Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, Nothing Ever Dies, and, most recently, To Save and to Destroy. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen is Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. About To Save and to Destroy From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer (now an HBO series) comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity. Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans. The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial. Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen’s craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother’s mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer’s responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless—or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to “model minorities” such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars.
Transcript:
Zach Powers:
Welcome to the Writer Center’s Virtual Craft Chat series where we talk with writers a little bit less about what they wrote and a little bit more about how they wrote it. My name is Zach Powers. I’m the artistic director at the Writer Center and I am also an author myself, which is why I get the absolute honor to welcome our guest today, the amazing, prolific brilliant scholar and author, Viet Thanh Nguyen. Viet, I just want to welcome you and thank you so much for taking the time to join us in this Craft Chat today and I was wondering if you might unmute yourself and give us a little preview of who you are in your own-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thanks so much, Zach. Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here at the Writer’s Center with all of the writers here. I was thinking about how to introduce myself when you told me I had to do it. The usual author bio is you talk about the person’s degrees and where they teach and the books they’ve written and the prizes they’ve gotten and all that kind of thing. I think you can probably just look that up online, so that’s not too interesting for me. I will say that I’ve written at this point nine books which span everything from academic university press books. My first book was for my dissertation as a scholar with a PhD in English. I’ve written a couple of novels. I have collection of short stories, a book of lectures, which is the book that Zach was holding up. Also, a couple of children’s books as well, so all over the place.
And I think, thinking about who I am as a writer, I was thinking that my primary identification is as a writer, not as a novelist, not as a scholar and so on. Everything for me falls under the act of writing and I just try to figure out the right genre, the right style, the right form in order to fit whatever it is that I’m trying to convey. So for me as a writer, I’ve discovered that I’m on an endless search for the right form because every book is different. Every book that I’ve written has been different and has demanded different things. And so that’s what it means for me to be a writer, is not to simply try to figure out the formula and then do the same thing over and over and over again, although there is a certain degree of repetition, but to try to figure out the right form.
And that leads to the bio. What is important about me? I was thinking that it’s not simply that I’m a professor, writer, scholar and so on, but also that I’m a husband and a father. And those identities have actually been incredibly important to me as a writer and I want to acknowledge them, because again, I think our personal lives as writers don’t often intrude into our public lives. And maybe that’s particularly true for men, but in fact, I’ve learned so much from being a husband and a father, because for me, part of the work of being a writer is deeply emotional.
So in a writing program and so on, you can be taught certain things about what’s called craft, which is a term I very much object to, and we can get into that. You can learn all the techniques and histories and genealogies and so on, but no one can really tell you how to access your emotions. And your emotions are a very substantial part of what animates your writing, whether it’s poetry or fiction or nonfiction. And for me, it’s been an incredibly difficult and rewarding process over the many decades and a process that is not finished to access my emotions, which I think were deeply stunted by my experiences as a child refugee, we can get into that too, and never wanted to become a husband and a father because I thought I was emotionally damaged by being a refugee. I was emotionally damaged.
But in order to become a writer, I had to confront that. What I said is being a refugee has been great for me because it’s given me the requisite emotional damage necessary to be a writer, just enough to make me a writer, not enough to completely mess me up. I use a different four-letter word in my book, A Man of Two Faces, but in order to access these emotions that I put into my characters, I have had to do a lot of emotional work on myself as a husband and as a father to access vulnerability. That’s something we should talk about. And again, the typical bio of a writer professes no vulnerability, and yet, I think, for me as a writer, it’s been incredibly important to tap in to this vulnerability, especially the further I get into this search for form. So that’s a very unconventional answer to your question, Zach.
Zach Powers:
I love unconventional answers to my questions, and you already have me off script, so I’m going to go straight to you mentioned that you object to the term craft and I think that’s a very important discussion to have and I’m assuming you have some very interesting thoughts on why you object that term, so if you would maybe share those with our audience.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, I became a writer because I love literature and art, not because I love craft. What is craft? And in one sense, I think craft is a demeaned term. It’s in some ways the secondary term beneath art. So art is this noble, grand, undefinable thing and craft is something that you do as a technique or something like that. It’s something that can be taught, whereas art perhaps may not be able to be taught. So there’s that kind of pejorative connotation, which I’m deeply aware of and I’m trying not to give into that. But the other issue for me is that craft connotes labor. There’s a labor that’s involved. And what characterizes the US writing workshop for me is a highly diligent attention to the craft of writing, but not to labor.
And this to me is symptomatic of so many issues I have with writing workshops in the United States that they’re so focused on craft that they’ve completely isolated it in many instances from these larger social, political, historical questions of what writing and art even mean. And for me, as a writer, I only took a couple of writing workshops when I was a student. The writing workshops obviously did help me with things like timing, setting, characterization, things like that, craft questions. They offered very little. They helped me grapple with issues that I was also concerned with, which is, “How do I write about history? How do I write about politics? I’m a scholar. I’m deeply invested in theory. How are theory and philosophy relevant to the act of writing fiction in my case?”
So these to me were actually really important questions about writing and art that were not addressed through the notion of craft. And I think that, in the United States, partly the reason why that’s the case is because we tend to have a very limited notion of writing in the United States as somehow being art for art’s sake, separate from a lot of really crucial political and historical questions. And for many writers who are shaped by these political and historical questions, we’re then left on our own to try to figure out how to deal with that outside of the question of craft.
Zach Powers:
Thank you. I am going to have to get the transcription of the video and read this and think more deeply, especially about the labor you mentioned. The labor angle is very interesting to me personally as well. So I want to stay off script because you mentioned that you’d like to get to vulnerability and the concept of vulnerability and I certainly won’t let anyone … Any author who wants to talk about something, they should be given that platform. So can you talk about the concept of vulnerability as it comes to creating the art of writing?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So for me, I approach everything autobiographically at this point. I’m in a very memoiristic mood for the last few years as I’ve tried to grapple with my own refugee origins and how it’s shaped me as a writer and the death of my parents and so on. But in a nutshell, I survived the refugee experience and witnessing and experiencing moments of abandonment and so on and watching what my parents were undergoing. I survived all of that by emotionally numbing myself and deciding at some inarticulate level as a 10-year-old, 12-year-old, 14-year-old, that I was going to be invulnerable, that nothing could touch me emotionally because I was terrified of being hurt.
And the way that manifested itself professionally for me is that I became an English professor. I got a PhD in English. And if you know anything about academics, you should not be vulnerable because academics are like sharks. They smell vulnerability, they’re going to kill you. So you have to be invulnerable to survive in academia and that fit my approach to life and to writing perfectly. And the other reason why invulnerability worked for me is because I had a very canonical education going through private schools and UC Berkeley and I was raised intellectually to admire the canon, to admire mastery.
And so that was the only aesthetic route available to me, was this idea that, if you are to become a writer, you have to be a master. You have to master your craft and then you want to be really, really good at it, so that one day you could become a master in the canon. You could be canonized. And the further I’ve gotten into academia and the further I’ve investigated the canon and the further I’ve investigated my relationship to the canon and my relationship to the idea of the mastery of the art, the more I’ve realized that there is … I don’t think there’s any such thing as mastery of one’s art. You can become really competent at it and so on, but do you really master the art?
I’m very skeptical of that idea and I’m also skeptical of the connotations of mastery for obvious reasons. When you say the word master in the context of the United States or any kind of colonial context, some people are going to be masters and some people are going to be the mastered. So why invest in this notion of mastery and invulnerability? And if we look at our own American canon, we have plenty of examples of masters who are deceived by their mastery and brought down low from Ahab to Thomas Sutpen, for example. So is it possible to be a writer who gives up mastery and is it possible to be a writer who aspires not to the invulnerability of the canon, but instead to vulnerability?
And that has been my project for the last decade because I think, when I wrote the book I’m best known for, The Sympathizer, it was very much an ambitious, provocative … I’m going to write my own blurb, ambitious, provocative, masterful attempt to grapple with American literature and the Vietnam War and so on. And in the last 10 years after that, I’ve realized that I think that, while that allowed me to write The Sympathizer, those ambitions, it also has to be something that I’ve refuted and I’ll tell you why. There was one moment when I was on the lecture circuit after The Sympathizer and I was standing in front of an audience of 800 people, total strangers and I was recounting the story that I knew very well, which was the story of my parents opening a grocery store in San Jose, California and getting shot in their store on Christmas Eve, which I knew as fact.
And to me, this has simply been a part of my life. All this kind of stuff happens to Vietnamese refugees all the time, no big deal. But as I was telling the story, I was suddenly overcome with emotion. And it was as if a trap door had suddenly opened up beneath my feet and I was looking into the abyss of my own past and the abyss of my own self and the abyss of my emotions. And at that moment that I realized, even though I knew these events as facts, I had never grappled with them in terms of what they meant for me psychologically and emotionally and obviously in terms of my own family. And that was the first clue to me that, in fact, I was not invulnerable, that if I felt invulnerable, it was only because I’d sealed off some vast portion of myself.
And that if I was to be a better writer and a better human being and husband and father, I would have to open that trap door deliberately and go into that part that I found so overwhelming that it reduced me to being inarticulate, which never happens to me. And so that’s what I mean by being vulnerable. All of us have that trap door, I think, somewhere within us. You can get into a Freudian analysis or you can just simply acknowledge that all of us have unknown parts that we have not dealt with or even known parts that we can know factually, but that we have not really dealt with emotionally.
And I think that these are the parts that intimidate us, even terrify us. And some people go to analysts and some people run away from these kinds of things, but I think as a writer, it seems to me that it’s safe to say that it’s partly our task to go into parts of ourselves that terrify us because this is where the emotions come from that we can put into our characters or our poetry. This is where our ideas come from. This is where our motivations come from. And sometimes it actually takes a long while to realize that we have to go directly where it is into the hurt in order to be better writers.
Zach Powers:
Yeah, thank you. And the difficulty of doing something like deliberately leaning into vulnerability and making that change, the change against the inertia of your life almost is so … I mean, even on a much smaller scale, it’s so hard. So a scale that large is an admirable pursuit even if you don’t pull it off all the way, so thank you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Let me point you out this one more way, which is I talked about this in purely individual terms, but it’s true for us collectively as a society as well. There are trap doors in our society. There are places where our society tells us, “Don’t go there.” Whether it’s our individual, let’s say if you come from some so-called minority community or whether it’s the nation as a whole, there are places where we’re not supposed to go, things we’re not supposed to investigate. And that is also a provocation that it might be terrifying to open the door to those kinds of things, but it’s also, again, where some really powerful stories lie as well.
Zach Powers:
Yeah. And to me, there’s too, one of the roles of the writer is to investigate ourselves through our writing in a way that opens us up to those risky moments of self-realization. And one of the things that I was challenged by in this book, positively challenged, not difficultly challenged, was you point out that the concept of racial or racist othering is a specific form within a broader category. And it seems like an important point maybe especially for writers because there’s this immediate need in our work to make sure that it’s not being culturally regressive or outright racist, but should it also be a goal to become more aware of when we’re placing any character in a position of other and why might that …
Because you mentioned this broader concept of othering that we can place ourselves, we define ourselves in opposition to this other thing, but there’s risk there in dehumanizing the other thing in other contexts. And then if we don’t investigate ourselves at this broadest level, then we leave ourselves vulnerable or susceptible to othering at the racial or racist level.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s a very complicated question and I’ll probably answer it in a few different ways, so it might take me a while to answer your question, but whenever we talk about the other, we also have to talk about the self. So there’s always this dynamic between the self and the other. And of course, it’s not the case that somehow we are the self and there are these others out there somewhere. It’s the case that the self and the other exist within us and whatever dynamics of that self and other within us, we project that outwards onto other populations and we render them into others. Toni Morrison has talked about this extensively. She’s talked about how white people have projected their racist fears onto Black people, for example.
And this unexamined othering of other people obviously does tremendous damage to those categorized as others, but it also does damage to one’s own self as well. Okay, I think you all probably realize that. But that dynamic is both an individual and a collective experience. So in writing about the othering in the book of lectures, what I wanted to stress was I think the experience of feeling otherness is I think a universal experience. I think all of us at some point or another, whether it’s something as mundane as being in a cocktail party and we feel out of place, we felt some tinge of otherness, okay? And the ones who become artists feel that otherness probably extremely distinctly, but that’s different than a collective otherness that’s projected onto an entire population who has not asked for that and that’s the imposed sense of otherness that becomes a collective experience.
And so there’s always that negotiation between individual and collective otherness and that raises the kinds of ethical, artistic, political questions that are embedded in your question. And so of course, yes, we have to be sensitive to that as writers. We have to ask ourselves, “As we write about characters, are we rendering them as other and in what way?” I think, at the most basic level, that’s unavoidable because the other is not simply, let’s say, a racist, a racialized other, for example, like Mexicans currently in the Stephen Miller imagination or the Donald Trump imagination.
The other is oftentimes most terrifying when the other is in oneself. I don’t want to look into Stephen Miller’s soul because I don’t know what has hurt Stephen Miller that he hates others so much, but there’s something within him. That’s one sense of otherness. But then there’s the other who’s right next to you. You don’t have to go cross the border or go to the border to find the other. You just have to turn to your mother or your father or your siblings or your lover where you will also encounter the other as well. So the ethical and political questions of how to render otherness, sometimes it will take on these vast political connotations, but sometimes it’s just extremely intimate.
So you can read, for example, Molly Jong-Fast came out with a memoir about herself and her mother, Erica Jong, in which her mother is the other, all right? So sometimes it’s that dynamic that raises very serious ethical and political questions already. And there’s nothing I can tell you about this, that there’s no uniform answer to this, except that you have to be alive to these ethical and political connotations. They don’t prevent you from rendering a person as an other. And that’s one thing I want to stress simply because the process of othering can have enormously damaging consequences doesn’t mean, therefore, that we cannot show people as others. What it does mean is that we have to consider how we are portraying these people.
I’ll give you some examples. The opening of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Maxine, the character … The opening line, Maxine says, “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother told me, ‘What I’m about to tell you.'” And then of course, the entire book is about Maxine, the narrator, totally betraying all of the family secrets that her mother has told her not to betray. So on the one hand, that is an ethical betrayal. On the other hand, because the betrayal is foregrounded and we are allowed to see it as a reader, we’re now aware of the ethical stakes at hand. So that’s one possibility of doing that.
Another possibility, more controversial, is Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. He depicts Black Africans in terrible, terrible ways in order to demonstrate how horrible white colonizers are. Now, is that a satisfactory ethical resolution? Chinua Achebe doesn’t think so, wrote a whole critique of Joseph Conrad. But yet at the same time, I think there’s something also still potentially really powerful about rendering the other in such a way that it criticizes one’s own self. And so these examples, I think, speak directly to so many other possibilities that I’m sure you can all imagine in terms of recent controversies over whether writers of one group can write about people of another group and so on.
And there’s good ways of doing it and bad ways of doing it, but it can’t be reduced simply to saying the other has to be portrayed in a positive light or that one person of one group cannot write about one person of another group. Basic conditions, you have to do your homework about this other population that you’re going to write about and you have to, I think in some way, be aware of this process of othering and try to figure out for your own self and your own aesthetic how you can deal with that ethically and artistically in your work.
Zach Powers:
Thank you. I think we have some questions coming in the chat window, so I’m going to turn to audience questions for a bit and perhaps for the rest of the conversation. So, “Where in the realms of craft or emotion or experience or now you’ve added canon do those of us who write not to publish, but to process, where do we find a measurement by which we can say, ‘Okay, good job. It’s done and it is as good as it can be'”?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I love that question because it’s a question that’s totally about process and discipline and not about outcome. And that was actually a really hard one for me to grapple with. Over the years as I was writing, my lovely wife was always my first reader and she would always say, “It’s the process, not the outcome.” I’m like, “Yeah, sure it is, but I still want to be published, right?” So if you can separate yourself from that, that’s great. That’s a very crucial thing to do. And I think about it in this way, which is going back to the question of craft versus art, another term that we haven’t mentioned so far is discipline.
And I’m very attracted to the notion of discipline because I’m Vietnamese, I was disciplined all the time by a hierarchical structure and I’m a Catholic and we love to be disciplined and to suffer, okay? But that analogy is really important to me, because when I started off as a writer, I had all these ambitions to mastery and so on as I’ve discussed, but 20 years into it, as I became better as a writer, ironically, the question of success in publishing became much less important to me. So by the time I got around to writing The Sympathizer, for example, I’d spent 20 years trying to be a writer. I’d written an entire short story collection that apparently was not going to see the light of day.
And so I wrote The Sympathizer and said, “You know what? I’m going to write this for myself.” And that’s a very crucial psychological, artistic, political move. That’s actually a lot easier to say than to do, but I think I met a lot of writers who’ve had that moment. They’re like, “I’ve tried to write this for other people. Of course, you write it for yourself, but do agents like it, editors like it, reviewers like it, so on?” Those are human questions. They’re also questions that I think are irrelevant in the end to the question of art, to the question of discipline and to the question that was just asked. And so getting to the moment where it’s not about the outcome or about the publishing, but simply about the process or the discipline is enormously liberating.
So it’s hard for me to answer the question directly because The Sympathizer got published and I had the fairy tale ending. The book was successful even though I wrote it for myself. I wish that for all of you if that’s what you want. But to get to that moment, it was actually really important to say to myself, “It’s not about publishing the outcome. It’s simply about this, what I would call this discipline of art.” And it is analogous to the religious experience because I think, if I hadn’t become a writer, I would’ve become something else that would’ve required a lot of discipline, like a gardener or a chef or a priest if priests were allowed to be married.
These kinds of things, these occupations, what I would call vocations are done by people who would do them regardless, I think, of whether they made a living out of them or not or whether they got the rewards of human vanity or not. And likewise, writing can be that too. Writing can be something that we just do because we need to. And I think, for many writers, we need to write. I think many of us are not doing it because we think it’s not like becoming a doctor where you’re going to get a paycheck. You do it because you have to do it. And if you do, you have to do it, it’s coming out of somewhere in your soul. And so there is a way in which writing is very analogous to religious faith and spirituality.
And I’ve become increasingly comfortable with that idea because I do think that if you have faith in something, whether it’s in a religion or whether it’s in your art, you’re going to do it simply because you believe in that. That’s a very pure space and I don’t know if there’s a way to really answer the person’s question because I think that, since there is no external measure, it’s only you, what also happens when you get deeper and deeper into this discipline is that you develop the capacity to be your own editor. In other words, you develop the capacity to look at your own work as if you’re both inside the work and outside the work. That’s very hard to achieve as well. But the more time you spend in the discipline, I think the more it’s possible to do that.
Zach Powers:
Great. Thank you. Another question from the chat window, “What advice might you have when a writer is stuck in the between, i.e., ‘my otherness’ is non-white externally and non-Asian internally?” For context, they are orphaned Vietnamese immigrant, Operation Babylift, adopted and raised by a white family.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So the question is, “What if my otherness is hard to decipher?” Is that-
Zach Powers:
Is stuck in the in-between, between an external otherness, yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Okay. So great question, great concrete example and then what I would say to this is now, of course, using this person’s example, I think they’re gesturing at the fact that they wouldn’t fit easily, for example, into something like Asian-American or Vietnamese-American because these categories have certain notions of authenticity and they’re external markers and all this kind of stuff. But the point here is that, now in this day and age, to be Asian-American or Vietnamese-American is a bureaucratic category with lots and lots of people. And so you have the comfort of a group that you didn’t have, let’s say, over a hundred years ago.
So can you imagine being the first writer who willingly identified as being of Asian descent in the late 19th century writing in English? These writers existed. Do you know how lonely and anomalous that experience was? And so that would be the analogy, is to realize that, as isolating and as anomalous as this questioner’s identity may happen to be, they’re not in that. They may be alone in those specific demographic features, but they’re not alone in feeling completely anomalous. And so you can go back to historical precedents. And the reason I would do that is, because if we look at these precedents and analogies, let’s say Asian-American writing an Asian-American literature, at the beginning, what we realized is that now Asian-American literature is an entire market category.
It’s really not that hard to be an Asian-American writer anymore because now you have a market niche, you have a spot on the bookshelf and editors and agents know what to look for. They didn’t know how to do that 150 years ago or even 50 years ago. But out of that anomalousness of being the very first Asian-Americans to write in English, then you produce this entire category. So what does that mean? It means that it’s perfectly possible to write from the position of being a total anomaly and that your total anomalousness might in fact become something that generates an entire category for better and for worse.
But how does that happen? To me, how that happens is, yes, you can be published by writing from your position of anomalousness. It doesn’t mean you’ll make great art. It doesn’t mean you’ll generate an entire category. And even as I’m saying this, I’m hesitant because I’ve already questioned the notions of mastery and greatness and all of that, but let’s go a little bit further into that. You could write the story of being an adoptee, an orphan, someone who doesn’t fit in and that could get published as your typical memoir, talking about an experience no one knows about and very few people know about, relatively few people know about.
And typically, the way that would happen is that you translate your experience. You’re like, “I’m an anomaly. No one understands me. I don’t fit here. I don’t fit there. I have to translate and explain everything about myself to other people,” and that can get you published. However, I would argue that that is not going to actually constitute some greater sense of art. And the reason why is because I think, when we look at enduring works of writing, what we see is that typically writers don’t translate. Writers don’t translate. When was the last time … I mean, as a Vietnamese person, sometimes I know that, if I put something into my story, let’s say pho for example, I’m expected to then say, comma, “A delicious beef noodle soup,” comma, because I can’t assume or I shouldn’t assume that everybody knows what a bowl of pho is. And if you don’t know what a bowl of pho is, you’re missing out.
But can you imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald in an early draft of The Great Gatsby writing, “I made Daisy a sandwich,” comma, “two slices of bread between which there is something delicious,” he would never do that because he assumes that everybody knows what a sandwich is. That’s the assumption that the person of a majority can make. But the lesson from that is that’s the assumption we all should make. Why translate? Why translate? When you translate, you’ve already conceded your own anomalousness. You turn your anomalousness into an apology, into an act of translation and that’s a losing stance to take, I think, artistically and politically.
When I was a little boy in San Jose, California, I would go to the library, I would read everything, Dickens, Austen, the romantic poets. I love these works. Never I think was I translated to in these works. I just had to assume the position of a 19th century reader in England or an 18th century reader in England because Charles Dickens had no idea that he was one day going to be read by Vietnamese refugee boy in San Jose, California, and yet, his works connected with me. Why? All kinds of art and craft questions of course, but also because he didn’t translate. And if Dickens doesn’t have to translate, why do you have to translate? Dickens probably was a really weird person from everything that I’ve read, but also within himself, right?
So don’t apologize for your anomalousness. Make people come to you. That’s I think where how I would deal with that issue. Because in reading the works of Dickens and Austen and the romantic poets, eventually what I realized was they didn’t translate to me, and yet, they still connected with me. Their otherness connected with my otherness. Their self connected with myself. And the lesson from that was I should do the same thing. I should not be translating a Vietnamese refugee experience, for example, to people who are not Vietnamese refugees. I should just simply state the story, and then if people don’t understand, that’s their problem, not mine.
So don’t turn your anomalousness into your problem. It’s other people’s problem, not your own. And so I think you do have to write out of a position of a defiance and an assurance of your own self. Even if you are aware of your own otherness, that’s how I would cope with the anomalousness.
Zach Powers:
I love that answer and I’d throw in too that you probably will encounter resistance if you take it to a writing workshop, for example, and you have full permission now from an accomplished author to ignore that advice and stick with your guns. So I think that’s an important, building that confidence to be able to do that in the face of someone telling you what a counterintuitive bad advice about writing. Next up in the chat window, “How do you write about a moment or event while it’s still unfolding?” And there’s a second part, but I’ll come to that one in a second.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Difficult to answer, but let me give it a shot. I think some forms are easier to use in order to respond to that. So for example, poetry I think is very good at being immediately responsive. I have all kinds of stereotypes about writing poetry, so poets out there can correct me, but also, Zach, thank you for endorsing the necessity of reading poetry. I read a lot of poetry because I think, really, the highly concentrated attention to language and to rhythm, to images, to word choice in poetry, the intensified use of language has been so important to me as a writer of prose.
But I think because poetry is shorter in some of its forms, it can be deployed more quickly to immediate circumstances. And there are versions of poetry out there, genres of poetry that are responsive to immediate political and cultural concerns. So poetry is provocation, poetry is politics, poetry is satire. Poetry is not as constrained in the United States with some of the expectations that are put on prose and especially on fiction. Goes back to this idea of what writing workshops teach and so on. Somehow in fiction, you’re not supposed to … I’ll give you an example. To go back to the E.M. Forster example of round and flat characters, fiction is supposed to only have in the United States round characters. They have to be three-dimensional, fully fleshed out and it takes time to write these kinds of characters.
Flat characters, stereotypes are somehow bad. And I think that’s … Not only E.M. Forster was endorsing this kind of valuation, that’s how it’s turned out in American fiction. And because of that, it’s hard for fiction to respond to the immediate needs of the day, because hey, if you’re going to write about Stephen Miller or Donald Trump as an American fiction writer, you think, “Oh, I have to turn them into these round characters. I have to empathize with them.” No, you don’t. They can be types, they can be stereotypes, they can be deployed in satire and provocation, but that that’s not typically what American fiction does. So American fiction I think is just slower to respond to the demands of the day because it takes so much more time to work in the modes of realism that American fiction requires, but poetry can.
And if we look at how American wars, for example, it’s I think oftentimes the poets who respond the fastest to war in the United States, fiction probably comes next, nonfiction, then fiction, then finally you have Hollywood and cinema. They just get more complex and more expensive. But the other form that can really respond well to contemporary moments is nonfiction, whether that is nonfiction books or nonfiction articles. And for example, I have an article that just came out in The Nation for subscribers only, but I think on Monday it’s going to be open to everybody. It’s a 4,000-word article on my trip to El Salvador in February where I was in El Salvador on the same day that Marco Rubio was in town.
He was signing the prison deportation agreement and I was investigating the history of American-sponsored massacre in El Salvador and both of those things are related in this article. It would take me a very long time to write a novel about that, but I could write that article in a week. And so that would be one possibility and that goes back to the idea that I put forth that I see myself as a writer versus as a novelist or as a nonfiction writer first, because one way to get around the question of writer’s block and the need to respond to contemporary issues if that’s what you want to do is to see yourself as a writer who has multiple writing projects. The novel for example or the short story are not the only forms you have to do. You can write other things.
And so I never have writer’s block because there’s always something to write. So if that’s what you want to do, there’s always a letter to the editor you can write. There’s always an op-ed you can write for the newspaper. There’s always an article you can write for an online journal or a magazine and these are ways to respond to pressing issues.
Zach Powers:
Thank you, and sorry, I lost my internet connection there for a minute. The dangers of hosting events in unfamiliar places. Unfortunately, too, that all the questions that came in before I was disconnected have disappeared from my screen in the chat window, so if you want your question, please copy and paste it back in there and I will get to those as soon as possible. My apologies. So one thing in the book, you write about the idea of hatred and I spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of hatred is one of the thing and how it manifests and what it does. But you’ve mentioned that hatred can be politically effective, but it’s also corrosive. And I’m wondering, looking at literature, what then is the role, if any, of hatred? How do we approach hatred in literature and how do we channel it in a maybe noncorrosive way or less corrosive way?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, so I guess hatred is a bad emotion, right? And we live in politically sensitive times where you’re not supposed to give into bad emotions or express them and so on. And yet, at the same time, I think that that’s simply a part of the human experience that literature has to respond to and to depict, even if it makes people uncomfortable. You go back to, let’s say, I already mentioned Thomas Sutpen from William Faulkner. You go to the canon of Faulkner, there’s a lot of hatred in those books. A lot of hatred in Toni Morrison’s works as well. So it’s not as if these works themselves are necessarily hateful and I think that’s certainly not true in Morrison’s case, and generally, I don’t think it’s true in Faulkner’s case either, but they depict hatred in operation.
And I think part of what happens here that’s interesting from an artistic perspective is whether they render judgment on that hatred. And I think that the reason I bring up judgment is because judgment allows readers to feel better about negative things that they experience. So when we read Toni Morrison about racism, for example, we know where Toni Morrison stands on the question of racism. It’s bad, okay? So there’s a judgment being rendered, a very well-done judgment, but there’s a judgment being rendered in her works that allows us to come away from her works thinking, “Yeah, racism of all kinds, but particularly, anti-Black racism is bad and who can disagree with that depiction of hatred if there’s a judgment rendered on it?”
When you read William Faulkner, I’m not sure you always feel that sense of judgment, especially if you know anything about Faulkner’s own statements outside of his fiction. And likewise, with the example of Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness, there’s hatred being depicted towards Black Africans in there, but there is not necessarily the kind of judgment that we would want necessarily. That puts the writer into an interesting situation and I confronted that in The Sympathizer. One of the books I reread for The Sympathizer was a book that depicted hatred that really angered me when I read it when I was 12 or 13, much too young of an age, which was Larry Heinemann’s novel, close Quarters. Heinemann was a US soldier. He was in Vietnam.
Close Quarters is about a young American man who goes to war in Vietnam. He’s a nice guy, average guy. Within 10 pages, he’s a killer once he gets to Vietnam, and at the climax of the novel, he and his colleagues, his comrades, gangraped a Vietnamese woman and they’re just motivated by hatred. These are gooks. And when I read it, it was really disturbing because there was no judgment rendered on the hatred. It was simply being depicted. And that made me not just extremely uncomfortable, but also very angry about the depiction of that hatred. And then I reread it for the purposes of writing The Sympathizer and I thought, “Oh, Heinemann was correct. Heinemann was correct in depicting the hatred, the racist and sexist hatred of American soldiers in Vietnam without judgment and editorializing.”
He was right because this is in fact what took place. And if it makes you uncomfortable as a reader, you should ask, why are you uncomfortable as a reader? I think there are some subset of readers who’d be like, “I don’t want to feel uncomfortable and you can’t do anything about those readers, but these things really exist. This is human nature. Hatred is part of human nature and it leads people to do horrible, terrible things. And sometimes, yes, maybe you want to render a judgment, but sometimes maybe you don’t want to render a judgment and you’re going to just want to force the reader to confront this hatred.
A hatred in Heinemann’s case, I think he did not give a judgment because I think he wanted American readers of his book to sit with the fact that these men who are so hateful are Americans just like the average American reader. And if these men could do these kinds of things, so can the average American reader. So it takes a lot of courage as a writer, I think, to put forth not just hatred, but any other kind of really negative emotion that is a part of the human character and just force readers to deal with those emotions.
Zach Powers:
Thank you. Back to the chat window, “I love that you use the spy novel as the genre for The Sympathizer. I think a lot about the diasporic novel as insurgent literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about using the genre, which more often is about how the West uses its colonial powers abroad as a means of critiquing it from the global south. Maybe this extends to the discussion of form and the canon broadly.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Sure. Well, I wanted to write an entertaining novel and so I turned to genre and I think it’s obviously a pretty commonplace move today to turn to the ghost story, the spy novel, the historical novel, the romance novel, science fiction and on and on in order to deploy a genre to come up with an entertaining story, but then also to make political and cultural critique as well. Now, why is that the case? I don’t know what’s done at The Writer’s Center, but in my experience with writing workshops, the thing that isn’t taught very much or very well is plotting. How do you plot a story? Get all kinds of discussions about perspective and narration and point of view and setting and all that, but plotting seems to fall by the wayside.
I taught myself how to plot by reading a screenwriting manual. For better or for worse, the screenwriting manuals are all about plotting. They’re also about characterization and theme and all that kind of stuff too, but there’s such a huge emphasis on the structure of a plot. That can be obviously very limiting, could be very formulaic, but there is something really powerful about that notion that many human beings do respond very strongly to a well-plotted story. Now, make of that what you will. I’m not saying that everybody has to do that. I’m just saying that is one aspect of literature, is entertainment that so-called genre writers are super aware of, okay?
And in the realm of the genre that has no name, which is to say literary fiction for example, being aware of the market of the reader of entertainment are things that are looked down on. That can be very powerful and very provocative and that’s important too, but there is this hybrid moment where the aspirations of literary fiction can use the aspirations of the genre fiction to produce something that’s entertaining and yet also critical as well. So that’s what the spy novel allows. And of course, we turn to the spy novel. There’s all kinds of entertainments in the spy fiction world, but there’s also writers like John Le Carre and Graham Greene who used the spy novel as a vehicle, not just to entertain, but to stage historical and political arguments.
Now, this is really interesting, because in literary fiction, how much contemporary American literary fiction actually deals with politics? Not a whole lot. Why is it that we have to turn to historical fiction and spy fiction, for example, or science fiction or fantasy where politics is freely talked about? Why is that the case? Well, we won’t have to get into that, but it is a crucial, crucial oversight in terms of what is valued and taught in writing workshops and what is considered to be literary fiction. So I wanted to avoid all of that, all of these kinds of limitations that I saw in the dominant versions of literary fiction by turning to the genre.
And so each of those genres I mentioned, and again, that also includes romance as well, each of them has the potential to use their orientation towards plot and history to deal with difficult political subjects that a lot of literary fiction writers and a lot of poets too just have not figured out how to deal with.
Zach Powers:
Thank you. From the chat window, “How do you approach writing about history, especially around the trap doors in society you mentioned earlier?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think there’s different ways of doing it. I’m not a big fan of the big fat historical novels where there’s lots of explanation and stuff that take place, but of course, you could do that as well and you can do it very powerfully. In The Sympathizer, it’s a dense novel and I think it’s a bit a historical novel, but it’s not a novel that seeks to set out to explain things. It’s a novel that in which history is present, but in which history is oftentimes not explained. It’s only dramatized, right? So there’s different ways of coping with history in the form of fiction. You could take the realist approach and explain things and lay out the chronology, have the family tree in the beginning, all this kind of stuff or you could do something different, which is how I approached it, which is to think of history as, in my case, something that is surrealistic, something that is horrific and something that then demands more than realism as a formal response.
And again, in the world of contemporary American literary fiction, realism is the dominant mode. Could be good, could be bad, but I think realism as the dominant mode is also really limiting because it forestalls other ways of responding to politics or to history or even to characters. And so The Sympathizer is, from my point of view, a European modernist version of an American novel. That is not going to sell any copies out there, okay? But that was my aesthetic approach in thinking about that. So I’m not sure if I really answered the question, but history matters, but there is more than one way to deal with that history.
Zach Powers:
You blurbed yourself twice this evening and the first one was a little more effective, I think, for the cover of the book. That one was. So back to the chat window, “How do those of us who don’t have a spot on the shelf and still very much need to open the doors for ourselves and others in publishing go about doing that if not by translating ourselves to some degree, referring back to our earlier conversation, especially when the spots on the shelves for our culture are pretty much always taken by the other?” This person is a first-gen Egyptian-American. There are so few books about Egypt and Egyptian diasporic experience by Egyptians.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, translation is always an option. Obviously, you can tell I’m not a fan of it, but it depends on what you want to do with your book or your article or whatever it is that you’re writing. Obviously, there is a space on the shelf for works that translate, works that are explanatory and so on. And if in the example here with Egypt or Egyptian-Americans or the Egyptian diaspora, typically, what happens in these anomalous situations where there is not yet a market category is that there’s oftentimes a first wave of writers who do do the act of translation. And I say that with the awareness of also saying that you don’t have to follow that strict chronology.
You could be the first Egyptian-American writer who just decides, “I’m not going to translate. I’m just going to go straight for the gusto and write exactly what I believe and just confront this hostile marketplace out there.” So again, I just don’t have a definitive answer. It depends on how much you want to get published and under what conditions. There are people who … There are so many horror stories in publishing where editors and agents have forced the writer to just conform to what they think of as the dominant expectations of the marketplace. And these are not simply economic expectations, but obviously, when we talk about the marketplace, we’re also … When we talk about sales and visibility and so on, we’re talking about prejudice.
We’re talking about the capacity of people out there to understand something that they haven’t encountered before. And so yes, it’s always going to be easier to submit to the expectations of your editor and your agent when they tell you, “Well, we don’t understand this,” or, “Maybe you should explain this more.” Well, that’s unfortunately nothing I can guide you with. You have to make up your own mind what kind of a book you want to write and who your audience is. Okay, that’s an important question. We haven’t addressed, who your audience is, because from the perspective of the editor or the agent, typically, the audience for them is going to be the biggest possible audience that they can find.
Is that your audience, however? That’s only something you can determine. And in fact, I think it is a crucial exercise for every writer to imagine, to ask themselves, “Who is my audience?” When I wrote my short story collection, The Refugees, which I wrote before The Sympathizer, even though it was published afterwards, my audience was Vietnamese-American people and also the kind of audience that reads short stories in The New Yorker. That’s a viable response. It’s also a response that I think distorted me as a writer, because if that was my audience, then I’m writing towards them and their expectations.
And so many writers of a so-called minority background confront that question of their community like, “Oh my God, I’m Vietnamese-American. What do Vietnamese-Americans think of my work?” That’s important. Obviously, that’s an important ethical and political question. I think it’s also important to say, “The hell with the Vietnamese-American community. I’m going to write my truth about them, and if they like it, great. If they don’t like it, great.” And it takes a certain amount of guts to get to the point where you refuse to be cowed by your community, whether it’s the ethnic community or whether it’s your family, for example.
It also takes guts to say, “I don’t care what the editor or the agent thinks. I’m going to write what I want to write,” but it’s important to have a sense of conviction about your audience. So when I wrote The Sympathizer, my audience was me. That was my audience. Now, there are audiences beyond that, obviously. After I wrote for me, I had to deal with my agent and I had to deal with my editor and so on, but my first audience was me. And from that moment onwards, my first audience has always been me. So that’s a huge spectrum, writing for yourself versus writing for everybody else. And I think I would encourage you all to think about audience as a set of concentric circles. What is the most important audience? What is the least important audience?
And then you have to calibrate your aesthetic strategy and your idea of yourself as an author and how you position yourself as a person out in the world as a writer in relationship to these concentric audiences. And that will tell you how much you’re willing to give up in terms of your own aesthetic principles and then your willingness to translate and to explain. So again, I don’t have a definitive answer for the person, but that would be a framework to think about.
Zach Powers:
I love, in the middle there, you mentioned the concept that viability, discovering an approach as a writer that is viable doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the end of your search for who you are as a writer. I think maybe there’s an impulse to stop once you find a viable answer to the question, “Who am I as a writer? Who is my audience?” but that’s not necessarily the point where you stop. You actually maybe want to push past that and discover if viability is the bare minimum spot or a baseline. And maybe great writing is pushing beyond that a little bit. We’re almost out of time. There are so many great questions. Apologize to everyone, I’m going to have to skip. I’m going to go to our final question that we like to ask all our guests, which is what’s one piece of advice you give to a writer just starting out?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Yeah, and I think that the thing about writing that I’ve discovered when I was younger, I certainly thought it was a sprint. I thought, “Oh, I can just be like F. Scott Fitzgerald and write a book and publish it when I’m 23 or 24 and I’ll be famous, da, da, da, da.” Well, there are some people for whom that happens and I hate those people. I hate them. For me, that was never the case and so I just had to resign myself to the fact that writing is a marathon for me and for most people, I think, because it really did take me 30 years of misery in order to become a writer. And I’m joking, but not joking. Writing The Refugees took 17 years and almost all of it sucked as an experience, honestly.
But you have to … I think, unless you’re that super genius, I think most of us have to go through not just the suffering, but the discipline. And that’s where the marathon metaphor I think is important and you have to have the discipline. And by this, I don’t mean that you have to do this every day, although that could help. The point is that you have to do it over time. So let’s pick the magic number of 10,000 hours. If you can do 10,000 hours in 10 years, fantastic. If you can do 10,000 hours in 50 years, still fantastic. It’ll just take you longer to get there, but you got to do the 10,000 hours. That’s what it means to think of writing as a marathon versus a sprint.
And I think that’s what separates writers from people who are not writers. People who are not writers and who just want to be writers, they can’t do the 10,000 hours. It goes back to the question about process from earlier on, the person who just wants to write for themselves and not for publishing. How do you know you’re a writer? How can you call yourself a writer when you’ve done the 10,000 hours? Nothing substitutes for that. Nothing substitutes for that. And that just takes a lot of discipline and sacrifice and willingness to endure the suffering. And as a Catholic, I can say there’s joy to be found in suffering. I’m not sure if that’s satisfactory answer for the non-Catholics out there, but there’s a reason why people flagellate themselves and find pleasure in that kind of thing.
And I think that’s true for me. It’s true someone like Haruki Murakami. I really recommend his book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. That guy’s nuts. He runs not just 26-mile marathons. He ran a 62-mile out ultramarathon and the whole book is about running as a metaphor for writing. It literally is just putting one step in front of the other. I’m here in my office. It might look very nice and everything, but on the other side is a washer and a dryer and my treadmill. That’s where I get my inspiration. So I just run every day on that treadmill and I listen to fitness instructors on Apple Fitness, they say the most banal things that would drive me crazy as a writer, but you know what? It works because all they want to do is make me put one foot in front of the other until I finish my routine and that’s what writing is.
If you can do your 30 minutes a day, it just adds up over time. And if you do 30 minutes a day for 20 or 30 years, you’re going to be a writer. Whether you’ll be a published writer or a great writer, I can’t guarantee that, but you will be a writer. And so that’s the best advice that I can give you.
Zach Powers:
So everyone please get a copy of To Save and Destroy. You can find it at your local bookseller. You can order it online. You can get it from your local library. Viet Thanh Nguyen, I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us. It’s been an absolute pleasure. I am enlightened and I hope everyone else here has been as well and we hope we’ll encounter you again here through the Writer’s Center in sometime in the future.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thanks so much for that. Good luck to all of you on your writing journeys.
Zach Powers:
Have a good evening, everybody.
