Viet Thanh Nguyen

Like, oh, you know, I can't decide.

My parents would have loved it if I became a priest.

I think Vietnamese priests have it pretty good.

But what I take away most from my upbringing with my parents and the life I spent with them is, again, discipline.

I think the similarity that Catholics and writers share is that Catholics love to suffer and to sacrifice and to be martyred.

That's the narrative, right?

That's our foundational narrative.

And writers also love to suffer and sacrifice and be martyred on our art, okay?

Or at least certain writers do.

And so how did my parents, who were shopkeepers, who never had a very good education, my father went to high school, my mother went to grade school,

How do they produce a writer?

Which they definitely did not want to do.

I think that what happened unintentionally was that I was raised in a household where Catholicism was always present.

I went to Catholic school almost my entire life.

But the larger lesson was actually about suffering.

We're here to, we suffer.

Suffering is just a part of our existence and we can't get away from it.

And what happens when we suffer?

We have to endure it.

We have to have the discipline to endure it.