Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, sat down with Jerid P. Woods at Baldwin & Co. bookstore for a candid conversation exploring the complexities of Vietnamese refugee identity, the burdens of war and displacement, and the universal struggles of vulnerability and resilience. Viet Thanh Nguyen discussed his insistence on the term “refugee” over “immigrant,” challenged the American narrative that obscures the causes and consequences of forced migration, and reflected on how trauma and emotional blockage shaped both his personal journey and artistic process. Touching on the political dimensions of literature, the tension between art and artist, and the transformative power of storytelling, Viet Thanh Nguyen offered incisive commentary on authenticity, healing, and the role of obsession in creative work, weaving together a richly provocative portrait of art as resistance and personal revelation.
Transcript
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think for many Americans, the idea of the immigrant is very powerful. It’s part of our American dream. The refugee totally complicates that. So the way that most Americans make sense out of refugees is just to call them immigrants. I insist on being called a refugee because as I argue in a few books, many refugees are grateful for having been rescued by the United States, but maybe we wouldn’t have needed to be rescued by the United States if we hadn’t been invaded by the United States in the first place.
And we see that contradiction being played out over and over and over again. And part of what it means to become an American for a lot of refugees is to agree silently that we’re not going to talk about that part, to the part of the war. War is actually very integral to the United States in terms of agreeing that the US has the right to bomb any country it wants to or intervene in any country it wants to. But when we do that as Americans, we create displacement. We create lots of refugees.
Judy Woodruff:
Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has been interested in how stories about his home country of Vietnam are told in America.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I was four years old in 1975 when Saigon fell, and we came as refugees to the United States, settled in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I also had to overcome my invulnerability. I didn’t want to be emotional. In order to be a writer, I think that my kind of writer, I had to tap into my emotions because that’s what I put into my characters. But now I see that vulnerability can also be strength.
Jerid P. Woods:
Can you separate the art from the artist? Is that something that you believe?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I believe so. It’s a lot more difficult when the artist is still alive.
Jerid P. Woods:
All right. Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Hey, Jerid.
Jerid P. Woods:
Hey, how’s it going?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Good. How are you?
Jerid P. Woods:
Doing great. Doing great.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
How you liking New Orleans so far? I love New Orleans. The only problem is, I don’t get to visit it very often.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yes, yes. Well, have you eaten anything special yet?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I went to Herbsaint last night, which was pretty cool. And then I insisted on beignets this morning.
Jerid P. Woods:
Absolutely.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And then last night, I have friends here. They took me to New Orleans East to a Vietnamese billiards hall with Vietnamese bar food, and that was amazing.
Jerid P. Woods:
Absolutely.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah.
Jerid P. Woods:
Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you so much for stopping by for Baldwin and Co. Let’s throw the obvious [inaudible 00:02:04] one out there, just to set the stage. What does success mean to you?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Success. Well, what it means to me is being able to tell my story in my voice in my way without any compromises. That’s actually kind of difficult to do. I’ve been lucky that my books have actually sold and we have a TV series coming out in a few weeks on HBO based on this first novel. But none of that would’ve been possible if I hadn’t been authentic to my own voice.
Jerid P. Woods:
Absolutely, absolutely. Are you excited about that?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Pretty excited about it. The only problem is if the series is a failure, everybody’s going to blame me. And if a series is a success, no one’s going to look at me. So that’s the paradox of having your book made into a TV series.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah. Are you going to be, I know sometimes that when that happens, you’re not necessarily always involved in the writing of it. Are you going to be involved in that?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
No, that’s a whole separate art. I’m an executive producer, so the big part of the job was actually just getting it made. That took several years of meetings because The Sympathizer is a novel from the perspective of a Vietnamese spy, communist spy. It has a lot of Vietnamese themes going on, for obvious reasons. Hollywood just didn’t know what to do with it. You know?
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And so it took a few years of persuasion of political turmoil in the rest of the country to get Hollywood kind of sensitive to what the book is talking about. So it was a big lift just to get that far. And then the writing was just another thing. I didn’t have time to do that.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, I was listening. We here are consummate perfectionists, and so I literally prepare up until the very end. I was listening to your conversation with someone talking about the way that America consistently forgets that a lot of refugees and/or immigrants, but specifically refugees, come here because of war, both war that we sometimes have our hands in, but also, well, I would personally, I feel we always have our hands in most that’s kind going on, but we kind of forget that, and we also don’t situate that properly in Hollywood and/or our literature sometimes. Talk a little bit more about that because that was a profound insider perspective, I think you were able to give to that particular conversation.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. I came as a refugee from Vietnam in 1975, and that was because of the war that the United States was involved in. Now it’s ancient history. That’s almost 50 years ago. And for most Americans, they weren’t even alive during that time.
Jerid P. Woods:
[inaudible 00:04:27].
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, thank you so much. I guess I betrayed my own age, but yeah. But I think for many Americans, the idea of the immigrant is very powerful. It’s part of our American dream.
Jerid P. Woods:
Absolutely.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The refugee totally complicates that. So the way that most Americans make sense out of refugees is just to call them immigrants.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I insist on being called a refugee because as I argue in a few books, many refugees are grateful for having been rescued by the United States, but maybe we wouldn’t have needed to be rescued by the United States if we hadn’t been invaded by the United States in the first place. And we see that contradiction being played out over and over and over again. And part of what it means to become an American for a lot of refugees is to agree silently that we’re not going to talk about that part, to the part of the war and so on. And I’m someone who believes that war is actually very integral to the United States. We have a lot of domestic divisions and so on, but we’re kind of fairly unified, bipartisan-wise in terms of agreeing that the US has the right to bomb any country it wants to or intervene in any country it wants to. But when we do that, as Americans, we create displacement. We create lots of refugees.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And it’s important for Americans sort of to mentally disconnect those two realities of our being a military industrial complex, now are suddenly having these refugees from different places come. Some of us are scared of these refugees coming from certain countries, and we have to create that American dream narrative to make ourselves feel better about why they’re here all of a sudden.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are two things I think about when you’re saying that. I want to say this is Toni Cade Bambara. She said, “The job of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” And then, ooh, come on. The revolution irresistible. Then I also was thinking about, “A nation keeps its shape by the stories it tells itself,” that’s something me and [inaudible 00:06:14] were just talking about. When you think about those two quotes and the work you do, but the work that you also read and love, which I may ask you about later, is there a obligation of the artist to be political, [inaudible 00:06:36].
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, that’s a controversial statement because there are a lot of people, a lot of artists in this country, and scholars and critics and so on, who don’t want to see art and politics connected, right? But from my experience, I’m certainly putting myself in that genealogy, that lineage of writers who are committed, who don’t see a difference between art and politics, that makes our lives harder. That’s not what’s rewarded generally in this country.
Jerid P. Woods:
Absolutely.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And then it is hard enough to be an artist, but to be an artist who also is trying to use the art to say something political and make it beautiful at the same time as the writers you’re quoting have done, it’s not simply to make the revolution irresistible. It’s to make the revolution beautiful.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yes, [inaudible 00:07:13].
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And I believe that you can do both at the same time. But there are a lot of people, a lot of artists in this country who don’t think in that fashion. So those of us who do, we’re willingly putting in extra, what in my mind, necessary challenge on ourselves.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is something that just kind of popped in my mind [inaudible 00:07:32]. I was telling someone yesterday, when smart people look up in the sky, it’s like something divine kind of coming down when they’re talking. Do you think that you can separate the art from the artists, right? So when people do, and I’ve been quoting this book a lot that I might need to reread it because I just loved it so much, but Monsters like Claire Dederer, and when you’re thinking about someone like Kanye West who says things that are problematic at times, can you still love that art? When you think about, is it, oh, it’s a book with an L name, but the book question is, the concept of, oh, I can’t [inaudible 00:08:12] but it has questionable things in fiction that has these things that are now taboo. Can you separate the art from the artist? Is that something that you believe?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I believe so. But obviously, it’s a lot more difficult when the artist is still alive.
Jerid P. Woods:
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And it’s like making money off of your choices or if you’re not buying the thing, you’re borrowing it and you’re still giving the artists some visibility and all that. So I get it when people are too personally offended to support an artist. But in my case, I think about how I have seen a lot of racist Vietnam War movies, okay?
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And I still watch them because I think you could actually make a work of art that is beautiful and powerful and racist all at the same time. We have a long legacy.
Jerid P. Woods:
Absolutely.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
We’re sexist. We’re whatever.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And so I still teach Apocalypse Now, for example, by Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, even though this novel, The Sympathizer, satirizes that movie, plus a lot of other American Vietnam War movies or sometimes it’s a selective issue. I love the work of Spike Lee, but honestly, Da Five Bloods, not a good movie. And especially the way that it deals with Vietnam, not good. But I still watched it, still support it. Sometimes it’s easier, of course, when the artist is dead. So a big influence on The Sympathizer was a novel called Journey to the End of the Night by a guy named Louis-Ferdinand Céline. It was a really hugely impactful novel in France in the 1920s or 1930s. And then during World War II, Céline became a Nazi collaborator and really a rabid antisemite. So I know all that stuff, but it’s still a beautiful novel. And so, I think intellectually, we have to be able to separate the art from the artist, just whether emotionally, we can do it.
Jerid P. Woods:
That’s what I was going to say because I think it’s predicated, it’s emotionally tied to the idea that this somehow came out of them because I mean, art has to be influenced or this is the general held idea that art is influenced by the spirit of the artist in some way. So surely they hold these same ideals, right? And/or first in the film, things unconsciously make their way into the film. So yeah, that’s something I think about often. And I definitely agree with you in terms of the, it’s definitely easier when they’re dead. It’s almost like, you know? Yeah. You know I mean?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think obviously, we tend to idealize and idolize our heroes, including our writers and our artists and so on. And I understand the impulse, but it’s a dangerous impulse because it mistakes the artist as somehow not human.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And the artist is very human, and we know human beings are complicated. And part of what I argue in some of my work is the separation of the human from the inhuman, is actually really dangerous. That’s the us versus them mentality. So we’re the human ones, they’re the inhuman ones, and that justifies all kinds of inhuman behavior towards them, allows us to be inhuman. So in looking at our artists and their artworks, I mean, the ones that I respond to the most viscerally, the artworks demonstrate that our humanity is inseparable from our inhumanity. Even those of us who feel we’ve been victimized by history or by whatever cause, it doesn’t make us better human beings. Sometimes it makes us worse human beings, and artists are not immune from that.
Jerid P. Woods:
People feel like that. I was thinking about something else I heard you kind of just talk about was the way that so refugee, I think, is dealing with two things on all our scale, distance and time. You were talking about there are folks who haven’t seen other folks in their family and/or in their [inaudible 00:11:40] for 20 years. And you were like, you know so many folks [inaudible 00:11:45] your story than [inaudible 00:11:46]. And it’s both, like I said, is wrapped up in time and distance. Does that, another thing you were just talking about is that there’s a certain pride that some people hold in living through the violence that they have experienced. I want to talk about resilience though. Does that create a certain level of resilience? And how do you nurture like in a healthy way, nurture their resilience?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It can produce resilience. I mean, I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee community. Hundreds of thousands of people fled to the United States and other countries, and they had to survive and they had to be resilient. It didn’t necessarily make them better human beings. They survived, they were resilient in the sense that many of them got jobs, raised families, did all the outward signs of resilience that you’re talking about. But I’ve met also a lot of people who were just emotionally screwed up by the experience, and then they passed on that trauma to their kids because they never worked through what they had been through. So is that resilience? I mean, they’re still alive, but the trauma has been transmitted through the generations because their resilience was not a healing of what they, or not even a recognition of what they had been through.
Jerid P. Woods:
I wonder, because I was trying to say that I agree with you, but I have another question. Is healing a necessary component of resilience?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
No, I think you can be resilient and not be healed. I mean, it depends how you define resilience. I’m thinking of resilience as simply, you’re still alive, you’re still capable of functioning, and it’s important to acknowledge that people who’ve been through traumatic experiences, some of them are not resilient, some of them don’t survive. Some of them are broken by that experience. Some of them have the trappings of material survival and so that they are resilient. But I think when you’re healed, that’s another… That goes beyond resilience. That is a restoration, let’s say, versus just resilience.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, yeah, that was a nice thing, nice little journey right there, because I was just thinking about it. That’s why I love having conversations like this because it just makes you think all the way through. Can you describe a significant goal you’ve pursued within your creative pursuits and the strategies you employ to kind of overcome any obstacles that kind of came in your way?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The way I survived my refugee experience, watching what my parents went through, because they had a very difficult life here as refugees in the United States. The way I survived, the way I was resilient was that I emotionally shut down. I became very numb and I’m very successful as an academic, got a PhD, et cetera, and I did it by being invulnerable emotionally. Okay, turning myself off. That’s not a very good human response, but it gave me all the material trappings of resilience that we just talked about. So in terms of writing, what I’ve learned is that in addition to struggling with the art of how to write a book, a novel and so on, along with the technical issues, I also had to overcome my invulnerability.
I had to learn how to feel, and that’s a growth process. That’s a painful process for me because I didn’t want to be emotional. But in order to be a writer, I think that my kind of writer, I had to tap into my emotions because that’s what I put into my characters. And so, that’s a very instrumental way of approaching the emotions. I have to put that into my characters, but it did transform me individually as well. To get in touch with my emotions meant that I had to become vulnerable, and I always, when I was growing up, I interpreted vulnerability as weakness. But now, I see that vulnerability can also be strength. It takes a strong person to expose themselves, to reveal weakness, and to share their vulnerability with other people. I hope I’m there.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, yeah. Listen, that’s heavy. I’m also an aspiring writer, and I struggle with being vulnerable with myself on the page even because I don’t know if that’s, do you feel like characters put enough distance between you, I guess, in that process, like writing in fiction as opposed to doing something that’s in the genre of memoir?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, it’s going to be different for everybody, but when I wrote The Sympathizer, The Sympathizer is a communist spy, and he’s not me. He does all kinds of terrible things and so on. However, I took my emotions and my feelings and my ideas about what it means to be a person of color or an Asian American or refugee in the United States going way back to Du Bois in double consciousness, and I put them into the character, and then I amplified them because he has a much more dramatic and interesting life as a spy than I did. But there’s something of me that’s autobiographical in there, although most people won’t know that. Then I wrote a memoir called, A Man of Two Faces. The opening line of this book is, “I’m a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” So I titled my memoir, A Man of Two Faces, and I pretended that I was my own character, The Sympathizer, writing about me. I had to get distance from myself in order to write about myself.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So we all have to find our own tactics about how to deal with fiction versus nonfiction, but I’ve been most deeply inspired by writers who, like James Baldwin, just given this setting, who have worked equally comfortably in both. And because I think they see that the biggest issue is how to be a writer. And then whether it’s fiction or nonfiction or poetry or whatever form you choose, that to me is secondary to the question of how to be a writer. And how to be a writer is an artistic question, but it’s also an ethical, a moral, a political, a personal question, all that is wrapped up. And then I find the right form to do that.
Jerid P. Woods:
That’s what I was going to ask you, I was like, and I was trying to [inaudible 00:17:35] if it was still a good question, which one is the most, the more effective medium, I guess, for you personally, rather than overall. Do you think literature or fiction is the easier or the better, more palatable medium for conveying all those different things that you were saying? Or do you think nonfiction is because I think personally, this has been my experience, I would like to think that nonfiction is because nonfiction, it’s kind of more, I guess, in most instances reliant on that.
But as an academic, I know where most of that lies. And it’s almost like, for me at least, like I said, it’s been my experience, and it’s just people who already kind of know these things, who are already kind of tapped into these things, having [inaudible 00:18:16] about those things. And I feel like fiction has the space to reach your everyday folk and get outside of the ivory tower of higher ed. But what do you think, is nonfiction a more palatable medium and/or effective medium or is fiction a more palatable and effective?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It just depends on the writer. I’ve read a lot of terrible memoirs, a lot of terrible nonfiction, and I read a lot of terrible fiction. So really, it depends on the writer and what they’re able to do with the genre. And thankfully, there’s many genres in there for all of us as diverse readers. So for example, you didn’t mention poetry. I love poetry when I was growing up and I love writing poetry. I love the Romantics. I loved all these white guys from England writing poetry, okay? Then I went to college and my college professors beat the love of poetry out of me because it was too ivory tower, too academic, their interpretation. But in the last 10 years, I’ve come back to poetry and I’ve come back to poetry via poets of color.
Jerid P. Woods:
Okay.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Solmaz Sharif, Layli Long Soldier, Mai Der Vang, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, list goes on and on. Tracy Smith, I think you’re having her in here very soon. And when I read these poets, I respond very viscerally because I actually think I understand what they’re doing. I understand why they’re making the formal decisions they’re doing, based on what I think their history is. And so, all I’m trying to say there is, it depends. The context is what happens. I don’t respond to bad poetry. I respond to this kind of poetry. I don’t respond to bad memoirs. I respond to a memoirs, like Tracy’s, for example, that connects to personal, to the political, the individual, to the collective. So it’s the spirit of the writer and how they’re able to deploy the genre that really matters.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah. What does the reader kind of fit into that? Because I think about a certain level of context and understanding that they may bring to the book? Where does the reader kind of factor into that, in terms of where you just were?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, of course, I mean, I would love to think that there are particular communities of readers that will respond to my work, but in all honesty, it doesn’t matter. In the first instance, it does not matter. Because I was growing up as a refugee boy in San Jose, California, didn’t have any books in my house, I would go to the public library, I would borrow a bag of books, and none of those writers I was reading when I was a kid, were thinking about me. If it was Percy Shelley or Charles Dickens or Jane Austen or Alice Walker, I don’t think they were thinking, is my book going to speak to a Vietnamese refugee boy in San Jose, California? And they shouldn’t. They should be writing for themselves or whoever is close and important to them.
And if they’re telling the truth, if they’re doing something beautiful, that work will connect with someone else eventually of varied backgrounds. So I did respond very viscerally when I encountered Asian American writers who were telling stories about people who looked like my parents and who looked like me, but I also responded very viscerally to Ralph Ellison and to Toni Morrison, and they transformed my life as a writer as well. So that’s, I think, is what’s really powerful about literature. Of course, we want literature that will reflect us and will tell our stories, whatever that means, but we also want literature that will connect us with people we’ve never thought of before. And if the writer has done their job, that is what’s going to happen.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, because I was thinking about when you said that you love the white, those old white poets, and I was like, yeah, it was kind of rough for me when I was younger. There was a certain, one of my friends, Philip B. Williams is a poet, and he just wrote [inaudible 00:21:49] Ours. He said to me while I was interviewing him that if people… Like Toni Morrison had this relationship with reading where she was, her brand of reading is difficult. It’s work. It’s like unpacking. And he would say, “Give a sharper knife.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Mm-hmm.
Jerid P. Woods:
Right? Do you feel like for certain texts, maybe I guess, that a reader has to come more prepared to engage or they won’t fully get what the art is attempting? Or do you think that art should be able to shape the person or like, I call it earthquake books, is what I call them, like to shift or make someone think, almost like people say that painting does? What do you kind of think about in that regard?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’m very catholic in the sense that I have a broad sense of taste. Okay?
Jerid P. Woods:
Okay, all right. [inaudible 00:22:37].
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So I think there’s a huge amount of room for books that don’t do what you just described, but they’re still very powerful. I grew up reading so-called genre fiction, like fantasy, science fiction and so on.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, science.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The prose is not terribly demanding in a lot of these books and they’re potentially very forgettable, but they still have an impact in terms of being able to transport me to some other place. My son, who’s 10 years old, he loves reading the Rick Riordan novels. Okay? I don’t think it’s great prose, but it doesn’t have to be great prose. There’s a different intention behind what Rick Riordan is trying to do with Percy Jackson, for example. We have to have space for that.
But for myself personally, as a writer, I do want to write a kind of literature that provokes the reader and that will elevate the reader, not in the sense of making the reader a better person, actually sort of a resisted idea that literature is supposed to make us better, because I think a lot of literature should, as we talked about earlier, be bad for us.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Okay? So the idea of elevation in terms of making us better morally, is not something I’m interested in, but elevate in the sense of challenging the reader, as you said, to work harder. And look at Toni Morrison, the example that you brought up. Nobody reads Toni Morrison, I don’t think, because they think it’s going to be an easy beach read. They know what they’re going to get at this point. And so, she created her readership. And I think that’s what a great writer does. A great writer creates their own readership, especially if it didn’t exist before. That’s one of her points. Morrison said, if a book is not about you, you have to move the universe to you. And so, I think that that’s also my ambition as well. And it doesn’t have to be every writer’s ambition. It’s just that’s what I want to do.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah. What do you do for hours when no one’s looking?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
What do I do for hours?
Jerid P. Woods:
When no one’s looking?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
See, that’s a good thing. It’s like sometimes when people think about the work that writers do, they think, “Oh, my God, you sit there at your desk for 10 hours a day.”
Jerid P. Woods:
[inaudible 00:24:26].
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
“All you do is type, type, type, type, type.” And really, no. I mean, if I sit at my desk, I’ve learned, four hours is good, and out of those four hours, probably one hour is writing.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, [inaudible 00:24:35].
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The other three hours, I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing, honestly. But if you actually do that over the course of a lifetime, and Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to be good at something, I think that’s actually probably true. But what he didn’t say, I don’t think is, in what time span do you do it? And if you can do it by the time you’re 25 or 30, good for you. I think I didn’t do it until I was like 45. So as long as you do it, eventually, if you can sit in a room somewhere or at a cafe and do your 10,000 hours, you will become a writer. And the liberating part is, you could do it by the time you’re 50 or 60 or 70. You’re your own pace setter in that regard. You’re the only person sitting in the room. If you’re fiddling around looking at social media or whatever, that’s up to you. As long as you get one hour out of those four that you’re sitting by yourself and actually do some writing.
Jerid P. Woods:
I would imagine some of those hours might lend themselves to, and if they don’t, that’s fine too. But when I’m wasting time, and even that idea is a very… I was talking to one of my friends, Tricia Hersey. She just wrote this book called, Rest is Resistance. It’s a radical rest in this grind culture. So I just want to bring that up as the [inaudible 00:25:48] moved to me while I was thinking about, when I’m wasting time, this idea, I think this is a Western idea that you have to maximize time. But I just think that sometimes, you need to take a walk. You need to, I don’t know, just blow off some steam, quite a type of thing in order to be creative. Do you kind of share that idea?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. I think that the problem with being a writer in some ways is that you never stop thinking about the writing. So I spend time with my family, it’s great, but some part of my mind is still processing the artistic or the philosophical or the personal question. Sometimes it’s just way in the background, but sometimes it’s the foreground. I’m like, I’m trying to have a conversation and I can’t stop thinking about whatever issue that I’m working on. So in a sense, writing is not just sitting alone in a room typing or handwriting or whatever you do. Writing is also this other process that’s happening all the time, somewhere in the back of your mind or in your soul or in your spirit.
And so, I think that there is a part of the writing that I’ve gradually come to understand is deeply intuitive. So you can read books about writing and you can discuss it formally, and talk about strategies, et cetera. And then you can do the physical act of writing. But there’s also, again, this part of the writing, if you do that often enough, it becomes a part of you. And so, you’re always thinking about it and you’re developing, if you use a sports metaphor, the athlete drills and drills and drills, and does all that stuff, very ritualistically in order to allow them to also then do it intuitively as well. And I don’t think there’s any difference between that and the act of writing.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, I think there was a nuance of obsession there. But I want to add to this question, what is the weight of obsession, but also trauma and/or pain to writing? Because I think there, we talked about this a little bit in one of the other conversations, but there’s this idea that you have to have had some type of pain to write, right? Do you subscribe to that idea? And also, while you’re thinking about that, what is the weight of obsession on your craft?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think you have to be obsessed to be a writer because, well, for a number of reasons. Like I said, if you want to do 10,000 hours in whatever span of time, you have to be obsessed. You also have to be obsessed because no one cares about you. I mean, honestly, most people do not care about the fact that you want to be a writer. Not you specifically, but in general, right? No one really cares, okay? They only care, like for example, this book, they sort of started to care when it was published. Then when it won the Pulitzer Prize, they really started to care. And then when it became a TV series, they’re like, “Oh, my God. Now, we have to really pay attention.”
Jerid P. Woods:
[inaudible 00:28:20].
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And so you have to be obsessed because you can’t listen to either the neglect or the over attention that people are going to bring. You have to be obsessed on your vision, your goal, whatever it is, however you see yourself as a writer. As for whether you have to be traumatized or damaged in some way to be a writer, it depends on the kind of writer you are. I don’t know for sure. I think for the kind of, I don’t want to generalize. If you’re going to be a children’s book writer, do you need to be traumatized? I don’t know. I don’t want to generalize.
Jerid P. Woods:
[inaudible 00:28:48].
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I don’t know.
Jerid P. Woods:
[inaudible 00:28:49].
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, you want to write a book, a book about a tractor as a children’s book writer, do you have to be traumatized? I don’t know. I don’t want to generalize. But for what I do, yes, I think so. But it doesn’t have to be simply living through some gigantic historical calamity like a war. Many, many people are screwed up in very quiet ways.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yes.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Can they recognize that and can they deal with that, and how do they deal with that? So I think that what I try to tell people is, so for example, even for me, I didn’t want to write a memoir because I felt my life is unimportant. My parents’ lives, their stories were important. So I had to at least come to a recognition that my own internal drama, my own internal issues, that actually is worthy of a story. And the idea that we all are our own universe, we all have our own powerful story, I think that’s true. The only distinction is, do you have the art to make other people care about your story? That’s the issue.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yep. Absolutely. You were preaching the word, as we say in the South right there. There’s a lot to kind of unpack there. How did you feel? So the part where you say, no one cares, how did you navigate going from that to Pulitzer Prize?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It was a tricky navigation. It unsettled me and my family as well, because my life changed, in very good ways. I mean, someone did ask me, are there any negative consequences to winning the Pulitzer Prize? I have to say, “No. None.”
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Just heightened expectations. But that is the problem, the heightened expectations. And I think what I, I was very lucky that in retrospect, that I didn’t publish The Sympathizer, my first novel, until I was in my mid-forties. And by then, I’d been through more than 20 years of struggle trying to be a writer. If all that stuff had happened, like the success when I was 25, it might’ve made me into a bad human being. But at 45, I was not that impressed by all the material stuff.
I liked it, for sure, but I did not attribute my own self-worth or my own capacity to the celebrity that accrued in the wake of the success of the book. So I think that’s very important. I mean, I take my work seriously. The writing, the art, as we’ve been discussing. I don’t take myself seriously or too seriously, and that’s the issue. I’ve met a lot of people who take themselves very seriously, and they may have done great things or not done great things, but taking yourself too seriously makes you sort of an unpleasant human being, but also could lead you into the trap of hubris.
Jerid P. Woods:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, thank you so much Viet for stopping by. It was an amazing and enlightening time. Like I said, I love doing this because it makes me smarter. No, I know it didn’t make you smarter because you’re already-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, it absolutely did. Yeah.
Jerid P. Woods:
But we appreciate you stopping by to chat with us, all right?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thanks, Jerid. It’s been a pleasure.
Jerid P. Woods:
Absolutely.
