Viet Thanh Nguyen

We have to have the discipline to overcome it.

However, whatever that discipline is, for my parents, the discipline was being business people.

They just worked themselves to the bone, like throughout many decades.

And sacrifice for themselves, but also for the next generation and struggle.

So I watched all that very intimately growing up.

That was a lesson that I learned.

I came out an atheist, so perhaps from one perspective, my parents utterly failed.

But everything else that they represented to me through the model of their own lives, suffering, endurance, discipline, sacrifice, that

has stayed with me because you know why?

They lived what they preached.

They were not hypocrites.

That is such a powerful experience to grow up with as a child to realize that your parents are actually everything they said that they were and that they're genuine, they're authentic.

They may be hard on you, but they're not hypocrites.

They're not fakes.

They did everything they said that they should do and that I should do.

My parents never realized they were raising one of the most dangerous creatures you can find in your house, a writer.

No, I mean, they valued education above everything.

So I give my parents credit.

They were very conservative people.

But they let me do a PhD in English because it has the word doctorate in it.