Videos
A compilation of Viet’s appearances on television and online videos.
Viet Thanh Nguyen reads a letter to his father.
Watch Viet Thanh Nguyen on Seth Meyers discuss his experience as a refugee and why refugees are important for America.
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In this video essay, Viet talks about his parents and their struggle on CBS This Morning.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen covers themes of war, refugees and exile directly and personally in a new memoir about his own family’s experience, “A Man of Two Faces.” Jeffrey Brown spoke with Nguyen for PBS’s arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks about The Committed for CBS This Morning.
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Christiane Amanpour interviews Viet Thanh Nguyen about immigration and refugees.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks with DemocracyNow! about how U.S. foreign policy creates refugees.
MacArthur Fellow, Viet Thanh Nguyen is challenging popular depictions of the Vietnam War and exploring the myriad ways that war lives on for those it has displaced.
In this season 4 finale episode, actors from The Sympathizer television show, Hoa Xuande, Fred Nguyen Khan, Duy Nguyen, Kayli Tran, PhanXine, VyVy Nguyen, and Tom Dang, converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, and Philip Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American Studies scholar.
Join host Philip Nguyen after each episode to delve deeper into characters, motives, and the show’s reflection on the Vietnam War and its portrayal in U.S. pop culture.
Philip Nguyen debriefs and decodes Episode 1 and then he talks to co-showrunners Don McKellar and Park Chan-wook.
Host Philip Nguyen gets into it with the Captain himself, Sympathizer star Hoa Xuande. He is also joined by Executive Producer Amanda Burrell as well as Author Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Host Philip Nguyen sits down with Robert Downey Jr., Hoa Xuande, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Don McKellar and renowned prosthetics designer, Vincent Van Dyke to discuss the four patriarchs played by Robert Downey Jr.
Host Philip Nguyen is talking costumes and production design with costume designer Danny Glicker and co-showrunner Don McKellar. Then we are joined by author Viet Thanh Nguyen to talk about the depiction of the Vietnam War in literature, art and Hollywood.
Host Philip Nguyen sits down with legend Ky Duyen, host of Paris by Night and a star of The Sympathizer, and her on screen daughter Vy Le, alongside EP Niv Fichman to talk about music and art imitating life.
Host Philip Nguyen chats with Sympathizer star Sandra Oh and EP Susan Downey about the roles of women and representation in the TV series. Then he welcomes legend Kieu Chinh and actor Toan Le about the many meta layers of this series- Kieu herself is mentioned in the novel!
Stay tuned for transcript.
“I relate to the pain of that loss, it happened exactly like how it happened in the show.” – Toan Le
“Even working on The Sympathizer, it tears me up, because I have a real life parallel to the script.” – Ky Duyen
Projections of The Captain.
That’s going in the movie. The Captain serves as Vietnamese consultant and translator on the set of a tone-deaf Vietnam war film.
“It’s like walking inside a time portal.”
“We tried to be as true to life in these camps as possible.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks with DemocracyNow! on how anti-Asian is rooted in US colonialism.
Watch Viet Thanh Nguyen discuss his debut novel, The Sympathizer with Charlie Rose.
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Roxane Gay and Viet Thanh Nguyen at St. Paul’s Church.
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Asian Health Services profiles Viet, in a video directed by Tony Nguyen.
Viet and his son Ellison and Thi Bui and her son Hien discuss their collaboration, the children’s book Chicken of the Sea.
Watch Matty Huynh’s “The Ark,” a short film narrated by Viet Thanh Nguyen and based on the opening of The Committed, his sequel to The Sympathizer.
Watch Viet Thanh Nguyen discuss The Sympathizer at the 2016 AWP Conference.
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Watch Viet Thanh Nguyen at the 2016 Wisconsin Book Festival on C-SPAN.
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Watch Viet Thanh Nguyen and others speak about refugee crises on C-SPAN.
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Watch “Past to Present: The Echoes of War,” Viet Thanh Nguyen and others speak about war and history at the 2016 LA Times Book Festival.
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Watch Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with filmmakers John Sayles and Vilsoni Hereniko.
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Watch Viet Thanh Nguyen and Reza Aslan riff on Viet’s propensity to win awards for his writing. Special musical guest Thao Nguyen (Thao and the Get Down Stay Down).
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Echoes of the Past: Viet Thanh Nguyen on Writing the Vietnamese-American Story | Moderated by: Thi Bui
Watch Norton Lecture 1. This opening lecture addresses what it means to write as an other, especially given writing’s power both to save and to destroy the other.
Watch Norton Lecture 2. Timed to coincide with the release of Nguyen’s book, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, this lecture highlights some of the book’s themes and problems, especially concerning writing memoir as both an individual and a collective story, the perils of betrayal, and the difference between private secrets and open secrets.
Watch Norton Lecture 3. Asian Americans exist at the juncture of exclusion and inclusion. Asian American culture and politics is more unified in the face of exclusion and less unified in the face of inclusion. This lecture looks at this dynamic as it is dealt with in literature, which has also been one of the most successful ways for Asian Americans to achieve inclusion through narrative plenitude.
Watch Norton Lecture 4. Colonization violated borders and redrew them, generating political, economic, and cultural consequences that are still being lived and felt. Part of the literary and cultural response has been to find the right forms that can speak back to colonization; the ones that interest this lecture cross or abolish (generic) borders and invent new styles like “horrific surrealism.”
Watch Norton Lecture 5. What does it mean to be a “minor” writer? From a minority, from a small nation, from the conquered, from the displaced, from spaces that are inevitably politicized or forgotten or overlooked? Art and politics explicitly overlap for the writer who is forced to be minor or who chooses to be minor, and whose aesthetic strategies and archives can and must be eclectic.
Watch Norton Lecture 6. To write as an other is to remember the conditions and origins of one’s otherness, which are usually unhappy, both individually and collectively. What are the possibilities in finding joy as an other?
What is the role of collective memory in creating identity and belonging? Cecilie Surasky of the Othering & Belonging Institute discusses these questions with three of our sharpest chroniclers, observers, and witnesses: Palestinian historian Sherene Seikaly, acclaimed author and activist Naomi Klein, and Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Viet Nguyen.
