Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

What Happens After a Revolution?

Viet Thanh Nguyen reads from The Committed and reflects on what could happen after a revolution for the San Diego Tribue Festival of Books.

Viet Thanh Nguyen reads a short excerpt of “The Committed”, a sequel to “The Sympathizer.” He then explores what happens next in the aftermath of a revolution, once the committed revolutionary has time to contemplate all that has transpired.

Read the transcript below.

Speaker 1:

San Diegans accomplish great things every day. We care about our neighbors and our community. We are proud of our diversity. We are resilient. We hold our leaders accountable. We live in one of the most dynamic cities in America. The San Diego Union-Tribune telling San Diego’s story for more than 150 years.

Gail Baker:

Hello. I’m Dr. Gail F. Baker, Vice President and Provost at the University of San Diego.

Noelle Norton:

And I’m Dr. Noelle Norton, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences here at USD.

Gail Baker:

For the second year in a row, USD, along with its college of arts and sciences and humanities center, is proud to return as the presenting sponsor for the 2021 San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books.

Noelle Norton:

As a university, deeply committed to the liberal arts, USD promotes a form of lifelong learning that ignites curiosity builds critical connections across different ideas and topics, by seeing them from unique perspectives.

Gail Baker:

Our partnership with the Festival of Books enables all of us avid readers, to come together as a community alongside renowned authors from all over the world and to dive deeply into imaginative stories and important themes.

Noelle Norton:

Yes, books do have the ability to open minds and hearts. On behalf of the University of San Diego, we thank you for joining us for today’s program to explore the world of books with us.

Gail Baker:

Enjoy the presentation.

Julia Dixon Evans:

Welcome everyone to this San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I’m Julia Dixon Evans and I report on the arts for KPBS, San Diego’s NPR station. And I write the weekly KPBS arts newsletter. I’m also a fiction writer. My debut novel is, How to Set Yourself on Fire, came out in 2018. And in 2019, I was awarded the National Magazine Award for fiction for a short story in [inaudible 00:02:36].

Julia Dixon Evans:

And it is such a joy to introduce our guest right now. Author Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Hi Julia.

Julia Dixon Evans:

Oh hello.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Sorry I jumped the gun.

Julia Dixon Evans:

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer prize in fiction alongside seven other prizes. By the way, I Googled how to pronounce Pulitzer for this. He is also author of the short story collection, The Refugees, the nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. And is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing called The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles. Welcome!

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Hi Julia. Such a pleasure to be here talking to you.

Julia Dixon Evans:

Great. How about we get started with you reading a little bit of The Committed? Do you have a section?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

I do. But in order to maybe just give the readers a little bit of context, let me just say that. As you mentioned, The Committed it’s a sequel to The Sympathizer, but you don’t actually have to have read The Sympathizer to read The Committed. Now I don’t know why you haven’t read The Sympathizer, but if you haven’t it’s okay. You can just go read The Committed. It’s meant to be a standalone novel, but just to give you a little bit of background, The Sympathizer is a novel about a communist spy in the south Vietnamese army in April, 1975. And when Saigon falls or is about to be liberated, depending on your point of view, his task is to flee with the remnants of that army to the United States, and spy on their efforts to take back Vietnam.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

And long story short, they do go back to Vietnam. He ends up in a reeducation camp and he escapes at the end of The Sympathizer. So The Committed starts off exactly at that point on a refugee boat, fleeing from Vietnam. And that’s where we’re going to be. All right. “We, the unwanted, wanted so much. We wanted food, water and parasols, although umbrellas would be fine. We wanted clean clothes, baths and toilets, even of the squatting kind, since squatting on land was safer and less embarrassing than clinging to the bulwark of a rolling boat with one’s posterior hanging over the edge. We wanted rain, clouds and dolphins. We wanted it to be cooler during the hot day and warmer during the freezing night. We wanted an estimated time of arrival. We wanted not to be dead on arrival. We wanted to be rescued from being barbecued by the unrelenting sun. We wanted television, movies, music, anything with which to pass the time. We wanted love, peace and justice, except for our enemies whom we wanted to burn in hell, preferably for eternity.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

We wanted independence and freedom, except for the communists who should all be sent to reeducation, preferably for life. We wanted benevolent leaders who represented the people by which we meant us and not them, whoever they were. We wanted to live in a society of equality. Although if we had to settle for owning more than our neighbor, that would be fine. We wanted a revolution that would overturn the revolution we had just lived through. In some, we wanted to want for nothing. What we most certainly did not want was a storm. And yet that was what we got on the seventh day. The faithful, once more cried out, ‘God help us.’ The non faithful cried out ‘God, you bastard.’ Faithful or unfaithful, there was no way to avoid the storm, dominating the horizon and surging closer and closer. Whipped into a frenzy, the wind gained momentum.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

And as the waves grew, our arc gained speed and altitude. Lightening illuminated the dark furrows of the storm clouds and thunder overwhelmed our collective ground. A torrent of rain exploded on us. And as the waves propelled our vessel ever higher, the faithful prayed and the unfaithful cursed, but both wept. Then our arc reached this peak and for an eternal moment perched on the snow-capped crest of a watery precipice. Looking down on that deep wine colored valley awaiting us. We were certain of two things. The first was that we were absolutely going to die. And the second was that we would almost certainly live. Yes, we were sure of it. We will live. And then we plunged holly, into the abyss.”

Julia Dixon Evans:

Thank you. My first question is based on one of the early reviews of The Sympathizer, in fact. Where it was, it noted that the book was about how and what we choose to remember and forget particularly in the face of war. And it feels like the Committed is more about how and what we choose to reconcile or choose to rationalize or philosophize. I wondered if you could talk a little bit on that, on this things about memory, forgetting and reconciling.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Sure. Well, The Sympathizer has many things including being a war novel and being a novel about what happens after a war. And part of the claim that I make in a lot of my works is that it’s very difficult to determine when a war actually ends. I mean, if you read a history book, it says, “Hey, the war ended in 1975.” But if you talk to people who’ve lived through the war, whether they happen to be soldiers and combatants or civilians and refugees, what you often find is that the war never ended for these people. I mean, the war continues for them in memory and in trauma. And so the question of how to cope with those feelings and the history is really important to everybody who’s lived through a war and obvious that that affects the way that they remember and forget these terrible and important events in their lives.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

So the terrain that The Sympathizer explores is I think fairly common terrain in some ways, because we have a lot of novels about war, about trauma, about memory and forgetting. And when it comes to revolutions, we have a lot of novels about revolutions too. But what I wanted to do in The Committed was to look at what happens afterwards. So what happens after a revolution? What happens after people have had a chance to think about the terrible things that their side or that they themselves must have done. During the heat of a war that those questions about, did we do the right thing or not, are often put to the side for more pressing issues, but in the aftermath of a war or a revolution, those issues can not be avoided for so many people. So this is what The Committed deals with, and it follows the adventures of The Sympathizer.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

He’s part French part Vietnamese, spy, bastard, as he calls himself. And he’s a committed revolutionary in The Sympathizer. And in The Committed, he has to deal with the consequences of what he has done, what he has witnessed. And it’s a novel about dealing with guilt, about trying to rebuild oneself after a war and after a revolution. And in his case, he was a committed revolutionary in The Sympathizer, but in The Committed, he has serious doubts about the revolution he committed to. And so it’s also a novel about dealing with the regrets of revolutions and commitments as well. And I think that is something that is pertinent to so many people who have been revolutionaries or who have been idealists, and have gone to war for various kinds of reasons.

Julia Dixon Evans:

Great. I wanted to talk a little bit about writing a second book after The Sympathizer. How much of The Committed was already seeded or waiting or planned before you began?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Well, I wrote The Sympathizer as a one-off novel did not think there was going to be a sequel, much less a trilogy, which is what it is now, but when I reached the end of The Sympathizer and wrap it up and all that, I thought, “Wow, I actually have a whole nother set of questions for my protagonist, for my sympathizer.” And those questions could not have been answered in that first novel. I mean, it would have been too long of a novel if I tried to do that. So it made sense to write a sequel. And also The Sympathizer besides being a war novel is a spy novel. And in the genre of the spy novels, sequels, trilogies, series are to be expected. So I thought it worked in that context of the genre as well.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

And I felt that I was really fascinated by my sympathizer. I really identified with him. I thought that I had created a pretty unique voice when it came to him, a voice that I hadn’t seen before in literature. And that’s one of the compelling reasons for a writer to write, is to write something that they haven’t seen before. And so what happened after The Sympathizer was done was that I immediately sat down to write some ideas for the next novel and got around to running about 50 pages of it and was having a great time.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

And then, The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer prize, which everybody should win a Pulitzer prize. It’s awesome. But one of the drawbacks is that I just lost a year of time in terms of writing after that. And then I had to get back into writing The Committed, and writing The Committed was actually much more difficult than writing The Sympathizer because in writing The Sympathizer, no one knew who I was. I was writing in total freedom and no one bothered me for a couple of years and in The Committed it was the complete reverse. So it’s a good challenge to have, but it was a very different writing experience.

Julia Dixon Evans:

I was going to ask about that. Like, is there also an element of pressure? There were no expectations, I assume, as you started writing The Sympathizer, to write a Pulitzer worthy novel. Although maybe we all have that before we start writing. But now, you’re writing the second novel, you’re 50 pages into it. Is there a pressure that you had to contend with? Are you able as a writer to compartmentalize that a little bit?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

I think for the first 20 years of my writing life, trying to be a writer is starting around college. There was a lot of pressure, even as an aspiring writer, I don’t know if I speak for a lot of writers, but just speaking for me, I felt, “Wow, is anybody going to publish my short stories? Doesn’t anyone care? What do the editors, agents, publishers, et cetera, what is my writing group going to think?” So there’s a lot of pressure and, a lot of insecurity. And that seems to be part and parcel of the writer’s life.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

And after about 20 years, and I was writing the short story collection called The Refugees, which was published, but it came up after The Sympathizer and I finished that collection and I thought, “No one cares about this book.” I mean, I had published some short stories, but it was whatever. I wasn’t burning down the world or anything. And I thought, “Gosh, I’ve spent 20 years of my life trying to be short story writer, trying to perfect this art, no one cares.” And when my agent told me to write a novel, I said, “Okay, I’m going to do it, but I’m going to do it my way. I’m not going to do it thinking about what the editors or agents or publishers or readers or whoever, will think about this book.” And was enormously liberating to make that decision because it took all the pressure off of me. I felt like I’d spent 20 years crumbling under pressure. And then to decide that I just was not going to deal with it was really liberating. So The Sympathizer was an unexpected success, as I think most people will acknowledge, including me.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

And when it became so successful with the Pulitzer prize and I was writing the sequel, I thought, yes, initially there was a little bit of concern that the expectations would be very heightened, but I just felt that I had to get back to my original mindset with The Sympathizer, which is, “I don’t care. And I already won one Pulitzer. I don’t need to win anymore. I have that forever.” So I should be liberated, if I’m not liberated, that would be really weird. And so in writing The Committed actually, and after its publication, to me, it feels like there’s very little pressure because I’ve decided, number one, I’m not reading my reviews, take it or leave it. Here’s the novel. Because the only thing that really mattered to me was just writing the novel and not really again, caring what other people thought. And if they like it, that’s great. If they don’t like it, that’s not so great, but I don’t care. So it’s a good mindset, I think, for a writer to be in. To be free from these kinds of pressures and expectations.

Julia Dixon Evans:

Yeah. That’s great. I’m jealous. I wanted to talk about this narrator who seems to have really driven your process and why you wanted to return to the story as well. And also this voice that the humor, the type of humor in The Committed, I laughed on nearly every page I read. It’s the story full of tragedy and horror, but somehow there’s just enough absurdity to the way our narrator dispenses everything he’s experiencing. I would love to hear a little bit about your approach to this style. What does it mean to take on that kind of voice?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Well, I think before The Sympathizer, no one in the world would have said, “Viet’s a funny guy,” including all my friends, as they have told me. But in creating the character of The Sympathizer, I think what happened is that I liberated some part of myself. Deep within me, there was this way of looking at the world that was absurd and satirical, but I’ve done a very good job of repressing myself for many decades, growing up in a very conservative Vietnamese Catholic community, and then becoming a professor, which is like to be professors, you got to be repressed most of the time in order to be able to survive in this profession. And so part of the decision about rejecting pressure was also about rejecting the pressures of my family and my community and the academic world and creating a character who would be both very intelligent, very committed, but also very divided and very torn, including in the way that he looks at his own commitment.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

So he’s a very sincere communist, but he’s also capable of seeing the hypocrisy and the absurdities of every world that he finds himself in, whether it’s communism or American democracy and capitalism and so on. And I think that is genuinely how I see the world too. I have a hard time fitting in with a lot of cliques or groups or whatever, because I’m always seeing the absurdities and hypocrisies of every group that I find myself in, whether it’s the United States or Vietnam or capitalism or communism. That’s very bad for feeling that we belong but it’s very good for being a writer and for being a critic. And so that’s the voice that’s in The Sympathizer.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

And once I created him, he did take on a life of his own. And I think that’s true for a lot of writers. I think, we wish, we hope that we create characters who are so real that they just have to exist. And once that’s been created, it’s hard to let go of these people. And so there was just simply a need. There had to be a justification for another novel, thankfully there was. And I think partly why there was that need is because his view in The Sympathizer, the absurdities and hypocrisies that he contends with, have not been exhausted.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

He deals primarily with Vietnamese communism and American democracy and what The Committed addresses is, the French. He’s part French and part Vietnamese. I thought the French got off easy in The Sympathizer and the French really loved The Sympathizer, they gave it a couple of book awards. And I think it’s because they liked seeing Americans being made fun of. Well, let’s see how they deal with The Committed, where I make fun of the French quite a bit. And the French translation comes out in November and I’m going to France. So we’ll see what they say to me then.

Julia Dixon Evans:

Also, can I ask you about what is in a name and the decision to write, or do you even continue this nameless narrator is one thing. And I also think that his name was necessarily intertwined with his identity. Two minds, two faces, his existence as a spy or an exile. And even in his relationship to his own parents or his relationship with his sexuality, it’s all very, this somewhat… Towing this line of namelessness, universality, anonymity. I would love to hear about your decision to keep, keep him nameless or give him this nameless name.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Sure. I mean, I don’t think it’s unheard of obviously to have nameless narrators or protagonists. And usually when someone appears without a name, what’s going to be involved with the book is oftentimes a quest or an investigation of one’s identity and through one’s identity, the identity and the complexities of the society in which our narrator or protagonist is immersed. And so this issue of being nameless, you find that in certain kinds of detective and spy novels, where obviously the investigation is partly about the individual protagonists, but then also again about the society in question.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

You also find the anonymous narrator in existentialist kinds of works as well, and these two novels gesture in all these directions towards the spy genre and existentialism. And then finally the reason for the namelessness and the anonymity is slightly different and unique perhaps to my concerns in these two books, which is that these novels do deal very specifically with what happened in Vietnam during the war, during French colonialism and afterwards, which includes the afterwords of living in the United States or in France as a Vietnamese person of the diaspora or someone who becomes French or American, but with Vietnamese origins. And my experience growing up in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, there’s a lot of racism directed against Asian Americans, Asian immigrants. And in the context of the Vietnam war, a lot of racism directed against people of Vietnamese backgrounds.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

And then there’s also the general unease or discomfort or lack of familiarity that a lot of Americans of all backgrounds have with people with so-called foreign names. And so I’d run into many issues with my name. And I thought, “Well, if I make my character have a full fledged Vietnamese name and stock the book with a lot of Vietnamese names, what I’m going to run into is a lot of people who are not Vietnamese, not being able to identify with these characters or even remember their names and how to spell them,” and so on and so forth.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

And I think there’s a time and a place for having that battle of having those names. So in The Refugees, for example, my short story collection, full of Vietnamese names, but in these particular books, I wanted to eliminate the names for the most part, in order to encourage the readers to identify even more strongly with the Vietnamese people that they’re reading about and reading with. So no names, but yet relentless Vietnamese content in terms of history and politics and culture and jokes and language and food and all of that. So I was trying to have it both ways, both with the specificity of Vietnamese content, but also with the ratio of Vietnamese names, to ease identification for the reader.

Julia Dixon Evans:

And in this book, there’s so much theory, communism, socialism, capitalism, and it’s all kind of wrapped up in the way critics can be at odds, even the narrative’s aunt who he accuses of being like an armchair version of this, it can be at odds with people who have experienced actual effects of any of those systems. And these theories and systems, they seem heavy in our discourse in 2021. And maybe it’s still a thing. Maybe it’s a different league thing, but did that matter to you taking on this project set in the 1980s about how the modern world would see this?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

So the narrator’s aunt that you’re talking about, what happens is that he goes to Paris as a refugee, and he ends up living with his so-called aunt who has part French and part Vietnamese. And she’s an intellectual. I mean, she is an editor for a very elite French public publishing house. And through her, he meets these French intellectuals and leftists and so on in a salon. And there’s all these heavy discussions about French theory and French philosophy and French literature and French politics. And I thought, “I think this is the way the French see themselves,” because it’s certainly how I saw the French until I got to France. I’m like, “Well, yes, they have that. But then they have a lot of people who eat McDonald’s and go to Starbucks and buy crappy novels in the local department stores.” So you have all kinds of stuff, but you have this French intellectualism, that’s a part of French identity.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

And the flip side of it in the United States, it’s like you have anti-intellectualism. I mean, I think there is an anti intellectual strain in the United States to put it modestly, talking about vaccines and to all that kind of stuff that’s happening today. And it’s been existent throughout our history. And so that affects American literature because I think that contemporary America, most American fiction, you can disagree with me please, but a lot of American fiction of the literary kind, refuses to be philosophical or theoretical or intellectual because that’s just not the way American fiction works for the most part. American readers, readers, like realism. They don’t want foregrounded conversations about ideas. They just want to get to the action and so on and so forth.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

So I had a few ambitions of writing the novel in this way where the novel and the characters engage with Marxism and feminism and colonialism and decolonization and so on. And the primary reason is that these are ideas that I find thrilling, and this is a thriller. So this is a thriller, trust me, there’s a lot of sex, drugs, violence, crime, all kinds of good stuff. And there’s a lot of thrilling discussions in my opinion, about ideas. And we have to understand now, I mean, the anti intellectual strain in American life says, “Ideas are not that important. It’s action that’s important.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

But if you think about it and you look at the 20th century, the events of the 20th century have been driven by ideas. What did we fight the Cold War for? And in the war in Vietnam and Korea, these were ideas. These were fights over ideas about communism, capitalism, democracy and so on. So in fact, as anti intellectual as anybody may be, their lives have been deeply impacted by these ideas. Think about today, we’re having huge political controversies over a theory, critical race theory, which, most of the people who say have no idea what they’re talking about, but they’re arguing over an idea that they believe is driving American life in one direction or another. So I believe that theories and ideas can be the source of great action, drama and excitement, both in fiction, but also obviously in real life and in real politics. And that’s the terrain that The Committed engages in.

Julia Dixon Evans:

You touched on this, I wanted to talk a little bit about the pacing and this idea of your book being a thriller. I found that pacing really brilliant and varied in fact. There are parts that are terrifying and exciting. And then I’m also thinking of one example, I saw pieces of this throughout the book, and it said it was a terrifying scene of torture, but the way it unfolds inside the narrator’s head and the way he’s telling us, it was almost just charming. It was such a strange pacing. And I was thinking a lot about your approach to genre and the merging of literary and genre. So if you could talk a little bit about how you balance those things in your pacing.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Let me also say there’s a lot of sex in the novel and an orgy. All right, let’s get that other way. You have to read far enough long to get to the orgy. But anyway, so about violence and crime and torture and all that kind of stuff. I, as a human being, I recognize that these things are terrible, right? And I don’t want them to happen to me or to anybody I know, all of that. As a writer however, I find this to be an artistic challenge. How do you write about terrible things? And how can you make it interesting for the reader? Now, you could write about terrible things in a very terrible way. Make it very blunt and make it very graphic and just gross people out and make them very uncomfortable.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

And I felt that part of the fun and it’s weird to talk about this, but part of the fun about writing about crime and torture and violence and all that is the challenge of trying to make it interesting for readers. And you’ve mentioned a couple of times the absurdity and the hilarity of the jokes that are in the book. And honestly, you can find those things in the worst circumstances of life. That’s why we have a tradition of satirical anti-war novels. War is a terrible thing. So how can you find something funny in war? Just go read, Catch 22 or Journey to the End of the Night books, which were very influential on me. And so likewise with things like torture and all that, you can make it very, very interesting. I’ll just plug the fact that The Sympathizer’s being adapted for TV, by HBO with Robert Downey Jr. And the director Park Chan-wook.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Now Park Chan-wook’s film Old Boy was a huge influence on The Sympathizer. And if you’ve watched Old Boy, or The Handmaiden or many of the things that Park Chan-wook has done, he engages in very similar terrain to my work, which is why I think he’s a perfect director, but he’s able to make torture compelling to look at and not gross. So just watch, Old Boy, to see how that’s done. And that’s the visual analogy of the very things that are being done in these two novels. That yes, terrible things are happening, but they’re being done in a very compelling and interesting way. I hope.

Julia Dixon Evans:

Now we have time for about one more question. So I wanted to zoom way out in your career and to be a little bit more about refugee literature and the type of refugee storytelling, particularly what you have worked on in your anthology that you edited The Displaced. Can we talk about your experience, not just writing fiction or writing your own experience, but also in helping others tell their stories and about their refugee experience?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Well, whether you are a refugee or a so-called minority or a person of color, and when I say minority, I mean any kind of population that is lesser in number or disempowered or marginalized in any way, it doesn’t have to be racial or ethnic. Oftentimes when it comes to cultural representations, whether it’s in writing or in film or in pop culture or whatever, many of us have experienced the phenomenon that there’s only room for one of us, right? So there’s one for one Vietnamese writer, there’s room for one queer person or whatever. And if you get to be that person, it’s great for you, you get all the attention and you get the platforms and all that kind of stuff. And I was never interested in that.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

I was always, ever since I was in college, I went to Berkeley, I got radicalized. I became an Asian American, a person of color and all this kind of stuff. I thought myself to be a part of a community or communities and a believer in solidarities, not individualities. And that’s part of what my commitments are about. Writing for me as an individual act, but it takes place in the context of a whole history of solidarity and commitment and the existence of other writers, including Asian American writers, black writers, anti-colonial writers that have come before me that have set the stage for me to be able to write these books. So I’m a believer, not in being a voice for the voiceless, which is too often the backhanded praise that’s put upon writers like me, but on abolishing the conditions of voicelessness, of trying to create a world in which there’s more opportunities for people to speak, but there’s no need for gatekeepers and all that. So that’s a big job, right?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

I can’t do it, but, in whatever way I can, I do try. And so the book The Displaced, Refugee Writers on Refugee lives, it’s a compilation of acts 17 or 19, depending on the edition writers who have been refugees and who continue to write about refugee issues. And there are many things like that, that I and other people do, that are designed exactly to create these communities of voice and with speech, in the hope that we will not just open doors, but encourage writers to speak in their own ways. So I have no desire to reproduce myself or anything like that. I just want to make sure that in whatever way I can, and I think all writers should be doing this and other members of the literary community to create opportunities for new voices to emerge.

Julia Dixon Evans:

Thank you. I love that. And thank you so much to Viet Thanh for joining us today. This was such a pleasure. Thank you.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Julia. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.

Julia Dixon Evans:

Yeah. So you thank you all for coming. You can purchase The Committed from the festival indie bookseller partners. You can go to bookshop.org/shop/sdfob. It’s right there on the bottom of your screen. And also on the bottom of your screen, you can support the San Diego Council on literacy by going to literacysandiego.org. You can find a full program of author panels and so much more at the book festival, all streamed, entirely online. The schedule, and all videos will be available at sdfestivalofbooks.com. Again, I’m Julia Dixon Evans. And thank you all for spending some time with us. We appreciate it.

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