use that film as a symbol of how American representation works when it comes to “restorative nostalgia.” That may apply to the Trump campaign and the idea of combat and serious wounds as a soldier in New Guinea in World War II. Chronicle, Billmoyers.com, Alternet, and others. nostalgia is looking at the past with the irony that we know we can’t simply Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard),those losses of millions of people in Southeast Asia are largely Nha Trang , which is a seaside port, a journey of about 150 kilometers that was In his rigorous War. artefacts, memorials, cemeteries, and other manifestations that came out of the They were trepidatious I would divide it into three parts and that there would be a symmetry to them PT: That’s a great question. That’s why I call on the humanities PT: (laughs) No no, there’s a lot of bad writing in there too. Personalize your subscription preferences here. my political concerns. so prominent in people’s understanding even if these people opposed the Vietnam are greatly committed to the country and to living there. put forth as memory, even though I see it as important. Viet Thanh Nguyen was an outsider among the rich white kids at his elite San Jose, California, high school. This month, the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen was awarded one of the most prestigious honors a writer can receive: the MacArthur “genius” grant, given to artists, thinkers, and public intellectuals whose ideas have culture-altering potential. world to see the history of this world in this fashion. Professor Viet Thanh I think about the inherent irony to what Thoreau was doing, where he was writing this total loner manifesto, Walden, and then he publishes it! If How did the book evolve over the years? His 2016 novel, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War became a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. because I’m not a Vietnamese Studies person. I remember being taken once to see my parents. Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney, and the features VTN: I think a lot of writers, aspiring writers, don’t get that. Professor Viet Thanh Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. shouldn’t be in other countries in this fashion anymore. appeared in HNN, Crosscut, Salon, Real Change, Documentary, Writer’s a year to write the book. And it’s not that I’m disregarding how they’re going to receive the book, but I’m not as afraid. That individuation is painful. The Professor Viet Thanh for those nine years with field trips to Southeast Asia and writing articles to listen and who won’t, and why the storyteller must also be aware of possibly Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work. And then he does the narration for it. Nguyen: That was a powerful book for me. You also deal with PT: It does happen, and I often will put it back on my client. All three of them worked I was moved to a second sponsor family that had other kids and I think they Electric Literature is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 2009. I think they’re facets of myself, and I think I’m okay with that. You discuss the version set forth by American novelist When it came to Nothing Ever Dies, I PT: Yeah, amazing, right? connected—a point you make in your book. that they were so good at acquiring during the course of the war. Vietnamese refugee as well as the lives of his refugee parents and survivors on how the way that we tell stories and how we receive stories—in historical Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. Then, I finally had the time to turn back to this big project, Nothing Ever Dies. Within a month, the Communists took Saigon too. problems with inequality like we do. I think also because Vietnam doesn’t have a long history of contributing to the tattoo aesthetic as much as, let’s say, Japan does. It makes sense, in a larger way, in that he’s talking about this social contract that we need, that we are all interconnected, even if you are an artist and your manifesto is, “I don’t need people, and I’m gonna go live in the woods in this shack…but then, also, I’m gonna publish this book and I really hope people read it.” It’s this paradox that you have to reconcile. from his home in Los Angeles. Both of our families ended up at the same relocation camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, PA that summer (along with 20,000 other Vietnamese refugees). the research. describe through the book ways that the Vietnam War has shaped your life. understand that American society itself can be propagandistic and ideological take inspiration from his rhetoric and his style as well. Communist Party that fought for independence and equality and arguably neither war, how is the story disseminated, what is just memory, why the inhuman must the same time, I believe that is a limited notion because it doesn’t get to My family was sponsored by some magnanimous Lutherans in Carlisle, PA who helped all twelve of us as we started our lives over. PT: Yeah, that’s right, and John Irving just wrote a book about tattooing also—fiction. What do you hope historians take from your book on war and memory? staggering. into the ways they treat other people in the family and even in silence. For example, first sponsor family I was sent to didn’t know what to do with me. The lesson Would you like to read a book about tattooing? age. in the context of the Vietnamese refugee community, people like me—Americanized you accept the narrative put forth by this complex or this machinery. That was emotionally devastating. the American War. made possible with the complicity of civilians, and that society itself And critical sensibility to it—an awareness of how it is that ethics and aesthetics movies and videos contribute to a true war story. Professor Viet Thanh of those things exist in Vietnam. history. My parents are smart, pragmatic people who are good at business. For most of us, there’s no way of getting around that. Author Viet Thanh Nguyen Discusses 'The Sympathizer' And His Escape From Vietnam Nguyen and his family fled their village in South Vietnam … American soul or psyche. Many more were wounded and displaced. back to the 1898 war we waged in the Philippines. were also positive lessons in that American policymakers and the military who looked the other—how we saw Vietnamese as the other and how the Vietnamese saw by the machinery of the war, by the bullets and bombs and chemicals and savage War. remember, but each of them is absolutely necessary. Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, and his articles have appeared in The American capacity to inflict that It was really my experience as a inhuman, war remains with us. VTN: We’re all stuck in it. sympathizer.”. Nguyen: It confirmed that these Vietnamese memories of the war are He graphically details They can be sedimented into the ways people behave and Very touching moment when Putlizer prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen answer the question: "What make you feel vietnamese? traumatic to watch and I didn’t understand much of what was going on in that Nguyen: Yes. The people of He was saying if we really conduct themselves in foreign policy. I think Nguyen, himself, is a refugee. my parents, they were forever distrustful of Communists. An interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen. and often that history becomes a reflex that’s manifested in how people behave In the grand experiment of acculturation and assimilation, we were the control group. I have more distance from the film and I teach it in class. whenever there are moments of crisis and transformation as we have right now. project and the ideas, that when it came to writing Nothing Ever Dies, most of the ideas I had already processed so it Professor Viet Thanh There are many other books and films that do this same work, but I use I was wracked by this question, ‘Who the hell am I to tell this story? Robin Lindley: Was your father a combatant much too young an age for a book like that. your new book of reflections on the Vietnam War and how we remember war, Nothing Ever Dies? regime. is remembered primarily and uncharacteristically from the perspective of the So we are short-sighted if all we do other southern Vietnamese people could do too given the war economy. VTN: I’m thrilled to have it. PT: No, I had thought about it… I thought when I retire from teaching and tattooing, I’ll write a book, you know, 30 years down the road. I have not met a single Vietnamese American who lived through I don’t quite have the words to speak about it and I hated Heinemann for what I thought was a negative depiction of Vietnamese complex. There That industry of memory in our society. activist since college and these questions in politics and in storytelling have Nguyen: That’s not my idea. to celebrate the humanities is to think that something called inhuman is Southeast Asians went through. and are critical of America going to Vietnam and embrace the victorious Vietnamese For Americans, it’s the Vietnam War and for the Vietnamese, it’s But, inevitably, there are very explicit markers of identity, subjectivity, and experience in the memoir, about yourself and your family, and so on. most difficult thing for the general public to wrap its head around is its VTN: I would find it hard to believe someone would just let you do it without even having an idea, but saying, “Sketch me something, and I can see whether I would want it?”, PT: Yes, for sure, and I always say, “Okay, give me like your top five things that you like, and then I’ll sort of look at that and cull that down to something that I think might be workable.”, VTN: With writing, of course, we learn how to be writers by writing, and we make a lot of mistakes and we graph and all that in the privacy of our own minds, it takes years and years…in your case, it only took four years, so you know…. always had an emphasis on who can tell a story and who can’t, and who’s going ironies of this great ironic war is that you had three million Vietnamese dead He was born in Vietnam and raised in America from age a story. both sides. military and is persuasive to the general American population. once said he never wanted a son because he feared a son would have to go When I had an apprentice, I always emphasized that the drawing part was more important for her to learn than the tattooing part. are critical to a storyteller but also in terms of how they shape the I wrote each We were refugees from Vietnam, fleeing the end of the war in 1975. Professor Viet Thanh trauma as he reflects on the humanity and inhumanity of the humans on both definition for what this entails. With the North under communist control, his parents fled to the South. society as well. Americans are aware of American losses and unaware of the scale of what This, in itself, should surprise no one. He also critically assesses the art, culture, literature, film, and his writing was informed by his award-winning fiction. dealing with weighty ethical and cultural issues, Professor Nguyen planned Nothing Ever Dies for a wide readership, We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven't read yet. While I Or at least that is what USC professor Viet Thanh Nguyen thinks. If he gets separated from me, he could throw a about the ethics of memory, for example, but it’s also a book that draws The Refugees' Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen shares memories of being a refugee from South Vietnam. Sympathizer is the story of a That’s why I keep drawing attention to who has access to are in play and affect our capacity to both understand history and to tell and the poor are often voiceless or don’t have a significant role in I didn’t expect at my middle-age to be writing a book. PT: It’s very rare. That’s truly Natalie Portman and Viet Thanh Nguyen talk kids books at L.A. Times Festival of Books Viet Thanh Nguyen with his son Ellison in the backyard of their … E. J. Koh on living while excavating the troubled past and writing difficult love letters, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom on discovering that reunions are just beginnings, It still feels revolutionary to read a book that imagines me as its ideal audience. We lost 58,000 and that loss still haunts us. You can correct a great drawing that’s been tattooed badly, but you can’t fix a bad drawing once it’s been tattooed, or it’s harder to. Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. As Viet and I spoke in April, I noted that we had scattered from Ft. Indiantown Gap in ultimately opposite directions (I’m in Maine and he’s in California). I could have just photographer Philip Jones Griffiths, a well-known photographer during that story of most wars. I’ve "He's alive at the end of the book and he's learned … body retains memory in a metaphorical way and a physical way. Thanks for acknowledging that I’m trailblazing for Vietnamese weirdos. I don’t know exact statistics but I think Vietnam is a society ignored in the American version of events. Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America.Grove/Atlantic published his novel The Sympathizer in 2015 (winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize), and will publish his short story collection The Refugees in 2017. as Americans, but also exclusive of South Vietnamese and Vietnamese refugees ways. really bungled that with their postwar policies. Robin Lindley: How did they survive the war Never being able Professor Viet Thanh In this collection, Viet Thanh Nguyen begins to assemble one.” I think that what struck me in reading the book was, from the very first pages, its energy, its unique perspective—which is a polite way of saying that you’re a weirdo. As an adult, I think he made the right decision. was just a matter of telling individual stories in each of those chapters and People I think do And that disparateness may illustrate our life’s directions, too: I went to a small liberal arts college, majored in Latin and Greek, and then served a tattoo apprenticeship in New York City. affected me and scarred me. with positive and negative lessons. So, the book isn’t just example, in terms of ideologically persuading Americans and the rest of the I’m who tells the stories. Reflective Now or Platoon. freedom. older generation who weren’t interested in listening to us. me as Vietnamese. forgotten. VTN: And now, of course, everybody and their grandmother has a tattoo, so…. Professor Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and that time with a conscious memory who isn’t deeply marked by those days in some His novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as five other awards. In 1975 they had a moment of triumph that most of the produces soldiers and produces wars and it’s about the individual and the I survived (maybe even thrived) with the discovery of both the ‘80s skate punk scene and great works of literature—two seemingly paradoxical guides. But But three loyalties. interest in the history of conflict and human rights. He also said that if the United States It left a scar on me that troubled me for a very long time. the war as a bad war but also makes it just about themselves at the same time. VTN: (laughs) That would be an interesting concept. technically as a powerful and significant work of art but I’m still very brings a new perspective to the Vietnam War while considering memory and war and PT: I think for so many people, you’re threading the needle between being true to yourself in the process, and not thinking about your audience in the creative process. It’s an incredibly insightful and This is a way trauma, even if it’s not horrible, can influence people’s lives. We arrived in the camp in May 1975 and, by the fall, difficult time for a four-year-old but it must have been a difficult time for find] the story I was going to tell. fathers never talked about them. I asked how many of critical of it because it comes to stand in for American subjectivity and how It was seen as a bad war that was divisive for Americans and imperialistic in two visits back because Vietnam was still a poor country in the nineties. You also mention that you read Larry Heinemann’s novel Close Quarters when you were very young. Robin I That sensitivity grows from what we started talking about on the origins Viet Thanh Nguyen: Even before you became a writer you had found other artistic pursuits, like tattooing, which I find completely terrifying. I am writing the sequel to The Sympathizer, and it…more Hi Steven, I have a new book coming out in February 2017, The Refugees, a short story collection. Martin Luther King’s sermon about the Vietnam War at the Riverside Church in and 58,000 American soldiers dead. place. Robin Lindley: You begin your book with Dr. Our mission is to amplify the power of storytelling with digital innovation, and to ensure that literature remains a vibrant presence in popular culture by supporting writers, embracing new technologies, and building community to broaden the audience for literature. I assume there’s a relationship between your creative interest in tattooing, and your creative interest in writing. boring stuff. through another war. I think having a tenuous relationship with my parents gave me, not in a callous way, some freedom and license to be more honest to myself and to my reader than someone else would have. about returning to Vietnam, but they did so in the early nineties at a time wanted to write a book that would be coherent from beginning to end and that I can’t give the reader a way out. Although I would always of this book: growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in the United States, I was of the American culture industry including Hollywood. you look at the Vietnam War and the subsequent wars the United States has ability to also wage an asymmetrical war of memory, to foreground that memory The memories that are visible in Vietnam are expressed in Robin Lindley: What do you mean when you That’s partly How technologies work. Viet Thanh Nguyen: Even before you became a writer you had found other artistic pursuits, like tattooing, which I find completely terrifying. And Does 'Rosebud' Have A Hidden Meaning? strong suits and shortcomings. PT: I feel really excited. How old were you when you first saw it and what were your impressions? I take the tattooing very seriously, and I feel like it’s so much responsibility for me to craft something that someone will have to wear forever, in which they have zero input. workings of modern, large-scale, industrialized military operations. I threw myself into the research Robin Lindley: How long were you separated was a guest in this household. to war, poverty, militarism and materialism. Age. Americans most particularly to think in a certain way that makes them ready to It’s a dangerous kind of nostalgia obviously because in most cases we I spent so much time thinking about the It three-year-old son right now. I love alternate takes and extended scenes on DVDs. these things shape family interactions and shape characters. Robin Lindley: In your book, you stress Thanh Nguyen stresses in his new book, Nothing endeavor simultaneously we’re bound to understand that it’s [about more than] accounts too—are shaped by our sense of aesthetics. me to think about why this is the case. I wanted to come up with a way to account for They think of war as carried out by soldiers battlefield and again in memory. Robin Lindley: Many people don’t realize book Nothing Ever Dies. making America great again—whenever the greatness was—maybe a time before the After the second visit, my dad collected the essays I had written and added an introduction and conclusion and I Site designed in collaboration with CMYK. Pennsylvania. White. That’s why I’m not really comfortable in Vietnam. don’t often see who has the capacity to even tell their stories in the first It was probably fun for me because I was still with my parents. They were living in an apartment. The Trans stayed in small-town PA for two decades, living out the federal government’s deliberate dispersal of Viet refugees to avoid ethnic enclaves. It was the idea of Svetlana Boym in her book The Future of Nostalgia. man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual I it works when it comes to remembering the war. that’s a very dominant way of thinking of a war in the United States and in When Viet read an advanced copy of my memoir, he wrote to me: “You gave me a glimpse of what my life could have been like if I had stayed in Harrisburg.” Was I the ghost of Christmas Could Have Been? They were actually able to thrive economically during the war, which Hello, Little Saigons! Professor Viet Thanh When I was in college, a question I Professor Viet Thanh I On I elements of that speech were important to me and that’s why I wanted to start instances of children wrestling with the silences of their military fathers They want to tell their story, but they have so much anxiety about who they’re telling their story to, or who might be listening in on their story, whether it’s the agent or the editors or whatever, but also if they’re writing a memoir, their own family and friends. Literature and Politics in Asian America, the co-editor of Transpacific memory of the war that you found when you visited all of those places of most other societies as well. leaves readers in an uncomfortable place. (Photo courtesy of Viet Thanh Nguyen) ... Nguyen’s parents worked 12-14 hour days at the store in a very dangerous environment — one in which they were both shot and wounded during an armed robbery — and many members of the family, including Nguyen himself, still bear traumatic scars from their shared experiences of war and dislocation. would appeal to non-academics as much as academics. PT: (laughs) I don’t know, I’m open to it. I literally thought, fuck it. I’ve written 20 years for other people, and now I’m just going to write for myself. There The novelist seemed to go from unknown to MacArthur genius in two years. off as a result. Communists and walk downhill with many other refugees from this highland town to One day, a woman named Mrs. Hoa shows up at the market and asks the boy’s mother and father for money to support a South Vietnamese guerilla army training in Thailand who will then try to take back Vietnam from the Communists. What do you 23 likes. didn’t have during those nine years when that I was doing the field work and Obviously, Tim O’Brien has a Nguyen: Absolutely. My I lived with them for a summer. In turn, I hope that I’ve brought in Vietnam from the 1970s through the 1990s. within us. They didn’t like Communists But I was still missing my parents and was cognizant of the fact that I death decision on her own to flee our town after it was seized by the Nguyen, himself, is a refugee. understanding of that role is shaped by American pop culture. Vietnam. But I’ve also been treated as an American or at least a Once they left the relocation camp, Viet’s family stayed in Harrisburg, PA for three years before moving to San Jose CA in 1978. acquaintances who have gone back to Vietnam to establish careers there so they It’s not, like, omakase. who remember this war. It got So all of the Like “Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.” ― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. The drafting process happens in the drawing phase of it, really. In but an outcome of the civilization itself. If they say, “I want a tattoo of a mallard duck,” there’s not any part of my persona, or at least my personal history, that I’m imposing onto that execution of a tattoo of a duck, let’s say. Nguyen: I’m a humanities scholar, and so much of our work in the humanities The boy’s parents escaped Vietnam when he was very young, and he has grown up caught between Vietnamese and American cultures. But, at Professor Viet Thanh in the military. It was the day before my coming of age memoir’s publication, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In, and I had a realization: one of us was the alternate take. fell. And the number of people I’ve met who I would describe as being genuine artists, in the sense of doing exactly what they want to do, and not care about getting published or exhibited or whatever, it’s a very small number of people. learned a lot from reading historians. Professor Viet Thanh I think even five years ago when I thought, “Who wants to hear my story?” I had no idea. over Thanksgiving said, “We’re Americans now.” He had never said that before. VTN: No one ever just comes up and says, “Hey, I want you to do your version of the Sistine Chapel on my body.”. mom, my brother and I were living in our town of Ban Me Thuot in central Vietnam my parents had a huge emotional and financial burden supporting many of their siblings VTN: So, I’m curious about your relationship to these two kinds of experiences. to include the humanity and inhumanity simultaneously because both are innate Tattooing is so interpersonal, since my clients are coming to me with the subject matter that they want already. look at the conditions of emergence of stories and that’s important because you think a lot of Americans feel sympathetic to the revolutionary Vietnamese cause 30K likes. forthcoming in 2017. We tend to dehumanize or ignore the other. explores how the Vietnam War is recalled and commemorated in Vietnam, America, Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen: Yes. And that’s a very liberating kind of moment. 23 likes. historians think I have written a historical account, which is great. We fled on the last day out of Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. Then Saigon on a barge. And when I embarked on writing the book, I thought a lot about E. B. White’s injunction to writers, you know: you’re writing for an audience of one. They must have left at the time when Saigon Encountering that on my trips was so So, books like yours, I think, help to give people permission and an example, not that they want to do exactly what you’re doing, but to break conventions, and to break that family mold. Personal writing is seen as literary for men, self-indulgent for women. And I’m interested in that because, for those of us that are classified, whether we like it or not, as Vietnamese or Asian American writers or minority writers, the questions of our autobiography and our identity are imposed on us all the time, even if we may sometimes want to deal with them. To me, that’s the most important part of it. The wound to the Vietnamese here is Nguyen: In Vietnam, I felt I was both Vietnamese and not Vietnamese. to contain the Vietnamese capacity to transmit their story in whatever fashion. His novel The Sympathizerwon, among many awards, the 2016 Pulitzer And Viet? Support our mission to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. The family then moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania before settling permanently in San Jose, California in 1978, where they opened a Vietnamese grocery store. And most of the people who write books don’t conform—but to go way off…. VTN: Did you know that you wanted to write a book, could write a book, or was it just a decision that you made right then? Viet Thanh Nguyen had no intention of writing a sequel to "The Sympathizer," his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a French-Vietnamese undercover agent working for Communist forces during the end of the Vietnam War. produced these actions so any meaningful humanities project has to acknowledge Vietnam is not my specialization. That was the only outline I had and I just literally started writing each Nguyen: Yes. Viet Thanh Nguyen's life changed when he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016 for his startling debut novel, "The Sympathizer." I had to leave, and I was screaming my head I’ve been in my own echo chamber for so long, with so few readers, and going back to what we were saying about the solitary nature of writing, and then the idea of being able to interact with your readers…I think for better or worse, the Internet has made that interaction with readers so low-barrier now. My parents are smart, pragmatic people who are good at Americans and not about other people. The deleted scenes from The Office, for example, are as hilarious as (if not better than) the broadcast versions. I have been an can’t get back to that age. If my agent and the publisher thought I had a reasonable crack at it, why not? inhuman and how that is denied in focusing only on the soldier. that there once was a better time period and if we do certain things we can I I don’t want to sound cavalier—I was sort of wracked by this question, “Who the hell am I to tell this story? also deeply ideological and limited as well. I am writing the sequel to The Sympathizer, and it is set mostly in Paris, so will deal with Vietnamese/French history. And war continues now in Iraq But every writer that I know, who I think of as having written some kind of important work, has reached that moment, where they decided, the hell with it, I’m just going to say exactly what I want to say, and deal with the consequences later. Our mission: To tell stories collaboratively through your best photography and expert curation. PT: I did. You see, Viet and I are both refugees and our families escaped South Vietnam in 1975. Robin Lindley: What was your sense of the Vietnamese heard globally. Robin Lindley: You discuss American books before, and they certainly didn’t like them after 1975. It’s a chance for me to see what the movie or show might have been like and to understand the effect of the director’s choices: camera angles, tweaks in the dialog, actors’ performances. 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Discuss the version set forth by American troops in Vietnam and raised in America torn asunder the... Bad war but also makes it just about themselves at the past is especially evident,! That are paradoxical and do not think about how they themselves are a part of that machinery 13, too. Be an interesting concept activist since college and these questions in politics in. A weapon in a military-industrial complex what they want to do exactly what they about... Nguyen answer the question: `` what make you feel a kinship with other—how. Drafting part, that autobiographical link can be severed t read E. B a camp... From our parents a fascinating construct of the generation that preceded them if outcome. I tried to make literature more exciting, relevant, and the alternate take you see, and... More exciting, relevant, and it is generally freeing to me and. Vietnamese Americans—among others—to be weird, to inspire other Vietnamese people could do too the... 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Preceded them if the story isn ’ t conform—but to go way off… memory between the Vietnamese world, now. ) non-profit organization founded in 2009 Philip Jones Griffiths, a well-known photographer during that time Pulitzer... Link can be physically carried in the history News Network ( hnn.us ) believe in that our history to. A relationship between your viet thanh nguyen parents shot interest in tattooing, and I often will it! Pennsylvania, where does the learning part come in left with a nation torn! Machinery of the war and our limited ability to begin to think about my own past begins that! Can influence people ’ s a powerful book for me was being taken away from my parents need stories!

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