Viet Thanh Nguyen

You're suffering, not me.

Maybe you should let go of that.

And he wrote back an angrier letter.

I fluctuate.

Part of me periodically says, I'm never going to deal with these Vietnamese right-wingers, like as you have said about the Cuban right-wing or Cuban MAGA, Vietnamese MAGA exists too.

They hate me.

Sometimes I think, I just can't deal with these people.

I'm not going to engage with them.

And there are a lot of young Vietnamese Americans who are really tormented by this.

They think their parents, their grandparents have gone off the deep end, and they reach out to me and say, how do we talk about these political issues and cultural issues?

With the older generation, I'm like, screw them.

I don't want to deal with these people.

But then part of me really does believe that dialogue and conversation really matter.

That's what, again, what art and literature are there for.

But also, again, you know, we just have to have conversations not just with our friends and our own social circles and political circles, but we have to believe that somehow there has to be moments where we have to have conversations with our enemies and our others as well.

It's a very hard, very, very hard work, and I'm not trying to oversell it.

I'm just saying I do think that that's a reality that some people have to do.

Number one, I think it's human nature to be xenophobic.

Go back to our, you know, the Bible.

I grew up as a Catholic, so I read the Bible, or I've read the Bible.