Simon and Rachel speak with the novelist and academic Viet Thanh Nguyen. Born in Vietnam, Viet came to the United States as a refugee in 1975. He completed a PhD in English at Berkeley, moved to Los Angeles for a teaching position at the University of Southern California, and has been there ever since, now as a chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity. Viet’s first novel, “The Sympathizer”, published in 2015, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became a New York Times bestseller. HBO also turned “The Sympathizer” into a TV series in 2024, directed by Park Chan-wook. Viet’s other books include “The Committed”, a sequel to “The Sympathizer”, “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War” (a finalist for the National Book Award in non-fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award) and “Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America”. We spoke to Viet about branching from academia into writing fiction, “The Sympathizer”, and “The Cleaving,” an anthology of work by Vietnamese diaspora writers.
Transcript:
Simon Akam:
Hello, and welcome to Always Take Notes.
Speaker 2:
Are you a professional writer struggling with financial difficulties? The Royal Literary Fund is here to support you. At the RLF, we believe that every writer deserves a chance to thrive, no matter what life throws your way. We offer a variety of hardship grants tailored to help professional writers in need, whether it’s short-term relief or ongoing support. Perhaps you’re dealing with an unexpected expense, a drop in income or are facing challenges that make writing difficult, such as illness, disability, or are now relying on your pension. If you’re eligible, our grants team will walk you through our discreet and confidential application process, ensuring you receive the support you need. Visit RLF.org.uk to check your eligibility and enquire today. The Royal Literary Fund, we believe writers matter because writing matters.
Rachel Lloyd:
Hello and welcome to Always Take Notes. In this episode, we speak to the academic and novelist, Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Simon Akam:
We spoke to Viet about branching from academia into writing fiction, The Sympathizer, his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, and The Cleaving, an anthology of work by Vietnamese diaspora writers.
Rachel Lloyd:
It’s a great episode. We hope you enjoy it.
Simon Akam:
Viet, welcome to the show. It’s excellent to have you on the podcast. We wanted to start with The Cleaving, this anthology of Vietnamese diaspora writing that you’ve been working on. Could you tell us a bit about the project and how it came together and how you ended up getting involved?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Sure. First of all, thanks, Simon and Rachel, for having me. The Cleaving is this compilation of dialogues between Vietnamese writers in the diaspora, there’s about 35 or so writers in there. And when I say diaspora, I mean writers who live in the United States, Canada, Australia, France, I believe Germany, Israel. And that reflects the fact that after the Vietnam War, something around four million people left Vietnam to migrate to other countries, or they were born in other countries. We have a diasporic population of about four million odd people, and they’ve been pretty good at becoming writers. This group of 35 writers in the book isn’t even a total accounting of all those writers.
This book comes out of this conviction that I have, and many others that I’ve worked with, including the co-editors, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and Lan Duong, that it’s so crucial for Vietnamese people and everybody to tell their own stories, especially given that most of us grew up in the diaspora, where we were quite aware that our stories were not being told, that whenever we appeared in Western stories, like Hollywood movies, our presence was erased or distorted in ways that are actually really damaging. It’s not just a matter of stereotype, but I grew up, I think, significantly psychically damaged by the kinds of images that Western media and literature and political discourse had about Vietnamese people, whether in Vietnam or outside.
So as a college student, I had this tremendous sense of conviction that I wanted to tell Vietnamese stories and I wanted to help others tell Vietnamese stories, and so that meant that I didn’t just want to be a writer, I wanted to also try to foster a sense of community among the arts and among Vietnamese people, that eventually led to this book.
Rachel Lloyd:
How did you find your contributors, and what kind of steer, if any, did you give them in terms of what you were looking for for the collection?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
One of the fun parts about being a writer for me who likes to engage in community organizing is that eventually I get to meet a lot of writers. So I think I know most of these writers personally in one way or another, some are friends, some are acquaintances. But I’ve tried actively to build a literary community just by reaching out, but also having my own podcast, where I interview writers and artists and so on. So that’s where the genesis was.
And also, because this arts organization that Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, one of the co-editors and I started, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, we put on a lot of events, residencies, writers conferences and speaking events and so on, and so we brought a lot of these writers together. And then, the real genesis was when we brought about 10 of these writers to this beautiful art colony called Djerassi in the mountains above Palo Alto, California. They came from France, Australia, the United States. And Carl Djerassi was a Stanford scientist who invented the IUD, and he used that money to build this really incredible resident colony, and that’s where the first dialogues started several years ago.
Simon Akam:
I thought it was the contraceptive pill, not the IUD, that he invented.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
You may be right. I heard IUD.
Rachel Lloyd:
Either way.
Simon Akam:
He was definitely a contraceptive pioneer of some sort.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah.
Simon Akam:
In your essay at the beginning of the anthology, you talk about this burden of representation, this idea that a minority writer is often expected to speak for the entire community. Could you tell us a bit about that maybe in your own experience and where that stands with regard to the Vietnamese diaspora community?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, I think the idea of the burden of representation has been well-discussed. Pretty much every so-called minority community, however you define minority, has felt that burden. For me, growing up as a refugee and as a so-called minority in the United States, feeling inarticulately my sense of difference from much of American society, I experienced what I now call narrative scarcity, which is when almost all the stories that I encountered were not about me. And that could be fine, I would go to the public library, I would read tons of books, none of them were about me. I was reading books by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and the English and Romantic and Victorian poets, and it was great. They weren’t writing to a Vietnamese refugee kid, and I still connected with them, and that was amazing.
But there were oftentimes occasions where I would encounter Vietnam explicitly in books and in movies and in journalism, news reports, photographs, things like this, and it was a dehumanizing experience. And that is what narrative scarcity is about, not only are almost none of the stories are about you, but when they do appear about you, they’re oftentimes unrecognizable to you as an individual. And then, when stories about you do appear, you’re excited, you’re like, “Oh my God, here’s a story about us.” And oftentimes, these stories are not very good from an artistic perspective or from a representational perspective.
And if we live under conditions of narrative plenitude, when almost all of the stories are about us, that doesn’t matter, because if you encounter a story about yourself that does not look like you, you don’t like it, it’s a distortion, you can literally walk away and have a thousand other stories. There’s no burden of representation. But when there’s very few stories about you, those few stories then carry that burden, and it’s a completely unfair burden. We shouldn’t be holding artists and writers to this kind of a standard, but unfortunately, when there’s narrative scarcity, that’s what happens.
Rachel Lloyd:
And you wrote about this in your memoir, but I wondered if you could share with listeners some of the stories that you encountered as a child that you found particularly difficult to stomach.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, there were so many. Sometimes the stories are very personal. On the playground, for example, my name is Viet, so a common question from my classmates, “Is your last name Nam?” Or, “Did you carry an AK-47 and fight in the Vietnam War?” Those are stories that I encountered on a daily basis from my classmates. But then, turning on the TV and watching Vietnam War movies, or going to the movie theater and watching these movies as well, from Rambo: First Blood Part II to Platoon to Apocalypse Now, these were the most common forms of stories about Vietnamese people that I saw.
And of course, our only role as Vietnamese people in these movies was to scream or curse or beg for help or die, be raped, be rescued, say thank you, that was normal. And it’s distorting when you see yourself and people like you represented that way, especially because I grew up in this Vietnamese refugee community where it was a completely different set of stories I heard about Vietnam and the war and ourselves. It didn’t mean that our stories made us look good, our stories were complicated, and sometimes they were about us as victims or us as human beings, and sometimes there were stories about us doing terrible things. But that’s the full complexity of humanity that I knew about in the Vietnamese refugee community that simply wasn’t present in these other stories that Hollywood was telling, or even in literature by American veterans.
Simon Akam:
What do you think the significance of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war is for the way we talk about it and the way it’s discussed and represented in art?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’m sick and tired of it. My best known work, The Sympathizer, came out on the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, and actually, I did that very deliberately. We could have published that in 2014. I told my editor, “We’re going to publish it in 2015, because the world only knows Vietnam from the war. 40th anniversary of the end of the war, I’m going to get a lot of interviews about the end of the war.” That’s exactly what happened, I did 30 interviews in 30 days, barely talked about the novel, just talked about the Vietnam War. So that’s part of the burden of representation that I willingly take on and strategically take on, and there’s a lot to say about that from a Vietnamese point of view. There’s this whole diversity of Vietnamese perspectives, whether you are pro-communist or anti-communist or somewhere in between, that are just not captured by American and Western points of view.
That being said, 50 years later now, 10 years after The Sympathizer came out and the 40th anniversary, I am sick and tired of talking about the end of the war, because it means I have to respond to American and Western concerns about Vietnam and what it means for Americans in the West. Vietnam, if you go there, most of the people have been born after 1975, they don’t really, for the most part, care about the war or it’s memory. They want to move on and they want to be capitalists, for the most part. That’s a very complicated history we can spend much more time talking about. It’s not really something that America, the United States and the West understand very well, because again, we’re fixed in the past from this perspective.
And so, when people ask me now about the 50th anniversary, I say, “I think that the United States and probably the West learned all the wrong lessons from the Vietnam War.” On the one hand, you would think, given all we’ve just talked about in terms of Hollywood’s Vietnam War movies, that the United States understands this to be a bad war, that was true. That memory is now fading. I teach a class on the Vietnam War, I think all my students are born after 9/11, almost none of them have watched a Hollywood movie about the Vietnam War. So even that really poor sense of education that you could rely on 20 or 30 years ago is gone.
And so, what’s left? What’s left are these terrible lessons that the United States has learned. Number one, don’t interfere with wars of liberation and independence. Don’t sponsor genocide. Don’t kill non-white people. Don’t drop bombs on non-white people. Don’t give bombs to other countries to drop on non-white people. Don’t get involved in invading countries for which you have no plan except to kill hundreds of thousands of people, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those are the wrong lessons that the United States has learned and has built into its military industrial complex and the way that the United States looks at the world and tries to be a global hegemon.
The Vietnam War was an interruption to that, and now that has been smoothed over. And so, if you want to talk about the end of the war, that’s what we should be talking about, not what happened in the past, but what’s happening in the present in terms of the United States just having absorbed all these strategic and tactical lessons to try to wage better war, more effective war, from an American perspective
Rachel Lloyd:
With this collection then, how did you make sure that it had one eye on the present and one eye on the past?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think we have a diversity of viewpoints in there. There are some “older” writers, and I say this as someone who is now seen as an older writer, but there are people in there older than me, writers like Le Ly Hayslip and Mai Elliot. These were women who grew up in the thick of the war as teenagers and young women, and now they’re in their 60s to 70s. They have a very different take upon Vietnam, the history of the country, the war, the revolution, all these things, versus some of the writers we have in their 20s and 30s, who some of them were born in the United States, they didn’t witness the war directly. They’ve been shaped by the legacies of the war, as we all have, but many of these younger writers are much more interested in other kinds of issues besides war and the refugee experience and colonization.
So on the one hand, the book, The Cleaving, even the title itself is twofold, the cleaving splits us apart and the cleaving brings us together. And likewise, to be a part of the Vietnamese diaspora means that we should be allowed to be fully human in our complexity and tell all kinds of different stories. And on the other hand, we wouldn’t exist as a diaspora if it hadn’t been for war, colonialism, refugees and the like. So that’s the complexity that’s wrapped up in the very idea of The Cleaving.
Simon Akam:
We wanted to come back to the new collection in due course, but could we roll back now to your early life? So you were born in South Vietnam as it was in 1971, but you came to the US as a young person. Can you tell us a bit about that period of your life and some of your earliest memories as your family settled into a new and different culture?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, my memories begin in the United States in a refugee camp, 130,000 Vietnamese people fled the country in 1975, were settled into four refugee camps in the United States, and in order to leave those refugee camps, we had to have Americans sponsor us. My particular origin story is that there was nobody willing to sponsor all four in my family, so one sponsor took my parents, one sponsor took my brother, one sponsor took four-year-old me. And so, my memories begin howling and screaming as I’m being taken away from my parents.
And so, that was a defining feature of my life, and I didn’t talk about it very often before I started to write my memoir. And the reason why is because every single person who is a refugee, Vietnamese or otherwise, has a horrible story, and most of these horrible stories are much, much worse than what I just told you. So I approach my own origin story with a sense of humility that it’s not that big of a deal compared to people who lost relatives, survived combat, survived boat journeys, things like this, and were fully traumatized by those experiences. But becoming a writer, for me, means excavating my past and my origins to try to find the various kinds of emotional traumas and messes that turn me into a writer, and I have to say that being separated from one’s parents at four years of age when one can’t really comprehend why that’s being done, that can be traumatizing in a way that I denied to myself.
And so, my experiences after that were, number one, just becoming an American, growing up as an American kid in a Vietnamese refugee community in Harrisburg, in California, and watching my parents suffer and struggle, the refugee shopkeeper lifestyle, which was very difficult for them and difficult for me to witness. And the way that I coped with it, going back to that four-year-old experience, was to emotionally shut down, just to be completely numb emotionally. And I thought there was something wrong with me. I spent decades asking myself, “What is wrong with me that I can’t love people?” And it goes back to that four-year-old experience and to my survival tactics. And that, for better and for worse, gave me the requisite emotional damage necessary to become a writer.
Rachel Lloyd:
I listened to an interview with you somewhere where you said that memoirs are only written by people with trauma or narcissistic influences.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think so. Who in their right mind wants to write a memoir? You either want to sell something about yourself, if you’re a celebrity or a politician or a narcissist, and they’re probably all the same overlapping categories, or you’ve had some kind of difficult, terrible experience that has stuck with you and you want to try to make sense of it in some way. And for me, writing is, for better and for worse, my way of grieving, my way of mourning, my way of fighting, my way of thinking.
So I’ve fought through the most difficult elements of my life and of the way my life has intersected with the histories of Vietnam and the United States and my own parents, all of that through my writing. And writing the memoir, this book called A Man of Two Faces, a few years ago was probably the most difficult book I ever had to write. Writing a book is always difficult and bringing a book out into the world is always a challenge, but I never in my life have experienced the kind of gut-wrenching experience I had as I finished that book and thought about bringing it out into the world and having to talk about the things I just talked about with you.
Simon Akam:
And we saw that in the 1980s, you’ve written about having to go to Vietnamese Catholic Sunday school and barely speaking any of the language back then, how has it worked over time? Did you subsequently learn more Vietnamese?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, yeah. I think my relationship to language is complicated because of this refugee experience. I came at four years of age and I was fluent in Vietnamese, and when I look at my children when they became four years of age, they’re fully fluent, they can communicate and everything, so I thought I must’ve been able to communicate with my parents when I was four. And then, somehow by the time I was 10 or 11, I could no longer do that very well. Our range of conversation had shrunk drastically to food, education, religion, morality, upbringing, that was it, that’s all I could talk about.
So it was a language, for me, of shame and discipline. But it was also a language of intense emotion, because even hearing the Vietnamese language to this day brings all these deep emotions out of me, because I associate it with my parents and the difficult lives that we led, but also the intense love that was in that household, because my parents sacrificed so much to provide a life for my brother and myself and for everybody back in Vietnam that they were sending money home to. But for me to survive in the United States, I think I made a subconscious choice, but I didn’t articulate it, that I was going to commit to one language, and that language was going to be English. I don’t know exactly at what point I made that decision, somewhere between four and eight years of age, I think.
But my recognition that I was stuck in this country, I was in the United States, I was an American, for better or for worse, and my way of survival was going to be through mastering English, a foolish desire in some ways, but I think an understandable one. But also, it was a calculation that I couldn’t master two languages. Some people can, I don’t think I felt that I could. And so, I subconsciously decided, I’m going to sacrifice this native language of Vietnamese for this other language, English, that felt like a native language to me. And again, that was born out of that requisite emotional damage that came out of being a refugee and which turned me into a writer because I committed to English.
Rachel Lloyd:
We’ve talked about your early experiences watching film and television as a child, but were you interested in books from a young age as well?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, absolutely. I don’t remember when I learned how to read in English or even speak in English, but I came when I was four, and then the next thing I knew, I could speak English. So somewhere between four and six, I suddenly learned how to speak English, all due credit to the teachers that I had, but also just being thrown into the environment of a primarily white Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And my parents certainly did not teach me how to speak English or how to read in English, so that was all through school. I remember very early on, somewhere between four and six, spending time in the Harrisburg Public Library, my parents brought me there. I don’t know what they did because they weren’t going to borrow books in English from the public library. But they just dropped me off, I was in the library, and I was borrowing books and I was reading books in English.
And one of the earliest books that I remember was Maurice Sendak’s, Where the Wild Things Are. It’s a classic in the United States, I don’t know if it’s a global classic or not, about a boy fleeing from his home and going to this island full of wild things. I didn’t like it, I did not like it, I was scared by it, and I think it was because that was my life already. I was living among the wild things, and I didn’t need to see that in my childhood literature. But nevertheless, I was completely immersed in the world of books, because I think they provided me with an escape from the world that I was living in as a refugee, and they provided a sense of beauty that I didn’t have growing up. Books were much more important to me than TV and the movies, although TV and the movies were important too, books were always the first love, the first refuge. I never wanted to be a filmmaker or anything like that, I just wanted to be a writer.
Simon Akam:
You mentioned earlier the treatment of Vietnamese people in a lot of America literature and film about the war, do you think that there are some examples that do stand up? There’s some very celebrated “books” in the Vietnam War canon, things like Dispatches by Michael Herr or The Things They Carried, and I saw elsewhere you’d mentioned your changing feelings about Larry Heinemann’s novel Close Quarters. Both as you were growing up and now, what do you think about the canon of cultural response to the Vietnam War in the US?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think the classic example for me is still Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Chinua Achebe’s response to that. Achebe thought Heart of Darkness was a racist work, and yet that hasn’t really affected Heart of Darkness’s reputation as a major piece of art. And I agree, I think it’s both, I think Heart of Darkness is as a major work of art, and it’s also racist at the same time. Those things can exist simultaneously, and so I think that is the way that I would characterize a lot of American literature and film about the Vietnam War. And that’s not necessarily simply because it was about the Vietnam War. I’ve read works by Japanese writers about the Vietnam War, they’re not characterized by the same kind of racism.
So there was something very much about the American experience that was intensely racist that Americans brought with them from their own racist attitudes in the United States, and then combining that with a racist war, where it was necessary for Americans to see the Vietnamese in a racist fashion in order to kill them to the degree that Americans did [inaudible 00:23:13] Graham Greene in The Quiet American, that can be criticized as well. I wrote a whole senior thesis on The Quiet American using Edward Said’s Orientalism to look at the Orientalist aspects of The Quiet American. But it’s not a racist book in the same way that a lot of American literature is about the war in Vietnam. And that American literature that we’re talking about is written by very intelligent people.
So I have complicated feelings about a lot of that literature and film. So a movie like Platoon, for example, yes, it’s opposed to the brutality of American soldiers in the Vietnam War, but again, when you reduce Vietnamese people in a movie like that, or in Apocalypse Now, to simply being inarticulate victims or people speaking a language that other people can’t understand, it’s inevitably dehumanizing. More complicated works, like Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters, which you mentioned, is to me on the same scale as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I have a very complicated relationship to Larry Heinemann’s novel, and it’s not a novel that’s widely read or taught anymore, even though it won a major award when it came out.
I don’t know how it is where you’re at, but in the United States, audiences much prefer Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which is now a canonical American literary text taught in high schools and things like that, because I think a book like The Things They Carried, which is not a racist work, offers us a complicated metafictional way of understanding war. I appreciate that. But Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters is going to show us American soldiers, who are nice young men, we see them, and then they go to the Vietnam War and then they become monsters and they just end up raping and killing. It’s horrible, it’s horrifying. And when I was 12 and reading that book, I was very upset, because Heinemann doesn’t hold back, he just shows this horrifying, racist and sexist violence, and he doesn’t try to humanize the Vietnamese.
And then, when I read it as an adult getting ready to write The Sympathizer, I thought Larry Heinemann did the right thing, because this is one thing that art is supposed to do. It’s not supposed to give us comfort, it’s not supposed to give us metafiction, it’s not supposed to give us a way out. It’s meant to make us fully confront horror, that’s one thing that art can do. And so, I have an appreciation for what Larry Heinemann did in that book, and I think because he did that, it’s almost an unteachable book, because Americans, and maybe many people, don’t want to be fully confronted by that kind of horror.
Rachel Lloyd:
Do you see that as a recent development in the way that books are discussed, or do you see that as something actually that’s a bit more enduring?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think it’s pretty enduring. It goes back to that burden of representation idea. I think it’s perfectly logical that if you have grown up in a society where you feel stigmatized, erased, ignored, silenced and all that, that when you encounter yourself in supposedly great works of art in the canon and all that, it doesn’t matter that it’s the canon. In fact, it’s probably more offensive that it’s the canon in which you’re silenced than it is in a trivial work. I’ve read a lot of trivial works of Vietnam War literature too, where the racism and the sexism are bad, and I don’t care because no one’s going to read these books except a specialist like me. But reading a major work of art, in which you are silenced, distorted, erased and so on, that’s infuriating. And again, it’s a very common experience for so-called minorities or people who have been colonized or women or queer or trans people, when they encounter themselves in that way, they have a right to be upset.
Now, I think people legitimately have the right to their feelings and their opinions and their judgments in those kinds of situations. Does that mean that the work that they object to is not a great work of art? I’m not going to make a blanket judgment on that. I think that’s part of the tussle that we all have over trying to define what constitutes greatness or complexity and the like, so I’m not going to try to advocate for other works for other populations. But I will say because I grappled with Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters, I feel I can make this kind of a judgment and say, “That’s a great work of art, it’s going to survive.” Platoon, not so good. So I think we should be capable of making these kinds of qualified, aesthetic, political, personal judgments, but I give great license to people who refuse to do that.
Simon Akam:
How do you feel about the way that, say, Germans are depicted in a lot of the American or English-speaking art about the Second World War? Because they’re often also not treated as fully rounded people, for instance.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. For obvious reasons, even today, of course, the United States is still making movies about Nazis and World War II and all of that, and it makes Americans feel great, we’re not the Nazis. And so, that kind of moral simplicity and political simplicity totally serves the interests of the United States, because it allows us to ignore how we sometimes behave in ways that I would describe as being genocidal.
That being said, I think because we are at a moment in history where we’re many decades removed from the end of World War II and that living memory is almost, almost gone at this point, there is a little more flexibility for creating works of art that address the complexities of what it meant to be German. Zone of Interest would be the last major work in that way that definitely condemns Germans, but also shows their viewpoint, or at least one of their viewpoints, on what was happening during the Holocaust. That’s a mainstream major movie. I think that the United States still struggles with its capacity to fully confront the horrors that itself has done, and so the depiction of Nazis as the reliable bad guys has always been our way out.
Simon Akam:
Hello, listeners. You may remember that a few months ago, we made some improvements to our Patreon offering, refreshing our package of successful pitches for people who support Always Take Notes. Since then, we’ve been so delighted to see more people join up. We’ve loved hearing from you about how useful you’ve found the package and the podcast. But we’re really keen to keep expanding the benefits available to all the people who support us.
Rachel Lloyd:
So with that in mind, we’ve added 40 new pages of material to the package, including pictures to the New York Times, The Washington Post and the BBC. This means the whole compendium now runs to a whopping 160 pages. And we’re excited to announce that for people who contribute $10 a month, we’re also going to start releasing bonus mini-episodes. If you’d like to know what these will sound like, there’s a sample episode with Lee Child that you can listen to for free on our Patreon now.
Simon Akam:
Thanks to the help of our sponsor, Scrivener, the first 10 new sign-ups at $10 per month will receive a lifelong license to Scrivener, worth £55. This specialist word processing software helps you organize long writing projects, such as novels, academic papers and even scripts. We’re now down to eight of them left, so if you’re interested, check it out as soon as you can.
Rachel Lloyd:
These are just a few of the updates we’ve made to our Patreon offering. So if you’d like to find out more about how to get your hands on an ATN mug, suggest questions for guests or join a monthly call with us to workshop a pitch, head to www.patreon.com/alwaystakenotes. That’s www.patreon.com/alwaystakenotes.
Simon Akam:
And thanks so much again for all your support so far.
Rachel Lloyd:
If we could return to the chronology of your career now, can you tell us a little bit about your student days, and particularly the class taught by Maxine Hong Kingston that maybe didn’t go quite to plan?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I wanted to be a writer, I also wanted to be an activist, and I got to UC Berkeley, University of California at Berkeley, desiring a transformation for myself. I knew that inarticulately, I was escaping San Jose, where I’d spent my adolescence and felt very stifled, both by my family household, but also by the environment in San Jose, California, which I felt was very limited. And so, going to Berkeley was really… It felt like going home. The moment I stepped foot on that campus, I felt this is the place I’ve always wanted to be, and that meant both in terms of being this budding aspiring writer, who had really no idea what being a writer meant, and also someone with these burgeoning political convictions that were really facilitated by the intellectual and political environment at Berkeley.
And so, I was very lucky to get into my very first writing seminar, taught by Maxine Hong Kingston, who was this major Chinese American/Asian American woman writer, but also American writer as well, and it was very lucky, there was only 14 students in that class. And I got in on the basis of this nonfiction essay that I’d written for one of the local newspapers called Growing Up in White America, so I was a very angry young man, and Maxine Hong Kingston let me into her class. And she’s this very gentle person, a great writer, very gentle person, soft-spoken, and I was loud and angry and I wanted political and moral clarity about everything. And her work is very much about ambiguities, there’s clarity and conviction in her work, but there’s also a lot of ambiguity as well. And also probably not a coincidence that she’s a feminist and an Asian American woman, and this angry young man who had come out of an all boys Jesuit high school and had all kinds of unresolved issues around gender and masculinity and sexuality and identity.
And I was also staying up late at night doing things like putting up political posters on campus and organizing activities and getting arrested and things like that. So I was very tired in her class, and then every day I would go in, I would sit a couple of feet away from the Maxine Hong Kingston, and every day I would fall asleep. And at the end of the semester, she wrote everybody a letter, and in my letter, she said, “You seem deeply alienated and you should make use of our university’s excellent counseling services.” And I was like, “I’m not alienated, I have nothing wrong, I’m just tired. I don’t need to make use of any counseling services. I’m going to become a writer.” And so, that’s what happened. I never went to seek psychiatric or emotional help and I did become a writer. That’s not necessarily the way I should have done things, that’s the way I did things.
But I took what I wrote for Maxine Hong Kingston, I put it into a box, I didn’t look at the box again for 30 years. And then, during the pandemic, I opened that box and I reread what I’d written for Maxine Hong Kingston, and I realized I was deeply alienated, I was really messed up. I was going through all kinds of things that I was writing about, and I was a bad writer, and I was bad at dealing with my own issues. And the major issue that I was writing about was that my mother had gone to a psychiatric facility, I wrote about that in that essay, and then I put it away and I forgot about it for 30 years. So she diagnosed me correctly, and in my own stumbling way, I worked through my own issues, it took me 30 years to do it, to come back to that essay that she identified as indicative of this deep problem that I had, and then I finished that essay by turning it into a book.
Simon Akam:
Did you subsequently seek psychiatric or therapeutic help?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Never, no. My partner certainly thinks I should. I’m not saying people shouldn’t, I’m not saying people shouldn’t. I know I’m supposed to say, “You should go seek psychiatric and emotional and counseling help,” so there, I said it. But for me personally, as I said, writing is my way of grieving, writing is my way of mourning, my way of fighting, my way of thinking, my way of dealing with things, working through things. And so, I use my writing as my way of, I would say, coping. And I really resist the language of healing. People say, “Are you healed now from everything that’s happened, and does writing help to heal you?” And that treats writing in such an instrumental way, which I really, really resist.
I think writing is my way of talking about the kinds of issues that we’ve been discussing, but I don’t believe that writing is a way of healing, because if I was healed, I couldn’t write about… What else am I going to write about if I’m healed? And the things that we’ve been discussing, these are injuries that I’ve experienced individually, but these are injuries that are produced collectively through war, colonialism, racism and on and on and on. Vietnamese society, American society, have not healed from those things, those things are still endemic in these societies. So because those injustices still exist, then our societies aren’t healed, and so therefore the writing can continue, and I can still use the writing in my own way to cope with these issues.
Rachel Lloyd:
Yes, he’ll suggest closure of a wound. Can we talk as well now about your academic career? Why did you decide after your PhD to go into academia?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I needed a job. I was growing up in this environment where there was intense pressure just to survive. My parents were, again, they were working 12 to 14-hour days, seven days a week, in a grocery store, and I was studying English literature. How do you reconcile that? I couldn’t reconcile that. So I compartmentalized. I did not bring my work home to my parents. They had no idea what I was studying at Berkeley. I was an English major, which was weird, and then I was an ethnic studies major at the same time, that was even weirder. I never explained that to my parents. My older brother, who is seven years older, had done what I was supposed to do, which is go to Harvard and become a doctor. But he had done philosophy and he said, “Just tell mom and dad you’re going to go to med school anyway.” So I did science classes. It was a disaster. And then, I said to my parents, “Okay, I’m going to go become a lawyer.” So I was just trying to keep my parents away from me and what I wanted to do.
And then, when I was about to graduate from university, I applied to PhD programs in English, MFA programs in creative writing, and law degree programs. And in as much as I reject the model minority stereotype, I’m unfortunately a model minority, because my thinking was, I’m going to go to the best programs that will accept me, and I’m not going to go to a top 20 law school, I’m not going to go to a top 20 medical school, I’m going to go to a top five program. So English PhD programs, that’s where I was most successful, and so I went into those and I had to get a job. So becoming a professor, becoming an academic was a real intellectual pursuit for me, that’s pure in its own right, but to become a professor was a job, and that’s what happened. And I was lucky, I got my PhD and I got a job as a professor right away. It was my day job, a real job in which I produced a lot of academic work, but really a day job to keep my parents happy.
Simon Akam:
With writers who have academic careers or have spent time in academia, we’ve often had interesting conversations about academic prose, about the kind of language that is often used in academic writing or is rewarded there. As someone who’s written academic books, but also had a lot of success writing fiction, what’s your thought on the kind of language and style of writing that often, although not always, is used in the academy?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
When I became an academic, I started reading serious criticism and theory when I was 18 or 19 years of age, all the famous names, and I was really seduced by all of that, because in fact, the complexity and the difficulty were a challenge that I wanted to confront. And there were really powerful arguments and ideas in the works of Edward Said, Derrida, Foucault, on and on and on, and so I don’t want to dismiss that. Reading those theorists, reading Marx, reading Judith Butler and Freud, Lacan, all this really transformed me and allowed me to see the world in a particular way that I think really did shape me as a fiction writer as well. And I wanted to imitate those writers, those scholars, those philosophers and theorists, I wanted to write in as complex of a way as they did.
And I internalized that language, and I eventually wrote my first book, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, which was published when I was like 31 or 32. And I’d spent a decade as a graduate student and as an assistant professor working on that book, and I was really committed to it, but by the end, I was exhausted. And when that book was published, I looked at it and I was like, “If I have to write another book like this in imitation of all these great names, I don’t want to write another book, it’s so hard.” It was so hard to write it. And then, one of my high school classmates said, “Yeah, I bought your book and I keep it on my nightstand so I can read it when I want to fall asleep.” That’s not the kind of reaction I want people to have.
And so, it took me another 10 years to unlearn all that academic language and become a fiction writer. Now, when I say that, I don’t mean that I’ve just given away all that academic heritage. For me, unlearning the academic language didn’t mean disposing of theories and philosophies. It meant I didn’t need the language anymore, I still like the ideas. So I think of myself as having become bilingual, I can write fiction and I can write theory equally, I think, and fluidly, as one can speak two languages. And that’s enormously powerful to do, because there aren’t too many fiction writers who are capable of doing that, and there aren’t too many theorists and critics who can write fiction. So that space of bilingualism between critical and creative language is something that was really hard to achieve and something that I really appreciate that I can do.
I just recently started to reread Race and Resistance, because the publisher is reprinting the book in a second edition, and I wouldn’t say I’m horrified by it, but I will say that’s a very different person than I am today. But it’s somebody I’m grateful that I was, because I don’t think I could have written The Sympathizer, for example, and everything else afterwards without all the struggles that I went through with academic language.
Rachel Lloyd:
We appreciate your candor there, not many writers revisit their early work in that way. Speaking of The Sympathizer, can you remember when you first had the idea, and when you then decided to have a go at writing it as a novel?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’d spent, I think, 14 years writing a book called The Refugees, a short story collection. That was really my first book of fiction, although it was published after The Sympathizer. And it was a real struggle, I hated almost every moment of writing The Refugees, it was just really awful, because it was how I taught myself to write. I didn’t go get an MFA, I took a few writing classes, but mostly it was through writing The Refugees over 14 years that I learned how to write. And I got an agent out of it, and my very smart agent said, “Well, if you want to sell this book in New York City,” meaning all the major publishers, “you really have to write a novel, that’s what they really want.” So I said, “Okay.”
I always wanted to write a novel, and the first thing that came to mind was writing a spy novel, because I thought that a spy novel allowed me to both write something entertaining, because I did want to entertain, but also would allow me to talk about history and politics, which is what spy novels are really also good at doing. And I’d read John le Carre and I’d written a senior thesis on Graham Greene, so I knew that genre pretty well, at least the literary version of the spy novel, so that concept was there from the very beginning. And it was really then a matter of spending a few months trying to figure out the character, the main protagonist, and trying to figure out the opening paragraph or the opening lines.
And once I knew both of those things, once I knew who the protagonist was, what shaped him, how he saw the world, and once I knew the voice, the rhythms and the language that he was speaking in and writing in, then the rest of the novel… I wouldn’t say that it wrote itself, but it was on a very clear track, and I wrote that novel in a little bit over two years, so possibly the easiest thing I’ve ever written.
Simon Akam:
And we saw that you had leave from your teaching obligations for that period, how were you able to negotiate that?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So I’m an academic, I got a fellowship from an organization called the American Council of Learned Societies to write a non-fiction academic work, and I got the fellowship and I thought to myself, I’m going to write a novel, but I promise, to myself, I will eventually write that non-fiction academic book, which I did, called Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. So I got a year off from the American Council of Learning Societies. And then what happened? Oh, then I had a year of sabbatical from my university. So those two years, I was underpaid, but I didn’t have any kids, it was just me and my partner, Lan, and no one cared, no one cared what I was doing. So I had two years off, no one had any idea that this academic was writing a novel. And when they did find out, the few academics that found out, I think their attitude was, “Why is he writing a novel? What does he think that he can do?” And when writers found out that I was writing a novel, they were like, “Why does this academic think he can write a novel?”
So I had two years off with very low expectations from anybody, except my agent, and the only unpleasant moments, I have to say, in writing that novel were when my agent would call and say, “What’s happening with the novel?” And then there was all this pressure. But for those two years, the only person who was reading my work besides my agent was my partner, and it was a wonderful time.
Rachel Lloyd:
You said that the writing was fairly straightforward. Was it because you had planned out what was going to happen in the novel ahead of time, or did you just sit down every morning and the words and the story came to you intuitively?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
A little bit of both. I had a two-page outline for the novel, and I pretty much faithfully followed it until the last quarter of the outline. The outline had the ending of the novel set in a re-education camp, there was going to be a big mono, a mono conflict between the two, the protagonist and the antagonist, and I thought, that’s not really what’s going to happen. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’ll trust that I’ll figure it out along the way. And so, a two-page outline is not a very detailed outline, but it was this broad roadmap of the novel, and that was enough. And so, I just had to take a leap of faith that I would follow this broad roadmap, and as I would go follow this roadmap, all the little details would become more and more clear, and that’s exactly what happened.
So I would write a chapter, it would take me, I don’t know, a week or two to write a first draft of the chapter, and then I would spend another couple of weeks revising that chapter, forwards and backwards, making sure it was as tight as possible, and then I would proceed to the next chapter. And that’s exactly how I built the first draft, the first draft took two years, and then it took me three months to revise that draft into what I eventually submitted to publishers. Because by the time I’d finished the first draft, I’d revised each chapter along the way, it was a pretty good first draft when I got done with it.
And the other component of writing was actually running. I had read Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and he’s crazy, he runs marathons and ultra marathons and things like this, and I was like, “I’m not Haruki Murakami, but I will get on the treadmill and I will run six miles every day after I write.” And so, I would write a certain number of pages, I would get on the treadmill, I would run, and it was in the process of running that the ideas for the next day’s writing would come to me. And it was really a wonderful experience, because when I was running on the treadmill, these ideas would come, I would get so excited, so I would run and I would be typing on my iPhone and running at the same time, not something I would advise. But that was such an integral part of the writing process, to trust my intuition in combination with this broad outline that I had.
Simon Akam:
And could you tell us about the publication experience of the book? It won the Pulitzer Prize and was very highly lauded. But from the moment that it emerged into the world, how did things build up and escalate from that point?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I had some toned down expectations, because when we sent that novel out for publication, we sent it to 14 editors, and these were handpicked by my very experienced agent as likely to be sympathetic, but 13 out of 14 turned the novel down. The 14th editor bought it, and lo and behold, he wasn’t an American, he was English, he is English, and he turned out to be mixed race, which I didn’t know from Peter Blackstock’s name. But he was also a graduate of, I can’t remember, Oxford or Cambridge, and he had studied Slavic literature, he knew Marxism and things like this, and Russian. He turned out to be the ideal editor because he was not an American, that was one of the major reasons why.
So because of that experience, I thought my expectations for this novel would be very low. I just wanted to sell 20,000 or 30,000 copies, which is a lot already, and be well-received and make a little bit of an impact on discourse of the war and so on. And so, when it came out, and it was, I think, pretty much universally well-received, that was great. I didn’t get a single bad review, I thought. But it did sell 20,000 or 30,000 copies, and then that was about it. And I thought, okay, so it did well. And then, it started to win prizes. And then, it won the Pulitzer Prize, which was a total shock. I had no anticipation that any of that would happen in terms of prizes and the whatnot. And in fact, I found out that I won the Pulitzer Prize on Twitter, I believe, so it was a total shock.
I think that, as I said before, I had planned the fact that the novel would come out on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, because I knew that Americans who felt guilty about the war and/or curious would respond to the book and to me. It was a strategic decision on my part, and it worked out. And I don’t doubt that the novel won prizes partly because I think it’s at least a decent novel, I think I’d safely say that, whether it’s more than decent, history will make that judgment. But also, it’s a novel that fits squarely into the guilty conscience of white, liberal, guilty Americans, and that also helped to provide the framework for winning prizes too.
Rachel Lloyd:
That’s very interesting. In terms of following it up, was it hard having had all this acclaim and winning these prizes to then start The Committed, or because there was that lag between you finishing it and it being published, had you already started to work on a new story?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Immediately after I finished The Sympathizer, I had a year before the book was published, so then I wrote Nothing Ever Dies, which I’d been working on for a decade. And then, when I finished Nothing Ever Dies, I immediately published The Refugees, which I’d been working on for like 17 years at that point. So in fact, I think by that point, I’d decided that my primary identity was writer, not novelist, not scholar or anything like that, but writer, and all the other forms of writing would fall under that category.
So when it came to The Committed, it was just a matter of momentum. So there was no difficulty in writing the novel in and of itself, because I’d decided, I already won all these prizes, I don’t need to win anymore, so I don’t have to worry about what people think, I’m just going to follow the same instincts that I had in writing The Sympathizer. The big challenge was not the writing, the big challenge was the fact that now people knew who I was and I was getting all these invitations to write this and speak at that type of thing. And so, it took four years to write The Committed versus two years to write The Sympathizer, and it was mostly because I was now immersed in the world, for better and for worse. But the ambitions behind The Committed were the same ambitions as behind The Sympathizer, which were to write purely for myself and then to write for others.
Simon Akam:
It’s almost 10 years since The Sympathizer came out, and a lot has changed in American culture and American politics since then. This fairly Identitarian position that you’ve taken, I suppose, that the new anthology begins, how do you feel that is received now? And I suppose also this other point, you talked about this idea of American hegemonic imperialistic behavior in the world, but obviously the US is dialing down its support for Ukraine, things like that. Do you feel that the cultural moment that you’re operating in now is fundamentally the same or different as to when The Sympathizer came out?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I have my own interpretation of American history, which is that the origins of this country, the United States, are born out of this contradiction between the beautiful ideals of freedom, democracy, equality and so on, which are real and are very beneficial for a certain portion of the American population. But that is in contradiction with the fact that none of those ideals would’ve been possible without the other history of this country, which is that it’s been built on colonization, genocide, enslavement and war. And I interpret American history completely through this lens and this arc, which leads from the origins of the country through the United States becoming a global imperial power in the 20th century, which took it into Vietnam, and then which took it out of Vietnam into Central America and Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Israel’s, in my view, genocidal campaign in Gaza. To me, it’s all related.
And what that means is that when I was a university student and my primary political activities were around questions of diversity in the curriculum, diversity in the faculty, diversity in our books and so on, those activities back in the 1990s were a part of what were being called the culture wars in the United States. And in some ways, it seemed that the culture wars were kind of insignificant in comparison to real wars, for example, or in comparison to Apartheid in South Africa, which the previous cohort of Berkeley students had been fighting against. But now, obviously, in the United States, in fact, we’re still in the culture wars. So what had seemed relatively trivial to some people in the early 1990s is now actually at the very center of American politics.
The idea of the culture wars is being used to defund American universities, for example, and the idea of the culture wars is now completely enmeshed with questions of anti-Semitism and the support of Israel and all this complicated stuff. In fact, the fact that the idea of diversity, equity and inclusion is now being used as this political tool to destroy American universities and to attack certain kinds of books and so on means that a book like The Cleaving… It’s not at the very center, but it’s a part of this discourse. And I think that means that in fact these issues of identity or identitarian politics, as you put it, are not going away, and the reason they’re not going away is that they’re not incidental to everything that’s happening in American society, they’re actually quite central.
And another way to understand it is that the attack on diversity, equity and inclusion and all of these so-called minority populations is being done out of another identitarian politics, which is white nationalist identity politics, which have always managed to remain invisible as long as white people have been the dominant force in American society. But because that position is being contested, then, all of a sudden, everybody’s identities are being revealed in stark contrast with each other. So I think, again, it goes back to that idea of The Cleaving, it is about identity, but it’s also about the histories that produce that identity to make that identity relevant in the first place. And so, these issues aren’t going away, because the questions of war and colonialism and white supremacy, they’ve always been with us in the United States and they’re still here.
Rachel Lloyd:
I wondered if you could speak to your own experience of the culture wars. In 2023, you signed an open letter asking for an end to violence and destruction of Palestine and had an event canceled and various other things followed. Could you tell us a little bit about that experience?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It was not an experience that I asked for and it’s an experience that I would describe as a learning experience, because I signed on to BDS, Boycott Divestment Sanctions, I think around 2016, with a general sense of sympathy for the Palestinian cause and a general sense of anxiety or skepticism about what Israel was doing in Gaza in the West Bank. But it wasn’t a primary concern for me. My primary concern was about the Vietnam War, about being an Asian American, about refugee issues, all these things that were going to preoccupy me for a while. But I think October 7th and its aftermath has forced many people to clarify and articulate their inarticulate positions on these matters. Not everybody, a lot of people already had very clear, articulate positions, not me. So I take full responsibility for the fact that I was inarticulate and I was forced to articulate.
And in fact, I think I articulated very clearly on Instagram soon after October 7th, somewhere around October 15th or something like that, where I said I was very upset about one of the Israeli ministers saying the Palestinians are human animals. And I was like, “I’m a human animal, I’m going to align with the human animals.” Because this rhetoric of the human animal to me was completely recognizable as a part of racism and colonization that had been applied to Vietnamese people, but also to many other colonized peoples as well. The use of human animals by an Israeli minister clarified for me completely what was going on here.
And then, from that point onwards, with having a few events canceled and becoming more vocal, both in terms of social media, but also in terms of my own work, there’s a whole essay on Palestine in my next book, To save and To Destroy, it’s been a learning experience for me that I’ve been grateful to have been subjected to, to be forced to more clearly engage with my own convictions, and forcing me to very clearly connect the dots between colonization in the United States, colonization in Vietnam, and what I see as colonization in Palestine.
Simon Akam:
Thanks for going through that in detail. We’re coming towards the end of our time, but could we touch briefly on the HBO adaptation of The Sympathizer? We always find it very interesting with novelists to ask what level of involvement did they have in the project. So for you, how did that work out, how close were you to pulling that all together?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Officially, I’m an executive producer on the show, which probably means very little in some ways, because there are many producers on the show, and I was probably one of the least important, except for the fact that I’m the writer of the so-called intellectual property for the show. But what was important for me was simply getting the show made, and that took five or six years from initial conversations with producers to actually having HBO green-light and fund this production for the amount of apparently $135 million. I wasn’t even really aware of that sum of money until I got my royalty statement or whatever it’s called and I saw the dollar sum, I was like, “Oh my god.” I thought, this is much more than I thought it was going to cost.
But to get to that point, which is a long period of time, five or six years, in some senses, because some books are turned into TV shows or movies right away, but it’s not long in other senses, because some books never get made into TV shows or movies, that required a lot of conversations with Hollywood studios and power players and things like that. So my experience of production is that involves a lot of talking and a lot of people saying very nice things to you and then never following through. And so, it just took a lot of meetings to get to the point where we could align, my producer, Niv Fichman and I, who’s Israeli Canadian, we could find all the right collaborators, starting with Park Chan-wook, who is possibly my favorite movie director and TV director. And when we got him, I thought, this is perfect, because his movie Oldboy was a major influence on The Sympathizer, and his vision, both politically, but also artistically, really aligns with mine.
Once we got him on board and then we got A24 on board, I felt increasingly confident that we could make this TV show in a way that would at the very least align with the parameters that I thought were the bare minimum, which is that this would be a show centering Vietnamese perspectives, mostly done in the Vietnamese language, telling Vietnamese stories. And after that, of course, Hollywood is going to step in and do whatever it has to do, and I could accept a certain level of adaptations and changes. But as long as that show met those parameters and that it cast mostly Vietnamese actors, I could live with what happened after that.
Rachel Lloyd:
That’s quite the creative team you had behind it. You mentioned the royalty statement, and it’s the rule of the show that we always ask about money, so how has money worked throughout your career, both in your time as an academic, and then publishing novels and your memoir and the TV show as well?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So this book, To Save and To Destroy, is based on these lectures I gave at Harvard, and in the first lecture I gave at Harvard, I said, “Why did I accept these lectures? Because they’re very stressful to give.” And I said, “It’s because of the prestige and all that, but it’s also because of the money.” And that produced a nervous laugh in the audience, because you’re not supposed to talk about money in places like academia and all these very rarefied places. But I grew up, again, the son of refugee shopkeepers, and it’s all about the money. My father gave me a bill when I was like 20 saying, “This is how much you cost.” And he meant to do it in a loving way, he didn’t make me pay the bill, but he wanted me to know that to live, we have to work, we have to make money.
My mother, when I was growing up in this shop, I remember her telling me, “I sold this bag of rice for $20. I’m going to make 50 cents on this bag of rice.” They wanted me to know that this is what it costs to live, this is what it costs to survive. And so, for me to become a writer was a necessity, but it was also a luxury. Maxine Hong Kingston says this in The Woman Warrior, she’s steered by the banks of necessity and extravagance, and that to me is a perfect idea about what it means to write. Those of us who are writers, we have to write, it’s a need, it’s a necessity. But those of us who come out of these backgrounds of poverty or working class or refugees or surviving war, it’s an extravagance, because our families have to survive, they just have to live.
And so, the money was always an issue for me, because I could never just simply say I was going to be a writer and not have a job, because who was going to support me, my parents? No, I had to support myself. And so, it was always important to have a paycheck. It’s very hard to walk away from academia because academia gives me a paycheck, but I’m walking away, spring 2026, I’m resigning from the university, I’ve had enough. I don’t need that paycheck anymore. But I don’t need that paycheck anymore because I’ve made all this other money from selling books and selling the TV show.
There’s nothing to be ashamed about in terms of making money for those of us who didn’t have any money when we were growing up. It’s something that I’m glad you asked me about, because I think writers do need to talk about what it means to make a living as a writer as well. And I have to say, my parents, my father, he never asked me about the content of my work. He was always very proud when I published the book. But our conversations about my books always revolved around one question, which is, “How many copies have you sold?” And when I told him how many copies I sold, he was very happy. And there’s no shame in that conversation to be had.
Rachel Lloyd:
We are right up against our time limit, but I wanted to ask one final question, which is about A Man of Two Faces, which is extraordinarily inventive in terms of its form. And I wondered at what point that came to you in terms of the way that you wanted to tell the story, and whether you felt that was the only way that you could tell the story, blending different genres and also using the second person and things like that?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’ve read a lot of memoirs, and many of these memoirs are obviously very good and so on, but the conventional form of the memoir is first person and it’s very linear and it’s whole. There’s paragraphs, there’s whole chapters, all that kind of stuff. But I experience my own memory in a very fragmented way, lots of wholes, lots of forgetting, lots of amnesia, non-linear and all this. And I thought that I wanted to write a book that formally would also express how I remembered. And it was a very strategic choice then not to write this memoir in the manner of, let’s say, Vladimir Nabokov and Speak, Memory, which is a beautiful book which presents memory for Nabokov as a holistic thing. Maybe that’s how he really experienced his memory, I don’t know but that’s not how I experience mine.
And so, I set out very deliberately, inspired by writers who work more in fragments, Theresa Cha and Dictee, Gloria Anzaldua and Borderlands/La Frontera, or the work of many, many different poets, Don Mee Choi, for example, and so all those influences are expressed in this book. But perhaps important of all is the fact that I became a father and I witnessed my children growing up and being very, very playful and being very free. And I thought, God, it’s very painful sometimes to have to deal with these kids. But in other ways, it’s enormously pleasurable, because I get to see how we all were when we were three or four or five years old, unrestrained by rules, unrestrained by these terrible adults telling us what to do. And critics and scholars and the literary establishment are the adults in the room saying, “You have to write a memoir in this way.” And I thought, no, you don’t have to, you don’t have to do anything. As a writer, you can do anything you want.
And that playfulness of the child is something that I had when I wrote my first book when I was eight years of age, and I wanted to get back to that, and that’s really what the form and the shape of A Man of Two Faces expresses, is this return to the childlike play that I think so many of us want.
Simon Akam:
Well, look, thank you very much, Viet, for a wide-ranging conversation, and wishing you all the best with your projects going forward and with your escape from academia.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thanks, Simon. Thanks, Rachel. It was a real pleasure.
Simon Akam:
That was the Always Take Notes interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen. His website is vietnguyen.info, and his last name is spelled N-G-U-Y-E-N, and he’s on Instagram @viet.tan.nguyen.writer, and The Cleaving is published by the University of California Press.
Hello, it’s us again. Rachel, what was your takeaway from the interview with Viet?
Rachel Lloyd:
So we did this interview a few months ago around the time of the anniversary of the Vietnam War, and I found it to be a very candid and insightful conversation. I’m not sure we’ve talked to anyone in depth about their experience as a refugee before, and as I mentioned in the interview, I’d read his memoir and found it formerly very interesting, so it was great to hear about his process there. How about you?
Simon Akam:
I thought it was interesting on the academia/creative writing divide, which is a area that we often zone in on the podcast. And also interesting, I think, that he has achieved a lot of success, so he is on his way out of the academy, as it were. And again, I suppose another example of the extraordinary power of a prize, and that when that book, which, as he said, had a relatively slow burn launch, then won the Pulitzer, it catapulted both the novel and his own literary career to another level, so definitely a good one to have. Anyway, Rachel, what have you been up to and what have you been consuming culturally?
Rachel Lloyd:
The two are one and the same for me now. I have been reading, we’ve had our first Baillie Gifford meeting, so I have about 60 books to assess in the next three weeks. And this is an initial scouting stage, so it’s spending a little bit of time with each of the books and seeing whether they’ve got legs, so to speak. So I’m doing that with about three books a day, so I don’t really have time for anything else. But it’s been really enjoyable, and there’s a really great range of stuff that’s been submitted by publishers and that we’ve identified, so I’m sure I’m going to learn a lot in the next few months. How about you?
Simon Akam:
That is a relentless program. I’ve been on holiday, which has been very pleasant, so I was in the west of Ireland and had an opportunity to read some stuff that’s not related to what I’m writing. So I read Fundamentally, this novel by a woman called Nussaibah Younis, who was at university with me, and it had a spectacular launch, and I enjoyed that. And then, I read Rivals by Jilly Cooper, which I was actually recommended to read relating to something else that I’m working on, which was also fun and has made me want to watch the TV program as well, which-
Rachel Lloyd:
Highly recommend.
Simon Akam:
… which I understand has changed it, but not that much. And then, I read yesterday a couple of magazine pieces. I read a piece by a writer in The New Yorker called Joshua Jaffe about NATO and [inaudible 01:09:16] and rearmament in Europe and stuff like that. And then, a piece in The New York Times magazine by a writer, who I also know, called Alex Dziadosz on a task force that was confiscating yachts and stuff like that from various bad people. Anyway, this has been Always Take Notes, hosted by me, Simon Akam.
Rachel Lloyd:
And me, Rachel Lloyd.
Simon Akam:
Our producer and social media editor is Artemis Irvine, our score is by Jessica Dannheisser, and our graphic designer is by James Edgar.
Rachel Lloyd:
If you’d like to follow us on social media, we’re on Instagram @alwaystakenotes, we’re on Twitter @takenotesalways. If you’d like to support us on our crowdfunding page, on Patreon, we’re on there under Always Take Notes. And if you’d like to leave review on iTunes or get in touch with us via our website, please do.
Simon Akam:
Many thanks. Goodbye.
Always Take Notes | Viet Thanh Nguyen, novelist and academic
