Episode #300: Remembering and Forgetting: The Refugee Journey
featuring Viet Thanh Nguyen
Hello storytellers, scribes, scribblers, and scripters!
It’s Write-minded’s 300th episode! And we’re celebrating by bringing listeners the esteemed Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose novel, The Sympathizer, was adapted for HBO Max and started streaming in April. In this interview, Nguyen addresses didacticism as a craft choice, the mindset of writers who, like him, find themselves between two languages, and how his desire to capture the Vietnamese perspective on the Vietnam War (and more) made him a writer. Nguyen’s generosity and enthusiasm for his work and his craft shine through in every answer, and Write-minded is grateful to cap this milestone with such a beloved author and guest.
Partial transcript from the show
Grant: I’m Grant Faulkner, and I’m here with my co-host Brooke Warner, and Brooke, today’s podcast marks a special occasion. I don’t know if you’ve been counting, but this is podcast number 300. I’m the type of person who likes to celebrate milestones, so happy 300th, and thank you for listening to my voice and to all of my experiences and opinions and theories and more for 300 episodes.
Brooke: It’s a pretty major milestone, and really wonderful that we’ve had 300 conversations, and almost as many guests—since some of our weeks have been just us, though very few. I’m so happy to be ringing in 300 with today’s guest, Viet Thanh Nguyen, because I admire him so much, and I have done something unprecedented in my life, which is read his book, The Sympathizer, while I’m watching the adaptation on HBO Max. But first, Grant, 300 episodes in, I’m wondering what you remember of our very first episode, and how you were feeling as we launched that nearly six years ago.
Grant: I remember it well because I was nervous as hell. I definitely had performance anxiety. We interviewed Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, and I don’t know why I was nervous because she is always a delight, but it was a new medium, and as much as I liked appearing on podcasts, I’d never been on the other side of the mic, so to speak. The episode aired on August 6, 2018, and the world was very different then. To think that we’ve interviewed such a variety of authors over the years. I’m just going to do a little name dropping here to encourage people to dig into our archives. You can listen to Elizabeth Acevedo, Elizabeth Gilbert, Rebecca Makkai, V.E. Schwab, Hugh Howey, Kwame Alexander, Laurie Halse Anderson, Charlie Jane Anders, Alka Joshi, Melissa Febos, A.M. Homes, Jeff Vandermeer, Lan Samantha Chang, Steve Almond, David Yoon, Xochitl Gonzalez, Peter Ho Davies, Gish Jen, Peggy Orenstien, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Nicole Chung, Maggie Smith, Rainbow Rowell, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, K-Ming Chang, Javier Zamora, Stacey D'Erasmo, and Dhonielle Clayton. And that’s just naming a handful, so please check out the other 250 or so episodes.
Brooke: Yes, so many incredible people over the years. I want to throw in Kiese Laymon, Christina Baker Kline, Pico Iyer, Ashley C. Ford, Mary Karr, so many others. And now to cap it off with Viet is obviously a big honor. Grant, I know you’re a fan of The Sympathizer. I’m curious if you’ve had time to watch the show?
Grant: I have the show in my queue, but I haven’t watched it yet. The Sympathizer will always be important to me, though, because when my son Jules was in high school, he decided to read all of the Pulitzer-prize winning novels, a lofty goal he didn’t reach, but it was a noble goal. He started with The Sympathizer, which had just won the Pulitzer, and he essentially introduced the novel to me and made me want to read it. One thing that I’ve found interesting in reading authors like Viet Thanh Nguyen and Ocean Vuong, who is one of my favorite authors, is how they’ve reshaped the Vietnam War and its aftermath for me. You know, I grew up watching movies like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket, and I read various Vietnam novels and stories, and these works were almost solely about the war’s effect on the American psyche, but without much on Vietnam the country or its people. It was the war I grew up that played the biggest role in my mind because of its prominence in 70s and 80s film and literature, eclipsing World War II, certainly, and I have probably thought about it more than either of the Iraq wars in some ways, so it’s been very meaningful to get other perspectives of the story, and to feel how the trauma of the Vietnam War is passed on to generations who didn’t experience it directly. In most, if not all of the movies and stories I read, the Vietnamese peoples were essentially extras on the set. I think Viet Thanh Win is particularly interesting because of the way he tells personal stories through the lens of larger historical forces and how he deepens my thoughts on what it means to be a refugee. The Sympathizer definitely filled a void in the literature.
Brooke: It’s interesting because I also read Ocean Vuong this spring, and then to read The Sympathizer nearly back-to-back with that book—it just opens up such a different representation. We grew up with the same canon of literature, which is why it’s important that publishing strives for better representation, a topic we recently covered with Dhonielle Clayton. It’s very different to hear a perspective about the Vietnam War from an American soldier as opposed to a Vietnamese refugee, obviously—and helps us keep in perspective the reverberating effects of trauma that a war like that causes for everyone involved, and in very differing ways. I also think it’s important because Viet explores the nature of being a refugee in his work. Grant, in today’s interview you ask him about the existential nature of his aesthetic because of how he understands refugees as not truly having a choice in their lives. Even as compared to immigrants, most generally choose to move, meaning that they choose when to move and where to go whereas refugees don’t really have that much of a choice. They’re forced by drastic circumstances to make very rapid decisions, and then they’re at the mercies of the forces that force them out and the countries where they try to get into. We’re obviously seeing this in dramatic fashion at the U.S.’s borders. We are living in a moment in world history where we are seeing an unprecedented number of refugees, and we all too often blame the refugees instead of blaming the circumstances that are causing them to flee. But books can help us widen our views, and to see those circumstances more up close and personal.
Grant: Yeah, we have an interesting book trend at the end of this show that I hope listeners stay tuned for because we talk about the many different book clubs and how those book clubs are taking on book banning and forming discussions in local communities. All very heartening stuff. Viet shared some really interesting thoughts on the psychology of refugees. Before we talk with Viet, I just want to say how his work has so many layers to it, and how it provides such a rich reading experience. I particularly love his opening,
I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, which I reflect on now I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess.
So he’s riffing on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and he presents an unnamed narrator-protagonist, just like Ellison, and his character recounts and attempts to make sense of his doubled life from a position of concealment—in this case, as a prisoner forced to make a political confession. The main character is also the illegitimate son of a French Catholic priest and a teenage Vietnamese villager, so he grows up at odds with the world around him. Per this opening passage, this novel is so many things at once. You can read it as a spy novel, a war novel, an immigrant novel, a novel of ideas, a political novel, and more. This is one of those novels where, as a writer, I found my jaw dropping.
Brooke: There are so many passages in his book like that, ones that gave me pause, that made me think and want to know more. He’s a nimble writer, and someone who excavates meaning, who’s not afraid to linger, who’s inventive with his turns of phrase. He’s also a bit shocking with his writing, like in The Sympathizer he has this whole long uncomfortable passage about masturbating with a dead squid, which he then proceeds to allow his mother to cook, and which he eats so she doesn’t. He forces his reader to be with their discomfort, calling them out on it and saying that we ought to be more uncomfortable seeing the slaughtering of innocents, more uncomfortable with the outcomes of war, than we are with sexual curiosities such as this one he reminisces about. It’s arresting, and serves to turn discomfort or judgment or shame—whatever the reader might be feeling—into a lesson about the losses of war. I love writers who do that, I like sitting with discomfort in that capacity when I read—not that I always want to read scenes like that, but you know what I mean. So it’s just an interesting to use of that taboo topic to get to something bigger. I really like Viet for that and all of his language choices and deliberateness, so I’m very exited to learn more, hear more, and probe a bit into his influences, his craft, and his process. We'll be right back.
This Week’s Book Trend:
This week we're tackling a tough trend, which is the polarization we're experiencing in the face of Israel's War in Gaza. Recently, an op-ed piece came out in the Times that described the “chill” Jewish writers and authors are experiencing. We are coming down on the side of more conversations, more reading, more open dialogue as the only way through this very challenging moment, globally, but also inside of book publishing.
ABOUT VIET THANH NGUYEN
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of The Sympathizer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is now a series on HBO Max, and The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer. His other books include Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction; Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America; The Refugees; and The Man with Two Faces. He also co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then six-year-old son, Ellison, and he’s the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston.
P.S. Congrats on reaching 300 episodes!
As ever, I look forward to listening!