I chose a variety of stylistic approaches to fiction and nonfiction. VTN: Right now, you could clearly have longlists for the Booker Prize and short lists for the Pulitzer Prize that are all women. It was a matter of practice. I think Ginsburg is correct in that regard. I’m not done with him because, from the perspective of the plot, I think there are still some interesting things to put him through. But our current moment has also made clear that there are lot of Asian Americans out there who are also racist; who accept the inequalities and injustices of American society because it benefits them; who are perfectly ready to spout anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-immigrant, and anti-refugee rhetoric; and who are willing to embrace the military industrial complex and the use of American power overseas. A lot of readers like the book. It’s an unequal terrain because if you happen to be a poor Asian American in an urban environment, you are oftentimes subjected to anti-Asian violence and prejudice. Writing short stories was a completely miserable experience. Viet Thanh Nguyen 05:44. Writing The Refugees really was 10,000 hours of sitting in a room by myself. VTN: Cathy Park Hong’s book, Minor Feelings, which set the groundwork for that essay in The New York Times Magazine, is a great read and a book that taps into her own anger as well as the anger and suppressed rage of a lot of Asian Americans. It’s obviously a great thing to know that there are people teaching these books. I, too, was once an undergraduate student enrolled in Asian American and other minority-specific literature courses, who was thrilled to read books by Asian Americans and other writers of color. The Booker Prize, on the other hand, represents the Commonwealth. It just probably depends on the criteria. So, yes, once you start talking about these things, the absurdity of having a shortlist that’s all white men becomes very clear. Nguyen’s first novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Why can’t you have an entire longlist composed of Asian international authors if your prize is that capacious in its criteria? What was the ethnic studies program at Cal like and when you're there? People can turn to a recent issue of Ploughshares that I edited for evidence of that. I’m reading more works by people of color than white people, but I’m reading twice as many American writers than non-American writers. When the North Vietnamese invaded the south, his family was living in a small town in the central Vietnamese highlands called Buon Ma Thuot, the first town captured by the North Vietnamese. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser. The exhibit is designed to elicit thoughtful dialogue on a wide array of issues with contemporary immigrant and refugee writers delving into questions about writing influences, being multilingual, community, family, duality, otherness and what it means to be American. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Viet Thanh Nguyen February 3 2017 I am a refugee, an American, and a human being, which is important to proclaim, as there are many who think these identities cannot be reconciled. The exhibit is designed to elicit thoughtful dialogue on a wide array of issues with … How does it feel to see your work reach those heights? June 25, 2020, ... officer descended from refugees is different from that of a stereotypical model-minority Chinese-American engineer or a Vietnamese-American writer like me, the moral choices remain the same. I think of The Sympathizer as a dialectical novel, and in finishing it, I decided I needed a dialectical trilogy because the issues the book raises, in terms of colonialism, race, and war, I only got part way through parsing. Submissions for Columbia Journal‘s 2020 Winter Contest will open in all categories on November 15, 2020. Viet Thanh Nguyen (born March 13, 1971) is a Vietnamese-American novelist and professor. They enjoy it and read it pretty quickly, which is not the way it was written. ', 'If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth? Whatever works. My trajectory has been that first, I was sort of a convert to the Asian American cause, believed in it deeply, and then dealt with it for a few decades. The Refugees' Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen shares memories of being a refugee from South Vietnam. I’m working on a nonfiction book in spurts, but I take time off to write Facebook posts and Twitter posts. VTN: I’m certainly very grateful for that and pleasantly surprised. So no doubt, it’s an added layer of stress. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser. "It saddens me deeply that many Vietnamese Americans support Donald Trump to such a degree," Viet Thanh Nguyen, a novelist and professor of English and American … Every moment of writing is an exercise of who you are as a writer. Books and stories, especially literature and fiction, were my salvation.”, “I believe deeply that stories are fundamental to how we see ourselves as people, as citizens, as Americans. That was what it was like for me. This character goes through a lot in The Sympathizer but goes through even more in The Committed, which is all good for the reader because a suffering character is dramatically interesting. It’s critically lauded and taught in Asian American studies classes at major universities. I think recently that changed for me a bit because I became a father, and now I feel at home with the family that I have, the home that we’ve created. The moment a writer gives up on other people’s expectations, human frailties, vanities, and desires and just writes the book that they want to write, regardless of circumstance, that’s the moment they really become a writer. He is also the author of the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies and Race and Resistance. That has to be a key component of anything we do as Asian Americans. Viet Thanh Nguyen had no intention of writing a sequel to “The Sympathizer,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a French-Vietnamese undercover agent working for … My America: Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen was in third grade. You have certain idols and certain dreams about what you can accomplish. But pounding my head against the wall for 20 years with that book meant that somehow I had broken through and learned how to write without really understanding how. I’m also thinking about the impact of COVID and what it reveals about our country and the rest of the world—inequalities that are structural and deep. CJ: For a period of time before writing The Sympathizer, you primarily wrote short stories, many of which were anthologized in your collection, The Refugees. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. “When I was your age, I was very conscious of myself as a Vietnamese American and Asian American, and I knew I was a refugee but I didn’t like go around calling myself that because I knew that there weren't a lot of stories about any of these populations that I was a part of.”. I never thought about being a short story writer until I got to college and discovered that short stories were a thing. He is a professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern ... America was never great for people like me and if I have a mission in my life as a storyteller and as a CJ: What advice would you give young writers during this time of upheaval, both in the world and the publishing industry? Whichever way you arrange my name, it is not a typical American name. Jay Kang 05:58. Viet Thanh Nguyen. And if you’d like to hear more from Nguyen, he visited the AWM along with writers Kao Kalia Yang and Vu Tran in May of 2018 to discuss the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, which they all contributed to. Viet Thanh Nguyen 06:04. No one knows how to cut you down like another Vietnamese person, who’ll do it with a smile. And I wanted to write an entertaining novel—that was also a very serious novel at the same time—and a novel that would grapple with politics, history, and obviously the Vietnam War. That was half my committee. But we were simultaneously forgotten because we only appeared as background. The library was my second home. Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize ... People like me and the Barnard students who want to read different kinds of literature are the barbarians at the gate, the supposed purveyors of … My advance for The Sympathizer was $35,000, which is not that bad in the literary world, but small when compared to the $2 million advance that Garth Risk Hallberg got for City on Fire, which was the big debut novel of that year. There are so many moments of selection and gatekeeping, and the people who are manning the first gates are oftentimes young and unquestioning of their assumptions. Viet Thanh Nguyen received his Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley. But again, it’s always been there, latent, ready to be reawakened at any moment of crisis in which Asians are situated as a threat to the United States, and of course, Trump has made that threat quite visible. “When I was growing up as a refugee in San Jose my parents were working all the time, so they provided all the material things that I needed but they didn’t have the time to spend with me. People of all kinds who are subject to their own unexamined tastes and prejudices are selecting what gets published, including myself. Watch the program in its entirety on YouTube. The novel is written from the perspective of a Communist spy, something unacceptable to his Vietnamese refugee community. That was absolutely liberating. A person whose every act of writing is a part of their writing persona. CJ: To pivot towards some of your work, we now know that The Committed, the upcoming sequel to your 2016 novel, The Sympathizer, is due to be published next year. 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