Viet Thanh Nguyen

My own memories began very concretely in a refugee camp a few weeks after the fall of Saigon.

We were actually boat lifted out of Saigon and then airlifted from Guam to Pennsylvania and ended up, you know, in a military base, Fort Indiantown Gap in Harrisburg.

And that's where my memories begin.

Before the end of the war, all I remember, because I was four years old, are just these fragmentary images, which I don't even know whether they really happened.

For example, being on a boat...

and seeing sailors shooting at a smaller boat approaching us.

My brother, who was seven years older, said, never happened.

So I have to trust that his memory is right and my memory is wrong.

I am a professor, a scholar, and a writer of fiction and nonfiction, probably best known for my novel The Sympathizer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016, as well as its sequel, The Committed, a collection of short stories called The Refugees, and a nonfiction book called Nothing Ever Dies, Vietnam and the Memory of War.

I was growing up in the United States in the 70s and 80s and the war was officially over.

But it seemed to me that Americans were fighting the war again through most visibly Hollywood and the dozens of movies that it made.

Even a bad film or TV series will be seen by millions of people.

That's really about the kind of cultural production that Americans can do versus other countries.

So that, again, an American movie like Apocalypse Now will be seen all over the world, including in Vietnam, where people have seen Apocalypse Now.

But a Vietnamese story will most likely not be seen outside of Vietnam.

So all these things became very, very personal for me, these politics of the nation.

And I felt like I had to confront my own past in order to try to understand not just myself and my family, but also to try to understand the nations, Vietnam and the United States, whose conflicts shaped us.

My memories really began very coherently when I was taken away from my parents.

What happened was that in order to leave the refugee camp, we had to have Americans sponsor us, but there was no American willing to sponsor my entire family.

So one sponsor took my parents.