Caught up in History: In Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyên
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I’d given up on interviewing Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyên after receiving an automated response to a lengthy email. Apologies. Viet is declining all interview opportunities for the foreseeable future.
I’d cold-emailed Nguyên in an eager rush back in November, during a week off, and my first spell in the sun in god knows how long. Looking back on the hour I spent writing the email, I recall my state only vaguely: a feverish, semi-hallucinatory spell, during which I chose to forget, or temporarily ignore, my apprehensions around making audacious requests of people I’ve never met.
Viet Nguyên was born in South Vietnam in 1971. His parents were refugees from North Vietnam, who’d moved south in 1954 and fled to the US after the fall of Saigon in 1975, leaving behind Viet’s sixteen-year old adopted sister. He didn’t meet her again until he returned to Vietnam twenty-seven years later. By this time he is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. He has a PhD from Berkeley. For all intents and purposes he’s a model refugee success story.
I first encountered Nguyên’s work last year when his unconventional memoir, A Man of Two Faces, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Then I picked up a copy of his Pulitzer Winner, The Sympathiser. I was hooked. It’s by far his best-known work, with two sequels and an HBO adaptation – a sprawling, difficult dive into the absurdity of the Vietnam war and its aftermath. Its protagonist is a man of conflicted loyalties: raised by a poor Vietnamese mother, he studies in the US and returns to Vietnam to fight for the Viet Kong. Eventually he finds himself a communist spy socialising with elite Vietnamese exiles in LA. In reversing the gaze – showing the Vietnam war not through the eyes of Americans, but from the perspective of a ‘man of two faces’ – he deconstructs America’s cultural imaginary of its most propagandised conflict, and ultimately shifts the narrative around Vietnam into new territory.
I keep getting derailed from writing fiction because there are so many pressing things to write about at the moment.
When the automated email arrived I deleted it and forgot about the whole thing. It was four months later, in March, when a reply from Nguyen’s EA landed unannounced in my inbox. Nguyen would be keen for an interview. Would I still be interested?
After a few weeks back and forth I was allocated a slot over Zoom. I’d recently moved to Delhi, a frantic, eleventh-hour uprooting that involved abandoning various day jobs to pursue dreams of being a foreign correspondent. My hasty decision now meant I was scheduled to interview Nguyên at four in the morning.
I joined the call: groggy, slightly discombobulated. But any tiredness vanished when Nguyên started to speak. I was caught off guard by his peculiar charisma. Nguyên is at once laid-back and self-assured, with none of the haunted self-deprecation that defines the voice of his memoir. He seemed to have quick-fire calls lined up all day – but still he appeared on my screen in an elegant grey suit, radiating energy.
Among Nguyên’s lengthy list of achievements – on top of the Pulitzer, he was a recipient of both the Macarthur and Guggenheim fellowships, and in 2024 became the first Asian-American to headline the highly prestigious Norton Lecture Series at Harvard – he’s a regular essayist and a committed public intellectual, outspoken on topics from Gaza to the refugee crisis. ‘I keep getting derailed from writing fiction,’ he sighs, ‘because there are so many pressing things to write about at the moment.’
Nguyên is refreshingly unpretentious. He’s also unusually attuned to his own perceived flaws and intellectual contradictions. ‘The way the Norton Lectures start is with me feeling like I’m inauthentic,’ he laughs. It’s an issue that’s plagued him across his career, and it means that, whatever dizzying success he achieves, no accolade is taken for granted. ‘Who are we,’ he smiles wryly, ‘as racialised, colonised, or minoritised people, to end up in the halls of power?’
This ‘inauthenticity’ is not just a personal anxiety. It’s an ethical issue – a political dilemma in which everything is at stake. Inauthenticity is a form of relation to a perceived centre. It’s a high vantage point from which one can view the so-called ‘authentic’ from a safe distance. From there, gradually, one begins to notice the cracks in the facade.
In Nguyên’s oeuvre the problem of relating to the centre is articulated with humour and precision. Sometimes it is articulated through doubleness: his characters are both outsiders and insiders, never completely estranged, never truly belonging. We might call them ‘partial outsiders’. The narrator in The Sympathiser is a prime example: ‘I am a man of two faces,’ he tells the reader, ‘and also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or horror movie. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.’
Stories save our lives, but stories are also used to destroy people.
It’s a line I connected to when I read it. Before I’d read Nguyên, my guru of inauthenticity was Homi Bhabha, the Indian scholar who’d coined ‘colonial mimicry’, the idea that colonialism engenders a trompe l’oeil effect, effecting a kind of doubleness. The act of mimicry exposes the hollowness, the artifice of the coloniser’s normalised cultural codes; thus the colonised subject, in the act of mimicry, is both subservient and subversive. As Nguyên puts it to me: ‘the inauthentic unravels the authentic’.
Nguyên’s solution to accusations of inauthenticity: ‘not to feel that I’m the one to blame, and not to feel that what I have to do is prove myself to anybody, or seek validation. But instead,’ he says, ‘to go to the paradox and the contradiction and the dialectic, and assert that mimicry itself, as a site of inauthenticity, is exactly where we should be.’
The paradox Nguyên describes is captured in the title of his latest work, To Save and to Destroy. It’s a collection of essays, based on his Norton Lecture series, in which the author talks directly about what is at stake in writing from the position of an other. When I ask him about the book’s title, he says he wanted to ‘give recognition to the idea that storytelling is powerful’, but not just in the ‘sentimental’ mode. ‘Like, stories save our lives – which they do!’ he says. ‘But stories are also used to destroy people.’ That is precisely what’s at stake now, in the US, he says, ‘what the Trump administration is doing in terms of using storytelling to characterise people as being invaders of the United States, and then using that to do incredibly inhuman things to immigrants and refugees. For me, that is a perfect example of using dark narratives of salvation in order to destroy people.’
It’s a precarious position: to be both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, privy to both sides of the story, but never to align oneself with one side. It’s a subject position that is part and parcel of the diasporic experience, but not limited to it. Think of Kafka, a German-speaking Jew living in Prague; Melville, who spent many years at sea, or George Orwell, who spent his early years as a police officer in Imperial Burma. W. G. Sebald, who wrote in German, but rarely about Germany, who wrote about the English countryside in order to look, obliquely, at the reverberating trauma of the Holocaust. Sometimes that position of otherness is even self-imposed. (James Joyce, who insisted on moving to Zurich to write about a colonised Ireland.) The point is that success (literary or otherwise) is often not in spite of – but precisely because of – a certain degree of alterity.
‘I think those of us who find ourselves to be minorities in our society – however that minority experience is defined, it’s not just about race – often experience a sense of duality,’ Nguyên tells me. ‘That’s because we live in societies where that sense of duality is imposed on us and enforced on us. For example, in the context of the United States, I’m an American, but I’m also somebody else, I’m also something else. And I’m reminded of that all the time, because of America’s obsessions with the Vietnam war, but also because of America’s – the United States of America’s – commitment to perpetual war, which is always producing displacement, in terms of refugees. You know, we’re coming to the US, becoming these minority populations. I think the minority experience is a universal feeling in some ways, that people experience in very small doses.’ But – and this is crucial – ‘for people who are [ethnic] minorities, it’s a constant condition, because it’s imposed.’
There’s no easy answer to power.
Nguyên is also fascinated by the mechanics through which the ‘symbolic and economic value’ of otherness, his own and others’, is ‘created, extracted and exploited’. In To Save and to Destroy, he details the story of novelist Thelonius Ellison, the fictional protagonist of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure – a prescient and shrewd critique of the publishing industry’s readiness to reward writing that conforms to racial stereotypes. ‘Fed up with the Blackness projected onto him and his work’, Ellison writes a joke novel titled ‘My Pafology’. When it’s clear readers aren’t getting the joke (a producer asks to buy the film rights for three million dollars) he changes the title, ludicrously, to a single word: ‘Fuck’. The more subversive he tries to be – the more he resists – the more voraciously the market feeds off his work, churning it out as commodity. ‘Trying to escape capital is an illusion,’ says Nguyên. ‘It’s an illusion that generates and feeds into the capitalist machinery’.
Nguyên’s determination to avoid the trap of exploiting his own otherness seems almost compulsive. He knows his own position is a delicate one, fraught with contradictions. He lives, teaches and has made his career in the US – the very same country that waged war on his home country, Vietnam. Of course, he says there’s ‘no easy answer’ to these quandaries, simply because ‘there’s no easy answer to power’. Gayatri Spivak captures the problem best, he tells me. ‘You cannot not want to have an identity. Identity politics is a complicated thing. We live in a society in which identity is commodified. But identity is also the route through which exploitation, oppression and liberation takes place.’
Maybe one answer lies in refusing to deal in binaries. ‘It’s about thinking through the paradoxes, and the contradictions, of identities and commodities. That’s why some of my writing is explicitly self-conscious about that capture, but also about the possibilities of revolt against that capture.’
How to cope within a system that insistently neutralises and transforms radical work into something palatable? It’s an issue that’s at stake for Nguyên every day. ‘We live in an absurd situation,’ he tells me, ‘because to be a minority in a Western context is to live a surreal experience. You have the sense that the only way in which you can be heard is to turn yourself into the commodity that the dominant society wants you to be.’
Nguyên’s literary heroes are the authors that have confronted these issues head on – writers he describes as ‘committed and engaged’. (His second novel is of course titled The Committed – a title in dialogue both with Sartre’s espousal of ‘the committed writer’ and Adorno’s 1962 essay ‘Commitment’, a response to the former.) ‘These are the key adjectives for me,’ he says. This commitment, he says, is a commitment to form and to truth – and for Nguyên, the two are inextricably linked. ‘John Keats,’ he says. ‘Beauty is truth, truth is beauty. For me, that means art and politics are not simply these different things pushed together by ideologues. Art can be political, explicitly political, simply out of a response and a commitment to beauty and truth.’
Nguyên consistently challenges any and every form of categorisation thrust upon him and his work. In A Man of Two Faces he tells me, he is not just writing a memoir: he is challenging ‘the very notion of what a memoir is’. ‘When we’re dealing with people who have survived or not survived horrible, calamitous tragedies, like the Vietnamese refugees, what also becomes important for me is to think about ourselves not only as individuals, which is what memoirs are typically supposed to deal with,’ he says, ‘but as people who are caught up in history.’
I love that phrase – people who are caught up in history. I love the way he uses the passive voice, and with it flips the conventional notion of a memoir on its head. The subject is foremost as an object of history – as opposed to a subject splayed out on the operating table, awaiting the memoirist’s dissections.
More often than not, these challenges to hegemony are at the expense of Nguyên’s career. But doing the work matters to him more than success. ‘I have no ambitions to write “the great American novel”,’ he says, smiling. ‘I’m perfectly fine with writing the not-so-great American novel, being a not-so-great American writer.’ For Nguyên, aspiring to greatness is a ‘trap’ – because aspirations of greatness are invariably rooted in vanity. ‘These are the human frailties, in the back, at some level, of the way the whole market operates.’
But he also sees the other side. Even though he’s embraced the idea of being a minor writer, he tells me, that doesn’t mean there’s some level of trickery involved, on the level of his own thought-processes. ‘It’s hard not to think about questions of greatness – at least for me. But I hope we can inoculate ourselves against that,’ he smiles. ‘Being not-so-great, being minor, can have its own sense of power. It produces an inauthentic insight that I embrace.’
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Arjuna Keshvani-Ham is a writer, journalist and filmmaker from London. She is currently based in New Delhi where she is working as a foreign correspondent.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was turned into an HBO limited series. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, his most recent books are A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial; To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other; and the edited volume The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora.
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