Viet Thanh Nguyen

It's not the world.

It's what you believe.

And the challenge for me as a writer was to spend 17 years learning the craft, the art, the technique, all these kinds of things you need as a writer, but also being preoccupied with the world, what the agents thought, editors thought, reviewers, and so on.

But the thing about a discipline for me is that after I spent 17 years being disciplined and disciplining myself...

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.