If history is written by the victors, what artefacts of the world today have already won their own B-side on the record? The Atlas asks Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen what fragments of history – a song, a building, a place, a meal – he would preserve for posterity. Historians of the far distant future, human or otherwise, you’ll just have to thank us later.
I grew up in San Jose in California as a refugee in the 1970s and 1980s. We did not have a single book in the house, and so my place of salvation was the San Jose public library, which was named after Martin Luther King Jr. And to someone who’s a small boy, it was a gigantic building of four storeys. There were no boundaries in there. I could go from the children’s section to the young adults section to science fiction to adult fiction. I was shaped and saved in the San Jose public library, which no longer exists. That building is gone. But in my mind, it still exists … sometimes, the archive is what’s in our imagination as well.
My song is Just Can’t Get Enough by Depeche Mode, from their 1981 album Speak & Spell. That was when I was ten years old. I associate it with youth and love and desire and fun. There’s lots of other reasons why you can choose songs, but if we’re looking a thousand years into the future, I want people to think there was love and joy that was a part of our lives as well.
The meal I want to talk about is the meal I would cook for my father in his last years, in his 70s and 80s. I would come home and make him a steak, and serve it with red wine. It gave me such pleasure to watch him eat it. He really enjoyed the steak, and the red wine, and it brought back all these memories. When I was growing up, that was how he would express his love for me, he would make sure that I ate constantly, all the time. He was not an expressive man, but that was how he expressed himself.
I’ve lived in Los Angeles for more than 30 years and it has grown on me, it has transformed me. Los Angeles can be a difficult place, but it’s also an entire region, a state of mind, and I really think Los Angeles is a place where the entire world lives. It’s a Pacific Rim city, a Latin-American city, an American city, and in it you can find some of the largest diasporas in the world. The largest Vietnamese diaspora is only an hour away, the largest Korean diaspora is in Los Angeles. You could live your entire life in Los Angeles and hear almost every language in the world, sample some of the best food in the world, and confront some of the greatest difficulties in the world. It is a city that is inexhaustible and a place that I could live forever.
One crucial turning point [in history] was the Haitian revolution against France [from 1791-1804]. The enslaved peoples of Haiti successfully throwing off their chains, then France coming in to punish them, and to impose this gigantic burden upon them to pay back the debts to their own slaveholders. That transformed the future. It obviously devastated Haiti up until the present, but it also transformed the possibilities of revolution and liberation. The French betrayed their own revolution.
