Viet Thanh Nguyen

But I do have this optimism that in 100 to 200 years, we will see a substantial transformation if we struggle for it.

If we keep imagining what a different world and a different future looks like.

I think, again, back to Beloved and Toni Morrison and the final refrain in Beloved as the novel talks about slavery.

that refrain is that this is not a story to pass on in the sense that this is not something that we want to give to another generation, but also this is not a story that we can avoid or ignore.

And so that paradox that she identifies is true here as well.

We have to both be able to forget and to remember simultaneously.

And how do we do that for us as individuals?

It's one question, but as a nation,

It involves trying to figure out some program of justice to achieve that equilibrium of happy forgetting.

So what happened is that I was doing research which included going to Laos.

And of course, the United States fought the so-called secret war in Laos.

So I was there to look at some of these battlefields and the remnants of bombs and things like this.

During Vietnam, the U.S.

And I was being driven through the country by a driver.

And he said, oh, look, we should stop off here at this cave.

So the story is that during the war in Laos, hundreds of people, civilians took refuge in this deep, deep cave.

And then an American rocket was launched and it went into the cave and killed a whole lot of people.

So we stopped off, and I was the only person there at this hill, except for these four schoolgirls, Aloysian schoolgirls.

All of us were going hiking up this hill, and I was ahead of them, and they were teenagers, and they were doing what teenage girls do, which is, you know, they were after school, they had their cell phones out, they were giggling and talking and taking photographs and texting.

And I was on my very serious mission to get to this cave at the top of the hill.