Pulitzer Prize-Winner
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Pulls Back the Mask
Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, who has a new book
coming,
knows you’re hiding something. Jen Tse for Newsweek
By
Josh Saul On 11/20/16 at 9:30 AM
Viet
Thanh Nguyen was an outsider among the rich white kids at his elite San Jose,
California, high school. His hardworking Catholic parents had saved enough
money for him to attend a prestigious Catholic prep school, but Nguyen’s
refugee background and his work in his parents’ grocery store isolated him from
the mostly privileged student body. “When I got invited to classmates’ homes it
was like Leave It to Beaver,” he tells me, sitting in the lobby of his
hotel in midtown Manhattan in October, hours before he attended the 2016
Pulitzer Centennial Dinner to accept the prize for his first novel, The
Sympathizer. “I wouldn’t talk about what it was like to be Vietnamese—not
that anybody asked.”
As
part of a long-term campaign to present himself as “normal,” Nguyen took a
summer job at a Great America amusement park, where he operated a ride in the
Yankee Corner section of the park, forced to wear bell-bottoms and a tricorn
hat. He saved up so he could afford the checkered pants cool Southern
California kids wore in the 1980s, but his mom freaked out when he bought a
pair at Macy’s. She thought the pants were weird—too American and not
Vietnamese—and made him return them.
Nguyen
says his many attempts to wear two masks back then, to be a Vietnamese son at
home and a normal California teen at school, usually ended as painfully as that
pants purchase. But those experiences are the basis of the most powerful theme
in Nguyen’s fiction: a person with two faces who has to choose which to show,
depending on the surroundings. “It’s universal. Most of us have that sense of
duality,” says Nguyen, adding that the feeling of having “two faces” is
aggravated for immigrants and refugees. “That sense of pretending to be
somebody, or to be an impostor.”
His
short stories in The Refugees, written before The Sympathizer but
set to be published in February, also explore that duality, through the
experiences of “strangers in a new land,” from a Vietnamese refugee who settles
with two gay men in San Francisco to a black ex–Air Force pilot on vacation in
the Vietnamese countryside he once bombed. The refugee experience is deeply
personal to Nguyen—his family fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and
settled in a refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. “ My memory begins
when I arrived in the United States at age 4 and was taken away from my parents
to live with a white family. That was the condition for being able to leave the
refugee camp,” Nguyen wrote on his blog earlier this year, adding that the
experience remains an “invisible brand” stamped between his shoulder blades.
The
first sentence of Nguyen’s The Sympathizer , the Vietnam War–era spy
novel about a double agent, reads, “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of
two faces.” With sly references to both Apocalypse Now and The Quiet
American , the book is a page-turner in which the double agent carries out
assassinations for the South Vietnamese general to whom he pretends loyalty,
betrays the general by screwing his miniskirted daughter and grapples with a
long list of conflicting loyalties. The New York Times said in its
review that, “ It’s about being forced to hide yourself under so many layers
that you’re not sure who you are.”
In
an attempt to relate to Nguyen’s point about duality and having two faces, I described
my Alaska childhood in a woodstove-heated home my mom built on a mountain
bordering a state park, and how when I moved to New York City, my girlfriend’s
father bought me a suit so I could attend events with their family. “That’s
what I mean,” Nguyen says, kindly embracing my marginal example. “There are
these moments in everyone’s life. But if you’ve been forcibly displaced or
migrated to another country, it’s an everyday part of your life for a very long
time, possibly never ceasing.”
Nguyen
wanted his first novel to encompass that duality, but feared an autobiography
would be boring. He decided a spy novel was the perfect way to tell the
universal story of immigrants yearning for checkered pants or feeling
underdressed in a new city, but with pulpy characters and a quick-stepping plot
that would work for a Hollywood thriller. ( Vulture noted that The
Sympathizer was the first book to win both a major literary prize and a
major genre prize, in this case the Edgar Award for best first mystery novel.)
“I knew that my autobiographical experience of
wearing a mask, of having two faces, of always pretending, of doubting my own
interiority, could be allegorized,” Nguyen says. “And so the spy would be the
vehicle for these emotional experiences and exaggerated to a great degree so it
would be much more interesting.”
The
mashup worked, and The Sympathizer vaulted Nguyen from being simply a
respected professor at the University of Southern California—his nonfiction
book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War , was shortlisted
for the National Book Award this year—to a higher-profile role where he now
also writes regular columns for the Los Angeles Times and The New
York Times and posed next to Lin-Manuel Miranda at the Pulitzer dinner.
(His publisher even bought him and his wife tickets to the musical Hamilton
, a prize that’s become as hard to obtain as a Pulitzer.)
Toward
the end of our conversation, I tell Nguyen my favorite short story in The
Refugees is the one about James Carver, the crotchety black ex–Air Force
pilot who torments his daughter with his constant, tight-lipped rudeness.
Carver’s triumph over racism and entrée into a white world leads the reader to
initially assume he’s a virtuous character and illustrates Nguyen’s theme of
the two masks. The story lays out Carver’s background: “In the one-room library
of the small town five miles down the road from his [Alabama] hamlet, at Penn
State, which he attended on an ROTC scholarship, in flight school at Randolph
Air Force Base, in an airman’s uniform, in his B-52 and later his Boeing
airliner, he was never where he was supposed to be.”
Speaking
about that story, Nguyen says a major goal in both his works of fiction was to
refute the idea that anyone is truly virtuous. There’s an expectation that a
minority character like Carver—who overcame tremendous hardship to become a
hero—will be a good person, he says, but his carpet bombing during the war
blows that notion to hell. “We all are flawed human beings, and we have masks
of humanity and we have inner savagery,” Nguyen tells me. “We’re not virtuous;
none of us are.”
Source:
newsweek.com
