Randa Abdel-Fattah

Split Brain I used to think it was my re-memory.

You know, some things you forget, other things you never do.

But it's not.

If a house burns down, it's gone.

But the place, the picture of it stays.

And it's not just in my re-memory, but out there in the world.

When he first returned to Vietnam, Viet Thanh Nguyen set out to run into memories.

But understanding them took much longer than he anticipated.

Viet thought he would be plugging holes in the dominant American narrative of the Vietnam War, what Vietnam calls the American War.

When you say deeply limited, what did you feel was limiting about it?

If Vietnamese people were missing from America's memory, the best way to remedy that was to bring Vietnam's memory of the war to an American audience.

So he traveled through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and he started to change the way he saw his whole project.

Because when Viet went to Vietnam to visit museums and monuments and memorials and to talk to people at all those sites dedicated to remembering, he found that the Vietnamese perspectives were also selective.

If Viet brought that perspective back to the U.S., he would just be pairing one victim narrative with another.

And that's not what he wanted to do.

He wanted to point out that that's what all sides of a conflict are still doing.

That they're missing the larger point.

That no one is just a victim.

And no one is just a hero.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the U.S.