Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen is learning to embrace vulnerability these days. Fatherhood in particular has softened his Aquarius sun spirit. In this episode, Viet talks about how the act of witnessing can unlock truths about us, the wisdom in accepting the unknown, and accessing family memory.
Transcript
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I built this whole structure around myself of intellectual work and politics and so on to shield myself from the question of an internal otherness. I was ready to deal with external otherness, all the questions of racism and colonialism and stuff, but the internal otherness, that’s terrifying.
Isa Nakazawa:
Welcome to Stars and Stars of Isa. This is the show where we look to the stars above with the stars below. I’m Isa Nakazawa, your host and resident astrologer. Today we have Viet Thanh Nguyen on the show. He’s a Pulitzer Prize winning author, professor, and as you’ll see very soon, the best dad ever. Viet is an Aquarius sun and a Virgo moon, and today’s show is going to be a little different because we don’t start with the rising sign the way we normally do. We know that the ascendant is calculated by the exact time and location of your birth, but not everyone has access to that information, including Viet, who fled Vietnam with his family as a refugee at the age of four.
So we get into all of that in today’s episode, and we also talk about how family memory and the act of witnessing can unlock truths for us and about us, but also how there’s power in accepting the unknown. So without further ado, let’s get into the episode.
Viet, welcome to Stars and Stars with Isa. How are you?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Good. How are you doing?
Isa Nakazawa:
I’m great. I’ve been really looking forward to this. I’m just sitting with all of your work. So I’m really excited you’re down to talk about the stars.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. No, thanks for having me so much. And this is the first public appearance of the best dad cap, which obviously I got for myself. My kids got it for me. So I think it’s like being given a medal. So I’m proud to wear it.
Isa Nakazawa:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that would be amazing if you did buy it for yourself though. I would also love that. And one of the things that I thought was really great about talking to you today is because, and you talk about this openly, that you grew up Catholic, and I have heard you self-describe as an atheist, which I do want to verify. So I’m kind of just curious off top to get us started, how you relate to astrology and the cosmos. What do you think of? I mean, it’s so big now, so I’m just curious what your thoughts are.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. I grew up in Catholicism, which obviously it’s its own kind of mythology and symbology, but when you live within that kind of a system, you don’t think of it as myth and symbol. You think of it as the actual universe of meaning and storytelling that you live in. And for me, that gave me a very powerful set of references that I still am shaped by today. So the whole narrative of Catholicism and the Bible and Jesus Christ have all been enormously impactful on me, even if I reject the actual institution of the Catholic Church.
So when I say I’m an atheist, it’s partly a reaction against institutionalized Catholicism, but it’s also, for me, sort of a sign of humility. Who are we to look at the universe and think that we can name the forces that have created us and that have created the universe or created itself? Atheism is not necessarily a rejection of some kind of universal power. It’s just a rejection of the idea that God or the divinity or whatever you want to call it is something that we could actually understand, which I don’t think that we can.
Astrology, interestingly enough, is not something that I think is referenced within Vietnamese Catholicism, but a lot of Vietnamese people who are not Catholics really do believe in their versions of astrology. I know many people who have their fortune-tellers and astrologists that they go to. And I have people who have given me very passionate explanations as to why they believe in this. And I’m perfectly, again, in the spirit of humility, in the sense that the universe is complex, there’s so many different ways of interpreting it. And there’s many, many possible patterns and structures out there that we’re only barely beginning to understand whether we’re doing it through some kind of science or whether we’re doing it through human-made forms of interpretation like astrology. So I’m very open to other people’s systems of belief.
Isa Nakazawa:
In astrology as a field, we talk a lot about birth time as kind of a privilege, right? So many countless people don’t have a historical record. They don’t have a birth certificate for so many different reasons, whether they have refugee status, war, displacement, neglect, birth, adoption, family separation, on and on. Potentially people once had a record that was destroyed, right? So there’s infinite reasons why.
So I thought we could kind of start there because a lot of times when people on the show, a lot of my clients in my practice rely on memory, on family memory, on witness, on people who were there, who they contribute to this mythology of our origin story, of our birth story. So yeah, I would love to hea from you what your relationship is to your birth story.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So my official birthdate, if you look at my driver’s license, passport and so on, is March 13th. And at a certain point in my youth, it became evident to me. I think, I don’t know whether I asked my parents or my parents told me, but March 13th is actually not my birthday. It’s actually February 13th. And that produces all kinds of confusion when people ask me, “What’s your sign?” I’m like, “Well, it depends on what date you’re going to pick.”
The reason why I have these two birthdates is because when we came as refugees, when you’re being processed at wherever you’re being processed, you have to obviously talk to the bureaucrat or the soldier who’s taking down your information. I guess my father just got it wrong. Now, why he got it wrong … Or maybe my mother, why they got it wrong, they have no excuse. They only brought two kids with them. I know Vietnamese refugees who brought like 10 or a dozen, and you’re under stress and you have to remember 10 or a dozen birthdates of your children and so on. And Vietnamese culture is one in which the birthday is actually, I don’t think, that important.
Isa Nakazawa:
Oh, I didn’t know that.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That idea of being out of focus from this astrological or even legal perspective, I think totally matches with my understanding of what it means to be someone born into a time of war and colonialism and displacement. For many of us who have been forcibly moved by circumstance from one location to another, I think there’s often a sense of being out of place, of being displaced, of being out of focus to ourselves and to the people who perceive us. And so the idea of having a confusion around one’s origins, one’s birth is completely relevant here to the experiences of not really understanding where one belongs and how one is perceived.
But at a certain point, I actually wanted to get my Vietnamese birth certificate because that is required in order to get a long-term visa if you’re an overseas Vietnamese to return to Vietnam. So I contacted my sister, my adopted sister, who was left behind when we left and she got me the official birth certificate from the hospital where I was born. And it really does say February 13th. Now, you have to trust the Vietnamese bureaucracy. So let’s say that that’s true.
Isa Nakazawa:
It’s interesting too, because you’re one of the few guests we have that there’s equally misinformation as correct information on your birthday. If you Google, it says March 13th everywhere, which I don’t know why I love that for you. There’s something that I’m like, yes, this is part of Viet’s lore. Is it you’re a Pisces, you’re an Aquarius. And with the memory that we have from your sister, I believe, you would likely be a Pisces rising. So there’s still … And for, I don’t know if you know this, but Pisces is kind of the sign … It’s the final sign of the Zodiac.
Astrology definitely functions narratively. There’s Aries, the first sign, which is the first shriek of life. And then Pisces, which is really kind of this idea, this concept of non-being, non-duality, it’s the kind of the something, nothing concept you talk a lot about. And so Pisces is a mutable sign. It’s a liminal sign, and it’s kind of the sign of what you’re talking about, of the murkiness. And for Pisces, confusion is generative. Confusion is a way of being as opposed to something that we need to reconcile or solve. I thought that was interesting that there’s kind of this confusion about whether you’re a Pisces or an Aquarius.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I did go back to my adopted sister and ask her, “Do you remember what time I was born?” And she said, “Well, I wasn’t there.” But my father and my sister went to the hospital in the morning of February 13th to see me, I guess, as families will. So your description of non-duality, of non-being, of mutability and confusion as being generative, that’s me. I’d like to have someone give me a reading where I’m like, “No, that’s completely inaccurate.”
That is very much, as you’ve said, themes that are core to my work. I thought a lot about the fact that I’m a refugee, that I left Vietnam when I was four years old and came to the United States and struggled constantly with the problems of categorization and identity and of other people’s necessities of trying to put me and everybody else into certain kinds of boxes and so on. And me being really resistant to that because of the experiences of displacement, of being a refugee, of being a migrant or an immigrant, whatever you wanted to call me.
And rather than trying to, in my case, seek solid answers, I’ve had to become increasingly comfortable with vagueness, with confusion, as you put it, with undecideability. Because I think you and I have both concluded that it’s going to be impossible to pin down what time I was born, we’re never going to really know for sure. And that is just a condition of being that’s important to me, but I think is probably true for so many other people. And one human response is to try to get rid of the confusion, which I think is dangerous. But the impulse that I’ve embraced is to try to live with confusion and ambivalence, the gray spaces, because from there, hopefully something closer to peace and reconciliation can come about versus absolute clarity in binaries.
Isa Nakazawa:
That’s really profound. I hope that that will resonate with folks because in astrology, we have this process called rectification and there’s a lot of trained astrologers and it’s really a listening process where they interview you and a lot of astrology is timing techniques and so they can kind of place these core memories. So it still is based on memory in a way as source.
So yes, you can go get your chart rectified for people listening who are interested in that, find a talented, a trained astrologer to do that. And you can also rectify your own chart. But I do think beyond that, this notion of kind of accepting the unknown, I think is a deeper call. And I think whether you rectify it or not, there’s kind of this acceptance instead of resisting or feeling incomplete somehow when we don’t have it. And there’s still so much that we can know in astrology without it.
In our conversation, I feel like what’s emerging is that Pisces is really resonating. And one of the things that we’re going to talk about today that I love so much and feel very seen when you talk about is kind of your suspicion around authenticity. And I think that kind of relates to this of like, I think when you have a certain identity or I imagine, like for example, the refugee status, there’s even in interviews, I’m sure like a certain kind of assumption around that narrative, around that fight or around what that means. And I think that in my life, I’ve seen how that can feel, that can reproduce the same claustrophobia. It’s like, it’s reproducing the same sense that you already know my experience, so therefore I don’t even have to speak to it. Or if I do speak to it, maybe I’m just kind of performing or rehearsing something that we all already know.
So even when we’re inverting that, there’s something kind of expected about like, “Oh yeah, you know what it’s like.” We’re all the same singular refugee experience. And I think you do a really good job of speaking for yourself while also understanding that you’re part of a larger collective and a larger string of experiences. But when I listen to you talk, I think so much of your Aquarius sun, so I do want to pivot us there. So in astrology, your sun, I really want you to think about your sun as your vitality and not your ego in a more shallow sense, but really what animates your life and what gives it meaning. And a simpler way to put it is the sun is really where we shine. I think it’s, for me, a place of aliveness and how we express that aliveness, that vitality. And one could also suggest that it’s a place of our joy. And it sits quite uncomfortably in the fixed air sign of Aquarius because Aquarius, the archetype of Aquarius, which famously non-astrology nerds think is a water sign because they hear aqua, but it’s an air sign. It’s the water carrier, not the water itself.
But Aquarius is the paradoxical archetype that describes both the commons, the communities, the people, and it’s also the only child. So it’s the archetype of the one who observes from a distance. And so it’s able to see the patterns that maybe are calcified and the interventions that are necessary because it sees the ways that maybe the tried and true, the normative conventions are kind of atrophying. And that’s why it’s known as kind of the rebel or the scientist or the mad genius because Aquariuses are really here to identify new ways of being. And so they create these interventions through, because it’s an air sign, a lot of times it’s through new systems of thought, through new forms of consciousness, it could be through a lot of different mediums.
But I was struck and kept smiling. I loved, love, love your lecture on the joy of otherness. And I said, “Wow, this is the perfect way to describe an Aquarius sun.” Because you have in this lecture, that I am going to ask you to kind of, in your own words, describe what the joy of otherness is to you, but you have this reverence for the mystery, the eternal mystery and haunting alienation of ourselves within ourselves. So not just with our most intimates, whether it’s our spouses or our siblings or even our parents, but actually the otherness that we might experience with ourselves, right? And that potentially that doesn’t just have to be a source of fear or something that we have to spend our entire lives reconciling or pretending isn’t there.
So I want to start there and ask, what is the joy of otherness? When did you first feel, not think, but kind of feel into the joy of otherness? And then if you’ll humor me, I’m also curious on the other side of that coin, if you can share a time when otherness did not feel joyful, if there was ever a moment.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I went to school at Berkeley and went through, at 19 years of age, became an Asian American, became very politically aware, conscious, radical, and so on. At that moment of intense intellectual excitement and political excitement, what I really wanted were clear answers. There had all been these mysteries of politics and race and war that had shaped my life. And all of a sudden I came to Berkeley and I was exposed to theories and scholarship and so on and political revolutions that had preceded me and they seemed to offer very clear answers. And that was very reassuring in a lot of ways.
But what it also meant was that I was not really able to handle these issues of ambivalence, ambivalent otherness in particular, because the kind of politics I was being exposed to was, it was a politics of otherness, but it was about mobilizing that otherness in terms of very clear political and theoretical set of goals. And so I think that it took me a very long time to come to the position that you described and this idea of the joy of otherness, where one could not be terrified of the otherness within oneself, but in fact, embrace it. And that was very, very hard to do because I built this whole structure around myself of intellectual work and politics and so on to shield myself from the question of an internal otherness. I was ready to deal with external otherness, all the questions of racism and colonialism and stuff, but the internal otherness, that’s terrifying.
I don’t think we can understand our world and its divisions without understanding both the structural forms of otherness that lead people to demonize and exploit each other and kill each other, but the internal forms of otherness that people can’t reconcile with and which drive them to behave in ways that they don’t fully understand or don’t understand at all. And so it would take me decades to really confront that otherness within myself and learn how to dwell within the shadows of the things that I couldn’t comprehend, the mysteries of the external universe, but also the mysteries within myself and to find joy in it.
I mean, this joy of otherness that you’re talking about, it’s the last of six lectures I gave at Harvard on otherness. And it was actually, despite the title, one of the hardest lectures to write because I was like, “Joy? I don’t know. You want to talk about pessimism? I can do that. The pessimism of otherness, not a problem.” But the joy of otherness, it was really compelling for me to write because it forced me to confront, number one, joy, but also the fact that something that is painful, oftentimes experience that’s painful, that is the conditions of our otherness can actually be a source of joy as well.
I mean, if you look at just US history, American history, and the fact that all kinds of horrible things have happened in this country and have been done to people, partly because of their otherness from others, and yet at the same time, incredible cultures and histories have been built out of these horrific experiences. That on a grand scale is what the joy of otherness is about. And on a smaller scale, my individual scale, looking at my own family and my mother and so on, horrible things happened to my parents, horrible things happened to the Vietnamese people, and yet my parents and others were able to build communities, were able to build families, were able to love other people. And all of that was inextricable from the terror and the pain. To me, that’s the joy of otherness, to look back on my own family history, my community’s history, and to see that everything is intertwined and nothing can be separated. And there’s no way I or anybody else can go back. We can’t turn back the clock. We can’t go back and say, “Well, I want to separate the good from the bad.” In fact, what makes me is the good and the bad have been intertwined. And so otherness is a part of me, otherness ties me to history, otherness ties me to my mother. And as painful as some of those relationships are, they’re also a source of joy as well. Who my mother is, for example, everything that made her, everything that destroyed her, all of that made her capable of loving me as well. That is the joy of otherness that I’ve had to spend decades trying to understand and not just think about in an intellectual level, but feel as a human being.
Isa Nakazawa:
Yeah, that was beautiful. And I think I felt that. That was transmitted in the lecture was the living behind the words. And I often am known for making jokes about, I’m sure all of us, about how joy is kind of anemic now or just like, what does this mean? We’re like bludgeoned with joy. But I think there is a truth that when the joy is not of kind of avoiding the pain, that when there is kind of a relationship between the two, it feels … I think of Toni saying, “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” And it’s like, yeah, thin joy isn’t what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the joy that has … I finally started really going into Jung’s work. I’m obsessed with his phrase the inner depths because it really feels like it when you’ve avoided your inner depths.
I’m 39 and I feel like the inner depths come for you. Whether you accept the dissent is another thing, but I feel like they come for you. And you talk really, I think really generously and honestly and openly about fatherhood as this kind of series of encounters with the depths. And it does make sense. I’m curious if you can share a little bit about how fatherhood cracks that open a little bit and you start to see parts of yourself that maybe were previously unexamined, reflected through you and your child. I haven’t had that experience and I’m curious. It seems related. It seems related to the joy of otherness.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, you use this idea of the depths or the inner depths, and I’ve used a variation of that as well. The metaphor I use is a trap door that I felt … I feel that for a long time, there was a trap door within myself under which I suppressed all kinds of things, but that I was also standing on that trap door as well. And during times when I’m overcome by emotion, as I talk about my past and people I’ve known like my mother, I feel like the trap door opens up and I just fall right through into these depths.
For many of us, I think we stand on these trap doors and we have these trap doors within us where we’ve suppressed, kept away all the kinds of things that have shaped us in ways we don’t understand and that can terrify us. For me, going back to the issue of war and being a refugee, which really shaped my entire existence, that had ramifications for me of being separated from my parents, of growing up in an environment in which I was aware of how painful that separation was from my own parents, that they were separated from their parents. I mean, they came to the United States when they were in their 40s, and I’m older than that now. And I look at them now, I’m like, “Wow, they were younger than me when they lost everything. They had to come to this country. They didn’t have their parents with them.” And the first time my mother went to a psychiatric facility was in, I think, 1976 when her own mother died in Vietnam and she was heartbroken because … Can you imagine what that was like? I couldn’t. I was like four or five years of age, but I had this vague, shadowy memory of sitting on these steps at our house and it was just my brother, me and my father, and my mother was not there. And my father was telling us something very important and I didn’t know what it was, I couldn’t remember. But obviously what he was telling us was, “Your mom’s not here.” My brother remembers that. My brother remembers that.
So many things happened that were terrifying to me. And I think as I look back upon myself, what I did was, my own method of coping was to put everything away and put that trap door on top of it and pretend that none of it bothered me and just to move forward and try to survive in this country, as so many people do. And that is not a healthy way of coping with one’s experience. It’s healthy in one way because I became … I mean, I built a career, all that kind of stuff, but it’s not healthy in an emotional sense. And that’s where history can really return to destroy you because you could look fine on the outside and you’ve accumulated all the material things that you’re supposed to do. But underneath is that trap door, you never know when it’s going to fall open-
Isa Nakazawa:
Come get you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And you could fall through, but you could take other people with you. And that’s what happens for unaccounted trauma. And that’s why history really messes people up because it’s not just even the fact that history affects individuals, but it affects them and then they do things to other people, including their loved ones and their children.
So part of what happened when I shut away the things that could hurt me was that I shut away all feeling. I could not be bothered by anything. Nothing harmed me because I couldn’t feel anything. And I think I didn’t articulate that, but I think that was how my childhood self tried to insulate myself from any kind of harm. And it worked in the sense that it allowed me to do things like study and work and all that kind of thing. But it also meant that I was incapacitated. I couldn’t love people. I could not even say the word love, could not say, “I love you,” to anybody, and not just to my parents, but even to people, romantic partners.
So when it came time for fatherhood, I was terrified, partly because I was selfish and I thought I want to write and this will totally destroy my life if I have to take responsibility for a child. But also because I was terrified because I didn’t know that I could love somebody else besides a romantic partner. It took a long time even to get to that point, but then to love a child, wow. So that was terrifying. I found fatherhood to be quite frightening because it would require me to open that trap door again in order to find the capacity for love. All those emotions are tied together, I think, right? You can’t separate love from hate. If you want to be able to feel deeply, you have to open the trap door.
Becoming a father was … And I don’t want to be sentimental here. When I say that becoming a father was one of the best things that ever could have happened to me, I’m never going to write a book that says, “You should become a parent because it’s going to be the best thing that ever happened to you.” Because honestly, obviously for a lot of people, they shouldn’t become parents. But the problem is we don’t know that until they become parents and they’ve messed somebody up. So deal with your stuff first before you become a parent.
So I think I was able to do that. And because I was able to sort of prepare myself emotionally by discussing all the things we’ve dealt with so far, I could open that trap door and deal with more of the issues of what it meant to be a father or a parent who could be capable of loving another person. And in order to do that, I had to look within myself as well. I mean, it’s all wrapped up together, which is again, why it’s impossible to separate one’s own personal feeling or lack of feeling, one’s own wellbeing or trauma from the history that has produced you.
Isa Nakazawa:
Oh, that was really gorgeous. And yeah, I think there’s so much there that I think we can all relate to even if we’re not yet parents. And I do think it’s all related. And it also reminds me of just, I don’t know if you know, do you know Lauren Berlant’s work, Cruel Optimism?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Mm-hmm.
Isa Nakazawa:
I think of the way that she always reminds us of the conditions that create what we think of when we think of affect or love. These things are all related to how we had to survive. And so I think it is really important. Because when I was preparing your chart, Venus is another signature and Venus has to do with the ways that we give and receive affection and love. And I wanted to ask these, the questions that we’re asking right now on similar lines of inquiry because it’s in Capricorn. And so Venus and Capricorn often, it’s more of like a shows affection by showing up. It shows affection through duty and often affection and love are intertwined with a sense of duty.
And so for people receiving that kind of love, like let’s say in the context of romance, it depends on who this person is hypothetically, but if they’re someone who wants to be romanced in some kind of hopeless romantic kind of sensibility are going to be like, “What’s up? What’s up Viet? Give me all the compliments or tell me all the things.” And you might be like, “I’m showing up. I’m here, ain’t I?” And they’re like, “Tell me you love me. Tell me …” And you’re going to be confounded because the way that you’re showing love is true to you.
And so while I wanted to ask these questions of your journey with affection and love and kind of like how maybe it’s shifted and evolved and deepened in the last maybe five to 10 years, I also wanted to not pathologize the ways we all love because I think that can get weird. I don’t know how you feel, I want to ask you that. But sometimes it gets tricky where there’s almost like a fetish now around a certain kind of vulnerability or disclosure. And my mom calls me out on it a lot who’s an immigrant and is like, “What if transparency and honesty and all the things you guys are shoving on me is not just inherently what’s up?”
And I’m like, “Huh.” So I’m kind of interested in your journey with that and kind of your thoughts on where you’ve come and then also maybe honoring some of your own kind of early ways of expressing love that were potentially just examples that you saw growing up from your parents.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I mean, this is very insightful. Everything you’ve said seems true to me and to my experience, including the part where you mimed me saying, “But I showed up. I’m here. This is my love language.”
Isa Nakazawa:
Yeah, does that resonate?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, that’s literally the conversations I’ve had many times in my life with my partner. Your mom is probably right. I think that there are ways in which obviously there are these extremes of stoicism and reticence on the one hand, and then transparency and vulnerability on the other. And they both have their strengths and their weaknesses. And in my own life, I’ve come from a family of stoic, enduring people.
This is part of my family, but part of the region in Vietnam where we came from, the reputation is this is a region that is a really hard, tough place to live and it produces people who endure and who rebel.
Isa Nakazawa:
Wow.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So it’s famous for hardcore Catholics who are willing to be sacrificed and to martyr themselves and for hardcore communists who are willing to martyr themselves as well. So I mean, Ho Chi Minh was born 30 minutes from where I was … From my home village or whatever.
Isa Nakazawa:
No way.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So that is the culture from which I emerged and there was never vulnerability or all the kinds of stereotypical ideas of American affection that we talk about. And so I’ve had to learn a lot about how to expose myself because it’s not culturally reflexive for me to do so, but also because again, I built up this shell of invulnerability to survive. So it was very hard to learn the idea of being vulnerable because to be vulnerable was to me not a sign of strength. It was a sign of weakness. But I think I’ve increasingly come to realize that vulnerability, if one can embrace it for certain kinds of reasons, can be a source of strength as well.
I mean, it takes strength to open yourself up, to expose yourself, to be vulnerable to other people or in certain kinds of situations because you accept the possibilities of harm being done to you. But if you’re doing it out of a willingness to expose yourself, a willingness to bear the consequences of what can happen, then I think vulnerability can be a sign or can be a position of strength, can be a position of courage to take up.
As always, it seems to me that we have to find some kind of a balance, some kind of a negotiation that’s always fluctuating about where we stand between closing ourselves off completely and opening ourselves up completely. And there are certain positions that we take at certain times. For me, as a partner and as a father, I’ve made a very conscious decision to be increasingly vulnerable over time the more I’m able to do it. With my children, for example, I’m always telling them, “I love you.” They’re getting to an age where they’re not responding anymore.
Isa Nakazawa:
Yes.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
But I’m not going to give up. With my father, my older brother and I, he never said, “I love you,” to us when we were growing up. But once we became mature adult human beings and we understood that it was up to us, we were constantly telling him, “I love you.” He came around. He was always saying it to his grandchildren and he was saying it to us as well.
So people can change. So with my own children, I just think that whether or not they respond to me now, the point is if I keep on exposing myself to them and being the kind of father who is vulnerable to them, they will learn that. They will absorb that and they will be hopefully emotionally mature people themselves when they grow up.
Isa Nakazawa:
That’s beautiful. I do want to move us back to the two luminaries in astrology are your sun and your moon. So the sun, like we said, is kind of that animating life force. And your moon is something that is often considered more private and concealed, though equally, if not more essential, because the moon changes every two days. So the moon is actually even more personal. And it often describes kind of our inner child, our emotional needs.
It’s also our physical body. So it’s not metaphorical. It’s not like the emotions as some sort of ephemera. It’s like everything comes through the body because your Virgo moon ruled by Mercury, Mercury is a much faster planet. I like to call it a trickster planet. I love the notion of the trickster and Hermes making his cattle walk backwards so that Apollo won’t catch him stealing, but also the moon is your body. So it’s like this relationship with language is embodied and visceral. It’s not just like this abstraction or theoretical. And Virgo is an earth sign. But just so you know, your natal mercury is actually an Aquarius.
So I loved hearing that you still had this kind of fixity or stubbornness about you in moments in your life that it’s very typical for Aquarius Scorpio, Leo and Taurus, which are the fix signs where they’re like, “I want to get to it. I want black and white answers.” You keep saying that there are periods of your life where you just wanted the answer. And I think that’s your Aquarius, but then your Pisces and Virgo are the mutable signs that I feel like they know how to accept the mystery and revere the mystery. So all it to say, that’s all in you.
One other thing that I thought you might find interesting about Virgo is Virgo is really the sign that’s associated with service, but beyond that, it’s really about form, giving form to the formless. And it also reveres the mundane. So Virgo is really the unsentimental, repetitious, almost tedium that you talk a lot about in terms of the practice and craft of writing. I also think of the word craft when I think of Virgo.
Virgo is a process based sign. And I really resonate with this. I think you’re someone who talks a lot about imagination and also really understands that what writing requires of us sometimes is extremely unsexy. I mean, it’s just like you show up and you write sentences and that is extremely demanding, tedious work. Can you speak a little bit about that part of the craft of just like … And not just in writing. I think in life, right? In love and fatherhood, so much of life is not sexy. It’s just like ordinary, repetitious. And I think even those words are kind of nice. There’s some degree of accepting and confronting the banality of being alive.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think I’ve been deeply shaped by the environment that I grew up in, which is, again, this environment of Vietnamese Catholic refugee parents who were invested in three things. One was their family and the other two were Catholicism and capitalism. So they wanted to create a world of stability because they came from a world of instability. They wanted security. They wanted to make sure everything was taken care of. And the only way to achieve their goals was just to work relentlessly at them. And so I just grew up with parents who were always working, 12 to 14 hour days, seven days out of the week and so on. And they were also relentlessly spiritual. They would go to church every week and they would pray the rosary every night. Even if Catholicism was not what I believed in, the rituals I think have left their imprint on me.
And so I think you’re absolutely right that for me writing … Writing is a … I’ve had to understand that writing is a form of spirituality and the way to access it is through repetition because unless you’re willing to just sit down and do the same thing every single day, you’re never going to be a writer. And this idea that many writers have talked about that you just have to sit by yourself for thousands and thousands of hours, at least 10,000, let’s say. That to me is not simply a craft issue. It’s not simply an issue of discipline. It’s an issue of hopefully spirituality. Why else would you sit by yourself for 10,000 hours? You can be doing any number of things.
So I think there is, for me, this sort of homology between the writer and the monk and the priest and the nun and the spiritual figures. And we’re all engaged in this effort through repetition of learning how to sit with ourselves and whatever’s inside of us spiritually. And so for me, the spirituality of the writing is my way of, as you said, giving form to the formless. We live in a world in which we really … I think we’re surrounded by this huge, immense mystery of forms and we don’t know what to make out of it. And writing for me is my way of trying to make sense out of it, trying to give forms through particular kinds of stories and books.
For me, there is mystery out there. There is mystery within us and in our particular passions, but they can only be accessed, as you said, by these very boring, unsexy forms of repetition.
Isa Nakazawa:
So I want to end on this kind of … So Sag is … The planet ruler of Sag is Jupiter, and it shares that with Pisces. And Jupiter is another outer planet that has now kind of been reduced to luck and blessings, but it’s really higher mind, higher learning philosophy. And it’s often kind of relegated and reduced to the word hope, which I think we can all agree is quite a fraught word. So I’m more interested in potentials.
And I’ve heard you recently, maybe in the last couple of years, use the word utopia, which I think would also fit under Jupiter. So I’m kind of interested in ending on this notion of potentialities and what stories and forms and struggles and joys are you personally invested in either for yourself, for your children, for the world in this exact moment, and what do you feel like you’re writing towards?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
For better or for worse, storytelling is my way of understanding myself and the world and trying to give shape to it. So casting spells to make the world understandable to me and myself understandable to me. So for example, that idea that my parents would be understood from the larger American perspective as simply these non-fluent English refugees who ran a grocery store versus my version of their lives, which is this epic.
And so the ability to re-narrate is so crucial because if we can’t re-narrate, then we have to live with the narratives that are imposed on us or given to us. And so narration or that idea of casting spells is a form of power. And that was my way of trying to get control over the world that I found myself living in and try to understand myself as well. And so through my own writing, I think I’ve understood myself better. And that can be a horrifying experience.
As I’ve written my novels, I’ve like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that I’m the kind of person who enjoys these kinds of narratives that I’ve been using.” And so there’s a way in which hopefully the use of narration, of spell casting, of trying to give form to the formless is also a way of giving form to the formlessness within myself. I mean, I think for so many people that our interior is such a mess of different things and we don’t know how to articulate them. And writing at least is a way for me to give shape to the confusion within myself, not simply the confusion of the world outside.
For me, I find my writing changing over time. The kinds of stories I tell change over time. And that’s why the long horizon, the journey is something that I can’t predict of what that would be. But you need that idea of utopia, that idea that there is some kind of form that can make sense out of the confusion of the world that we live in.
So that’s where I’m at, this sort of optimistic sense that there is some shape to the journey that I’m going through that I don’t fully comprehend, but that it will deliver me to death because we all meet the final mystery, whatever that is. And so each of us has to prepare ourselves for that through whatever form that we have. And for me, it’s through writing. Writing is my way of making sense out of the world, making sense out of myself ultimately to prepare for death. It sounds really morbid, right? But to me, it’s simply just another sort of reality that we have to confront. And if we’re not ready to think about that reality, we’re going to reach our moment of death and be terrified. And I would like to reach the moment of death and be happy because I’ve done what I needed to do for myself, but also for my family as well.
Isa Nakazawa:
Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I feel so encouraged and inspired and energized by everything that you shared Viet. And yeah, let us know how we can stay connected with you, how our listeners can connect with you and anything you want to shout out, anything you want them to do or read or … Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Isa, it’s been marvelous talking to you. It’s not my usual kind of conversation, which is not disparaging at all. It’s actually a conversation I’ve learned a lot about. And I think that everything you’ve described resonates so much with who I am and what I’ve done. If people want to follow me, I’m on Instagram at Viet_T_Nguyen, N-G-U-Y-E-N. There you’ll get all my unvarnished opinions, but meanwhile, I just want to say thank you. It was a really powerful experience having this conversation with you.
Isa Nakazawa:
Yes, for me too. Thank you so much.
That was Viet, who is an Aquarius sun. As always, to end the show, I want to leave you with some key takeaways we can all benefit from inspired by our stars chart. So Aquarius is the part of us that creates distance so we can think, contextualize, survive. Pisces lives on the other side of that impulse in the fog, the liminal, the unsayable, and Viet named that tension so beautifully when he talked about building an intellectual life that could face external otherness while the internal otherness remained, in his words, terrifying. He described it as a trap door, the things we seal off so we can function until one day the door opens and we’re asked to fall into the depths we’ve avoided.
And what moved me most is that he doesn’t frame that dissent as failure. He calls it an opening, a way toward what he names the joy of otherness. So here’s today’s takeaway. If you’re someone who’s built a powerful mental or ideological life to move through the world, ask yourself where that brilliance has also become a shield, a trap door you’re standing on, protecting you from what you haven’t let yourself feel. Ask yourself this week, where am I insisting on certainty when what’s being asked of me is the courage to stay with ambiguity and what’s one ritual of return I can commit to that helps me give form to what I can’t yet fully name? Because sometimes healing doesn’t come from clear answers. It comes from letting the trap door open and trusting that even there, something meaningful can be found.
And that’s it for our download from the cosmos this week. If you like today’s episode, please leave a comment to keep the conversation going. Hit that subscribe button and remember we’re live on YouTube every Wednesday answering your Cosma questions. I’ll see y’all next week.
