Viet Thanh Nguyen

I didn't know what was in the absence, but I knew there was an absence there.

The same thing was true for the Vietnamese refugee community.

This was a community that was dominated by its veterans, that had veterans in military uniforms present during its community celebrations, where we had to sing the South Vietnamese national anthem.

This brought home to me this idea that just because a shooting has ended, it doesn't mean that the war is over.

And that the people who survive a war, whether they're the winners or the losers, will want to keep refighting the war again in order to prove their own narrative, that the war was justified or that their defeat was not justified.

So the first time I went back actually was 27 years later in 2002.

I was an adult and I decided that I was going to go back and just see Vietnam for the first time, but not my family because it was just going to be so hard to see the family.

And so I went for two weeks as a tourist and it's great.

I encourage everybody to go to Vietnam as a tourist because it's a lot of fun.

There's great beaches and bars and nightclubs and the American dollar goes a long way, etc.

And, you know, seeing the country that way in 2002 was really helpful because, number one, it allowed me to partly get past the hang up that a lot of Americans have about Vietnam, which is that it's a war and not a country.

And in fact, going back as a tourist really helped me to see that most of the people in Vietnam don't want to think about the war.

They want to move forward with their lives like everybody else does.

Make money, have families and all that kind of thing.

Americans as a whole talked constantly about the war in Vietnam.

Lots of movies, lots of books, all these kinds of things.

And so I took that contrast between so much talk on the one hand about American experience and so little talk about the Vietnamese experience very personally.

And so that was partly the genesis for becoming a writer, the sense of resentment and anger and the sense of mission and purpose to tell our stories.

Nothing Ever Dies is special to me because the...

The title actually comes from Toni Morrison's Beloved.