Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American author best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Sympathizer.

 

Early Life:  Nguyen related the tale of his early life in The New York Times.  His mother and father fled the communist regime of North Vietnam as teenagers in 1954, relocating to South Vietnam and leaving much of their family behind.  They eventually settled into the city of Ban Me Thuot, where Nguyen was born in 1971.  During the last years of the Vietnam War, many residents of South Vietnam fled, seeking refuge in other countries.  When Saigon, the capitol of South Vietnam, fell in 1975,  Nguyen’s family fled to America.

“Although my family and other refugees brought our war stories with us to America, they remain largely unheard and unread, except by people like us. Compared with many of the four million Vietnamese in the diaspora, my family has been lucky. None of my relatives can be counted among the three million who died during the war, or the hundreds of thousands who disappeared at sea trying to escape by boat. But our experiences in coming to America were difficult.”

Nguyen came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family and was settled in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, one of four such camps for Vietnamese refugees.  Initially, he was separated from his parents and put into a foster home while his parents “got back onto their feet”.  They would be reunited and moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where they lived until 1978.  His parents then moved the family to California, seeking better economic opportunities.  They settled in San Jose, California and opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores in the city.

Nguyen attended St. Patrick School, a Catholic elementary school, and went on to Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose.  His experiences as a refugee shaped his childhood and adolescence.

“In mastering that language and its culture, I learned too well how Americans viewed the Vietnamese.  I watched “Apocalypse Now” and saw American sailors massacre a sampan full of civilians and Martin Sheen shoot a wounded woman in cold blood. I watched “Platoon” and heard the audience cheering and clapping when the Americans killed Vietnamese soldiers. These scenes, although fictional, left me shaking with rage. I knew that in the American imagination I was the Other, the Gook, the foreigner, no matter how perfect my English, how American my behavior. In my mostly white high school, the handful of Asian students clustered together in one corner for lunch and even called ourselves the Asian Invasion and the Yellow Peril.”

Professional Life:  After high school, Nguyen briefly attended UC Riverside and UCLA before settling on UC Berkeley, where he graduated in 1992 with degrees in English and ethnic studies, graduating with the fullest honors.  He stayed at Berkeley, getting a Ph.D. in English in 1997, and moved to Los Angeles for a teaching position at the University of Southern California.  He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and American Studies and Ethnicity, as well as a member of the steering committee for the Center for Transpacific Studies.

The USC website described some of Nguyen’s accomplishments at the university: “His teaching and service awards include the Mellon Mentoring Award for Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students, the Albert S. Raubenheimer Distinguished Junior Faculty Award for outstanding research, teaching and service, the General Education Teaching Award, and the Resident Faculty of the Year Award. Multimedia has been a key part of his teaching. In a recent course on the American War in Viet Nam, he and his students created An Other War Memorial, which won a grant from the Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Teaching and the USC Provost’s Prize for Teaching with Technology.”

Written Work: Nguyen is an award winning author.  His work, fiction and nonfiction, serves to highlight the often misunderstood and misrepresented Vietnamese-American culture.   In an interview with Displaced, he described how his experiences fuel his work:  “I suppressed for so long that experience of being a 4-year-old refugee being taken away from my parents. I don’t want to feel that,” Nguyen tells Grant and Ravi on this week’s episode of Displaced. “But that was where the authenticity lay, in trying to keep drilling into that emotion, trying to understand it. in order to write genuine drama, genuine characters, I would have to sort of look inwardly into myself and my own experiences.”

His first book, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, was published in 2002.  In it according to Good Reads, Nguyen “argues that Asian American intellectuals have idealized Asian America, ignoring its saturation with capitalist practices. This idealization of Asian America means that Asian American intellectuals can neither grapple with their culture’s ideological diversity nor recognize their own involvement with capitalist practices such as the selling of racial identity. Making his case through the example of literature, which remains a critical arena of cultural production for Asian Americans, Nguyen demonstrates that literature embodies the complexities, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture.”

 

His next book, The Sympathizer, is a work of fiction published in 2015.  Good Reads describes it: “It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.”

It won numerous awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2016), California Book Award for First Fiction (Gold) (2015), PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2016), Edgar Award for Best First Novel (2016), The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize (2015) Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction (2016), Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Adult Fiction (2015), International DUBLIN Literary Award Nominee for Shortlist (2017).

He followed this up shortly in 2016 with the non-fiction Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.   According to Good reads: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations.  From a kaleidoscope of cultural forms novels, memoirs, cemeteries, monuments, films, photography, museum exhibits, video games, souvenirs, and more Nothing Ever Dies brings a comprehensive vision of the war into sharp focus. At stake are ethical questions about how the war should be remembered by participants that include not only Americans and Vietnamese but also Laotians, Cambodians, South Koreans, and Southeast Asian Americans. Too often, memorials valorize the experience of one s own people above all else, honoring their sacrifices while demonizing the enemy or, most often, ignoring combatants and civilians on the other side altogether. Visiting sites across the United States, Southeast Asia, and Korea, Viet Thanh Nguyen provides penetrating interpretations of the way memories of the war help to enable future wars or struggle to prevent them.”

He as written several more books: The Refugees, a collection of short stories surrounding Vietnam, Vietnamese-Americans, and the Vietnam War, and The Displaced, which he edit and contributed to and which contains essays from various authors that explore and illuminate the refugee experience

He also contributes writing and essays to other publications including The New York Times and L.A. Times as a Critics-at-Large. Many of his articles can be downloaded here.

In addition, according to his website, Nguyen is actively involved with promoting the arts and culture of Vietnamese in the diaspora through two organizations: the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), for which he is the co-director, stages film festivals, youth arts groups, and literary festivals and events that center around the voices of Vietnamese in the diaspora and diaCRITICS, a blog for which Nguyen is the editor. It features book, film, and art reviews, essays and commentaries, interviews with artists and writers, travelogues, and more, all dealing with the cultural production of Vietnamese in the diaspora.