Viet Thanh Nguyen joins Randy Kim on The Banh Mi Chronicles to talk about the Asian Pacific Islander community during COVID-19 and more.
For this Season 2 finale centering on the theme, “1975”, NY Times best seller and Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen joins in as a guest on the podcast. In this episode, Viet reflects on the growing hostility towards the API (Asian Pacific Islander) communities in the face of the Covid 19 pandemic, and how the API community can build solidarity and strength during this critical time. He also speaks about former presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s recent controversial op-ed. Viet looks back on the 45 year anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, and his critically acclaimed fiction novel, The Sympathizer which is set in the post Vietnam War period.
Bio: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books are The Refugees, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. His most recent publication is Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his six-year-old son, Ellison.
