have been your observations there?
- [02:43]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Well, Dan, first of all, thanks for having me with the observations. Well, you know, Cubans ended up in Florida and most of the Vietnamese or the largest community who fled from Vietnam in 1975 ended up in California. So we're literally on opposite sides of the coast. Both communities are dominated by their anti communist factions. And both have been using that kind of anti communist both to cement their cultural communities where they are, but also to advance their political interests in the United States. And obviously, the Cubans have been actually much more effective at doing that than the Vietnamese Americans have. So we have a few politicians, but nothing on the scale of Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. And the ability of the Cuban exile community to determine a great degree of American politics is something that I think a certain portion of the Vietnamese community would envy.
- [03:29]
Interviewer Dan
Tell me about winning the Pulitzer Prize and how it is that it changed your life to have a debut novel that you wrote a little bit later into your writing career, but still your debut novel to win that prize. Like what happened to your life at that point? And did you know the book was good?
- [03:49]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I knew the book was good. I thought the book was very good. But winning a prize is completely arbitrary, as I'm sure you're aware. So it's obviously nice to win prizes. I would never turn down a prize, especially the Pulitzer, which completely transformed my life. But now I serve on the Pulitzer board and we give out Pulitzer Prizes, and I've served on other juries for prizes, and I'm quite aware that it's quite arbitrary in many ways. So how did it change my life? Well, I mean, the Pulitzer is especially for fiction, for the novel. People care about it. So just having winning that prize meant more eyeballs were on the book. And the book had done very well. It had been reviewed uniformly, positively. It had made a big impact already, but a big impact for a literary work. You know, you're lucky if you sell 25,000 or 100,000 copies, which the book did, too. But after the Pulitzer, it sold a million copies, and it turned into a TV series for hbo. My trajectory has been completely transformed because of that book.
- [04:42]
Interviewer Dan
The reason I asked, did you know it was good? Which might seem like a stupid question, is because a lot of writing comes with doubt and insecurity. And I talk to a lot of writers who, for whatever reason, aren't totally sure that what they've made is, never mind prize winning, just worthy of being read by others in a way that meets, you know, community standards.
- [05:03]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I spent 17 years writing a short story collection called the Refugees before I wrote the Sympathizer. And everything you said is true. That was a horrible, miserable experience. The book itself was actually pretty good, I think, according to readers as well. But it was how I learned to write. I suffered all the agony and the doubt and the fear that you described, and then at the end of that process, I thought I wrote this book partly for me, but also partly for the community of Vietnamese readers, but other people who have influence, who can publish the book. And that is a very human experience to do something for other people. But at the end of that, I thought had it. I'm going to write my next book for myself that was a sympathizer. And ironically, because I didn't care about what other people thought, I wrote the best possible book I could. And that is actually kind of a life lesson for writers, but also for others as well.
- [05:50]
Interviewer Dan
So what happened there? Like, how did that happen? Because you're changing the entirety of your process to, you know, the greatest of rewards.
- [06:00]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Well, I mean, the colloquial way is to say, I don't give a. You know what anymore. And we spend most of our. Many people spend the bulk of their lives actually giving that. Like they care about what other people think for obvious professional and personal reasons. But I think for artists, as an example, but I think probably for other people, too, we have to reach a space where we don't care what other people think. So we can give completely honest expression to what we believe. Both what we believe about the world, but what we believe about our art as well. And honestly, that was the hardest thing for me to achieve.
- [06:36]
Interviewer Dan
But how did you. So how did you get. You're saying 17 years of suffering, Your relationship with it is what for 17 years I'm writing about my experience. Also, it feels like I'm shouting into a tin can.
- [06:49]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I grew up a Catholic, and I feel that if I hadn't become a writer, I would have become a priest. Anything that required discipline, in other words, the discipline is what matters. The calling is what matters. It's not the world. It's what you believe. And the challenge for me as a writer was to spend 17 years learning the craft, the art, the technique, all these kinds of things you need as a writer, but also being preoccupied with the world, what the agents thought, editors thought, reviewers, and so on. But the thing about a discipline for me is that after I spent 17 years being disciplined and disciplining myself, I stopped caring about the world. There's no way to teach anybody how to do that. That's what makes a discipline so frightening and so powerful and so necessary for those of us who think of ourselves as art or anybody who has a calling of some kind. If I hadn't become a writer, I would have become a priest, or maybe I would become a chef or a gardener. Something that would have required Me, just to spend a huge amount of time by myself until I realized that it is the art itself that matters, not the world.
- [07:51]
Interviewer Dan
Why were those your only choices? Why were the disciplines? I know your brother gets to this country, doesn't speak English upon arrival, seven years later, he's in Harvard. Like what was happening in your family as it regarded discipline.
- [08:06]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
We had a very typical story, which is that we became refugees from the Vietnam War. And I'm not going to bore you because you know these stories as well. Coming out of Cuba, you know, when people are refugees, everybody who's a refugee has a horrible story to tell about how they escaped whatever situation they find themselves in. And we went through all of that. I call myself an eyewitness to eyewitnesses because my parents were full grown adults. They were in their 40s. They lost everything. They made life and death decisions to get themselves and their children out of the country. I was 4 years old, so I don't remember any of that. But I grew up watching my parents struggle in very difficult circumstances, living these refugee lives in the United States. And my brother did too. And I think what we experienced out of that is we knew the kinds of sacrifices that had been made to give us the opportunities that we had. And so we never needed, I think, a lot of motivation to just do our hardest to try to pay back our parents for their sacrifices, but also, I think, simply to pay back this entire idea that we were the lucky ones. We were the survivors, we made it out the country. We were given opportunities that many people literally would have died for, and many people did die for. And so, you know, everything that happens after that, I feel grateful that I've had the opportunity to be a writer. But everything takes place in that context of tremendous loss of the refugee experience, of war, of knowing, as I do as a scholar of this war, that during the years of the 1940s through the 1970s, in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, millions of people died. So I'm very lucky, and I try to make the most out of that opportunity.
- [09:42]
Interviewer Dan
When you talk about remembering the details or witnessing the details of your parents struggling, obviously they're in the books. But for the uninitiated who have not yet seen the books, what are the struggles that you're talking about?
- [09:54]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
My parents were born poor, in a poor rural northern village in an area that's famous for producing hardcore communists and hardcore Catholics. So 30 minutes from where my parents were born, Ho Chi Minh was born. My parents were Catholics. They chose a different route. They lifted themselves out of Poverty through hard work and ingenuity. They lost everything again 20 years later as they became refugees for the second time. They fled from north to South Vietnam in 1954 when the country was divided. Fled from Vietnam in 1975 when their side lost the war. They came to the United States with some money, but not a lot. They started from the bottom, working as janitors and people doing manual work. They opened a grocery store in San Jose, California. They worked for 12 to 14 hour days, seven days a week, almost every day of the year. They were shot in their store on Christmas Eve. They were held up in their own house at gunpoint. I was there to witness that. It was just a very difficult physical and emotional experience for them. My mother ended up going to a psychiatric facility three times in her life soon after she arrived. When her mother died in Vietnam and she was not there to be able to mourn her mother in person, that broke her. Then again, 15, 20 years later, I was 18 years old and I wrote a whole book about it, A Man of Two Faces. Was she broken simply because of some crack in her own foundation? Or was she broken because of all the horrible things that she experienced through war and the refugee experience? I will never know the answer to that question, which is why I wrote a book about it. And then she was broken for the third time when I was an adult and she never recovered from that. So that was the kind of life that my parents. They were hardworking, intelligent, successful people who overcame a lot. And in my mother's case, who she could not overcome, the last and final weakness within herself that she was not responsible for.
- [11:51]
Interviewer Dan
I don't know the details of that. You will share what you wish or don't wish to, but you sort of jumped right over them being shot multiple times. One when you were nine and one when you were 16. One was in the home, but they were both shot in their store.
- [12:07]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I was nine years old. I was home on Christmas Eve with my brother, who was 16. I was watching, I believe, Scooby Doo Christmas. I was having a great time. Phone rings. My brother answers the phone. He puts it down. He says, mom and dad have been shot. I'm nine years old. I have no idea what to do with this information. So I just continue watching the cartoons. And my brother, who is crying, says, why aren't you crying? What's wrong with you? And I thought there was indeed something wrong with me. And I bore that for the rest of my life. To think that. Anyway, so my parents had flesh wounds. The robber had shot them, but thankfully they were not injured too badly. And within a couple of days they were back at work. And we never spoke of that incident again. And that pretty much characterized our existence as refugees. You just had to keep on moving forward. And if something bad happened to you, you have to remember something worse happened to somebody else. So that's why I'm saying for those of us who are refugees, everybody I know went through some horrible experience. So most of us as refugees hardly ever talked about what we went through because we realized everybody in our community had gone through something similar or something much, much worse. And when I was 16, yes, a gunman followed my parents home from the store, broke into the house, pointed a gun at all of our faces. Thankfully we were not shot. And thankfully he was probably an amateur because what he did was he said, get down on your knees. And my father and I, being the brave men that we were, got down on our knees and my mother just dashed right past this guy, right out into the street screaming. And we lived on a very busy street. So everybody saw the gunman, turned around, stepped outside to go after her. And my father jumped up and slammed the door shut and locked the door shut behind her. And I looked to my left and I looked through the living room window and I saw my mother running down the street screaming, saving our lives. So yeah, that was what childhood was like. That was what the refugee experience was like. Not just for us, but for so many other refugees who were trying to survive in a very difficult and violent time. In San Jose, California, you stopped yourself.
- [14:08]
Interviewer Dan
There saying, I've lived my entire life with what my reaction was to both of them being shot at. Nine years old. And then you didn't go any further, you detoured there. Where were you headed?
- [14:22]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I think that. Well, first of all, the first thing that happened that I really remember that coming to the United States at 4 years of age, we ended up in an army camp. So 130,000 Vietnamese refugees come, we're put into one of four camps. Ours was Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania. In order to leave that camp or any camp, Vietnamese people had to have Americans sponsor them. So we had a very unusual circumstance. No American church or institution or family was willing to sponsor all four of us. So one sponsor took my. One sponsor took my 10 year old brother, one sponsor took 4 year old me. That's where my memories begin, howling and screaming as I'm taken away from my parents. And I thought it wasn't such a big deal. I got to come home after two months, three Months. My brother didn't get to come home for two years, and I thought everything was fine. I just moved ahead with my life. And then I think in retrospect, looking back upon my life as I was writing this memoir, man of Two Faces, looking back at me at four years of age, nine years of age, listening, hearing about my parents being shot, 16 years of age, gunman in our house, I understood in the end that, in fact, these things really did matter, that how I had coped with the refugee experience was by turning myself off emotionally, by just becoming completely numb. So when my brother said, what's wrong with you? I thought that was what was wrong with me. I couldn't feel anything. And so that was my coping mechanism. So sometimes when people go through horrifying traumatic experiences, they bear the traces and the scars very visibly. Sometimes it's much quieter. And that was the case for me. And sometimes the traumas are incredible, like people drowning and dying and being shot. But sometimes, for so many of us who have been through traumatic experiences, the trauma is a lot quieter. And I think that's especially true also for the children of people who've been through trauma. We watch what our parents have gone through. We're the eyewitnesses to eyewitnesses. And we bear those scars as well, though.
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Commercial Announcer
Hey, Chris, hockey season almost here.
- [16:21]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Oh, Roy, I need Barkov in my life.
- [16:24]
Commercial Announcer
Absolutely. We celebrate a championship season for the second year on a row we own.
- [16:28]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Back to back to back.
- [16:29]
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Jack, you know how we celebrated little Miller Light ski? Damn right.
- [16:33]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
You're darn right I'm right about that, Roy. I love Miller Lite.
- [16:35]
Commercial Announcer
Don Tooton.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen
Yeah.
- [16:37]
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- [17:02]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Punt, punt.
- [17:03]
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- [17:16]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Oh, the little foam. Little foam head. Oh, so refreshing. Miller Light. I love you.
- [17:20]
Interviewer Dan
Oh, yeah.
- [17:21]
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- [17:39]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
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- [19:04]
Interviewer Dan
I'd like to talk to you about the immigration issues in this country. I'd like to talk to you more about the refugees experience and some of the details in it. The way that you write about sewage, for example. Something as simple as that. Why do you think your debut novel resonated the way that it did? Why do you think it was able to open eyes the way that it did?
- [19:29]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I think it's actually a very good novel. Whether it's a great novel, I have no idea. I think it's very good. I'm a literary critic, so I think I know what I'm talking about, but I'm obviously very biased. So that was one reason. I think technically, artistically, I think the novel was doing stuff, stuff that people hadn't seen before because you have to remember. Americans think they know what the Vietnam War is. Americans Just say Vietnam. And when they say Vietnam, they mean the Vietnam War. And when they say the Vietnam War, they mean the American war. Like, what did it do to Americans? So, number one, this is a novel purely about Vietnamese experiences that's unsettling for Americans to realize they're not at the center of the world. And number two, it's a novel that is very, very dark. A lot of terrible things happen, but it's a novel that I tried to make very, very funny because I was inspired by novels like Catch 22, for example, and the belief that humor and satire can help us deal with tragedy. But humor and satire can also be very pointed political tools as well. So I think all that happened, but the thing that was out of my control, but I knew was probably going to happen, is that Americans also feel terribly guilty. Not all Americans, but a good number of Americans, especially those who went through the war or those who are in the book and publishing industry who skew liberal. They feel guilty about this terrible, terrible war. And so they want voices like mine to come out there and tell them what it was like for Vietnamese people. And of course, what I always say is you can't depend on one novel, one story, one writer. But my novel was one that came along that people focused on at that time. People, as in American people, who wanted to hear again what Vietnamese people have gone through.
- [21:02]
Interviewer Dan
For those who do not know, it's a war story, it is a spy story, it is a love story, and it was your debut novel. What was the pressure after that like?
- [21:14]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Well, because I'd already gone through 17 years of writing the Refugees, and I basically said, I don't care. When I wrote the Sympathizer, winning the Pulitzer was obviously a big deal. But also at that point, I was very fortunate. I was in my early 40s, and it didn't matter to me in a lot. Genuinely, honestly, it didn't matter. Because all I knew was I was just gonna write another novel. So whether I got the prizes or didn't get them, I would still write another novel. So I wrote a sequel called the Committed. And so, you know, we have to remember with the sympathizer, I said out to try to offend everybody. Americans, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, anti Communists, pro Communists. And judging from my hate mail, I succeeded. So when I finished, I thought, who else is there left to offend the French? And so the Committed continues the adventures of our protagonist, who is this mixed race French and Vietnamese Communist spy in Paris, the land of his father. And so anyway, when I wrote that Novel again, I didn't care. And so it made no difference to me that the first one won the Pulitzer Prize because I had to keep that same conviction that what really mattered was the art, nothing else.
- [22:17]
Interviewer Dan
Can you help me, please? I'd like some help. I didn't care. How did you get to. I didn't care. Were you broken? Like, what? Were you broken by the process? How does one get to. I'm not going to care what anyone thinks. And then writes the seminal work for the year.
- [22:38]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I think we all have illusions. Illusions about ourselves, illusions about the world. We're raised in certain ways, and we're told, hey, this matters. That matters. This prize, this accomplishment, that school, those people, their opinions. And we've all imbibed that to one degree or another. And then I think as one gets older, for many of us, there is a process of disillusionment. It's called growing up. And, you know, for some people, they become cynical. You don't have to become cynical. You just have to realize that the world is. The world is a beautiful place. Many beautiful things like art, that are made by people, and people mess these beautiful things up. There's nothing that human beings have invented, nothing beautiful that they haven't also messed up at the same time. And that's the paradox of being human. We create beautiful things, and we also undermine them by the institutions that we create. Okay? And so I realized about that, about that, about writing and about art, which were my things that I really cared about a lot, that the writing and the art matter, everything else around them do not. Publishing awards, recognitions, fancy dinners, interviews, these kinds of things. I mean, they're fun. They don't.
- [23:52]
Interviewer Dan
Oh, you're crushing me. I thought that this was gonna be the highlight here.
- [23:55]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
We're having a good time. That's important. We need it, right? And it's a good time to go to a dinner party or literary party or whatever. But it's not the art. It's not the writing. And so it took 17 years of working at the art to realize I didn't care about the illusions. And that's a very beneficial experience to have. And again, there's no way to teach anybody.
- [24:17]
Interviewer Dan
But it wasn't from one day or the other, right? Because it's 17 years of drip, drip, drip, drip. And then you look up and I'm, like, doing it wrong. Am I doing it wrong? Are you asking yourself that? It's a conscious decision to. No. I am going to pour myself into the presence of my every act, is going to Be BLEEP off. I don't care what anyone thinks. All that matters is I'm gonna follow my convictions on this. And the places that I feel hurt, betrayed, wounded or whatever, I'm just gonna let it fly.
- [24:48]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Yeah, because you look around and I looked around after 17 years, and I realized, oh, the things that I thought I cared about, like, will I get published in the New Yorker, or will I get this fancy prize, or will I get this fancy residency and so on, I realized those are acc. If I got those things, would they make me happier? Would they make me a better writer? No, they're just baubles, which doesn't mean they're not bad, which doesn't mean they're bad. I mean, I would take them, but again, the only thing that matters is sitting down at a desk and writing. Now, people doing different things, it's different. If you're a ball player, it's like you do the sport, you do the discipline, and there's something beautiful in that. And of course, you want to be paid a million dollars for it, but is that. I don't know. I'm not in sports. Is that what really matters? You're in sports. Is that what really matters? I don't know.
- [25:36]
Interviewer Dan
Well, money, obviously. Money is obviously important. And you winning the Pulitzer opened up an assortment of abilities for you that you wouldn't have had before. But when you talk about human beings making beautiful things and destroying them. Your present book, the title, To Save and to Destroy, this is something you've been thinking about, obviously, that human beings were very good at this.
- [26:00]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Yeah. I think about the fact that, yes, a million dollars is awesome. I wouldn't turn it down, but it's an interesting. I could write a story about this. The Devil gives you a choice. All this money, and you suck at what you do, or you're really great at what you do, but you don't get the recognition. Now, obviously, hopefully, you want a sweet spot, but let's say those are your two choices. What would you choose? For me, the Devil didn't literally appear, but it felt like that was a choice I was sitting down with when I wrote the Sympathizer. And I'm going write what I care about, and I don't care if I win any prizes or make any money out of that. So that was my rejection of this institution of literature and art that had saved me, because when I came as a refugee boy to the United States and I was watching my parents struggle, they didn't have any time to spend with me. Because they were working to save their lives and our lives. So what did I do? I just read a lot of books. I read stories. I fell in love with literature.
- [26:57]
Interviewer Dan
You were always in the library, right?
- [26:58]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Always.
- [26:59]
Interviewer Dan
Free knowledge. They were just g away down the street. So that's where you were.
- [27:03]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
We never had a single book in our house. Not even the Bible. I don't know why we're Catholic. Not even the Bible. So my parents would have never spent money on books. So I got that education for free. I educated myself, and I fell in love with literature. And I believe that literature really, really mattered. And literature saved my life, and literature could save the world. And I believe we all should find that passion, whatever it is, for each of us. But I had to understand something, which is that if stories have the power to save us, they have the power to destroy us as well. If you give something that much power, that's simply the recognition that you're granting it. How did I know that? One day When I was 11 or 12 years old, I put this movie into the VCR. It was called Apocalypse Now. I'd never seen any Vietnam War story before. I was a war fanatic. I loved American war movies. I was an American. Started watching this movie, and I realized the Vietnamese are the bad guys in here, or if we're not the bad guys, we're the unimportant people. The Americans are the good guys, or the Americans are the good guys, even if they're the bad guys. Because if you watch Apocalypse now, you know, the American soldiers are doing terrible things, but we see the world through their eyes. And I was seeing the world through their eyes up until the moment they massacred Vietnamese civilians. And then I was split in two. Was I the one doing the killing, or was I the one being killed? And that was when I realized what the true power of stories are. Not just to save us, that's a sentimental belief. But to destroy us. Because I felt destroyed at that point, and that really shaped me. And I grew up after that realizing that the United States had gone into Vietnam and destroyed a lot of places and a lot of people. But before the United States could ever do that in the name of saving Vietnam and the Vietnamese people, before the United States could do that, the United States had to have already destroyed the Vietnamese through the stories that Americans were telling themselves. And Americans have always told stories about non white people, non American people that justified their destruction long before the United States arrived in their countries and actually destroyed them.
- [29:14]
Interviewer Dan
Could you have imagined in 2015, when you're receiving the prize. If I come up to you and say, wait till you see what America is like in 20, 20, 19, 25, you're not going to believe it, your response would have been, what?
- [29:32]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Well, if you appeared as this angel from the future, I would have probably said, I do believe you because you're coming from the future. And I'm a student of American history to some extent, and I don't think there's anything we're seeing now that we haven't seen before to one degree or another. But Americans probably, like most other people, have a good talent to be amnesiac about their past. I mean, we as Americans have collectively forgotten a lot of horrible things that we have done in our history to our fellow Americans, to the people we've encountered, to countries we've gone to. So I would have said, well, I'm really sad to hear this is how things are going to turn out in 10 years. But I also think that's the logic of American history and society that has taken us here.
- [30:18]
Interviewer Dan
You're a professor, as I mentioned off the top, you are doing a lot of stuff to yell from the mountaintops about the dangers of artificial intelligence. I don't know. That's one historically that you could look at, no matter how much you know American history and say that is the threat that you saw coming from somewhere.
- [30:36]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Well, I wouldn't have said artificial intelligence necessarily, but I don't think it was beyond the imagination. Didn't Steven Spielberg do a movie called AI like 20 years ago? And in fact, if you go back to Mary Shaw, Shelley, Frankenstein in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley already gave us the template that here is a scientist. He's not even a mad scientist. He's just a scientist who believes in the power of science, and he wants to push the boundaries of what we know as human beings and push the boundaries of humanity itself. And then, of course, something terrible happens in Frankenstein. To Frankenstein, but also to the monster that he creates. So, in fact, AI may be, yes, a new technology, but Peter Thiel, that dude is Frankenstein. Okay, so the tech bros and the tech oligarchs think they're doing something new. In some senses, obviously, yes, they are. But in other senses, they're repeating a very old mythological template. I believe one of the new projects. I thought people were kidding when they said this is it Zuckerberg who's come up with Prometheus? Somebody's come up with Prometheus. Have you read. Do you know what Prometheus is? I mean, come on. So, I mean, the Greeks already Knew, do not tempt the gods, do not mess with the gods. And that with AI is what we're doing. That's what Peter Thiel is saying. It's like, humanity is not enough. We need to be divine. Well, be careful what you wish for because you go back to the Bible, the Tower of Babel. God struck down human beings who aspired too much to divinity.
- [32:02]
Interviewer Dan
Tell us, though, your present cause and what the real dangers are. As you're watching students use artificial intelligence to not have to be at college actually learning, you're probably reading papers all the time that have been written by computers.
- [32:18]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Yeah, actually I have teaching assistants, so thankfully I don't have to do that. But I hear from my TAs like, oh, my God, we think this has been written by AI. And I teach a large lecture class on the Vietnam War, and I try to make it AI proof. Their big project as students is to go and interview people, which hopefully you can't do with AI or else you might be out of a job. Could happen, but they have to actually interview real living people. You could be replaced by AI, but the subject, the interviewee should be a real human being. We hope, anybody, anyway. So that part hopefully is AI proof. And so we as teachers have to be smarter now. We always have to meet new technological challenges, but even in things like, oh my God, I have in class blue book exams, and my TAs are like, this looks like it was written by AI. Somehow, some students snuck in something that allowed them possibly to manufacture their writing. So look, education has always been confronted by technology. I'm sure people were upset about calculators and about rulers and things like that. Plato was critical about the pen as an instrument or writing as a technology that distracted people from full knowledge. And so I don't want to undersell what AI means, but I do want to say that we always have to confront new technological challenges. So I think AI is probably different than a calculator, probably different than a computer. Computers and calculators still required human input and us to do something with that technology. AI promises to simply replace our brain functions altogether. I don't know. I don't know what that. Actually, I do not know what that future entails from a teaching point of view. I think it probably means that ironically, something that's supposed to make life less labor intensive, like to make us do less things for teachers at least will make work if we want to skirt AI more labor intensive. Because what do we have to do? We actually have to make sure we're in the Room with the students to see what they're learning, like to have a conversation, to do oral examinations, that kind of stuff. That might be the new reality. And of course, we don't live in a country in which we're willing to invest in our teachers and in models where, you know, it would be 12 students and one teacher. To get that kind of experience, you have to pay $100,000 a year. So here it is. That's one of the basic contradictions. You know, we're in a capitalist society that wants to reduce everything thing to the pure profit motive. That's what AI is going to do. So all the human beings who, who are suddenly gravitating to AI, they, they hopefully are realizing that AI is also going to take their jobs at the same time. And then the, the, the promises of liberation that AI entails can only be made possible through greater human interaction, which requires that we treat human beings as valuable and not simply as, as widgets or people to be exploited for the cheapest possible wage.
- [35:16]
Interviewer Dan
What keeps you up at night in this regard?
- [35:19]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
That AI will win. Peter Thiel will win. That does keep me up at night.
- [35:23]
Interviewer Dan
How soon, how eminent do you regard the largest of the threats here?
- [35:33]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I think it's pretty fast. If we think about the development of the personal laptop, for example, was that the 1980s and then the iPhone was about 15 years ago in our own lifetime, in the lifetime of our children. 15 years. I remember the times before the iPhone. I remember times before the cell phone. I remember my first cell phone from 1997. Okay. The life has been completely transformed. I'm someone who loves literature and language and even I have been transformed by the iPhone. I spend an ordinate amount of time reading things that are stupid on my iPhone. I also spend time reading things that are good on my iPad. But nevertheless, even someone like me who specializes in words has been shaped by this technology. Who knows what a 12 year old who has hardly ever read a book, how they will be impacted by this technology. So in fact, I think this technological transformation, we've already seen the evidence that it's extremely rapid with the introduction of personal devices, and it's going to get a lot faster.
- [36:34]
Interviewer Dan
What do you see being lost though, with your students, with that generation, with their reliance on only having to find things instead of having to learn them?
- [36:45]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Well, it's hard to say. I mean, the students I get at my university, which is usc, tend to be extremely well prepared. They've already been through a certain kind of educational system, so I think they're at least a little bit aware of the dangers posed by technology because I don't actually allow them to use laptops or phones in my classroom. And no one has ever protested. You figure if these people are that addicted, they would protest. But even they recognize what I say, which is these devices confuse the human relationships. You actually understand more if you're not taking notes on your laptop. You understand more if you're not tempted by going to shop online on Amazon.com instead, instead of interacting with other people in your classroom. So they recognize that. But there are a lot of other people who are not so well prepared. So I think that I see some encouragement in these surveys that say that there are some younger people, teenagers, who recognize the dangers that technology poses to them and to their human relationships. I think we have to lean into that and we have to offer our young people and our students and our children more human opportunities. And we have to do things like take away their damn folks.
- [37:56]
Interviewer Dan
What do you make of what is happening right now in this country as we're sitting here right now in Los Angeles around immigration, given everything that is your identity in your work?
- [38:10]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I believe in something that apparently a quarter to a third of the country doesn't believe in, which is that immigrants and refugees make America great. And if we look at our history, I think we have repeated evidence of that taking place both at a qualitative level in terms of things like food and culture and music, and at a quantitative level in terms of economics and metrics and that kind of stuff. And we also live in a country in which every now and then, periodically, cyclically, the American people, some portion of them, turn against immigrants and refugees. It's happened repeatedly throughout our history. People freak out about some kind of economic or political or cultural problem and it's very easy to tempt them into fear mongering and into demonizing people who appear to be different from them in some way. So we again, repeatedly Throughout American History, 1882, Chinese Exclusion Act, 1907, gentlemen's agreement that prevented Japanese from coming in 1924, immigration act that prevented almost all non white immigration. On and on and on. We deported 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s and 1940s. And reading about that as a student, I wondered how could that possibly happen? Now we're actually watching it happen in real time. We're seeing the mechanisms being built, both the political and legal mechanisms, but also the cultural mechanisms that get people, some portion of the people to agree that this should be done. So I have hope that recent surveys indicate that now two thirds to three quarters of American people are saying, actually, immigration is good for this country. They're having a reaction against the brutality that we're seeing on screen. I don't have to repeat what those.
- [39:49]
Interviewer Dan
But you're offended by them emotionally. You see how. You see how crude it is and that cruelty is the point. You're seeing how crass all of it is in 2025. It's a blunt instrument. It's not even subtle.
- [40:05]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
It's inhumane and blunt, as you said. And I'm horrified by a few other reasons. I think many people who watch these images obviously are horrified for the same reasons that I am, and maybe you are. But I also see it as a historical horror. Like I said, this has happened before. So Americans who are saying, this is not who we are. I'm sorry, this is exactly who we are. We've done this, this through the generations to many, many different populations, thrown them into concentration camps, deported them without due process, tortured them, killed them. We have done this many times throughout American history. The other thing that offends me, however, is people like Cubans and Vietnamese people who came here as refugees saying, this is good, Okay? I mean, during the previous Trump administration, when children were being separated from their parents and put into cages, there were Vietnamese Americans saying, trump is doing the right thing. Those are the bad refugees. We were the good refugees. I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee community of the 1970s and 1980s, and let me tell you something, there were a lot of bad Vietnamese refugees doing terrible things, okay? We've forgotten all about that, because there's always a new, scary other demon, monster to distract us, and that now is brown people, Muslim people, and so on. You know, Marco Rubio, descendant of immigrants or refugees, depending on how you interpret his history, shows no remorse for what is going on. He went to San Salvador on the same day I went to San Salvador. He was there to sign the deportation agreement with President Bukele of El Salvador. And as you know, that led to hundreds of people being deported as criminal. And all those people have now been released and sent back to Venezuela. Very few of them were actually criminals.
- [41:49]
Interviewer Dan
Cubans, though, have had a really privileged relationship with this country where Cubans get on land and stay here and Haitians are sent back. And so I've actually watched how it is that we, as a minority, have now protected some things that make me feel surrounded in Miami with a state militia for a police force that's corrupt. And Marco Rubio and an assortment of just Corruptions that are flabbergasting to me. But I'm surrounded, like, I am alone or feel often alone among my people because they don't see Trump as the communist threat. They see or have seen by. By large voting segments that. That Trump is not the dictator, that he will protect us from communism. And it's baffling to me. Like, I don't get. I don't get how my people can be that against others.
- [42:50]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Divide and conquer. Pretty simple strategy. And it works every time. You said Haitians, well, you know, Vietnamese people, when we came, the majority of the American people did not want to accept Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees. So we got in through, you know, President Ford and an act of Congress. But we also got in because, number one, we were anti communist. Americans understood that we were also not black. So the Haitian refugees were also coming in the mid to late 1970s. They were being turned back even as we as Southeast Asians were being let in. So you as a Vietnamese refugee, or we as Vietnamese refugees could say, well, we're better than Haitians. Whether we thought that explicitly or not. That's the message that's being sent out. And so again, throughout American history, divide and conquer, demonize one population. Everybody else feels better, or some of them feel better not realizing that we're just waiting our turn. And even for Asian Americans who might say, well, this is being done to brown people, this deportation stuff, it's being done to Asians too. Just selective Asians at certain moments. But the Trump administration is coming for everybody. That's my conviction. And he's gonna get to a lot of these Latinos and a lot of these Asians who voted for him one way or another.
- [44:02]
Commercial Announcer
This episode is brought to you by State Farm.
- [44:05]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Checking off the boxes on your to.
- [44:06]
Commercial Announcer
Do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off.
- [44:10]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Coverage, a State Farm agent.
- [44:11]
Commercial Announcer
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- [44:20]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
- [44:27]
Interviewer Dan
There's a reason Chevy trucks are known for their dependability. Because they show up no matter the weather, push forward no matter the terrain, and deliver.
- [44:33]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
That's why Chevrolet has earned more dependability awards for trucks than any other brand.
- [44:37]
Interviewer Dan
In 2025, according to J.D. power, because in every Chevy truck, like every Chevy driver, dependability comes standard. Visit Chevy.com to learn more.
- [44:43]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Chevrolet received the highest total number of awards among all the trucks in the J.D.
- [44:47]
Interviewer Dan
Power 2025 U.S. vehicle Dependability Study Awards.
- [44:50]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Based on 2022 models. Newer models may be shown.
- [44:52]
Interviewer Dan
Visit jdpower.com awards for more details. Chevrolet together.
- [44:56]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Let's drive.
- [44:57]
Interviewer Dan
What does it mean to you to be an American?
- [45:01]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
What it means for me to be an American is that I. I think there are simple Americans and complex Americans. Okay? The simple Americans are the love it or leave it Americans, this country, right or wrong Americans. They've always existed in American history. For them to be American is a stark choice. Either or. I come as a refugee from an American war, and I arrive in the United States feeling complexity. Like, as I say in my novel, the Sympathizer, my protagonist says, well, I'm grateful for American aid, but maybe I wouldn't have needed American aid if we hadn't been invaded by the United States in the first place. It's a very common, very common thing. You know, a lot of people. A lot of people, Indianapolis, United States, fled from wars that the United States was responsible for, and they made the very sensible choice, it's better to be behind the guns than in front of the guns. So some people would hear me say this kind of stuff, and they'll be like, oh, he's un American. He's got a. You know, I literally get messages from people saying, since you love the commies so much, go back to Vietnam. They apparently did not read more than 10 pages of the Sympathizer because the novel was actually banned in Vietnam by the communist government. Okay? So that's complexity. Now, the complexity for me as an American is to recognize this is a beautiful country. It's a country built on democracy, equality, liberty, rights, all of which I've benefited from. It's also a country built on brutality, genocide, colonization, enslavement, perpetual war. These are facts. Now, you can interpret them differently. And in fact, people do interpret them differently. Donald Trump interprets those facts as make America great again. We conquered this country, we're going to conquer the rest of the world. It's not a problem. We committed genocide, okay? But the complexity is in recognizing that the beauty of this country was made possible by the brutality of this country, that all the privileges that a certain part of the population enjoys, a large portion of people, women and enslaved people, didn't have those freedoms in the late 18th century, and that dynamic continues with us today. That complexity is unsettling for a lot of Americans. But only by confronting that complexity, complexity, would it be possible for us to even hope to make the United States as democratic of A country as it wants to be.
- [47:11]
Interviewer Dan
You might have been a priest in a different life. You're about the discipline, and you're saying that after 17 years of writing, it's about the art, not about the prizes. So I give you one and only one. You can have the Pulitzer Prize or you can have your book banned in Vietnam by the communist government. You take what? Which one?
- [47:31]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Book banned in communist Vietnam because that means it spoke the truth, and the truth is what matters.
- [47:38]
Interviewer Dan
Your life was changed how? By the Pulitzer Prize?
- [47:41]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Well, number one, I mean, I have found a lot of financial freedom I didn't have before. I found many more readers than I didn't have before. The Pulitzer as that symbolic prize, is something that even people who don't read books recognize. And I got a plat. I hate this language. The brand, the platform. I got the platform. People are like, oh. Everywhere I go, I'm introduced as. He won the Pulitzer Prize, legitimates me, gives me an opportunity to speak. I went to speak at the State Department. I've spoken at West Point to all the plebes of West Point. I've gotten so many opportunities to be heard because of the Pulitzer Prize. And I try to say that wherever I go, I still try to say the same thing. And that's what, to me, if we recognize that these prizes are illusory and they're simply part of the material world, that's fine. But then I try to make use of. Of them to try to advance what I think of as the truth.
- [48:33]
Interviewer Dan
But you wouldn't be able to if you chose only one, and I didn't give you the Pulitzer Prize. You'd be banned. You'd be banned in Vietnam, in that.
- [48:39]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Hypothetical world, but you wouldn't have all.
- [48:41]
Interviewer Dan
This other wonderful stuff that gives you the freedom to do your. Continue doing your art.
- [48:46]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
That's okay. I look back, I mean, I look back upon this history of writers that I admire, and a lot of writers that I admire never got those big prizes. You know, James Baldwin. Everybody loves James Baldwin now, right? Everybody loves James Baldwin. He barely got any literary prizes when he was writing. And people totally misunderstand James Baldwin. They don't understand. This man fled the United States as a refugee from what he experienced in terms of American racism. He fled in the 40s. He fled again in the 70s. He spent a lot of his life in Turkey and in France. He exiled himself because of what he saw here, because he spoke the truth. So these are the kinds of writers I admire. The writer, I don't know what maybe Baldwin wanted prizes, but he didn't give. And it's that conviction of trying to use your art to make it the best that it can be. Because art is about both beauty and truth. And those two things are inseparable. I believe that with a passion. And so that, in the end, I hope, is what would drive me more than this aspiration for prizes.
- [49:46]
Interviewer Dan
The way that things broke after that. Have created the opportunities in your life that represent joy. Are you able to now enjoy what it is that you're doing? Or because of the need for discipline? The priest's lifestyle might not feel totally like a joyous one. Or the monk's lifestyle if we're doing discipline. So writing can be hard. I don't know what your relationship with it is. Writing something better or continuing to not care after you've won the Pulitzer, when you now have. Whatever the pressures are of having won the Pulitzer. What do the last 10 years look like in terms of happiness with you being able to represent your people in a way that gives them voice.
- [50:31]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Joy is also a complicated thing. I mean, joy can be. You can take a pill and it'll give you joy, and then it wears off. You feel like garbage after that. And joy can also be something that you work at. And joy can be complicated and multi layered. So writing is, for me, a very joyful experience. But it also is very boring in a lot of ways. You sit in a room by yourself and you just sit and you put words on paper and it goes on and on and on. And you realize it never ends. If you're a writer, it never ends. I think myself as a writer, I hope I write until I die, but it just means doing the same things over and over. But there's joy to be found in that repetition, in that drill, in that discipline. There's joy to be found in the act of creation, but the act of creation is not. It can be an extremely difficult, difficult thing. It should be a difficult thing to make something. And actually, I think it's a lot harder to create something than it is to destroy. Destroy something. So I found it, yes, I do find it joyful to have the opportunity to speak and to have people listen to me, to hear my opinions, but also to hear my version of the history that involves Americans and Vietnamese people. This complicated, tragic history that we share together. But the other thing that's brought me joy over the last 10 years, besides the writing and the art, is the fact that I became a father, which I thought would end my life literally. My son was born three Days after I finished the Sympathizer. Because when I realized that he was going to be born, I thought, oh, God, my life is over. I'm not going to be able to do anything ever again. And so I needed to finish this novel before he arrived. But the thing about becoming a father is that I realized there is joy to be found in other people. There is joy to be found in the act of giving, and there's joy to be found in realizing that, in fact, I'm not as emotionally numb as I thought I was as a consequence of being a refugee. So being a father forced me to confront my emotions, forced me to be to able. Able to give love to other people. And personally, that's very healing. But also, as a writer, emotions are crucial. We can only make our readers feel when we ourselves feel something. So it's really hard to be a writer when you're emotionally numb.
- [52:37]
Interviewer Dan
I think I believe you on the second half of your answer. I'm not sure I believe you on the first half when you say that writing is boring and endless. I found it lonely. I don't find it joyous. I find it fulfilling after having done it. But I don't find the process of writing very joyous. I would like to have it. And as careful and good as you are with words, as perfectionist, as I imagine is in the song of your words, I'm not sure I believe you on the process being a joyous one, based on what it is that you've presented me so far.
- [53:10]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Well, I think, like I said, joy is complicated, right? So if people expect Joy to be 100% joyful, they're looking for the picture. But human life is not like that. So let's say being a parent is joyful. Well, I think a lot of parents will say, yeah, being a parent is joyful. Then they will say, it's also really boring. I've spent time with my kids. I'm like, I can't believe I'm going to be watching this stupid TV show or watching them build blocks or whatever, and then I can't believe I'm going to spend 18 years doing this. That can be very painful, but it's also joyful. And the thing is, you can't have the joy without the pain. And that maybe some people don't recognize that that's the complicated version of joy that we have as human beings, that we're all capable of, that the pill cannot do. The pill is a shortcut to something that we as human beings have to actually struggle for. Fatherhood and children do represent all of that complexity of boredom and pain and terror and joy that is a part of human nature and human experience. Now with the writing, it is painful, like you said, anybody who's ever written will acknowledge that it's painful. But there have been many moments in my life, just to use a sympathizer as an example, where I laughed out loud while I was writing a sentence. I was like, oh, my God, this is a great sentence. And I couldn't believe that I was able to create that. Where it came from, I have no idea. And the only reason I was able to create that sentence was because I spent hours and hours alone in a room, bored and suffering or stressed out or whatever to reach that moment of joy.
- [54:36]
Interviewer Dan
What do you identify as the details in your journey that are most connecting to human beings who are reading about you not knowing your birthday or you growing? That the refugee experience is to know what it is to live amid your own waste as you try to janitor your way up to owning your own store?
- [54:59]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I grew up reading, for example, the novels of Charles Dickens. I'm not English. I didn't grow up in the 19th century. I mean, to read about poorhouses and things like this, it was a completely alien experience for me. Nevertheless, I found something meaningful and moving in reading Charles Dickens as a Vietnamese refugee boy. Did he intend that a Vietnamese refugee boy in San Jose, California, would one day read his work? I'm pretty sure it never crossed his mind, right? But again, the power of storytelling, the power of art, is that it can connect two human beings in vastly different times and circumstances. So even as you're describing what some of my writing is about, and I know that most of the people who are watching this show have not been referencing, are not Vietnamese, have not been through a war. It doesn't discourage me. It doesn't make me think, God, I have to translate myself for all these people. Charles Dickens never translated himself to me, and yet I understood him. And that's the power of art and the power of storytelling, that telling the truth about human experience will connect with other people. Because we realize that changing the material circumstances, refugee or English or. Or whatever, if we change all that, we still see underneath the same core of human experience and human understanding. That's what we turn to literature and art for.
- [56:16]
Interviewer Dan
Have there been any number of things that you can point out to us that you've been surprised that they connected someplace even more than you thought it would as you were trying to connect there?
- [56:28]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The sympathizer has Been read. There's like 30 different translations. And it's been read by people all over the world. I get messages from people who are Turkish, Iranian, Palestinian, French, other kinds of Asians. Hey, we see our experience in this book, even though they haven't been through that exact same experience. That gives me hope. The stuff I post on social media about Gaza and about Palestine, I get so much human reaction from that, from Palestinians, from non Palestinians, and I'm not Palestinian. What right do I have to talk about that issue? But it's a human issue. So I'm continually reminded of the fact that if we tell them the truth through our art, through our passions, through even social media, people will respond, because people can recognize when a truth is being told.
- [57:14]
Interviewer Dan
What does your hate mail look like?
- [57:17]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
You know what? I think I'm actually sort of, again, the Pulitzer Prize, I think, has insulated me from a lot of hate mail because I have a lot of friends, women of color get much more hate mail than I do. And I hate emails, hate messages and all that. I've had a couple of stalkers in my life. That's been challenging to deal with. But the hate mail that she shows up hasn't been that often. And oftentimes it makes me laugh. And the times that it gets discouraging is when I try to reach out. Like, remember soon after the sympathizer came out, I got this angry letter from an American veteran. You know, the typical love it or leave it kind of thing. And I wrote him back and I said, look, I think you're full of rage and anger and it's got you, it's got you. You're suffering, not me. Maybe you should let go of that. And he wrote back an angrier letter. You know, so sometimes people just can't.
- [58:02]
Interviewer Dan
I mean. But yeah, but maybe you should let. Let go of that. Some helpful advice from someone. You've written an angry love it or leave it. You've learned some things about how intractable and stubborn some of these ideological viewpoints are now.
- [58:16]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Well, I'm a human being. I fluctuate. Like, part of me periodically says, I'm never gonna deal with these Vietnamese right wingers. Like as you have said about the Cuban right wing or Cuban maga. Vietnamese MAGA exists too. They hate me. Sometimes I think I just can't deal with these people. I'm not gonna engage with them. And there are a lot of young Vietnamese Americans who are really tormented by this. They think their parents, their grandparents have gone off the deep end and they reach out to me and say, how do we talk about these political issues and cultural issues with the older generation? I'm like, screw them. I don't want to deal with these people. But then part of me really does believe that dialogue and conversation really matter. That's, again, what art and literature are there for. But also, again, we just have to have conversations, not just with our friends and our own social circles and political circles, but we have to believe that somehow there has to be moments where we have to have conversations with our enemies and our others as well. It's a very hard, very, very hard work. And I'm not trying to oversell it. I'm just saying I do think that that's a reality that some people have to do.
- [59:11]
Interviewer Dan
Well, what do you think people would have to hear here about xenophobia? Obviously, it's a very broad question, but what would you want known? I mean, it pulsates in your work, right, that you want to be heard here. So what do you want them to know?
- [59:27]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Number one, I think it's human nature to be xenophobic and go back to our. The Bible. I grew up as a Catholic, so I read the. Or I've read the Bible. And, you know, you find all kinds of xenophobia and massacres and murders and demonizations taking place of people who are different from some other kind of people, what I would call the other. So it's always existed throughout human history. It certainly exists inside the United States. And at the same time, we go back to these narratives, whether it's the Bible or whether it's our own history as Americans, and we see other stories not of xenophobia, but of hospitality, of welcoming the stranger, of ticking for care of the poor and the downtrodden. That's a part of the Bible. It's also a part of our American mythology. And so we have to understand that these two impulses have always existed within human societies and American society, where it's not to. We're never going to get past xenophobia itself. It will always be with us. But we have to understand why it happens and how we can solve it. And I'm a believer in this idea that it's not simply hospitality that we. We need to extend, but that so many of the problems we face as Americans, it's about dividing and conquering. It's like we think we have too little and we have to separate some people out and deport them or put them into prison and so on. And I think if American society is as great as we think it Is it has enough for everybody. It has enough to grow, room enough to grow so everybody can have it, have things that they need. But we're led by people, Democrats and Republicans, who should showed just a paucity of imagination and willpower and daring to make this country as beneficial as it could be for everybody.
- [61:04]
Interviewer Dan
Your wife is a poet. Yes.
- [61:06]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Yes. And she's beautiful.
- [61:08]
Interviewer Dan
So you put the Sympathizer or your present work in front of her. She reads it. How does that go? You both love words. It's vulnerable. You're proud of something. Where and when is her criticism most astute?
- [61:25]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Well, I literally met my wife on a dark and stormy night at a poetry meeting that I organized, and she showed up for the open mic as this beautiful poet. And, you know, the rest is history. But we have a shared conviction for so many things, shared passion for so many things, including, you know, the truth of language and the truth of art. So she's always been my first reader, which is a terrible job to have because first drafts are terrible, and she read them for 20 years, and so she knows how bad of a writer I can be. And so with the Sympathizer or with other works that she's read where she thinks I've done something good, she'll tell me so, and I trust her, that she'll tell me the truth, that I'm writing to the best of my ability, to the most honest. I'm being the most honest I can be about my own emotions about my view of the world, and honest about my art. She thinks A Man of Two Faces is my best book, as a matter of fact, so I take her at her word for that. But likewise, I support her in her work as a poet and scholar as well. And so we have a part partnership, and that's a beautiful thing to have.
- [62:24]
Interviewer Dan
Do you agree with her on what is your best work?
- [62:27]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Oh, I'm too close to the work to know. A Man of Two Faces is pretty good, though.
- [62:32]
Interviewer Dan
But are you too close to know what felt the best? I mean, I would think that you have you reread the Sympathizer at any time recently?
- [62:40]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
You know, people keep forgetting there's a sequel called the Committed. And I run across readers, you know, several in the past few weeks, who've said the Committed is a better novel than the Sympathizer. The Sympathizer is probably more of a crowd pleaser because it speaks about the Vietnam War. And again, Vietnam War. Everybody thinks they know what that's about, so it's a hook right and the.
- [62:58]
Interviewer Dan
Committed is that I've never heard the Vietnam War described as a crowd pleaser before, but it is.
- [63:05]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
It's just entertainment for Americans. You know, it's dark entertainment, but it's entertainment for Americans. Right. And the Committed is set in Paris, and most Americans are like France. What's France? You know? So actually, for me, let me put it this another way. I think of myself as a writer, not as a novelist or as a short story writer or as a critic or something. I think of myself as a writer above all else. And all my books are just part of one larger book. All my books are chapters of some larger book that only exists in my head. So I think of the Sympathizer and the Committed and A Man of Two Faces, and nothing ever dies as all chapters.
- [63:38]
Interviewer Dan
But you don't think of when you're done with whichever one. Look, I know that sometimes these things are so meticulous that you're sick of them by the end. You don't even want to read them anymore because you just want them out in the world. But you don't remember having, like, this is the best I can do, or this is the best I've done as a feeling on any of them.
- [63:59]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
No, the Sympathizer, definitely. When I finished at that point, I thought, that's the best thing I've ever written. I loved writing that book. When I finished A Man of Two Faces, I thought, that's the hardest thing I've ever written. I feel viscerally ill because I'm exposing myself and my family in that book. I felt. I mean, like, when I say viscerally ill, I mean, I felt it in my gut, my stomach, bringing that book to other people to read it for the first time. I felt terrified. And that. That made me think, this is a pretty good book. If I'm terrified as a writer, I'm telling the truth, you know, so, yeah, you know, I'm being a politician answering your question, like, oh, you know, I can't, I can't.
- [64:33]
Interviewer Dan
No, it's not a politician. But if you're not ranking them that way. Viscerally ill. If you're saying you're too close to. Yeah, winning a Pulitzer probably feels a little better than viscerally ill. And you're just too close to either of them. But I was curious whether you agreed with your wife's assessment on that, because she. She's pretty close to it, too.
- [64:50]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Yeah. Hey, my wife is always right.
- [64:54]
Interviewer Dan
Okay. That's a good.
- [64:55]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
That's a.
- [64:56]
Interviewer Dan
That's a Good way to handle that. What can you tell me about your upbringing that you would regard as your parents shaping you? That wherever it is that you were, like, close to priest is. That is a specific household. And I would have said I had some of that in my household, that it was that the parents were so afraid that religion was something to hold on to, a tether in this country. You don't know the language, you're terrified, you're too young to be married, too young to have kids. So grab onto something, bring it into the home, and then with all that religion brings, you get an assortment of different complications, and. And then you become an adult, and perhaps you hang on to those things that you don't. But my brother or I could have been a priest in a different realm if we had stayed afraid and chosen something to simply hold onto.
- [65:47]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
My parents would have loved it if I became a priest. I think Vietnamese priests have it pretty good. But what I take away most from my upbringing with my parents and the life I spent with them is, again, discipline. I think the similarity that Catholics and writers share is that Catholics love to suffer and to sacrifice and to be martyred. That's the narrative, right? That's our foundational narrative. And writers also love to suffer and sacrifice and be martyred on our art, okay? Or at least certain writers do. And so how did my parents, who were shopkeepers, who never had a very good education, my father went to high school, my. My mother went to grade school. How did they produce a writer, which they definitely did not want to do? I think that what happened unintentionally was that I was raised in a household where Catholicism was always present. I went to Catholic school almost my entire life. But the larger lesson was actually about suffering. We suffer. Suffering is just a part of our existence, and we can't get away from it. And what happens when we suffer, we have to endure it. We have to have the discipline to endure it. We have to have the discipline to overcome it. However, whatever that discipline is, for my parents, the discipline was being business people. They just worked themselves to the bone throughout many decades and sacrifice for themselves, but also for the next generation and struggle. So I watched all that very intimately growing up. That was the lesson that I learned. I came out an atheist. So perhaps from one perspective, my parents utterly failed.
- [67:22]
Interviewer Dan
But.
- [67:22]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
But everything else that they represented to me through the model of their own lives, suffering, endurance, discipline, sacrifice, that has stayed with me because, you know, why they lived what they preached. They were not hypocrites. That is such a Powerful experience to grow up with as a child to realize that your parents are actually everything they said that they were and that they're genuine, they're authentic. They may be hard on you, but they're not hypocrites. They're not fakes. They did everything they said that they should do and that I should do.
- [67:55]
Interviewer Dan
Were they supportive of you being a writer? Because that seems like a bad choice for a parent who would prefer something safer.
- [68:02]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
My parents never realized they were raising one of the most dangerous creatures you can find in your house. A writer. No. I mean, they valued education above everything. So I give my parents credit. They were very conservative, but people. But they let me do a PhD in English because it has the word doctorate in it. My brother had gotten his medical doctorate. That was what they wanted. But they thought, okay, okay, fine. Philosophy. Doctorate is kind of close to that. And I became a professor. And for them, these words had material meaning they could sort of wrap their minds around. Doctorate, professor, university. I never told them I was going to be a writer. That was just a step too far. I think the first time they had a sense of that was when I brought home a short story that I published in English. And then it had been translated into Vietnamese, and I gave it to my dad. I was like, hey, this is in Vietnamese. You want to know what I'm doing? The short story which appears in the Refugees is about a young Vietnamese refugee man who comes to San Francisco in 1975, separated from his family, and discovers that he is gay. My father never mentioned that story to me again. So did he read it? I have no idea. But our typical coping mechanism, never talk about anything that can disrupt the harmony.
- [69:17]
Interviewer Dan
How do they feel about the accolades? How do they feel about the success?
- [69:21]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I think they thought that was good. But you know, what was actually most. I mean, they recognize, obviously, that, oh, these prizes meant something to Americans. Therefore, it's important. But what really made the big difference, I think, was sales figures. Like, every time I'd go home, my dad would ask me, how many books have you sold? And I'd tell him, like, oh, he understood that you shipped this number of units. You must be making this.
- [69:41]
Interviewer Dan
So there's not a connection or an understanding around it. There are limits on being able to share in the most understanding of ways.
- [69:48]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Well, okay, So I think because the news of the Pulitzer Prize, for example, was reported in the Vietnamese Language Press, that. Which they did read that, as so many of my friends have recognized. Vietnamese, Vietnamese friends, you could do anything. Nothing really matters until you appear in the Vietnamese language media. And then your Vietnamese language parents are like, oh, okay, now we get it. And their friends are like, oh, your kid appeared in the newspaper, or whatever it was, you made it.
- [70:16]
Interviewer Dan
Congratulations.
- [70:17]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
In the community, therefore, that matters. So that's how that information circulated. So when I won the Pulitzer Prize, I actually learned when I was on the road, okay? So I learned on Twitter, I won the Pulitzer Prize. I was on book tour. And my psychology was I actually did. It did not occur to me to call my parents. Literally never crossed my mind, I think, because who am I to brag to my parents about winning a stupid prize that they never even heard of? The next day, I'm on the road, still dealing with the outcome of this prize, and my father calls me and he says, the villagers in Vietnam called. You won the Pulitzer Prize. And his voice is like, shaking with happiness. So that's how the news circulated. Obviously, that circulation that was being told to him by his own family from Vietnam, he knew that was a big deal at that point.
- [71:07]
Interviewer Dan
What do you want people to know about your current book? To Save and to Destroy. Writing as an Other.
- [71:13]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
It's about the power of storytelling to do exactly what we've been talking about. To save us and to destroy us. I go through many examples of books and stories and poems and writers that have been meaningful to me. Me. But what I have always believed is that literature is a part of the world. Literature is not just storytelling. Storytelling is fundamental to who we are, okay? And literature and books, we've never given that up. And so literature and books and art are a part of the world. And to Save and to destroy that book is very much not just about the writers and the art, but about the worlds in which these writers and their art emerged from. About all the histories of colonialism and racism and war, but also of beauty. Beauty that have produced them and me as well.
- [71:57]
Interviewer Dan
Vietwin.info is where people go if they want any information about this experience. And To Save and to Destroy is the name of his most recent work. Thank you for spending this time with us.
- [72:08]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
It was a pleasure, Dan, it was great talking to you.
- [72:21]
Commercial Announcer
Hey, Chris, hockey season almost here.
- [72:22]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Oh, Roy, I need Barkov in my life.
- [72:25]
Commercial Announcer
Absolutely. We celebrated a championship season for the second year in a row.
- [72:28]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
We own back to back to back.
- [72:30]
Commercial Announcer
Jack, you know how we celebrated little Miller Light Ski? Damn right.
- [72:34]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
You're darn right I'm right about that, Roy. I love Miller Light.
- [72:36]
Commercial Announcer
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- [73:03]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Punt. Punt.
- [73:04]
Commercial Announcer
Just 96 calories and 3.2 carbs per 12 ounces. The original light beer since 1975 and still hitting different five decades later. The can or draft ski.
- [73:16]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I could do it.
- [73:16]
Commercial Announcer
Oh, I love a draft.
- [73:17]
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Oh, the little foam. Little foam head at the top. Oh, so refreshing. Miller Lite, I love you.
- [73:21]
Interviewer Dan
Oh, yeah.
- [73:22]
Commercial Announcer
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