Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen joins student reporter Khadeejah Khan for a thoughtful discussion on identity, memory, activism, and the role of art in “abolishing the conditions of voicelessness.” In addition, Annalise shares a conversation with her father about growing up Chinese in Ecuador and how he embraces his multiple cultures.
Transcript Below:
ON OUR MINDS, SEASON 5, EPISODE 4:
VOICES ACROSS CULTURES: VIET THANH NGUYEN AND THE TEEN SEARCH FOR BELONGING
[Theme music starts]
Eason: From PBS News Student Reporting Labs.
Evelyn: And WETA
Eason: This is On Our Minds
Evelyn: With Evelyn
Eason: And Eason
Evelyn: A podcast by teens, for teens
Eason: telling stories about who inspires us!
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Eason: I really like that last episode that we just did about family, it honestly makes me appreciate family so much more.
Evelyn: Yeah, I agree. In today’s episode, we’ll dive deeper into culture and identity. We have a special conversation to share with you with an author, his name is Viet Thanh Nguyen. He is a Vietnamese American novelist.
Eason: But before we go into that conversation, we first want to share with you one more story about family. This one comes from Annalise who is from Danville, CA. She and her dad talk about their culture and identity…
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Annalise: When my dad is travelling, we like to stay updated by FaceTiming, so let’s give him a call.
[Facetime call sound]
Annalise: ¡Hola Papi! ¿Estás listo?
Mr. Huang: Sí hija, comencemos.
Annalise: [record scratch] Pause really quickly. My dad’s Chinese and I’m half Chinese, half Vietnamese, so why are we speaking Spanish to each other? Even though my dad was born in China, he moved to Ecuador when he was five and he lived in the South American country until he moved to the US at 16. Ecuador is a huge part of his culture and identity, and because we speak Spanish together at home, now it’s a part of mine. But don’t just take my word for it.
Annalise: As the only Chinese family in your Ecuadorian town, what was it like for you growing up?
Mr. Huang: I can definitely tell you that it wasn’t easy. It’s just a big part of human nature to want to fit in, and when you look differently and speak differently than the people around you, it’s really difficult.
Annalise: Is there any particular moments you can recall, whether it was in Ecuador or America where you felt like you were treated differently because of how you look?
Mr. Huang: I think a lot of the times people will see that I’m a Chinese man, and so they’ll try to say “Ni Hao” to me or something like that. I know that it is impossible to ask for someone to know that I’m from Ecuador because I do look Asian, but I do think that in America, because we are so diverse, it’s kind of odd to me that people would still say “Ni Hao” and assume that I’m Chinese and speak Chinese, and so I go to response to kind of deflect that kind of stereotyping is I just talking really rapid fire sp Spanish, and I think it just catches them off guard. It’s kind, it’s not aggressively calling them out, but at the same time, I hope that message really sticks with them and people know that going into the future or you can’t always assume someone’s race or ethnicity, just because of how they look, and oftentimes you’ll find that a lot of people’s backgrounds and histories are a lot more complex than you would initially think, and I think that’s really beautiful.
Annalise: I love the way you put that, Papi. Now that you’ve been in America for so long, what are some aspects of your Ecuadorian culture that you still keep with you? And how have you managed to keep them alive?
Mr. Huang: Well, it really comes in the little things, like listening to Spanish music, being sure to speak with you and your brother in Spanish as much as I can. And, you know, sometimes cooking Ecuadorian dishes for dinner are just little ways that I can preserve my culture and really maintain my identity.
Annalise: Yes, heavy on the dishes. My favorite that you make is encebollado, which is a fish stew that’s topped with onions.
Mr. Huang: That used to be my favorite dish back in Ecuador too, and so I love being able to keep that tradition alive and pass it down through the generations, and I hope really one day when you have kids, you make it for them, too.
Annalise: Do you ever feel kind of lost balancing all these different aspects of your identity? Like, you have traditions from America and China and Ecuador, how do you keep it all straight?
Mr. Huang: I’d say it’s a lot harder sounding than it really is. I mean for me, all these cultures and traditions are just part of my identity, and so when I just show up every day, it feels like I’m really representing all these aspects of my heritage. For example, maybe I’m celebrating Chinese New Year with my parents, but I’m also speaking English because I’m in America and I’m listening to my Spanish music with you in the car ride home from school. The real difficulty is in how I define myself, you know, I sometimes struggle with feeling like I belong to one culture or another, but I don’t think I have much of a problem representing it all in my everyday life because they are just such an integral part of me. And I think I really show it every day with everything I do.
Annalise: I can definitely see what you’re saying because, I mean, as your daughter, when I think of you, I just think, hey, that’s Papi, that’s Dad, you know? He just does what he does and if it’s all part of your identity, then every single day when you show up just as yourself, you really are showing everything that you came from and every culture that you represent. What advice do you have for other people about preserving their traditions and really feeling proud of their identity?
Mr. Huang: Ooh, that’s a tough one. What I would say to that is really to use your loved ones, really share what you know and what you love, with the people in your life. For example, I’ve sourced so much pride and joy and love from sharing my traditions and my culture and all my silly stories about my life back in Ecuador with you and your brother and to never forget that part of yourself and to always hold it close to your heart, you should be introducing it to other people that you care about. And that’s really how you become proud of it, because I promise you as you share your culture, other people find it interesting, other people find it amazing and beautiful and special to see so many people experiencing so many different things, and so really just share what you know and love and who you are and show what makes you unique.
Annalise: Hey dad, can we go out singing “Rosas” by La Oreja de Van Gogh?
*singing*
Mr. Huang: Bye everyone!
Annalise: Bye!
[Facetime call hang up]
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Evelyn: Yeah, I found it hilarious that her dad rapid-fires Spanish as a way to combat stereotypes.
Eason: Yeah. I know how he says he doesn’t find it hard to keep in touch with his culture, but honestly, sometimes I kind of feel like I’m losing touch with my Chinese side.
Evelyn: Yeah, I didn’t really realize that this was an issue until people started mentioning this idea of like losing your identity and culture And I was like, well, should I be worried? I’m kind of like my biggest concern is like not being able to talk with native people in China
Eason: I think I’ll always be able to talk in Chinese just fine, but it’s, you know, the surface level Chinese versus like Chinese culture. Yeah, I think, you can always have like a businessy conversation, but to, you get all the memes in China, like make references, talking like Chinese slang, that’s like a whole different level that like, honestly, whenever I go on, whenever try to talk with cousin over text, I’m like, should I be making some kind of like… Reference to this like is there a meme that I can reference that makes it not so stiff But yeah, that’s one of my concerns.
Evelyn: I’m glad this is a universal experience, universal insecurity.
Eason: Actually, these are some issues that our author today writes about.These are some of the issues that our author today writes about. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a writer, scholar and activist. His best-selling novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016. He has also published short stories, children’s books, and his memoir.
Evelyn: Student reporter Khadeejah Khan spoke with Mr. Nguyen last fall.
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Khadeejah Khan: Hi Mr. Nguyen. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I want to start off by saying how much you inspire me, especially by how you tell a story of the Vietnam War. Your activism and advocacy has sparked so much solidarity between so many communities, and has definitely spoken to me as a Muslim South Asian American writer. I’m curious, who are some of your literary inspirations?
Viet Nguyen: I think that when I was growing up as a refugee in California, I just went to the public library and I read everything. I was reading Charles Dickens and William Thackeray and a lot of English literature and boys literature, children’s literature that were, that were basically all written by white people. And they were probably not thinking that they were writing to a young Vietnamese refugee boy, or that someone like me one day would be reading their works. And yet I was connecting with those works. And I think for me, the inspirational part of that is knowing, therefore, that out there in the world, there are people who are not like me, who are reading my work as well. And that being said, it’s still also great. Obviously, when we find writers and works that seem even more specific to our cultural, historical, political, experiences. And so when I started reading Writers of color, reading writers who were actively engaged in decolonization and activism, in addition to thinking about themselves as writers who are, trying to be great artists as well. That was really inspiring for me. because I could see that there were other people kind of like me who were who had already done this work that seemed so daunting.
Khadeejah Khan: And in your writing, you describe this idea of being a spy and a man of two faces, which is also the title of your memoir. Growing up for me, Muslim and American. I was made to believe as if my identities could never intersect. That one was always against the other. And when I read your work, I was reminded how in my community after 9/11, the disconnect between our identities were used by organizations like NYPD who hired Muslim Americans as informants or spies against other Muslim Americans, post-9/11. Can you tell me a bit more about your relationship between your identities and how you bridge them throughout your life?
Viet Nguyen: The fact that some of us may feel internal conflicts, around who we are, is obviously very important, but I think it’s also indicative of what you just pointed out, which is that there is no community out there probably that is unified. You might you could call a community Muslim American or South Asian or Vietnamese American or what have you. But that is, simply put, a label on a very heterogeneous group of people. So the outside world might look at Vietnamese Americans and think, well, they’re Vietnamese America. And that label says everything. But inside the Vietnamese American community, we we, we may love each other and so on, but we also may hate each other, too. And that’s it’s a very human, response. And that’s why we have civil wars and revolutions and things like that that you’re undoubtedly very familiar with. And that’s exactly what we’re witnessing now, that we don’t have a unified Asian-American community. We don’t have a unified American nation. That’s deeply uncomfortable for a lot of us. And if we want to try to ameliorate those conditions, I think our task as, as writers is certainly to struggle with not trying to offer solutions necessarily, but to struggle with that very human nature that produces those kinds of fractures. And I think for me, that’s what a Novel of The Sympathizer does. I don’t know if anybody should turn to the The Sympathizer for example, to make themselves feel better about an identity, but hopefully they’ll feel better about the fact that other people have struggled with these same kinds of issues. And I think that’s one of the things that art and writing can offer us is a deep grappling with human complexity. And if that human complexity on the on the surface looks like our human complexity in terms of our faces and colors and religions and so on, that’s an added bonus.
Khadeejah Khan: And as we talk about themes of identity, and especially in your writing, another theme is memory. Where memory starts, how memory can be painful, but forgetting can also be especially dangerous without accepting and understanding the memory. Today, we live in an America that has made efforts to erase its racist colonial past in education and broader conversations. What are some of the dangers that can come with these efforts?
Viet Nguyen: Oh, I think the dangers are pretty obvious in the United States. It’s hardly unique. I think every every nation probably, engages in this, in these deliberate acts of erasure. And that’s because we all want to protect an image of ourselves and our communities and our nations that fits a certain ideal. And amnesia and forgetting certainly play a key role in the rewriting of our historical and personal narratives. The danger, obviously, is that by pretending that we have not compromised ourselves, that we have not betrayed our ideals, that we have not killed others in the names of our in the name of our own self-interest. If we forget those things, then we’re going to do them again. And I think that’s pretty much exactly what characterizes the history of the United States, that it’s, in my opinion, built on certainly beautiful ideals of democracy and equality, and also has been built on, brutal realities of genocide, colonization, enslavement, and so on. And the United States as a whole has has not really been able to reconcile these two conflicting versions. And I really think that only by recognizing how fundamental to the American character these aspects of genocide, colonization and enslavement happened to be only by realizing that they’re fundamental rather than accidental. Can we actually try to prevent them from being repeated. And unfortunately, I think many Americans are certainly not at that stage. And that’s why they would rather forget that these things have happened at all.
Khadeejah Khan: And I think the best way of understanding our identity is also understanding history and that’s where education comes through. And as a college student, you stepped into the world of activism, having been arrested at college protest twice. Now, as a professor at University of Southern California, you spoken at protests in solidarity with Palestine and Gaza. How do you, activism and writing intersect for you, especially as an Asian-American writer?
Viet Nguyen: I think they intersect. As long as I thought of myself as a writer and as a scholar. When I was a young boy and I wanted to be a writer, and I was writing and drawing my own book, certainly I had no, no conception of what an activist was. I also had no conception of what a writer was, to be honest. So to me, it was all just fun and games. And that’s actually at the core of what art should be, I think. I mean, I think for me, being an artist or being a writer is fundamentally about being playful. But. At a certain point, I also realized that play was extremely serious. That’s the paradox and the contradiction for me of of being a writer. It’s both serious and playful all at the same time. And the topics and the themes that concern me are certainly, I think, universal topics and themes, all the human emotions and all that kind of thing, but also the questions of exploitation and injustice that are also universal as well. So the challenge for me was always, well, how do I how do I create an art that’s adequate to dealing with both the personal and the political? Once I started to think in those terms, it was inevitable that I also started to think in activist terms as well. And of course, art and activism are not the same thing. They’re different worlds, but they do overlap in very important ways. And I like to think that my work occupies that space where things overlap.
Khadeejah Khan: As we talk about resistance and identity, and how all of these aspects of ourselves come into our advocacy. A big part of your memoir that stuck with me the most is when you write about the myth of being a voice for the voiceless, as communities that are titled voiceless are instead deliberately silenced, and that instead we should abolish the conditions of voicelessness. What advice do you have for young people like myself who also want to spark this change?
Viet Nguyen: The reason why I think for me, that I that’s that slogan, abolish the conditions of voicelessness, and this is powerful for me, is because it demands that we think about what that would entail. What are the conditions that silence people? They are complex. And in order to abolish those conditions, we need art. We need writing. But we need all of these other forms of political engagement and activism as well. If I look back on my genealogy of the writers and activists who have influenced me, they made a difference in their lifetimes. they did move us forward to a certain degree. And that made it possible for me to move forward to a certain degree. So, for those of us who believe in art and who believe in abolishing the conditions of voiceless ness, we’ve made a commitment of a lifetime.
Khadeejah Khan: I’m glad that we’re able to end this conversation in a light of hope and optimism for the next generation of storytellers, writers, readers, or journalists who also want to abolish the conditions of voicelessness. Thank you so much for your time and speaking with me today.
Viet Nguyen: Khadeejah, it was lovely talking to you.
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Eason: Especially considering the polarization in American politics, it’s super insightful to hear from someone like Mr. Nguyen talk about our struggles with unity versus individualism.
Evelyn: Even within our communities, our own communities, we can sometimes feel out of place and it was so validating to hear what he said. For me personally, I was born in Taiwan and I lived in China for 10 years and then now I live in the US. So it’s a constant struggle to have to balance all three of these identities and honestly what Mr. Nguyen said is like speaking something that I haven’t been able to form into my own words.
Eason: Before we go, we have another podcast we recommend you check out…
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Eason: Today’s segments were produced by Annalise and Khadeejah.
Evelyn: Lead Podcast Producer Briget Ganskey produced this episode with editing and mixing by Genesis Magpayo (Mag-pie-o)
Eason: Ryan Janes is our camera and audio operator.
Evelyn: Approval and oversight by Editorial Director Marie Cue-sick and Executive Producer Leah Clapman.
Eason: Theme music by Isaiah Brown. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
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