Viet Thanh Nguyen
speaker
1,011 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 7 May
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We were also not black.
So the Haitian refugees were also coming in the mid to late 1970s.
They were being turned back even as
we as Southeast Asians were being let in.
So, you know, you as a Vietnamese refugee, or we as Vietnamese refugees could say, well, we're better than the Haitians, whether we thought that explicitly or not, that's the message that's being sent out.
And so again, throughout American history, divide and conquer, you know, demonize one population, everybody else feels better, or some of them feel better, not realizing that we're just waiting our turns, right?
And even for Asian Americans, you know, who might say, well, you know, this is being done to brown people, this deportation stuff, it's
being done to Asians too.
Just selective Asians, you know, at certain moments.
But, you know, the Trump administration is coming for everybody.
That's my conviction.
And he's going to get to a lot of these Latinos and a lot of these Asians who voted for him one way or another.
What it means for me to be an American is that I think there are simple Americans and complex Americans.
The simple Americans are the love-it-or-leave-it Americans, this country right or wrong Americans.
They've always existed in American history.
For them, to be American is a stark choice, either or.
I come as a refugee from an American war, and I arrive in the United States feeling complexity.
As I say in my novel, The Sympathizer, my protagonist says, well, I'm grateful for American aid, but maybe I wouldn't have needed American aid if we hadn't been invaded by the United States in the first place.
It's a very common thing.
A lot of people in the United States fled from wars that the United States was responsible for, and they made the very sensible choice, it's better to be behind the guns than in front of the guns.
Showing 681–700 of 1,011 · page 35 of 51
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