Viet Thanh Nguyen

Anybody who's ever written will acknowledge that it's painful.

But there have been many moments in my life, just to use a sympathizer as an example, where I laughed out loud while I was writing a sentence.

I was like, oh my God, this is a great sentence.

And I couldn't believe that I was able to create that.

Where it came from, I have no idea.

And the only reason I was able to create that sentence was because I spent hours and hours alone in a room, bored and suffering or stressed out or whatever, to reach that moment of joy.

I grew up reading, for example, the novels of Charles Dickens.

I'm not English.

I didn't grow up in the 19th century.

I mean, to read about poor houses and things like this, it was a completely alien experience for me.

Nevertheless, I found something meaningful and moving in reading Charles Dickens as a Vietnamese refugee boy.

Did he intend that a Vietnamese refugee boy in San Jose, California would one day read his work?

I'm pretty sure it never crossed his mind, right?

But again, the power of storytelling.

The power of art is that it can connect to human beings in vastly different times and circumstances.

So even as you're describing what some of my writing is about, and I know that most of the people who are watching this show have not been refugees, are not Vietnamese, have not been through a war, it doesn't discourage me.

It doesn't make me think, God, now I have to translate myself for all these people.

Charles Dickens never translated himself to me.

and yet i understood him and that's the power of art and the power of storytelling that telling the truth about human experience uh will will connect with other people because we realize that changing the material circumstances refugee or or english or whatever if we change all that we still see underneath the same core of human experience and human understanding that's what we turn to literature and art for

French, other kinds of Asians, like, hey, we see our experience in this book, even though they haven't been through that exact same experience.