In this wide-ranging conversation, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Thi Bui explore the role of writers and artists in confronting injustice, challenging dehumanization, and making sense of a world shaped by war, displacement, prisons, and political violence. Reflecting on refugees, incarceration, identity, anger, privilege, and the limits of art, they argue that the problem is not the humanity of marginalized people but the systems and perspectives that deny it. The discussion moves from personal experiences and childhood trauma to activism, community, and the responsibility of storytelling, ultimately arriving at a shared belief that while art may not change the world overnight, it can connect people, challenge assumptions, preserve hope, and help readers feel less alone.
Transcript
Thi Bui:
Hi, my name is Thi Bui. I’m a writer and an artist.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Hi, my name is Viet Thanh Nguyen and I’m a writer and a professor.
Thi Bui:
That’s a really good question. This question of humanizing through art, I have a lot of feelings about,
mixed feelings, but I guess it does have to do with what we’re able to accomplish when we take on the
role of humanizing people through art. What do you think, Viet?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I resist that term so much. A lot of people have talked about this, the idea of humanizing means that
somehow we have to apologize for ourselves. Somehow we’re already put on our back foot because
someone says you’re not human or prove your humanity to us. And so if we start from that question of
humanizing, I feel like we’ve already lost half the battle to begin with. At the same time, we work in a
field in which we know that the idea of the human still counts for a lot of people. And part of what we do as writers and as artists and as teachers is to try to reach our audience.
And so I feel very conflicted sometimes because part of me just says, “I don’t want to deal with your
humanity. I want to talk more about inhumanity.” But we know we have to deal with both the humanity
and inhumanity. And you deal with this all the time because you’re working on refugees, you’re working
on abolition, you’re working on prisons and these things are all interrelated. And of course, the way that so many societies see refugees and prisoners is as less than human. How do you cope with that?
Thi Bui:
Right. Well, these are the underdogs that I gravitate towards and I want to write stories about. And you’re right, these are the people who are the easiest to dehumanize and you see it all the time happening to them. So then the impulse is to try to reverse the effects of dehumanizing language with stories and art that humanize them. But you’re right, you are fighting a losing battle if you start there because the problem isn’t that you are less of a human. The problem is in the gaze of the people who dehumanize. So I’m trying to flip it. I’m trying to say, “This is not a me problem. It’s not an us problem. We who are being dehumanized. This is a you problem. You people who are racist, you people who are dehumanizing other human beings. We’re no less human beings. We may have less power than you and that is something we are trying to address, but you’ve got a problem and you need to think about that.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. I think about that all the time. Obviously refugees and prisoners are dehumanized. I think it’s
important to stress the verb. Someone is dehumanizing them and it’s oftentimes these institutions, these nations that pride themselves on their civilization and their humanity. So for me, I was reminded of that very viscerally when I went to San Quentin prison last year to talk to some of the men that are there. And we had a whole long conversation. I was up on stage, but it wasn’t just me talking. There was also a moment where the men themselves put on a culture show. That’s what they wanted to do. There was singing, there was dancing, there was people telling their own stories, recounting their memoirs. And it didn’t feel to me like they were humanizing themselves. To me it felt like they were already human, and they knew that.
Thi Bui:
That’s right.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
But myself as an outsider, I was coming in as someone from not from that place, someone from a society that sees these men as being less than human. So it’s so important when the question of humanizing is raised, and you’ve already touched upon this, that we as writers and artists, our job is to challenge the people who think someone else’s humanity needs to be proven to them. We have to show them that actually their humanity is partly what’s in question.
Thi Bui:
That’s right. The gaze is inhumane and then the problem is in the mind of the person who gazes upon
others with this lens that discriminates, that dehumanizes. I’m thinking about, I’ve only started your new book, you’re too prolific. I can’t quite keep up, but I am thinking about you writing about the other and I can’t help thinking that there’s a relationship between this idea of the other and the process of
dehumanizing people. It’s basically a very violent form of othering somebody, right? Like you’re so other than me that you’re not even human.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
We’re up against the law. When we talk about these processes of othering, it’s not just what takes place at the level of language and speech where we often feel that we’re dehumanized or othered, but it’s real violence. That is violence. I mean the symbolic violence of calling someone by some kind of epithet that is dehumanizing. But so it’s like dropping bombs on people.
And then I think all the time about what we do, does it matter? Does it matter that we create art in the face of this kind of violence and can art stop these kinds of things? And so I dwell on that quite often and in my darkest moments I’m quite depressed about that. And I want to ask you about how you feel about it, but the one thing I would say is, I think about this book that I read and taught recently, Nathan Thrall’s, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. And it’s about an incident, 2015 or so, a bus full of kindergartners in the West Bank who has an accident, hit by a truck, catches on fire and six kindergartners burned to death along with one of their teachers. And it all unfolds within a minute and a half of an Israeli Army checkpoint with ambulances, but no one comes for the kids.
And the Palestinians can’t come for their own kids because of the system of occupation and apartheid and all the checkpoints and everything. They can’t come for three hours. And at the end of Nathan’s book, the last line of the book is, “And no one was held to account.” But what I think is that Nathan’s book did hold somebody to account. Now that may be a very minor power that we have as writers and as artists, but I want to hang on to that idea that part of what we do is to hold people to account through our writing. How do you feel about that?
Thi Bui:
Sure. And then if so, if that ultimately is our power, then we better do it well, right? Why be wishy-washy about what we say then? We have to state things clearly.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, what do you feel when you’re really depressed and you think that even this doesn’t matter?
Thi Bui:
This a weekly struggle to find the reasons to get up. And I had one of those weeks recently actually, and something that James Baldwin said helped me a lot in an interview that he did in Paris, he said, I’m paraphrasing here, but he was like, “Well, you can give into despair, but when you go away from what
you know, you’re betraying a lot of people. And it may only be six people that you know who you really
believe in, but you can’t betray them. And you have to remember all of the people who are out there
helping and doing good work and holding the world together literally with their love and their passion,
you can’t betray them with your depression. You’re allowed to be depressed, but pull it together and get back to work after you have your moment.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think it’s compelling to think that there are others involved in this, in what we do. It’s not just us, us all
the time. Because if it is just us all the time, then yes, I feel like what is the point of me running around
writing op-eds or giving a lot of talks or writing nonfiction or novels, but the idea that there are others
who depend on this work does give me a little bit of hope.
I also think about the writer John Berger. He went to Palestine, he wrote an essay after visiting Palestinians that he titled Undefeated Despair. I though that’s such a powerful idea. You’re allowed to feel despair. It’s human to feel despair. And you’re probably unrealistic if you don’t feel despair at some of the conditions that you or other people face. But to be undefeated is important too, this idea of persistence even in the face of despair. And so I think undefeated despair is my go-to phrase, but that’s as much optimism as I allow myself.
Thi Bui:
That tracks. That’s on brand for you, Viet. I blame it on your early Catholicism.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, I mean, if you grew up in a religion where your best hope is to be sacrificed and martyred,
undefeated despair doesn’t sound so bad.
Thi Bui:
It’s all right. That gets you up in the morning and keeps you at work. But I always though of us as being
on the same football team and I was always very proud to have you as our quarterback, Viet, so you can’t give up. I mean, you can take a rest on the bench sometimes and train up other quarterbacks, but you’re an important part of the team.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
One of the things that interests me about your work is you do work in isolation obviously, but you also go out and do things like you went with your son to …. some years ago to look at what was happening to the refugees who were coming to that island. In your other work, you go out and you meet people, right? What is that… I don’t like doing that very much.
Thi Bui:
Really?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah.
Thi Bui:
That’s-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I do it sometimes, but it’s not something I do often and I’m just wondering, is that something natural for
you or do you have to compel yourself to go out there and do this, I don’t know what you want to call it,
field work?
Thi Bui:
Field work. Yeah, meeting people. That’s my favorite part of the work actually. That’s where the curiosity gets to be the driver and I just get to ask other people about their experiences and I get to see the world through their eyes and learn that way. It’s actually the bringing it all back and sitting in the quiet and trying to make work that’s worthy of the stories that people have shared with me. That’s the hard part.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I did do a trip to El Salvador last year for a few days and I was investigating the history of massacre in El Salvador. The United States sponsored this regime that had trained the Salvadoran military to commit atrocities during the Civil War. And I visited El Mozote, which is the equivalent of the My Lai Massacre, except a thousand people were killed versus 500 at El Mozote and I talked to some of the survivors and it was incredibly a moving experience for me to do that.
And it required me to leave my room, leave the United States, go on this trek. It was a very minor thing in some ways, but it was also, it was powerful at the same time, in the same way that going to San Quentin was powerful. So there is something about meeting people, real people and talking to them and hearing their own voices and hearing their own stories that has shifted certain things in me. Now I don’t like doing it. There’s a lot of inertia. I like sitting in this chair, so I spend a lot of energy to go and do these trips. But once I’m there engaging with people, I do feel myself transformed by that.
Thi Bui:
Tell me more about that. I’m curious, what’s the shift in you?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I went to El Mozote and I talked to three of the survivors and they’re all roughly my
age. And that was the official memorial and this is where the tourists go. So there’s now a tourist track to El Mozote, there’s a tourist track in the My Lai village as well, Sơn Mỹ as it’s called in Vietnam. But one of the men said, “I want you to come to my house. I live about 30 minutes away outside where there aren’t any real paved roads. And I have my own private memorial to 40 or so victims right next to my house. And a dozen of them are my relatives, including my mother.”
So the next day I went out there. And it was as in my experiences going to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, it’s one thing to read about the history in books. It’s another thing to get in a pickup truck, go out on the road, experience what rutted roads are like, go over a flooded stream and have your driver say, “Oh yeah, the local school teacher drowned in that stream last year because there’s no bridge.” We’re behind a truck with 15 kids in their school uniforms standing in the back of a pickup truck. That was their way of getting home. And they would just hop off the pickup truck as it stopped at each small house.
And then his house, he was running the equivalent of the local 7-Eleven. His house was a convenience store in the front room. I think there’s only two rooms, the front room and then the kitchen in the back. I don’t know, that was just very real to me. These are the kinds of homes of people I would see in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos when I was investigating war and aftermath back then. And I wouldn’t have encountered that if I hadn’t physically gone to El Salvador and I wouldn’t have seen that literally right next to this man’s house, he had constructed his own memorial. Can you imagine living next to a
memorial for the dead for your entire life and it’s something you willingly choose?
And I ended my meeting with him by saying, “I want to share with you what Vietnamese people say
when we encounter grief and sorrow. I say, [foreign language 00:13:22].” It’s a very small thing to do, a
very small thing to say, but I just found his story obviously enormously moving and just thought that’s
what we should be…You talked about sharing responsibility with others. Our work is connected to other people. I felt that at that moment, whether he thought so or not, I though that my work was connected to his world in some way or that I needed to connect my world to his world.
And that was part of the thinking for my third novel that I’m supposed to be writing that goes from
Vietnam and Paris to El Salvador and then back to the United States because I think our worlds are all
connected. You’re working with refugees and you are a refugee yourself, it’s so tempting to just talk about our own stories and our own people and it’s so crucial to try to connect our stories with those of others. I don’t know if there was a moment in your travels or journeys where you felt that kind of human connection that transformed you in some way.
Thi Bui:
Yeah. I mean, listening to what you said, describing the physical terrain and your body moving through it, it makes it so much easier for you to connect with the human experience that people had in those places. And then it makes you a better reporter, I think, of their stories because you can pull in these physical sensations and describe those to the reader and that helps bring the reader into the experience too, even though they don’t get to be there physically.
So I think there’s something about being out in the world and interviewing people that just keeps it more real, keeps the issues more simple and keeps them grounded in real lived human experience, which I really like because you can get very theoretical and you can get quite complicated in your arguments and I think that there’s a, you do it really well and there’s a way to do that where you’re making everybody in the room smarter, right? But I think sometimes we can lose the human experience when we go very deep into theoretical, political, historical reasons for why something is bad. But sometimes you can just talk to the people who went through it to see the same thing and maybe it’ll stick with readers longer too.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
We have to get out of our comfort zone, whether that means physically leaving the zone and meeting
other people, but sometimes also going within ourselves to whatever the comfort zone we have inside.
I’ve said, and it’s not anything original, that for me, part of the challenge of being a writer is to try to go
outside of my comfort zone within myself to look at the things that kind of scare and terrify me from my own childhood, from my own history, from my own emotions. And that’s a difficult thing for me to do. Personally, I’m wondering if you’ve had to do that work?
Thi Bui:
Oh, yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
What would that be? Give me an example. Where did you terrify yourself that you had to go there?
Thi Bui:
So working on The Best We Could Do, there’s an early chapter that used to be called Terror. It’s about
just growing up with my father who terrified me. And my preparation for myself to write and draw this
chapter was to go back and re-watch all of the scary movies that he had let us watch as kids
inappropriately when we were too young to be watching them. And they really scarred us. So I went back and watched every single one to prepare myself. And I, for the most part, found that they weren’t as scary to me anymore as an adult, with the exception of a couple. The Shining was one. So the cinematography in that I’ve realized was very effective and very powerful. So I borrowed some things from it, like the long hallways turned into one point perspective drawings and from a lower angle so you can see the ceiling behind adult people’s heads.
So it actually ended up being really good for me to go through that process. But yeah, it did scare the
bejesus out of me and really unsettle me. I’m pretty sure that I got into a few accidents or something
because my nervous system was so unsettled by this exercise that I did, but I kind of had to do it so that I could get back in the head of that little kid who was so scared.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. I think childhood is such a terrible place in some ways. I think those of us who became writers
Thi Bui:
… Very powerless.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
… came out of difficult childhoods in one way or another.
Thi Bui:
We wouldn’t be writers otherwise.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Right, and most sensible people just want to look forward. They don’t want to look backwards to the
difficult things. I don’t know. For me, my writing got better, the more I was able to confront the fears and the terrors of childhood. And I don’t know, I just wonder how long I will have to keep on dwelling on that material. I might feel afraid, but maybe I’ve delved deeply enough. Maybe there’s nothing else to get into. So that’s why I have to go and find other kinds of experiences and terrors somewhere else. But then maybe there’s something beneath that I haven’t been able to get into. How do I even go there to the stuff that I don’t even know is frightening to me. I mean, this is why… therapists. You’re my therapist right now, so I’m talking to you about this. So it’s a weird mental state to be in to think that I have to try to uncover more within myself in order to find things to write about.
Thi Bui:
I feel like there’s lots in the world that you’re interested in that you could be writing about, right? And
then the things in yourself, I think, I don’t know, the universe has jokes and life will throw you some
curveballs as your kids get older.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So let me ask you another one. It’s nice to, we’re in a place called Baldwin & Company. James Baldwin’s a much beloved writer. I don’t know if he had haters in his life. He probably did, but by now he’s just a legend, right? So everybody’s like, “Everybody loves Jimmy Baldwin.”
Thi Bui:
This is the first time I’ve heard him called Jimmy. Wow.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Friends call him Jimmy.
Thi Bui:
Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
But for us, for me and for many living writers that I know, we’re not so beloved. We’re in the midst of big fights. We have people who hate us and so on and so forth. And that comes also from people within our own communities. And I get that all the time
Thi Bui:
I’ve heard, yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
… with the Vietnamese people. So I don’t have the luxury of thinking of myself as someone who’s just
beloved by the Vietnamese community. And that’s for very good reason. I think there’s a lot of reasons
where for some people, for some writers, our obligation is not only to hold up our communities, our
obligation is to challenge our communities as well. Whether in my case, that’s the Vietnamese community or whether it’s the United States as a whole or whether it’s Vietnam. So I get a lot of hate mail. Do you get that? Do you get hate for what you do?
Thi Bui:
I try not to, but yeah. Actually, I always thought it was going to come from some right-winger when I was mouthing off about Trump or Republicans. But actually I feel like my first hate mail or online hate came from talking about Asian and Black solidarity in Oakland. And I guess it came at a time when there were some Asian people who were feeling some kind of way about anti-Asian violence and they didn’t like that I was just trying to be an Asian voice for solidarity between our communities. And I don’t know, like when you’re a woman also, people love to threaten you with sexual violence, so that wasn’t fun. And I think I was just very sensitive at the time and my nervous system was shot and I took a little break. I think I might have quit Twitter too, honestly. But-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I heard you were getting attacked there as well.
Thi Bui:
People are really not nice on Twitter. Yeah. Oh, and then I got dragged for saying on your show that… I
think I said that white people… We were talking about Southeast Asia and the effects of French
imperialism, French colonialism on the people there. And I said, “Yeah, sometimes Vietnamese people
are the white people of Southeast Asia.” And we had a chuckle on the show, and then I think I tweeted
that. And then I was very surprised to get dragged all over Twitter by a bunch of young left leaning
Vietnamese people. And I was like, “Well, that’s surprising. Don’t you all have a critical opinion about
imperialism and colonialism and structures and privilege?” I guess they weren’t ready for it.
And I think I tried to engage with people on that platform and I just found that no, people go there to box. They don’t go there to be nuanced. I kind of left it in and felt some despair like, “What are we even doing here? Why are we fighting each other like this?” But I don’t care anymore, and I think I have to be ready for the internet and how nasty things are when my next book comes out about ICE and prisons. It’s going to be a lot more controversial. I hang out with journalists now who get death threats and it’s preparing me.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I remember that episode and I was surprised too by the criticism that you were getting. I get a lot of criticism too, but in some ways I think it’s not as bad as being an Asian American woman or a woman of color. I think that the fact that, like you said, that you’re a woman and you’re an Asian woman exposes you to a lot more assumptions and a lot more vitriol in some ways. I wonder about my own privilege all the time. In some ways I’m a so-called minority because I’m an Asian American, a Vietnamese person, a refugee, but in other ways as a man, I get a lot of privilege as well. This is something I’ve been, I think, wrestling with ever since my college days. I don’t think it’s ever gone away, this idea that I have unexamined male privilege. And you know this, in the Vietnamese community, there’s a lot of unexamined male privilege.
Thi Bui:
Oh, yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So even as a well-meaning progressive person, I struggle all the time with how much have I internalized structures of patriarchy that I don’t even realize. I’m just posing that as a question because I’m always trying to interrogate myself about that.
Thi Bui:
Yeah, it’s complicated. I’ve gone to San Quentin a lot too. Did you go to the Roots program, the Ethnic
Studies program that they have?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I did not go to that one.
Thi Bui:
Okay. That’s a really great program that’s still running. I’m about to go again in a couple of weeks, but the guys there are wonderful. I’ve heard that in the past, I think that they had access to more programs, so therapy, a lot of work on themselves, and so they were able to talk about ethnic studies issues at this higher level. Whereas without a lot of that programming happening these days, they’re coming in with a lot less self-examination. And so the facilitators are having to do more of that individual work with them. So yeah, I think it does help a lot when men have done at least a little bit of reflecting on what male privilege might have looked like in their lives.
But I remember recently doing a Zoom book club kind of thing about The Best We Could Do with some
guys at, I can’t remember if it was Solano or Folsom State Prison and they were all very taken with my
father’s character in the book. And I think there’s only one Asian American man in the crowd. So I was
pretty pleased that these guys were identifying with an old frail Vietnamese American man. So that part was cool. But I think what I wanted to tell them was that he’s by no means a perfect man and that he probably had a lot of undiagnosed PTSD and some other stuff that he probably could have worked out in therapy because whatever he didn’t work out on his own, he inflicted upon his wife and children and they didn’t want to hear that. They weren’t ready for that.
So yeah, it can be a bit of a cliche when we say it, but it’s absolutely true that hurt people hurt people. So I do think that patriarchy plus the abuses of so many systems around us create these dynamics that are basically rolling downhill on women and children of men who have not processed stuff and also have unexamined male privilege.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I was impressed in the conversations with the men at San Quentin, how much all of them were
interrogating themselves.
Thi Bui:
It’s so good.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Of course, they were all there for some reason.
Thi Bui:
Of course.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And they were, at least the ones that I met, who was with a self-selected group, were interested in talking about themselves autobiographically and where they were from and what their responsibilities were. There’s a great difference between them and me, but I do think that so many of us who have privilege don’t examine it enough of all different kinds. And for me, what was interesting in terms of my writing, that’s part of how I sometimes understand where my privilege is coming from. I’ll create characters, put them into certain situations. I don’t think, “Wow, they’re doing things that I would do myself and these things are problematic.” As I think about my task as a writer, it’s partly about criticizing the world and the world that we live in, but it’s also partly about criticizing myself as well.
Thi Bui:
Right. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s something that we should all be doing. None of us is the perfect guiltless person, but probably some of us need to do more examining than others.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, we live in a country that doesn’t really examine itself. Right now, as we are talking, we’re in the
middle of a war with Iran. We’re watching… It’s so depressing right now-
Thi Bui:
It is.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
… for those of us who happen to be concerned about the use of American power or the use of American power to support other kinds of wars. We just went through two years of really intense atrocity in Gaza and that genocide is still unfolding. There’s still an ethnic cleansing in the West Bank that’s happening. We immediately went from there into a war with Iran. I feel like this goes back to the earlier part of our conversation about what art can do. I just feel like our work is needed and yet our work is so small at the same time to point out how often can we say that the United States is built on war and genocide and colonization and enslavement, all these horrible things. How often can we say it? That fills me with depression.
Thi Bui:
Right. What else would you do? If you could pick a job where you felt like you had some power, what
would it be?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I guess the fantasy would be the president, but someone could just wave a wand and you could be the
president versus having to go through a whole electoral process. But no, I fear that if you give somebody that much power, something will go wrong. Someone would make a movie about this. The person who thinks, “If I was the president, I could change the world.” And then your angel waves a wand and you’re the president, and you’re faced with these decisions. That’s a terrible scenario.
Thi Bui:
Yeah. Generally, the people that you would want to be president would think about a really good cabinet of wise people and the balance of power with a good Congress. They would want to share that power with other responsible people. But I do think about when I’m down on how little effect I have on changing these big things, I’m thinking about these people in power. Our elected officials who are supposed to be in charge here and have some power over these things. I’m like, well, they all seem to express that their hands are tied. So I’m just like, I guess I’ll just stay over here and do as much as possible with what I have because this power is getting wasted in other hands.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I feel that we all would like to think that there is a solution at hand to the problems of war,
genocide, colonization, enslavement. And yet we live within a whole world that’s been created by these
systems for centuries. And what is depressing for me is thinking that people have made these arguments long before I ever have, and they repeated them throughout their lives. And we are the inheritors of that process of resistance. And we are probably going to be condemned to repeating ourselves endlessly until it’s time for us to die and pass it on to the next generation.
Thi Bui:
I think we’re only here, but for the grace of, and thanks to the passion of the people who resisted as much as they could. I think if nobody had resisted, we’d be long gone. So we’re all just doing maintenance work here.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s depressing.
Thi Bui:
Maybe that’s my form of-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I keep saying depressing. No, it goes back to that idea of undefeated despair. I have to periodically remind myself
Thi Bui:
I don’t think I can go with undefeated, that’s really- No, that’s something you ought to put on a poster above your desk. I’ve got to come up with a different one.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
No one’s calling me to put up the right propaganda posters or slogans.
Thi Bui:
Optimistic, pragmatic optimism.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That doesn’t work either.
Thi Bui:
Why?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s not a great slogan.
Thi Bui:
Well, it doesn’t have the word despair in it.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Pragmatic optimism.
Thi Bui:
Mine’s got optimism in it. Yours has despair in it.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I don’t think writers and artists should be coming up with slogans. I don’t know. I understand the public
function of what we’re supposed to do in terms of resistance or politics and things like that. We have to mobilize and motivate people. That’s why Zohran Mamdani is doing such a great job, at least at the
campaigning stage. But for writers, we’re not campaigners. That’s not really our job, I think. So on one
hand, as committed people, yes, we can utter other people’s slogans, but I just don’t feel like it’s our job to write them as writers.
Thi Bui:
Not slogans, but don’t you get people who are like, “Wow, you just said what I was thinking. Thank you
so much.” You’re able to put something into words that helps people articulate what they’re feeling.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, but usually it’s undefeated despair, that kind of thing. I’m envious of writers, so you look on social media and then there are people say, “Yes, writer X did such a great job uplifting my spirits at this time.” No one’s ever going to say that about me.
Thi Bui:
No, this is true. This is true. They’re not wrong there. But I think that just the fact that you keep going is
very optimistic to me.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s what I mean. The process is optimistic, right? The process of thinking about people who are
political activists, they’re the ones who also, they have to keep going every day, every week, every year, every generation, fighting the same battle with variations over and over for various kinds of social justice. And so I think that parallel for those of us who are writers and artists is that’s also what we do in our own way. That’s the unromantic daily grind of trying to think about things and create things that will illuminate the problem that is the same but different. Wars are the same, but they’re different. What’s happening today is different and yet it’s a repetition of our desire to bomb other countries into submission. That is a horrifying repetition and yet there is something different about what’s taken place. And so there is something… There’s still a new opportunity for us to, those of us who post these kinds of things to find different ways of talking about them.
Thi Bui:
That’s right. Yeah, no notes added there. I do admire you for your discipline and I think that’s something that I’ve been trying to cultivate in myself. I think I bring some other thing to the table that’s not discipline, but-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
What is it?
Thi Bui:
I don’t know. I mean, you tell me, apparently there’s something about emotional intelligence maybe or
human stories people tend to call on me for.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, you seem angry. I don’t mean that as a negative judgment.
Thi Bui:
Oh, I love being angry. Thank you for saying that. Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I was going to say gentle, but I though that’s insulting.
Thi Bui:
It is. Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
You’re angry, you’re angry.
Thi Bui:
Thank you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I see it in the drafts of the work that you’re posting. Right now, you’re doing these drafts, the book that
you’re working on in terms of ICE, abolition, refugees and so on. And I don’t know if these are the final
versions of the drafts, but your commentary is angry and there’s a lot to be angry about with what’s
happening with ICE and with what I see as the ethnic cleansing of the United States at this moment. But what I’m saying about you in particular is that you speak very gently, but I think you’re really angry.
Thi Bui:
Thank you. Yes. I don’t know how to speak in any other way, but yes, all the feelings inside are quite
angry. And I hang onto my anger because it is a force for change in action. Otherwise, if I let myself just
feel sad all the time, that would drive me to inaction and depression. So I hang onto my anger for good
reasons and it helps me stay clear on what needs to be said, what needs to be done, who needs to hear it. And like I said before, we shouldn’t be mincing words these days.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I have another joke that I’m telling now, it’s a new joke. You may have heard a lot of my jokes before
because I only have so many.
Thi Bui:
Is this a dad joke?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
No, this is an anger joke.
Thi Bui:
Oh, okay.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So I became an Asian American in college, but I was an angry Asian American. And that’s the only kind
of Asian American there should be because if you’re not an angry Asian American, you probably sold out. That’s the joke. So is that true do you think? I mean, if you’re not an angry Asian American and you sold out, have you conceded something to white supremacy or to racial capitalism or to whatever kind of force of domination and injustice that exists out there that Asian Americans are complicit in?
Thi Bui:
I mean, that’s a hard one for me to answer because I think that… I’m having a feeling. What is this feeling? I’m feeling like I want to resist any kind of external force telling me what kind of Asian American I need to be. I’m like, isn’t the whole point of claiming that identity we’re going to write it ourselves. So yes, I guess there’s a built in anger there that I’m not questioning, but I also don’t want anybody to tell me what kind of Asian American I need to be.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, I get it. But you’ve met non-angry Asian Americans before, right?
Thi Bui:
Oh, and we’re talking about what’s the problem with them?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
When you meet non-angry Asian Americans aren’t you irritated? Like, “Why are you not angry about
whatever…” There’s a lot of issues to be angry about, but you’re not angry about anything.
Thi Bui:
Like apolitical Asians? Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
They tend to be not angry. Well, they might get angry if they’re getting-
Thi Bui:
Like assimilationists?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
… taxed too much, for example. Taxes are too high
Thi Bui:
Oh, Asians who don’t like taxes and apolitical Asians and what else?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
MAGA Asians.
Thi Bui:
Oh, MAGA Asians. They’re kind of angry too, don’t you think?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I’m saying. When we get back to the anger issue, what’s interesting for me is that whenever we talk about emotions, emotions have to be qualified. Some people think anger is bad. I think anger is actually good in the right amount, the right dosage, but also the right kind of anger, like a righteous anger.
Thi Bui:
That’s right.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Anger for a certain kind of justice. MAGA anger is a righteous anger, but it’s totally messed up. It’s like a racist anger, a sexist anger, a white nationalist anger, that’s different. That’s the anger of-
Thi Bui:
We don’t want that kind of anger.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
… the Old Testament God who wants to bring fire and brimstone down upon the sinners. That’s a different kind of anger. I think there’s a different kind of anger that for me is a justifiable anger, one that is oriented towards justice and others as we’ve been talking about. So every emotion has to be qualified in some way. That includes-
Thi Bui:
Even love.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Even love. Even love.
Thi Bui:
Even love.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
There’s such a thing as too much love, there’s bad love, there’s-
Thi Bui:
There’s selfish love.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Selfish love, right.
Thi Bui:
There’s people who will eat your children to save their children. That’s-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Smothering love. Asians know a lot about smothering love, right? Asians know a lot about smothering
love. I mean, if we think about the stories that Asian Americans like to tell each other, I’m not saying
these are good stories, but that’s one of the stereotypes that Asian American parents, Asian immigrants, refugee parents, they love too much and they can’t articulate it well. They want to hover over their children and tell them what to do because they think they know what’s best for the kids.
Thi Bui:
I think I’m also resisting that. I mean, there’s definitely instances of that, but I also want to be careful
about creating our own cliches about ourselves.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Who else is going to create the cliches about ourselves, that’s our prerogative.
Thi Bui:
Well, I don’t know. It’s tricky though, because I’m writing about Southeast Asian dudes who ended up in prison and they are definitely not part of the Asian American narrative, the cliches that we tell about
ourselves.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I don’t know, I think these gangsters are a real cliche that I grew up with.
Thi Bui:
It’s kind of niche, you have to know, you have to have lived in San Jose to know, but a lot of people think Asians are the kind of Asians that they see on TV. So they hear about the stereotypes of smothering parents and you had to go to tutoring after school and the model minority stuff. There’s definitely people like that, but I’m just very careful these days about adding any of my own bait to spreading these stories because I’m trying to tell other kinds of stories and I’m not trying to make my work any harder. So I’m for a complexity. There’s no monolithic Asian American. There’s so many different kinds of Asians. It depends on when they came here, it depends on their economic class and education level and who they hung out with. There’s so many things that affect what an Asian family is like and what an Asian upbringing is like here in the States. I don’t know. I’m really resisting any kind of broad strokes characterizations.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, we got on this tangent because of the idea that all emotions need to be qualified.
Thi Bui:
Oh, including love.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Including love, right? So I’m not saying that all Asian parents smother. I’m just saying that love itself
could be smothering, love itself could be beneficial, but there’s different versions of all that, just as there’s different versions of anger and sadness and resentment and so on. I think for me what justifies certain emotions is what’s the point of them? What are we using these emotions for? If we’re using love in order to manipulate another person deliberately or not, that’s bad, right? If we’re using anger in order to tear down another people, another person versus using anger to change a society that we feel is doing something wrong, that’s different. So for me as a person, a human being, father, husband, writer, I think about the question of these emotions all the time because I don’t know about you, I’m not going to generalize. I’m saying that for me, I grew up in a highly emotionally repressive family and my portion of the Vietnamese community tended to be emotionally repressive. So I want to bring out emotions, but I also want to interrogate what they mean at the same time.
Thi Bui:
Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I think I grew up with emotions running the show and they were
unexamined and could be pretty destructive. So I’m very grateful to be around people who actually keep their emotions in check and offer a different way to structure their decision making.
So should we get back to the question of what do we think about the assimilationist Asians, the MAGA
Asians, the apolitical Asians?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, as you said-
Thi Bui:
Are they still your audience?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Is that my audience?
Thi Bui:
Yeah. Do you consider them as part of your audience that you’re trying to reach?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, yeah. In order to provoke them. They hate me, but actually I-
Thi Bui:
Are people that unchangeable though? Do you feel like you’re trying to change hearts and minds?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I don’t think I’m trying to change hearts and minds. I think that the battle lines have been drawn and
people who are on opposite ends of the political spectrum probably aren’t going to change. It’s the people in the middle and it’s the children of these generations that could change. And so the battles that I fight in the writing or on social media or do the op-eds, I think there’s all kinds of people in the audience. I don’t know who they are necessarily, but I feel that I am able to reach some of them. I get emails from people sometimes or messages saying, “My kids listen more to you than they do to me.” And I’m like, “Oh good, I’m glad.” That’s part of the reason why some people hate me because I’m reaching their children and putting ideas into their kids’ heads that their parents think are wrong. But sometimes people from the older generation will reach out and say, “We agree with you.” So that totally explores this idea that you can homogenize generations that they’re all one way or the other politically.
Thi Bui:
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, now that I’m living in the South, it’s interesting. I’m trying to understand the
older Vietnamese generation that’s here. And sometimes they might vote conservatively or they might say something that sounds conservative, but then when you ask them, “What do you value? What are the big issues that you think about a lot these days?” And they might say some stuff like healthcare and housing and jobs and groceries are getting expensive. Basically, I think they want a socialist agenda, but they just don’t know it. So that’s interesting. And so that makes me think about, well, how do we reach people where they’re at? How do we talk to them in words that make sense to them? If they came here and they spent all their lives just surviving so that they could feed their family and the way that they did it was not by reading books, it was by shrimping.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So I have a complicated love for our people, the Vietnamese people that we’re talking about, because I see their humanity, I see their complexity, I see their capacity to love their children and to build lives for
themselves. And then some of them I’m like, “You can be a wonderful human being and yet you still are
also politically something I would object to.”
Now, I’m not rejecting them for that. I’m saying that’s part of the human complexity and it’s part of our job as writers and artists I think is to acknowledge what that complexity is. Not to agree with it, but to
acknowledge it and try to portray it in our work, even if we’re going to be critical about it. So even when I fight with people, I fight with this abstract idea of the MAGA Asian American or the MAGA Vietnamese, it’s not that I love them, but I acknowledge that we’re all part of the same community. We’re supposed to be having these fights with each other. It’s actually worse if we didn’t have these fights. That’s actually more dysfunctional not to have these confrontations with each other and pretend that everything is okay, which is what happens in some very dysfunctional families that I know.
Thi Bui:
Yeah. Yeah. People are becoming very polarized, but I do feel like part of our work is at least, if not
changing hearts and minds, providing means for people to change their own hearts and minds.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
All right. Well, Thi, you said you’re the pragmatic optimist. You didn’t like my idea of undefeated
despair. Fine. Let’s end-
Thi Bui:
It’s just a sweater I don’t want to wear-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Give me a pragmatically optimistic thought.
Thi Bui:
… it seems like a scratchy wool sweater.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Give me a pragmatically optimistic thought at the end of this conversation about art and politics and
community.
Thi Bui:
We have to keep trying different angles. I think we know what we want to say and audiences out there
may not hear us the first time or the third time or the 10th time, but if we keep at it and we keep trying
different angles, I think that eventually we do reach people and that’s the work, right?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
People are surprising. That’s where I’m going to end with. I’m affirmed by the fact that despite how some people object to some of the things that we argue, some of the things that we do, some of the things that we propose in terms of what I think should be a better world, I get messages from people that surprise me, messages from people who I think would not agree with me, but do agree with me. They write me letters, they write me messages, they communicate with me on social media and they say, “You got it right.”
Thi Bui:
Oh good.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I just heard from a friend of mine about a Vietnamese veteran of the war. So he must be in his 70s or 80s. He survived 12 years in a prison camp. He gave his daughter The Sympathizer and said, “If you want to know what I went through, read this book.”
Thi Bui:
Oh wow.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And that is affirming that you cannot generalize that the entire generation has a certain political or
cultural viewpoint, whether it’s the older one or the younger generation. And so that gives me hope that our art and our writing is not necessarily meant for everybody and that’s fine. It’s meant for those people who will find in the work an affirmation of their experiences, of their worldviews. It helps them feel less alone. And when they communicate with me, it makes me feel less alone. So there’s that in the power of our art and our writing. It’s something that we create and experience individually in isolation and that could be very isolating, but also it allows for the creation of community when we realize we’re not alone. We share feelings and experiences with others.
Thi Bui:
Yeah. And the beauty of a book is that you can put all of that thinking and work into it, close it, slide it
across the table to the other person, and they will open it and take it in on their timeline. And if it catches them at the right point on their timeline, then it goes straight to their heart and the best of you reflects the best of them and that connection is made.
But the book allows for that to happen in a very organic way, I think. You’re not barging into their home, hitting them over the head with your ideas, you’re just offering them, putting them out into the world. And then the ecosystem of booksellers and people who talk about books helps get our work to the readers. And it is kind of a magical process. And I think it’s a slow process, which is why it doesn’t feel effective sometimes, but we just keep dripping like a dripping faucet and I think we erode away some prejudices over time.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Lovely. Thank you for that final image. It’s been great talking to you.
Thi Bui:
Same.
