Andrea Brody interviews Viet Thanh Nguyen on his Pulitzer Prize-Winning novel, The Sympathizer— now being adapted into an HBO series, and his new memoir for KCRW
One of the most-watched shows on HBO currently is the spy thriller The Sympathizer, the story of a young Vietnamese spy who flees to the US as a refugee in the late ‘70s, just as the Vietnam War was ending.
The miniseries is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by author Viet Thanh Nguyen, who himself fled Vietnam with his parents at the age of four.
Though The Sympathizer is fiction, the themes Nguyen explores are central to both his own lived experience and those of many other immigrants in America. Growing up in Northern California, Nguyen felt neither Vietnamese nor American. Nguyen’s parents worked around the clock to survive and to send money back to relatives.
More: Viet Thanh Nguyen on being a refugee and being unwanted (Press Play)
“My parents told me often that we were 100% Vietnamese,” says Nguyen, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. “At the same time, I was also watching TV and reading books in English and becoming an American, and I felt very American by the time I was 10 or 11 or 12 years old.”
Nguyen’s latest book, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, further explores the challenges, trauma, and complexities of his childhood and how he ultimately comes to lean into and embrace his own identity and duality.
““I’ve learned to embrace the fact that my authenticity is my inauthenticity,” he says. “It’s that paradox, that contradiction of duality that was so discomforting when I was a kid and an adolescent that I can fully embrace now.”
Nguyen talks about the power of good stories, his skill as an observer, and how his sense of straddling two worlds has stayed with him.
“In my parents’ very Vietnamese household, I was an American spying on them,” he says. “When I left that household to go into the rest of the United States, I was a Vietnamese spying on Americans.”
More: Viet Thanh Nguyen on his 2021 novel The Committed (Bookworm)
Though much of what Nguyen writes about is painful and traumatic, he resists the idea that his writing process is a form of therapy.
“There’s nothing wrong with using writing or other forms of art as therapy, it can be very beneficial. But I don’t know that I want to be healed through my writing, because if we think of writing as therapy and you’re healed, then there’s no more need to be a writer,” he says.
More: Viet Thanh Nguyen on The Sympathizer (Scheer Intelligence)
In his book A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, author Viet Thanh Nguyen explains that “my parents were business people, anti-Communist, devoutly Catholic, and look at me. I’m a writer. I’m an atheist at least, a socialist probably more, and so how did that happen? But their sacrifice enabled me to become a writer because I have watched them sacrifice in that grocery store 12 to 14 hour days and every day of the week, and so their model of sacrifice was hugely influential on me as a writer.” Viet Thanh Nguyen pictured here, says that “stories are not only about narratives, and plots, themes, and symbols, but are also about emotion, about characters undergoing certain kinds of challenges and their responses to those challenges, and there was no place for those emotions to come from, except within myself.” Photo courtesy of Hopper Stone.
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Listen to the Podcast below
Jonathan Bastian:
I’m Jonathan Bastian. This week on KCRW’s Life Examined, growing up Vietnamese in America defined Viet Thanh Nguyen’s life. As difficult as it was as a child, it’s a duality Nguyen now says was beneficial.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
My parents told me that we were 100% Vietnamese. At the same time I was watching TV all in English, becoming an American, and I felt very American. So in my parents’ very Vietnamese household, I was an American spying on them. And when I left that house, I was a Vietnamese spying on Americans.
Jonathan Bastian:
And the trauma and memories relived, Nguyen explains the necessity to embrace who he is in his writing.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I resist the word therapy when it comes to writing. There’s nothing wrong with using writing or other forms of art as therapy. It can be very beneficial, but I don’t know I want to be healed through my writing because if we think of writing as therapy and you’re healed, then there’s no more need to be a writer.
Jonathan Bastian:
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen on writing, authenticity, and the challenges he faced as a Vietnamese refugee. That’s all coming up on Life Examined.
Steve Chiotakis:
You’re listening to 89.9 KCRW, kcrw.com, the app, or your smart speaker, thank you for being with us on a Sunday morning Life Examined right here on KCRW. I’m Steve Chiotakis alongside KCRW’s Arnie Seipel.
Arnie Seipel:
Hey, Steve.
Steve Chiotakis:
So good morning. As we had the news this morning, we did weekend edition. You got up to date on what’s going on in the world, and now you’re taking a break and looking at, I want to say the more important stuff, but that’s you.
Arnie Seipel:
The bigger picture.
Steve Chiotakis:
Yeah, the bigger picture.
Arnie Seipel:
You’re taking in the bigger picture.
Steve Chiotakis:
Exactly.
Arnie Seipel:
And what matters in your life with a show like Life Examined, which is only on KCRW. This is something that we create here. Jonathan Bastian and his fabulous producer, Andrea Brody, have been with KCRW for a long time. And this is really the kind of special thing that KCRW does that a lot of other public radio stations don’t, and it’s why you want to be a part of it.
Steve Chiotakis:
By the way, a lot of public radio stations don’t do it because, because they can’t afford to.
Arnie Seipel:
Right.
Steve Chiotakis:
Right?
Arnie Seipel:
And we have the support of our members who know that they’re part of a really special community here at KCRW.
Steve Chiotakis:
Yeah, and that’s why we’re here asking for your support at kcrw.com/give. It’s our Spring Fundraiser. This is an important time of year. We do this a few times a year, not very many. Two, three times a year we come to you asking you directly for your support of the radio station to keep us strong and healthy. If that’s important to you, if knowing that your dollars help the radio station to provide services like Life Examined or like the news or like the music you’re going to get this afternoon, all of those things are supported by the listener, by you. You obviously are fed this information. You’re fed and enjoy the music, and now we ask you to help support it.
Arnie Seipel:
And one of the reasons I love the KCRW community in particular is because of their generosity. Not just to us, but Steve, you know we have some great swag.
Steve Chiotakis:
I know.
Arnie Seipel:
Some great gifts that you can get when you give to KCRW. Do you know what I’m-
Steve Chiotakis:
I have a closet full of it.
Arnie Seipel:
Do you know what the most popular gift is though?
Steve Chiotakis:
Well, it usually is, for public radio, it’s a tote bag or a mug.
Arnie Seipel:
Not at KCRW.
Steve Chiotakis:
No?
Arnie Seipel:
No.
Steve Chiotakis:
What is it?
Arnie Seipel:
It’s giving to the local food bank.
Steve Chiotakis:
That makes a whole lot of sense. And I only know this because having lived here for a long time now, I know how generous people are, Angelenos are, Southern Californians are. And I get it.
Arnie Seipel:
Yeah. And I love this. So we partner with food banks across Southern California, LA, Orange County, Santa Barbara, the Coachella Valley. And what you can do is if you go to kcrw.com/give and you put in your gift for KCRW, when you get to choose what item you get as a bonus, instead of choosing a mug or a T-shirt, you just choose the food bank. And today actually, we are doubling the meals that your donation will provide to the food bank. So you’re not just giving to KCRW and investing in this really important community service. You’re also helping a neighbor in need.
Steve Chiotakis:
I feel like such a bozo thinking that it was the mug or the tote bag. Of course, it’s the food bank. Of course it is. And we’ve given… How many have we given over the years? Hundreds of thousands.
Arnie Seipel:
It’s got to be hundreds of thousands.
Steve Chiotakis:
Over the years. I think we were closing in on a million last… It’s a lot, just to say, and it’s through your generosity that we’re able to do that. So thank you for doing that. Again, if you want to forego the mug, I think I’m going to do that too. I give to the food bank anyway, but it’s one of those things where it’s like we know there is a need in Southern California, and I think that’s our little way of helping as well.
Arnie Seipel:
And I think it really speaks to the spirit of KCRW and what we try to bring all of you who are listening, which is actually being a part of the community, not just talking at you through the radio but talking to you and being with you at programs like Summer Nights. You have to check out. Go to kcrw.com/summernights. Check out all the great shows all around the area. Our DJs are just on it. And you can just go to the biggest party ever with fellow KCRW listeners.
Steve Chiotakis:
Yeah, we’re talking about gathering that connection. Now, let’s talk about you as we move on with Life Examined on KCRW, kcrw.com/give.
Jonathan Bastian:
Welcome to Life Examined on KCRW. I’m Jonathan Bastian coming to you during our Spring Pledge Drive. One of the most watched shows on HBO currently is the spy thriller, The Sympathizer, the story of a young Vietnamese spy who flees to the US as a refugee in the late ’70s as the Vietnam War was ending. The miniseries is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name by author Viet Thanh Nguyen, who himself fled Vietnam with his parents at the age of four. Though the story is fiction, the themes Nguyen explores are central to his experience and those of many other immigrants in America. Growing up in Northern California, Nguyen felt neither Vietnamese nor American. And in his latest book called A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, Nguyen further explores the challenges, trauma, and complexities of his childhood and how he ultimately comes to lean into and embrace his own identity and duality.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. He’s the author of several books, including The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Viet Thanh Nguyen, welcome to Life Examined. It’s great to have you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Hi, Jonathan. Thanks for having me.
Jonathan Bastian:
I’d love to hear of just early memories of arriving to the US. I believe you were just four years old. And I don’t know how much I remember when I was four, but I know you do have some memories of arriving to the US. I believe it was Pennsylvania first. But take us to what some of those were, any images, tastes, sounds, smells. What still comes to your mind when you think of those early days in the US?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I did come to the United States when I was four. My family was in Vietnam when the fall of Saigon happened. And in fact, we were in Saigon when that happened and fled as refugees. I do have some flashes of memories from Vietnam and from the refugee experience, but they’re fleeting images in my mind so I’m not even sure if they’re real or not. But the really narrative memories started when I arrived in the United States in Pennsylvania to a place called Fort Indiantown Gap, which was one of four refugee camps set up to accommodate the Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees who had come to the United States. And I think my memories really started there because in order to leave this refugee camp, Vietnamese refugees had to have Americans sponsor them. And there wasn’t a sponsor willing to take all four of us, so one sponsor took my parents, one sponsor took my 10-year-old brother, one sponsor took four-year-old me.
And this was done benevolently to give my parents the time to get on their feet to take care of us. But of course, when you’re four years old, you don’t understand those kinds of things. And so I understood that as being taken away from my parents as abandonment. And so my first memories are of howling and screaming as I’m being taken away from my parents. And unfortunately, I think memories that scar us, that hurt us in some way are the memories that tend to stick with us. And certainly those memories have stayed with me. And then that’s when I really started to see the world. I started to remember things like the American sponsor family that I lived with, who I remember as being very, very kind and very blonde, but also obviously maybe a little unequipped to handle a four-year-old child from Vietnam who didn’t speak any English. And so it was a great relief to eventually be able to come back to my parents a few months later.
Jonathan Bastian:
Wow. I know eventually you would settle more permanently in San Jose, and there’s just some incredible stories that you write about your parents that were operating, it was a grocery store, correct? But working with such tremendous energy and such amazing hours, I found that whole part of your story to be amazing, just the life that they were trying to create so quickly and with such fervor.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
My parents were really poor when they were born in Northern Vietnam. They were both born to rural families. And my mother didn’t have very much education. My father got a high school education. And so they, in Vietnam, became refugees in 1954 when the country was divided, and they went south with 800,000 other Vietnamese Catholics. And that was when their hard work started. They were respectively 21 and 18 years old, my father and my mother. And they, from everything I’ve been told, just worked incredibly hard to raise themselves out of poverty and become merchants even though they had no formal education. And then they lost most of that when they became refugees in 1975 and fled to the United States.
So by the time I knew them, they’d already lived a very full life of ups and downs, and I got to see a very brief glimpse of them before they opened that grocery store where they were working 9:00 to 5:00 jobs, manual labor in the United States, which were not great jobs but ironically gave them time to spend with their family. So I actually remember the early years in the United States fondly because even though we didn’t have much money, we had a family.
And then they came to San Jose and they started what we call the American Dream, which is to start their own business. They opened perhaps the second Vietnamese grocery store in San Jose. And as you said, they basically just worked constantly seven days a week, 12 to 14-hour days at the store. And then after they came home and cooked dinner, they had to do the receipts, which I helped them with. And so all I knew of them for most of my youth and adolescence were these people who worked incredibly hard and suffered for their labor. And they did that because they loved their children and they wanted to take care of them and they wanted to build a new life in the United States. And they were also taking care of many of their relatives back in Vietnam because in the late ’70s and 1980s, Vietnam was very poor and a lot of the relatives were on the brink of starvation. And so my parents were also sending money home.
And all of that was a part of that refugee early life in the United States wrapped up with, for me, becoming an American and struggling with the Catholicism that my parents deeply believed in, a faith which helped sustain them doing all this work. And so for me, that was just normal life. That was the way that all the Vietnamese refugees were living. And what was weird was watching TV and seeing how Americans or the rest of the United States was living in TV shows like Leave It to Beaver and The Partridge Family. And I thought, “Wow,” that America is so exotic because that’s not the way that life is for the Vietnamese refugee community.
Jonathan Bastian:
Yeah, I’m really also fascinated by the evolution of your sense of identity as a young man. Even the title of the memoir, A Man of Two Faces, you talk about seeing the Leave It to Beaver style of American living or other shows, films, radio shows. But I know at the same time you’re also probably looking at yourself in the mirror and look in your family and saying, “But I’m very distinctly different from that.” Talk to me more about where your sense of identity was coming from and how you were grappling with these two different ideas of who you were and how to live.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I don’t think my experience was that unusual, that sense of duality. I think feeling as if one is divided in at least two ways and probably multiple ways is a really common experience for immigrants, refugees, outsiders, people of color, and so on in the United States and possibly elsewhere. And for me, what happened was that I grew up in a household with my parents that was very Vietnamese. We ate Vietnamese food, spoke the Vietnamese language, watched Vietnamese TV and so on. And my parents told me often that we were 100% Vietnamese.
And at the same time, I was also watching TV and reading books all in English and becoming an American. And I felt very American by the time I was 10 or 11 or 12 years old. So in my parents’ very Vietnamese household, I was an American spying on them. And when I left that household to go into the rest of the United States, I was a Vietnamese spying on Americans. And so that sense of duality has always stayed with me. And in some ways that can feel like a very debilitating experience not to feel wholly unified when I look around and, for example, watch the Beaver and Brady Bunch and the Partridge family, and none of those characters on those shows seem to have any sense of duality or psychic inner turmoil. And yet I felt that that was the way that I was experiencing my own life.
But I think that as difficult as that was, it’s also been very beneficial as a writer and as a human being, maybe as a parent, to have that sense of duality and awareness that people can be divided and that people can be complicated, and that these complications and divisions can manifest themselves in ways that can be really troubling that people can take out their confusions on other people, that nations can take out their confusions on other nations and certain populations, and that a writer like me has to try to struggle to understand these kinds of divisions and multiplicities.
Jonathan Bastian:
Yeah, you’ve talked about it and you said it there a second ago that there seems to be something within maybe all of us that looks for a unified identity, right? Because it’s just a much simpler way to understand ourselves and how people view us. Was there a part of you that was looking for that, that wanted to just be American or just be Vietnamese? I think that’s a very understandable sentiment.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think it is. And that certainly was reinforced constantly because I think it’s quite normal in both Vietnamese and American cultures and many, many cultures to yearn or to believe that there’s a unified sense of individual self, but also collective self for the culture and the nation. And we give the name of authenticity to that sense of unity. So when I was growing up in the Vietnamese refugee community, I was constantly reminded that I was inauthentic. I didn’t speak Vietnamese fluently. I didn’t know Vietnamese culture as well as even compared to other Vietnamese kids of my age. And that of course made me feel bad. And then I would be in the rest of the United States or American culture and I would be reminded on a regular basis that I wasn’t wholly American or even American at all, given the kinds of anti-Asian or racist stereotypes about Asians that were prevalent in mass media and pop culture, especially regarding Vietnamese people who were only really recognized in the United States through Vietnam War movies and American memories of the war.
And so it’s very normal, I think, to come out of that situation and want to fully belong, as you said, to American or Vietnamese culture. But I think I’ve reached a point in my life where I think that authenticity, as comforting and desirable as it is, can also be really, really dangerous because in the name of authenticity, we bully people, marginalize them, shame them. And those are just a social ramifications. In the name of authenticity, we also do things like erect borders and wage wars and things like that. So there’s something about inauthenticity that is quite scary to people and can be something that people look down on and denigrate. But I’ve learned to embrace the fact that my authenticity is my inauthenticity. It’s that paradox, that contradiction of duality that was so discomforting when I was a kid and an adolescent that I fully embrace now.
Jonathan Bastian:
Maybe you could also talk about the uniqueness of the title we give to, say, the Asian American, which I think is distinct from African American or from Indian American because I think that Asian American was portrayed in its own unique and oftentimes belittling ways. And I wonder if you could tell us about how you understand that term, or it could be Vietnamese American, but I think that you were subject to a very specific type of prejudices in America.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think so, but I think so many, many populations are. We have a long history of that in the United States. So even becoming a Vietnamese American was a complicated experience because when I was growing up, whenever my parents would use the word American, they were referring to other people, not to themselves, which was fair because they didn’t see themselves as Americans, but not about me either. And so to even be able to say I’m an American was already a rebellion against my parents, but to say I was a Vietnamese American was also a rebellion because they saw themselves as Vietnamese, not as Vietnamese American.
So this idea of the hyphenated identity is a very American thing, and it is a way that specific populations from very specific places can claim both their origins and ancestries, but also their belonging to the United States as well. So we can be Vietnamese American, Indian American, Korean American, and so on. Asian American is a little bit different because Asian American is a much more political identity. I think Vietnamese American is political too, but Asian American is supposed to be a much more political identity because what it does is that it says we’re not Orientals. That’s the way that other Americans have tended to look at people from the vast Asian continent, Orientals, as people who are embodiments of certain kinds of racial stereotypes and traits.
So Asian Americans bonded together in reaction against these Oriental stereotypes, but they also bonded together to say, “Well, in Asia, we might’ve been Korean or Vietnamese or Japanese or Chinese and so on, and we might’ve fought wars with each other and hated each other and so on. But in the United States, we actually have more in common than we have in difference, and so we’re going to become Asian Americans.” And that was a very radical identity in the 1960s when it was first proclaimed by college students. And now we’ve seen a long history pass, almost 60 years, and it’s not so radical anymore. There certainly are radical Asian Americans and Asian American organizations out there, but Asian American as a whole has become rather mainstream. We have Asian American actors winning Oscars. We have Asian American celebrities and influencers. We have Asian American politicians. We have Asian American liberals and conservatives.
And while this is challenging and problematic for the radical Asian American activists of whom among who I count myself, I think on the other hand, it’s actually very positive because it shows that in fact, that whole Asian American movement has had great success in exactly one of its intentions, which is to make Asian Americans, Americans. But now we’ve reached the whole new level of problematic contradictions such as Asian Americans being deployed against affirmative action, which is going to force, is forcing Asian Americans as a whole to reconsider what being Asian American means.
Jonathan Bastian:
How does someone like myself then even make sense of what we think are these ridiculous stereotypes of the quiet Asian or the one who’s trying to assimilate quietly or just work hard, and how that seems to have been this unique way of branding the Asian experience in America? How did you see this stuff play out in tropes around you and how did you feel about it?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I wasn’t even aware, I think, of some of those things until I started to watch TV in the movies. And then you see the stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans play out, including the quiet model, minority stereotype that you’re talking about, but also the reverse obviously, which is the villains and the gangsters and all of that. And I think that what I would say is that every so-called minority or subjugated population is subjected to these bifurcated stereotypes. By that, I mean stereotypes are either/or. They’re like a coin. You can’t have one side of the coin without the other.
So if you think that Asian Americans are quiet and docile and good at math and all these kinds of things and good partners and good neighbors and so on, and you think, “Well, that’s a good thing,” in some ways, obviously the good stereotype does help because those subjected to good stereotypes have more opportunities. They’re treated better. The expectations of them are higher, and they respond to those stereotypes. However, good stereotypes always go with bad stereotypes. And that’s what we have to remember because the quiet, nice student who you would love to have in your classroom can very easily become the over competitive machine who threatens the curve in your biology class, who works so hard and doesn’t have any personality and therefore is going to take over the entire workforce. So you cannot separate the good from the bad stereotypes. And that’s true not just for Asian Americans, but every other stereotype population in the United States.
So I think in response to your question, I would say whenever you start to feel like you’re thinking, “Well, that population is so nice,” you have to think also that it always comes with the negative as well. So we have to reject both extremes of that and to think about why, if it’s even true, that Asian Americans might tend to be more quiet or more good at certain things, why that’s the case. If you go to various Asian countries, it’s not true. Asians tend to be quiet and good at math and so on. There’s certainly those kinds of people, but there’s a lot of bad Asians in particular Asian countries. And the reason why we might have a trend in a different direction in the United States is because the Asian American population in the United States has been socially and politically engineered to look like this. They’ve been selected by the immigration process and by politics in the United States. And the ones that may not conform so well, they often tend to be deported.
Jonathan Bastian:
What you said right there, I think, is really interesting and provocative, that maybe they were politically selected or asked to conform to a certain set of social norms to make themselves assimilate or to fit into this idea of America. Would you say that’s true too, there was a pressure to be a certain way?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, it’s a matter of social norms, but also political and economic norms and mechanisms as well, because you have to think back to the entire history of the presence of Asians in the United States. Asians were oftentimes not the model minority in this country, and they were not perceived to be docile and quiet. And just pick one example, Chinese immigrants in the 19th century, they were regarded once there were too many of them as being ridden with vermin, disease, bringers of vice and drugs into the United States, as being threatening and loud and so on. And so they were subjected to all kinds of violence through the law, but also through physical violence and economic exploitation and things like this.
And so how is it possible that Chinese immigrants went from being seen as this really horrifying threat to the economics and the morality and the health of the United States and the 19th century to for a while in the 20th and 21st century being seen as incredible boons to the United States? I think what changed was not only the social engineering of the Chinese immigrant and Chinese American population through American immigration policies, but the way that Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans have been positioned as being not Black in this country. And so that’s certainly one function of Asian Americans as a so-called model minority. Who are we a model to? We’re a model to Black and brown people and indigenous people to say, “Look, this country is not so bad. If the Asians can do it, why can’t you do it?”
And so it’s a very temporary reprieve, I think, for Asian Americans and Asian immigrants to be positioned as being positive immigrants or positive role models in the United States because again, the situation can change extremely quickly. So for example, with affirmative action, Asian Americans have been positioned as being victims of affirmative action. But I’m pretty sure that once affirmative action, if affirmative action is completely abolished and we start to see larger and larger numbers of Asian Americans in the college ranks, the sentiment against Asian Americans will accelerate in that situation.
Jonathan Bastian:
If you’re just joining us, my guest this hour is Viet Thanh Nguyen. He’s the author of The Sympathizer, and we’re discussing his latest memoir called A Man of Two Faces. We’ll be back with part 2 of our conversation after the short break. Stay close.
Steve Chiotakis:
Thanks for being with us on 89.9 KCRW, Sunday morning, easy like Sunday morning. Didn’t Lionel Richie say that one time?
Arnie Seipel:
I think so.
Steve Chiotakis:
Yeah, The Commodore. Here we are.
Arnie Seipel:
That’s that essential music insight that you get from KCRW.
Steve Chiotakis:
It really is. It really is. I’m Steve Chiotakis. That’s KCRW’s Arnie Seipel-
Arnie Seipel:
Good morning.
Steve Chiotakis:
… alongside, and we are here asking for your support during our Spring Fundraiser. This is the time of Sunday morning where we are taking it, I was going to say, take it down a notch. We’re focusing on ourselves right now.
Arnie Seipel:
Take a breath.
Steve Chiotakis:
Take a deep breath, examine your life, which is right. It’s literally the name of the show, Life Examined, right here on KCRW with Jonathan Bastion. And only on KCRW. It’s only on KCRW. Again, we provide this service because if your past support to the radio station. You have given money to the radio station. Maybe you haven’t. Maybe you become a new member today. That would be great, by the way. But the money that we get from our listeners goes toward providing you programs such as Life Examined that you’re not going to hear anywhere else.
Arnie Seipel:
And if you can give $10, $20, $30, $50, if you can get there, especially if you can give monthly and just really keep the engine of KCRW going and really just invest in your community. And today, that investment will pay off even more because we have a challenge grant.
Steve Chiotakis:
We do have a challenge.
Arnie Seipel:
KCRW board member Shahram Delijani, he is putting up $25,000. He will match your donations today, only dollar for dollar. So if you give us $100, it instantly becomes $200 thanks to Shahram and Shahram’s generosity.
Steve Chiotakis:
And it’s so nice. Thank you, Shahram, and thank you for your contributions to the radio station. Hoping that maybe that 100 bucks goes to 200 bucks or whatever, or if you just set it and forget it.
Arnie Seipel:
That’s right.
Steve Chiotakis:
And like you said, 10, 20, 30, $50 a month, whatever you can afford, and put it on a credit card and become a sustaining member to KCRW. We also have an incentive, Arnie, and I think you know about this as well. This is the Hollywood Bowl sweepstakes that we’re doing, and everybody loves the Hollywood Bowl here in southern California.
Arnie Seipel:
Incredible.
Steve Chiotakis:
We partner with the Bowl every single year for KCRW’s Festival.
Arnie Seipel:
That’s right.
Steve Chiotakis:
Where we have six shows, wonderful shows at the Bowl. And if you donate this time around, you will be entered into the sweepstakes to win a box.
Arnie Seipel:
It’s really cool. It is. I wish I could.
Steve Chiotakis:
I’m talking about-
Arnie Seipel:
I wish I could join. I’m not allowed because I work here.
Steve Chiotakis:
No, I know. I know. We’re not talking about the bench. We’re talking about a box with three of your friends.
Arnie Seipel:
This is a VIP treatment at the Bowl. And you can bring three guests. It’s seating for four. And what are some of the shows that are coming up?
Steve Chiotakis:
Jason Isbell & the 400, it’s amazing. Reggae Night, which is always a lot of fun, especially the things that you smell at the Bowl. And Vance Joy, Grouplove.
Arnie Seipel:
That’s right.
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Back to Life Examined.
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Jonathan Bastian:
I’m Jonathan Bastion, back with Life Examined on KCRW, and joined by Viet Thanh Nguyen, USC professor of English and comparative literature and Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer, the basis for the new hit HBO miniseries. Today we’re discussing his memoir called A Man of Two Faces.
As we rejoin the conversation, I asked Nguyen about the art of writing and how he navigates exploring so many traumatic and painful periods in his life. Let’s shift gears and just talk about the process of you writing this book and a lot of the themes that we’re talking about today, which are identity and trauma and memory. There’s a wonderful anecdote in the book that you were sitting with a teacher, could have been a professor, and they more or less alluded to the fact that you may think you’re cool and okay and together, but you should seek therapy. You should get some help. And you use that as a way to say, “Well, I’m going to become a writer because maybe there’s a similar practice in there of therapy.” Can you talk about for you, how writing allows you to access trauma, almost allows you to sit as both the therapist and the client in that great psychological room? Could you explore that with us a little bit?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Maybe I would be a better writer if I had therapy. I’ll never know. I’m not sure. I think that for me, I’m the kind of person who thinks through his writing. And so it’s a long and slow process. I think it’s taken me, it took me somewhere around 25 or 30 years of struggling with writing before I finally felt comfortable enough with it to say I’m a writer. And by that, I meant that I had developed a sufficient kind of discipline and sacrifice to call myself a writer. I suppose anybody who sits down and starts writing, they call themselves a writer. But I always felt that to be a writer meant that I could do nothing else but to write. And that’s what I mean by a discipline and a sacrifice.
So for me, that discipline and that sacrifice, which took place over thousands and thousands of hours, partly involved the learning about the art of writing, all the various techniques and things like that. But it also involved just sitting with myself alone in a room for all that time, working with my imagination, playing with my imagination, but also understanding eventually that stories are not only about narratives and plots and themes and symbols and so on, but stories are also about emotion, about characters undergoing certain kinds of challenges and their responses to those challenges. And there was no place for those emotions to come from except within myself.
And how was I going to discover or experience those emotions? One way was through empathy, that sense of duality, that ability to try to project myself into somebody else’s character who was different from me and try to imagine how they would think and how they feel. And so empathy was really crucial, but the other element was looking within myself and seeing what it was that I was feeling, if I could feel certain things and I could project those feelings into my characters as well. And this was really, really challenging because my response to the refugee experience and seeing everything that my parents had gone through and coping with what it meant to be a Vietnamese refugee, Vietnamese American, Asian American in the United States and all the kinds of racisms and stereotypes that that involved, my response to all of that was to go become emotionally numb, to stop feeling these terrible feelings. And I didn’t understand that when I was 19 or 20. I just thought I was weird. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t feel love when I was 19 or 20 years old.
And so it took 20 or 30 years of growing up, becoming an adult, having human relationships with my wife and my children and my family, but also of struggling with the writing of trying to put this all into words. And I resist the word therapy when it comes to writing. I think there’s art and there’s therapy, and there’s nothing wrong with using writing or other forms of art as therapy. It can be very beneficial. But I don’t know that I want to be healed through my writing because if we think of writing as therapy and you’re healed, then there’s no more need to be a writer. Instead, I think that writing as art helps me certainly to understand myself better, but also to understand the world better. And in understanding the world and myself better, I see that we’re completely connected and interrelated.
And how is it possible to heal myself from the trauma when the world itself is still traumatized? All the various conditions that created my family and me and the refugee experience and so on, those are not finished. So what would it mean to heal myself when everything else is still troubled? And so as a writer, I certainly think that I, as an adult and a human being, I think I’ve grown and I understand myself differently, but I also see the writing as a way to continue to explore the damage and the trauma that still constitute the world that I live in.
Jonathan Bastian:
Yeah. Well, I love listening to this as both the host of this program and as a therapist myself. Because what I hear in the way you’re talking about this is though a story of personal transformation. There’s a difference in who you are now than the person you were at 19. You were using the word numbness, for example, or the inability to feel love. And that maybe what I hear again is that even if there was no sense of making peace with trauma or with your past, and I don’t even know if that’s possible sometimes anyway, but there’s a part of you now that’s able to go back and be with it in a way that feels safe or interesting, or at least you’re allowed to be there now and maybe you couldn’t be there as a 19-year-old. And in that way to me, the way you describe writing is quite therapeutic in the sense that there’s movement in a direction that feels like emotional health. Does that resonate with you?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think it does. And what I struggle with is that I’m a pessimist. And so whenever there’s any optimism, I’m like, “Oh, no, no. I don’t know if I’m optimistic enough for this.” But in some ways, if I think about my emotional journey as a person, for example, in 19, I never wanted to be a father. I thought, “Wow, I’m just not emotionally capable of doing this. I don’t even know if I can love another person,” and so on. And now I’m a pretty happy father and looking at my kids, they seem pretty happy with me. We’ll have to wait 20 years to see whether they want to write memoirs or not. I have no idea, but they seem happy with me.
And now I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a father and a son. My own father is 90 years old and he’s fading, and I’m in the middle between him and my 10-year-old son. And so there’s still plenty of material for me to work with as a writer and as a person. And so I think you’re right. I’m glad that I’ve moved on. Not moved on, but I’m glad that I have multiple selves that I can still talk about my childhood self and my young adult self, but I’m not only stuck with those selves. I can also think about my present self and my future self as a son and as a father. And I can see that my own relationship to these individuals in my life has changed over time, but also my own relationship to the world as well.
So for example, we talked about being Asian American, when I was 19 and I became an Asian American. I was very angry. I was like, “Why did no one tell me about all of these horrible things that have happened to Asian immigrants in the United States? Why did no one tell me about all the wars that the United States has waged in Asia and so on?” I’ve become a very angry Asian American. I am still an Asian American. I’m still angry in a lot of ways, but I think I’ve also, my sense of being Asian American has changed. I recognize now that being an Asian American is not a solution to our problems. Instead, it opens up new problems. So for example, what does it mean to be an Asian American and to claim this country? It’s great for our equality as Asian Americans, but in claiming this country, do we also claim all of the racism and settler colonialism and the way that we are complicit in taking away land from indigenous people?
So with every change in myself, it’s not simply a solution to what happened before, but it’s also an evolution to recognize that there’s new problems and new contradictions to deal with. And I think that’s a good thing. And so in the sense that writing has helped me to see the politics of my world differently but also the emotions of my own life differently, then yes, in that sense therapeutic. But also as you implied, it opens up new challenges and new problems that are interesting for me rather than allowing me to rest on my laurels as a supposedly whole and healed person.
Jonathan Bastian:
I’m also really struck just with the way you describe maybe not a totally fluid sense of identity, but the ability to occupy different identities, whether it’s that as a Vietnamese man or American, and how that in a sense maybe gives you a certain imaginative flexibility to write fiction. And to write fiction well is to embody different voices and people of different times or genders or races. And again, I think about you versus, say, a writer who I also love, Philip Roth, but who wrote about being a white Jewish guy for 40 years, and I love his books too. But that there is something of uniquely suited about the immigrant identity in terms of writing fiction, occupying these different empathetic spaces. Do you think that’s true?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
You would hope so. I’m also a fan of Philip Roth. I was thinking about him about five or 10 minutes ago because what I didn’t want to do as a writer was to write about being a Vietnamese American man for my entire life. I think I could do that. Philip Roth obviously demonstrated that you could do that for being a Jewish American heterosexual man, but I personally don’t want to do that. I would just find it so claustrophobic. But so there is something in me that wants to embrace and to be all these different kinds of identities. I don’t think that’s an inevitable result of being an immigrant or a refugee or a writer because I think there are a lot of immigrants and refugees who, going back to the authenticity question, want to be exactly who they are. They have an identity and they’re going to stick to it. They’re very rigid about it, even if they themselves have had to be mobile and had to move geographically and culturally.
And so it’s not an inevitable consequence of movement that one becomes mobile psychologically or emotionally or culturally. And likewise, with being a writer, just because a writer can be empathetic and inhabit different identities doesn’t mean the writer is going to be a good human being. They’re two totally separate skills. And so for me, I feel that I take seriously this intersection of politics and art and ethics. I want to be a good writer. And I think James Baldwin said, “I want to be a good writer and I want to be a good man.” And I think that I embrace that because for me, it’s not just about the art, although the art is really important. I want to be a good writer and a good artist, but I also want to be a good father and a good man and a good inhabitant of this world that we live in.
And so the challenge is to try to figure out how to do all these things at the same time, because in some ways, as I implied, you can be a good writer and a nasty human being, and that’s a temptation that’s there for those of us in the arts. What are we willing to sacrifice for the art? Are we willing to sacrifice love and relationships and humanity for the sake of producing great art? Maybe I’ll never be a great artist because I’m not willing to do those kinds of things, but I hope that it is possible to be empathetic and to be embracing of my multiplicity in all these different ways at the same time.
Jonathan Bastian:
Yeah. One thing that really jumped out to me in your memoir as well is are the role of these very quiet unsung heroes, which I think we could talk about your parents as. And for some reason, I kept thinking about the last lines of Middlemarch by George Eliot, and there’s this line I was able to pull it up, which is, “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that the things that are not so ill with you and me, as they might’ve been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.” And I think Eliot is getting to this idea that there are these people around us who have lived these beautiful quiet lives to help and to serve, but we’ll never know who they are but we all could pick them out in our own lives. And I feel like there was a way that you could talk about your mother like that who had passed away. Could you go on with that idea just a little bit?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, of course. I don’t think I’d be the person that I am without my parents and everything they went through and everything they did for themselves, but also for me and my brother and our family, and everything that they sacrificed. And I think about how their lives and their sacrifices had intended and unintended consequences. The unintended consequences are very ironic because my parents were business people, anti-communist, devoutly Catholic. And look at me. I’m a writer. I’m an atheist. I’m at least a socialist, probably more. And so how did that happen? Very unintended consequences.
But the intended consequences were that they never punished me for those things. Not that they knew half of what was going on, but what they did know about, the writing part and the artistic part, they never punished me for that. But more than that, their lives were a model for me. I never became a devout Catholic, but their sacrifice enabled me to become a writer because I watched them sacrifice in that grocery store 12 to 14-hour days every day of the week. And I don’t even do that much for my writing, but I try to. So their model of sacrifice was hugely influential on me as a writer.
What I will never forget is how my mother would always actually compliment me on my intelligence, on my good looks. And those are minor things. They may not even be true, but they gave me a sense of self-confidence and a sense of my own self-worth that I think has been enormously beneficial, because I know a lot of emotionally damaged children of refugees whose lack of validation by their parents or even worse has never left them. And so when you think about the quotation from Middlemarch, these quiet lives, these lives of goodness and virtue that have impacted us, I think of those very small gestures by my mother in addition to the great gestures of her entire life and her sacrifice. But those small gestures of just affirming me helped me become a writer. It gave me the confidence to withstand decades and decades of neglect and obscurity and rejection and all of that.
And then the consequence, the ironic consequences I discussed in the memoir is then that I became a writer who was capable of writing about her in ways that she may not have wanted. That contradiction of love and betrayal is something that I wrestled with in the memoir, I still wrestle with, and it will never leave me.
Jonathan Bastian:
Yeah. How do you sit with that now? Having this book out, knowing that there were things that maybe she wouldn’t have loved to have been written, what does that feel like now in you to just acknowledge that?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think about how to be a writer, my kind of writer, maybe a writer like Philip Roth, requires not just the empathy and the compassion and the sense of art that we’ve been talking about, but also maybe a sense of ruthlessness as well. And that’s a contradiction, right? To be a writer who wants to portray the world and people as they really are, you have to empathize with people but then you also have to show them in ways they may not want to be shown. That requires ruthlessness. That’s a real contradiction.
So there is no resolution to that. It’s just something that I think I have to live with as a writer and as a person and as a son, and potentially as someone who other people may write about. There’s a moment in my own memoir near the end where I say, I talk about my children and say, “Well, if they don’t like the way they’ve been portrayed in this book, they can write their own memoirs.” And that was my way of, if they ever decide to read this book, my way of giving them permission to be who they are and to do unto me as I have done unto my mother. I think that’s fair. I think that that’s what art requires, and I don’t think that’s irreconcilable with love and fidelity and loyalty to one’s parents and one’s loved ones. It’s just simply a contradiction that a writer like myself embraces and has to live with.
Jonathan Bastian:
Well, it’s been such a pleasure to be joined by Viet Thanh Nguyen. He’s the author of the book, a memoir, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. I really enjoy just spending this hour in hearing your story and thoughts. Thank you for joining us on Life Examined/.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Jonathan, it’s been such a pleasure.
Jonathan Bastian:
That’s it for this week. The producer of Life Examined is Andrea Brody. And a reminder that it’s listeners like you that keep this show going and allow us to explore all the questions you hear every week on Life Examined. So if you’re not a member, consider becoming one today. Go to kcrw.com/give and support Life Examined and all the other shows here at KCRW. I’m your host, Jonathan Bastion. Thanks as always for tuning in, and we’ll see you again soon. Take care.
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Credits
Guest:
- Viet Thanh Nguyen – professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at USC – @viet_t_nguyen
