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Ask the Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Ask me a question.” Viet Thanh Nguyen

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I bought The Sympathizer as gift but ended up keeping it myself. Besides not daring to do same with The Committed, what would you tell someone planning to read it next? :) Thanks
Viet Thanh Nguyen sorry for the delay! If you've already read The Committed, then A Man of Two Faces
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I read Fatherland in my writing class bought the book. Than decided to buy Nothing Ever Dies, I got my mom to read The Sympathsizer, she loved it . My question is when we meet Man in the book , she is described as a woman , later she is referred to as he when the narrator and Boon are talking about Blood Brothers, I was wondering Why ? and thank you for your wonderful and thought provoking works
Viet Thanh Nguyen I don't recall doing that, so it mus be an error
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Wanted to say that I have used your book "Nothing ever dies" quite often in both of my thesis dealing with Gestational trauma of Vietnamese refugees. One of them specifically for Thi Bui's "The Best We Could Do". I was wondering if you would ever be interested in writing some more theory on subjects of mental health?
Viet Thanh Nguyen probably not theory, but A Man of Two Faces directly addresses mental health and illness
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?Loved The Committed. You da man!!
Viet Thanh Nguyen thanks for reading! extra points for it being The Committed
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Hi Anh Thanh, as a fellow Vietnamese, I can't help but wonder when you wrote your memoir A man of two faces, did you have in your mind a Vietnamese pronoun for the character "You" that you addressed yourself with? Was it a formal like "anh", "bạn", or was it informal as in "cậu", or "mày"?
Viet Thanh Nguyen good question. I imagine the pronouns might shift depending on mood, or maybe if it's an older me addressing a younger me, but mày is probably the best.
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I quite literally just finished the last pages of your book, and as you've hoped, the book has shaken me. Has this book been translated to Vietnamese? I am first-gen Viet-Canadian and this is the first time I have ever read anything that echoes the self-loathing & criticism of Vietnamese people that my father has raised me under. I would be very excited to have him read this, but can't imagine VN gladly selling it.
Viet Thanh Nguyen thanks for sharing, and glad to know the book affected you. The Refugees is in translation in Vietnam now. The Sympathizer is in process.
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Having a refugee history yourself, how do you feel about the backlash against refugees in this country? How do you think the US should handle the issue?
Viet Thanh Nguyen You can see some answers here:
https://vietnguyen.info/2017/viet-tha...
https://vietnguyen.info/2016/the-hidd...
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The narrator of The Sympathizer uses ridicule and satire in portraying most of the American characters presented in the text. That is certainly appropriate to his experiences and ambivalent values related to the US. To what extent might you share his opinions about Americans?
Viet Thanh Nguyen You could read my essays and interviews, and my nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, to get a better sense of what I think.

https://vietnguyen.info/category/essays
https://vietnguyen.info/category/inte...
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Mr. Nguyen, I taught English as a second language to ARVN soldiers. I now wonder about what they went through after the collapse of Saigon. Do you know of any nonfiction books that make an accounting of what re-education camps were like, how many people were executed or imprisoned, and what the citizens of South Vietnam faced when the North took over?
Viet Thanh Nguyen Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh's South Wind Changing; Duong Thu Huong's Memories of a Pure Spring; Nghia M. Vo's Bamboo Gulag
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Your book reminded me why I liked books, at a time of great drought of the soul. You write with passion about the driest topics, and your stories are impossible not to relate to on a human as well as an intellectual level. As an aspiring and practicing writer; if I could one day harness the capacity to put my raw thoughts to paper as powerfully and elegantly as you do, I'll call my life well-lived. When did you start?
Viet Thanh Nguyen I wrote my first "book" in the third grade, and wrote intermittently through college and graduate school. I started writing (fiction) more regularly in my late twenties and very seriously in my early thirties. Writing is a life-long practice and vocation, and it's never too late to start.
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The Refugees is a stunning collection of stories. Thank you! Question: The family in the first story has been visited by a ghost. How do ghosts figure in Vietnamese American culture? I am Hispanic and was once told by my grandmother that if I was ever visited by a dead relative, that I shouldn't be scared, and I believe I was visited once by my grandmother shortly after her death. That story really resonated.
Viet Thanh Nguyen Ghosts are very important. Most Vietnamese believe that the dead need to be worshiped at an ancestral shrine in the home, and that the graves of the dead need to be tended regularly, all to appease their souls. Those who die badly--violently, unnaturally, or away from home--become "wandering souls." Ghosts can be both benevolent and malevolent. Visits by the dead soon after death are often not supposed to bee frightening, as you say. The dead come to say goodbye.
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I just finished Nothing Ever Dies, and there is a clear and valid argument about how the way we remember wars perpetuates the war machine. But global deaths from war have dropped precipitously over the past 40 years (see https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace/). Is it possible we are also doing something right in how we remember wars that we can build on?
Viet Thanh Nguyen We are clearly making progress as a species. We no longer organize ourselves by tribes and villages, or city-states, but by nations. So our notion of community has grown ever larger. But are capacity for killing has grown too. So even if we may be less likely to go to war now, we have the ability to inflict much greater destruction if we do. Whether or not our growing capacity for empathy and inclusiveness will beat our growing capacity for total annihilation obviously remains to be seen.
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Reading in "the sympathizer" your (inspiring) pages on film-making and the americanization of the world through hollywood blockbusters I could not help to wonder if they were underscored by the zizekian mantra of ideology conveyed through filmography? Greetings from Brussels.
Viet Thanh Nguyen Zizek and many other scholars of ideology, spectacle, and representation were important--Althusser, Gramsci, DeBord, Trinh T. Minh-ha, to name a few.
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Not only am I impressed by your critical perspective on both sides of VN-US war in The Sympathizer, I totally get interested in your statements about VN-US hybridity from your essays and interviews. What do you think about the visibility of contemporary VN-US culture today and maybe in the future without regard to war? -All the best and admiration from a VN student in Germany, who's already ordered your upcoming book
Viet Thanh Nguyen you can see some of the exchanges happening between US and VN with food and travel (regardless of language). With language taken into account, there is some exchange in music and film, but it's all in Vietnamese, or else it's an American impact on Vietnam. Then there's education, with tens of thousands of Vietnamese students studying in the US. I hope they will have a significant impact on Vietnam when they return.
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Do you have any idea how great a writer I think you are? Just when I thought I read the most perfect sentence ever written, I read another. And another. And another...
Viet Thanh Nguyen aw, thanks! I'm delighted that you're delighted.
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I found your book by accident, and I am so glad that I did! It was just prior to our visit to Vietnam, so the timing was also perfect. When are you going to publish another book, and will you continue to mine the Vietnamese/US/French history or go another direction? The self-reflection perspective of the book was such a great perspective to read this from. Thank you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen Hi Steven, I have a new book coming out in February 2017, The Refugees, a short story collection. I am writing the sequel to The Sympathizer, and it is set mostly in Paris, so will deal with Vietnamese/French history.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
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My husband and I are both "armchair" scholars of Vietnam and have written a book about our volunteer experiences there. Most recently involved with the rescue and rehabilitation of children trafficked into slavery. Looking forward to reading Nothing Ever Dies as we were both enthralled by the Sympathizer. Can you recommend a book which will enlighten us as to how the Amerasians have assimilated in the US?
Viet Thanh Nguyen there are a few. Perhaps you can begin with Thomas Bass's Vietnamerica.
http://www.thomasbass.com/vietnameric...
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This is the first time I've heard about your book. I like it because of the Multicultural angle. I've read about Lowell, Massachusett's manufacturing period. Why did you choose to write about Lowell, Mass. ? Is there a large Vietnamese community living there?
Viet Thanh Nguyen sorry, I didn't write about Lowell. The question was whether I'd been to Lowell.
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Have you ever visited Lowell, Massachusetts where there's a large Vietnamese population? I've recently read your book and, in growing up in a town near Lowell, and have memories from my early years when the first large influx of Vietnamese immigrants started to migrate to Lowell; your novel has put some of these memories in a different perspective! Steve
Viet Thanh Nguyen I have visited, briefly, the college campus there. But didn't see the Vietnamese community itself.
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I am deeply amazed by this book, while only on page 131. Coincidentally, last night I heard Allan Johnson speak on race and the concept of systemic perpetuations of power over/exclusion of "the other," including the example of films that diminish the characters of "non-whites" - so precisely depicted in your interchange between the narrator and the film director. Are you aware of Johnson's writings?
Viet Thanh Nguyen no, but there are many scholars and artists who deal with the (mis)representation (or exclusion) of the other, or non-white, in dominant culture, from film, tv, literature, art, etc.
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