“The power of storytelling is to save us…. and to destroy us.” Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, is deeply shaped by his identity as a refugee. Viet describes his upbringing, one without many books, one that dealt with violence and isolation, and one that made him incredibly interested in the Vietnam War. The two bond over the shared burdens that family takes on to start a new life and Viet talks about what it was like winning the most prestigious prize in literature for his debut novel, and how he was propelled from a professor to a public figure. Viet also speaks to the importance of sharing and uplifting refugee stories amidst the digital and political dangers facing today’s society. Viet’s latest book, “To Save and to Destroy”, an exploration of otherness and a call for political solidarity, is available now wherever you get your books
Transcript
Dan LeBatard:
Welcome again to South Beach Sessions. We have got a teacher, we’re going to learn something here today, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, is with us. You can go Vietnguyen.info if you want his works that include a book that is now out and the book that you won the Pulitzer Prize with with your debut novel, The Sympathizer. You’re somebody refugee is sort of part of your identity publicly. So thank you for joining us. Interesting times in America. I’m being diplomatic now. I can’t imagine how you are experiencing what it is that you’re witnessing, but right before we turned on the cameras, you were talking about how similar Cubans and Vietnamese people are. What have been your observations there?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, Dan, first of all, thanks for having me. With the observations, well, Cubans ended up in Florida and most of the Vietnamese are the largest community who fled from Vietnam in 1975 ended up in California. So, we’re literally in opposite sides of the coast. Both communities are dominated by their anti-communist factions, and both have been using that kind of anti-communism both to cement their cultural communities where they are, but also to advance their political interests in the United States. Obviously, the Cubans have been actually much more effective at doing that than the Vietnamese Americans have. So we have a few politicians, but nothing on the scale of Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. The ability of the Cuban Exile community to determine a great degree of American politics is something that I think a certain portion of the Vietnamese community would envy.
Dan LeBatard:
Tell me about winning the Pulitzer Prize and how it is that it changed your life to have a debut novel that you wrote a little bit later into your writing career, but still your debut novel to win that prize. What happened to your life at that point and did you know the book was good?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I knew the book was good. I thought the book was very good, but winning a prize is completely arbitrary, as I’m sure you’re aware. It’s obviously nice to win prizes. I would never turn down a prize, especially the Pulitzer, which completely transformed my life. But now I serve on the Pulitzer Board and we give out Pulitzer Prizes, and I’ve served another jury juries for prizes, and I’m quite aware that it’s quite arbitrary in many ways. So, how did it change my life? Well, I mean, the Pulitzer is, especially for fiction, for the novel, people care about it. So just having winning that prize meant more eyeballs were on the book, and the book had done very well. It had been reviewed uniformly positively. It had made a big impact already, but a big impact, impact for literary work, you’re lucky if you sell 25 or 100,000 copies, which the book did too. But after the Pulitzer, it sold a million copies and it turned into a TV series for HBO. My trajectory has been completely transformed because of that book.
Dan LeBatard:
The reason I asked did you know it was good, which might seem like a stupid question is because a lot of writing comes with doubt and insecurity, and I talked to a lot of writers who, for whatever reason, aren’t totally sure that what they’ve made is never mind prize-winning, just worthy of being read by others in a way that meets community standards.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I spent 17 years writing a short story collection called The Refugees before I wrote The Sympathizer, and everything you said is true. That was just a horrible, miserable experience. The book itself was actually pretty good, I think, according to readers as well, but it was how I learned to write. I suffered all the agony and the doubt and the fear that you described. Then at the end of that process, I thought, “I wrote this book partly for me, but also partly for the community of Vietnamese readers, but other people who have influence, who can publish the book,” and that is a very human experience to do something for other people. But at the end of that, I thought, “I’ve had it. I’m going to write my next book for myself.” That was The Sympathizer. Ironically, because I didn’t care about what other people thought, I wrote the best possible book I could, and that is actually a life lesson for writers, but also for others as well.
Dan LeBatard:
So, what happened there? How did that happen? Because you’re changing the entirety of your process to the greatest of rewards.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I mean, the colloquial way is to say, “I don’t give a you know what anymore.” Many people spend the bulk of their lives actually giving that. They care about what other people think for obvious professional and personal reasons. But I think for artists as an example, but I think probably for other people too, we have to reach a space where we don’t care what other people think, so we can give completely honest expression to what we believe, both what we believe about the world, but what we believe about our art as well. Honestly, that was the hardest thing for me to achieve.
Dan LeBatard:
But how did you? You’re saying 17 years of suffering. Your relationship with it is what for 17 years? I’m writing about my experience also. It feels like I’m shouting into a tin can.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I grew up a Catholic, and I feel that if I hadn’t become a writer, I would’ve become a priest. Anything that required discipline that… In other words, the discipline is what matters. The calling is what matters. It’s not the world, it’s what you believe. The challenge for me as a writer was to spend 17 years learning the craft, the art, the technique, all these kinds of things you need as a writer, but also being preoccupied with the world, what the agents thought, editors thought, reviewers and so on. But the thing about a discipline for me is that after I spent 17 years being disciplined and disciplining myself, I stopped caring about the world.
There’s no way to teach anybody how to do that. That’s what makes a discipline so frightening and so powerful and so necessary for those of us who think of ourselves as artists or anybody who has a calling of some kind. If I hadn’t become a writer, I would’ve become a priest, or maybe I would become a chef or a gardener, something that would have required me just to spend a huge amount of time by myself until I realized that it is the art itself that matters, not the world.
Dan LeBatard:
Why were those your only choices? Why were the disciplines? I know your brother gets to this country doesn’t speak English upon arrival. Seven years later, he’s in Harvard. What was happening in your family as it regarded discipline?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
We had a very typical story, which is that our parents, we became refugees from the Vietnam War. I’m not going to bore you because you know these stories as well coming out of Cuba. When people are refugees, everybody who’s a refugee has a horrible story to tell about how they escaped whatever situation they find themselves in and we went through all of that. I call myself an eyewitness to eyewitnesses because my parents were full-grown adults. They were in their 40s. They lost everything. They made life-and-death decisions to get themselves and their children out of the country. I was four years old, so I don’t remember any of that, but I grew up watching my parents struggle in very difficult circumstances, living these refugee lives in the United States, and my brother did too. I think what we experienced out of that is we knew the kinds of sacrifices that had been made to give us the opportunities that we had.
So, we never needed, I think, a lot of motivation to just do our hardest to try to pay back our parents for their sacrifices, but also I think simply to pay back this entire idea that we were the lucky ones. We were the survivors. We made it out of the country. We were given opportunities that many people literally would’ve died for and many people did die for. So everything that happens after that, I feel grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to be a writer. But everything takes place in that context of tremendous loss of the refugee experience, of war, of knowing as I do as a scholar of this war, that during the years of the 1940s through the 1970s in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, millions of people died. So, I’m very lucky, and I try to make the most out of that opportunity.
Dan LeBatard:
When you talk about remembering the details or witnessing the details of your parents struggling, obviously they’re in the books, but for the uninitiated who have not yet seen the books, what are the struggles that you’re talking about?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
My parents were born poor in a poor rural northern village in an area that’s famous for producing hardcore communists and hardcore Catholics. So 30 minutes from my parents were born, Ho Chi Minh was born. My parents were Catholics. They chose a different route. They lifted themselves out of poverty through hard work and ingenuity. They lost everything again 20 years later as they became refugees for the second time. They fled from north to south Vietnam in 1954 when the country was divided, fled from Vietnam in 1975 when their side lost the war. They came to the United States with some money, but not a lot. They started from the bottom working as janitors and people doing manual work. They opened a grocery store in San Jose, California. They worked for 12 to 14-hour a day, seven days a week, almost every day of the year. They were shot in their store on Christmas Eve. They were held up in their own house at gunpoint. I was there to witness that. It was just a very difficult physical and emotional experience for them.
My mother ended up going to a psychiatric facility three times in her life soon after she arrived. When her mother died in Vietnam, and she was not there to be able to mourn her mother in person, that broke her. Then again, 15, 20 years later, I was 18 years old, she… And I wrote a whole book about it, A Man of Two Faces. Was she broken simply because of some crack in her own foundation or was she broken because of all the horrible things that she experienced through war and the refugee experience? I will never know the answer to that question, which is why I wrote a book about it. Then she was broken for the third time when I was an adult, and she never recovered from that. So that was the kind of life that my parents lived. They were hardworking, intelligent, successful people who overcame a lot, and in my mother’s case, who she could not overcome the last and final weakness within herself that she was not responsible for.
Dan LeBatard:
I don’t know the details of that. You will share what you wish or don’t wish to, but you jumped right over them being shot multiple times, one when you were nine and one when you were 16, one was in the home, but they were both shot in their store.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I was nine years old. I was home on Christmas Eve with my brother who was 16. I was watching, I believe, Scooby-Doo Christmas. I was having a great time. Phone rings. My brother answers the phone. He puts it down. He says, “Mom and dad have been shot.” I’m nine years old. I have no idea what to do with this information, so I just continue watching the cartoons and my brother who was crying says, “Why aren’t you crying? What’s wrong with you?” I thought there was indeed something wrong with me, and I bore that for the rest of my life to think that.
Anyway, so my parents had flesh wounds. The robber had shot them, but thankfully they were not injured too badly. Within a couple of days, we were back at work and we never spoke of that incident again, and that pretty much characterized our existence as refugees. You just had to keep on moving forward. If something bad happened to you, you have to remember something worse happened to somebody else. So that’s what I’m saying. For those of us who were refugees, everybody I know went through some horrible experience. Most of us as refugees hardly ever talked about what we went through because we realized everybody in our community had gone through something similar or something much, much worse.
When I was 16, yes, a gunman followed my parents’ home from the store, broke into the house, pointed a gun at all of our faces. Thankfully, we were not shot and thankfully he was probably an amateur because what he did was he said, “Get down on your knees.” My father and I, being the brave men that we were, got down on our knees and my mother just dashed right past this guy right out into the street screaming. We lived on a very busy street, so everybody saw. The gunman turned around, just stepped outside to go after her. My father jumped up and slammed the door shut and locked the door shut behind her. I looked to my left, and I looked through the living room window and I saw my mother running down the street screaming, saving our lives. Yeah, that was what childhood was like. That was what the refugee experience was like, not just for us, but for so many other refugees who are trying to survive in a very difficult and violent time in San Jose, California.
Dan LeBatard:
You stopped yourself there saying, “I’ve lived my entire life with what my reaction was to both of them being shot at nine years old,” and then you didn’t go any further. You detoured there. Where were you headed?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think that, well, first of all, the first thing that happened that I really remember that coming to the United States at four years of age, we ended up in an army camp. So 130,000 Vietnamese refugees come, we’re put into one of four camps. Ours was Fort Indiantown gap in Pennsylvania. In order to leave that camp or any camp, Vietnamese people had to have Americans sponsor them. So we had a very unusual circumstance. No American church or institution or family was willing to sponsor all four of us. So one sponsor took my parents, one sponsor took my 10-year-old brother, one sponsor took four-year-old me. That’s where my memories begin howling and screaming as I’m taken away from my parents, and I thought it wasn’t such a big deal.
I got to come home after two months, three months. My brother didn’t get to come home for two years, and I thought everything was fine. I just moved ahead with my life. Then I think in retrospect, looking back upon my life as I was writing this memoir, A Man of Two Faces, looking back at me at four years of age, nine years of age, listening, hearing about my parents being shot, 16 years of age, seeing a gunman in our house, I understood in the end that in fact, these things really did matter, that how I had coped with the refugee experience was by turning myself off emotionally by just becoming completely numb. So when my brother said, “what’s wrong with you?” I thought that was what was wrong with me. I couldn’t feel anything. So, that was my coping mechanism.
Sometimes when people go through horrifying traumatic experiences, they bear the traces and the scars very visibly. Sometimes it’s much quieter, and that was the case for me. Sometimes the traumas are incredible, like people drowning and dying and being shot. But sometimes for so many of us who have been through traumatic experiences, the trauma is a lot quieter and I think that’s especially true also for the children of people who’ve been through trauma. We watch what our parents have gone through, where the eyewitnesses to eyewitnesses, and we bear those scars as well.
Dan LeBatard:
I’d like to talk to you about the immigration issues in this country. I’d like to talk to you more about the refugee experience and some of the details in it, the way that you write about sewage, for example, something as simple as that. Why do you think your debut novel resonated the way that it did? Why do you think it was able to open eyes the way that it did?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think it’s actually a very good novel. Whether it’s a great novel, I have no idea. I think it’s very good because I’m a literary critic, so I think I know what I’m talking about, but I’m obviously very biased. So that was one reason. I think technically, artistically, I think the novel was doing stuff that people hadn’t seen before, because you have to remember, Americans think they know what the Vietnam War is. Americans just say Vietnam, and when they say Vietnam, they mean the Vietnam War. When they say the Vietnam War, they mean the American War. What did it do to Americans?
Number one, this is a novel purely about Vietnamese experiences. That’s unsettling for Americans to realize they’re not at the center of the world. Number two, it’s a novel that is very, very dark. A lot of terrible things happen, but it’s a novel that I tried to make very, very funny because I was inspired by novels like Catch-22, for example, and the belief that humor and satire can help us deal with tragedy, but humor and satire can also be very pointed political tools as well.
So I think all that happened, but the thing that was out of my control, but I knew was probably going to happen, is that Americans also feel terribly guilty. Not all Americans, but a good number of Americans, especially those who went through the war or those who are in the book in publishing industry who skew liberal, they feel guilty about this terrible, terrible war, and so they want voices like mine to come out there and tell them what it was like for Vietnamese people. Of course, what I always say is you can’t depend on one novel, one story, one writer, but my novel was one that came along that people focused on at that time, people as in American people who wanted to hear again what Vietnamese people have gone through.
Dan LeBatard:
For those who do not know, it’s a war story. It is a spy story. It is a love story, and it was your debut novel. What was the pressure after that like?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, because I’d already gone through 17 years of writing The Refugees, and I basically said, “I don’t care.” When I wrote The Sympathizer, winning the Pulitzer was obviously a big deal, but also at that point I was very fortunate. I was in my early 40s, and it didn’t matter to me in a lot. Genuinely, honestly, it didn’t matter because all I knew was I was just going to write another novel. So whether I got the prizes or didn’t get them, I would still write another novel. So I wrote a sequel called The Committed.
So, we have to remember with The Sympathizer, I set out to try to offend everybody, Americans, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, anti-communist, pro-communist, and judging from my hate mail, I succeeded. So when I finished, I thought, “Who else is there left to offend?” The French. So The Committed continues the adventures of our protagonist, who is this mixed-race French and Vietnamese communist spy in Paris, the land of his father. Anyway, when I wrote that novel again, I didn’t care. So it made no difference to me that the first one won the Pulitzer Prize because I had to keep that same conviction that what really mattered was the art, nothing else.
Dan LeBatard:
Can you help me, please? I’d like some help. I didn’t care. How did you get to, “I didn’t care”? Were you broken? Were you broken by the process? How does one get to, “I’m not going to care what anyone thinks,” and then writes the seminal work for the year?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think we all have illusions, illusions about ourselves, illusions about the world. We’re raised in certain ways, and we’re told, “Hey, this matters. That matters, this prize, this accomplishment, that school, those people, their opinions,” and we’ve all imbibed that to one degree or another. Then I think as one gets older, for many of us, there is a process of disillusionment. It’s called growing up. For some people, they become cynical. You don’t have to become cynical. You just have to realize that the world is a beautiful place, many beautiful things like art that are made by people, and people mess these beautiful things up.
There’s nothing that human beings have invented, nothing beautiful that they haven’t also messed up at the same time, and that’s the paradox of being human. We create beautiful things and we also undermine them by the institutions that we create. Okay. So I realized about that, about writing and about art, which were my things that I really cared about a lot, that the writing of the art matter, everything else around them do not, publishing, awards, recognitions, fancy dinners, interviews, these kinds of things. I mean, they’re fun, but they don’t-
Dan LeBatard:
Oh, you’re crushing me.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Not to the writer of the art.
Dan LeBatard:
I thought that this was going to be the highlight here for you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
We’re having you having a good time. That’s important. We need it, right? It’s a good time to go to a dinner party or a literary party or whatever, but it’s not the art. It’s not the writing. So, it took 17 years of working at the art to realize I didn’t care about the illusions, and that’s a very beneficial experience to have. Again, there’s no way to teach anybody how to do that.
Dan LeBatard:
But it wasn’t from one day or the other, right? Because it’s 17 years of drip, drip, drip, drip, and then you look up and I’m like, “Doing it wrong? Am I doing it wrong?” Are you asking yourself that? It’s a conscious decision to, “No, I am going to pour myself into the presence of my every act is going to be bleep off. I don’t care what anyone thinks. All that matters is I’m going to follow my convictions on this, and the places that I feel hurt, betrayed, wounded, or whatever, I’m just going to let it fly”?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. Because you look around and I looked around after 17 years and I realized, oh, the things that I thought I cared about like, “Shit, will I get get published in the New Yorker, or will I get this fancy prize or will I get this fancy residency and so on?” I realized those are accidental. If I got those things, would they make me happier? Would they make me a better writer? No, they’re just baubles, which doesn’t mean they’re not bad. Doesn’t mean they’re bad. I mean, I would take them, but again, the only thing that matters is sitting down at a desk and writing. Now, people doing different things, it’s different for… If you’re a ball player, it’s like you do the sport, you do the discipline, and there’s something beautiful in that. Of course, you want to be paid $1 million for it, but is that… I don’t know. I’m not in sports. You’re in sports. Is that what really matters? I don’t know.
Dan LeBatard:
Money is obviously important, and you winning the Pulitzer opened up an assortment of abilities for you that you wouldn’t have had before. But when you talk about human beings making beautiful things and destroying them, your present book, the title To Save and to Destroy, this is something you’ve been thinking about, obviously that human beings were very good at this.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, I think about the fact that yes, a million dollars is awesome. I wouldn’t turn it down, but it’s an interesting… I could write a story about this. The devil gives you a choice, all this money and you suck at what you do, or you’re really great at what you do, but you don’t get the recognition. Now, obviously, hopefully you want a sweet spot, but let’s say those are your two choices, what would you choose? Okay. For me, the devil didn’t literally appear, but it felt like that was a choice. I was sitting down with when I wrote The Sympathizer, and I’m going to write what I care about, and I don’t care if I win any prizes or make any money out of that.
That was my rejection of this institution of literature and art that had saved me, because when I came as a refugee boy to the United States and I was watching my parents struggle, they didn’t have any time to spend with me because they were working to save their lives and our lives. So what did I do? I just read a lot of books. I read stories. I fell in love with literature.
Dan LeBatard:
You were always in the library, right?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I was always in the library.
Dan LeBatard:
It was free knowledge. They were just giving it away down the street. So that’s where you were.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
We never had a single book in our house, not even the Bible. I don’t know why we were a Catholic, not even the Bible. So my parents would’ve never spent money on books. So I got that education for free. I educated myself and I fell in love with literature, and I believe that literature really, really mattered. Literature saved my life, and literature could save the world. I believe we all should find that passion, whatever it is for each of us. But I had to understand something, which is that if stories have the power to save us, they have the power to destroy us as well. If you give something that much power, that’s simply the recognition that you’re granting it.
How did I know that? One day when I was 11 or 12 years old, I put this movie into the VCR. It was called Apocalypse Now. I’d never seen any Vietnam War story before. I was a war fanatic. I loved American war movies. I was an American. Started watching this movie, and I realized the Vietnamese are the bad guys in here, or if we’re not the bad guys, we’re the unimportant people. The Americans are the good guys, or the Americans are the good guys, even if they’re the bad guys, because if you watch Apocalypse Now, you know the American soldiers are doing terrible things, but we see the world through their eyes. I was seeing the world through their eyes up until the moment they massacred Vietnamese civilians, and then I was split in two. Was I the one doing the killing or was I the one being killed?
That was when I realized what the true power of stories are, not just to save us, that’s a sentimental belief, but to destroy us because I felt destroyed at that point and that really shaped me. I grew up after that realizing that the United States had gone into Vietnam and destroyed a lot of places and a lot of people, but before the United States could ever do that, in the name of saving Vietnam and the Vietnamese people, before the United States could do that, the United States had to have already destroyed the Vietnamese through the stories that Americans were telling themselves, and Americans have always told stories about non-white people, non-American people that justified their destruction long before the United States arrived in their countries and actually destroyed them.
Dan LeBatard:
Could you have imagined in 2015 when you’re receiving the prize, if I’d come up to you and say, “Wait till you see what America’s like in 2025, you’re not going to believe it,” your response would’ve been what?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, if you appeared as this angel from the future, I would’ve probably said, “I do believe you because you’re coming from the future.” I’m a student of American history to some extent, and I don’t think there’s anything we’re seeing now that we haven’t seen before to one degree or another. But Americans probably, like most other people, have a good talent to be amnesiac about their past. I mean, we as Americans have collectively forgotten a lot of horrible things that we have done in our history to our fellow Americans, to the people we’ve encountered, to countries we’ve gone to. So I would’ve said, “Well, I’m really sad to hear that this is how things are going to turn out in 10 years.” But I also think that’s the logic of American history and society that has taken us here.
Dan LeBatard:
You’re a professor, as I mentioned, off the top. You are doing a lot of stuff to yell from the mountain tops about the dangers of artificial intelligence. I don’t know. That’s one historically that you could look at, no matter how much you know American history and say that is the threat that you saw coming from somewhere.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I wouldn’t have said artificial intelligence necessarily, but I don’t think it was beyond the imagination. Didn’t Steven Spielberg do a movie called AI like 20 years ago? In fact, if you go back to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley already gave us the template that here is a scientist. He’s not even a mad scientist. He’s just a scientist who believes in the power of science, and he wants to push the boundaries of what we know as human beings and push the boundaries of humanity itself. Then of course, something terrible happens in Frankenstein to Frankenstein, but also to the monster that he creates. In fact, AI may be, yes, a new technology, but Peter Thiel, that dude is Frankenstein.
So the tech bros and the tech oligarchs think they’re doing something new. In some senses, obviously yes, they are, but in other senses, they’re repeating a very old mythological template. I believe one of the new projects, I thought people were kidding when they said this. Is it Zuckerberg who’s come up with Prometheus? Somebody’s come up with Prometheus. Have you read… Do you know what Prometheus is? I mean, come on. I mean, the Greeks already knew, do not tempt the gods, do not mess with the gods, and that with AI is what we’re doing. That’s what Peter Thiel is saying. Humanity is not enough, we need to be divine. Well be careful what you wish for because you go back to the Bible, the Tower of Babel. God struck down human beings who aspired too much to divinity.
Dan LeBatard:
Tell us though your present cause and what the real dangers are as you’re watching students use artificial intelligence to not have to be at college actually learning. You’re probably reading papers all the time that have been written by computers.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. Well, actually, I have teaching assistants, so thankfully I don’t have to do that, but I hear from my TAs like, “Oh my God, we think this has been written by AI.” I teach a large lecture class on the Vietnam War, and I try to make it AI-proof. They’re a big project as students is to go and interview people, which hopefully you can’t do with AI or else you might be out of a job, right? It could happen, but they have to actually interview real living people.
Dan LeBatard:
Don’t threaten me.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
You could be replaced by AI, but the subject, the interviewer, interviewee, should be a real human being, we hope. Anyway, so that part hopefully is AI-proof. So we as teachers have to be smarter. Now, we always have to meet new technological challenges. But even in things like, oh my God, I have in-class blue book exams and my TAs are like, “This looks like it was written by AI.” Somehow some students snuck in something that allowed them possibly to manufacture their writing.
Look, education has always been confronted by technology. I’m sure people were upset about calculators and about rulers and things like that. Plato was critical about the pen as an instrument or writing as a technology that distracted people from full knowledge. So I don’t want to undersell what AI means, but I do want to say that we always have to confront new technological challenges. I think AI is probably different than a calculator, probably different than a computer. Computers and calculators still required human input and us to do something with that technology. AI promises to simply replace our brain functions all together. I don’t know. Actually, I do not know what that future entails.
From a teaching point of view, I think it probably means that ironically something that’s supposed to make life less labor-intensive, to make us do less things. For teachers, at least we’ll make work if we want to skirt AI more labor-intensive. Because what do we have to do? We actually have to make sure we’re in the room with the student to see what they’re learning, to have a conversation to do oral examinations, that kind of stuff. That might be the new reality. Of course, we don’t live in a country in which we’re willing to invest in our teachers and in models where it would be 12 students and one teacher. To get that kind of experience, you have to pay $100,000 a year.
So, here it is. That’s one of the basic contradictions. We are in a capitalist society that wants to reduce everything to the pure profit motive. That’s what AI is going to do. So all the human beings who are suddenly gravitating to AI, they hopefully are realizing that AI is also going to take their jobs at the same time. Then the promises of liberation that AI entails can only be made possible through greater human interaction, which requires that we treat human beings as valuable and not simply as widgets or people to be exploited for the cheapest possible wage.
Dan LeBatard:
What keeps you up at night in this regard?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That AI will win. Peter Thiel will win. That does keep me up at night.
Dan LeBatard:
How soon?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
How soon?
Dan LeBatard:
How eminent do you regard the largest of the threats here?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think it’s pretty fast. I think it’s pretty fast. If we think about the development of the personal laptop, for example, was that the 1980s and then the iPhone was about 15 years ago, in our own lifetime, in the lifetime of our children, 15 years. I remember the times before the iPhone. I remember times before the cell phone. I remember my first cell phone from 1997. Okay. The life has been completely transformed. I’m someone who loves literature and language, and even I have been transformed by the iPhone. I spend an ordinate amount of time reading things that are stupid on my iPhone. I also spend time reading things that are good on my iPad. But nevertheless, even someone like me who specializes in words has been shaped by this technology. God, who knows what a 12-year-old who has hardly ever read a book, how they will be impacted by this technology? In fact, I think this technological transformation, we’ve already seen the evidence that it’s extremely rapid with the introduction of personal devices and it’s going to get a lot faster.
Dan LeBatard:
What do you see being lost though with your students, with that generation, with their reliance on only having to find things instead of having to learn them?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, it’s hard to say. I mean, the students I get at my university, which is USC, tend to be extremely well-prepared. They’ve already been through a certain kind of educational system. So I think they’re at least a little bit aware of the dangers posed by technology because I don’t actually allow them to use laptops or phones in my classroom, and no one has ever protested. You figure if these people are that addicted, they would protest, but even they recognize what I say, which is these devices confuse the human relationships.
You actually understand more if you’re not taking notes on your laptop. You understand more if you’re not tempted by going to shop online at Amazon.com instead of interacting with other people in your classroom. So they recognize that. But there are a lot of other people who are not so well-prepared. So I think that I see some encouragement in these surveys that say that even there are some younger people, teenagers who recognize the dangers that technology poses to them and to their human relationships. I think we have to lean into that, and we have to offer our young people and our students and our children more human opportunities, and we have to do things like take away their damn phones.
Dan LeBatard:
What do you make of what is happening right now in this country as we’re sitting here right now in Los Angeles around immigration, given everything that is your identity in your work?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I believe in something that apparently a quarter to a third of the country doesn’t believe in, which is that immigrants and refugees make America great. If we look at our history, I think we have repeated evidence of that taking place both at a qualitative level in terms of things like food and culture and music and at a quantitative level in terms of economics and metrics and that kind of stuff. We also live in a country in which every now and then periodically it’s like cyclically the American people, some portion of them turn against immigrants and refugees. It’s happened repeatedly throughout our history. People freak out about some kind of economic or political or cultural problem, and it’s very easy to tempt them into fear-mongering and into demonizing people who appear to be different from them in some way.
So we again, repeatedly throughout American history, 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement that prevented Japanese from coming in 1924 Immigration Act that prevented almost all non-white immigration on and on and on. We deported two million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the 1930s and 1940s. Reading about that as a student, I wondered how could that possibly happen? Now we’re actually watching it happen in real time. We’re seeing the mechanisms being built, both the political and legal mechanisms, but also the cultural mechanisms that get people, some portion of the people to agree that this should be done. So I have hope that recent surveys indicate that now two-thirds, the three-quarters of American people are saying, “Actually, immigration is good for this country.” They’re having a reaction against the brutality that we’re seeing on screen. I don’t have to repeat what those-
Dan LeBatard:
But you’re offended by them, right?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’m deeply offended. I’m deeply offended.
Dan LeBatard:
Emotionally, you see how crude it is, and that cruelty is the point. You’re seeing how crass all of it is in 2025. It’s a blunt instrument. It’s not even subtle.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s inhumane and blunt, as you said, and I’m horrified by a few other reasons. I think many people who watch these images obviously are horrified for the same reasons that I am, and maybe you are, but I also see it as a historical horror. Like I said, this has happened before. So Americans who are saying, “This is not who we are.” I’m sorry, this is exactly who we are. We’ve done this through the generations to many, many different populations, thrown them into concentration camps, deported them without due process, tortured them, killed them. We have done this many times throughout American history.
The other thing that offends me, however, is people like Cubans and Vietnamese people who came here as refugees saying, “This is good.” Okay. I mean, during the previous Trump administration when children were being separated from their parents and put into cages, there were Vietnamese Americans saying, “Trump is doing the right thing.” Those are the bad refugees. We were the good refugees. I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee community of the 1970s and 1980s and let me tell you something, there were a lot of bad Vietnamese refugees doing terrible things. Okay. We’ve forgotten all about that because there’s always a new scary other demon monster to distract us, and that now is Brown people, Muslim people, and so on.
Marco Rubio, descendant of immigrants or refugees, depending on how you interpret his history, shows no remorse for what is going on. He went to San Salvador on the same day I went to San Salvador. He was there to sign the deportation agreement with President Bukele of El Salvador. As you know, that led to hundreds of people being deported as criminals, and all those people have now been released and sent back to Venezuela. Very few of them were actually criminals.
Dan LeBatard:
Cubans though have had a really privileged relationship with this country where Cubans get on land and stay here, and Haitians are sent back. So I’ve actually watched how it is that we as a minority have now protected some things that make me feel surrounded in Miami with a state militia for a police force that’s corrupt, and Marco Rubio and an assortment of just corruptions that are flabbergasting to me, but I’m surrounded. I am alone or feel often alone among my people because they don’t see Trump as the communist threat. They see or have seen by large voting segments that Trump is not the dictator, that he will protect us from communism and it’s baffling to me. I don’t get how my people can be that against others.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Divide and conquer, pretty simple strategy, and it works every time. You said Haitians. Well, Vietnamese people, when we came, the majority of the American people did not want to accept Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees. So we got in through President Ford and an act of Congress, but we also got in because number one, we were anti-communist. Americans understood that. We were also not Black. The Haitian refugees were also coming in the late mid to late 1970s. They were being turned back even as we as Southeast Asians were being led in. You as a Vietnamese refugee or we as Vietnamese refugees could say, “Well, we’re better than Haitians.” Whether we thought that explicitly or not, that’s the message that’s being sent out.
So again, throughout American history, divide and conquer. Demonize one population, everybody else feels better or some of them feel better not realizing that we’re just waiting our turns, right? Even for Asian Americans who might say, “Well, this is being done to Brown people, this deportation stuff,” it’s being done to Asians too, just selective Asians at certain moments. But the Trump administration’s coming for everybody. That’s my conviction and he’s going to get to a lot of these Latinos and a lot of these Asians who voted for him one way or another.
Dan LeBatard:
What does it mean to you to be an American?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
What it means for me to be an American is that I think there are simple Americans and complex Americans. The simple Americans are the love it or leave it Americans, this country, right or wrong Americans. They’ve always existed in American history. For them to be American is a stark choice either/or. I come as a refugee from an American war, and I arrive in the United States feeling complexity. As I say in my novel, The Sympathizer, my protagonist says, “Well, I’m grateful for American aid, but maybe I wouldn’t have needed American aid if we hadn’t been invaded by the United States in the first place.” It’s a very common thing. A lot of people in the United States fled from wars that the United States was responsible for, and they made the very sensible choice. It’s better to be behind the guns than in front of the guns.
Some people would hear me say this kind of stuff, and they’ll be like, “Oh, he’s unAmerican.” I literally get messages from people saying, “Since you love the Commies so much, go back to Vietnam.” They apparently did not read more than 10 pages of The Sympathizer because the novel was actually banned in Vietnam by the communist government. Okay. That’s complexity. Now, the complexity for me as an American is to recognize this is a beautiful country. It’s a country built on democracy, equality, liberty, rights, all of which I’ve benefited from. It’s also a country built on brutality, genocide, colonization, enslavement, perpetual war. These are facts.
Now, you can interpret them differently, and in fact, people do interpret them differently. Donald Trump interprets those facts as, “Make America great again. We conquered this country, we’re going to conquer the rest of the world. It’s not a problem. We committed genocide.” Okay. But the complexity is in recognizing that the beauty of this country was made possible by the brutality of this country, that all the privileges that a certain part of the population enjoys, a large portion of people, women and enslaved people didn’t have those freedoms in the late 18th century and that dynamic continues with us today. That complexity is unsettling for a lot of Americans, but only by confronting that complexity would it be possible for us to even hope to make the United States as democratic of a country as it wants to be.
Dan LeBatard:
You might’ve been a priest in a different life. You’re about the discipline, and you are saying that after 17 years of writing, it’s about the art, not about the prizes. So I give you one and only one. You can have the Pulitzer Prize, or you can have your book banned in Vietnam by the Communist government. You take which one?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Book banned in Communist Vietnam because that means it spoke the truth and the truth is what matters.
Dan LeBatard:
Your life was changed how by the Pulitzer Prize?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, number one, I mean, I have found a lot of financial freedom I didn’t have before. I found many, many more readers than I didn’t have before. The Pulitzer as that symbolic prize is something that even people who don’t read books recognize. I hate this language, the brand, the platform, I got the platform. People are like, “Oh. Everywhere I go, I’m introduced as he won the Pulitzer Prize. It legitimates me, gives me an opportunity to speak. I want to speak at the State Department. I’ve spoken at West Point to all the plebes of West Point. I’ve gotten so many opportunities to be heard because of the Pulitzer Prize, and I try to say that wherever I go, I still try to say the same thing. That’s what to me, if we recognize that these prizes are illusory and they’re simply a part of the material world, that’s fine, but then I try to make use out of them to try to advance what I think of as the truth.
Dan LeBatard:
But you wouldn’t be able to if you chose only one and I didn’t give you the Pulitzer Prize. You’d be banned. You’d be banned in Vietnam.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s in that hypothetical world.
Dan LeBatard:
But you wouldn’t have all this other wonderful stuff that gives you the freedom to continue doing your art.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s okay. That’s okay. I mean, I look back upon this history of writers that I admire, and a lot of writers that I admire never got those big prizes. James Baldwin, everybody loves James Baldwin now, right? Everybody loves James Baldwin. He barely got any literary prizes when he was writing. People totally misunderstand James Baldwin. They don’t understand this man fled the United States as a refugee from what he experienced in terms of American racism. He fled in the ’40s. He fled again in the ’70s. He spent a lot of his life in Turkey and in France. He exiled himself because of what he saw here because he spoke the truth. So these are the kinds of writers I admire. I don’t know what… Maybe Baldwin won prizes, but he didn’t get them. It’s that conviction of trying to use your art to make it the best that it can be, because art is about both beauty and truth, and those two things are inseparable. I believe that with a passion, and so that in the end, I hope, is what would drive me more than this aspiration for prizes.
Dan LeBatard:
The way that things broke after that have created the opportunities in your life that represent joy. Are you able to now enjoy what it is that you’re doing, or because of the need for discipline? The priest lifestyle might not feel totally like a joyous one or the monk’s lifestyle if we’re doing discipline. So writing can be hard. I don’t know what your relationship with it is. Writing something better or continuing to not care after you’ve won the Pulitzer, when you now have whatever the pressures are of having won the Pulitzer, what do the last 10 years look like in terms of happiness with you being able to represent your people in a way that gives them voice?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, joy is also a complicated thing. I mean, you can take a pill and it’ll give you joy and then it wears off and you feel like garbage after that. Joy can also be something that you work at, and joy can be complicated and multilayered. So writing is, for me, a very joyful experience, but it also is very boring in a lot of ways. You sit in a room by yourself and you just sit. You put words on paper and it goes on and on and on, and you realize it never ends. If you’re a writer, it never ends. I think myself as a writer, I hope I write until I die, but it just means doing the same things over and over, but there’s joy to be found in that repetition and that drill and that discipline.
There’s joy to be found in the act of creation, but the act of creation is not… It can be an extremely difficult, difficult thing. It should be a difficult thing to make something. Actually, I think it’s a lot harder to create something than it is to destroy something. Yes, I do find it joyful to have the opportunity to speak and to have people listen to me, to hear my opinions, but also to hear my version of the history that involves Americans and Vietnamese people, this complicated, tragic history that we share together. But the other thing that’s brought me joy over the last 10 years, besides the writing and the art, it’s the fact that I became a father, which I thought would end my life. Literally. My son was born three days after I finished The Sympathizer because when I realized that he was going to be born, I thought, “Oh, my life is over. I’m not going to be able to do anything ever again, and so I needed to finish this novel before he arrived.”
But the thing about becoming a father is that I realized there is joy to be found in other people. There’s joy to be found in the act of giving, and there’s joy to be found in realizing that, in fact, I’m not as emotionally numb as I thought I was as a consequence of being a refugee. So being a father forced me to confront my emotions, forced me to be able to give love to other people. Personally, that’s very healing. But also as a writer, emotions are crucial. We can only make our readers feel when we ourselves feel something. So it’s really hard to be a writer when you’re emotionally numb.
Dan LeBatard:
I think I believe you on the second half of your answer. I’m not sure I believe you on the first half when you say that writing is boring and endless. It is. I found it lonely. I don’t find it joyous. I find it fulfilling after having done it, but I don’t find the process of writing very joyous. I would like to have it. As careful and good as you are with words, as a perfectionist, as I imagine, is in the song of your words, I’m not sure I believe you on the process being a joyous one based on what it is that you’ve presented me so far.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think, like I said, joy is complicated, right? So if people expect joy to be 100% joyful, they’re looking for the pill, but human life is not like that. Let’s say being a parent is joyful. Well, I think a lot of parents will say, “Yeah, being a parent is joyful. Then they’ll also say, “It’s also really boring.” I’ve spent time with my kids. I’m like, “Ah, I can’t believe I’m going to be watching this stupid TV show or watching them build blocks or whatever, and then I can’t believe I’m going to spend 18 years doing this.” That can be very painful, but it’s also joyful. The thing is you can’t have the joy without the pain, and that maybe some people don’t recognize that. That’s the complicated version of joy that we have as human beings that we’re all capable of, that the pill cannot do. The pill is a shortcut to something that we as human beings have to actually struggle for. Okay.
Fatherhood and children do represent all of that complexity of boredom and pain and terror and joy. That is a part of human nature and human experience. Now, with the writing, it is painful. Like you said, anybody who’s ever written will acknowledge that it’s painful. But there have been many moments in my life just to use The Sympathizer as an example, where I laughed out loud while I was writing a sentence. I was like, “Oh my God, this is a great sentence,” and I couldn’t believe that I was able to create that. Where it came from, I have no idea. The only reason I was able to create that sentence was because I spent hours and hours alone in a room bored and suffering or stressed out or whatever to reach that moment of joy.
Dan LeBatard:
What do you identify as the details in your journey that are most connecting to human beings who are reading about you, not knowing your birthday or you growing, that the refugee experience is to know what it is to live amid your own waste as you try to janitor your way up to owning your own store?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I grew up reading, for example, the novels of Charles Dickens. I’m not English. I didn’t grow up in the 19th century. I mean, to read about poor houses and things like this, it was a completely alien experience for me. Nevertheless, I found something meaningful and moving in reading Charles Dickens as a Vietnamese refugee boy. Did he intend that a Vietnamese refugee boy in San Jose, California would one day read his work? I’m pretty sure it never-
Dan LeBatard:
Probably not.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
… crossed his mind, right? But again, the power of storytelling, the power of art is that it can connect to human beings in vastly different times and circumstances. So even as you’re describing what some of my writing is about, and I know that most of the people who are watching this show have not been refugees, are not Vietnamese, have not been through a war. It doesn’t discourage me. It doesn’t make me think, “God, I have to translate myself for all these people.” Charles Dickens never translated himself to me, and yet I understood him, and that’s the power of art and the power of storytelling, that telling the truth about human experience will connect with other people because we realize that changing the material circumstances, refugee or English or whatever, if we change all that, we still see underneath the same core of human experience and human understanding. That’s what we turn to literature and art for.
Dan LeBatard:
Have there been any number of things that you can point out to us that you’ve been surprised that they connected someplace even more than you thought it would as you were trying to connect there?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The Sympathizer has been read. There’s like 30 different translations. It’s been read by people all over the world. I get messages from people who are Turkish, Iranian, Palestinian, French, other kinds of Asians, like, “Hey, we see our experience in this book.” Even though they haven’t been through that exact same experience, that gives me hope. The stuff I post on social media about Gaza and about Palestine, I get so much human reaction from that, from Palestinians, from non-Palestinians. I’m not Palestinian. What right do I have to talk about that issue? But it’s a human issue. So I’m continually reminded of the fact that if we tell the truth through our art, through our passions, through even social media, people will respond because people can recognize when a truth is being told.
Dan LeBatard:
What does your hate mail look like?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
You know what, I think I’ve actually sort of… Again, the Pulitzer Prize, I think has insulated me from a lot of hate mail because I have a lot of friends, women of color get much more hate mail than I do when the hate emails, hate messages and all that. I’ve had a couple of stalkers in my life. That’s been challenging to deal with. But the hate mail that shows up hasn’t been that often, and oftentimes it makes me laugh. The times that gets discouraging is when I try to reach out. I remember soon after The Sympathizer came out, I got this angry letter from an American veteran, the typical love it or leave it kind of thing and I wrote him back and I said, “Look, I think you’re full of rage and anger, and it’s got you. It’s got you. You’re suffering, not me. Maybe you should let go of that.” He wrote back an angrier letter. So sometimes people just can’t-
Dan LeBatard:
But maybe you should let go of that. Some helpful advice from someone you’ve written, an angry love it or leave it. You’ve learned some things about how intractable and stubborn some of these ideological viewpoints are now.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I’m a human being, I fluctuate. Part of me periodically says, “I’m never going to deal with these Vietnamese right-wingers,” like as you have said about the Cuban right wing, where Cuban, MAGA Vietnamese MAGA exists too. They hate me. Sometimes I think I just can’t deal with these people. I’m not going to engage with them. There are a lot of young Vietnamese Americans who are really tormented by this. They think their parents, their grandparents have gone off the deep end and they reach out to me and say, “How do we talk about these political issues and cultural issues with the older generation?” I’m like, “Screw them, I don’t want to deal with these people.” But then part of me really does believe that dialogue and conversation really matter. That’s, again, what art and literature are there for.
But also, again, we just have to have conversations, not just with our friends and our own social circles and political circles, but we have to believe that somehow there has to be moments where we have to have conversations with our enemies and our others as well. It’s a very, very hard work and I’m not trying to oversell it. I’m just saying, I do think that that’s a reality that some people have to do.
Dan LeBatard:
Well, what do you think people would have to hear here about xenophobia? Obviously, it’s a very broad question, but what would you want known? I mean, it pulsates in your work that you want to be heard here. So, what do you want them to know?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Number one, I think it’s human nature to be xenophobic. Go back to the Bible. I grew up as a Catholic, so I read the Bible or I’ve read the Bible and you find all kinds of xenophobia and massacres and murders and demonizations taking place of people who are different from some other kind of people, what I would call the other. So it’s always existed throughout human history. It certainly exists inside the United States. At the same time, we go back to these narratives, whether it’s the Bible or whether it’s our own history as Americans, and we see other stories, not of xenophobia, but of hospitality, of welcoming the stranger, of taking care of the poor and the downtrodden. That’s a part of the Bible. It’s also a part of our American mythology.
So we have to understand that these two impulses have always existed within human societies and American society. We’re never going to get past xenophobia itself. It will always be with us, but we have to understand why it happens and how we can solve it. I’m a believer in this idea that it’s not simply hospitality that we need to extend, but that so many of the problems we face as Americans, it’s about dividing and conquering. It’s like we think we have too little and we have to separate some people out and deport them or put them into prison and so on. I think if American society is as great as we think it is, it has enough for everybody. It has enough to grow, room enough to grow so everybody can have it, have things that they need. But we’re led by people, Democrats and Republicans, who show just a paucity of imagination and willpower and daring to make this country as beneficial as it could be for everybody.
Dan LeBatard:
Your wife is a poet? Yes?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yes. And she’s beautiful.
Dan LeBatard:
You put The Sympathizer or your present work in front of her, she reads it. How does that go? You both love words. It’s vulnerable. You’re proud of something. Where and when is her criticism most astute?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I literally met my wife on a dark and stormy night at a poetry meeting that I organized, and she showed up for the open mic as this beautiful poet and the rest is history. But we have a shared conviction for so many things, shared passion for so many things, including the truth of language and the truth of art. So she’s always been my first reader, which is a terrible job to have because first drafts are terrible and she read them for 20 years, and so she knows how bad of a writer I can be.
So, with The Sympathizer or with other works that she’s read where she thinks I’ve done something good, she’ll tell me so, and I trust her that she’ll tell me the truth that I’m writing to the best of my ability, to the most honest, I’m being the most honest I can be about my own emotions and about my view of the world and honest about my art. She thinks A Man of Two Faces is my best book as a matter of fact, so I take her at her word for that. But likewise, I support her in her work as a poet and scholar as well. So we have a partnership and that’s a beautiful thing to have.
Dan LeBatard:
Do you agree with her on what is your best work?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, I’m too close to the work to know. A Man of Two Faces is pretty good though.
Dan LeBatard:
But are you too close to know what felt the best? I mean, I would think that you… Have you reread the Sympathizer at any time recently?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
People keep forgetting there’s a sequel called The Committed, and I run across readers several in the past few weeks who’ve said, “The Committed is a better novel than The Sympathizer.” The Sympathizer is probably more of a crowd pleaser because it speaks about the Vietnam War. Again, Vietnam War, everybody thinks they know what that’s about. So it’s a hook and The Committed to set-
Dan LeBatard:
I’ve never heard the Vietnam War described as a crowd pleaser before.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
But it is. It’s just entertainment for Americans. It’s dark entertainment, but it’s entertainment for Americans, right? The Committed is set in Paris, and most Americans are like, “France. What’s France?” Actually, for me, let me put this another way. I think of myself as a writer, not as a novelist or as a short story writer or as a critic or something. I think of myself as a writer above all else, and all my books are just part of one larger book. They’re like, all my books are chapters of some larger book that only exists in my head. So I think of The Sympathizer and The Committed and A Man of Two Faces, and Nothing Ever Dies as all chapters.
Dan LeBatard:
But you don’t think of one you’re done with whichever one… Look, I know that sometimes these things are so meticulous that you’re sick of them by the end, you don’t even want to read them anymore because you just want them out in the world, but you don’t remember having, “This is the best I can do,” or “This is the best I’ve done as a feeling on any of them”?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
No, The Sympathizer definitely, when I finished, at that point, I thought that’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I loved writing that book. When I finished A Man of Two Faces, I thought that’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written. I feel viscerally ill because I’m exposing myself and my family in that book. I mean, when I say viscerally ill, I mean, I felt it in my gut, my stomach, bringing that book to other people to read it for the first time. I felt terrified, and that made me think, “This is a pretty good book. If I’m terrified as a writer, I’m telling the truth.” Yeah, I’m being a politician answering your question like, “Oh, I can’t decide.” Yeah.
Dan LeBatard:
No, it’s not a politician. But if you’re not ranking them that way, viscerally ill, if you’re saying you’re too close to it. Yeah, winning a Pulitzer probably feels a little better than viscerally Ill and you’re just too close to either of them, but I was curious whether you agreed with your wife’s assessment on that, because she’s pretty close to it too.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. Hey, my wife is always right.
Dan LeBatard:
Okay. That’s a good way to handle that. What can you tell me about your upbringing that you would regard as your parents shaping you, that wherever it is that you were close to priest, that is a specific household, and I would’ve said I had some of that in my household that the parents were so afraid that religion was something to hold on to a tether in this country. You don’t know the language. You’re terrified. You’re too young to be married, too young to have kids, so grab onto something, bring it into the home, and then with all that religion brings, you get an assortment of different complications, and then you become an adult and perhaps you hang onto those things that you don’t. But my brother or I could have been a priest in a different realm if we had stayed afraid and chosen something to simply hold on to.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
My parents would’ve loved it if I became a priest. I think Vietnamese priests have it pretty good. But what I take away from most, from my upbringing with my parents and the life I spent with them is again discipline. I think the similarity that Catholics and writers share is that Catholics love to suffer and to sacrifice and to be martyred. That’s the narrative. That’s our foundational narrative. Writers also love to suffer and sacrifice and be martyred on our art, okay, or at least certain writers do. So how did my parents who were shopkeepers, who never had a very good education, my father went to high school, my mother went to grade school, how did they produce a writer, which they definitely did not want to do? I think that what happened unintentionally was that I was raised in a household where Catholicism was always present.
I went to Catholic school almost my entire life, but the larger lesson was actually about suffering. We suffer. Suffering is just a part of our existence. We can’t get away from it. What happens when we suffer? We have to endure it. We have to have the discipline to endure it. We have to have the discipline to overcome it, whatever that discipline is. For my parents, the discipline was being business people. They just worked themselves to the bone throughout many decades and sacrifice for themselves, but also for the next generation and struggle.
I watched all that very intimately growing up. That was a lesson that I learned. I came out an atheist, so perhaps from one perspective, my parents utterly failed, but everything else that they represented to me through the model of their own lives, suffering, endurance, discipline, sacrifice, that has stayed with me because you know why? They lived what they preached. They were not hypocrites. That is such a powerful experience to grow up with as a child, to realize that your parents are actually everything they said that they were, and that they’re genuine, they’re authentic. They may be hard on you, but they’re not hypocrites. They’re not fakes. They did everything they said that they should do and that I should do.
Dan LeBatard:
Were they supportive of you being a writer? Because that seems like a bad choice for a parent who would prefer something safer.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
My parents never realized they were raising one of the most dangerous creatures you can find in your house, a writer. No, I mean, they valued education above everything. So I give my parents credit. They were very conservative people, but they let me do a PhD in English because it has the word doctorate in it. My brother had gotten his medical doctorate. That was what they wanted, but they thought, “Okay. Okay. Fine. Philosophy doctorate is kind of close to that, and I became a professor. For them, these words had material, meaning. They could wrap their minds around doctorate, professor, university.
I never told them I was going to be a writer. That was just a step too far. I think the first time they had a sense of that was when I brought home a short story that I had published in English, and then it had been translated into Vietnamese, and I gave it to my dad. I was like, “Hey, this is in Vietnamese. You want to know what I’m doing?” The short story, which appears in the refugees is about a Vietnamese young Vietnamese refugee man who comes to San Francisco in 1975, separated from his family and discovers that he is gay. My father never mentioned that story to me again. So did he read it? I have no idea. But our typical coping mechanism, never talk about anything that can disrupt the harmony.
Dan LeBatard:
How do they feel about the accolades? How do they feel about the success?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think they thought that was good because… I mean, they recognized obviously that, “Oh, these prizes meant something to Americans, therefore it’s important.” But what really made the big difference, I think, was sales figures. Every time I would go home, my dad would ask me, “How many books have you sold?” I’d tell him, they’d be like, “Oh, that’s…” He understood that. You ship this number of units. You must be making this book money. So
Dan LeBatard:
There’s not a connection or an understanding around it. There are limits on being able to share in the most understanding of ways.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, okay. So I think because the news of the Pulitzer Prize, for example, was reported in the Vietnamese language press, that which they did read,` that as so many of my friends have recognized Vietnamese friend… You could do anything. Nothing really matters until you appear in the Vietnamese language media, and then your Vietnamese language parents were like, “Oh, okay. Now we get it.” Their friends were like, ‘Oh, your kid appeared in the newspaper or whatever it was.”
Dan LeBatard:
You made it. Congratulations.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Even in the community, therefore, that matters. So that’s how that information circulated. When I won the Pulitzer Prize, I actually learned when I was on the road. Okay. So I learned on Twitter I won the Pulitzer Prize. I was on book tour. My psychology was actually, it did not occur to me to call my parents, literally never crossed my mind. I think because who am I to brag to my parents about winning a stupid prize that they had never even heard of? The next day I’m on the road still dealing with the outcome of this prize, and my father calls me and he says, ‘The villagers in Vietnam called you, won the Pulitzer Prize.” His voice is shaking with happiness. So that’s how the news circulated. Obviously, that circulation, it was being told to him by his own family from Vietnam. He knew that was a big deal at that point.
Dan LeBatard:
What do you want people to know about your current book To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s about the power of storytelling to do exactly what we’ve been talking about, to save us and to destroy us. I go through many examples of books and stories and poems and writers that have been meaningful to me. But what I have always believed is that literature is a part of the world. Literature is not just storytelling. Storytelling is fundamental to who we are, okay, and literature and books, we’ve never given that up. So, literature and books and art are a part of the world, and To Save and to Destroy, that book is very much not just about the writers and the art, but about the worlds in which these writers and their art emerged from, about all the histories of colonialism and racism and war, but also a beauty that have produced them and me as well.
Dan LeBatard:
Vietnguyen.info is where people go if they want any information about this experience, and To Save and to Destroy is the name of his most recent work. Thank you for spending this time with us. It was a pleasure.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Dan, it was great talking to you.
