This opening lecture addresses what it means to write as an other, especially given writing’s power both to save and to destroy the other. The lecture also lays out the methodology of the lectures, an embodied, autobiographical criticism that emerges from the tension between the humanities and the bare life of refugees for Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center
About the Speakers
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed; a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son, Ellison. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.
Min Hyoung Song is the Chair of the English Department and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Boston College. His most recent book is entitled Climate Lyricism. He is also the author of two other books, The Children of 965: On Writing and Not Writing as an Asian American and Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. The Children of 1965 won the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Prize in Literary Criticism, the Alpha Sigma Nu Award in Literature and Fine Arts, and received an Honorable Mention for the Association for the Study of the Arts in the Present (ASAP) Book Prize. He is the general editor (with Rajini Srikanth) of the four-volume series “Asian American Literature in Transition” for Cambridge University Press, and co-editor (with Rajini Srikanth) of The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature. In addition to numerous shorter publications in edited volumes and academic journals, his writings have appeared in venues like the Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, Public Books, The Chicago Review of Books, and the Margins.
Introduction By:
Bruno Carvalho, Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center.
About the Norton Lectures
The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term “poetry” is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts.
Read below for transcript.
[CLAPPING]
Good evening. I’m Bruno Carvalho. I’m the interim director of the Mahindra Humanities Center while Susie Clark is on sabbatical. Let me open by thanking those involved in the organization of this lecture series. So the Norton committee members, Jonathan Bolton, Glenda Carpio Susie Clark, Robin Kelsey, Jesse McCarthy, Melissa McCormick, Jahan Ramazani, Mariano Siskind, and Paul Yoon.
And at Mahindra, special thanks to executive director Steve Biel, events coordinator, Mary MacKinnon, as well as Julia Corso, Lisa Brown, Charlotte Whitman, and [INAUDIBLE].
So the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. And for the 61st time, we gather today for the Norton lectures. The biennial series resumed online in 2021 with Laurie Anderson after the COVID pandemic caused only the second hiatus in nearly a century. The other one was World War II.
So today, we convene again in person for the first time since 2018, in this awe inspiring theater, in a building that serves as a memorial to Harvard affiliates, who fought for the union and for abolition during the US Civil War. And we gather to listen to Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose writings are often concerned with wars and their consequences.
The war that most shaped Viet’s work added another set of stories to those that Americans sometimes tell themselves, with perhaps more of a sense of shame and wounded self-regard than those that were first memorialized in this space. Viet’s fiction and essays often dwell on war’s consequences in Vietnam, in the United States, beyond, on refugees and their children, on humanity’s experiences of pain, reinvention, loss, self-fashioning, displacement, and joy.
Jonathan Dee, in the New Yorker, wrote of a Viet as a quote, “standard bearer in what seems to be a transformational moment in the history of American literature. A perspectival shift pressing the truth that the only difference between the heroic journey of the pilgrims to the New World, and the voyage of the Vietnamese boat people, was that with the pilgrims.” And will now quote from the narrator of Viet’s latest novel, “There was no camera to record them as the foul smelling, half starved, unshaven, and lice ridden lot that they were.”
Over the years, the Norton lectures have featured authors and artists representing an extraordinary range of human creativity and intellectual accomplishment. Jorge Luis Borges, Herbie Hancock, Toni Morrison, [INAUDIBLE]. As a writer of many modes, Viet Thanh Nguyen brings together much of this range, as well as the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression.
He is a University professor at the University of Southern California. His accolades include a MacArthur, Guggenheim fellowships. He’s the author of the novel, The Sympathizer, a bestselling Pulitzer Prize winner, and the sequel, The Committed, from which I quoted. He wrote a short story collection, The Refugees, the children’s book, Chicken of the Sea, with his son Ellison.
And in nonfiction, among others, Nothing Ever Dies, Vietnam and the Memory of War. And most recently, A Man of Two Faces, A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. We are also so fortunate to have with us as an interlocutor, Min Song. He is currently the chair of the English department and the director of the Asian-American studies program at Boston College.
His most recent book is Climate Lyricism, which follows the award winning, The Children of 1965, On Writing and Not Writing, As An Asian-American, and Strange Future, Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. We are so grateful to have them and all of you here. So please join me in a warm welcome to Viet.
[CLAPPING]
Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, good evening, Harvard and Cambridge. It’s great to be back here. And thank you to Professor Carvalho for that very kind introduction. And thank you to Harvard and the Mahindra Humanities Center for inviting me to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, the first of which, this one is titled, On The Double or Inauthenticity, where I lay out some of the concerns that will preoccupy me throughout the series titled, To Save and To Destroy On Writing As An Other.
I’ll admit that when I received the letter of invitation for this lecture series, I was taken aback. I’ve been in academia long enough, more than three decades now, to know that named chairs and named lectureships mean something, even if I don’t know exactly what they mean, or who these names are. Was this Norton somehow related to WW Norton, the publisher? Or was he related to the Norton Anthologies of English Literature?
I diligently read those pages of Norton as an undergraduate for they presented a canon that I, good student, model minority, immigrant, refugee, outsider, other, felt he had to know. Clearly, however, I did not know the canon enough for I needed to look up Charles Eliot Norton and the Norton lectures.
On seeing some of the names who have given these lectures, including E.E Cummings who grew up in Cambridge and knew Norton, I was dutifully and suitably impressed for I grew up in San Jose, and who knows the way to San Jose? Now, knowing a little bit about this name of Norton, I confess that the rather large button of my vanity was pressed.
And immediately after that, the even larger button of my insecurity. What was my name in comparison to these names? Then I proceeded to read some of the Norton lectures. And after going through those of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Nadine Gordimer, and others, I can only conclude that Harvard has indeed aired.
This invitation to speak was, is, a case of mistaken identity. Me being mistaken for someone else who is also myself, someone else who also bears my name. This has happened to me before more than once since my first and last name together are rather common.
I have a friend in Los Angeles, a television director also named Viet Nguyen, who gets mistaken for me at places like Home Depot when he presents his credit card with our name on it. Then there was my senior year at Berkeley, when I was in one of the English honors seminars. There were very few Vietnamese American English majors, but as it turned out, one of them was also named Viet Nguyen and he was enrolled in the other English honors seminar.
My double was short, and gay, and looked nothing like me, or looked exactly like me depending on who was looking, like his professor. That Professor was in charge of graduate admissions and when I applied, mistook me for the other Viet Nguyen whom he disliked. I was almost not admitted to Berkeley’s graduate program and my life would have taken a perhaps radically different direction because of this other who also wore my name.
Mistaken identity or not, I accepted this invitation to speak, mostly because of the challenge, which a good student never turns down. But honestly, also partly because of the prestige which a model minority is always seduced by. And even more honestly, because of the money. We’re not supposed to talk about the money, right? Crass, I know, especially so early in our relationship together.
But the absent presence of money is always there, speaking in the lower frequencies, at least for someone like me. I once knew how much I cost because after college, my father, frustrated by my careless way with money, gave me an itemized bill of all the expenses that my parents had paid for my existence.
I wish I still had that invoice of myself, but it’s now lost. I wish I had it because it was written in my father’s hand, my father who can no longer calculate, who can no longer write. I don’t blame my father for even though he gave me my bill, he never actually made me pay. His sacrifice and my mother’s were their gifts to me.
Born into rural poverty, a refugee twice, my father loved me. And when he remembers, loves me still. He would not charge me for my existence, but neither could he afford to ignore money. Nor could my mother, also born into rural poverty. Also a refugee twice. She told me once when I was a teenager how the 20 pounds sack of Jasmine rice my parents sold in their grocery store in San Jose for $20 netted her $0.25 in profit.
Perhaps he exaggerated how little she made per sack or perhaps my memory is unreliable, especially given my carelessness with money and bills. But my mother intended to impart a lesson about labor, and cost, pain, and profit, about value, and values. Each sack of rice had absorbed some part of my mother’s being and was contributing to my care, and education.
My mother was and my father is a devout Catholic, and a fervent capitalist, and their habits of sacrifice and struggle are my inheritance. Even as I set out to acquire another kind of culture altogether, another kind of faith that is delivered me here, if my mother wanted me to understand how my parents hard work and their belief in the cultures of capitalism and Catholicism had saved us from godless communism, I could not help but wonder what it might have been destroyed by these cultures from which I had gradually become estranged.
This theme of salvation and destruction should be familiar enough to anyone who is or has been a devotee of a religion, including Catholicism, communism, or capitalism, the most fundamental of American creeds. Refugees also stand at this juncture between salvation and destruction. The spectacle of refugees stranded on overcrowded boats or in squalid camps, raises the implicit question for those seeing them from a safe distance. Would they live or die? Be saved or destroyed?
As a refugee myself, or having been a refugee, having spent time on the sea and in a camp, my origins and their potential crassness continue to influence, or taint, or haunt, or horrify me. As some refugees or former refugees have noted, determining when one sees as feeling like a refugee can be difficult, even if one is no longer a refugee, in fact and by law as in my case.
Still I locate my origins not only where I was born in Vietnam, but also in the place of my memory, which begins in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania. Without these origins, without my double who is and always will be a refugee, I would not be a writer. Or at least not this kind of writer who I am, inhabited by the memory of what a refugee is, a specimen of bare life.
In the words of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, bare life means being stripped of all the trappings of humanity, rendering one biologically alive but not human in a cultural, social, civilizational sense. Bare life exists, Agamben argues, in concentration camps and refugee camps. I’d suggest that bare life is also found wherever the refugee is. On a boat, or on foot, on the sea, or in a jungle.
For those refugees who survived their crossing or containment and become human again, many do their best to leave bare life behind, refusing sometimes even to call themselves refugees. Instead, using for themselves the somewhat more palatable name of the immigrant. But perhaps the memory of that reduction to physical essence always clings to them, as shadow, as double, as in other that is also at the same time them.
Edward Said, one of my influences and role models, preferred the term exile over refugee to describe his own journey. In his elegant and melancholic essay, Reflections on Exile, he writes that the word refugee has become a political one. Suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance, whereas exile carries with it a touch of solitude, and spirituality.
The implication is rather clear. The exile has the capacity to be an exegetical figure, a writer, or a scholar, while writers and scholars would rather become exiles than refugees. In Said’s prose, ascent of romance, and glamor, and artistic possibility lingers around exiles, even as they suffer. A perfume that cannot be detected around more malodorous refugees. The exile is human, the refugee is not.
As a graduate student in my early 20s, I once saw Said deliver a lecture in a crowded hotel ballroom at the Modern Language Association Conference. The topic was opera, one of his passions. I understood all the words, but very little of the meaning having never seen an opera, and never having heard one in its entirety. Said was a classical pianist whereas my parents chose for my musical instrument.
An electronic organ with an illuminated keyboard so I could play Ave Maria, and all the rest of the church music they loved so much. Needless to say, I never learned to play that organ and I became an atheist. But I was aware that classical music and opera signified art and canon, taste and refinement, wealth and power. And I learned the names of the composers, even if I did not know their music.
From my vantage point at the back of the ballroom, I admired Said’s erudition, his well-tailored suit, his August bearing, his enormous stature in the field. He seemed to belong completely to the Modern Language Association. And so I was struck, many years later, by the title of his memoir, Out Of Place.
Said presumably knew he was also in some ways an insider, someone who laid the foundations for an entire field post colonialism, and someone whose surname carries at least as much weight as Norton’s. I share Said’s sentiments of being an insider and yet out of place. Uneasily dwelling in the border zone of the other in the humanities and the arts. A liminal space often overlooked, but occasionally illuminated by those who would celebrate us, or condemn us, caught in the spotlight.
I, or someone like me who bears my name, realizes he has separated himself from the herd, presumably because he has a voice and can be heard, or so I think. The noises I utter are not those of beasts, although once, when I gave a talk on war and memory, the professor who invited me to a seminar described my work in his words as a [NON-ENGLISH].
I was impressed by his French. I’m sure mine in comparison is terrible. Nevertheless, there will be a great deal of such cries from the heart in these six lectures. In the great duality between body and mind, people like me or someone like me who share in the vast and conflicted kinship of the other refugees.
So-called minorities of the racial, sexual, and other kinds. The colonized or the formerly colonized, we are consigned to the space of the body. Or perhaps our bodies occupy and preoccupy some of us. For a writer like me working in fields like, where I should be defined by my voice, mind, and art, my body is my own double. My lingering insistent connection to the world in which writers and critics refine their texts.
My texts have been mined for my emotions and ideas, but those are embedded in my body. When I write or speak, I cannot forget my body, even if this invitation to give the Norton lectures tempts me to speak to you purely in the voice of disembodied authority.
If once I, or an earlier version of me, was reduced to bare life, that nakedness has by now been covered with the shroud of the humanities. The cloak of literature that I have wrapped around myself. This culture of the humanities and the arts helped to save me from my parents’ culture of Catholicism and capitalism.
I still vividly recall the charismatic professor who taught my survey of British literature, proclaiming the hundreds of idealistic undergraduates that what we study here in English mattered so much more than what those Philistines in the business school did. I laughed along with everyone else, reveling in our cultural superiority to the money makers.
I don’t remember if I thought about my parents, who my professor might have seen as Philistines or maybe even less than Philistines since they had never even gone to college, much less business school. My parents knew how to make money, but not as masters. Making money and talking about it is vulgar, while creating art and the scholarship that discusses it is refined, at least in the fields, artists and scholars find themselves in.
And yet part of what it means to be an other in the humanities and arts, at least in the West, which is a euphemism for the still beating, still glowing heart of colonial and global empire, is to be reminded, on a fairly regular basis, that one’s otherness is one’s value.
That value fluctuates based on the market conditions of one’s individual reputation, and the estimation of the herd to which one belongs. Sometimes the other is devalued, at other times overvalued. And if one happens to be that other for whatever reason, one is marked by the x. Where two intersecting ways of being and belief meet.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described these two ways of being and belief as invested in radically diametrical systems, economic value on the one hand, and symbolic value on the other. Czeslaw Milosz, in his Norton lectures, the witness of poetry more poetically called this an opposition between the Bourgeois and the Bohemian.
They are each other’s other, their worlds reversed. What the Bourgeois esteems, the Bohemian disdains, and vice versa. But those who toil in the Bohemian field of cultural production, where symbolic value is created in the arts and humanities, nevertheless, can still spin that symbolic value into eventually, economic value or money. The other to art and poetry.
This is how writers who may make little money in the open market might still earn a decent living in the university. The economic return on their symbolic value. I am invested in the symbolic and economic values of otherness, and how those values are created, extracted, and exploited. I’m also interested in the political and artistic possibilities of otherness and what it means to write as an other, one of the themes on which I will play through these six lectures.
I want to think through what otherness means for writers who write about others, and for writers who may themselves be others. By others, I mean those who are outcast from, or exploited by the powerful norm of their societies. Or those who have moved voluntarily, or been moved forcefully from one place to another. Or those who have been dominated in their own homes by outsiders whom they would consider to be others. By others, I also mean ourselves.
For as Toni Morrison points out in her Norton lectures, the origin of others, otherness emerges from within the mysterious, and unknown, or partly known territory inside us all. A nexus of fears and desires we project onto those whom we label strangers, foreigners, enemies, invaders, threats.
The literature of those who could be called others in some way has long been my preoccupation, but it’s also an autobiographical theme as I have long felt myself to be in other in some manner, both as an other to others, but also, as I’ve come to realize, as in other to myself. This is one of my more painful realizations as I became a writer and began to vivisect myself rather than only dissecting texts.
For me to write about others is also to write from the position of an other. Rather than pretend that my autobiography and my body have nothing to do with my critical theme, I acknowledge my refugee roots. This is a paradox, as refugees are by definition uprooted. No more paradoxical, however, than to think of refugees as alive but not human, which is also how others are often perceived by those who don’t see themselves as other.
Money too, is alive but not human. Money possesses a life of its own, a life deemed by many to be much more valuable than the lives of others. Otherness can be traded for money or otherness can be exploited for it, from the enterprises of capitalism and colonialism, to the work of art and culture.
These intersections of otherness and value are serious, and oftentimes, tragic matters for others and otherness are created through the brutal encounters of war, enslavement, and genocide, as well as the hierarchies of class, capital, and labor, and the slow violence of patriarchy and its norms of sex and gender.
But these tragic matters, which seem to demand our reverence or our refutation, can also be absurd. Isn’t that what we mean when confronted by some bizarre situation? We say, “You’ve got to be joking.” The joke, however, is often on us, the other, including the other in the humanities and the arts.
In the West, humanities and the arts, besides being crucial endeavors in exploring and celebrating the human, also function at least partially to obscure the viciousness of the conquests and exploitation that have made the West the West, and the other the other.
Rithy Panh, the greatest commemorates for of the Cambodian genocide, points out this obfuscation in his book, The Elimination, where he argues that the genocide is the responsibility of the Khmer people of Cambodia, but is also the culmination of Western civilization.
A genocide created by an elite of Khmer students who Czeslaw Milosz describes as the young cannibals of Cambodia who had graduated from the Sorbonne and were simply trying to implement the philosophic ideas they had learned. This tragedy in absurdity occasions the following joke.
In afterparties, the short story collection by Anthony Veasna So that focuses on Cambodian refugees and their descendants in California. In one story, a father who is a Khmer survivor of the genocide that killed about 1.7 million people says that the television reality show Survivor, was actually the most Khmer thing possible. And he would definitely win it because the genocide was the best training he could have gotten.
So’s irreverence toward something as sacred as the genocide might only be possible for someone one generation removed, but the laugh of the other in the face of the tragic and the absurd is a critical artistic and political strategy. In another of So’s stories, his gay narrator describes himself as a girly wimp, and a precocious freak who came out before puberty.
Responding to his open gayness his mother says, “It’s hard enough for people like us.” She means Khmers refugees from Cambodia, including herself and her husband, whom the narrator calls immigrant parents. Coming out to these immigrant parents, the narrator says, is all very cliche in that gay sob story kind of way. But I can’t explain it any better than that.
The sob story, gay, refugee, immigrant, Asian, or otherwise, is perhaps the dominant kind of story the other is expected to tell and to sell, especially to readers who desire insight into the condition of the other who is supposedly defined by trauma. But not just trauma in general, one, and only one specific trauma. The trauma which belongs to this other and to which this other is bound. The trauma that gives the other value and also devalues the other.
The poet Bao Phi addresses this lure to speak of trauma, and this trap of trauma in a poem from his book, Song I Sing. He writes about Vietnamese refugees who came to the United States and resettled in Louisiana where decades later, Hurricane Katrina would displace them once more. In talking about this second disaster, the poet connects the experiences of war refugees and climate refugees, but he encounters resistance from some in his audience.
It’s like, this country only allows us one grief at a time. Your people, you had that war thing, that’s all you get. Shut the fuck up. Bao Pho is ventriloquizing the skeptics in his audience, amplifying their sotto voce dismissal of the other who dares to claim more than their allotted grief.
I think of Caliban, the native from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and his most famous line, “Addressed to his alien master, the invader and colonizer of his island, his own other, Prospero. You taught me language and my profit on it is I know how to curse.” Caliban had another language before Prospero’s arrival, but all Prospero heard was gibberish or gobbledygook.
The incomprehensibility is so dangerous that the master would rather teach the native his own language so that if the native were to curse him, he could understand. The curse of the other and the laugh of the other help writers to avoid the first of three major temptations in writing about others.
The first temptation is to idealize or sentimentalize. To turn the other into an angel or a victim. To disguise the faults of the other or exaggerate the other’s pain. I think of Salman Rushdie’s essay, Is Nothing Sacred? He was referring after the fatwa directed against him and the Satanic Verses, to Muhammad, to his novel, to himself. His answer was no, nothing is sacred, not even literature. An answer that might disturb writers who treat literature as holy.
So it is with one’s own otherness, to treat the trauma of the other as sacred. To treat the other as holy is perhaps the most common weakness in the literature written by others about themselves. Given how others are erased, distorted, and dehumanized in literature not written by them, the temptation to revere one’s otherness is understandable, but is still a weakness.
In contrast, canonical literature, the literature of high value, is replete with depictions of white men doing terrible deeds as written by white men. As in Joseph Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness, which helped to inspire Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
The freedom to show people like oneself being horrible is a freedom that others might be tempted to deny themselves, not realizing that in so doing, we deny ourselves the full power of art, which comes from grappling with the otherness inside of ourselves. This otherness we fear as many people do. But also this otherness we are tempted to deny because of the ways we’ve been demonized.
I first fully saw my own otherness when I saw Apocalypse Now at the age of 11 or 12. Experiencing the shock of misrecognition so commonplace to those who discover how we perceive ourselves is not how others see us. Being unsettled through misrecognition is a classic moment in the constitution of the other, recounted by many, including Chinua Achebe in the lectures he gave at Harvard, Home and Exile.
Required to read the acclaimed novel, Mister Johnson, by Joyce Cary a white man writing about Africa. Achebe and his high school classmates rebel against their white teacher. What his book, Mister Johnson, did for me, Achebe remembers, was to call into question my childhood assumption of the innocence of stories.
What Achebe found in Mister Johnson was, among other things, how the enslavement and expatriation of Africans was a blessing, he said. And not even a blessing in disguise, but a blessing that is clearly recognizable. A blessing that delivered the poor wretches from a worse fate in their homeland. My family were among the wretched too, if from a different homeland. We had been delivered from the worst fate of communism to the promised land of the American dream, or so many Americans understood this history.
This story of American salvation also defined my mindset to the extent that I thought anything at all about the war in Vietnam when I experienced my shock of misrecognition. The setting, our living room in San Jose, where I read the Sunday edition of the San Jose Mercury News from cover to cover because I was a nerd. It was through the book review that I learned about the world of literary taste.
I had the house to myself every weekend because my parents worked at their grocery store, leaving me in solitude and spirituality, but not of the religious kind. My secular spirituality was found first in books, and then movies watched on a VCR. Communing with stories saved me from the loneliness of being a refugee child of refugee parents.
But if stories were powerful enough to save me, Apocalypse Now was my first encounter with a story powerful enough to destroy me. This loss of my childhood illusions and innocence about stories, this scene of my otherness takes place in the middle of Apocalypse Now, when American sailors on a gunboat come across a sampan of Vietnamese civilians.
The movie is told from the perspective of Captain Willard, the Marlow figure who journeys into the heart of darkness of white men, including himself. As a boy, I was already a veteran of watching American propaganda, which is to say war movies and westerns.
I viewed this movie through the eyes of the Americans, of whom I considered myself one, until the moment the sailors massacred the Vietnamese civilians, who were not yet refugees but who fit Said’s description of refugees as an innocent and bewildered herd. When Willard fired a bullet into a Vietnamese woman’s chest, I was split in two. Was I the American doing the killing or the Vietnamese being killed?
The movie’s depiction of actually existing physical violence against the Vietnamese, which some have interpreted as an anti-war statement, also nevertheless, constitutes an act of renewed symbolic violence against the Vietnamese. Said described the interlocking nature of physical and symbolic violence against Orientals in his book, Orientalism.
Just as Morrison showed the same processes against Africans and African-Americans in the origin of others and throughout, her body of work. Each mode of violence, physical and symbolic, justified and perpetuated the other. Each one capable of saving or destroying the other. In the realm of symbolic violence, the true violation was not primarily the depiction of killing others, but the silencing of others and rendering them purely as victims, innocent, and bewildered.
Having grown up in a refugee herd, I felt that bewilderment was only part of our Vietnamese sentiments. What about rage, sadness, melancholy, bitterness, resentment, affection, and love? As for innocence, what about the domestic abuse, gang violence, adultery, alcoholism, bigamy, or the economic predation some of us did to each other and the government? Not to mention the assassinations.
If we others were to be shown doing such terrible things by those more powerful than us, it was not because we were complex anti-heroes suffering from the tragedy of our misguided deeds, but because we were inscrutable villains who derived sadistic pleasure from our crimes.
In contrast, how was it possible for white men to depict white men committing atrocities and get me and millions of others to read and watch them doing so repeatedly up until the present, Oppenheimer. The answer was that the awesome physical violence being depicted on screen and which happened in real life, was matched by the sublime symbolic violence that was the depiction itself. The movie, or the book, the entire industry of representation.
No surprise that those subjected to symbolic violence might react by engaging in a defensive reflex of the herd, demanding only sob stories be told about them by others and by themselves to enhance their innocence, vulnerability, and victimhood. Camouflaging themselves in the guise of humanity. Hoping for a mercy that may or may not come, a mercy which depends on the guns, cameras, and pens of the hunters and the masters.
Along with this temptation of idealization and purification as a mode of symbolic self defense, a second temptation exists for the writer as other. To separate oneself from the herd, to become less of a target by paradoxically becoming more visible, more individual, and perhaps in that way, more human. This separation from the herd is to internalize in oneself the already existing strategy of master and colonizer, to divide others and conquer them. Subjugating the many and rewarding the few.
This internalization of the master’s logic is seen in Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest, his rewriting of the tempest from Caliban’s perspective. Caliban becomes Prospero’s match, a figure of decolonizing violence that repudiates Shakespeare’s rendering of him. When I saw A Tempest staged at the Berkeley Rep as a student, I was mesmerized and transported. Including by the director’s choice to have Caliban sing Bob Marley’s Redemption song. I laughed a lot because the play’s angry satire was a hell of a lot of fun.
Oddly, the older white couple next to me didn’t laugh at all. Perhaps Cesaire’s play puzzled them, precisely because it could incite the laugh of the other through reversing Shakespeare’s play, with the power and limitations that turning the tables implies. In Cesaire’s version, facing Prospero before their final battle, Caliban at last says his truth blunt and simple, “I hate you.”
Is I hate you the right response to Prospero’s hatred of Caliban which he masks with a paternal benevolence? Hatred may be an effective political emotion, but it is also spiritually corrosive. A human response entwined with inhumanity, with the victim becoming the victimizer, the other aspiring to mastery. We all exist at this juncture of humanity and inhumanity.
But one definition of others is that they are relegated to only one or the other side of this contradiction, human or inhuman, but not both. The aesthetic and political response of others must be to claim both sides of the double, as well as everything in between, which is what the masters have always done and to great effect.
In other words, Heart Of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, inasmuch as they desecrate the natives, are still for some, including me, important works of art. I have tried to absorb their troubling power in my novels The Sympathizer and The Committed, whose protagonist is his own double, a man of two faces and two minds.
Being of two minds, he’s too smart for his own good. Spy, womanizer, alcoholic, liar, traitor, murderer, but still in the end, kind of likable, a Caliban of sorts. Cesaire’s Caliban is a victim but also more than that. An innocent, he also wants to do harm. Both human and inhuman. He is the tragic and anti-heroic protagonist of his own drama.
But he is not just a figure for the native, savage, enslaved, or colonized. Knowing language and knowing how to curse, he might also be a writer. He is certainly irritable enough and irritating enough to be a writer. If he is such a creature, then Caliban’s curse is not that he can curse, his curse is to be alone, to separate oneself from the herd is also in the West to heed the call of the Bohemian. The artist who is in Milosz’s words, an alien from his own society.
I think about the poet, Rimbaud’s line, [NON-ENGLISH]. I is another. Rimbaud was certainly an other to Bourgeois society. In his case, gestures at how otherness is experienced individually, including by artists who voluntarily take on their own otherness or seized by it. One difference between Rimbaud and Caliban however, is that Caliban’s otherness is also imposed on him by his master.
Inasmuch as Caliban is an allegorical figure for the native in both Shakespeare and Cesaire’s versions, his otherness is collective as well as individual. Perhaps Caliban could say instead, we, is, and other. In both The Tempest and A Tempest however, collective possibility is foreclosed, the Caliban.
His mother is dead. Ariel has sided with Prospero, the white man who Caliban allies himself with are fools. Cesaire adopting Shakespeare’s setting, only has a deserted island to give to Caliban instead of an island populated with other natives with whom Caliban could cultivate solidarity.
We is another, expresses a solidarity necessary to combat both politically and aesthetically the conditions of otherness. But that solidarity, that we-ness, could also be the condition for further alienation for the writer as an other. While these communities of our otherness can assuage solitude and be the source for stories, they also could be the limit. Particularly, if writers struggle under what’s been called the burden of representation.
Mirror image to the white man’s burden. This burden of representation demands that writers tell idealized, sanitized, or stereotyped stories about their communities. Kneeling before the sacred as they attempt to carry out salvation through stories. This obligation to a sacred community, whether that be family, culture, religion, or nation is important, but also constitutes the third temptation of otherness, which is to see the other from the outside. Only as an actual person or group.
Seeing the other from the outside, one might be tempted to think one can know this authentic other. Even master or own its representation without understanding that otherness is a position one might inhabit, but which one does not, and cannot own. Before our own otherness, we are always inauthentic.
Jacques Derrida describes this in monolingualism of the other where the philosopher provides glimpses of his own autobiographical otherness. I feel like Jacques Derrida is calling me, he’s hailing me right now. That’s perfect. His own autobiographical otherness as an Algerian-born French Jew out of place amid Algerians and their French colonizers.
After the Algerian revolution against France in the 1950s and 1960s, Derrida was eventually forced to move to France. But he refuses to write a full blown memoir, to narrate his otherness in a cohesive manner. For his interest lies in how otherness is always elusive, even to the other. Is there anything more contradictory than to write a memoir of being an other when otherness, both of ourselves and others is something that we ultimately cannot grasp?
Derrida suggests an autobiographical link between his youthful experiences in Algeria and his eventual philosophical concerns with the elusiveness of meaning in language. For Derrida, it is impossible to master language, an idea I had not considered as I began to harbor dreams of being a writer. By college, I was intent on mastering English language and literature in order to demonstrate through my writing that I, and we, as Asian-Americans, as others belonged here, in a country that saw us as foreigners. Our alienness defined partly by our weird English.
But what if writing is itself an other to the writer? To be or to become a writer is in some ways to feel as if one has been called, as if writing has chosen the writer as much as vice versa. Writing as an other is a lure, a compulsion, a temptation to, and an illusion of mastery.
But masters are not always masterful. They are sometimes undermined by others or by themselves. As for the Asian-American desire to belong to this country, this others desire to be counted among the masters, owners, settlers, is not without complication, as later lectures will explore.
The diluted master appears in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which I studied for my doctoral qualifying examination in American literature, and which also appears in Anthony Veasna So’s afterparties. In one of So’s stories, a high school teacher, also Cambodian, American, and gay, contemplates teaching Moby Dick to his students.
No surprise that a Cambodian American high school teacher, and a Vietnamese American doctoral student in English, would both meditate on this master text of the American canon. For the teacher who is his high school’s endowed teaching fellow for diversity, the white whale symbolized a failed promise of closure. And the novel itself didn’t care for resolutions.
My take on Moby Dick when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, where or was funded by the Predoctoral Minority Fellowship differed. Moby Dick was one of many texts I read for my 19th century American Literature field, but a text on which my professor devoted half of my exam. Imagine that.
He focused on only one scene out of the entire novel, where Ahab nails a doubloon of the purest virgin gold to the mast of his ship. A reward for the man who would first spy the white whale. I no longer remember what I said about the doubloon, but I’m certain I nailed my answers. Qualifying to master American literature or perhaps to doctorate.
My desire for mastery was rooted in being an other, or feeling myself to be one. If I wanted the prestige and power of mastery, even if only the mastery of literature, I also wanted what the men of the Pequod wanted, what my fellow graduate students yearned for, the gold doubloon.
Not that we ever said this so crudely, unless we had lost hope about obtaining our gold doubloon, the tenure track professorship. A job that promised intellectual satisfaction. And if we dare to say it out loud, economic fulfillment.
If I had not yet discerned that I could never master language any more than I could master literature, I also had no idea that the tenure track professorship, the prize that signaled an ascent to mastery in academia might also be the entryway into a university as a corporation that was at least as capitalistic as a whaling ship.
Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale is another enactment of the master being destroyed by his other, although it is not only the white whale who embodies and symbolizes that irresolvable otherness already inside of Ahab, the white male. So does the gold doubloon which hailed my parents and admittedly, me making promises of fulfillment and ecstasy that it could not keep writing itself.
While the doubloon was nailed to the mast, it also inhabited us, occupied us. Whether I was refugee, exile, or immigrant, I could see the glint of that gold doubloon shining like the city on a hill across the Pacific. Glowing like the green light on the faraway dock, beckoning to Jay Gatsby, who was also someone aspiring to mastery. Also a storyteller, undercut by his own otherness in the eyes of others and himself.
If the doubloon symbolized one kind of otherness embodied in capitalism, then writing was antagonist, and antidote. And yet writing remained an other to myself and to my parents, to whom I did not dare explain my writerly ambitions. I was supposed to become a medical doctor like my older brother, graduate of Harvard. Instead, I became a doctor of English. Forget that the doctor of philosophy is the original doctor.
Now, the PhD is the phony doctor, at least in the eyes of many refugees and immigrants. But being a writer was even worse, for what use was writing? Perhaps I instinctively understood that uselessness was precisely what was useful about writing in a world that valued the doubloon. In this world, my parents relied on capitalism to save their lives and mine, which also meant saving our souls.
But if the soul elevates the human above the bare life of the refugee to which we had been reduced, writing would save my life and soul. Either turn, however, to capitalism or writing would be imperfect means of salvation. Given capitalism and literature’s power to annihilate as much as to save. One last example of the writer as other, and as double. Wavering between authenticity and inauthenticity, salvation and destruction.
In Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure, the novelist Thelonious Ellison is fed up with the Blackness projected onto him and his work. Deciding to feed white ideas of Blackness back to white readers, he writes a novel of Black otherness so extreme. He assumes readers will say, “You’ve got to be joking.” He submits the novel pseudonymously under the title, My Pathology.
A producer immediately wants to buy the rights for $3 million. Sensing that people are not getting the joke, Thelonious Ellison amplifies his parody by changing the novel’s title to one word, Fuck. His agent says, “Why not hell or damn?” His otherwise enthusiastic editor says, “It might hurt sales.” The novelist insists.
Of course, the joke is on him when the novel becomes more successful than anything he has written under his own name. Meanwhile, he has agreed to serve on the literary prize jury. Unexpectedly or expectedly, the novel is shortlisted for the prize. And Thelonious Ellison has to confront his own monstrous pseudonym and double, Stag R. Lee when Lee wins the Book Award.
The doubloon is bestowed on the buffoon. No joke, but definitely a curse. Erasure has now been made into a movie, into this tragic comic conundrum. The writers who are others must nevertheless fall and rise, fall and fail, again and again. Confronting, avoiding, exploiting, elevating their own otherness, both the otherness projected onto them and the otherness already entwined inside.
This otherness and its history, the man’s grief. But the challenge of the writer as an other is to expand that grief, to make it ever more capacious rather than reducing it to a singular sorrow. Capacious grief acknowledges that the trauma of the other is neither singular nor unique.
That there are others out there with whom we can share the burden. Perhaps only by expanding our grief might we be able to leave our trauma behind. And in sharing our burden of writing, of representation, of otherness, we might also transform that burden into a gift. Thank you.
[CLAPPING]
CONVERSATION WITH VIET & MIN
[Viet] Really, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the stage my dear friend and colleague, Min Song, who looks exactly the same as when I met him 25 years ago.
[Min] You look exactly the same as when I met you.
[Viet] Well, thank you. All right. Here we go. So Min, we’re going to have a conversation, right?
[Min] Yeah.
[Viet] And then Min will moderate the discussion. So if you have questions, please think of them. There will be mics.
[Min] I’ll warm you up by asking you a few questions and then we’ll open it up. When Viet you asked me to do this, I was like, “Sure.” This is a chance for me to hang out and talk with you. I didn’t realize you were so smart, though. It’s a brilliant talk. I have so many questions to ask and none of them are appropriate for how smart that was.
[Viet] Afterwards.
[Min] You also reminded me that when I was young, my parents always said, “We want you to become a doctor.” It’s very common experience. And I did. I became a PhD and then they had this look on their face like, we should have been more precise about what we wanted. Truly, the other. What you’ve proven is that the other is the English professor, right? That’s the true other.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents when I was listening to your talk. I reached that age where I think about them a lot. And they came from a really poor background, devastatingly poor. And when I was growing up, they just talked about money all the time, all the time. It was everything.
Any time we bought something or went out or anything, they just didn’t want to talk about how much everything cost. And so it was a real surprise to me when I went to high school and I realized that people who grew up with money, you cannot talk to them about money. That is really, really crass but you did. Why did you start the talk with discussions about money? Are you teasing us or are you trying to be a little naughty? What’s going on?
[Viet] Of course, it’s always fun to tease audiences, but I’m also really crass. I mean, it’s honestly true. But yeah, I mean, I had very similar experiences. And when I became an author and my books started to get published and everything, I never had conversations with my parents about the actual content of the books. I mean, my dad never asked me, what’s it about, or anything like that. But he was proud of the books because he would put them on his shelf. They’re still there.
And he’d had pictures taken with my books and everything like that. But he didn’t need to know what was in the books, and for good reason. Because if he knew what was in the books, he might be really upset. But what he would ask me about is, “So how many copies have you sold? How much money did you make?” And when I would tell him the figures, he’d be so happy.
And I thought, that’s all I need. I don’t need to torture my parents more. They already sacrificed so much. Now, I’m not to make them read my books too? That’s going too far. So in a sense, I could still be the good son to them by being successful in the ways that they saw it. But what I’m describing here is not simply unique to the world of literature and writing, but also to academia in general, right?
I mean, for me to become a professor maybe for you too, it was not just a matter of learning our subject, our masters and our qualifying exams and so on. But we had to learn the culture of the university. You had to learn what could be said and not said, and how to say it, right? And so learning the discipline is only part of it to be successful.
When people hire you and they vote on you for tenure, they’re only partly judging you on your intellectual capacity. They’re also judging you, does this person fit the culture? And it’s not innocent in any way, shape, or form. And then part of the point of the talk was to say, we cannot actually simply pretend that culture has no relationship to power, and money, and finances, and all of those things, especially in the humanities and the arts where it’s so tempting to construct as our other the people who are so nakedly crass as to discuss money.
When honestly, there are so many, I’m sure you’ve participated in these or heard them, backroom conversations about, what is that person making? And what does that person? I’m talking about English professors, OK? I’m not talking about business professors. What did he make? What was the starting offer? And all this. So I mean, it’s there. That’s what I’m saying. On the lower frequencies, there’s that money calling. And so it’s not just a desire to be crass and to provoke, although that’s always fun for me.
But also the beginning of the narrative to talk about what it is that I value and you value. Literature, and beauty, and art, and all these things. These are enmeshed in a world in which profit is derived and not in any innocent way. So those of us who’ve done colonial studies, post-colonial studies, et cetera, I think we all know that the word culture and the words culture and human are very dangerous words.
It sounds good in a place like this and then you go outside, and then culture and human are used precisely to distinguish who has culture and who has humanity and who doesn’t. And who doesn’t is in the realm of bare life. And so it seems disingenuous to pretend that somehow money and all of that human vanity and greed and so on somehow has no relationship to this high flown endeavor that we’re all participating in.
[Min] So that quotation you provided from Bao Phi, a terrific poet, made me think about conversations I’ve had with lots of Asian-American writers who do worry that they’re always being asked to trade on their trauma of some kind. And my parents would have said, “Good, you have something to sell.”
But then it makes me think that there’s actually another level to that that’s at stake because we ask a lot of migrants who are coming to the US seeking asylum to tell us a story. That the entry to the US is to tell a really good traumatic story. If you’re coming here because you’re poor like my parents, you don’t get to come here as a refugee. You don’t get to come here at all.
But if you come here because you’ve been persecuted in some way, then you are allowed. So you have to tell a really good story. And with the recent affirmative action decision, I think college admissions essays are starting to feel similarly. Tell us a really traumatic story and we’ll let you in. I’m curious to think through those different levels of trauma storytelling that you were exploring.
[Viet] There’s no doubt an incitement to storytelling and incitement to use tropes.
[Min] Right.
[Viet] And one way that I would distinguish it is that, there are ironic ways of storytelling and unironic ways of storytelling. And in our world, Harvard, high literature, all this kind of stuff, what is valued is valued is generally ironic ways of telling stories. So for example, in contrast to the refugee example you brought up which I’m going to get to, there’s the American dream narrative.
Now, unironic narratives of the American dream proliferate, right? And that’s the basis for nationalism, and patriotism, and jingoism. But ironic versions of the American dream are present too. That’s what we do here, right? I mean, that’s what when we talk about the literature of writers who are others in the United States, specifically in the context of American contemporary fiction, I’m just going to narrow it down, you are in fact, I think expected to write ironic versions of the American dream.
You’re not supposed to say, “America is great.” You’re supposed to say, “God, it really was a terrible experience being a refugee or an immigrant. We suffered. We had racism, blah blah blah. My parents, blah, blah, blah.” But in the end, your book affirms the American dream because here you are, an author. Here you have a voice. You’re no longer part of the herd.
Asian-Americans, you brought that example up. Asian-Americans like to say, “We’re not the model minority. We’re not like the engineers. We’re artists, let’s say.” But I also think of contemporary Asian-American literature as a model minority literature. One of the reasons Asian-American literature has been so successful is because Asian-American writers are the model minority. They haven’t gone to medical school but they went to Harvard, and then they went to get their MFA from Iowa. And now they have access to the whole industry of representation. That’s a model minority narrative. And so we have to acknowledge that.
Now, the refugee story. Dina Nayeri has a great book called The Ungrateful Refugee. When she was a refugee from Iran herself, and went to Princeton, became the model minority as she talks about. And then the ungrateful refugee is devoted to her going to refugee camps and seeing what refugees have to endure, and what kind of stories they have to tell. Because they’re being screened by immigration officers who are asking them for their story.
And ironically, if they actually tell the truth, not tailored to what their immigration officer expects, they’re not likely to get in. So in fact, they have to know what the expected trauma story is and how it’s narrated by their Western immigration officers in order to tailor their story to fit that expectation. So in a very unironic way, that’s also the incitement to narrative.
Refugees, as you’re perfectly right in pointing out, have to tell these kinds of refugee stories just as immigrant writers or so-called minority writers are expected to tell certain kinds of stories here in the United States. And if you’re unironic, you don’t know what you’re being asked to do. If you are a well trained, ironic, contemporary writer of American fiction and poetry, I think you do know what’s expected of you.
[Min] Thanks for that. I have so many more questions which because I’ve emailed you several of them and kept changing them. But I think it’s time to hear questions from the audience. I believe there are people walking around with microphones. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hands and we would love to hear from you. Though I know that Viet is not a fan of comments. We would generally like questions.
[Viet] Honestly, no one in the audience is a fan of comments.
[Min] There’s someone right here in the front.
AUDIENCE Q&A
[Audience Member] Hello, hi. Thank you for such a wonderful lecture that you gave. Oh, OK. Hi. Thank you so much for such a wonderful lecture that you just gave, beautifully written. I have one question is that both of your novels, The Sympathizers and The Committed both offers a sharp critique of the Americans and the Vietnamese culture, and to some extent the French culture. So how have readers from those two cultures respond to your critique?
[Viet] Oh yeah. I mean, when I wrote The Sympathizer, it was done with the intention to offend everybody, except the Pulitzer Prize committee. They loved it. OK. But it was meant to be critical of Americans, South Vietnamese, victorious Vietnamese, because it’s a political satire. And you can’t write a satire only criticizing one side.
You have to write a satire criticizing all the sides because one of the points of political satire is to acknowledge that power, in fact, does corrupt everybody. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the American Revolution, or the French Revolution, or the Vietnamese revolution, all those revolutionaries and their descendants eventually went on to oppress, invade, and invade, and colonize other countries, or try to colonize.
So the reception in the United States is interesting, obviously, because on the one hand, the unironic reception is from some people, you must love communism so much. Go back to Vietnam. OK. The ironic reception is, well, we know that the United States has done all these things and we’re going to contain that by giving this book the Pulitzer Prize so we can’t be so bad.
The Vietnamese American reception is, he’s a Communist. And so a lot of Vietnamese Americans refuse to read the novel simply because the novel is written from the perspective of a Communist spy. Whereas in Vietnam, I mean, the government won’t allow the novel to be published in Vietnamese and didn’t allow us to shoot the TV adaptation in Vietnam.
We had to go to Thailand for it and I got the memo. I mean, I literally have the memo from the film department saying, “This novel does not authentically represent the Vietnamese revolution, the heroic Vietnamese soldiers who would never do the things that they were shown doing in this book.”
The French on the other hand love it. I tried to offend the French in the committee and they’re like, “Oh no. Yeah. We love the jokes about French culture and everything.” And they have the right attitude. If you’re being joked about, it’s actually a compliment. But that’s probably because the French are out of power in comparison to the Americans and the Vietnamese. Thank you.
[Min]Terrific. I believe there’s a question back there. Sorry, I’m looking in that direction.
[Audience Member] I have a question about the three temptations that you described. I believe they all relate to the concern about being inauthentic. And I’d like to ask you to discuss the first and the third one together because I have a bit of trouble separating the two. Because they both are signs of being inauthentic as a writer, but that’s the limit of my understanding.
[Viet] Sure. Well, the first one was about treating the other in extreme ways, either to idealize or to sentimentalize, to treat the other as a victim or as a villain. And that is not really about the– I mean, you could argue that it’s inauthentically representing the other, but it’s also about seeing only one side of the other.
The side of the other is being demonized or the side of the other as being defended by writers such as myself who align themselves with the other. The third position, the third temptation where otherness is not a position, otherness is not something that belongs to a group, but is instead something inside of ourselves that we cannot actually master, or control, or know.
I think that’s a little bit different because in the first temptation, the idea is we can’t in fact, represent this population. Let’s say, it’s Vietnamese Americans or Vietnamese people. There is a group called Vietnamese Americans or Vietnamese people. That’s the incentive for so many writers to say, “Well, I want to write my memoir about my family, about my mother, about whatever, about the travails of our community, and so on because so much has been done to us.”
That’s an important incentive, and it’s important that we write about these stories. But the temptation is to think that we can know this population dependent upon that population down, or to believe that this population is always going to be the victim in some ways. And it’s related to this third temptation where the otherness inside of ourselves that we think we’re trying to get to know is always going to elude us.
So I think you’re right in seeing a connection, but I do see them as being different because the otherness that’s inside of us that is related to the otherness of language, is something that we as writers are grappling with every day. And I think the temptation when we get something like a master of fine arts degree or some other certification is to think, “Oh, we know this now. We know how to write. We know what the other is.” In a case the case of writers like me.
But I think it’s actually really impossible to do that. And again, the Derrida example is supposed to bring that out because Derrida spends his entire time, before he gets to his own fragmentary autobiography, laying out the impossibility of even writing that autobiography to begin with. And I’m going to connect this to one of the previous question that you asked.
I mean, next in October, I’ll be presenting the book, A Man Of Two Faces. It’s a memoir but it’s a memoir in which I try not to allow readers to think that they can actually grasp and know the otherness that the book is speaking about, the otherness that I’m describing any more than I could.
And so in order to write that kind of a memoir, in order to foreclose the possibility of readers coming to this book and saying, “We’re going to know your trauma now and we’re going to know the trauma of your people, and your mom, and all that.” The book has to prevent that kind of knowingness, that kind of attempt to own that other.
[Min] That incitement narrative you talked about earlier then, it also feels like a trap. They’re like saying, “This is who you are.” That puts you in a little box.
[Viet] I mean, that is the temptation and of memoir writing, but also the writing of that’s categorized as literatures of the other. Readers who come to that think that they will know something about you the individual or you your people from reading this book or this story. And I think that is part of the attraction of reading people’s memoirs.
But my experience writing this memoir was that, I’m not sure if I know myself any better after writing this memoir than I did at the beginning. And I know some aspects of myself but there’s still– my knowledge of myself is that there’s even more that’s eluding me than I would have understood. And that’s true, I think, also for literatures about certain kinds of peoples as well.
[Min] I think we have time for one more question right here.
[Audience Member] Hi. Thank you for the wonderful talk. I know that you have been writing in English, and I have a question about diasporic writers writing in a language that is not directly related to their native culture. Do you consider that as having a voice or being able to wield a cultural tool that like Caliban, is able to curse like I hate you? Or do you think that it’s something that at the cost of certain subtlety or even authenticity?
[Viet] I’m sorry, the last half of the question.
[Audience Member] Yeah, or do you think that it is having this power but at the cost of certain subtlety or authenticity?
[Viet] Well, I think one of the books I want to quote from in future lectures is Hagin’s book on writing, in which she talks about the writer. Because Hagin himself was Chinese. And he came to the United States. And he wrote in English, and he’s not the only one. Yiyun Li, for example, but yes, there’s a sense of betraying your nation, or your people, or your community, whatever, when you write in a language that’s not theirs.
Now, that could be Chinese if you’re Chinese. But again, going back to the example of being a so-called minority writer, for me to write in English was to write in a language that was not the language of my parents. That’s already a betrayal in some ways. Or for me to write in a language that is not Vietnamese relative to a Vietnamese speaking community is already seen as distancing myself from that community.
So the next lecture is going to talk a lot about betrayal and treachery of familial betrayal, intimate betrayal, community betrayal, all these kinds of things and the writer as a traitor. But I think that’s rather inevitable. It is partly a function of language as you’re describing, but it’s also partly a function of being a writer. To write about your people whatever that is. A lot of them don’t want to be written about. They don’t. Who gave you the right to write about them. Whether in one language or the other? So you’ve already crossed a line by deciding to write about that community if that’s what you’re going to do, or your family, or your mother, for example.
But on the flip side of it you might be charged with inauthenticity for writing in a language not your own. But the flip side of it is for me, for example, I grew up speaking Vietnamese. I was fluent in Vietnamese at the age of four when I came here, and I’m still fluent in Vietnamese at the age of four.
But the interesting thing is that I knew enough Vietnamese, I know enough Vietnamese so that when I approach English, I’m both an insider and an outsider to the language at the same time. Now, does that make me inauthentic to English or not? But the point here would be, if I am inauthentic to English, that’s actually giving me a different relationship to the language than someone who only has been raised within English. So I think part of the implication of the lecture is inauthenticity is in fact, a part of who we are as others, but there’s nothing to be afraid of. I mean, I think the real fear is to think, well, we can try to be authentic. Isn’t not the usual thing? For those of us those of us who’ve been charged with inauthenticity, for example, whitewashed. Then there is the desire. If I can just learn Vietnamese like a native born Vietnamese person, I’ll be Vietnamese. I think in Vietnam. They’re fighting with each other all the time about what being Vietnamese is and authenticity there. So that’s an illusion of authenticity. It’s not that it’s not important, but that has to be maintained in relationship to what inauthenticity in an embrace of that can bring us, both in relationship to ourselves but also to language, and to writing, and to storytelling.
[Min] Believe it or not, we’re already out of time. The next lecture will take place on October 17. On that date, there will be copies of the new book, A Man With Two Faces– yes, A Man Of Two Faces– signed and ready to be purchased. So I hope you’ll join us at that next lecture. Thank you so much for joining us tonight.
[Viet] Thank you, Min.
