Viet Thanh Nguyen

I stopped caring about the world.

There's no way to teach anybody how to do that.

That's what makes a discipline so frightening and so powerful and so necessary for those of us who think of ourselves as artists or anybody who has a calling of some kind.

If I hadn't become a writer, I would have become a priest or maybe I would become a chef or a gardener, something that would have required me just to spend a huge amount of time by myself until I realized that it is the art itself that matters, not the world.

We had a very typical story, which is that we became refugees from the Vietnam War.

And I'm not going to bore you because you know these stories as well coming out of Cuba.

When people are refugees, everybody who's a refugee has a horrible story to tell about how they escaped whatever situation they find themselves in.

And we went through all of that.

I call myself an eyewitness to eyewitnesses because my parents were full grown adults.

They were in their 40s.

They lost everything.

They made life and death decisions to get themselves and their children out of the country.

I was four years old.

I don't remember any of that.

But I grew up watching my parents struggle.

in very difficult circumstances, living these refugee lives in the United States.

And my brother did too.

And I think what we experienced out of that is we knew the kinds of sacrifices that had been made to give us the opportunities that we had.

And so we never needed, I think, a lot of motivation to just do our hardest to try to

pay back our parents for their sacrifices, but also I think simply to pay back this entire idea that we were the lucky ones.