Viet Thanh Nguyen

Americans just say Vietnam, and when they say Vietnam, they mean the Vietnam War.

And when they say the Vietnam War, they mean the American War.

What did it do to Americans?

So number one, this is a novel...

purely about Vietnamese experiences.

That's unsettling for Americans to realize they're not at the center of the world.

And number two, it's a novel that is very, very dark.

A lot of terrible things happen, but it's a novel that I tried to make very, very funny because I was inspired by novels like Catch-22, for example, and the belief that humor and satire can help us deal with tragedy, but humor and satire can also be very pointed political tools as well.

So I think all that happened.

But the thing that was out of my control, but I knew was probably going to happen, is that Americans also feel terribly guilty.

Not all Americans, but a good number of Americans, especially those who went through the war or those who are in the book and publishing industry who skew liberal, they feel guilty.

about this terrible, terrible war.

And so they want voices like mine to come out there and tell them what it was like for Vietnamese people.

And of course, what I always say is you can't depend on one novel, one story, one writer.

But my novel was one that came along that people focused on at that time, people as in American people who wanted to hear, again, what Vietnamese people have gone through.

Well, because I'd already gone through 17 years of writing The Refugees.

And I basically said, I don't care when I wrote The Sympathizer.

Winning the Pulitzer was obviously a big deal.

But also at that point, I was very fortunate.

I was in my early 40s.