Talking
to
Pulitzer
Prize-Winning Writer
Viet
Thanh Nguyen
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen
Source: lithub.com
“ALL WARS are fought twice,” Viet Nguyen
has written, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
Born in Vietnam to parents who fled to the
United States in 1975, Nguyen understands this truth intimately.
Nguyen spent his first three years in the
US in a refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsyvlania and then with a host
family in Harrisburg, where he was separated from his mother and father and
sister. “Not everyone would take a whole family,” he says, speaking by phone
from Boston.
“This period had a big impact on me, I
didn’t realize how deep until much later.”
Nguyen’s family eventually reunited in 1978
and resettled in San Jose, where his mother and father opened one of the first
Vietnamese grocery stores. It was not an easy period, given the virulence of
anti-Vietnamese sentiment.
As an academic, Nguyen has read and studied
his way into the heart of this long conflict—the one that extends well beyond a
war. And in the past year he has made a double-barreled assault on broadening
how we talk about Vietnam.
Last April, Nguyen released his blackly
comic debut novel, The
Sympathizer, the tale of a communist party spy who escapes Saigon
for the United States, where he lives a double-existence—as a resident, and as
a informer on a general who has landed in LA and runs a liquor store.
Today it won the Pulitzer Prize for
fiction.
What begins casually turns murderous and
then absurd as the unnamed narrator tries unsuccessfully to separate from his
past. He winds up having to participate in assassinations to cover his tracks.
He even takes a turn in Hollywood working on a film that sounds an awful lot
like Apocalypse Now.
Two weeks ago, Nguyen also published a
searching and far-reaching work of criticism, Nothing Ever Dies, which examines—less
comically—the way memory of the Vietnam War—and war in general—is made, curated
and abused by those in power.
Put together, the two books perform an
optic tilt about Vietnam and what America did there as profound as Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man
and Toni Morrison’s Beloved
were to the legacy of racism and slavery.
Not accidentally, these were two of the
most important books for Nguyen at Berkeley in the 1980s and 1990s, when he
began to realize that for the war to be—as he calls it—justly remembered, we
needed to broaden the way it is addressed.
It would be tempting here to lay the feet
firmly on America’s feet. But while The
Sympathizer does not flinch at excoriating what the U.S. did in
Vietnam, Nothing Ever Dies
argues that blame and victimhood are not helpful categories in the long run.
It is Nguyen’s belief that for such
wide-scale conflicts to be avoided in the future we need to learn how to become
better acquainted with our inhumanity on both sides of the conflict.
So just as Nguyen examines Apocalypse Now for
putting America’s suffering at the heart of the Vietnam War, Nguyen looks at
the ways Vietnamese society is reluctant to acknowledge the deaths of
Cambodians and Laotians.
I caught up with Nguyen, who is now a
professor at USC, in Boston by telephone and he described the long road these
books had to their near simultaneous publication, and what he hopes they might
accomplish beyond earning readers.
John Freeman: The Sympathizer and Nothing Ever Dies are
published fast on the heels of one another, I wonder if you could talk about
how their thinking was linked.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Both of these books come out of a line of me wanting to deal with Vietnam, and
more broadly, the question of war and memory in general. The ideas in Nothing Ever Dies grew
slowly—I worked on it for over a decade, but the book itself I wrote in a year.
I threw out all the articles I’d written and then wrote it from scratch after I
had finished The
Sympathizer. Some of those ideas had filtered into the fiction—but
all the work of the fiction worked itself into the writing of the nonfiction.
The ambition in the back of my mind—I may not be there yet—is that I would love
to be able to write fiction like criticism and criticism like fiction. I think
of W.G. Sebald—a hero of mine—I can’t tell the difference in his work, whether
it is fiction or nonfiction, it all feels like literature. So as I was writing
these books closely together, I was doing the best to incorporate criticism
into the fiction, and fiction into the criticism, so with The Sympathizer I was
hoping to construct a narrator who could say dramatically very critical things,
but who wouldn’t be restricted as an academic to source his beliefs. In Nothing Ever Dies, I
couldn’t find a way to find a sense of humor into that book, but I really did
try to take everything I had learned from the novel—narrative rhythm, for
example—even working my basest unsaid feelings into the very shape of the thing.
One of things I want both books to do is to move the reader both emotionally
and intellectually.
JF: As a scholar, you
have read a great deal in the space of Asian-American literature, but also
literature of the Vietnam War, and in Nothing
Ever Dies you look at many of these books (from Larry Hienemann’s Close Quarters to
Duong Thu Huong’s Novel
Without a Name) and examine how they function as aspects of
collective memory. You’re arguing, essentially, that if we are to form a just
memory we need—as cultures, as individuals—to acknowledge both our humanity and
our inhumanity, as well as the humanity and inhumanity of the Other. Did your
experience critically examining these books alter the way you approached
writing The Sympathizer
and how you drafted character. As in showing you things you did not want to do?
VTN: Those books were
not negative examples, they were all positive in different ways in how they
confronted war and politics. Larry Hienemann’s Close Quarters was a novel I read when I
was very young, 12-years-old, it was a horrible experience, I wasn’t
emotionally or literarily equipped to deal with it. So for a long time I really
hated that book. But I think Heinemann actually did the right thing by
unrelentingly focusing on atrocity without editorializing that these things
were wrong. When it came to my novel—I realized if I could make the reader as
uncomfortable as I felt reading that book, that would be a good thing. Being a
critic, yes, I had to read a lot of things—in many categories—and in reading
entire categories of work, much of the writing in these categories is mediocre.
So reading the mediocre stuff and seeing the cliches was actually helpful in
teaching me what not to do.
JF: You mentioned
reading Close Quarters
as a 12-year-old in San Jose. You don’t speak much about your family in Nothing Ever Dies,
except glancingly and then more directly in the epilogue. What can you tell me
about your upbringing?
VTN: The bare bones of
it I was a refugee, and spent a few years in Pennsylvania, so my first memories
of anything was being separated from my family, and being sent—after also being
separated from my sister, which was very painful—to live with a white family.
In order to leave the camp, we had to split up—not everyone would take a whole family—so
there I was at 4 years old living with strangers. It was only for 14 months,
but this period had a big impact on me, I didn’t realize how deep until much
later. Then we went to San Jose. My parents, they were stereotypical shop
keepers. We had a challenging time in San Jose because they were working all
the time. For me this experience, it has to do with being emotionally separated
form my parents, as they were working a lot, and I was absorbing second hand
the experiences of the war and immigration. It took me 10 or 15 years to get to
the point to be ready to think about the Vietnam War and what it meant for me.
I just wanted to get out of San Jose. I never wanted to write my own memoir,
it’s not that interesting, my life, if I were a better writer I might write
abut my parents.
JF: Were there any
books which you read growing up or early on that helped you see your way out of
San Jose to a bigger, broader way of seeing the world?
VTN: As an undergrad I
studied English and ethnic studies—English, because I loved literature. The
reason why I needed ethic studies was during the 1980s and 1990s you were
engaging with the canon. And I couldn’t see myself making a life out of that
because of I also felt the imperative to make a difference. Ethnic studies revealed
to me the possibility that literature could matter in terms of politics and
social justice. So I took a lot from Chicano studies and African-American
literature and Asian-American literature. Certain people like Richard Wright,
Ralph Ellison, and Maxine Hong Kingston were hugely important to me. In terms
of going back to English studies, I go back to theory: Marxism,
deconstructionism, queer, theory, all those things came together and formed the
bedrock of Nothing Ever
Dies. I was trying to figure out for a decade some essential
questions: what does it mean to write, as a minority, what does it mean to be
scarred by a war? I was trying to do something in Nothing Ever Dies, to think
about memory, yes, but memory in terms of capitalism, and inequality, and how
to write about minority subjectivity and how we as minorities are lured into
idealized experiences—to think of our communities as defined by our
victimization. And the conclusion is: these are traps for any kind of writers
of minorities.
JF: I think what’s
remarkable in this book is the way you connect these questions of identity—and
how memory around Vietnam is curated—with domestic forms of violence, leaning
quite heavily on African-American thinkers, from W.E.B Dubois to Toni Morrison.
A quote from Beloved
gives this book its title. I wonder if you could find any aperture for the
broader forms of thinking you advocate in the past year, when there’s been a
huge rise in nationalistic rhetoric and simultaneously an ongoing spectacle of
terrible police violence against largely African-American men and women.
VTN: Anybody who looks
around the contemporary landscape and the activism of Black Lives Matter and is
surprised by any connection between wars foreign and domestic is naive, or has
no historical consciousness. And that’s probably a large part of America. This
isn’t an accident, though. Part of power and ideology in any society is the
work it does to prevent its citizens or residents from making these
connections. You know, the domestic and international roots of violence go far
back though, and the roots of slavery and racism are deeply embedded with
nationalism and war. I was always very aware of this once I started taking
Ethnic Studies in college. The upshot of this lack of context however is the
trap of believing our suffering is somehow unique. And this is true of any
people—a lot of Vietnamese people feel this way, a lot of black people feel
this way, a lot of white people think this way. We won’t be able to overcome
the artificial divisions this creates—and the conflicts it enables—until we
acknowledge that our suffering is shared and produced across multiple arenas.
That’s why I look at some of the work of writers who demonstrate that in Nothing Ever Dies: the
work of Junot Diaz, Susan Sontag, and James Baldwin in particular. These are
the writers who have thought about these things.
JF: Throughout Nothing Ever Dies,
you’re looking at the artifacts of culture—the artifacts of
imagination—examining, from Apocalypse
Now to smaller productions in Cambodia about the Khymer Rouge—to
see how we curate the Vietnam War and war in general. You use the term just
memory, which I have a hard time separating from justice, which is not easily
pried away from punishment. How do we work towards enlarging forms of
remembrance without giving in to the desire to punish?
VTN: Punishment is the
reflexive response to something that we’ve defined as a crime, and once we’ve
given that definition we’re able to circumscribe how that crime is produced and
has roots much deeper than what we’re comfortable with, whether it is a crime
that means a black person is shot on a street or where a terrorist is killed by
a soldier or put into a cell. We can deal with it then because we’ve put a very
limited historical frame on the crime. We may punish that person, but it’s not
going to address the roots that will lead to the same things happening again,
be it is perceived or actual crime or the response. For me justice is much
larger and takes in a wider historical view—it’s a perspective. Unless we
understand both of those things—we’ll never allow a just solution. That’s why
Black Lives Matter sees what’s happening now as a repetition of cycles of
violence that have already occurred before. And that’s why Black Lives Matter
is arguing now for a much larger view about the connection between injustice
and American violence.
JF: Two books coming
out so close together give the impression of immediacy, but you’ve clearly
studied this for some time, and been preparing to write for a long time.
VTN: Basically I spent
twenty years working in academia as a grad student and professor acquiring
various tools, writing an academic book, and it was very much a laborious
process, working within a certain set of rules. I think what happened to me
during that time was I learned patience, I learned how to live in obscurity,
and I learned that quick gratification wasn’t going to come my way, and at a
certain point I had nothing left to lose. So when it came time to write the
novel, in 2011, it was enormously freeing that I was going to write this book
for myself and no one else. And when it came time to write Nothing Ever Dies, which
I began in 2013 or 2014, to think similarly, in the context of academia, as in,
‘I don’t care what anybody else things, I’ve already paid my dues to this
life’—was freeing. I was hammering at a wall for 20 year and I finally hammered
through in the course of writing these books together.
JF: In Nothing Ever Dies, you
describe how—at least from the Vietnamese side—the ways of remembrance had yet
to incorporate an anti-hero. And yet that’s what you precisely have done in The Sympathizer, having
a narrator who is a spy, deceitful, murderous, and deeply problematic.
VTN: I think by the
time I wrote The
Sympathizer I knew I wanted to write an antihero, someone dark,
metaphorically speaking, because I had already thought through this issue of
the inhumanity of narrators in the fiction of writers of color. I had already
decided that the biggest challenge was to write about characters who were
capable of doing bad things—this was a sign not of inhumanity, but of full
fledged humanity. Of three-dimensionality. That’s a privilege of the whole
western canon, to have flawed characters, and in order for this novel to make a
case to be read—not only as minority literature, but as literature that
contests with the majority and is in some ways spy fiction, crime fiction,
existentialist fiction—I had to reject this claim, however invented, that my
character had to be either good or bad.
JF: How has this
response been in your family?
VTN: We don’t really
talk about the books in my family, I don’t shove my books into the dinner table
conversation, I think it’d be really tiresome. My dad was proud of the novel,
he insisted on having his picture taken with it when I brought it home. I think
part of him appreciates the reception of the book in the American press, but
when the nonfiction book was about to come out, I think maybe he thinks of it
differently, when I came home I told him I wanted to dedicate it to him and my
mother, their sacrifices are absolutely what made me the person I am today. But
he said, please, don’t put our names in the book. For him the history I deal
with has not died, and to be associated with the book would be too dangerous.
As if the history which put him through decades of war and made of him an
immigrant is out there waiting to grab him or to grab me. A couple of weeks ago
when we talked ago he said, “Are you done writing books now?” So I think there
is something much more dangerous about the nonfiction work for him. That is
something that I respect, and maybe something that shows that books are still
dangerous, words are still dangerous, and he is a person that wants to put them
back.
JF: But you’re not
going to stop, you’re working on stories which will be out next year—by the
way, I believe I read one or two at Granta, sorry we turned them down!—and a
sequel to the novel.
VTN: Oh don’t worry
about that, getting rejected a few times—it’s part of the whole process. I’m
sure I would have rather been accepted, that would have obviously been nicer.
But it’s about learning how to learn from rejection—and all that had a way of
turning me into the writer I became today. The short story collection, I don’t
know what to think of it, I wrote a whole collection in 1997 before I started
my academic career, and none of those words appear in this new collection.
Still, I have no distance from it, twenty years later. I could look at The Sympathizer when I
was done and think, I know what I’m doing here. So now I just depend on my
editor, Peter Blackstock. I’m just relieved that I don’t have to write any more
short stories. And I’m really super excited about writing the sequel of The Sympathizer, I wrote
a 20 page outline, and I’ve written the first 50 pages. There will be an
excerpt coming out in Ploughshares
soon. Hopefully by the end of the summer I’ll finish the novel and be turning
my attention back to the novel.
JF: You sound like an
extremely deliberate writer. Was there anything you decided to do along the way
to writing “The Sympathizer” that surprised you, which your unconscious did for
you, and for which you’re grateful?
VTN: Two things—I had
an outline, and I knew the ending of the novel would not be the ending, it was
sort of a Hollywood ending—with lots of explosions and shootouts. I had to
trust myself to figure it out, and two-thirds of the way through the book I did
discover what the ending would be. Not every writer feels that way, and so that
surprised me, but that came around because I inhabited the narrator’s
psychology for so long, and what needed to happen for him. But the other thing
is I didn’t understand was his character entirely. I had been having a great
time writing from his point of view and then I realized, oh, wait a minute,
he’s a misogynist, which I understood because I had constructed him to be a bad
James Bond, but I was taking pleasure in writing from this point of view. And
there was no way out of that part of his character. So that’s one of the things
the sequel will take up—his re-education is not complete, including his
impressions of gender and sexuality.
