Viet gave the commencement address for the UC Berkeley English Department on May 20, 2026. No photos or video were taken, but here’s a photo of Viet when he was a student worker at the Social Welfare Library at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, as well as another photo of Viet at a protest on the steps of Sproul Hall.
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Commencement speeches are a difficult genre. The audience needs to be uplifted and encouraged, which means trying to provoke can be challenging. The temptation to use platitudes abounds, but a writer can’t give in to that.
This is a speech meant to be heard rather than read. I deliver it with various intonations, emphases, beats, and so on. Judging from the many rounds of applause and cheers, all the intended jokes and rallying cries landed.
It was great to meet some of the families and students afterwards, who responded strongly to the pro-immigrant, pro-refugee, pro-solidarity, anti-genocide, anti-silencing argument of the speech, which stressed how literature matters because it is bound to the world.
I was happy to see that while there were only three Vietnamese Americans in my English graduating class, there were probably at least three times as many in this graduating class. Their parents were so proud of them. I am too.
Good morning, UC Berkeley! It’s a thrill for me to return to a place that changed my life, as I hope it’s changed yours, this place I affectionately call the University of Communists at Berkeley. I’m always ready to stand up for Cal, and so, when I recently gave a talk at Stanford, I made sure to open my comments by saying how nice it was to visit the second-best university in northern California.
Congratulations on your graduation from the best university, where you’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about some of the most important, universal, and challenging questions for humanity, including, “So what are you going to do with an English major?” I’m going to answer that, but imagine how hard it might be to find that answer if you are a refugee from Viet Nam like me.
I fell in love with the English language and English literature as a boy roaming the public library of San Jose. In that library, this refugee boy became an Anglophile, infatuated with England and its literature, from Wordsworth to Dickens to the Brontës. I am happy to report that after 33 years of working in English departments, I have been completely cured of my Anglophilia.
This early love of literature made me want to be a writer. I didn’t know how difficult that would be until my first creative writing class here with Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, already a classic at the time. Every day I entered her seminar of fourteen students, sat a few feet away from her, and every day—I fell asleep. Professor Kingston gave me a B+, otherwise known as…an Asian F.
At the end of the semester, Professor Kingston wrote me a long letter, recommending that I make use of our university’s excellent counseling services. Obviously, I did not. I became a writer instead.
One reason I was so tired was that I was an idealistic student activist, taking everything I learned in my classes and applying them to my world. I’m proud to say that I graduated with two majors—English and Ethnic Studies—two majors, three degrees, and four misdemeanors. Two counts of resisting arrest, two counts of trespassing, for protesting on campus, including taking over the chancellor’s office.
We were protesting for what would now be called the unholy trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I felt a little abashed demanding greater faculty and curricular diversity, because previous generations of Berkeley students had fought against the American War in Viet Nam and apartheid in South Africa. But we were fighting what were called the “culture wars,” and those wars have continued into the present, and those culture wars have proven inseparable from real wars.
I took part in these protests because I believed that literature and those who loved it could change the world, and I believed that we, as students should change the world. I still believe in that, I still believe in your power do do that, and I still believe that when college students have protested in the United States in the past and in the present, they have always been proven to be on the right side of history.
Professor Kingston’s class was formative for me in thinking about how literature is bound to the world. In her class and in others, I discovered that English was more than what came from England. England and English had colonized the world, and when I read The Tempest, instead of identifying with the master, I identified with the native, Caliban, who says to his master “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse.”
It was through figures like Caliban and the literary traditions of Black Americans, Chicanos, Native peoples, Asian Americans, and the Global South, as well as the writings of feminists, queer peoples, and misfits in general, that I finally felt that I, a misfit, could become a writer who told stories about people who looked like the Vietnamese refugees I had grown up among, who cursed a lot.
I could finally write about walking down the street from my parents’ grocery store when I was eleven and seeing a sign in another shop window that said, “Another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese.” I didn’t understand it at the time, but that sign was a story, an old one, and one still being told today in our America.
I wondered if whoever wrote that sign knew that my parents worked 12 to 14 hour days in that Vietnamese grocery store so that their son could study English, or that my parents were sending money home to keep their relatives alive in a country still recovering from an American war, or that my parents had been shot in their store on Christmas Eve. The person who wrote that sign and told that story did not see people like my parents as human, but only as aliens, invaders, and threats.
This was all a part of being a refugee, but I’m grateful for my refugee experience, because it left me with the requisite emotional damage necessary to become a writer. Being a refugee also leaves me with an opinion that not everyone in our country agrees with, which is that I think refugees—and immigrants—make America great.
Some people would argue that it’s only illegal immigrants that they are opposed to. You, of course, know that the original illegal immigrants to indigenous land were the Pilgrims. I was a boat person, and I know that the original boat person was Christopher Columbus.
These are controversial opinions, but they are also stories, stories about our country and how to interpret it, and you have learned how to deal with controversial ideas and stories and characters in books but also in the world. The beauty of literature that you and I fell in love with has also taught us, paradoxically, to understand the horrors of the world, of the full range of what we can do as human beings.
You have learned to look beyond a simple division of the world into us versus them, good versus evil, my country right or wrong. You have learned to have sympathy, even empathy, for those cast as the other and the monster, even when you are told you should not feel for them. You have been taught what F. Scott Fitzgerald said, that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
So it is that American literature, from Herman Melville to Toni Morrison, has taught you that your country is sometimes right and sometimes terribly wrong. English literature, from Jane Eyre to 1984, has also taught you that if authority tells you there is one person or one thing you should not talk about, that is the person or thing you should talk about. In our moment, it means you can stand against both antisemitism and Islamophobia. You can remember the Holocaust and still condemn the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Every age tries to silence us on something, and every age creates new demons. Storytelling creates these demons, whether that storytelling is carried out by writers or by politicians, pundits, and demagogues, or by people putting signs in store windows and now on social media.
So: storytelling matters. Some of you will become educators, writers, scholars, and journalists, all of whom depend on storytelling. Some of you will become lawyers, like my classmate, Cecillia Wang, who is here in the audience today. We thought Cecillia might not make it here today because she was busy this morning filing an emergency application to the Supreme Court to prevent a death penalty execution this Thursday.
Cecillia majored in English and Molecular Cell Biology. I don’t even know what that is. She was class of 1992 and went on to Yale Law School. I thought about going to law school, but after Cecillia got into Yale, I thought, what’s the point? She’s clearly much more talented than I am in that regard. And I was right. Just last month, Cecillia Wang, now the National Legal Director of the ACLU, argued in defense of birthright citizenship before the United States Supreme Court, with the President of the United States looking on. So if people ask you what you can do with an English major from Berkeley, that’s what you can do.
This work of advocating for the best of our country’s traditions, like birthright citizenship, and this work of demanding that our country live up to its own highest standards, is something I learned here. This work involves knowing what kind of story we want to tell of these United States.
As a student here, I came to believe in the power of stories. I knew stories could save us, but I had to learn that if stories have that power, they can also destroy us. You leave Berkeley with that same knowledge, and the ability to see yourselves, and our country, from all sides. This is a talent, and it is an urgent talent because the nation’s story is now dominated by a narrow-minded nationalism which demands that we see everything from only one side, in what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “brutal solidarity” of us versus them.
Literature demands something greater, a more capacious empathy, a more generous soul, and a more daring imagination, which leads us not to brutal solidarity but to radical solidarity.
Class of 2026, I hope you use your talent and your power to choose radical solidarity, which requires the courage to choose not our side but the right side, the side of the silenced and the demonized, the outsider and the outcast, the side of beauty and truth and justice, the side of literature. Class of 2026, congratulations and good luck!
