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Viet Thanh Nguyen came to the U.S. as a refugee from Vietnam when he was four years old. Growing up in San Jose, California, Nguyen remembers the moment he understood he was Asian-American. In his latest book, To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other, Nguyen examines the power in finding solidarity with other Others, especially in today’s America.
Transcript:
GENE DEMBY, HOST:
What’s good? You’re listening to CODE SWITCH. I’m Gene Demby. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s family brought him to the United States in the early 1970s when he was about 4 years old.
VIET THANH NGUYEN: That’s where my memories begin – howling and screaming as I’m taken away from my parents.
DEMBY: His parents owned a business in Vietnam and then the war happened and upended their lives, and they fled and found themselves trying to make a new life in this country on the other side of the world and in a country that was so deeply implicated in all the bloodshed and destruction back home. Viet’s family eventually settled in San Jose, California. They opened a grocery store there. And Viet would grow up as an American. To his parents’ chagrin, he became an academic and a writer. His debut novel, “The Sympathizer,” came out almost a decade ago, and the story follows this unnamed Vietnamese man in his own in-between space, living in LA among Vietnamese refugees and even working a little in the movie industry, all while secretly spying on those same Vietnamese American neighbors for the communists back home. “The Sympathizer” became a huge hit. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The HBO series based on his book came out last year – Robert Downey Jr was nominated for an Emmy for his role in the series. And now Viet is a professor at the University of Southern California, where he teaches about ethnicity and literature, and he’s emerged as this really prominent social critic, speaking out about immigration and climate change and Israel’s war in Gaza.
NGUYEN: I try to connect the fact that even though we’re talking about the past oftentimes, like with the Vietnam War, that there are so many connections to the present.
DEMBY: In this ep, I’m going to chop it up with Viet Thanh Nguyen about all this and his latest book, “To Save And To Destroy: Writing As An Other.” It’s a collection of essays based on lectures he’s given about the seductive danger of seeing the experience of being oppressed as unique and something we can only shoulder along with other people experiencing the same oppression as us. It’s also about the importance – maybe even necessity – of finding solidarity with other others.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: In this new essay collection, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that memoirs are full of secrets that we’re eager to read about – you know, hidden affairs and messy divorces and drunken benders and all that kind of stuff. But he says that there’s another kind of secret – the big, open kind that American memoir tends to stay away from. I asked him what he meant when he said open secrets.
NGUYEN: I think the open secrets that literature avoids are pretty much the open secrets that many Americans avoid because these open secrets are too disturbing. For me, my understanding of American history is that we have to go back to the very origins – to the very basic contradiction of what makes the United States, which is that we are a country born from these ideals of freedom, democracy, justice and so on, which are real, and they’re important, and they’re beneficial for a certain part of the American population. And then at the same time, none of those ideals would have been possible without the other part of American history, which is that our country is made out of conquest, genocide, enslavement, colonization, perpetual war.
That’s really uncomfortable for a lot of people to acknowledge because it’s a direct indictment of who we are as Americans and it means that the things that we think of as our American privileges are privileges born out of what the poet William Carlos Williams called the orgy of blood that is American history. That’s an open secret, right? And, you know, for me, the other part of this open secret is that, you know, we call ourselves a society of the American dream, but the American dream is just a euphemism for settler colonization. Most of us are implicated in that. When we came as refugees – my family – to the United States to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1975, my parents bought a house, like, in a year later. But they bought a house in Paxton Township. And when I did a little bit of investigation into the history of Harrisburg and this area, the last major massacre of Indigenous peoples in 1700 was carried out by a vigilante group – white men – called the Paxton Boys. They came out of Paxton Township.
DEMBY: Wow.
NGUYEN: And then, 250 some years later, here along – we come along, and my parents buy their first house in Paxton Township, a land that would have been cleared by genocide and colonization. So we’re all implicated in this, and that’s not to just say then we throw up our hands and give up. It’s just the basic challenge of who we are as Americans. But it is an open secret because so many people would rather just not talk about that.
DEMBY: So you’ve been really outspoken about a bunch of issues that are obviously in the current political climate right now, getting people fired and deported. What is this moment like for you right now? Like, what does it feel like to be in your shoes?
NGUYEN: Well, I think, as with a certain portion of Americans, I feel angry, terrified, sad, confused and also just affirmed in the sense that everything that I studied when I was at Berkeley has been validated. You know, so I got to Berkeley. I was basically this – you know, I’d gone to this Jesuit all-boys prep school that was primarily white. I showed up at Berkeley as a Vietnamese refugee, but who had the sensibility of an adolescent angst-ridden white boy.
DEMBY: (Laughter).
NGUYEN: And then I got – you know, was exposed to Asian American studies, ethnic studies, Chicano studies, Black studies. And it blew my mind. I was like, oh, my God, this is the history that had always been denied to me, but the history that had shaped my realities.
DEMBY: The open secrets you were talking about.
NGUYEN: The open secrets. And, you know, it instilled in me this sense that I wanted to be a writer and an activist, and I wanted to do both of those things together in this idea of being a committed writer or an engaged writer. So my genealogy is, of course, like all the great writers, but also a particular strand of those writers who were always politically engaged, whether we’re talking about Toni Morrison or Frantz Fanon, Edward Said or Maxine Hong Kingston. And the things that we were protesting against as undergraduates were things like – protesting for were things like faculty diversity and curricular diversity, you know, reforming the great books and things like that, which at the time, I felt sort of embarrassed about because the previous cohort of students at Berkeley had fought against apartheid in South Africa.
So what is asking for greater diversity relative to, you know, being against apartheid? But, in fact, those days of the early ’90s were the culture wars, you know, this idea that if you had Toni Morrison in the canon, you had to get rid of Shakespeare, a zero-sum game. That was a real debate at Stanford. So now fast-forward to our present time. And in fact, what we were doing back then is completely related to what’s happening today. We’re living through culture wars right now. And what I see is that culture wars are inseparable from real wars, which is why, you know, for example, we just talked about deportation, you know, who are we deporting as a country? We’re deporting Palestinians. We’re deporting pro-Palestinian advocates, international students, deporting anybody who’s identified as an alleged gangster who’s also now a terrorist, according to the Trump administration.
The rhetoric around this is cultural war rhetoric. And all these issues go directly back, again, to the beginnings of the country because for Donald Trump to call alleged Venezuelan gangsters terrorists, he’s invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. You know, so this is not ancient history. This is, you know, core American history that’s being extended into the present. We’re in a long continuum. And so what we were dealing with in the 1990s at Berkeley was related to the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, and all of that is, you know, directly related to what’s happening in Gaza today.
DEMBY: Are you worried about backlash from your university or the government of the United States, like, for the stances you were taking up?
NGUYEN: I think that the threat of punishment, of penalties, is real. People feel it. And I do, too, of course. I mean, I was in Italy just a couple of weeks ago, and I spent one afternoon in my hotel room just sort of hyperventilating. I was like, can I get back into the country and see my kids? You know? And that was just a little taste of, you know, what people who are really being deported feel like. So I do sense, you know, that intimidation. And I know that there can be real consequences. Part of me believes still that this country is based on principle and that, you know, somebody will come along and say, no, you cannot deport these people for these kinds of reasons. And then part of me knows that, of course, we can.
So what are we supposed to do in the – in confronting that reality? And foolheartedly, or not, I just, you know, go back to my 21-year-old self, the 21-year-old self who believes so much that writing and social and political movements mattered and that we had to stand up for our causes and our beliefs. And I was willing to do that when I was 21. And when I became a writer, I swore to myself, I’m going to go back. To that 21-year-old self. Not that I want to be 21. I’m a much better person now than when I was 21. But that bravery that a 21-year-old has, that is something that I wanted to – I want to try to capture.
DEMBY: You just mentioned that you were worried about being able to come back into the United States from Italy. I’m going to impose a little bit as an interviewer here and get personal, but are you an American citizen?
NGUYEN: I’m an American citizen, yes. But I’m a naturalized citizen. I wasn’t born in this country.
DEMBY: Right.
NGUYEN: Right? And now – I remember during the first Trump administration, I posted something on social media, saying – I said, oh, they’re going to go after naturalized citizens next. And somebody else said, no, they can’t do that. This is the United States. And, of course, this is exactly the rhetoric. The trajectory, the logic of what it is that the Trump administration and its supporters want to do is very, very clear. You know, they want to denaturalize. They want to strip citizenship. They want to make American identity an identity that’s both highly racialized, but also highly ideologized, as well. You have to, you know, submit to the Trump administration and demonstrate your patriotism in order to be safe here. And that’s really scary. It’s not anything to underestimate, I think. And, of course, we’re witnessing the test cases being demonstrated against the most vulnerable populations, which is international students, undocumented migrants, anyone accused supposedly of a crime.
DEMBY: In some cases, not even accused of a crime, just, you know?
NGUYEN: (Laughter) Yes, exactly.
DEMBY: There’s a chapter in your new book called On Palestine In Asia and in it, you do this really remarkable thing in which you talk about your Asian Americaness as a lens to understand the humanity and motivations of Palestinians and Israelis as full people who are capable of being victims, to use your words, victims and victimizers. And that chapter really struck me. And I’m wondering why you think it’s so hard for us to hold these two seemingly contradictory truths about power and otherness, as you see them at the same time.
NGUYEN: I think that otherness is a universal condition. We all feel other at some point or another, in some individual sense. But some of us feel it more than others. That’s who become writers and artists because we’re weirdos. We don’t fit in. We feel our sense of otherness. And then, in other cases, otherness is imposed, right? Like, power, you know, power comes along and identifies a population as being other, from some other population. And so I grew up with that, you know, this sense of my own individual weirdness, but a sense of my identity as an Asian or Asian American or Vietnamese American. And that sense of identity is powerful. It obviously builds movements and forms communities and collectives.
And a lot of times, that identity is built on a sense of victimization. Something was done to us. Something turned us into another – some violence, you know, was inflicted on us. And that sense of victimization is a powerful way of organizing ourselves. And unfortunately, for too many people, that’s where their sense of identity stops. Identity aligns with victimization. That’s what happened with Americans in 9/11. We’re the victims. And when you’re – when you only have a sense of yourself as a victim, what does it do? It allows you to victimize other people because you’re justified. Someone did something terrible to me. Now I am justified.
DEMBY: Any response you make is justified by this injustice that you suffered.
NGUYEN: Exactly. And I think that’s the wrong lesson to learn from victimization and the experience of otherness. I mean, the – one of the points of the book is to say that if we have been victims, we should identify with victims. We shouldn’t just identify with ourselves. That’s the mistake. I mean, obviously, we should defend ourselves. We should recognize injuries that are done to us. But the larger lesson is always identify with the victims, or you usually will not be led wrong if you go orient yourself in that direction. And that’s what otherness means to me. Otherness is not about hanging on to one identity because that’s really boring, and it’s a trap, you know? Like, I’m proud of being Vietnamese. I love Vietnamese food, blah, blah, blah. But that’s not the end of myself. I mean, I really think that the lessons of the Vietnam War and the tragedies that were inflicted on the Vietnamese people have taught me that I should always identify with others and with whoever is the victim at a particular moment. That’s a very powerful, ethical orientation for me, and it informs my art and informs the art of the writers I most admire.
DEMBY: Why is this issue so important for you to talk about, do you think?
NGUYEN: I think that, for me, I became a writer because I believed in the power of literature and art to save me because it did – they did. But then I also realized that if something has the power to save you or me, it also has the power to destroy you, as well. So in becoming a writer, I recognized that writing has that capacity, you know, to save and to destroy, and that this is a really crucial power that writers have. And if that is the case, for what purpose should I use that power? Absolutely, I should use it to create the greatest kind of art that I can possibly do. I should be committed to the beauty of the art. But in order to achieve beauty, you also have to, I think, have a sense of the truth. I go back to Keats – truth is beauty and beauty, truth. If that’s the case, then for me to be a writer, to be an artist, to acknowledge the power of what I’m grappling with, also means that I have to be committed to what I believe to be beauty and truth.
And so when I write about things, I’m looking to create something beautiful, but I’m also looking to unveil some kind of truth for myself. If I look at the history of our country, the truth is, as I described earlier, that it’s both beautiful and brutal all at the same time. That has to be addressed, at least for me. And so, likewise, if I believe that, that our country is built on both beauty and brutality, I make connections between the very origins of our country and then my Vietnam War. I don’t think the Vietnam War would have happened if the United States wasn’t defined by beauty and brutality, by the sense of idealism, and by this history of brutal warfare that brought it to Southeast Asia. And, likewise, I draw a direct connection between that and American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American support of Israel.
DEMBY: When we come back…
NGUYEN: So my brother puts the phone down and says, Mom and Dad have been shot. And at 9 years of age, I think I was speechless. I had no idea what to say. I had no idea what to feel, and so I didn’t say anything. And my brother, who was crying, said, why aren’t you crying? What’s wrong with you? And I had no idea what was wrong with me. I had no answer for that.
DEMBY: That’s coming up. Stay with us, y’all.
Gene – just Gene this week – CODE SWITCH. I’ve been talking to the writer and social critic Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose new book is about being the other and seeing the other.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NGUYEN: You know, I became an Asian-American when I was 19. I went to Berkeley. It was like a religious transformation for me to go from being this whitewashed kid from the suburbs to becoming an Asian-American and recognizing myself as part of this history of political struggle that has defined us.
DEMBY: Can you tell us a little bit about your preconversion life? Like…
NGUYEN: (Laughter).
DEMBY: …What were you like as a teenager? Were you like – when you say whitewashed, I’m trying to imagine. You know, you said it was the early ’90s. So like, late ’80s, early ’90s, like, what were you doing?
NGUYEN: Well, I – you know, I came as a Vietnamese refugee. My parents told me I was 100% Vietnamese when I was growing up. But yet, at the same time, I felt American because I was completely exposed to American pop culture. I spoke – I think I speak English like your unmarked American, whatever that means, like a White American. And then I went to school…
DEMBY: At least like a Californian, right?
NGUYEN: At least like a Californian, yeah. And then I went to school at San Jose’s best high school. Very elite school. I had a totally canonical education. Primarily white high school, where, you know, we, who were Asian, knew we were different. We just didn’t know how to put it into words. So every day, we would gather in a corner of the campus, and we would call ourselves the Asian invasion. You know, we didn’t have a political consciousness. We could only talk about ourselves as – with a pejorative. But mixed in with that was this sense of whiteness that, you know, my culture was Vietnamese, but it was also, you know, this canonical Anglo-American body of knowledge and literature that I was being trained in.
I mean, the movie that I most identified with when I went to college was “Dead Poets Society,” which is about a bunch of angst-ridden adolescent white boys quoting Shakespeare and Byron. And I was that guy. I had memorized those very poems that were going to be quoted in “Dead Poets Society.” So then I would – I showed up at Berkeley and, you know, the one – the first class I took there was intro to – introduction to Asian American history with Ronald Takaki. And that, again, blew my mind because it exposed me to a different kind of version of the United States than what I knew. So that was my transformation. Then I joined a bunch of other Asian-American students. We called – we were a part of this group called the Asian-American Political Alliance. But, you know, what was really key to that was, yes, we were affirming our Asian-American identity and sense of politics, but we always wanted to make alliances with, you know, Black students and Latino students and so on.
And so that had always been important to me as a part of my political consciousness, this idea that solidarity – identity was necessary, but solidarity was just as important, maybe even more important than our identities. And that was the way to protect ourselves or protect me against the temptations of otherness. If I’m in solidarity with other people, I’m aware of their histories. I’m aware of their victimization. I’m aware of their suffering. And if I’m aware of those things, I have to think about those in relationship to myself. If we don’t have a sense of solidarity and we only have a sense of ourself, that’s how we sink into idealization and the sense of the herd and so on. And that’s empowering but also really limiting, as well. And what I call expansive solidarity is the way out of these limitations of otherness.
DEMBY: You write that there are three temptations that writers should avoid when writing about others. You say that is idealizing and sentimentalizing is one. Separating oneself from the herd and seeing the other as the identity.
NGUYEN: Yeah. So that was the third point, right? Like, being trapped in our own otherness. And I – and it’s very human response to become attached to our own wound. If you’ve been wounded for whatever reason, around some kind of identity, then a natural response is to say, well, I’m going to inhabit that. You call me – you’re going to call me that slur? I’m going to be that slur, and I’m going to organize around that. That’s how we go from being orientals to Asian-Americans. So it’s a very powerful, you know, sense of otherness, but can also trap us at the same time. And that’s the dilemma that we find ourselves in, who identify as others. So we should be aware of that. But – and that relates to the first point about idealization. You know, we idealize ourselves because so often, if you are an other, you’ve been demonized. You know, you’ve been – your community, your nationality, your religion, whatever it is, has been treated as something to be denigrated by somebody more powerful. And so in response, you idealize that, and that’s valuable. That’s important. But it also can be very limiting, as well, because what does it lead to? It leads to a sense of authenticity.
You know, for example, if you’re Vietnamese, you would say, oh, I – there is such a thing as being 100% Vietnamese. There’s such a thing as the most authentic Vietnamese food and all of that. But in order for that to take place, you have to have somebody inauthentic. You have to have the real, and you have to have the fake. And that can be just, you know, playful, of course. But when it’s deployed in the real world around politics, it can become extremely dangerous. As the people who say they’re real will say the people who are fake need to be disposed of in some way. That’s exactly what’s happening with American identity now. The Trump administration, the MAGA movement and so on says American identity is this. And if you are not this, then you are – you know, you’re not American, which means you’re vulnerable to, you know, deportation. Love it or leave it, and even worse.
And then the other thing, that sense of separating oneself from the herd, well, again, when you’re being treated as an other, you’re being treated as part of a herd – a human animal. And that means that you’re vulnerable to being targeted as a part of this herd. And so for some people, there’s a natural or human tendency to think, I’m going to separate myself. I’m going to make myself special, unique in some way, and in that sense, possibly save myself. And for writers, how that usually manifests itself is that if we become successful enough, we get Christianed as the voice for the voiceless because a herd is inherently supposedly voiceless, and then the writer becomes separated out of that or separates themselves out of that and becomes a voice for the voiceless. And I really reject that idea.
I go back to what Arundhati Roy has said – there’s no such thing as the voiceless. There’s only the preferably silenced or the unheard. And that’s, to me, a much more powerful idea about thinking about who we are as writers, to say that we’re not voices for the voiceless. We’re just trying to say things that have already been said by the communities that we come from. And that, you know, my real project is not to be a voice for the voiceless, but it’s to attempt to help abolish the conditions of voicelessness.
DEMBY: In this book of lectures that you’ve turned into essays, you get real personal. I mean, like, you talk about memoir as a site of honesty and a site of betrayal because you might be telling stories that people in your life who are your memoirs and would rather you not tell. And I want to ask you about this traumatic moment from your childhood, if that’s OK. In the book, you talk about this moment that, shockingly, no one in your family has spoken about since it happened. Your mother and father were shot in their grocery store in San Jose on Christmas Eve when you were a child. Can you just tell us about what happened there and what you remember about that day?
NGUYEN: I believe I was 9 years of age, Christmas Eve. I was at home with my brother who was 10 years – who was seven years older, and I was watching cartoons. It was probably “A Scooby-Doo Christmas” or something like that. And my brother gets a phone call. And when he puts the phone down, he says, oh, Mom and – my parents were running this grocery store called the Saigon Moi in downtown San Jose. It was, like, the second Vietnamese grocery store open in San Jose, and downtown San Jose in the early 1980s was a very rough place to be. So my brother puts the phone down and says, Mom and Dad have been shot.
DEMBY: Wow.
NGUYEN: And at 9 years of age, I think I was speechless. I had no idea what to say. I had no idea what to feel. I – and so I didn’t say anything. And my brother, who was crying, said, why aren’t you crying? What’s wrong with you? And I had no idea what was wrong with me. I had no answer for that. And so I internalized that question. I’m not blaming my brother. I think it was a logical response for him, but I internalized that question. And my parents were OK. I mean, they were not wounded badly. I mean, they were actually back at work in their store within a day or two from what I…
DEMBY: You say – you said, two days later.
NGUYEN: …Remember.
DEMBY: Yeah, ’cause you said they had bills…
NGUYEN: Yeah, because…
DEMBY: …To pay, right?
NGUYEN: We had to survive. Well, they had to survive, and they had to take care of us. And to me – so everything was just normal. Nobody – we never talked about that again. And to me, what that signaled was, we have to endure these kinds of experiences. So, for example, you know, we left behind my 16-year-old sister in Vietnam when we fled. Didn’t talk about her again until I got – we got a letter from her in the early 1980s. I forgot I had a sister. I mean…
DEMBY: Wow.
NGUYEN: …Obviously, I knew when I was 4 years old I had a sister, but then I forgot. And then the next thing I knew, when I was in high school, perhaps or 13, get a letter and said – my parents said, this is from your sister. I said, what sister?
DEMBY: Wow.
NGUYEN: You know? And then being separated from my parents at 4. Couldn’t talk about that again afterwards. So, I think, actually, for – the reason why we never talked about these kinds of things is because this was the refugee mentality. You had to just move forward. You could not be stopped by the injuries that you were experiencing. You just had to survive. And everybody was like that. Everybody was like that. And I didn’t think it was worthy to talk about some of these things because I knew that there were other people in the Vietnamese refugee community who had gone through much worse. So there was always that sense of relative trauma. Yes, bad things happen to us, but bad things happen to everybody, and worse things happen to so many people.
So I think for so many Vietnamese refugees, it was just normalized that we had to go through these kinds of things and that we had to just, you know, not dwell because if we dwelled on these things, then we would be trapped in the past. We would be trapped in this morass of emotions and fears. And so, yes, I survived. Many of us survived by doing this, but I think – I, at least, paid an emotional price that I wasn’t aware of for many decades. When I met my future wife and we started dating for a while, you know, I told her, hey, I think I’m pretty well adjusted. And she said, no, you’re not.
(LAUGHTER)
NGUYEN: I was like, OK. I didn’t believe her, but she turned out to be right. But it would take me decades to figure out that, in fact, something like being separated from one’s parents at 4 years of age, even if I could move on from that and build, you know, this middle-class life and everything. In fact, I was deeply emotionally damaged by that, and it would take me a long time to realize that. In fact, you know, the reason why this book is so memoir-intensive, and the previous book was a memoir, “A Man Of Two Faces,” is because I think I was finally able in my – what? – late 40s to begin confronting the damage that was done to me from the ages of 4 through 17, right? And so I don’t think I’m unusual at all. I think that probably happens to a lot of people. We’re damaged in various ways that we cannot articulate. And if we can’t articulate how we’ve been damaged, of course, what’s going to happen is that we’re never going to address that damage, and we’re going to possibly damage other people or at least damage ourselves.
DEMBY: It’s funny you mentioned when you started dating your wife, she said, I think you’re not OK. In the book, you write about how a professor you had at undergrad sent you a note like, I think you need to see a counselor. And you forgot about that entire exchange till decades later when you found this letter again.
NGUYEN: Not just any writer, but my professor, Maxine Hong Kingston, one of the most famous writers in the country. And I took a class with her. I was one of 14 students. And every day, I would go into a seminar, and I would fall asleep. You know, that was the kind of person I was when I was 19. So, yeah, I was messed up, but I didn’t see it at the time. You know, I wrote about it. I wrote an essay for her class about my mother going to a psychiatric facility. So I obviously was trying to deal with this – these issues in my life, but not very well. I was a bad writer and not a very good human being in some ways.
And so she was right to say that I was, you know, alienated and damaged in some ways. But my excuse was, I’m just tired. I’m a political activist. I got better things to do. And even though I wrote that essay, I didn’t really confront what that essay represented either as an act of writing or an act of dealing with my mother’s illness and everything that led to it. So I did put it away for 30 years, and I picked it up. I finally re-read it during the pandemic. And I realized that my memory had completely changed. I never forgot that my mother went to a psychiatric facility. But in my memory, she had gone when I was a little boy because that’s how I felt. When I read the essay, I realized I was 19 when I wrote that essay. I was 18 when my mother went to that psychiatric facility.
DEMBY: Wow. So it was very present at this time.
NGUYEN: Very present. And you would imagine that 18 or 19, you – your sense of memory should be fully formed, right? But what that taught – what that experience taught me was that, yes, people who are fully formed adults, our memories can be completely unreliable, and we are, in fact, not fully in control of ourselves and who we are. And, you know, this book, but much of my work is very much about the sense of multiplicity within ourselves, our abilities to deceive ourselves sometimes because we need to preserve ourselves, and we don’t want full knowledge of who we are or what we’ve been through.
(SOUNDBITE OF BLUE DOT SESSIONS’ “NEVILL”)
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This episode you’re listening to was produced by Christina Cala. It was edited by Dalia Mortada. Our engineer was Jimmy Keeley. And we would be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That’s Xavier Lopez, Jess Kung, Leah Donnella, Courtney Stein, Veralyn Williams and B.A. Parker. As for me, I’m Gene Demby. Be easy, y’all.
