Viet Thanh Nguyen: Finding a Voice in America

Viet Thanh Nguyen fled Vietnam as a child, escaping Saigon with his family the day before the capital city fell to communist forces. They went to military bases in the Philippines and Guam, then lived in Pennsylvania for a few years before finally settling in San Jose, California, where he discovered the American dream was complicated.

By the time he was in college, he explained at the National Book Festival last Saturday, he was reading James Baldwin and Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and he became acutely aware of the ties between American imperialism abroad and its domestic racism.

His mother, who had survived internal displacement, war and colonialism in Vietnam and then remade herself once more in the United States, could no longer handle the stress. In his late teens, she was hospitalized with mental illness. It was all very disorienting.

“I was raised in a very Vietnamese household in a Vietnamese refugee community and my parents told me, ‘You are 100 percent Vietnamese,” he told C-Span during the festival. “At the same time, I was constantly being exposed to American culture, so I felt like an American spying on these Vietnamese people.”

That dual identity, of seeing both the peril and the promise of the United States as a world power – and seeing the pain within a family that was doing well in its new home – is the driving force behind his literary work, most notably in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Sympathizer,” now an HBO series.

“It’s been a long struggle to wrestle with the idea of the United States, its mythology, the American dream, which is so seductive to so many immigrants and refugees who come here,” he said during the Celebrating James Baldwin’s Centennial panel at the NBF. “And to be able to root out American mythology from within oneself is extremely difficult to do.”

Nguyen, 53, a MacArthur fellow and the Aerol Arnold chair of English at the University of Southern California, was onstage with novelist and professor Ayana Mathis. NPR’s Eric Deggans moderated the hourlong discussion, which covered Baldwin’s lasting influence on American society, literature, the LGBTQ+ movement and civil rights activism.

Nguyen focused on Baldwin’s international perspective during his time onstage, but in a separate interview he spoke about the role that libraries and reading played early on. After the upheaval of fleeing the war, his parents worked long days at their small grocery store. They were saving to educate their children, but they “struggled tremendously” and their long absences while working left young Nguyen adrift.

His “salvation,” as he puts it? The San Jose Public Library.

“It was the place where I went for stories and entertainment and fantasies and escape because I couldn’t afford to buy any books myself,” he said. “These books were free and they connected me to the world — a world beyond my parents’ grocery store, beyond San Jose — a world of books that were not written for me … but those books did connect with me and gave me the idea I could be a writer.”

From the beginning, he set a high standard of both academic and literary success. He figured that it would take him at least 20 years to learn how to write the books the way he wanted, full of history and social critique and irony and interconnected storylines that tied all these themes together. He attended a private high school and went to U.C. Berkeley, where he obtained two degrees and then a Ph.D. in English.

He had not read many books by Black American authors until university, but he was then greatly impressed by Baldwin and many others. He was so taken with Ellison’s “Invisible Man” that he would later name his first child Ellison and use the opening imagery of “Invisible Man” as the inspiration for the first page of “The Sympathizer.” (The Library preserves Ellison’s papers, including his personal library.)

“Invisible Man” starts like this: “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind.”

The first lines of Nguyen’s “The Sympathizer” are a clear homage: “I am a spy, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such.”

“The Sympathizer,” some two decades in the making, drew on Nguyen’s lived experiences, of what had happened to his home country and his family, but he was also drawing energy and parallels from Black American authors of the mid-20^th century who were taking on political and social themes, such as Wright’s “Native Son,” Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and Ann Petry’s “The Street.”

In his new life in America, Vietnam “wasn’t even a subject” in school, he said in a 2022 PBS interview, and the American culture he was exposed to — Hollywood films and books at the library — viewed Vietnamese people most often in “deeply racist and sexist ways” and “that was shocking for me.”

“I was looking for role models, and I was finding that in Asian American literature,” he told the NBF crowd. “But the other tradition that was really powerful for me was Black writers, Black literature. … It was really important for me to think through, ‘What does it mean to be a writer of color?’ Black writers are offering these arguments that they’re putting forth about the relative relationship of politics, putting literature into art … and it was a very fundamental debate. I think it shaped a lot of people and we’re still talking about that to a certain extent today.”

Since “Sympathizer” marked his literary debut nine years ago, Nguyen has published a second volume extending the story (and is working on the third book in the trilogy), a book of short stories, a nonfiction book on the Vietnam War, two children’s picture books and, most recently, a memoir. It’s called “A Man of Two Faces,” again emphasizing that sense of duality.

He lives with his family in Los Angeles and is delighted that there is a “tiny neighborhood library that’s so beautiful” just three blocks from their house. In a city of cars and freeways, it’s an easy walk.

His face lights up when he remembers this: His young daughter Simone went there on a recent day and saw his children’s book, “Simone,” prominently featured in the front window. She proudly took it to the librarian at the front desk, holding out the cover.

“‘That’s my name and my father wrote this book,’” he recounts her saying. Delighted, smiling, he adds: “And for me, that just brought everything home.”

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