Matteo Pericoli is an architect, illustrator and writer. He was born in Milan, lived in New York from 1995 to 2008 and lives in Turin, Italy. These drawings and essays are taken from “Windows on Elsewhere: 60 Refugees, 60 Views,” a project he conceived and executed with Bill Shipsey between 2018 and 2021. The essays were edited for style and clarity. In this article, Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about the views outside of windows throughout his life.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
This is the most beautiful view from a home that I have ever had. It far surpasses the worst view — from my childhood window — of the highway entrance ramp that soared over our backyard in San Jose,Calif.. I gazed often out that window, wondering where those cars were going, wanting with all my being to one day go somewhere far from home.
And yet the room I gazed from was the master bedroom, which my parents had given to me. They worked constantly and perhaps felt they would make little use of a large bedroom. And maybe they felt that this room, where I could play and fantasize about all kinds of scenarios, might make up for the time they could not spend with me. But they never said these things, even after I left home. These were the costs and trade-offs of refugee life, of inarticulate silences and articulate sacrifices.
This history frames my current window, overlooking a Los Angeles garden as it frames any view and any observer. The window is in the second home I have owned. My parents helped me buy my first house, where the master bedroom overlooked downtown Los Angeles, although I wrote “The Sympathizer” in the back bedroom, facing a wall. The novel’s success allowed me to sell that first house and buy the second. It was my own achievement, but would that achievement have been possible without the sacrifice and love of my parents?
I look through this window from my writing office, the first one I ever had. I was not yet used to writing here, gazing out this window, when my mother died. Now, sitting here and looking at the garden, pondering the beauty and my good fortune, I think inevitably of my mother and how she never had a view as serene as this one.
Her grave is under the shade of a pine tree, in the middle of a park where deer roam. The last time I visited her I lay down next to her plot, listening to birdsong and staring at the clear blue sky. The grass was warm under my neck as I shared, for a few moments, her view.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Sympathizer,” and, most recently, of “A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial.” Born in Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam, in 1971, he fled to the United States with his family after the fall of Saigon.
