Viet Thanh Nguyen

She has an idea called re-memory.

This idea that memory is out there, that we can actually run into it.

Nothing Ever Dies actually took 14 years from start to finish.

And I think the reason it took 14 years is because what started off as a very simple project became a very complicated one.

I saw that the American way of thinking about the Vietnam War was deeply limited, and I wanted to compensate for that.

I wanted to fill in a gap and talk about the Vietnamese American and Vietnamese refugee experiences.

The way that Americans deliberately or accidentally forget the people and the countries that they get involved in, I think has a direct correlation to the fact that Americans keep going to war.

That Americans refuse to consider that other people are human beings with their own histories, cultures, experiences and predilections.

And then Americans get themselves into other people's countries one way or another, either through actual occupation or through drone strikes and what have you.

proxy wars and all of that.

And then Americans get surprised that they can't get themselves out of these kinds of situations.

And then Americans forget and then they do it all over again.

But the more I investigated this war, the more I realized that simply trying to fill in the Vietnamese perspective or at least the Vietnamese refugee or Vietnamese American or Southern Vietnamese perspective was not enough.

And in fact, that what I was doing was in many ways a mirror image of what Americans did, which is that Americans, when they're attacked or when they go to war, they feel themselves to be victims.

And then they focus on their own experiences at the exclusion of everybody else.

And the Vietnamese of all sides do exactly the same thing.

14 years is a long time for an individual.

It's not a long time for a nation.

And I think for me the larger lesson from this is that as difficult as it is for an individual to see past conflict,

their own predilections, their own desire to identify with their own people, nations are doing the same thing.