Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new book is an ode to literature and the radical politics of belonging for writers of color.
April 3, 2025
Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of Asian America’s literary A-listers, having achieved that rare trifecta of critical acclaim (Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction), academic gravitas (he is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English at the University of Southern California), and Hollywood bona fides (his most famous novel, “The Sympathizer,” was adapted in a critically acclaimed mini-series by HBO). Nguyen writes across genres, but always returns to the same distinct themes: the long shadow of the Vietnam War, colonialism, war, memory, and the redemptive love of family. Many younger Asian American writers — myself among them — claim Nguyen as a role model as we grapple with our personal and political selves. In these turbulent times, I find myself turning to Nguyen’s leadership as I think through and write through issues of race, gender, community, and belonging.
I was grateful, then, to read Nguyen’s forthcoming “To Save and to Destroy” (out next week with Harvard University Press), adapted from a series of lectures he delivered to students. “To Save and to Destroy” is true to its didactic roots, it is both patient and challenging, an ode to literature, but also a call to political activation for writers of color. Nguyen urges readers to resist national borders in our analysis of the world, to strive toward solidarity, and to understand that our freedoms depend on it.
Nguyen spoke to The Emancipator about our terrifying political moment — full-fledged war on DEI, First Amendment violations of protesters, and weaponization of American border security against students — and what it means to call for the literature of dissent at a time when the right to dissent is under attack.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Malavika Kannan: A lot of your writing draws from a coming-of-age experience as a Vietnamese American man, being a son and a student — and now you are a professor and father yourself. For the young people who are coming of age now, in historically unprecedented times — with two Trump presidencies, a pandemic, and global genocides — what advice would you offer us?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: If we look at the history of the United States — what has been done to Black people and Indigenous peoples, and the kinds of warfare that the U.S. engaged in — it helps to know that we’ve collectively survived all these kinds of things. That doesn’t alleviate the danger that we face today, but it gives us a lesson that the things that we cherish — things like diversity, equity, inclusion — are the results of collective struggles of solidarity that have taken place over centuries. That gives me hope that collectively we will survive what we’re going through right now if we do what our forebears have done, which is to refuse to be divided, to recognize real peril, but also real possibilities in resistance with community.
This is really heartening to hear. My friends joke that we were told that, when we grew up, we’d get more conservative, but really we’re just more historicized. But I do want to hear your perspective on these current perils. How do we — students, writers, scholars — respond in times like these?
When I was a student, I was very proud to graduate from UC Berkeley with two majors, three degrees, and four misdemeanors. I was arrested in student protests for things that we would now call diversity, equity, inclusion. Back then, it might have seemed trivial that we were protesting for multiculturalism, faculty diversity, and curricular diversity, especially [because] the previous generation had fought against apartheid in South Africa. But the culture wars, as they were called back then, are the same today. There’s no way to separate culture wars from actual wars, which is why we’re seeing pro-Palestinian advocates being detained and threatened with deportation. It’s unfortunate that we turn collectively as a society to students to give us moral leadership! It doesn’t make being a young person any easier, but it does make you realize that one of the benefits of being young is a sense of fearlessness. During the ’60s, the slogan was: Don’t trust anyone over 30. Now that I’m over 30, I think it’s up to people like me to prove that we’re the exception, hopefully.
You’ve built a literary career writing about the legacy of a war that, to many Americans, belongs in the past, and also contemporary racial injustice within the U.S., but now you’re setting your sights wider, toward Palestine. I read an interview in which you discussed MLK’s more radical speeches on Vietnam — and pointed out that he was assassinated a year later. Do you have fear in transgressing some of the oldest boundaries of what is “OK” to say in American liberal discourse?
My personal war, the Vietnam War, is now regarded as ancient history — but connecting it to other wars? Now, that’s threatening. You can talk about your civil rights, you can talk about your particular identities, but to connect those to the larger operations of the American empire, like our support for Israel, is connecting the dots in a way that structural power doesn’t want you to connect.
When I say structural power, I don’t mean just the Republican Party, but also the Democratic Party. Learning to speak up for Palestine in my own minor way did draw a retribution greater than anything I’d experienced before. I came back from Italy a couple of days ago, and I have to say, sitting in my hotel room in Milan, wondering if I could possibly get back into the country, filled me with a sense of dread that I hadn’t experienced in a long time, and gave me just the slightest inkling of what it might feel to be been deported or exiled or separated from family. I do feel trepidation, but I also feel it’s beholden on me to speak out, because that burden should not be on the younger people or students; it should be on older people like myself, who have more resources to try to weather any kind of storm that comes our way.
The Emancipator | In ‘To Save and to Destroy,’ a clarion call for literature of dissent
