Viet Thanh Nguyen

And it was painful for me to realize that because I wanted, I think, when I started writing the book, to see the world in a more simple fashion of Americans doing the wrong thing and Vietnamese doing the right thing and Americans doing the forgetting and the Vietnamese needing to remember.

And then understanding that the Vietnamese of all sides have done very much exactly the same processes of exclusion, forgetting, erasure, self-privileging.

That took a while for me to understand.

I think that's the reason why is because more often than not, nations are founded on violence, on conquest.

And what we see in war is oftentimes experiences that are contradictory to a nation's self-image.

The United States, for example, built on notions of democracy, freedom, equality, and so on, but only possible through wars of conquest and colonization that are fundamental to the nation's existence.

And so we fight these wars again in memory because

by narrating them in a way that makes them acceptable to our self-image.

So there's no getting around the fact that the United States would not exist without the fractious wars at the beginning, without genocide committed against Native peoples, but all that can be re-narrated again and again in American mythology as a war of independence and of freedom and of liberation.

And again, I don't think the United States is unique.

If I think about Vietnam, I see that happen exactly with the Vietnam War in terms of how the victorious Vietnamese have chosen to narrate that war again in memory by erasing all kinds of contradictions to communist ideals.

And that goes even back further in time to the founding of modern Vietnam as a nation built on conquest and colonization.

of other peoples, which the Vietnamese don't want to remember and instead would prefer to narrate the fact that we were colonized by the Chinese and we fought them off and therefore we became a free and independent people.

So wars are fundamental to nation states and re-narrating wars are fundamental to nation states as well.

In the case of something like Apocalypse Now, for example, I think it's a great work of art.

I also think it's racist when it comes to Vietnamese people.

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

So that kind of irony and contrast, these inequities in terms of whose stories get circulated, whether as novels or films, or whether as American stories or Vietnamese stories, is very much on my mind.

Being an American means that I have a lot of privilege.

And I think for a lot of Americans, oftentimes we don't realize how much privilege we have.