Chapter 1: How does Viet Thanh Nguyen's refugee identity shape his storytelling?
Kings Network. Welcome again to South Beach Sessions. We have got a teacher. We're going to learn something here today. And a Pulitzer Prize winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen is with us. And you can go to VietNguyen.info if you want his works that include a book that is now out. And the book that you won the Pulitzer Prize with, with your debut novel, The Sympathizer. You're somebody...
refugee is sort of part of your identity publicly so thank you for joining us interesting times in america i'm being diplomatic now i can't imagine how you're experiencing what it is that you're witnessing but right before we turned on the cameras you were talking about how similar uh cubans and vietnamese people are what have been your observations there
Well, Dan, first of all, thanks for having me. With the observations, well, you know, Cubans ended up in Florida, and most of the Vietnamese, or the largest community who fled from Vietnam in 1975, ended up in California. So we're literally on opposite sides of the coast. Both communities are dominated by their anti-communist factions.
And both have been using that kind of anti-communism, both to cement their cultural communities where they are, but also to advance their political interests in the United States. And obviously the Cubans have been actually much more effective at doing that than the Vietnamese Americans have.
Chapter 2: What impact did winning the Pulitzer Prize have on Viet's life?
So we have a few politicians, but nothing on the scale of Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. And the ability of the Cuban exile community to determine a great degree of American politics is something that I think a certain portion of the Vietnamese community would envy.
Tell me about winning the Pulitzer Prize and how it is that it changed your life to have a debut novel that you wrote a little bit later into your writing career, but still your debut novel to win that prize. Like what happened to your life at that point? And did you know the book was good?
I knew the book was good. I thought the book was very good. But winning a prize is completely arbitrary, as I'm sure you're aware. So it's obviously nice to win prizes. I would never turn down a prize, especially the Pulitzer, which completely transformed my life. But now I serve on the Pulitzer board and we give out Pulitzer prizes. And I've served in other juries for prizes.
And I'm quite aware that it's quite arbitrary in many ways. So how did it change my life? Well, I mean, the Pulitzer is, especially for fiction, for the novel, people care about it.
Chapter 3: How does Viet Nguyen view the importance of sharing refugee stories?
so just having winning that prize meant more eyeballs were on the book and the book had done very well it had been reviewed uniformly positively um it had made a big impact already but a big impact impact for literary work you know you're lucky if you sell 25 or 100 000 copies which the book did do but after the pulitzer it won it sold a million copies and it turned into a tv series you know for hbo i've been my trajectory has been completely transformed because of that book
The reason I asked, did you know it was good, which might seem like a stupid question, is because a lot of writing comes with doubt and insecurity. And I talk to a lot of writers who, for whatever reason, aren't totally sure that what they've made is, never mind prize winning, just worthy of being read by others in a way that meets community standards.
I spent 17 years writing a short story collection called The Refugees before I wrote The Sympathizer. And everything you said is true. That was a horrible, miserable experience. The book itself is actually pretty good, I think, according to readers as well. But it was how I learned to write. I suffered all the agony and the doubt and the fear that you described.
And then at the end of that process, I thought I wrote this book partly for me, but also partly for the community of Vietnamese readers, but other people who have influence who can publish the book. And that is a very human experience to do something for other people. But at the end of that, I thought, I've had it. I'm going to write my next book for myself. That was a sympathizer.
And ironically, because I didn't care about what other people thought, I wrote the best possible book I could.
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Chapter 4: What themes are explored in Viet's latest book, 'To Save and to Destroy'?
And that is actually kind of a life lesson for writers, but also for others as well.
So what happened there? Like, how did that happen? Because you're changing the entirety of your process now. to the greatest of rewards.
Well, I mean, the colloquial way is to say, I don't give a you know what anymore. And we spend most of our, many people spend the bulk of their lives actually giving that. Like they care about what other people think for obvious professional and personal reasons.
But I think for artists, as an example, but I think probably for other people too, we have to reach a space where we don't care what other people think so we can give completely nothing
honest expression to what we believe both what we believe about the world but what we believe about our art as well and honestly that was the hardest thing for me to achieve and but how did you so how did you get you're saying 17 years of suffering your relationship with it is what for 17 years i'm writing about my experience also it feels like i'm shouting into a tin can
I grew up a Catholic, and I feel that if I hadn't become a writer, I would have become a priest. Anything that required discipline. In other words, the discipline is what matters. The calling is what matters. It's not the world.
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Chapter 5: How does Viet Nguyen discuss the challenges of the refugee experience?
It's what you believe. And the challenge for me as a writer was to spend 17 years learning the craft, the art, the technique, all these kinds of things you need as a writer, but also being preoccupied with the world, what the agents thought, editors thought, reviewers, and so on. But the thing about a discipline for me is that after I spent 17 years being disciplined and disciplining myself...
I stopped caring about the world. There's no way to teach anybody how to do that. That's what makes a discipline so frightening and so powerful and so necessary for those of us who think of ourselves as artists or anybody who has a calling of some kind.
If I hadn't become a writer, I would have become a priest or maybe I would become a chef or a gardener, something that would have required me just to spend a huge amount of time by myself until I realized that it is the art itself that matters, not the world.
Why were those your only choices? Why were the disciplines? I know your brother gets to this country, doesn't speak English upon arrival. Seven years later, he's in Harvard. Like what was happening in your family as it regarded discipline?
We had a very typical story, which is that we became refugees from the Vietnam War. And I'm not going to bore you because you know these stories as well coming out of Cuba. When people are refugees, everybody who's a refugee has a horrible story to tell about how they escaped whatever situation they find themselves in.
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Chapter 6: What role does discipline play in Viet's writing process?
And we went through all of that. I call myself an eyewitness to eyewitnesses because my parents were full grown adults. They were in their 40s. They lost everything. They made life and death decisions to get themselves and their children out of the country. I was four years old. I don't remember any of that. But I grew up watching my parents struggle.
in very difficult circumstances, living these refugee lives in the United States. And my brother did too. And I think what we experienced out of that is we knew the kinds of sacrifices that had been made to give us the opportunities that we had. And so we never needed, I think, a lot of motivation to just do our hardest to try to
pay back our parents for their sacrifices, but also I think simply to pay back this entire idea that we were the lucky ones. We were the survivors. We made it out of the country.
Chapter 7: How does Viet Nguyen address the complexities of being an American?
We were given opportunities that many people literally would have died for and many people did die for. And so, you know, everything that happens after that, I feel grateful that I've had the opportunity to be a writer.
But everything takes place in that context of tremendous loss of the refugee experience, of war, of knowing, as I do as a scholar of this war, that during the years of the 1940s through the 1970s in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, millions of people died. So I'm very lucky, and I try to make the most out of that opportunity.
When you talk about remembering the details or witnessing the details of your parents struggling, obviously they're in the books, but for the uninitiated who have not yet seen the books, what are the struggles that you're talking about?
My parents were born poor in a poor rural northern village in an area that's famous for producing hardcore communists and hardcore Catholics. So 30 minutes before my parents were born, Ho Chi Minh was born. My parents were Catholics. They chose a different route. They lifted themselves out of poverty through hard work and ingenuity.
They lost everything again 20 years later as they became refugees for the second time. They fled from North to South Vietnam in 1954 when the country was divided, fled from Vietnam in 1975 when their side lost the war. They came to the United States with some money but not a lot. They started from the bottom working as janitors and people doing manual work.
They opened a grocery store in San Jose, California.
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Chapter 8: What does Viet Nguyen believe about the power of storytelling?
They worked for 12 to 14 hour days, seven days a week, almost every day of the year. They were shot in their store on Christmas Eve. They were held up in their own house at gunpoint. I was there to witness that. It was just a very difficult physical and emotional experience for them.
My mother ended up going to a psychiatric facility three times in her life soon after she arrived when her mother died.
in vietnam and she was not there to be able to mourn her mother in person that broke her then again uh you know 15 20 years later i was 18 years old she and i wrote a whole book about it you know a man of two faces was she broken simply because of some crack in her own foundation or was she broken because of all the horrible things that she experienced through war and the refugee experience
I will never know the answer to that question, which is why I wrote a book about it. And then she was broken for the third time when I was an adult, and she never recovered from that. So that was the kind of life that my parents lived. They were hardworking, intelligent, successful people who overcame a lot.
And in my mother's case, she could not overcome the last and final weakness within herself that she was not responsible for.
I don't know the details of that. You will share what you wish or don't wish to, but you sort of jumped right over them being shot multiple times. One when you were nine and one when you were 16. One was in the home, but they were both shot in their store.
I was nine years old. I was home on Christmas Eve with my brother who was 16. I was watching, I believe, Scooby-Doo Christmas. I was having a great time. Phone rings. My brother answers the phone. He puts it down. He says, Mom and Dad have been shot. I'm nine years old. I have no idea what to do with this information. So I just continue watching the cartoons.
And my brother, who is crying, says, why aren't you crying? What's wrong with you? And I thought there was indeed something wrong with me. And I bore that for the rest of my life to think that... Anyway, so my parents had flesh wounds. The robber had shot them, but thankfully they were not injured too badly.
And within a couple of days, they were back at work, and we never spoke of that incident again. And that pretty much characterized our existence as refugees. You just had to keep on moving forward. And if something bad happened to you, you have to remember something worse happened to somebody else. So that's what I'm saying.
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