The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sympathizer” discusses becoming a writer and how literature can challenge American narratives about war and identity.
By James Dao Globe Staff
It wasn’t long ago that finding an Asian American novelist in a local bookstore felt like finding a rare flower.
Today, the options overflow. Viet Thanh Nguyen was on the leading edge of that wave. His first novel, “The Sympathizer,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. Since then he has written several more works and become a leading public figure, promoting the work of immigrant and minority writers and advocating for Palestinian rights. On “Say More,” Nguyen and editor Jim Dao discuss the author’s recent works and the role of the writer in times of political turmoil.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 7 episode of the “Say More” podcast.
Jim Dao: I’m Jim Dao. Welcome to “Say More.”
It wasn’t long ago that finding an Asian American novelist in the local bookstore felt like finding a rare flower. Today the options overflow.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was on the leading edge of that wave. His first novel “The Sympathizer” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016.
Since then, he has written a sequel, a collection of short stories, books for children, a book about the Vietnam War, and other works.
He’s also become an important public intellectual, promoting the works of immigrant and minority writers, and advocating for Palestinian rights. I first met Viet when I was the op-ed editor at The New York Times, and I invited him to write some pieces for us. These days, he’s a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California.
We’re honored to have him as a guest in our studio today. Viet Thanh Nguyen, thanks for joining me.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: Hi, Jim. Such a pleasure to be here with you.
Dao: So we’re in the Globe studio here in Boston, just across the river from Harvard, where you gave the Norton Lectures in 2023 and 2024. That’s an exceptional honor for those who aren’t familiar with it.
It’s reserved for literary, musical, and artistic titans, from Igor Stravinsky to Toni Morrison to Herbie Hancock. You built your lectures around an expanding view of solidarity, and these lectures have become your most recent book “To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other.”
I want to start there because I think this concept really sums up a lot of the character of your work. So tell me this concept of writing as others — what does that mean to you?
Nguyen: I think it means for me that I’ve always had a sense of my own “otherness,” my own origin stories that I came to the United States as a refugee and my memories begin in a refugee camp. So there was always that sense that I was different in some way.
As we can see today in our contemporary politics, refugees make a convenient scapegoat for different kinds of political tensions in this country. And as a young person, I felt that otherness extremely personally, because one of my earliest memories was being taken away from my parents and being put into a separate American sponsor household. So, that should be definitive for a lot of people.
Then as I grew up in the United States, I was constantly reminded that I was other in some way through popular culture, being denigrated as Asian through mainstream jokes and things like that, but also watching the Vietnam War being played out in the movies and realizing Vietnamese people are other — and I’m one of these people even though I feel like an American.
And so that theme of duality of self and other always being in tension with each other. It’s something that I would see repeatedly throughout my childhood and my adult life.
It affected the way that I read things. I was attracted to works that dealt with otherness, whether it was individualized otherness — which I think all of us have felt at one moment or another. It’s part of what makes otherness a universal experience. But collective otherness where an identity that you do not choose is imposed on you, that’s actually a very important historical experience for many groups of people, including the groups to which I’ve belonged. And so I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out how I’m located in these traditions of self and otherness, and how my reading has been shaped and how I can position myself as a writer.
Dao: Your childhood was really quite tumultuous. Just talk for a moment about that period of being separated from your parents. How old were you? How long did that last, and who did they place you with?
Nguyen: I was 4, and what happened was that 130,000 Vietnamese refugees and thousands of Cambodians came to the United States as a consequence of the end of the war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
In order to leave an American refugee camp, you had to have an American sponsor willing to take you. So typically a sponsor, whether it was a family, or a church, or some kind of aid group, would take an entire family. Unusually in our family’s case, no one was willing to do that. One sponsor took my parents, one sponsor took my 10-year-old brother, and one sponsor took 4-year-old me.
In my case, that sponsor was a very nice Pennsylvanian, Harrisburg family. I have no complaints about that. But when you’re 4, you don’t really understand that you’re being taken away for any kind of positive reason. And the positive reason was to help my parents have enough time to get jobs, get on their feet, and so on.
But when you’re 4, you only experience this as abandonment, which is how I felt about it. And I was lucky because I got to come home after a few months. My brother, who was 10, didn’t get to come home for two years. I think we were both shaped, importantly by these experiences, and I think it had a negative emotional impact that I didn’t realize.
You described my childhood as tumultuous, I would’ve described my childhood as normal. Because I just normalized all these things. You had to accept it. This is the price of being a refugee. My parents went through much worse things from my perspective, so that was how I came to accept that these things were just a part of my emotional landscape.
Dao: You’ve mentioned your parents, and they clearly have been important figures, not just in your life, but also in your writing. You described them, I think in one of your books, as having been twice exiled. First when they fled North Vietnam to South Vietnam during the Civil War, and then from the South to the United States after Saigon, or maybe just before, Saigon fell?
Nguyen: No, on the day Saigon fell.
Dao: Wow. You were young and you made that journey with them. Tell us a little bit about their journey, how they ended up eventually in San Jose, California.
Nguyen: When I look at my parents, I think they’ve had this epic life, which is also a life that they shared with so many hundreds of thousands of other Vietnamese people and other people from war-torn countries.
They were born in the 1930s during the period of French colonization. They grew up in the 1940s, when the Japanese came and occupied the country. They survived at a very young age of famine in North Vietnam that killed a million people. Then they became refugees twice, as you described. But in between those refugee experiences, they built a very successful life for themselves as business people in South Vietnam over the period of 1954 to 1975. And they did that without very much education.
So they had this very impressive life that dealt with war, colonialism, all these kinds of ruptures and tumult. Then by the time I knew them as a child in the 1970s, they had started perhaps the second Vietnamese grocery store in San Jose, California.
They had to build their lives all over again. It left me with this idea that in the United States, when we think of war stories, we usually think of soldiers. We have the luxury in the United States of having our wars mostly fought overseas, but for many people in many places, civilian stories like my parents’ are war stories, too.
Dao: You’ve written about your life as a refugee and you’ve called yourself a refugee, but you’ve also, in the Norton Lectures for instance, talked about your parents as having been exiles.
It’s an interesting, sort of semantic difference. Could you explain that? How do you see those as being two different things or are they just different sides of the same coin?
Nguyen: I’m a writer, so words have connotations, and I think that these experiences of being of migration, refugee, exile, they’re all part of the same family of human experiences, but they have different connotations that are important.
I think that refugees, in our contemporary idea, have really negative connotations.
When you’re a refugee, you’re part of a mass, you’re forced to flee. Typically, refugees are depicted in very objectifying terms because they don’t control their own narrative. So other people are looking at them, and in the case of Vietnamese people, the term that the Western media came up with to describe them, was not just refugees but boat people.
And so that’s a very negative connotation that, nevertheless, had this power to help in the rescue of so many Vietnamese refugees from boats and camps in the 1970s and 1980s. My parents are certainly among this group of people.
I don’t renounce that experience at all because I embrace being called a refugee because it is a denigrated term, and I believe refugees have to stand up for other refugees.
But exile is also a term that goes back much further.
Exile goes back to biblical times, and undoubtedly before, but I think there’s also something about exile that is, we understand it to be very existential, and perhaps we’re feeling this today to be exiled, is to be cast out from a community.
As a person who’s exiled, there is this potential to have a great tragedy, but also great insight into the human and political condition because of the exile. But from the perspective of the people who have not been exiled, the idea of exile is, I think, terrifying.
It means being thrown outside of the walls of the city state, for example.
And now if we look at our contemporary situation, we’re using terms like deportation when we’re casting people out. I’m trying to find other words that might have more power than deportation, which seems very technical and legal and permissible, and exile might be one of those terms.
I’ve just heard about one story of a Vietnamese American who was convicted for a horrible crime, did his time in prison for 25 years, and understood that he was going to be sent back to Vietnam instead. He accepted it, and his wife went to Vietnam to meet him after he was released from prison.
Instead, the government just sent him to South Sudan. That is not deportation, that is more like exile, but it is a part of the same human family as all these other ideas of forced migration that includes refugees.
Dao: One more story about your family I’m interested in. Your parents left behind an older sister, and you met her decades later. That must have been an incredibly emotional moment. Could you tell us about it?
Nguyen: I was 4 when I left Vietnam. So I certainly knew I had a sister at 4 years of age, but then I forgot.
The reason why we left her behind is because my mother was forced to flee by herself with her children. She had to make a decision, and her decision was to leave my oldest sister behind, who was 16 at the time, to take care of the house and the family business.
And apparently, my sister agreed with this when I met her many years later and tried to understand more of what happened. She said, “I did want to be responsible, I did want to do this.”
Of course, the assumption was not that we would be separated for decades, but that my mother and my parents would come back eventually. The war and the finality of the fall of South Vietnam prevented that from happening for many decades.
Sometime around 10, 11, 12 years of age, we received a letter in San Jose and there’s a picture of this young woman in there. And I was like, “Who’s this?” And my parents were like, “That’s your adopted sister.”
And I was like, “What? I have a sister?” And so that was the beginning of a very important moment in my life where I realized that there’s an absent presence in our house. We have a living ghost in the house.
I realized that we share that experience with so many other Vietnamese households, because every Vietnamese household I went to had similar black and white pictures of people who had been left behind for one reason or another.
It was a very formative moment for me because I think it imbued me with a sense of survivor’s guilt. Because, why am I here and why is she there? What was the difference? Why did my mother choose one over the other?
I think that was one reason why it took me a long time to go back to Vietnam, because I knew that going back to Vietnam was not simply going to be a personal encounter with the country.
It would have to involve me meeting my sister and all the other people we had left behind.
Dao: I want to talk to you a little bit about becoming a writer. I think like a lot of Asian immigrant parents, yours probably weren’t thrilled to hear that you wanted to be a writer, but obviously from a very young age, you were just drawn to the written word.
You read voraciously. I think you even wrote a book in third grade. So tell us about that process. How and what did it take to overcome your parents’ opposition, if that’s a fair word for it?
Nguyen: Well, my poor parents never realized they were raising one of the most dangerous creatures you can find in your household: a writer. And I spared them that knowledge actually.
I didn’t write a novel in the third grade, but I wrote and illustrated my own book called “Lester the Cat.”
“Lester the Cat” won a book award from the San Jose Public Library. My parents were working in their grocery store. They didn’t even have the time to take me to the library to get my award. So, the school librarian took me to get that award.
I’m not sure my parents ever realized I wanted to be a writer because I thought that would be too much information. My brother, for example, had gone to Harvard. And he had done philosophy, but he’d also done pre-med.
So he became the doctor that they wanted, and he told me when I went to college, “Just don’t tell them that you’re going to be an English major. Just say you’re going to do pre-med.”
I did pre-med for 11 weeks. That’s all I could take. But then after that I told my parents, “Okay, I’m going to do pre-law. I’ll be a lawyer.”
And then they said, “Okay, that’s fine.”
When I got to that stage where I had to choose whatever graduate program I was going to, I decided to go to get a PhD in English. And my parents were like, “What? What does that mean?” But they heard “doctorate,” and so doctorate was a compromise. They had no idea what I was doing as a professor of English, but at least it was a job in a university.
But, I never said to them, “I want to be a writer.”
I think maybe the first inkling my father got that I wanted to be a writer was when I published a short story and was translated into Vietnamese. I gave it to him.
Then maybe the next time they realized I was for sure going to be a writer was when “The Sympathizer” came out. Because “The Sympathizer” won the Pulitzer Prize, everything was fine, but you cannot treat this as a normal condition of things.
I was very lucky.
But after that, I think the way that they reconciled with it, we never talked about the content of my books. If they paid attention to the Vietnamese language news, I’m sure they’d discover that I’m not popular with the Vietnamese refugee community.
But we never talked about it.
Instead, the only thing my father ever asked me about in terms of my books, besides having me take pictures with him in my books, was how many copies I’ve sold. That made him happy. And I thought, “That’s all that I need.”
Dao: In your Norton Lectures, you talk about how you read voraciously.
You worked your way through the Western canon as an adolescent or maybe even younger, and you absorbed these books by, oftentimes dead, white men largely, much of which you loved.
You came to really appreciate their skill and their plots and their characters. You said something interesting in the lectures, where you said you sort of also realized that they weren’t writing for a Vietnamese refugee kid. They were just writing to an audience that would understand them because it was just assumed that that audience would understand them.
And there was an important realization for you, that as a writer, you would have to learn how to just write as if everybody understood what you were and who you were about, and that struck me as a fascinating sort of moment.
How did you incorporate that into the way you approached writing?
Nguyen: I think that was a long struggle to realize something so simple as that, because this is one of the distinctions, I think between being a part of a majority and being a part of a minority, however you choose to distinguish these populations.
When you’re part of a majority, I think you can oftentimes make the assumption that people do know what you’re talking about: the world of cultural and political references that you have or things that you think you share with your audience.
When you’re a part of the minority, you don’t necessarily have that assumption. That for a lot of people who are so-called minorities can produce a sense of dissonance and anxiety.
If we speak our truth, whatever our truth is, as some part of a minority, maybe the majority won’t understand us. And the reason that’s important is because the majority controls the levers of power. I think too often minority writers have felt the temptation to explain and to translate.
And I argue that this is a deformation now in some circumstances.
In some instances, I understand you want to explain and translate. There’s a necessity for those kinds of things. And all of us who have been immigrant or refugee kids of parents who don’t speak the English language, that’s a very common trope, that kids serve as interpreters for their parents.
But that’s not what literature should do. Literature is not a self-help manual. Literature is not a “how to” kind of thing.
Did Charles Dickens ever explain anything? I don’t know if he ever did. You read a Charles Dickens novel, you just assume you’re entering into his world.
Maybe it was easier in the 19th century if you lived in London, but even today, you’re reading the books. You just have to go into his world.
I thought that was the trick that I had to learn how to not renounce being Vietnamese, or Asian, or whatever refugee. To embrace whatever it is that made me a minority, but to write about it from the position as if I were a part of a majority.
It seems like a simple thing, but it took me a long time to get to that moment of conviction to do that. And I think that is a very powerful moment of realization that whatever our individual experience is, it is already inherently universal, no matter what dominant culture is telling us.
Dao: We’ve talked a little bit about your first novel, “The Sympathizer.” And for people who haven’t read it, the novel is this incredibly layered story about a half-Vietnamese, half-French man who becomes a spy for the North Vietnamese military. He infiltrates the inner circle of a South Vietnamese general, and eventually the general and the spy flee to California, where the plot takes all kinds of crazy twists and turns.
Just talk for a moment about how you decided to take what might have started as a sort of classic immigrant refugee story and then kind of turned it on its head this way, turning into a spy, a detective story in a way.
Nguyen: Before I wrote “The Sympathizer,” I’d already written a collection of short stories, which was published as “The Refugees” — but it was published after “The Sympathizer.”
“The Refugees” does exactly what you just described. It talks about the refugee or immigrant experience and so on. And they’re well-worn tropes and patterns for doing all of that, because if you are a refugee or an immigrant or different in some way in the United States, you offered this opportunity to tell the story of your people.
I felt an obligation to do that. But after I wrote “The Refugees,” I didn’t feel that obligation anymore. I felt like, “I’ve done my duty to the Vietnamese community, and now I want to write something for me and something that would be more fun for me.”
And so that’s where “The Sympathizer” was born because it was born out of a sense of this desire to write a book for myself and not for anybody else, to write a book that would not perform some kind of ethnographic or sociological function, and to write a book that would be entertaining.
So I had to fashion the character of my spy very carefully, and I deliberately made him mixed race.
So his father’s a French priest, his mother’s a poor Vietnamese woman, because I felt that someone who was Eurasian — as they were called in that time — would automatically be subjected to so many historical and cultural pressures that, if he was intelligent and educated, would allow him to be a commentator on all of these kinds of historical and cultural kinds of issues.
In the end, he’s also a smart ass, so he’s not some kind of somber figure who’s humorless. He’s actually got a very bitter and sarcastic sense of humor, like myself. His humor helps to make his politics hopefully go down easier along with this whole spy narrative that gives a lot of dramatic propulsion to the narrative.
Dao: The book is obviously beyond “The Refugees,” also a commentary to some degree on the war in Vietnam. You’ve often said over the years that you have to almost remind people that Vietnam is a country, not a war, and yet Americans still, I think to some degree, think of it first as a war and then as a country, secondarily.
Now, you had told me recently that you had pledged not to write anything about the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. I think you may have broken that pledge. Why do you feel that way about the war?
Nguyen: It’s such an exhausting topic because I don’t really think either Vietnam or the United States, for all the energies that both countries have expended on acts of memory and narrative and history, have, from my point of view, fully or adequately understood the ramifications of the war.
From the American point of view, this is still an American war and it’s so hard for me and anybody else who’s Vietnamese or Southeast Asian to overcome. It’s just embedded into the culture.
So “The Sympathizer” being told from a Vietnamese point of view was unsettling from the beginning.
It was rejected by 13 out of 14 publishers. The 14th publisher, who bought it, was not American. He was English and he was mixed race.
I’ve spent so much time over the past decade talking about the Vietnam War. I think it’s important to do so, but it’s also hard because there is so much education that has to be done. For non-Vietnamese Americans to really grapple with their own prejudices and assumptions on this.
Dao: Sticking with the topic of war, but shifting wars, you’ve become a very outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and the Palestinian people. In one of your Norton Lectures, you talk very passionately about why you think Asian Americans should empathize with the plight of Palestinians.
How did you come to that sort of commitment to that?
Nguyen: I think, as a whole, one of the reasons why Palestine has become an important issue is because of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians.
US support for Israel is, to me, a condensation of so many contradictions in our own history of the United States, doing actions like settler colonialism, conquering places, eradicating peoples, and then just forgetting that these things have happened and then arguing that we are a country of freedom and liberty and democracy, and so on.
And so what happens in Palestine is a repetition of some of these issues, but also a repetition of the attempt at erasure, the repetition at the attempt to say, “We support liberty and democracy, except for this group of people. Okay?”
So that’s why I think Palestine is symbolically and politically important for the United States as a whole.
But if you compare the history of anti-Muslim representation in the United States, it overlaps pretty clearly with anti-East Asian, anti-Southeast Asian representation. So we’ve gone from racist images of Fu Manchu, for example, to repetitions of Osama Bin Laden or Yahya Sinwar. So I see very clear continuities.
Dao: After Biden won in 2020, who wrote an essay for The New York Times saying you were now concerned that the country would pull back from difficult political conversations and that writers and artists would do the same and fall into their pre-Trump personas, I think is how you described it.
Some people probably said being politically minded isn’t great art to begin with. But now we’re in the second term of the Trump administration. Democracy seems more at risk than ever.
How do you feel now? Do you feel more strongly than ever about this and, what do you think the role of the writer should be at this moment?
Nguyen: I think the end of that essay, which is called “The post-Trump Future of Literature,” actually ended with Palestine. It actually talked about a Palestinian American poet, and so on.
And of course, by the time we get to the end of the Biden administration and the beginning of the second Trump era, that’s exactly what took place. If the first Trump era was defined largely around domestic politics, we would now look back and say these were the cultural war politics of diversity, equity and inclusion, immigration, and so on.
That’s been magnified now through antisemitism and Palestine.
And again, a lot of what I said in that essay in 2020 I think came true because the ability of the American literary establishment to respond to the late Biden, early Trump era has been pretty weak.
The literary establishment has been able to respond to domestic issues. Of course, we’re going to mobilize around DEI, for example, but the literary establishment just fell apart around the question of Palestine.
Every society is contradictory. And every society will manifest absurdities and hypocrisies. It’s easy to point to the absurdities and hypocrisy of Donald Trump if you’re a Democrat, for example, but can you point to the absurdities and hypocrisies of your own side, or to the absurdities and hypocrisies that are fundamental to your society as a whole?
That to me is oppositionally political, and that is exactly where the most powerful art can stand. Oftentimes when we look back on the works that have been canonized, that’s exactly what writers have done.
Dao: You’ve talked about leaving academia. I don’t know if you’ve talked about that publicly,
Nguyen: I have.
Dao: You have. Why is that and what’s next for you?
Nguyen: I’ve spent over 30 years in academia as a grad student and as a professor. It’s been, obviously, a very formative experience for me and taught me a lot, shaped my writing, but I don’t think I have anything more to learn from it as a human being.
So many things I can learn from interactions with other professors. And being in academia is very comforting. I have job security. I have a nice paycheck, et cetera. I’m walking away from all that. My parents would be shocked. They passed away. I don’t know if I could have done this while my parents were still alive because my parents would be like, “Are you kidding me? You’re walking away from this paycheck?”
The whole reason I became a professor was because at 21 years of age, I heard about something called tenure. I was like, “Oh, you can’t get fired. Perfect. I want this.”
I thought once I get tenure, I can do whatever I want to do. I can be a writer, which is exactly, eventually what happened.
But I think being a writer is also about risk taking in so many ways. Risk taking in terms of art. Risk taking in terms of emotions, risk taking in terms of just your life and what you do and how you speak, or how I speak.
I just feel now is the time I need to learn new things that I’m no longer learning from academia.
As a writer, I’ve always tried to challenge myself in one way or another. Whether it’s through questions of form or questions of emotions, and now with leaving academia, I also think it’s about taking chances and seeing how my writing will be impacted when I’m no longer a professor.
It’s exciting, but also daunting at the same time.
Dao: Well, we look forward to what comes next.
Kara Mihm of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Read this article at the Boston Globe.
