Viet Thanh Nguyen

I come as a refugee from an American war, and I arrive in the United States feeling complexity.

As I say in my novel, The Sympathizer, my protagonist says, well, I'm grateful for American aid, but maybe I wouldn't have needed American aid if we hadn't been invaded by the United States in the first place.

It's a very common thing.

A lot of people in the United States fled from wars that the United States was responsible for, and they made the very sensible choice, it's better to be behind the guns than in front of the guns.

So some people would hear me say this kind of stuff, and they'll be like, oh, he's un-American.

I literally get messages from people saying, since you love the commies so much, go back to Vietnam.

They apparently did not read more than 10 pages of The Sympathizer because the novel was actually banned in Vietnam by the communist government.

So that's complexity.

Now, the complexity for me as an American is to recognize this is a beautiful country.

It's a country built on democracy, equality, liberty.

rights, all of which I've benefited from.

It's also a country built on brutality, genocide, colonization, enslavement, perpetual war.

These are facts.

Now, you can interpret them differently.

And in fact, people do interpret them differently.

Donald Trump interprets those facts as make America great again.

We conquered this country.

We're going to conquer the rest of the world.

It's not a problem.

We committed genocide, okay?