Viet Thanh Nguyen is a guest on Asian Enough, a new LA Times podcast about being Asian American — the joys, the complications and everything else in between.
Read the transcript below:
Jen Yamato:
From the L.A. Times studios, this is Asian Enough. Each week on this podcast, we talk to one Asian-American celebrity about the joys, the complications, and everything else that comes along with being Asian-American. I’m Jen Yamato.
Frank Shyong:
And I’m Frank Shyong. This week on episode three of our show, we have the Pulitzer Prize winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Viet Nguyen:
When Jonathan Franzen puts a description of a sandwich in his novel, he says, I ate a sandwich, period. As a Vietnamese person, I’m expected to say, I eat a bowl of pho, a delicious beef noodle Vietnamese soup. When you say that, you know you’re not talking to Vietnamese people.
Frank Shyong:
Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer, was published in 2015. It’s this intense, funny, cinematic spy thriller, set in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In 2017, he wrote The Refugees, a collection of stories about refugee life.
Jen Yamato:
Viet has also written nonfiction books in commentary for lots of places, including our very own L.A. Times. He is prolific. We were so excited to take a trip outside our studio to visit him across town at the University of Southern California. Let’s get started.
Frank Shyong:
I wanted to talk to you, start with, first, what does being Vietnamese-American mean to you? What does being Asian-American mean to you?
Viet Nguyen:
Well, being Vietnamese-American to me means being traumatized, troubled by so many different things. Of course, there’s wonderful things about being Vietnamese-American. I grew up knowing that we had a very tight community, that doors would always be open to you, that people would be very hospitable to you, that blood was thicker than water. On the flip side of that is that Vietnamese-Americans also therefore know all the weak spots and know how to cause you pain. That’s what it means for me growing up being Asian-American, the source of both strength and pain, both culturally.
Viet Nguyen:
Because, basically, we were the losers of the Vietnam War and we carried that burden with us to the United States and took it out on each other, not on other Americans, but on our own community and in between generations. Given that this is an Asian Enough podcast, there was certainly, when I was growing up, a sense of being Vietnamese enough or not enough. In some ways, I feel like I was a generation ahead of my time because I was completely inauthentic at that time. My Vietnamese was fluent at a four-year-old level and it stayed that way. Whereas in the ’70s and ’80s, most people spoke good or passable Vietnamese at the very least.
Viet Nguyen:
Now we’re looking at a generation of younger Vietnamese-Americans who were born here who oftentimes can’t even say their names correctly. I have no problem with that. It just means that definitions of what is enough, what is authentic have changed over time. It’s a losing battle. Whoever sticks out their claim about being more authentic when someone else will always find that there’s someone else behind them who would say, no, not right.
Frank Shyong:
Exactly. We all lose. Nobody has the analytics of Confucius memorized.
Jen Yamato:
Actually for the record, can you share with the world, how do you say your name? What are the different iterations that you’ve heard that you would like to put out there to help people learn how to say your name, something so basic?
Viet Nguyen:
Well, recently, Kirk Douglas died. It was really cool reading his obituary and realizing that he was Jewish, from Russia, and that he has a very Russian-Jewish name, I guess, which everybody’s forgotten. I can’t even say it. He lived this life of duality. It feels to me that many of us who are Asian-Americans are refugees, or immigrants, or the descendants thereof have the same issues. We live with that duality all the time. I drew a line though. I didn’t become Kirk Douglas. I became Viet Thanh Nguyen, that’s the Americanization both in terms of the sequence of my names with the pronunciation.
Viet Nguyen:
If you were to go hybrid, I would do it the Vietnamese pronunciation, but the American sequence, Viet Thanh Nguyen. If I would just to go full on Vietnamese, the way they would do it in Vietnam, it would be Nguyen Thanh Viet. When my own work was translated into Vietnamese in publish, I thought for sure, going back to this idea of Asian enough or Vietnamese enough that they would see me as a Vietnamese writer and my name on my book would be Nguyen Thanh Viet. I was really astonished to see the cover of The Refugees translated into Vietnamese and seeing my name, Viet Thanh Nguyen, American sequence, no accent marks, which means finally, they see me as an American. I’m okay with that too.
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Jen Yamato:
Your family’s story in America began when you were age four. They came here, you grew up in San Jose, California. Your parents opened a grocery store. Tell us about that experience. What was that like? What was their journey? What brought them here? Why did they come to California?
Viet Nguyen:
My family fled the Vietnam War with 130,000 other Vietnamese refugees, because we were on the losing side. My parents, in particular, were hard core Catholics. Hard core Catholics hate communists. They fled from the communist twice in 1954 when the country was divided. They were in the north. They went to the south. Then they fled again in 1975. They’re refugees twice. Then they came, they were resettled in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for a few years. You have to realize, my parents have been very successful in Vietnam. They’d been born as peasants, work their way up and became wealthy.
Viet Nguyen:
Then lost a lot of that coming to the United States, arrived here as refugees. Their American sponsors expected them to be poor refugees who would be satisfied with working class or even menial jobs. That’s what they did in Harrisburg for a few years, but they obviously were not satisfied with that. They had a good friend in San Jose who said, “This is a promised land. Weather is good. There are a lot of Asians out here. I just opened up a grocery store.” They came out and worked with her, probably the first Vietnamese grocery store in San Jose in 1978. Then they opened the second Vietnamese grocery store right down the street for some reason.
Viet Nguyen:
I don’t know how their friend thought about that. We live the classic refugee immigrant American success story, which meant my parents climbed the ladder yet again, rebuilt their wealth. That exacted a huge physical and emotional toll on them and an emotional toll on me. I’m thankful they didn’t make me work in the store, because they didn’t want me to do that. They wanted my brother and I to get an education. What I saw growing up was my parents working 12 to 14 hour days, almost every day of the year, and working in a very dangerous environment. They were shot in their store. We were robbed at gunpoint at home.
Viet Nguyen:
My parents were always very paranoid about these kinds of issues. I’m saying we have this classic immigrant refugee story. Because they spent all their time working in order to support my brother and me and give us a good life. Of course, what that meant is that they had no time to spend with us. That’s the classic immigrant or refugee double bind. That’s part of what it meant to be having this lonely, traumatized childhood for me which, in the positive sense, gave me the requisite emotional damage necessarily to become a writer. I’m thankful for that.
Frank Shyong:
Inherited trauma you mentioned earlier, and it’s something that’s really hard to explain to the everyday reader because it sounds a little bit academic. When it comes down to it, it’s basically what your parents went through and how it affected you. I don’t know. If you could talk about the specifics of that, any characteristics that your parents might have passed down?
Viet Nguyen:
Well, my parents were devout Catholics and Catholics like to suffer. In a sense, we were very well equipped to deal with being refugees and immigrants because my parents suffered a lot, both in terms of just having to work really, really hard and also, of course, they survived 30 years of war in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975, which killed millions of people. I have no idea what they had to go through to become the people that they are except in a very conceptual way. That’s the consequences of that just in terms of their refugee shopkeeper, lifestyle. Even though they became very successful financially, and I’m an inheritor of that, I also grew up feeling like we were poor.
Viet Nguyen:
My parents made a lot of money, but they were not spending it on anything. I think that watching them suffer and watching them work as much as they did made me not want to do what they did. Ironically, I’ve turned into someone almost exactly like them in the sense that I work constantly. I work a very nice job being a professor and being a writer, but I’m always working and I suffer in my own way. Again, not in the grinding way that shopkeepers have to go through, but writing is a suffering. You to have to do this.
Jen Yamato:
It’s a very internal suffering.
Viet Nguyen:
Yeah, a very internal suffering, right. If you ask any writer, most writers, they’re tormented by the struggle of being a writer. As elite of a lifestyle as that is, nevertheless, I think I’ve been equipped to deal with that based on what I saw my parents go through and just absorbing their workaholic Catholics suffering lifestyle.
Frank Shyong:
Yeah. I think in my own family, the way that my mom is very pathological about saving money and maximizing, and that because she grew up very poor. Now I find myself 32, earning enough money to buy a pair of shoes that cost more than $20.
Jen Yamato:
Have them make you feel free.
Frank Shyong:
I can’t do it. I really can’t. Somebody told me that I had the shoes of a restaurant worker a couple years ago. I was like, “I need to fix this.” Even my dad, when you go back home and they do your laundry for you, he was looking at my clothes and he was like, “You need newer clothes, son. Why don’t you buy some new things?” These things all leave a mark.
Jen Yamato:
Going off of that, what your work is and the kinds of writing that you do require so much self-knowledge as well. You grew up in the Bay Area, which is a diverse place. I also grew up in East Bay, your South Bay, I’m East Bay. For me, being Asian-American as a kid in a very diverse place was great in some ways because it’s diverse. I didn’t stand out in the ways that Frank, for example, growing up in Tennessee …
Frank Shyong:
Tennessee.
Jen Yamato:
… has talked about, very different. By the same token …
Frank Shyong:
There’s more fighting.
Jen Yamato:
… there are things that you’ve written about your experience growing up that I really relate to, in that I was so intensely aware of the otherness that other people perceived when they looked at me. It gave me a chip on my shoulder. I had a lot of anger and resentment about that. It was really hard to know what to do with that for a long time. Then to become a writer who writes about these things, you’re not writing fairytales or sci-fi movies, your writing is very close to these experiences. I wonder, how did you process that? What enabled you to get to that point? What was your experience like growing up?
Viet Nguyen:
Well, it’s interesting hearing about both of your life experiences because I could see where Frank’s experience would mean that he would obviously feel like a complete other. Yet we grew up in the multicultural Bay Area and I grew up in a Vietnamese and Mexican neighborhood and so on. I still felt that sense of otherness. I think that’s because even if we did live in a multicultural environment, dominant American culture was in play, still is dominated by White people. I like to say, I didn’t really experience that many direct episodes of racism. I’ve experienced a few small ones.
Viet Nguyen:
Nevertheless, I felt like we were all irradiated by racism just by what was out there on the airwaves from TV, movies, radio, shock jocks, all this stupid stuff that was going on. I felt that on the one hand, I was absorbing that, on the other hand, I was also receiving support from the Vietnamese community and from an implicit Asian-American community. I went to this all White high school, mostly White high school. There were bunch of us who were of Asian descent. We knew we were different, we just didn’t know how. We gather in a corner of the campus every day for lunch and we would call ourselves the Asian invasion.
Jen Yamato:
You owned it.
Viet Nguyen:
We owned it.
Jen Yamato:
You reclaimed it.
Viet Nguyen:
Yeah, but we didn’t have the language. It was just like we knew we’re Asian. Most of those guys never became political like I became political. What happened I think was a combination of this Catholicism that I was raised with, the suffering and the sense of sacrifice, a willing sacrifice, like I’m going to be a martyr. Then I went to Berkeley and I was already an atheist. I couldn’t be a catholic martyr, but I became an Asian-American martyr at Berkeley, became immediately radicalized there. That was partly through political activism on the campus, but also wanting to be a writer in the context of the traditions of Asian-American, African-American literature, but also American literature.
Viet Nguyen:
I did a PhD in American literature. I thought I’m not going to refuse being Vietnamese or Asian-American, but I’m also at the same time going to claim my American as well. I’m going to write stuff that goes in both directions. I did a big chip on my shoulder, still do. I looked around and thought, well, people just aren’t angry enough. I came out of a Berkeley tradition where anger was good, being radical was good. Then you look out at the landscape of Vietnamese and Asian-American literature sometimes and you think, well, it’s well written, but maybe there’s not enough anger. That’s not enough politics in there. There has been in the past. I wanted to be someone who would incorporate both the politics of the Asian-American tradition with what I imagined to be the highest levels of aesthetics in literature. That was my ambition.
Frank Shyong:
Going back to the home country is one of those things that makes people feel Asian enough or not Asian enough.
Jen Yamato:
Also, anxiety into things sometimes.
Frank Shyong:
Yeah, it is, it is. You’ve only been begged once.
Jen Yamato:
Once, yeah.
Frank Shyong:
Jen’s fourth generation.
Jen Yamato:
Yeah, I’m fourth generation Japanese-American. I went back once with my grandmother and my aunt. Only one of us could speak Japanese, and I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t the one. It was my grandmother. To rely on a woman in her 80s as your guide when you go to Japan as a 20 something year old, it was very complicated and wonderful in ways. It’s interesting.
Viet Nguyen:
Did they see you as Japanese or American though?
Jen Yamato:
What a fascinating question, because I walk around Tokyo and I’m like, oh, they can tell. They can tell I’m not …
Frank Shyong:
They feel more American.
Jen Yamato:
That’s my feeling. That’s my feeling. I actually don’t know. I still don’t know how I would see …
Viet Nguyen:
I have fantasies that because, for example, Korean and Japanese-Americans have been here a lot longer than the Vietnamese and because Korea and Japan have more developed economies and Vietnam, that when Korean and Japanese-Americans go back, they have a better chance of perhaps being seen as Americans because people in Korea and Japan may be more used to seeing these returnees. That’s increasingly more the case in Vietnam. Of course, initially, when I went, that wasn’t the case. I didn’t go back with any anticipation that I would be fully Vietnamese going back.
Viet Nguyen:
I’d read enough Asian-American literature to know that you go back to the origins and you realize how inauthentic you are. I’d already seen it happening with my parents. My parents wanted to go back to Vietnam for years and years. Finally, were able to go back 20 years after the end of the war. I’d grown up with them telling me, “We are 100% Vietnamese.” They go back, they come back, and then over Thanksgiving dinner, my father says, “We’re Americans now.” That idea that there would be authenticity was not a desire for me. Certainly, there was a lot of trepidation because I have a lot of relatives to see.
Viet Nguyen:
When you are a returnee, especially of the first or second generation, there’s a lot of emotional consequences. If you go back to a poor country or to poor relatives like I did, there’s a lot of financial consequences. My dad sent me completely prepped with a list of the relatives and the amounts of money each one was going to get and envelopes prepared for each one.
Frank Shyong:
You had a list of …
Viet Nguyen:
I had a list, yeah.
Frank Shyong:
Oh my gosh, wow.
Viet Nguyen:
Then you can see even still random people would show up and say, “Hey, I knew your parents way back,” and I give an envelope too. It’s a very complicated thing to return to the homeland. Just the last thing I want to say is, it’s funny that Jen, you said you were going back, you’re fourth generation, you’re not going back. You were never there.
Frank Shyong:
Exactly.
Viet Nguyen:
Fourth generation.
Jen Yamato:
Exactly.
Viet Nguyen:
Yeah. Italians, and French, and German, people [inaudible 00:17:15] in the United States, when they go to those countries, I don’t think we ever say, “Did you go back to Italy?”
Frank Shyong:
No.
Viet Nguyen:
That’s like you’re …
Jen Yamato:
Like do you speak Italian?
Frank Shyong:
I remember you were talking about when you go back to … You didn’t go back every year or anything, you’re just been back a few times. How many times?
Viet Nguyen:
2002 was the first time, I went as a tourist. Because I just thought, I’m just going to have fun, get acclimated. I went for two weeks as a tourist, and probably four or five times after that for about a year all together to learn the language and do actual research for my nonfiction stuff and see relatives. Being Vietnamese enough, I thought, I know what the real prices are in this country. I’m not paying $300 a night to stay at the Hilton.
Frank Shyong:
Exactly.
Viet Nguyen:
I’m paying $25 for a room with an air condition. Funnily enough, when I brought my son back for the first and only time so far for him just for one night so he could spend his first birthday in Vietnam and see his aunt on his mother’s side, and she lives on this rural area, an hour outside of Saigon. I knew that if we stayed there, he would hate Vietnam. All the kids on my wife’s side of the family, they go back, they stay in this area, and they hate it. It’s hot, and boring, and poor. For the only time in my life in Vietnam, I stayed at one of the fanciest hotels in Saigon just for his sake. Because when I bring my children back to Vietnam, I want them to actually like it.
Viet Nguyen:
Later on, they can go for the authentic stuff and see the poverty and all that other kind of thing. Knowing how difficult this journey back is, I would like to have for my son a return to Vietnam where he would think, oh, it’s a resort. I can go hang out at the pool.
Jen Yamato:
These few depictions of Vietnam and pop culture and movies that are very, very different, and I wonder how your son’s construct of what Vietnam is compared to yours, going back as an adult, and then in comparison to what pop culture tells us it is. In your work, you’ve referenced Apocalypse Now, we see Rambo, that character’s history in Southeast Asia, even Watchman more recently.
Viet Nguyen:
I try not to censor myself too much in front of my son. He hears very adult conversations. When it comes to Vietnam, he knows it’s about war. When we talk about Vietnam, he’s like, “Oh, was there a war? What’s colonialism? What did the French do to us?” I was like, “Boy, you’re six years old now.” It’s my fault.
Frank Shyong:
I’d love to see him in a classroom someday.
Jen Yamato:
That’s a good book.
Frank Shyong:
What’s colonialism?
Jen Yamato:
That’s a good book, colonialism for six-year-olds.
Viet Nguyen:
He’s already aware at six-year-old level of some of these complicated issues. Of course, I know Vietnam is a lot more than that. My hope, obviously, is that by the time he is old enough to go to Vietnam on his own and so on, 20 years from now, that Vietnam will change, that Vietnam will have its own parasite, for example. Korea had a devastating war just as devastating as what happened to Vietnam. Korea went in a different direction for a number of reasons. I don’t think now with the impact of Korean pop culture and the Korean economy and so on, people have a different perception of what Korea is.
Viet Nguyen:
Korean-Americans can be proud of Korea and can do a lot of other things that have no relationship to war. That’s slightly more difficult for the Vietnamese to do because Vietnam is still even more of a repressive country than Korea and is much poor, and all these kind of thing. My hope is that Vietnam would be able to shed some of its complicated history, which means grappling with how that history has left contemporary traces of repression in both the politics and the pop culture. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but that’s my hope in the next 20 years.
Frank Shyong:
I think it’s wild how many depictions of the Vietnam War I have had consumed before, really understanding what happened in the Vietnam War. Discovering the Rambo movies actually about the Vietnam War was painful. Yeah, Forrest Gump. The way I see that movie now has completely changed after understanding what happened during the war. When you first went to Vietnam, were there any images that you had to try to shake off? What cultural products created those images?
Viet Nguyen:
Well, by the time I went back to Vietnam, I think a pretty good sense of the way that Americans had totally misrepresented the war. I was not concerned about that part. I think, for me, what I was struggling with was how the Vietnamese saw both the war, but also their contemporary period. For example, my book, The Refugees, only has I think one story set in Vietnam. That story, I had to wait a few years after my first visits to Vietnam, because I didn’t want to write that story as if I were a foreigner coming to Vietnam and seeing all the weird things. Oh, that’s weird and that’s weird. I got to put it in my story because it’s weird.
Viet Nguyen:
I wanted to see the country the way that Vietnamese people might see it so that it’s normal. I would observe the things that Vietnamese people would see rather than a foreigner would see. My specific concerns as a scholar and a writer were about the Vietnam War like, how can I write about this from their perspective of Americans and Vietnamese-Americans, but also the Vietnamese? I wanted to hear people’s stories, see how from different sides, see how they were grappling with the history and recognize that it’s complicated. Because people, I think, have fairly sophisticated approaches to the memory of the war in that country because they have their own family to deal with.
Viet Nguyen:
They have the memories that they have, but then they also know that the government wants them to remember in a certain way. Some of them accept that, some of them reject that. I just wanted to get into those kinds of complexities and nuances.
Frank Shyong:
Interesting. They know that there’s a message being that they’re supposed to receive and then there’s another truth to discover beyond it.
Viet Nguyen:
Sometimes I wonder, I think many of the Vietnamese that I encounter here from Vietnam are foreign students, they’re pretty intelligent and everything like that. They respond well to The Sympathizer because I think they know there’s a gap between the official version of history that they always got and then what The Sympathizer offers them. I think a lot of Vietnamese in Vietnam are just like the Americans here. They have one version of history. They may not think twice about it. What they do think about it though, I think, is that it’s boring. Ironically, the propaganda in Vietnam is bad propaganda. It’s not fancy like American propaganda.
Viet Nguyen:
It has one unintended consequence. I think it’s unintended, which is that it’s so boring about the past, and about history, and the war, and revolution, and all that, that the Vietnamese youth want nothing to do with it. They just want to make money. That’s perfectly acceptable to Vietnamese communism, ironically.
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Jen Yamato:
For people who don’t yet know who definitely need to get on it, how would you describe The Sympathizer?
Viet Nguyen:
The Sympathizer is a thrilling, funny, exciting novel about a communist spy.
Jen Yamato:
It is exciting.
Viet Nguyen:
It is, I think so personally.
Jen Yamato:
It is.
Viet Nguyen:
It’s got a lot of good jokes in there as well, and violence, and sex, and pop music, and all that. It’s about a communist spy in the South Vietnamese Army who has to flee with the remnants of that army to the United States and spy on their efforts to take their country back. It’s all true. I grew up with this story watching fundraising efforts in the Vietnamese community to support this ragtag army in Thailand of Vietnamese veterans who wanted to go back and invade their country, that stayed with me. I wanted to pack everything into The Sympathizer that I grew up with.
Viet Nguyen:
When you’re Vietnamese, you grew up with Paris by night, for example, our own song and dance review show which is like 130 episodes now. I grew up with that. That’s in the book, and the refugee struggles, and the fight against communism, and intergenerational conflict, and then lots of sex, and all that kind of thing. Because I wanted to center Vietnamese experiences and all their diversity and make us the stars or the villains our own story.
Frank Shyong:
This is not related to something we want to talk about. In The Sympathizer, you talk about a congee place in Monterey Park. Is that delicious food corner?
Viet Nguyen:
I just made that up.
Frank Shyong:
Really?
Viet Nguyen:
I’m glad it resonated enough, because they all look the same. A lot of it look like that.
Frank Shyong:
Yeah, yeah, well …
Jen Yamato:
Foodie Frank is on the case. He’s trying to figure out all …
Frank Shyong:
Well, this Paris by night, there’s a pho restaurant in Houston called Pho Binh By Night.
Viet Nguyen:
Pho Binh By Night, okay.
Frank Shyong:
Yeah, and I never understood why it’s by night. I don’t know, maybe if that’s a reference, anyway.
Viet Nguyen:
It must be. It must be a reference, but I’m not sure if …
Frank Shyong:
Back to the business of [inaudible 00:27:59].
Viet Nguyen:
You need to make people basically like nightclubs. We just love nightclubs. I grew up with that kind of thing too, we’re very romantic people who like to drink, smoke, dance, and just be romantic.
Jen Yamato:
Why do you think that is?
Viet Nguyen:
It’s partly because we were deeply colonized by the French. This whole cabaret culture is from the French and Western pop music is from the French. We’ve adopted it and made it our own. I think there must be something in Vietnamese culture as a whole that’s deeply romantic, at least among the men. I don’t know if the women feel that way. That’s a whole different set of issues, but the men see themselves as romantic.
Jen Yamato:
I will say in The Sympathizer, one of your several very fascinating and complex in their own right supporting characters is a Japanese-American woman that I deeply relate to.
Viet Nguyen:
Good.
Jen Yamato:
I really love that character. As a person who also is not from Los Angeles, but moved to Los Angeles, I love every detail of L.A. that is also in the book.
Viet Nguyen:
Good.
Frank Shyong:
Me too, me too.
Viet Nguyen:
Good. I finished the sequel to The Sympathizer called The Committed, and it’s set in Paris in the mid-1980s. Then there will be a final third part trilogy where he returns to Los Angeles. Miss Mori, the Japanese-American character that you’re talking about will play I think a significant role in that.
Frank Shyong:
Awesome. Awesome. Looking forward to this.
Jen Yamato:
Oh my! That’s very exciting. Have there been attempts to adapt your books, especially The Sympathizer?
Viet Nguyen:
The Sympathizer has very complicated history over the last few years. I’ve had many, many, many conversations with various kinds of actors, and producers, and all that. I always wanted to make it into a television show because it was influenced deeply by the new wave of now classic serial dramas like The Wire and so on that I was watching while I was writing The Sympathizer. The Sympathizer is totally structured as if it’s a TV series. We can reverse engineer it for TV. When we first went out with it, I had a great producer whose work I really admired and who was a woman of color, Asian-American, we’re on the same wavelength.
Viet Nguyen:
We were comparing what we wanted to do with The Sympathizer to a show that was popular at the time called Narcos, $40 or $50 million budget for a season of Narcos. She went out there. Then she came back after several months and she said, “Well, look, this budget that we’re talking about.” It’s about 2016, 2017. “People are telling me that unless we have somebody like Keanu Reeves, we’re not going to get this made,” because the narrator of The Sympathizer is half Vietnamese, half French. At the time, I thought, okay, I get it, Hollywood is stupid.
Frank Shyong:
I would watch the hell out of that though.
Viet Nguyen:
Right. Imagine, Narcos has no stars. You can make this drug story in Mexico with no stars, which is itself a complicated thing. For Asians, we still got to get Keanu Reeves to do this thing. Then Crazy Rich Asians happened and my agent said, “Hey, people are calling, they’re calling after Crazy Rich Asians.” I said, they realize it’s not Crazy Rich Asians. Hollywood is still stupid, and is still implicitly racist even if it wants to not be racist like, we’ll make more crazy rich Asian stories, even about people who are not crazy rich Asians. I’m hoping now with Parasites win at the Oscars revert that stupid racism will still work to our favor.
Viet Nguyen:
That people are like, “Oh, oh, Parasites been a big hit, we’ll make movies about everybody who’s Asian.” Fine. We’ll take it if that’s the case. That’s where we’re at right now. There’s forward progress. I can’t talk about it too much, but we have a director lined up who is the dream for me. This person came from Asia to here. We spent a whole day together talking about the book. He clearly read it, had a lot of great questions. We had meetings. We’ll have meetings with prospective financiers and so on. We just wait and see.
Jen Yamato:
Great. Now I’m just racking my brain trying to guess who it is.
Frank Shyong:
It’s trying to break some news on this podcast.
Jen Yamato:
Actually, another anecdote that is related to this that I was going to share with you is, when I interviewed Constance Wu for Crazy Rich Asians for the L.A. Times, she quoted you to me in the interview. She quoted your concept of narrative plenitude. In the context of Crazy Rich Asians in this conversation, I think that actually is really interesting because we want more stories to show more breadth of experience and to hang all of our expectations and hopes and responsibility on one movie, whether that’s Crazy Rich Asians, or The Farewell, or the upcoming, The Sympathizer, whatever it is. It’s a lot. How does it feel to know that your concepts are making it out there into the mainstream conversation?
Viet Nguyen:
Well, I read that. Thank you for including that. You got to believe, I tweeted the hell out of that particular quote. I should met Constance Wu for 30 seconds at the Pasadena Playhouse, and I was, of course, too shy to bring that up and said, “Hi, love your movie.” I didn’t say that. No, it’s good. The whole idea of narrative plenitude, of course, is that we need to have many, many, many stories about us so that one story itself is not going to make or break us. We’re not there yet. Because even with Parasite, people are freaking out about it. It’s still the same issue.
Viet Nguyen:
It’s like we’re hanging our hopes on Parasite both for Asian cinema and Korean cinema, but also for the ripple effects onto Asian-American representation too. It’s unfortunate. Because obviously, we’re still dependent on industries and people who are not Asians or Asian-Americans to make these decisions about what gets shown, what gets made, and so on. Until we have the capacity to do that ourselves, we’re still going to be having these terrible conversations about these stories that bear too much of a burden. Crazy Rich Asians has too much of a burden on. It’s just a romantic comedy. It should be just like every other romantic comedy. Our expectations should be leveled with that. People who don’t like romantic comedies shouldn’t feel obligated to go see a romantic comedy.
Frank Shyong:
Right. A lot of pioneering Asian-American content collapses under the weight of all of those expectations. It is a strange and absurd expectation that everyone of a particular race is supposed to like the movie that has the people of that races. You don’t expect all White people to like The Joker. Certainly, they didn’t.
Viet Nguyen:
I have to say, as a writer of The Sympathizer, for example, which has been read by a lot of people, whenever a Vietnamese person doesn’t like it, I take it personally. Come on, what’s wrong with you? I did that for you. No, its hurts. It really hurts when it’s your own people. I can understand that. With Crazy Rich Asians, if it weren’t attention completely changes the way we perceive something and a way you receive something, that’s why it’s so important talk about narrative plenitude. How do we get it? How do you …
Jen Yamato:
You give the answers, right?
Viet Nguyen:
I don’t have the answers. I don’t have the answers.
Frank Shyong:
You talk also the twin of narrative plenitude is the narrative scarcity. Narrative scarcity changes which stories do get elevated and which stories don’t. The publishing controversy with American Dirt it being this coordinated publishing campaign to promote it, but then rejected by a lot of writers of Mexican descent has revealed this process by which certain stories get valued and certain stories don’t. Have you experienced any of that and how do you fight back against it?
Viet Nguyen:
Well, I think I’m a writer. My primary focus is on literature and writing, which means nothing in Los Angeles. No one cares about literature and writing in Los Angeles except writers. There, at least, I think we are seeing movement on the question of narrative scarcity versus narrative plenitude. Obviously, when I was growing up in the 1970s, 1980s, do you even see a book by an Asian-American was so rare. When I came across Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club at Berkeley bookstore in 1989, I was like, oh my god, there’s actually a book by an Asian person. I read it in two nights. I was thrilled about that.
Viet Nguyen:
You’d only see a book by an Asian-American writer literally once every year. It was always an occasion to see it. Now you see a book by an Asian-American writer almost every week, at least every month. We have achieved something close to narrative plenitude. They’re in the ranks of Asian-American literature where there are so many of us. I think the reason for this is twofold. One is that the whole stereotype of the Asian-American model minority has had an unintended consequence, which is that we’re not just a model minority in engineering or science, but we’re starting to make our presence felt in the humanities too.
Viet Nguyen:
We’ve done well in college or a good segment of Asian-Americans has done well in college, and they become writers. There is a model minority track in writing. You get your BA, and then you go to your MFA, and you know how to work the system within the industry of publishing. Asian-American writers, some of them have done that. The reason why we’ve been able to do that is because it’s a low cost enterprise for the writer. All you have to do to write a book is you need one person willing to sacrifice her or his life for the book. That’s it.
Jen Yamato:
Insanity, time.
Viet Nguyen:
Insanity, right, yeah. The very little money, the money is put forward by the publishing industry. That’s where the barrier is when we see problems like American Dirt. They’d be perfectly happy to publish the Asian-American version of American Dirt if it came along, and they try to. They just haven’t been able to find the right one yet. I have no illusions about that part of the industry. At the level of the writers, the producers, we have the opportunities to do it. In film, the problem is, of course, that it costs so much more money to make a film than to write a book. Narrative plenitude is more easily achieved the less expensive it is.
Viet Nguyen:
Eventually though, we all run up against the problem of who controls the industry. Whether it’s the industry of publishing, or the industry of Hollywood, or whatever industry you want to talk about. That’s why even though there is a meme or whatever you call it that says representation matters and that we should all be telling our own stories and everything, which is absolutely true, having more representations doesn’t solve the problem. What solved the problem is having more power. This is what our American situation is about. We need power. We need access to the means of production and the means of representation. We basically need a social revolution.
Viet Nguyen:
This is what being Asian-American has always meant from its very inception in the 1960s and pre Asian-American movement. That was always the issue for liberation of Asian American populations. Nothing has changed. Even though now, we have many Asian-Americans who are successful corporate lawyers and the type, they’re not Asian-American in the sense that they want a social revolution. We’re never going to achieve adequate Asian-American representation at all levels across all ethnicities across all classes unless we actually have that power behind the scenes in the various industries that control this country.
Jen Yamato:
Have you felt the responsibility to be visible?
Viet Nguyen:
Yes. I felt that responsibility because I think it’s a lot easier for Asian-Americans to become successful and say, I have achieved the American dream, give me a position on your board or do whatever. Give me a slot on the Oprah book club or whatever. I don’t care about that. I think I’ll use my position to say, that’s not enough. Having an Asian-American bourgeoisie is not enough. Having certain kinds of stories is not enough. It’s not enough for us. It’s not enough for all of America. That’s again going back to the Parasite idea, the parasite critique of capitalism and class differentiation within Korea can be equally applied to Asian-Americans.
Viet Nguyen:
We got rich, boozy Asian-Americans who don’t give a damn about poor Asian-Americans or poor Asian immigrants. I’m not on their side. I’m on the side of the poor. I’m on the side of the working class, Asian Americans for sure, but across a spectrum. Asian-American liberation is for us, but it can’t be achieved without liberating the rest of the country too.
Frank Shyong:
You talked about writing about minorities as if they were the majority. That’s definitely something I’m trying to do. How do you do that?
Viet Nguyen:
The pressure of this whole country is designed to make minorities think of themselves as minorities and make them talk to majorities, that’s what racism is about both explicit racism, but also implicit racism. There’s enormous pressure there to orient yourself as a minority towards what the majority wants, which can affect you subconsciously. You’re already in the act of apologizing for yourself, translating yourself, explaining yourself, making room for the majority at whatever table or situation you happen to be in. I actually do that in my personal life. I’m a very nice guy. I don’t make trouble in an interpersonal environment.
Viet Nguyen:
Put me in front of an audience or have me write a story, that’s done, that’s done. The breakthrough there for me was to imagine that I’m not going to write for the so-called majority. First and foremost, I’m going to write for me. We have to imagine our audiences in concentric circles. I think you always have to write for yourself first. What do you want? What do you believe in? Be true to yourself. That’s the real authenticity.
Jen Yamato:
How did you get to this point though of feeling empowered to do that?
Viet Nguyen:
I always knew it in principle, theoretically, that that’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s actually a lot harder to do that in practice. Because in principle, you can do this. Then you think, well, how am I going to get published?
Jen Yamato:
When you’re working within a system, whether that’s publishing or journalism, or film, or whatever, that doesn’t.
Viet Nguyen:
Yeah, exactly. I think that affected me as a writer when I was writing short stories and I was learning how to be a writer. I was like, well, who’s going to publish these stories, who’s going to be my agent, et cetera, et cetera. I wrote that collection of short stories. After that was done, I was so fed up with that. I thought I’ve written my book that did that, some of those gestures, and now that book may never be published. I don’t give a fuck about what is going to happen next. I’m going to write a book just for me. That’s The Sympathizer. I think for a lot of artists and writers, whatever background, the moment when they can say, I don’t give a fuck, is the moment that they have become artists.
Jen Yamato:
It’s like a free moment, yeah.
Viet Nguyen:
It’s a free, right. Again, because you don’t worry about what the industry tells you. Whatever industry you’re in, you’re writing for yourself or you’re doing whatever it is for yourself. Then for us, those of us who happen to be minorities, I think our next audience is our community. That was my thinking when I wrote The Sympathizer. I had to construct it in a certain way. It was a Vietnamese person talking to a Vietnamese person, so much minority literature or minority cultural production. You can tell, it’s not from minorities to minorities, it’s minorities to the majority. You can always tell because there’s always some kind of translation taking place.
Jen Yamato:
Or some concession made to …
Frank Shyong:
Certain characters.
Jen Yamato:
Or setting or whatever it is, yeah.
Viet Nguyen:
Right. You can tell. If you talk to your own community, you don’t translate. Why would you do that? When Jonathan Franzen puts a description of a sandwich in his novel, he says, I ate a sandwich, period. As a Vietnamese person, I’m expected to say, I eat a bowl of pho, a delicious beef noodle Vietnamese soup. When you say that, you know you’re not talking to Vietnamese people.
Jen Yamato:
This is so fascinating, especially when it comes to food in writing, whether that’s fiction or nonfiction writing like newspapers italicized those terms.
Frank Shyong:
We’re debating this at the L.A. times. Our food section recently stopped italicizing ethnic food names. For me, when I write about them, I don’t do the comma parenthetical. Italics don’t upset me anymore, but I don’t want to have to explain things because I want to write to that audience. That can be really difficult to do, I think.
Jen Yamato:
It can lead to some very spirited arguments in the newsroom.
Frank Shyong:
Yeah, it definitely has. It’s all the question of audience. Here in Los Angeles, we can at least argue for a diverse audience.
Viet Nguyen:
I think the proper position for me is to say, look, the majority, their role in reading our work or listening to our work or watching our work is to be the eavesdroppers just as we as a minority population have always been forced to eavesdrop on the majority culture. I grew up watching White people on screen all the time, Red, White, cannon and all that. I don’t have a problem that. Those are beautiful works. Those are powerful entertainment works and so on. I was the eavesdropper. I was the outsider who was not there in those books and works. There’s no problem with that. The reverse needs to be true as well. White people, for example, cannot expect to see themselves in our works as if our works are written to them or made for them. They have to be on the outside listening in, which means they may hear some uncomfortable truths about them when we talk about them.
Frank Shyong:
Another thing about being an artist is you grow up thinking that you’re supposed to know certain references. There’s so many things. I just go home and quietly Google so I’d know what this is about.
Viet Nguyen:
For me, for example, now that I have children, I finally get a lot of references in kids’ stuff that I never knew before, like Georgie’s nursery rhymes and things that all Americans are supposed to know. I never grew up with that kind of stuff.
Frank Shyong:
It’s like you want it, you’re an Asian-American, you’re an outsider, you want to be an artist, you want to be a part of the literary elite. When I was first learning how to do prestige newspaper writing, I found myself just reading a lot of White guys and just being like, I’m trying to sound like an old White man. There was this process where I had to actually like, I want to sound like what I want to sound like. I started reading, translated literature, and stuff like that, and try to read books like yours to try to see what an Asian-American voice sounds like. That’s my question, I think, is like, what is an Asian-American voice sound like? Do you think there is such a thing?
Viet Nguyen:
I think it’s more accurate to say that there are Asian-American voices in the plural. Because one of the things that we want to get away from is the singular voice, is it’s too tempting. For example, when The Sympathizer came out, had a great review in New York Times on the front cover, but the second or third line said, Viet is the voice for the voiceless. I was like, no, that’s not true. That’s very tempting for a writer to say, okay, I’m the voice for the voiceless, I’m going to stand up, I’m going to represent, and I’m going to get all the credit for doing that. Nothing will change. You’re still going to speak for the voiceless and the voiceless are going to remain voiceless.
Viet Nguyen:
Again, my ambition as a writer, but also as someone who’s concerned about this country and our communities, is to say, we got to transform the conditions of this country so that there are no voiceless people. That’s the real project, not to get more voices for the voiceless out there and give them Pulitzers and Oscars and all that kind of thing. That’s good for the individual, not good for the community necessarily. Asian-American voices, there are so many. It’s hard to define what that is. I think how I know that something is a genuine Asian-American voice is when there’s no translation, when there’s no catering.
Viet Nguyen:
That doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with that voice, but at least I know that voice is being authentic to what the creator believes in and that it is aimed towards us rather towards other people. Then after that, we can argue with each other. Just because there’s Asian-American voices, doesn’t mean we all have to listen to each other or to agree with each other. Again, we have a plurality of these voices that can contest and maybe out of that will get some consensus or some strong viewpoints. The fight is part of the pleasure that would that we should be welcoming.
Jen Yamato:
As we wrap up with you, and thank you for your time, we are recording in a college campus, which is wild to me. I feel ancient walking around here. I feel like the Steve Buscemi meme. I’m like, hi kids.
Frank Shyong:
Hey kids.
Jen Yamato:
Hello, fellow … As we wrap up with you, what gives you hope? We have milestones in the last few years, whether it’s Crazy Rich Asians as we talked about, which you haven’t seen yet, but that’s okay. Culturally, it was a force. We have Parasite, which won four history Oscars earlier this year. We have Andrew Yang. What are some examples of things in your daily life that give you hope or optimism?
Viet Nguyen:
Well, you’ve mentioned being here on the college campus of the University of Southern California where I teach and you’ve mentioned feeling old. Well, that’s every day for me. I get older. The students stay younger. They stay the same age, 18 to 22 years old, and that gives me hope actually. Number one, it makes me feel old like I’m going to die, okay? That’s normal. That’s life. That’s a cycle of life. What gives me hope is that there’s always a new generation. This new generation 10, 20, 30 years from now is going to do whatever the people who made Parasite are doing. Those people were 20 years old at one point. They had their vision.
Viet Nguyen:
Or the people who did Crazy Rich Asians. We were all 20 years old at some point, and so was I. When I was 20 years old on the Berkeley campus, I was getting arrested for what I believed in, doing stupid crazy stuff that I would freak out if my own children did, but that’s exactly what needs to happen. What happened to me was that I became a professor and all that passion got beaten out of me, all right. I’ve spent the last 10 or 15 years trying to get back to how I felt when I was 20. Not that I want to be 20, but I want to feel that passion, that sincerity, that idealism, and then temper it with whatever kind of wisdom and experience and talent that I have.
Viet Nguyen:
I think that’s so crucial. That gives me hope, because these new generations, as they come up, will change the world. They’re also going to do it their own way. I don’t want the next generation, for example, of Vietnamese-American writers to have to write about the Vietnam War. That’s my obsession. That’s because I was traumatized by it, my family was. That’s not what’s happening for people who are born in the year 2000 in the United States. They’ll do something different. Whatever they do may not even be Vietnamese, but it’s still going to be made by Vietnamese-Americans.
Viet Nguyen:
Therefore, that’s going to be important to me, and to us, and to the Asian-American community, and to this country, and to Vietnam. I think we, obviously, should endorse and support all the wonderful interventions that are being made today and then welcome the changes that will take place by a new generation that may not see the world the same way that we do.
Frank Shyong:
Yeah, I think about all the kids growing up now. When I grew up and I saw an Asian person on TV, I’d Google it for hours and try to find it. That’s how I listen to Margaret Cho’s comedy. Now, kids are growing up with all these different things that they can watch. They don’t have to like all of them. There’s so many different versions of themselves being represented and then they will become many different versions of them self.
Viet Nguyen:
I think that I was that person so long ago and I wrote, for example, The Sympathizer knowing that people of the earlier generation hate this book, because it’s written from the perspective of a communist spy. They want nothing to do with communists. They want nothing to do with my voice. That’s okay. I waited 20 years to have the chance to speak. That’s what you do when you’re Vietnamese, you wait until you have the chance to speak. Again, the new generation will have their own voice. You asked about, Frank, Asian-American voices, what are they? Well, we don’t know until they start speaking and they start to claim whatever it is that they believe in. Then we, as the older generation, just got to step aside and let them speak.
Frank Shyong:
Just carry me into woods. Find a soft spot.
Jen Yamato:
That’s a beautiful way to approach it all with grace and I think to make space.
Viet Nguyen:
Until they criticize me, then that is all up.
Jen Yamato:
Our time together is unfortunately coming to a close. First, it’s that time of the show, we’ve come to call bad Asian confessions, which is when we share a time when, for whatever reason, we felt that we were not Asian enough. Please share anything, any of yours.
Viet Nguyen:
There are so many things to confess to you. First of all, my wife does not take off her shoes in the house. That’s a source of tension whenever I see that. My French is better than my Vietnamese, for example. I’m still enrolled in French classes and partly it’s because my son, he’s enrolled in a French school. I never stopped being a refugee. I’m thinking, what if I have to go out of this country? Where is the best place I’m going to go? I can’t go back to Vietnam because they’ll throw me in prison there possibly. Ironically, France, as our former colonizer, is still a better option than going back to Vietnam. I’ve taken my French classes much more seriously than I ever took my Vietnamese classes. I have many things I could confess to, but I still haven’t seen Crazy Rich Asians.
Jen Yamato:
Whoa!
Frank Shyong:
What?
Jen Yamato:
How did you avoid that?
Viet Nguyen:
I have read the book.
Jen Yamato:
Okay. Well, that counts for something.
Frank Shyong:
[crosstalk 00:50:58]
Viet Nguyen:
Whenever things like Parasite or Crazy Rich Asians happen or The Farewell, it goes way back in time, back to the Wayne Wang movies, for example.
Jen Yamato:
Joy Luck Club.
Viet Nguyen:
Joy Luck Club and so on. There’s always a big hub up, oh my God! We’ve got Asian representations. We all got to go out and support it immediately in the movie theater. There’s a sense of obligation for that to me and also the sinking sense of dread like, what if it’s not very good? What if it’s …
Jen Yamato:
Absolutely.
Viet Nguyen:
… well intentioned and so on.
Jen Yamato:
You’re afraid. You’re afraid.
Viet Nguyen:
I’m afraid.
Frank Shyong:
What if it’s too good? I want to feel that way. What if it’s like The Farewell and it makes you feel like too many things?
Viet Nguyen:
It’s like a lose-lose situation because of the hype about The Farewell was so great. I did see The Farewell we mentioned but not in the movie theater, but at home. I thought it was pretty good. Crazy Rich Asians, from everything that I can tell, I may not enjoy it if I ever actually see it outside of the eye candy aspects of it. Crazy Rich Asians has too much of a burden on. It’s just a romantic comedy, should be just like every other romantic comedy. Our expectations should be level with that and people who don’t like romantic comedies shouldn’t feel obligated to go see a romantic comedy.
Jen Yamato:
Hey there listener. Do you have a bad Asian confession that you’d like to share with us? Call us at 213-986-5652, that is 213-986-5652. Maybe we’ll play yours on the show.
Frank Shyong:
That’s it for the third episode of Asian Enough. Thanks to Viet for joining us. Thanks to you for listening.
Jen Yamato:
Asian Enough is hosted by me, Jen Yamato, and by Frank Shyong. Our senior producers are Rina Palta and Liyna Anwar. Our executive producer is Abbie Fentress Swanson. Our engineer is Mike Heflin. Our original music was composed by Andrew Eapen.
Frank Shyong:
Come back next Tuesday. We’ll be joined by the comedian Margaret Cho.
Margaret Cho:
I feel like, oh, I actually went from very current to very old school Asian, which is great, kind of an elder thing of Empress Dowager vibe. If I have some turtle soup brewing on the side, it’s that kind of … I’m always in a throne.
Frank Shyong:
If you like Asian Enough, please subscribe and leave us a five-star review on Apple. Special thanks to Julia Turner, Jeff Berkshire, Reed Johnson, Shelby Grad, Camila Victoriano, and Clint Schaff.
Jen Yamato:
Remember, you don’t have to like every single movie or book that an Asian-American makes. It is fine. You are safe here.
Viet Nguyen:
Come on, what’s wrong with you? I did it for you.
