Viet Thanh Nguyen is best known for his Pulitzer-winning 2015 debut novel The Sympathizer, whose protagonist is a half-French, half-Vietnamese spy for North Vietnam serving in the South Vietnamese army—a man who is othered many times over by his life circumstances and by his choices. Living and writing in a country where the mention of Vietnam more strongly evokes the war than the country or its people, the spectre of the other is essential to Nguyen’s work.
His latest book, originally delivered as the 2023-24 Norton Lectures at Harvard University, To Save and To Destroy is a meditation on what it means to be “the other,” both in establishing necessary distance, as well as being cast aside by stigma and outside perceptions. Othering, though usually connoting a negative separation, is in Nguyen’s eyes a necessary feature of writing. Across six sections, Nguyen invites his audience to seriously consider the pitfalls and promises of writing as an other.
Nguyen is quick to recognize that he can be labeled as both an insider and outsider depending on who’s keeping count. Privilege and power have never been easy, mutually exclusive hierarchies to sort people into—Nguyen comes from a working-class Vietnamese refugee family, but now he is an acclaimed author, a professor, a MacArthur Fellowship recipient. Through his writing of otherness, he has, in certain ways, paradoxically ascended to insider status.
Everybody competes with an entourage of past, imagined, idealized, and othered selves whether that’s in moments of internal crisis, contention with a public persona, divergence from expectation, or the strain of outgrowing relationships. The theme of the other that one might want to both save and to destroy has been dominant in popular media recently such as in the films The Substance, Mickey 17, A Different Man, and the TV show Severance. What are we supposed to do with all these versions of one person? Is there one truest self? In real life, as in media, the answer usually lives in the neighborhood of locating balance. The other should not be understood in extremes as the virtuous hero, the dastardly villain, or the hapless victim.
We’re born into many versions of otherness. With an identity like being the child of immigrants or the child of refugees, your otherness is inseparable yet distinct from your parents. Nguyen reflects on how it might be considered a form of betrayal to have told his parents’ stories so publicly, in ways they never forbid him from yet never asked for either: “And if I was finding my voice as a writer, how much of it was due to speaking for others, beginning first of all with my mother?” What and who was writing her story for? Disclosure alone is not inherently artistic nor is it inherently radical. It is easy for institutions and those in power to pluck a marginalized person out of obscurity every now and then and declare them the singular voice of their specific othered category. This is not Nguyen’s goal. Instead, he emphasizes that his imagined audience is never white people for whom he is translating and flattening all of Vietnam for. His “obligation was to speak as if everyone could already understand what I said,” illustrating this point with the comical hypothetical of a writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald feeling obligated to define a sandwich to readers the way an imagined white audience might demand Nguyen define phở. Rather than allowing otherness to become a demarcation of individuality or victimhood, writing opens the door for what Nguyen terms a “capacious grief” for the traumas of ourselves and others that lends itself to creating an expansive solidarity.
The model minority myth of Asian America haunts the entire project as Nguyen grapples with the commonly held aspiration for assimilation and the high costs of seeking inclusion in America. In the fourth section, “On Palestine and Asia,” Nguyen recognizes the necessary and logical solidarity between Asian Americans and Palestine. He dissects the double-edged natures of self-defense, inclusion, and solidarity here, how these impulses can protect but also blind us from broader forms of solidarity. Standing up for the excluded, oppressed, and colonized can be portrayed as radical, misguided, and threatening, as we see today with college campus censorship and the targeting of students and faculty involved in pro-Palestine protest efforts. A key feature of the status quo is its near invisibility. It’s treated like a law of nature, a moderated and measured conclusion that need not be challenged. Assimilating involves the implicit adoption of those invisible politics. “Empires and war machines deploy the language of neutrality, bureaucracy, and symmetry to disguise the impact of their asymmetrical policies and weaponry,” writes Nguyen. Operating from the point of view of the other can be leveraged to agitate these assumptions of neutrality and envision a better, more just world than the one that docile assimilation settles for. Nguyen is faithfully grounded in the political and historical conditions that precede us as well as the ways culture reflects and shapes history and vice versa.
Of course, otherness does not merely require us to be in perpetual tension with ourselves and those who alienate us. There is a joy to be embraced in the unending process of discovery. There is no freezing point where the contents of otherness solidify into a well-defined identity. Nguyen notes that, “Self-exploitation, self-exploration—both are crucial to the act of writing, which I think always involves a confrontation with one’s self, even if one writes about others.” The writer makes and remakes themselves on the page and in their minds. It is through that creative act that the writer understands the limits of understanding, and begins to see how one might make and remake the world.
The original Norton lectures were conducted across a span of months, carefully troubling assumptions and beliefs about “the voiceless” and “the other,” and presumably sparking lively discussion after each event. Absorbed here in book format, readers are likely to be craving a forum to work through everything Nguyen discusses, especially as he makes space for the thoughts of other writers throughout, including Edward Said, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Toni Morrison. Nguyen writes as an other while acutely aware that otherness is constructed, fluid, and not a weapon to be wielded. He has made peace with the fact that there will never be peace living amongst the many contradictions of self and identity and invites readers to join him in choosing ongoing deliberation rather than suffocating self-definition.
Chicago Review of Books | Otherness Fuels Solidarity in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “To Save and To Destroy”
