Viet Thanh Nguyen

Well, you know, Vietnamese people, when we came, the majority of the American people did not want to accept Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees.

So we got in through President Ford and an act of Congress.

But we also got in because, number one, we were anti-communist.

Americans understood that.

We were also not black.

So the Haitian refugees were also coming in the mid to late 1970s.

They were being turned back even as

we as Southeast Asians were being let in.

So, you know, you as a Vietnamese refugee, or we as Vietnamese refugees could say, well, we're better than the Haitians, whether we thought that explicitly or not, that's the message that's being sent out.

And so again, throughout American history, divide and conquer, you know, demonize one population, everybody else feels better, or some of them feel better, not realizing that we're just waiting our turns, right?

And even for Asian Americans, you know, who might say, well, you know, this is being done to brown people, this deportation stuff, it's

being done to Asians too.

Just selective Asians, you know, at certain moments.

But, you know, the Trump administration is coming for everybody.

That's my conviction.

And he's going to get to a lot of these Latinos and a lot of these Asians who voted for him one way or another.

What it means for me to be an American is that I think there are simple Americans and complex Americans.

The simple Americans are the love-it-or-leave-it Americans, this country right or wrong Americans.

They've always existed in American history.

For them, to be American is a stark choice, either or.