How do we make art in times of oppression? Do artists have a responsibility to explore questions of democracy, censorship, and human rights? In this conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen talks with poet and Antioch faculty member Cathy Linh Che about their experiences of democracy as Vietnamese American immigrant writers whose work engages vistas of American democracy amidst the legacy and representations of the Vietnam War. Listen to this edited version of their live conversation in the Antioch Works for Democracy speaker series to hear their ideas about immigrant identities, the after-effects of war, and the role of artists and writers inside of our societies for Common Thread: Stories from Antioch University
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William Groves:
So I want to welcome you to this exciting Antioch Works for Democracy Event. Antioch Works for Democracy is a multi-month, multi-pronged effort on the part of the university to strengthen our inclusive democracy in the United States. It involves everything from employee days of actions, to voter registration campaigns, to university and community engagement, projects, book clubs, speakers and panels. And tonight we have one such keynote event called Democracy: War and Identity. So thank you for joining.
I want to appreciate the fact that you’re here tonight, but also encourage you to keep track of the calendar of AW4D events that are coming up. We have a full fall here of activities for you and I want to encourage you to attend as many of those as possible. It could not be a greater honor on my part to welcome our Pulitzer Prize-winning guest and author, Viet Thanh Nguyen and our new MFA poetry Core Faculty member Cathy Linh Che. So welcome to the two of you. And at this point I’ll just turn it over to Lisa Locascio Nighthawk, who is the chair of our MFA program to do introductions and get the evening started. So thank you Lisa.
Lisa Nighthawk:
Thank you so much, Bill. Really great to be here with everybody. I hope everyone’s having a good late afternoon or early evening where you are and I hope it’s less hot than where I am here in West Hollywood. So I’m just going to introduce our two wonderful speakers tonight and I’ll be a kind of shadowy and ephemeral presence as a moderator as I’m needed. So I have the pleasure of introducing my new and very cherished colleague, Cathy Lihn Che. Cathy has recently joined Antioch University as Bill said, our Core Faculty in poetry in our MFA program. She is a Vietnamese-American writer and multidisciplinary artist, the author of two poetry books. Split, which was the winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.
And the forthcoming, Becoming Ghost, which will be published next April by Washington Square Press and which I know she’ll be talking about tonight. Cathy is also the co-author with Kyle Lucia Wu of the children’s book, An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation and McSweeney’s, and she has received awards from McDowell, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. Cathy’s video installation “Appocalips” is an open call commission with The Shed NY. And prior to joining us here at NTI, Cathy taught creative writing at New York University, Fordham University, University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe, and was a distinguished visiting professor and writer and residence at Sierra Nevada College.
And Cathy will be talking about our other wonderful speaker tonight and my beloved former teacher, Viet Thanh Nguyen. Viet is perhaps most well-known for his novel The Sympathizer, which was a New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was very recently adapted into an HBO limited series, which I thought was also wonderful. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the first Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards and the Asian Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian Pacific American Librarian Association.
His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam in the Memory of War, which was 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’s a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. And he’s also the author of a bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. He’s the editor of the Displaced Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and The Library of America Volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book with his then six-year-old son Ellison.
His most recent novel is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer. I think I’m actually reading an outdated bio though, because Viet’s most recent book is a memoir and I’m going to get the title wrong because I’m nervous, The Man with Two Faces. Am I getting that right? All right, I’m going to stop talking and let the people who you’re here to hear from talk. Thank you so much for being here with us.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Lisa, thanks so much for the introduction. Bill, thanks for having us and thank you to Antioch University and to all of you for being here. It is so cool to have this chance to talk about this topic with Cathy. I’m going to be reading from this newer book, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. It’s a very personal book, but it’s also a very political book. And these two short excerpts both revolve around my mother. But in the first brief excerpt, it would touch very directly I think on the topic of our panel. And so here we go. “If Ma’s life had secrets and is itself perhaps a secret, let it be said that two kinds of confidences exist to be confessed and told on. The private secret and the open secret.
Private secrets are common enough in the storytelling world: illness, divorce, alienation, infidelity, and the like. Like Ma’s life. And death. These are the kinds of secrets expected of a book like this. Matters of the self and only the self, not the collective, are the drama for an American storytelling world that honors showing over telling. That sneezes when politics nudges too close into fiction, poetry, movies and television. That associates telling with the uncouth acts of writers who are barbarians or even worse, communists. Art in the free West in America is above politics. Instead of being sentenced to re-education camps and forced labor, instead of being disciplined by socialist realism and writers unions, free writers in the west, especially America, are dispatched to campuses to work on their craft as creative writers.
Creative. A curious, an anxious adjective as if writers exist who do not want to be creative, as if being creative were more important than anything else, like being critical. To be creative without being critical risks being apolitical. A lack of politics is the politics of the dominant American literary world, leading many American writers to avoid certain open secrets. The open secret bears us to acknowledge its presence. If we tell on the open secret, we anger the many who do not want it called out. The open secret of America is that white people founded it on colonization, genocide, slavery, war and white supremacy. All of which continue shaping the self and the other. The open secret of America is that we do not call colonization by its name.
Instead, we give colonization another name, the American Dream.” So that was the very explicitly political polemical excerpt from A Man of Two Faces. And the next excerpt is also about my mother, much more directly about my mother and comes towards the end of the book. It’ll speak for itself. “Ma was born in 1937 as Nguyen Thi Bay. A poor girl in a poor northern Vietnamese village. She dies in 2018 as Linda Kim Nguyen, American citizen, traveler of a life both ordinary and epic. At 17, she married and became a refugee for the first time. At 17, I almost did not graduate from high school because I nearly failed pre-calculus. At 38, a mother of two biological sons and one adopted daughter. Ma became a refugee for the second time.
Her sequel, starting in an alien country. At 38, I, with no children, struggled with writing a short story about Ma. Ma’s first name is Bay. Giving children numbers as names was common in rural Vietnam. Families often had so many children, some would not survive. Why give a girl a real name? As a girl, the seventh child she deserved no more. Ma hated this birth name. In her last decades, she wanted to be called by her American name Linda. But both her names feel alien on my tongue. I never called her by her name, only Ma as a child, Ma as an adult. Her refugee path shaped even when I called her. Northerners say Ma, Southerners say Ma. And I, as always, am somewhere in between.
Most Americans who met Ma probably only saw her mortal, unextraordinary coil. If they knew anything about her, they might know she had been a shopkeeper, businesswoman, refugee. If they knew nothing about her, she was another Asian woman who did not speak good English. Me or Ma never wanted to mention how she received only a grade school education. I am telling on her, and yet she should be told on even if it is not my secret to tell. Look at what Ma accomplished with just a grade school education, overcoming everything. Almost everything. Except her mind. Defeated like so many heroes, not by others, but by herself. A hero but not a soldier. People like Ma who will not be remembered by history are also a part of history.
Drafted as reluctant players in horrific wars. Unlike soldiers, these civilians, many of them women and children never get the recognition they deserve. Some endure more terror, see more horror than some soldiers. And the wars of the 20th century, including the ones in Vietnam, killed far more civilians than soldiers. Civilian stories can be war stories too. Perhaps what happened to my mother was simply her body and mind’s fate. But history and war took their turns hammering Ma, unnerving her, breaking her. My mother, child of colonization and war. Me, grandchild of colonization and war. Also, the child of Ba Ma who chose each other. For all that Ma was lost to us for so many years, my father’s love was not lost to her.
She saw this reality from the orbit of her surreality. I know because the last words Ma says on her hospital bed in the family room before she says the Lord’s prayer with my father are for my father, to my father. [foreign language 00:13:04]. This I would translate even if the translation is not enough. I love you. After the Lord’s prayer, silence. My brother, the doctor, gives Ma morphine while my sister-in-law, the doctor, watches Ma’s breathing slows. I lean close to tell Ma in Vietnamese that I love her. She lived a good life, a life of hard work and sacrifice. A heroic life. A life that demanded so much strength, devotion, and love.
I don’t know where Ma found those qualities, but I am the beneficiary. These words, this faith in her, this betrayal of her are the outcome. Ma’s eyes do not open. She gives no sign of hearing. Her breathing finally stops. It is midnight. Her journey on this earth complete. My mother is mine and my mother is also other to me. My brother makes a phone call. In an hour a courteous stranger, who might be Filipino, arrives with a gurney, fills out a form, takes away my mother, leaves the empty hospital bed in the family room and drives my mother into the night. I remember Ma loved me. Everything else I can forget.” Thank you, Cathy. It’s all yours.
Cathy Linh Che:
What a stunning reading. Thank you so much. I am so moved by how open and vulnerable that was. I appreciate it. So I’m going to be reading three poems, and these three poems are from my poetry book that will be coming out in April or May 2025. It’s called Becoming Ghost, and it’s about my parents’ experiences as Vietnam War refugees who ended up being cast as extras in Apocalypse Now. I thought I would start with a poem about my mother as well, just to kick it off. Becoming Ghost. And this is from her voice. “In Saigon, I wore my [foreign language 00:15:52] side-saddle on my husband’s [foreign language 00:15:55]. The atmosphere, a slurry of exhaust and humidity.
My hair dragged like a black curtain through the traffic. Engines riled, multiplying. Here, Coppola dresses down shirtless, sometimes less fancy director, more man of the people gone jungle wild. Gray waves, zipper along the shore. Coppola says, ‘I wanted to smell like the real thing.’ I want to tell him the real thing is a landscape of work and death. The names of our ancestors slack in our mouths, just the art of loving your family line enough to reproduce it.” So in this manuscript, I have several poems that are in a golden shovel form, which is a form invented by Terrance Hayes where he in respect for with respect for Gwendolyn Brooks uses her poetry as the last word in each line.
And that is a kind of homage and collaboration. And I wanted to see about using that form as a form of critique of the film Apocalypse Now, which use these Vietnamese bodies to authenticate his film. To create a feeling of realness by using refugees who just escaped a war, to participate in his imagined artistic version of it. So in that, I was thinking that the golden shovel form could serve in some way to allow his words to be there but in the margins and be filled up instead with my family story. So this golden shovel is after the famous line from Apocalypse Now, which is where they played extras. “I love the smell of napalm, the golden shovel. Did I see napalm explode? All the time. Napalm flames their greasy fingers in the air.
I wasn’t a son drafted into the war, just a daughter to marry off. After Americans arrived, nothing was left of my grandfather’s home. What else do you expect when the tanks roll in? Translate the word napalm. Oh yes, the bombed world. Today I enter my garden teeming with smells, basil and lemongrass, dragon fruit climbing over the trellis. Reptile like, waxy and succulent. Guava, that swelled with my touch. Once I saw a South Vietnamese soldier, I knew him around the village, stumble into our home. War takes everything we love. He was shot by the Vietcong. I watched the man bleed out into the sheets. It was the fresh smell of death that got me. Flash forward, scene of myself on a film set.
I was the Vietcong, I was the scenery. Napalm explodes up. I heard boom, boom, boom, shaking in my fist. Couldn’t sleep last night. Who could sleep through a strafing? The sounds echoing boom, boom, boom from that day into this morning.” And this is my final poem, and I wrote this on the occasion of watching a TV show called The Walking Dead about the zombie apocalypse and thinking about the ways that it mimicked or had resonance with my parents’ stories where they were moving around as a way to find safety from people who they thought were people they recognize, family members or people you think you know, but because of some condition, they’ve become something else entirely.
So this title is called Zombie Apocalypse Now Survival. And the “I” in the poem changes and is in the voice of several extras, and there’s a speculative element to it too. “The air was blurry wet when the undead arrived. A director with his crew, the red-eyed camera trained on us ready to gobble up our Vietnam War fresh brains for their American art. We didn’t have lines, we were extras. We survived a war to be cast into the margins of our own story. They say that cameras steal your souls. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they pay minimum wage, which is more per hour than I earned an entire year working as an apprentice to a tailor.
Perhaps three months pregnant and not showing, I threw myself onto the dirt again and again pretending to be shot in the back. To the viewer, I was dead. I felt dead. My lover left me behind for Paris with his real wife and his newborn son, Chris and Philip for the Philippines. The country where he was born in Mandaluyong in a refugee camp just north of Manila. The palms grow verdant in thick clumps over the gun-gray river. In this fertile air, everything shoots up. The moviemen planted rigging into the ground. So much napalm faked. It looked just like the real thing.” Thank you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Wow, Kathy, I love those poems. That was my-
Cathy Linh Che:
Thank you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
…first time hearing poems from Becoming Ghost, which I’m so thrilled is coming out next year. Can’t wait to read it and talk to you hopefully on my podcast, Accented. I am struck by how we’re still talking about Francis Ford Coppola, right? I just came back from Italy, seven days in Italy talking about the Italian edition of A Man of Two Faces. And I think every conversation Apocalypse Now came up because it’s in the book too. It’s in the book advisor. I think it may be in A Man of Two Faces.
It’s been a while since I wrote it, but I was like, “Why are we still talking?” I know I wrote about it and you wrote about it, but why are we still talking about it? That’s the thing that people latch onto is this gigantic movie and epic and the persona of Coppola. And so to a certain extent, when Coppola says this was Vietnamese… When he was at the film festival talking about this movie and saying, “This was our Vietnam, this is exactly like the war.” In some ways it’s very obviously postmodern, but the post-modern ripples are still here because we’re talking about his movie about the war. And even if we’re critiquing him in the movie and so on, it’s still that black hole of the American perspective is still there drawing our attention.
Cathy Linh Che:
I mean the thing about Coppola, the reason why it’s sort of unavoidable is just because of the way that his film as an artistic piece, it really does occupy so much of the American and world imagination of what the Vietnam War is and what it looks like, even as the film was meant to be something of a critique of the war to some degree. There’s such a powerful, masculine, exotic idea of what Vietnam is. I was looking at old scripts that he had written, and one of the first lines of a December script was primordial swamp, i.e. somewhere in Vietnam.
Primordial swamp, this could be a forest of a thousand years ago. I’m like, this is 1960 or 1970. This is real history. It’s not some sort of ancient… It’s not as ancient backdrop in the same way that your imagination seems to project it to be. And that I think I find it very interesting when we talk about art and war and art and democracy, which is sort of the topic of today’s conversation. I find it very fascinating about the ways that writing and storytelling are in conversation with one another. I have a question for you. I have to pull it up though, give me a second.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
While you’re doing that, I’ll just tell the audience, by the way, obviously you guys can drop questions into the Q&A, not the chat, and Lisa will pull them up for us later in the hour. But just want to point out about Apocalypse Now, something that’s even worse. I think the experience of being colonized or gendered or racialized in various ways is a negative effect. We’re being erased whoever we are from some kind of dominant imagination and representation. And you find that in a lot of the Vietnam War movies made by Hollywood because if you go look in the credits, there’s Vietnamese people in them. Someone has to show up to be killed as you talk about in the poems, but they don’t usually have real names. It’s like VC or whatever.
And I satirize that in The Sympathizer, but then I went back, looked at Apocalypse Now’s credits just to be sure. Vietnamese people don’t even get that. You don’t even get the names of the Vietnamese characters. So there’s one moment in Apocalypse Now where a young Vietnamese woman has a line and she says something, she throws a grenade into a helicopter, kills a whole bunch of people. She doesn’t even appear in the credits. But the guy, the American gunner who shoots her and kills her, he appears in the credits. Maybe this is the last thing we’ll say about Apocalypse Now, but simply that is the violence of that erasure. There was real violence that was killing real people.
But then the violence of the symbolic erasure is so powerful that I think we’re still responding to it. From your collection, the poems that I heard, you’re talking about a generation that was certainly speaking back and speaking out, but they were doing so in Vietnamese. And so then of course anybody who was not a Vietnamese fluent, was not hearing what they were saying. And then our generation, I think we were raised here in the United States, English is our language. And so now we’re the ones who have to respond to this erasure in the image of Coppola and everything that he represents. I hope that we clear enough, hopefully through what you’ve done, the next… Another generation won’t necessarily feel the need.
Cathy Linh Che:
I don’t think so because there’s so many people who don’t even know what Apocalypse Now is. It really is sort of becoming more and more historical. But I will say the woman who throws the hat onto the helicopter, so I just actually wrapped a short documentary that I’m making with a friend, sent it out to Sundance. So good luck to us, but we identify that person. That was somebody in the refugee camp with my parents, that is somebody with the a and she isn’t named, but I think she got paid better than my parents did because she got face time, she got a line. But that is part of why I think the erasure, there’s something that wants to be addressed within the erasure.
And I think that this conversation that we’re having is very important because of the importance that culturally we placed on this art product that again, is wholly violent, is wholly not about Vietnamese people at all even though he insists that this was our Vietnam, which is like, I know he got a lot of pushback for that, but it was something that I think is still relevant because Apocalypse Now is shown in so many film studies courses, Vietnam War courses. All of these spaces where you’re talking about the Vietnam War. It’s part of the conversation. And so I think part of what we are doing is presenting another voice within that conversation.
So I think that even if it’s annoying and we got to do a corrective measure, there’s something powerful about restoring the archive in 2024.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I want to draw attention though to the fact that in fact, you’re responding through poems and I’ve responded through novels and memoirs and all that kind of thing. I think there’s still a faith and it is related to democracy, war and identity. I think there’s a faith that both of us have in the power of literary arts, whatever forms we’ve chosen. That this still matters in a democracy where we’re allowed to acknowledge or we’ve seized the opportunity to demand that the erasure should be recognized and that voices be heard.
That literature matters in mounting rebuttal. Now movies and it’s not just Apocalypse Now. It’s like this entire apparatus of American popular cultural soft power representations. Enormously powerful and expensive. And our tools or our weapons, whatever metaphor you want to use are small in terms of budget or cost or whatever. I like to say that poems cost nothing except the poet’s life and who cares? Who cares about that? But it’s precisely the fact that no one cares. And I’m speaking-
Cathy Linh Che:
I love it. No, I mean it.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
If you talk about the American world, American poets, I believe were the first artists to respond in the anti-war movement. It wasn’t Hollywood, it wasn’t filmmakers, it wasn’t even novelists. And so when we talk about democracy, war and identity, here it is. It’s poet poems. It’s poetry that’s trying to carry that spirit alive of our humanity, what our supposed democratic project is.
And I say supposed because every time in A Man of Two Faces, when I say America or the American dream, you don’t see this, but the text is capitalized and there’s a trademark symbol because yes, technically I guess we’re a democracy, but we failed so many times in so many ways, our own people who live in the country and we failed many of the countries that we’ve interfered in.
Cathy Linh Che:
My first question was going to be about the topic of writing and democracy, and we’re entering an election year. It’s a very fascinating thing for our industry. I love that poetry for the most part exists kind of outside of the market. It exists within a gift economy. Somebody can make a little bit of money on it, but it’s not enough to sustain you. So you must… Most poets do it because they love it. They do it because they can’t do anything else. They’re drawn to it. There’s something primal about poetry. There’s something connected to the spirit that it feels like a necessary act that doesn’t necessarily bring you great fame or reward at the end. So there’s something I find extraordinarily pure about it, and there’s nothing that pure.
But I just think that it is not surprising because when we think about even the early Asian American movement, the literature that accompanied that, for the most part, a lot of those early magazines always had a poetry folio. So that is also a way where it is the voice of protest and it is a voice of clarity and a voice of movement. So I don’t think that it’s only poetry that can do it, obviously, because it’s not the most popular art form, but it is a component of… And I’m thinking about at this moment, the poets who are being killed in Gaza and how many poets we’ve lost as a result of people who in their poetry are speaking to humanity or speaking protest.
And they are targeted for speaking the truth. Poets and journalists both are being very… And there’s so much right now about writing writ large about our periodicals and the ways that they use language to obfuscate, obscure, take away blame from a particular agent. All of these things are within our language. So there is something very powerful about the rescue of language, about naming something with clarity and with the level of precision that has to take place when you’re writing. That feels to me like a corrective. So that’s part of what I think about when I think about poetry.
And I am going to say, America TM, democracy, because I find personally this election utterly demoralizing, even though one should know better, but I don’t know. I’m going to pass it to you before I get in trouble.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’m going to get in trouble too. To your first part, first point about the power of poetry, but literature in general, we live in a crassly materialistic society, capitalist society, and there are many of these kinds of societies all over the world. And we’re constantly being told that literature doesn’t matter. What matters is finance and business. And if you have to talk about art, it has to be very expensive art or movies or music or video games or whatever. No one cares about literature. And I’m reminded of this in LA and when I tell people in LA that I’m a writer, nobody cares.
You know when people started to care, it’s when The Sympathizer was turned into a TV series and everybody got excited, including literary people. I’m like, “Uh, it was a book once.” But the fact that it’s a TV series, everybody got excited. I mean, the point here though is at the same time that this mechanism is happening about the commodification of culture and so on, and literature is not supposed to be a commodity, and no one cares. We’re living in an era of book banning and book burning. So in fact, people do care. They marginalize it, but they’re so scared of it. That books are symbolic of ideas, of subversion.
And so when it does matter, as you said with the poets of Gaza, then they must be eliminated, and the books here must be eliminated. The conditions we’re living under here are obviously not as extreme as what’s happening in Gaza. I think there’s a symbolic continuum in the literary world between outright slaughter in Gaza and sort of the symbolic erasure and suppression fighting here, which points to the fact that what’s happening in Gaza, Israel’s war in Gaza and the destruction of Israel’s democracy by Israelis themselves, is connected to the erosion of our democracy here because we support our government and many people support the Israeli project.
So about democracy. I’m demoralized too in terms of electoral politics. I’ve been participating since 1992 in American presidential elections. And to me, there’s real consequences, obviously for Americans.
Cathy Linh Che:
Yes, absolutely.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
But as a spectator, I am just done with the American theater of politics because I do think that as much as this election matters for Americans and all of our various interests and causes and all of that, I don’t think it’s going to make a huge amount of difference to the rest of the world in terms of American power. Because in A Man of Two Faces, I talk about the fact that we have quiet Americans and ugly Americans. Ugly is obviously Donald Trump, but the quiet American, whether it’s Bill Clinton, the Clinton’s or President Obama, or maybe President Harris, they’ll still kill you. Now they’ll do it with liberalism and politeness and whatever, but they’ll still kill you with drone strikes and $20 billion in aid and bombs.
Rant aside, going back to literature and what it can do. Yes, we as writers should be engaged in electoral politics, although I’ve refused to do it for this election, but literature’s power in terms of democracy is exactly as you’ve said, which is to tell the stories that matter, to tell the truth that no one wants to hear and to quote Frederico Garcia Lorca, “To stand with us on the side of those who have nothing.” And that’s a very simple moral test. You stand with those who have nothing, And if you make excuses and obfuscate, blah, blah, blah, then you’ve chosen the wrong side. And as you pointed out, part of what literature does, it’s not simply the content.
I mean, obviously we do need stories and poems that talk about the content of suffering and marginalization and the people who have nothing, but your focus on the fact that literature has a relationship to language, the truthfulness of language is absolutely important because as we see with this war in Gaza, language is, I don’t know if it was Orwell who said it, but truth is the first casualty. The language is the first casualty because by using language to prevent us from accessing truth, the moral corruption of our societies are happening by preventing us from acknowledging the truth of what is happening in my opinion in Gaza.
And so our focus as writers on making sure that we don’t use cliches that we [inaudible 00:39:10] participate in the fatuousness of our democratic rhetoric, when it’s hypocritical, that still matters. I still really believe in that. And again, I think that’s why books are being banned and possibly burned sometime in the near future.
Cathy Linh Che:
I have to agree that poetry, or I’ll say literature writ large is deeply powerful. There’s books about how the CIA had something to do with the creation actually of the Iowa Writers Workshop. So the idea was that people wanted… There was an interest in moving away from essentially communism and toward individualism, and how can you do that, but through culture? So to instill within… It really is about our stories and our imaginations that if we look inward and we look at only our personal lives, if we look closely at who we are and do a lot of introspection only, then that erodes a sense of communitarianism, I think, and that’s a concept. I also know that there are other countries that they have the money.
I’ll just give an example, like Singapore. It’s the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia. And they have this… There is a governmental interest in the arts, and there’s also a governmental interest in censoring the arts and controlling what arts are produced. But the idea is that the arts create a sense of deep culture that you can be powerful on the world stage, not because of your money, and not because of the land you own necessarily, but because of the way that your ideas and your sense of prestige ripples out. And so I was in Vietnam in 2023, and when I was there, I met with some artists. For a number of wealthy Vietnamese people, that’s another frontier that they’re trying to broach because they have money now.
So what they want is to create Vietnam into a place that is creating contemporary art that is cutting edge and interesting. And so there’s a lot of investment in that sort of thing. I just do think that literature is utterly powerful. It is not powerful because of money alone. It’s not powerful just because of the way that empire can use it, but it is powerful, and it’s not just about truth-telling because I don’t think that all literature is about truth-telling. I think sometimes it is about exploration, sometimes it is about the imagination.
And I think that’s also an amazing tool because even as, like I said, electoral politics can feel demoralizing, having a space wherein we can imagine new possibilities and new futures, and it doesn’t have to be new, but having spaces of encounter with ideas that give you a sense of possibility. It’s utterly for me, a space of freedom.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s interesting you bring up Vietnam in that example. I have such conflicted feelings because the dichotomy between Vietnam and the United States, supposedly communism and capitalism. It’s a tired binary because…
Cathy Linh Che:
It doesn’t really exist, I would say at all.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Right? So here we’re living through a time of extreme opposition and so on and conflict, whether it’s domestic American politics or whether it’s international scene, and yet at the same time, history shows us that oppositions are oftentimes completely intertwined with each other. And so Vietnam is a sense of a communist country, but it’s obviously very capitalistic, [inaudible 00:43:20] pointed out. But it also still engages in certain kinds of censorship and suppression that’s very, very vivid. I don’t think there’s even a whole lot of literature to suppress because it is been effectively suppressed for so long. That they’re suppressing people who write blogs. Not even just blogs about.. The bloggers are not saying, “We oppose communism or the Vietnamese government.”
They’re saying, “Look, we don’t like your ecological environmental policy.” And they’re being sent to jail for that kind of stuff. And that obviously has ripple effects across all of Vietnamese society about what people think they can say and can’t say, whether it’s through everyday life or politics or in their art. And I just can’t help but think that that does have any erosion on the quality of the art. Now, maybe it’s different for visual arts versus narrative arts and poetic arts, but I have some serious concerns about how vital the Vietnamese artscape can be if there’s this really active suppression of democratic spirit going on.
Now, that being said, I’m not saying that just to demonize Vietnam because if we look at the United States or the west, Western Europe, there’s all kinds of censorship taking place.
Cathy Linh Che:
Absolutely.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
People are getting fired, they’re losing opportunities for their art, they’re losing prizes. All this kind of stuff is going on right now very actively around the question of Gaza, but around other political issues also. And so the censorship that happens in a so-called western Democratic society operates in a different mechanism in some ways and how Vietnam would operate, but it’s not… By pointing at Vietnam or China or North Korea might make us feel better as a so-called democratic society. But we still have significant problems with censorship that ranges from the hard to the soft methods as well. I mean, I try to keep…
The fact that there are negative attempts to suppress people’s voices and their politics and their art. It’s enormously frustrating and discouraging, obviously. And obviously for some people it’s threatening to their lives and livelihoods. But at the same time, I mean, part of me as a writer thinks, “Good, they matter.” It means that people are paying attention enough to try to stop us, stop writers and other artists from speaking out.
Cathy Linh Che:
I was thinking I would be proud to have one of my books banned at some point, but I will say, I mean in the United States or elsewhere, that means I’m probably saying something that is on the side of justice or something that threatens empire actually. That is going to threaten capitalism or empire or a sense of who gets to be a person. I think that is probably why books are being banned in the US at least. I think that books in Vietnam, actually, my cousin, she made a living. She gathered money in order to escape Vietnam by renting out banned books. That was her profession. She would have… And they were mostly romances, romance novels and fantasies.
So a place where people could dream and could sort of feel a certain type of warmth towards something that was quite escapist, but those were the types of books that she would rent out in order to survive as a person. And then she escaped from that, and she was probably one of my… My family doesn’t read a lot, but she reads a lot. So she was one of my… Although my parents don’t read a lot, but they story tell very much. They’re oral storytellers. So this very much feels like part of the legacy. And I don’t know what happens when books are banned and censorship is upon us, but I think I’ve noticed… For instance, when I was in Singapore, I was noticing a very robust underground.
There was a room packed full of people who were listening to spoken word because they knew that this was not allowed in larger society. And there’s certainly utterly frightening about the rise of fascism in the US and the rise of censorship. The way that our universities and our governments are censoring what you can say and what can’t say. That is very scary. But I also am looking at places where censorship is strong, and I do think that those powers must be overturned. And while censorship is upon us, there’s still this powerful underground. I don’t think people can accept it ultimately. I think that there’s always ways around truth telling or censors, whether it be slant or directly or through underground pockets.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Maybe I’ll say one last thing and then maybe Lisa can lead us into the discussion or the questions, but in the United States, we’ve been talking a bit about Israel and Gaza and Palestinians, but in the United States, most banned books so far have been books by Black authors and by LGBTQIA authors. And that says something about what is at the core of American phobias? What are the sins of our own history? And what are the binaries that are so rigid that some people cannot let them go?
So it’s not only about war and imperialism, although those are very central to the democracy of the United States, but as you were implying also with the Vietnamese example, people are unsettled by questions of very personal identities and sexualities as well. So Lisa, do you have any questions from the audience for us?
Lisa Nighthawk:
Wow. I just want to say what an absolutely thrilling conversation. I’ve just been enjoying listening to you both so much, and those were beautiful readings. Thank you so much. I like to think… I have a certain saying, Freud, because I do so much introducing of writers I admire, but this summer I’ve really gotten really nervous, not about my own speaking but about my introduction. So see it as a sign of regard. We do have some great questions. Let’s see. And by the way, there’s still time for questions, so if anyone would like to add a question, please feel free to do so using that Q&A function.
Let’s see, Amy, who’s one of my colleagues at Antioch asks, “What can we learn from your brilliant writing and scholarship about the American war in Vietnam and the American myopic view of that war that can help us, parenthetical, white Americans avoid the same colonialist, racist, and xenophobic views about other conflicts around the world now and in the future?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Cathy, you want to go first or you want me to go first?
Cathy Linh Che:
Why don’t you go first?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think I have spent a lifetime trying to identify and extract out of myself, American mythology and ideology. I think it’s even for people who consider themselves to be liberals, let’s say, or maybe even further radical to the left. I think it’s really hard to understand how deeply internalized it can be to hold an American-centered point of view. So you could obviously sympathize or empathize with people who are not white or people who are not Americans and understand about American power and imperialism and stuff like that. And yet still continue to center American perspectives and ideologies, which is why… And I say this because I’ve seen so many instances within myself of how I fall in prey to that reflexive Americanness inside of me.
So that’s why it’s taken several books to try to understand what that ideology, what the mythology is, and how to think about the complexities of power as I think Cathy and I have been trying to articulate in our conversation. It’s never just one issue. It’s many issues and they’re always intertwined because our country was founded not just on one form of oppression and power, but on multiple kinds that were taking place simultaneously. And this idea that we are the best country on earth, the greatest country on earth, even those of us who might be skeptical about that, I still think… That’s why I prefaced my comments about Vietnam by saying, “Hey, I want to be critical of Vietnam, but not fall into the trap of reflexively lionizing or valorizing American democracy and its values and so on.”
All this is to say, I think it’s such a lifelong project to do this kind of work, and we’re not alone. The issues of solidarity and coalition are so crucial in terms of recognizing that so much of what Cathy and I have been talking about, I think have been dealt with by other people generations earlier. And so very little of what we’ve been saying I think is new to American history and the problems that it’s confronted. It’s just that we exile, we erase the people who have brought up these kinds of issues before, but they’re written legacies, I think, and other legacies still remain with us, but we have to do the work of finding those books and identifying our genealogy and our solidarities.
Cathy Linh Che:
I love that. Thank you Viet. I would say along those lines, the Vietnam War gave rise to a whole generation of people who participated in protest and solidarity movements and coalition building. And so the term Asian American was born out of the anti-war movement. I was born out of Asian American coalition building, and it was alongside the Black Power Movement. The fact that my parents and I are in this country are probably a direct result of the Civil Rights Movement. The Immigration Act of 1965 opened the doors for that. So much of what happened during Vietnam also created the effect of empowering people and having people come together.
So I think that there is something to that. And so just reading a lot of history, I think that’s a powerful thing to note. And I would say, just doing a lot of good reading and listening and contemplating and writing into spaces of allyship and solidarity. I don’t know if that’s very articulate, but I’ll stop there and I’ll pass it on to Lisa again.
Lisa Nighthawk:
I’m loving this conversation. Let’s see. We have a question from Nia Nguyen who asked, “Have both your and Viet’s books been banned or burned?” But I feel like you kind of addressed that, Cathy.
Cathy Linh Che:
Viet you go, because my book hasn’t been banned yet, but I have a children’s book, An Asian American A to Z, which talks about solidarity, and that’s a good place actually for adults to read into our history. A lot of this is born out of the Vietnam War movement, but it hasn’t been banned yet. I’m waiting. It says Free Palestine in it, so we’ll see.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So most of my books are not allowed to be published in Vietnam. There’s that. It’s interesting whether they’re banned or not. I mean, as far as I can tell, there’s no official list of banned books in Vietnam, but everybody seems to understand there’s certain things you can publish and certain things you can’t. So I’ve had a translation of The Sympathizer ready to be published in Vietnam with a Vietnamese publisher since about 2016 or 2017. Everybody’s too scared to publish that book and a couple of other books of mine as well. In the United States, nothing’s been banned. And I think it’s interesting to think about one possibility why, which is when we talk about the Vietnam War, which a lot of my writing is about, and I think my war is actually…
My writing is about much more than the Vietnam War, but people identify that with me because I’m Vietnamese, therefore, that’s the only thing I can talk about. And if I talk about the Vietnam War, people say, “Well, he’s talking about the Vietnam War.” When you actually read my writing, I think it’s actually about connecting the Vietnam War to so many other wars and so many other issues in the long history of the United States. But the point here is for Americans, you can criticize them about their wars. I don’t think people are going to ban books that are critical of the Korean War or the Philippine-American War or the Vietnam War because Americans don’t care. They’ve forgotten about these wars.
There’s so many wars that we have forgotten in American history and not even American history. I think Robin Coste Lewis posted on her Facebook page a couple of weeks ago saying her own students don’t even know anything about the war in Iraq. That was like [inaudible 00:56:55] How you measure it a few years ago to 20 years ago. That’s temporary. And so I think Americans have so internalized their own imperialism and their own… We’ve internalized how natural war is to us, that it doesn’t even bother us. We don’t remember these kinds of things.
And that’s why I think there are more books banned by Black authors and queer authors and trans authors, because those actually do speak very immediately to how history is completely wrapped up in a way that feels extraordinarily personal to a good number of Americans. But as Cathy said, there are certain issues that will break through. So Free Palestine, for example. The one time I’ve been banned or censored or whatever, canceled as an author was because in October I signed a petition, a letter along with 700 other authors saying we should end the war in Gaza and we should have a ceasefire. And that was offensive.
Cathy Linh Che:
I know we’re at time, so if anybody has to leave, thank you so much for being with us. But I do think that… I’ll just say, in the US, you’re provisionally allowed to exist in a safer way than in other times. So at any point the US could pivot and say, “Okay, Japanese Americans, you should be incarcerated.” So there is a kind of sense that whatever it is right now that we are allowed to do and say, that can be taken away at any moment if you are suddenly identified as the enemy. So I do think that our ability to write and speak and say whatever we want, I find it to be fairly provisional at this moment.
Lisa Nighthawk:
We have a couple more great questions, so if you guys are okay to keep going a little bit. I feel like people have really been opening up. So this question, and if I butcher anyone’s name, please forgive me. I’m doing my best. But this question is from Not Lam Nguyen who asks, “You mentioned the censorship issues. Sure, we have censorship all over the world, but I think the biggest difference is consensus of citizens saying the nationalism wave of Vietnam has strengthen ever since the death of Nguyen Phu Trong.
Hence, there’s a yearn of citizens asking for a stricter censorship in the name of patriotism. Using barriers as a metaphor, is it moral for a country to build the barriers as a result of their citizen’s request because that’s still considered democracy, right? Or is it self-destructive for any barrier as their self-determination would be lost? Is it too Eurocentric of morality if we got to decide the democracy in our name of intellectualism?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I actually have thought about this because we’re a democracy, so it’s supposed to be majority rules, but it’s also supposed to be protection of minorities, however you choose to define the minority. It could be obviously racial, gendered, sexualized or ideological or anything else. And so that’s a very difficult balance to try to strike because in the example that Not Nguyen brought up, I think yes, you can have a democracy that then turns to oppression. You could have people vote in a party or a government and so on and say, “Yeah, we’re cool with that party or government putting people in prison, oppressing them in some way.” That’s not even hypothetical example, that has happened and is happening right now.
And yet at the same time here in the United States, some of us would say, “Look, if we just had a national majority vote, why don’t we just do that?” Democracy rules, right? And yet we still want to protect these minority interests. There’s no exact answer to the question and simply to say, when we bring up democracy, this is exactly the mechanism we have to build in to be conscientious about, to be ethical and political about and moral about too. That yes, majority rules, but minority protection. That we cannot violate our own principles. And that’s the other issue obviously. What are the principles?
We actually should at least have a document that says, “Hey, we believe in ABC so that if we violate ABC, we can be held accountable.” That doesn’t mean we’re actually not going to violate A, B and C. As Cathy’s example, Japanese Americans, sent to concentration camps that everybody… That was wrong. And yet we as a society went through all kinds of permutations to try to justify that at the time, but at least in retrospect, we could say the United States was wrong by its own standards in doing that. So all those things have to be taken into account.
Cathy Linh Che:
Just to say that I think that I’m curious as to what this idea of censorship for the greater good looks like. What does that mean if the majority wants greater censorship? What are the aims of that censorship? What is the purpose of censorship in those ways? These are just a series of open-ended questions that I’m curious about. And I don’t know what the answer is, but I don’t… My suspicion is that that deserves a lot of interrogation.
Lisa Nighthawk:
Thank you both. Let’s see, we’ve got a couple more good ones. Clara asks, “As a Vietnamese American growing up in Boston, I’ve witnessed firsthand our food and culture move from things that we were bullied about to being trendy. As a creative, it’s left this bittersweet feeling that I felt in both of your readings today and definitely in the discussion regarding Apocalypse Now. Are there any thoughts that either of you could share regarding how we as people of color motivate ourselves to keep raising our voices within American democracy slash capitalism at the risk of our stories being consumed as aesthetic or trend?” Regardless of if you get to this question, thank you both for your time today.
Cathy Linh Che:
I think that the question of audience and who’s consuming your work, it’s with us because both Viet and I write primarily in English, for instance. It’s not my first language, but it is my most natural language. It’s the only language I can express myself most. It is the language I can express myself most fully in, and it’s the consequence of my parents’ refugee story. But as to… Am I writing, I think… Again, it’s a question worth asking and interrogating over and over and over again, who am I writing to? Who is my audience? What are my aims? Am I creating something in order to be consumed in this particular way?
Because in some ways, as a writer, you can only control your own intentions and the words on the page, but once you release it, how it interacts in the world, that’s not something I have total control over. But I do have total control over my sense of interrogation and my sense of engagement with the larger question of what is the purpose of my writing? And that can shift over time. But if I’m writing in order to find fame and success through commodification, then that’s worth noting. I’ll just say that much. And so for me, I think of writing as pleasurable.
It’s for me, it’s a personal thing for me, and it’s also mission-based, because I believe that what I’m trying to do is to write into silences. If somebody is going to eat that up and decide it’s delicious, that’s up to them. That’s not really… But the writing should be complex enough so that if they try to do that, maybe they’re also getting some sort of something else in addition to it. And so that’s what I’ll put out there.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think when we’re excluded, it’s very human impulse to want to be included, and then you being oppositional aligns with the struggle for inclusion. So I think Claire’s question points to what happens when you’ve actually gotten that inclusion. For me, the gradual marks question is always the best one. Why would I want to belong to a club that wouldn’t want to have me? And so once we’re in the club, I’m like, “Wait, have I been co-opted now? This club that I’ve been criticizing now lets me in.” And so at that point, it is worthwhile to appreciate that we are more visible. That does make an impact. That does make a difference culturally, psychologically, politically.
I do appreciate that more people know what Vietnamese food is, for example, and I don’t have to explain as much and so on and so forth. However, even in the food example, in the question of commodification, what’s raised is the fact that inclusion is not merely about appearances and representations. If you have a Vietnamese restaurant and all of a sudden people like to eat your pho, are you paying your workers enough? Are you replicating structures of exploitation and so on and so forth? And likewise for literature, I think the parallel issue is we are witnessing a moment in which 30 or 40 years ago, there were barely any Vietnamese American writers writing in English.
And now we’re producing so many that I’m having a hard time keeping up. And we’re doing that partly because yes, we have a lot of literary talent, but partly because Vietnamese Americans have gone through exactly what Cathy implied earlier, the workshops of empire. We come from a particular class of… Many Vietnamese Americans descend or come from a particular elite class or a particular majority ethnic background. It’s not as if just because we’re a minority, we’re completely underprivileged. We’re transferring structures of power from Vietnam to the United States. We participate in the structures of power in the United States.
Those of us who didn’t become engineers, lawyers or doctors, some of us became writers. It’s as much a model minority track as being a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. And so we have to recognize that part, and we have to recognize that I’m grateful for how much Vietnamese American literature we’re producing, but I mean, how much of it is still oppositional and still constestatory? I don’t want to get into that exactly with the limited time we have here, but it does offer at least a choice. Now, Vietnamese Americans or any other minority or any other group don’t have to simply say, “We’ll take it simply because it’s from our people.” Now we can make gradations of judgment.
And it is bittersweet to make that gradation of judgment. But it’s also better, I think in the long run. We’ll have better Vietnamese restaurants, some of them, and we’ll have better Vietnamese American literature, some of it, if we’re able to make that judgment on ourselves and our own people and our own artwork and culture.
Cathy Linh Che:
And I’ll just say one additional thing. It’s good to have so many Vietnamese American authors in conversation with one another because just as Viet says. Face it, many of us come from specific kind of an educated class in Vietnam. My parents did not. And I’m also sort of, my dad comes from a racial minority in Vietnam too, so they’re indigenous minority too. So there is room for so many of us. And so that can be… Sort of thinking about that rather than thinking about appeasing some mass audience that doesn’t really see you. I think that is useful.
Lisa Nighthawk:
I think if you’re all right with it, I have one more question I’d love to get your take on. It’s from Asin who says, “Can you speak to the role major and indie publishers are playing in service to or in resistance to empire. From the outside and as someone who has grown up witnessing the culture’s war and the war on terror. It’s hard to see where literary conglomerates play a vital role in producing friction for empire and capitalism, especially given how consumptive it all feels.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Wow. Cathy, I think this is your question. I don’t even know how much you want to bring in your own personal experience into all of that.
Cathy Linh Che:
I don’t know. I mean, I will say that I… My first book was published by an independent publisher, my second book published by an independent publisher. So they, I think, primarily move through a politics that seeks out stories that haven’t been told, that uplift stories. My first publisher, Alice James Books, publishes only poetry. I mean, that’s not actually… If you’re going to only choose to publish poetry, you’re not doing a great job at capitalism. I’m sorry, you’re just not. But it’s a choice and it’s an artistic choice to move into.
And Haymarket Books, the second book is an independent publisher, and they are very politically leftist, and so they actually don’t do capitalism that great either in some ways because… And my third book is actually going to be under… Well, yes, my third book will be under Big Five Press, which is much more diverse in terms of the stories and the politics and the ways that they think about it. And they are much more of a business. And being a business, I don’t think that their mission is to disrupt empire. I think their mission is to reap the most money they can and make a profit. So I think that there is a difference between the independent houses and what they are doing and what they feel free to do.
And so taking more risks with poetry and experimentation and with writing that might get banned somewhere. I think that there isn’t going to be as much concern about, “Well, this will alienate these audiences this way,” or, “This is too experimental or strange. We’re not going to take on.” In fact, some of that… Sometimes within those spaces, finding something utterly new, different, strange, but great is a win for them. So I don’t know if… I just differentiated between two types of publishers, but Viet, go for it.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So let’s not totally romanticize indie presses. The golden rule that most of any category is mediocre still holds true, but nevertheless, I do validate everything that Cathy said. That the mission of many indie publishers is to take these kinds of risks, and it’s not the profit motive for many of them. And then the flip side of course, is that for the Big Five or the corporate publishers, even if they produce all this mass market commodity stuff, there’s still the possibility of producing some life-changing world works as well. I’m published by University Presses, but also my fiction and nonfiction comes out from Grove Atlantic, which is an independent press that is a larger one.
So it works nearly like one of the larger publishers. I’m very lucky to be… And sort of what I think of as a sweet spot between the commercial, the independent. Grove Atlantic has published a lot of books that many of you have read from Frantz Fanon to William Burroughs, and I don’t know who else that we’re pushing against many of the limits. But last thing in this vein of the independent press, let me just make a pitch or a shout-out to the many literary collectives that are out there that are not doing the work of the commercial.
They’re sustaining and supporting writers and artists by giving them opportunities, by giving them fellowship, fellowships but also the social world of literary fellowship and artistic fellowship that are keeping the spirit alive and through many different kinds of programs and nurturing independent voices, new voices, oppositional voices, all the kinds of things that may eventually be co-opted by the Big Five, but oftentimes will not. And so when we’re talking about democracy and identity, I mean the United States is a very capitalistic country, but nevertheless, there is a streak of the avant-garde and the radical and the independent and so on that exists at the level of the literary.
People recognizing that they are not supported by capitalism and by big institutions, have created their own enclaves and collectives through these artistic societies. We’ve had them for a very long time. We have them today. If you’re a writer, editor, somebody in the literary and artistic worlds, and you’re not participating in one of these types of collectives and you feel isolated and alone, well, they exist out there for you to also find solidarity with.
Cathy Linh Che:
And also, maybe it’s a call for you to create it yourself.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s a good note to end on.
Lisa Nighthawk:
That’s a beautiful place to end. Orlando just wanted to say hi.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Hello.
Lisa Nighthawk:
Thank you all very, very much for joining us. This was such an incredibly generous and far-reaching and really just fantastic conversation. You made my dream come true by doing this, Cathy and Viet. So thank you so much.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thanks Lisa.
Cathy Linh Che:
Thank you so much everybody. Have a great night.
