The New Orleans Book Festival brings the world’s leading authors to Tulane University for a multi-day celebration of their works. The Festival features both fiction and non-fiction and convenes readings, panel discussions, symposia and keynote speeches. It provides an opportunity for outlets, authors and readers to interact with each other in one of the most vibrant and culturally diverse cities in the world
Watch video here and read below for transcript
Thi Bui:
Okay, now we can start. Viet and I know each other from a while back. I think it was right before he got very famous for winning the Pulitzer Prize that he blurbed my book, so I got in there just in the nick of time. Thank you very much, Viet. And then we’ve also done a few projects together, a children’s book called Chicken of the Sea, which I got to do with your son, Ellison, when he was only five, I believe. And my son was 13 at the time. They’re much bigger now. But we go back a ways, and so I think that’s why we wanted to start a little bit casual and reveal that we did go out drinking and karaokeing last night. That’s how I like to prepare for my book talks.
But I also have an inordinate amount of pages I have tagged here. And I’m going to try to keep it limited because I know our time is short, so I’m just going to cut to the heart of it, Viet. Why did you write a memoir? I think of you as this very intellectual dude who I followed on Facebook for your political opinions. They’re always so well articulated that then I’m like, “Great, now I don’t have to try to write something intelligent about this thing that’s upsetting me.” And you’ve also written, of course, academic books and dealing with the same questions that have perturbed me for my entire life. But you also do it in this very articulate, professorial way. You are, in fact, a professor. And then The Sympathizer very, very well known, very well lauded, also really hard to understand for a lot of normal people. And then now, you’ve got this memoir. And I remember when I wrote a memoir, you acted like you were never going to write a memoir, but now you’ve done it. Why did you write a memoir?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Okay, great. Let me just point out one thing, which is one of the other projects we did was for Thi’s paperback edition of The Best We Could Do. If you haven’t had it. If you don’t have it, you should get it because Thi did… Yeah, absolutely. But in particular, the paperback edition, because Thi wanted to do something special for that. So she interviewed me for that and then drew a cartoon that is the preface for The Best We Could Do. And it’s on the very important subject of my hair. Seriously, because I don’t know that, but we talked about. And so I thought, oh, I should pursue this autobiographical thing so I can talk more about my hair.
But what happened was I started… As you said, I’m a professor. And I became a professor because this was my compromise with my parents. My parents are Vietnamese refugees. They obviously wanted their kids to do things like become doctors and so on. My older brother became a doctor with degrees from Harvard and Stanford, all this wonderful stuff, and I became an English major at the University of Communists at Berkeley.
And I survived the refugee experience. My refugee experience wasn’t anything nearly as bad as what my parents went through because I was four years old when we became refugees. However, I witnessed my parents living the refugee life, running a grocery store in San Jose, California in the ’70s and the ’80s. I felt like I was an eyewitness to their trauma. And being an eyewitness to someone’s trauma is also traumatic too. It’s not the same, but it did affect me pretty deeply, and in ways that I did not understand. I thought I became very well-adjusted, and then I met my future wife, and we spent a little bit of time together, and I said, “I think I’m pretty well-adjusted, aren’t I?” And she said, “No, you are not well-adjusted.” Well, she proved to be right, as she always is, but it would take me about 20 or 30 years to figure out that my well adjustment was actually my way of just tamping down all forms of emotional sensitivity and nuance on my part in order to do things like become a professor and be very analytical and all this.
And so becoming a writer and writing The Sympathizer and other things was really my attempt to break away from all that analysis and to also be creative. And in The Sympathizer, if you’ve read the book, let me say this: There’s a TV series coming out in a few weeks from HBO or Max, and so if you haven’t read The Sympathizer, you never have to read The Sympathizer, you can just watch it on TV now. But that character of The Sympathizer is not me. He’s a half French, half Vietnamese spy who does terrible things. But what is in him that is me are autobiographical feelings and ideas just heavily masked under his character.
And the more I wrote, the more I realized that in order for my own writing to have any kind of power, the power comes not just from ideas and from stories and so on, but from emotions. And so the only place to find those emotions is inside of me. And so the more time I spent writing and the more time I spent going up and giving these kinds of talks and interacting with people and the more I was talking about the stories of my family, the more I realized, in fact, yes, I am deeply, deeply messed up by everything we had been through.
And so that was then the compulsion to write this book, A Man of Two Faces. And the only way I could write this book, because I did not want to write about myself, the only way I could really write this book was to pretend that I was the sympathizer writing as Viet Thanh Nguyen. And so that’s why it’s a man of two faces. He’s a man of two faces, I’m a man of at least two faces. It is definitely a memoir in the sense that it talks about my life and my parents’ lives and talks about some very intimate things. But I also had to do it my way as well, and so there is a lot of… The subtitle is deliberately A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, because in addition to the memoir, there is my version of US history and world history, which not everybody will agree with. And there’s a memorial. It’s also an act of mourning and grieving for my mother who passed away in 2018 after a long illness and struggle with mental health. Somewhere in the book, I say, “Writing is the only way I know how to grieve.” And so this was my act of grieving for my mother.
Thi Bui:
Whoo. I have so many responses to that, but I’m going to try to backtrack to this idea of the man of two faces and your resistance to doing anything the easy way or the simple way. And I just want to state the obvious about we’re both Vietnamese, we’re both writers, we’re both Vietnamese American, and then we have this subtitle under a panel writing the Vietnamese American story, which is a little bit like a trick question on a test. This is a trap. You’ve talked in other interviews about resisting the ethnic memoir. I think the problem is felt among many people, but people have different solutions to that problem. Some people say, “Well, I’m not ethnic, then. I’m just an author.” You have a different response to this problem of writing the ethnic memoir. Can you explain?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Sure. This is my interpretation of US history. You can disagree with me. We live in a country that is itself now a contradictory country. That’s why we have these very serious political cultural conflicts and divisions. But this is not a new contradiction. For me, the contradiction goes back to the very origins of what the United States is, how it was founded, which is as a country of freedom and democracy and also as a country built on enslavement, genocide, colonialism, and war. And there is no resolution to this contradiction, it’s just something… I think there is, but it’s far in the future, a utopian future.
But in the present, we have to live with this contradiction, that whole F. Scott Fitzgerald idea: The sign of a first-rate intelligence is to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time. And we live in a country in which a lot of people do not want to do that. They want to have this idea or that idea, but they don’t want to figure out how the two opposing ideas can exist simultaneously. What that means, in response to your question, is that for us to be Vietnamese Americans in this country is a living embodiment of that contradiction. Of course, then you have people saying, “I don’t want to be a hyphenated American, I don’t want to be trapped by history, I just want to start fresh. I want to be a human being.” And that’s the other side of things. And honestly, you can’t. You cannot do that. But it’s important to hold on to that belief that we should all be human, we should all be unmarked writers.
And yet, I’m constantly minded that I’m not an unmarked writer because I’m often introduced as a Vietnamese American writer. And I have no problem with that. Call me an Vietnamese American writer, call me an Asian American writer. But if you do that, then when you introduce Jonathan Franzen, you got to call him the white male American writer. It’s adjectives for all or adjectives for none. And we don’t live in that country yet. We don’t live in that country. We live a country that produces adjectives because it’s fundamentally built into our country that the adjectives are a sign of the legacy of history and racial and class and gender exploitation and everything else that is still a part of us. There is no simple answer to what you say.
And then so far as the ethnic memoir goes, when you hear the bare bones of my family’s story… And many of you will have a narrative already ready to hear my family’s story. My parents were poor. They grew up in a divided country that was war torn by colonialism and things like this. They fled twice, lost their fortune, rebuilt their fortune, came to this country, had sons who became very successful, and they retired wealthy. And if you were to hear that story, I think many Americans’ reactions would be, “Good for you.” That is the classical immigrant American dream story. “Life sucked over there. We know that.” Those are the you know what countries. “And then you came here. And yes, we’re not a perfect country yet so we know that the immigrants and the refugees experienced racism. We’re sorry. We’re liberals. We recognize that. And then no matter what happened to your parents or your grandparents, look at you. You won the Pulitzer Prize. You are the walking embodiment of the American dream.” That’s how the book is going to be interpreted, even by very intelligent people. And so I felt like I had to write a book which acknowledged the actual facts of the story as I’ve just recounted them, but then also forced readers to confront the very formulas that they use to interpret the stories.
If you want to, there’s a whole section here where I tell you how to write the ethnic autobiographical bestseller. There’s five steps. You have to buy the book. I’m not going to tell you. You have to buy the book and read it or borrow it and read it. And I lay you out the five steps of how to write the ethnic bestseller, because I’ve read a lot of these so-called ethnic memoirs, and they’re all very heartfelt, and they all have very important human stories to tell, but they also fit a formula for acceptability for American audiences.
Thi Bui:
Yeah. Do you mind, can I give them just a tiny taste?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Sure.
Thi Bui:
There are some really laugh out loud moments in this. And I think the bonus points in that recipe for your ethnic memoir bestseller that made me really laugh was on translating or incorporating food into your memoir. Could I read from your book?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Sure. Go ahead.
Thi Bui:
That would be fun. For example, you could write, “I introduced my corn-fed Iowa-raised fiance to a bowl of my mother’s delicious pho, a beef broth noodle soup that every Vietnamese person loves.” And while this might pass some people’s standards, you do point out a really great point, which is no one ever wonders if the great white American male novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, ever wrote in an early draft of the Great Gatsby, “I offered Daisy a delicious sandwich, two slices of bread between which there’s something delicious.” I love that so much, I made you a valentine.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, wow. Okay, cool.
Thi Bui:
This is what you get when you invite a cartoonist to interview you about your book. Yeah, I made a lot of hearts in here. The thing is you’re a little bit prickly, and I just want to point that out, if it’s not obvious yet. You don’t portray yourself as a soft person, like a loving character. And you’re a little bit hard on yourself in your testimony about yourself. In your interviews, in your own writing, you’re quite tough on yourself. And I wonder if writing this memoir has broken you a little bit and made you a little bit outwardly softer at all.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, yeah, first of all, if you write a memoir and you’re not hard on yourself, you’re not writing a memoir. Why? Why? Why would you do that? Why would I write a book that just criticizes other people? It’s fun, but… Or exposes other people’s secrets. In order to write a memoir, you have to expose yourself. And we all have secrets of various kinds. We all have various things we don’t want other people to see.
And the powerful thing about a good memoir is that when I’ve read them and the memoirist reveals themselves, I’m like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe they said that part out loud,” because it’s true. I feel it too, I just never thought anybody else felt that as well. I think it’s a sign of a good memoir. You have to engage in the act of self-exposure.
But the issue, I think, in the United States but in other countries is that the memoir, it’s a very individualistic form. We pick up a memoir because we want the writer to spill their guts in front of us. And then after we’re done, we’re like, “Nice. I’m happy I’ve seen your guts all over the place,” and all of that. And for me, that does happen in the book, but there’s also a collective spilling of the guts as well because I want to eviscerate American history. I don’t want to just expose myself, I want to expose what I think of this country and other countries that I’ve been involved with also because… And that’s the part of the ethnic memoir, the so-called ethnic memoir, that so-called non-ethnic readers don’t want to hear. They want to hear the ethnic memoirist expose Chinese patriarchy or footbinding or how awful Asian fathers and men happen to be without connecting it to whatever’s happening in this country.
That’s something this memoir refuses to do. And it does it with, hopefully, some good humor. If you get to the end, there’s a whole page of one star reviews of The Sympathizer that I took from amazon.com. I have a sense of humor about myself. And I confess that I read my amazon.com reviews. And I confess that the worst kind of amazon.com review or Goodreads review is not the one-star review, it’s the three-star review where it’s like, ugh, what? They actually offer critical assessments that I don’t like, but the one-star review is hilarious. It’s like, “This is disgusting. And this won the Pulitzer Prize?” And all this kind of stuff. And so I tell the story of The Sympathizer in one-star reviews. I think it’s hilarious.
Thi Bui:
Yeah, the last one is amazing: One star. Good book.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, one-star. Good book. But you said am I softer now as a result of writing?
Thi Bui:
Yeah. Are you a bit softer, you think?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, definitely. I’ve been tenderized by writing my own memoir. No, it’s true, it’s true, it’s true. It’s been really interesting becoming a writer because when I wrote The Sympathizer, it’s actually a pretty funny book, if you bother to read it.
Thi Bui:
It is.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
But most of my friends, up until that point, never thought that I had a sense of humor because I’m a very serious person. And they’re like, “Wow, Viet had a sense of humor, and he’s making these awful scatological jokes and things like this in The Sympathizer.” It’s like I’ve always been doing it in my head the entire time. That brought out the sense of humor in me, the fact that The Sympathizer and its sequel, The Committed, are very satirical, vulgar novels.
And this book is satirical and vulgar, but it’s also got a lot of tenderness in it. That was actually really hard, really, really hard for me to do that. And it must have worked because the Financial Times just published this profile they did with me, and the writer’s first paragraph is to say he comes off as this hard, analytical, intellectual kind of person, but after spending two hours with him, I realize at the core of it all, he’s mush. And so there it is. I’ve been working to be more vulnerable.
And I think when I was growing up and well into my adulthood, I thought of vulnerability as weakness; and it was not something to be betrayed. In order to survive in academia, for example, if you betray vulnerability, you’re dead. That was why I internalized. In order to survive the refugee experience, survive academia, survive the meritocracy of American culture, I had to be invulnerable. And then I would encounter people who were vulnerable, and it made me very uncomfortable. Other people’s vulnerability made me very uncomfortable.
Thi Bui:
I could tell.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, you? Really? How.
Thi Bui:
Well-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Still?
Thi Bui:
No, no. You’ve gotten softer.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, I’ve gotten softer, right?
Thi Bui:
Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
[inaudible 00:17:26].
Thi Bui:
But when I asked you about your hair, that was a euphemism.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Really?
Thi Bui:
Yeah. Well, because your hair is very hard and polished. Mine is not.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I didn’t get it. I was like-
Thi Bui:
I would like it to be sometimes.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I thought we were just celebrating my hair, but you were actually exposing me. Yeah. But I’ve discovered that being vulnerable actually requires a lot of strength for you to expose yourself emotionally to other people. And it’s an act of giving, I think, to be vulnerable in many circumstances. And so not to be too sentimental about it, but I think my course as a writer and as a husband and as a father has led me to recognize the strength in vulnerability, the strength in love, the strength in giving, all kinds of things that I would’ve completely dismissed when I was 21 years old.
Thi Bui:
Again, I think you’re being a little bit harsh on yourself. I think sometimes when you are so successful and have really put yourself out there a lot and people put you on a pedestal a lot, and it’s not your fault, you get a lot of haters. And I’m always out there defending you, saying, “You don’t know how nice this guy is and how giving he has been to other writers, me included.”
I was noticing that you never used the words trauma or healing in your own memoir, but I was thinking to myself, wait a minute, you used that in your blurb for my book. You said it was a book to break your heart and heal it. He used the word heal, so you pushed that on me. And I’m like, “You heal people.” You are such a skeptic, I think, about your own ability to love and show emotion. And you’re skeptical about wholeness. And I actually made a little heartbreak Valentine for you because I was so sad to read that. I was like, “Really? You don’t expect a return to wholeness? You don’t believe in the wholeness or authenticity?” Does that mean no healing for Viet?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, wow. It literally is a broken heart. Okay, I’m going to leave it right here. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Well, it goes back to the idea of contradictions and of paradoxes. And again, when I was in college and I was at Berkeley and everything, I wanted absolute clarity. I wanted revolution, I wanted linearity, I wanted clear solutions. Everything was very simple for me then, as I’ve looked at the world’s very complicated problems and as I hit away from my own complicated problems. And so now, I just feel that I think it’s important for me to be able to embrace paradox and contradiction and to realize that I’m not going to untangle all of these things.
And so I can hope for healing and yet also believe that it’s also impossible in certain ways. And by that, I mean some people… Again, the memoir elicits these ideas from readers oftentimes that, yes, people write memoirs because they’ve been traumatized. Why write a memoir if you haven’t been damaged horribly in some way? We don’t want to read about your happiness. Okay, no one cares. Then you’ve been damaged horribly in some way, and you write the memoir, and then people expect healing out of that. It’s a very American thing. We’ve gotten over it. We’ve treated ourselves and all of that.
And in some ways, I believe in that. I believe that’s possible. I hope so. I’ve met lots of damaged people, and for whom I hope that they get healed or their children do and so on. I do believe in that possibility. For a lot of people, the damage is not just individual. It could be the case that you had a really screwed up parent, et cetera, and they did some terrible things to you and vice versa. And so maybe you could heal that. But for a lot of us, for a lot of people, the damage is collective as well as individual. We have damaged families, we have damaged parents, we have damaged communities, not because these individuals are themselves inherently screwed up, but because history messed with them. They were subjected to war, to colonization, to displacement, all these things that they had no control over.
And so the memoir is partly about… And when I look at my mother, for example, and I just don’t know whether she was damaged because she survived 40 years, literally 40 years of colonization and war from the 1930s to the 1970s or whether it was something individual within her psyche that was broken, and that even without the war, she would’ve ended up the way that she did, visiting a mental facility three times in her life. I don’t know. And that’s the mystery. That’s the mystery that the book cannot resolve. And what that means is that individual healing is… I would’ve loved for my mother to have been healed, and she wasn’t. But the conditions, the collective conditions that created a refugee community that messed up millions of people, those conditions haven’t gotten away. And so I’m concerned that the language of individual healing is the deceptive. It allows us to feel that catharsis of you got over your problems, therefore everything is fine in the world when the world remains broken. And so that’s what the book is also about, again, confronting the difference and the overlap between our individual brokenness and the collective brokenness of our communities.
Thi Bui:
I love it when you write that the solution to colonization, it’s not self-healing necessarily, it’s decolonization. Can you explain what decolonization is exactly?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Again, we as a country, some of us, many of us recognize that we’ve had enduring problems around race and capitalism and gender and patriarchy and all these kinds of things. And we have a ready-made language now to address those things: diversity, equity, inclusion, and so on. Which I’m deeply cynical about, the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I’m deeply cynical about it. And yet at the same time, these terms still have a lot of political meaning because now we have a huge backlash against DEI. Exactly. Somebody’s taking it seriously out there, that DEI efforts are meant to completely undermine American society. And yet, from my perspective, DEI doesn’t go far enough.
When I say decolonization, I think about the fact that for me, when I look at the United States, my way of understanding our country is that it’s inseparable from colonialism. America as a whole, the vast idea of America, not just the United States, but America as a whole wouldn’t exist except for European colonization. That’s a process that took half a millennia at least. And it’s something that is not passed. My interpretation of the United States is that we are in fact a settler colonial country, by which I mean, and many others mean that settlers who did not live here, came here, took over, took over everything and built this country that we live in. And many of us derive enormous privilege from that, including someone like me.
And this is part of the contradiction. I came as a refugee to this country. And if you come as a refugee or you have any kind of so-called minority identity, it’s really easy to be tempted to dwell on your own victimization. And the paradox is that, for Vietnamese refugees who come here, many of us have been victimized in various ways, or our parents have been. And yet we come here, and those of us who become citizens and who become successful, we participate in all of the other privileges of being a part of a settler colonial country built on the sufferings of Indigenous peoples and colonized peoples and enslaved peoples and on the lands that we have conquered as a country in which are now ours. That paradox doesn’t go away. That paradox is still with us.
And so when I think about a name for a political project that I want to be engaged in, empowerment or diversity or representation or inclusion, they’re not enough. They’re important in the short term because I want to be included too. You do. I’m here. I’m included. I’m here. I have all these privileges. But for me, the larger framework is decolonization because in order for us to… Go back to that idea of the more perfect union, what does that even mean? If we genuinely take that seriously, it means decolonization. It means centuries and centuries of effort to undo the centuries and centuries of exploitation that has created this country in the first place. I think it’s a hard thing for many people to face.
Thi Bui:
It would mean giving up power, for some people, and they don’t want to do that. But I guess there is a hopefulness that I sense in you, in spite of everything. Would you say that you’re an optimist about this project?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s going pretty far. Yeah. No, I’m writing these lectures for Harvard that I’m delivering, and the last lecture is on the joy of otherness. And I started off by saying, “This is such a hard thing to write about because I have to talk about joy or optimism and so on.” And so I would say, no, but here’s where I’m mushy. I am an optimist, but I’m only about a 10% optimist. If it’s like a cocktail, that’s like the equivalent of the vermouth you put into a martini. A lot of me is still pessimistic because obviously the struggle is very, very real. The struggle is very, very hard to carry out this project of decolonization that I’m thinking about.
But I’m an optimist in the sense that I look at human history, at least the part that we can remember, and I can look back and think, wow, 1,000 years ago, we, as human beings, were killing each other because we lived in different villages or different towns. Those were our identities on which we were going to organize and murder other people. And now we do it at the level of the nation-state. I’m like, “Well, that’s pretty depressing.” And it seems insurmountable to imagine a world in which nation-states are no longer the primary ways by which we organize our imagined communities. And so I’m optimistic in that sense, that 500 or 1,000 years from now, if we survive nuclear war and everything else, climate catastrophe, yes.
Thi Bui:
Okay. Let’s talk about kids for a second. I think the way that I find a little bit of hope on hard days where it’s really difficult to see the point in getting up and going through the day, I think about the seasons. You go through winter, but then eventually it’s spring again, and spring is pretty great. And I think that the children that come into our lives bring this feeling of springtime back again. Can you talk about becoming a father and the ways that it has probably made you mushy to be a father, but also maybe the ways in which it has triggered certain memories in you of when you were a child?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. I never wanted to become a father. And I’ve told my children that, so I’m not betraying a secret or anything.
Thi Bui:
Already messing them up.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. And I remember when I realized, oh, I’m going to become a father for the first time, I thought… And I was in the middle of writing The Sympathizer, the first draft. And I thought, ugh, my life is over. And the arrival of my son was the literal deadline for finishing the book. I finished the book three days before he arrived. And then I revised it over the next three months while he was just a blob lying on the futon in his mom’s office. I had the night shift, so I would revise the novel until 3:00 in the morning. And then anytime he stirred, I would stick a bottle formula in his mouth. He loves this story, by the way. He loves it. He’s like, “Oh, that’s why I’m so fat,” or, “I was so fat.” Yes, you were so fat, because that’s how I pacified you. And then at 3:00 AM, I would be done with my writing, and then I’d sip on my formula, which is single malt scotch, until his mom woke up at 5:00 and took over. That was the beginning of my experience of care for another person besides my wife. And this realization, of course, that as parents we’re responsible for these new people.
And it did have an effect on me. I think I discovered that… Look, when I was growing up in my parents’ refugee household, I felt numb. I felt emotionally numb. And I talk about it in the book. And I found it impossible to say, “I love you.” And that’s a very common Asian stereotypical kind of a story, but it was also deeply rooted in this emotional numbing that I felt that I subconsciously had to do to survive what was taking place in this refugee community. And so one reason I didn’t want to become a father was because I thought I wasn’t going to be able to love somebody. And I was deeply, deeply afraid of that and that I would really mess up this other person. And so it’s been a real amazing experience for me to discover, in fact, I am capable of loving my children and other people and other children as a result of that. That was an emotional experience that I never thought I would have, so I’m grateful in the end for being forced to become a father.
And you’re right, and in that I find optimism. I find optimism. We’re all going to die, and some of us will leave children behind. And let me say this: I am not trying to be sentimental. I’m not trying to moralize here. I’m not trying to tell people in this room, “Get married or partnered up and have children.” I’m not saying that. If you want to stay single and childless, good for you. And in fact, some of you who have become parents probably shouldn’t have become parents. Honestly, if you go by the statistics, something will go wrong for some percentage of these parental-child relationships. I don’t know how ours is going to turn out, but so far so good. But that’s just for me. And so having children does make me more aware of my mortality and these questions about the afterlife and so on that I have to confront and also makes me a little bit more optimistic.
I just finished a children’s book. It’s going to come out in May. It’s called Simone, named after my daughter. And it’s about a Vietnamese American girl who confronts wildfires that force her to flee from her house. And it ends not with her house burning down but with optimism that, even in the face of this climate catastrophe, she finds hope in the stories of her mother and in the artwork that the little girl does as a way of coping with the situation that she finds herself in. For the sake of my children and children in general, I do think that I’ve become a little more optimistic.
Thi Bui:
I’m going to poke at you a little bit here because you do talk about it in your book. Can I get a sense of who has read the book already? Okay.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Nice.
Thi Bui:
The memoir, the memoir. Yes. Okay. Well, I won’t spoil it for the rest of you, but there is a really fascinating shift in perspective from first person. The first 18 pages are written in the first person, and then there is this switch over to the second person, which lasts for the whole middle section. The whole third of the book is written in the second person, and it gets very political. It sounds like your Facebook rants, but very articulate. And it’s about America and all that stuff, and it’s brilliant. And then it gets vulnerable again at the end. I’ve heard you say that you have to earn the privilege to cry with him, so I feel like the middle section is making people do the work of getting back to the emotional part. But the shift back to the first person is so interesting, and that’s where I feel like it gets soft again.
But I noticed when the shift happens, it’s in a moment that would otherwise be, by a lesser author, be called a traumatic childhood memory. You don’t call it that, you just give us what happened. You were at home and your parents, who were working overtime at the grocery store that they ran in San Jose, were shot in a robbery. And your brother came home to tell you that. And your first reaction was perhaps to laugh. You don’t really remember. And you were very little. And then he asks you, “What’s wrong with you?” And then in that moment, you stop writing in the first person and you start talking in the second person for a long time. And that to me was so powerful as just an illustration of how it happens.
In another part, you talk about how when Ellison, your son, was, I think, four years old, that’s when you remembered this other memory of yours from when you were four years old. Has the experience of becoming a father also changed you as a writer then by unlocking these core memories that maybe you tucked away because they were just too painful?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, when my brother told me the news, I was watching cartoons. And it was Scooby-Doo Christmas cartoons. It happened on Christmas Eve of all times. And so, yeah, I remember just not being able to react. How do you react to that news? And of course, a human being would cry. That’s what I thought. A human being should cry at this moment. And so when my brother says, “What’s wrong with you?” He didn’t mean anything negative by it, but to me, that stayed with me. There is something wrong with me. I am not capable of reacting in a humane fashion to this horrible thing that has happened to my parents. And that was just a symptom of many other kinds of moments of me shutting down emotionally in the face of watching my parents undergo various kinds of struggles.
And I think that the reason why the book goes into second person for a long time is because that’s part of a traumatic experience. You’re disassociated from yourself. And so I went through decades of being disassociated for myself without realizing it, and I needed to… Again, the only way for me to write the memoir was actually inhabit that experience of looking at myself from the outside.
And then by the end, I guess you could say there’s wholeness because I returned to the first person in the last third of the book to talk about my mother’s illness and her breakdown. And that’s the part that most people ironically love the most because that’s the part where the book fulfills its memoiristic design. Again, you pick up a memoir in order to go into the emotion. You want to feel the pain. And ironically, it’s someone else’s pain you’re feeling. And I’m willing to give it to you, but as you said, I did not want the reader to start there because I felt that, again, that would just be me giving into the demands of the memoir audience. The memoir audience is a very demanding audience. We want you to suffer and we want you to expose your suffering, and we want to feel better after reading about your suffering. Fine. Okay, you’ll get it, but you’re going to get my version of how my family ended up here in the first place.
Thi Bui:
Yes. I have so many more Valentine’s to give you, but I do want to give the audience a chance to ask you questions as well. I just wanted to give you this one because you have a lot of things you like to critique, but you had such a lovely description of the artist colony where I got to meet your child and where the idea for Chicken of the Sea was born. I’m just going to give you this to hold. You describe this colony as, “Where one can experience what socialism probably feels like or should feel like, which is to say a kinder version of capitalism with a wealth of resources and choices, minus the exploitation, greed, and soul-crushing alienation as well as a kinder version of communism with a commitment to justice and collectivity, minus the paranoia, secret police, and re-education camps, allowing one to be creative, playful, and free.” That should be their description under their-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, yeah, it’s perfect. Yeah.
Thi Bui:
On their website. And I also have an interest in utopias. I know that they are probably temporary because, as you also write in this book, humans will find a way to mock up anything, but maybe-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s not the word I used.
Thi Bui:
No. I don’t know if I’m allowed to cuss here, but I guess even if they’re only temporary, even if we all die, we can still strive for these utopias. And I think this is where you and I share a similar optimism and bit of activism sometimes in what we choose to put our energies into, I guess. I don’t know, what would you like to see more of?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think if we lived in a world in which everyone had the opportunity to have sabbaticals and attend artist colonies, we’d be better world. I don’t know how many of you had the chance to be in an artist colony; it’s pretty amazing. But that should not be a privilege for the artist at the behest of a wealthy donor. That should be the way our society operates.
And so I think maybe the last note I will end on with this book is that it’s a playful book in the best way. In other words, to be a writer for me is to be playful. And to become writer has been a process of me trying to actually take apart decades and decades of learning how to become an adult. You learn to become an adult, you acquire all these rules and conventions and boundaries and the game, et cetera, et cetera; you may be very good at it. Then I look at my children and I’m like, “They don’t have any rules,” which is extremely irritating sometimes. However, it also is incredibly playful. They just want to play. And their imagination is boundless. And that is a wonderful thing. And so the paradox for me as an adult, as a writer is how do I still live within certain kinds of rules but also achieve that childlike playfulness as well? And so even though this book has some very serious topics and everything like that, if you read it, I think it’s very playful because I try to disregard all kinds of rules.
Here’s the last thing. And I draw a lot of inspiration from poets in the way this book is written, but it’s not poetry. But poets have no rules. When you pick up a book of poetry and the poet does something weird, you’re like, “Yeah, the poet. They’re a poet; of course they do weird things.” But prose… For example, when I wrote The Sympathizer, there’s no quotation marks. I can’t tell you, this is the one biggest complaint readers have had. “Why are there no quotation marks?” I’m like, do we go around saying, doing this all the time? It’s just a stupid convention that we have come up with. And prose writers are bound by all these conventions. If you deviate just a little bit, suddenly you’re an experimental avant-garde writer. I am not, I am just being playful in this book. And we should all have the opportunity to be playful.
Thi Bui:
Here, here.
Speaker 4:
Okay, we might have time for one or two audience questions. If you can raise your hand and I’ll bring you the microphone.
Speaker 5:
Thank you. Thanks for your talk. It was very, very enlightening. I wonder if you could help me understand something I’ve wondered about for years. As you may know, it was at the basketball arena here at Tulane University that Gerald Ford announced the end of the US involvement in the Vietnam War. And almost a week after that speech, Saigon fell. And I was a student at Tulane in 1975 when that speech was made. And you have to believe that, as president of the US, he could have chosen anywhere in the country to announce that, make that talk. Why did he choose Tulane? Do you know?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I have no idea. I think, Mary, do you have an idea?
Mary:
Oh, no.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
[inaudible 00:41:01] question. Yeah.
Thi Bui:
A question. Okay. Yes.
Mary:
[inaudible 00:41:05].
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Sure.
Speaker 7:
She’s got a question.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
My guess. I’m sorry. My guess would be if he announced it at Harvard, people would pay a lot more attention. But, no. You asked. I answered. Yeah. Okay, sorry.
Speaker 8:
No, thank you, Viet. You mentioned audience, and that’s something I’ve been thinking about throughout your talk. You mentioned the memoir audience and what they’re looking for. And I’m curious what your relationship to audience has been throughout your artistic life, and especially now with this show and stepping into this very commercial world where, as you know, Robert Downey Jr. has been put at the center of your story, what that conversation was like for you and what advice you have for other creators who are grappling with this idea of who is this work for?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. I think the question of audience is, for me, actually a metaphor for our own behavior as individuals because when I started off as a writer, I was very conscious of audience. I was conscious of the fact that I wanted to write for Vietnamese Americans, but I also wanted to write for the New Yorker and editors and agents and reviewers who were mostly going to be white. I couldn’t get these audiences out of my mind. I think it’s a pretty good book, but it’s still a book written with attention towards whatever these audiences happen to be.
And I was so exhausted after writing that book. It took me 17 years of struggle to write it. And I wasn’t even sure it was going to get published, and so then I wrote The Sympathizer. And with The Sympathizer, I decided I’m going to write for myself. And I don’t care what anybody else thinks. And that was, I think, a moment that was very freeing for me. And the reason why I think it’s a metaphor for life in general is many of us spend our lives worried about audiences, like how are these people going to judge us? Et cetera. What kind of rewards and penalties can that bring? And then it’s freeing to just live your life for yourself. And so for me, it was very freeing to write just for myself.
And I’ve encountered other artists who have said that. Yeah, that was the breakthrough psychological moment when you seize caring about other people’s expectations of your work. That doesn’t mean that I gave up on the idea of audience altogether, but my idea of audience was that it was concentric. My first audience, after myself, would then be my wife, then my agent, then my editor, then Vietnamese Americans, then Asian Americans, then Americans, then the world. I understood that there was still a pragmatic concern, but my feeling also was that I got very lucky with The Sympathizer. But at the same time, the reason I got lucky was because I wrote it for myself. No one can predict that you write a book and then it becomes an HBO TV series. However, if I had not written it for myself, I don’t think it would’ve become an HBO TV series.
And so again, you get to that contradiction that now all of a sudden something that I wrote for myself is a $100 million production that’s going to go global. And a $100 million production based on two years of my life that no one cared about. That’s a kind of a fairy tale story, but I think that the roots are still the same, that as an artist, you still have to be committed to whatever your own inner vision happens to be. That’s the only authenticity I believe in is the authenticity of your own self and your own vision. I don’t believe in the authenticity of the community, I don’t believe in the authenticity of culture or anything like that because there’s so many different versions of that. There’ll be Vietnamese people who look at this TV series and will say, “It’s inauthentic,” and there’ll be others who will say, “It’s authentic.” And I can’t worry about that. But the book itself is authentic to my vision.
Now the problem is it’s then becomes amplified through a gigantic corporation and the marketing mechanisms. And Robert Downey Jr. is obviously the marketing mechanism. And I have no problem with that because literally the budget went up 50% when he signed on. That’s the lure. People are like, “Oh my god, it’s Robert Downey Jr.” And he’s been great. Props to Robert Downey Jr. Had lunch with him. He does a great job performing four roles in the movie… TV series.
However, if he’s the lure, once you turn on that TV series, you’re going to see Hoa Xuande, a relatively unknown Vietnamese Australian actor, in almost every single shot for seven hours. And you’re going to see a cast that’s 90% Vietnamese. And you’re going to hear a show that is… There’s a lot of English, but it’s at least 30% in Vietnamese. That’s the price to be paid at that level.
And that was the compromise that I thought that we could make because here for finally, after watching literally decades and decades of American takes on Vietnam and the Vietnam War and mostly white male and some Black male perspectives, you’re going to get seven hours of mostly Vietnamese people talking about Vietnamese things. Whether you agree with it or not is not the important part, it’s just the sheer presence of that much screen time devoted to Vietnamese people that I think will have a material, emotional, psychic impact.
Thi Bui:
I love a Trojan horse. Can I shout out one person? Actually, [inaudible 00:46:24]?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, yeah.
Thi Bui:
Yeah, yeah. We are running out time, but I just want to shout out, in the spirit of narrative plenitude that yet always talks about a great Vietnamese American book that was written here in New Orleans by a local author, E.M. Tran, Daughters of the New Year is amazing. And is has a really great, cathartic end. Hopefully the author’s in the room.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
He’s’ right there.
Thi Bui:
Eh.
Speaker 9:
Yay.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thanks so much, Thi. It was really a wonderful conversation. You know me so well. And thanks to all of you for being here today. Thank you.
Speaker 9:
Thank you so much to our panelists.
