An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen

Former associate editor Andrew Koenig sat down with Viet Thanh Nguyen to discuss his memoir A Man of Two Faces, the themes of his Charles Eliot Norton lecture series “To Save and to Destroy: On Writing as an Other,” and how he sees this work fitting in with his career as a novelist.

Andrew Koenig: I wondered as I was reading A Man of Two Faces: is this memoir? Is this family history? The word “autoethnography” came to mind, but I don’t know if that’s the right word. How do you classify the book, or do you not think of it in those terms?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I thought about the genre issue quite a bit. Some of the books and writers I’m drawn to are extremely hard to classify in terms of genre. One of the reasons is that the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, or between genres like autobiography or history or theory, are not useful in terms of talking about historical experiences where borders and boundaries have been completely disrupted. I think of writers like W. G. Sebald and António Lobo Antunes in the European context, whose novels sound as if they are autobiographies or histories. In the American context, people like Theresa Cha and Gloria Anzaldúa, who mix genres together, have influenced me. Cha and Anzaldua are highly subversive because they disrespect boundaries and borders as writers, but also as individuals in periods where nationalism demands strict borders.

I know how genres are supposed to work; I know what their conventional boundaries are supposed to be. I was simply not interested in them. I could have written a much more conventional memoir and probably made more money. But because I know exactly what I’m supposed to do, I don’t want to do it. And the reason I’m supposed to do a certain thing is because that genre will reinforce the ideologies of the nation-state that led to the war that created me in the first place. I’m not interested in describing that war, in describing the content of an experience. I’m interested in looking at the formal relationship between nations, wars, subjectivities, and genres.

AK: You talk about your desire to tack away from both the sob story and the success story and about those being overdetermined genres, especially in the American context. So, when you decide that you’re not going to go a tried-and-true route, or fulfill a genre expectation, what challenges accompany that? Were there difficulties in terms of structuring or presenting this material?

VTN: When I wrote The Sympathizer, I had spent something like fourteen years working on short stories, trying to learn the rules of the short story. And then with The Sympathizer, I decided, I don’t care about your stinking rules anymore, I’m just going to do what I want to do. And it was liberating to do that. It was a very joyful experience as a writer. That, for me, is very rare. Mostly it’s a struggle and agony. With A Man of Two Faces, I wanted to continue to give in to the joy of the writing and the intuition, even though I’m dealing with some very serious subject matter, both historically and personally.

I felt that that was an interesting tension, to feel joy in writing about something horrifying. The first two-thirds of the book were very easy to write because I’ve been thinking through a lot of these theoretical, political, formal questions for a very long time, decades. I didn’t have to sit there and think very hard about the formal properties of the book. I just gave in to the intuitive choices that I made.

The last third of the book was actually much harder because that was where I had to go into the unexpected territory of things I had not thought about, namely my mother and her illness and the impact that had on my family and on me. That was where I had to slow down and try to figure out how I could write about those experiences in a way that would do justice to my mother’s experience.

AK: I am interested in this series of plays on words: remember, re-member, dismember, disremember, where you use spaces or hyphens to play with the idea of just remembering. Reading them, I was reminded of the Holocaust Remembrance Day motto, which is never forget. That’s what you do when you tell a certain kind of story, chiefly testimonies: you say, this is what I went through and here’s how I was before and here’s what came after and here’s where I am. I want to ask about competing impulses. On the one hand, there’s a desire to just say the thing that happened. These are the facts of the case, this horrible war was fought and these are the various casualties of that war, here is what it was like to live in a refugee camp in the United States, and so on, but also wanting to capture some of the difficulty of what actually remembering is like. Something I appreciated in the book is that occasionally you would say, “I don’t actually remember when or where this happened, I can’t really place it that well.” Could you talk about that dimension of remembering?

VTN: I grew up in two communities that put a high price on memory, the Vietnamese refugee community and the American community. In the 1970s and ’80s I was never allowed to forget that the Vietnam War happened because I was hearing it both from the Vietnamese refugees, their version, and from the United States. So it was very easy to become attached to an object of memory: the war. Always remember, never forget, the war or X, whatever X happens to be, and every community has that object of memory, whatever it is.

And yet it became apparent to me that the Vietnamese community has been deeply fractured into two ideological factions. Each of these communities chooses to always remember and never forget in completely opposite versions, depending on what side of the political conflict they follow. So how do you reconcile that? You have the same object of memory, but one side says we’re always going to remember this and never forget that, and the other side says the exact opposite. I had written a book called Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, where I tried to wrestle through the ethical implications and complications of what happens when you have the same object of memory in two completely opposite versions.

With A Man of Two Faces, I didn’t want to write a book that would fetishize memory, that would say, Hey, look what we Vietnamese refugees have been through, isn’t it awful? Of course it was awful, but it was no more awful than any other group’s experience of whatever happened to them. I did want to talk about what happened to Vietnamese people, but I wanted to also demonstrate, or make readers feel, or be aware, that as much as terrible things happen to Vietnamese people and we should remember those things and never forget them, we should also remember that the Vietnamese people have done terrible things to other people. That’s the problem that practically every community struggles with and most communities fail at. I’ve dealt with that topic academically in Nothing Ever Dies, and here I wanted to deal with it emotionally.

Even my own family was implicated in that process. If you talk about Vietnam, the Vietnamese people, no matter what their ideological position is, are always happy to talk about how the Chinese colonized us. Everybody would talk about thousands of years of Chinese colonization. But no one ever talked about what the Vietnamese have done in terms of colonizing Vietnam, in which I think my family was implicated.

AK: It’s interesting too because you mentioned that you were bombarded with constant remembrance growing up, and yet you describe some of the critical scenes in this book as things that your family never talked about: a holdup at the store, a break-in at your house. I actually wrote down, and then you refer to it later on, the opening sentence from Maxine Hong Kingston’s book, The Woman Warrior, which ironically and very cleverly begins, “You must not tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.”

VTN: There are always official processes of memory. I grew up in this refugee community and every time you would go to a public event there would always be a military honor guard. You would have to sing the Vietnamese anthem. There would be speeches and rituals. All these things are meant to create a public sense of memory. In our specific case it was about losing the war, losing the country, how much of a tragedy that was.

Of course the United States has very similar rituals as well. These are the collective memories that we all share if we’re a part of the national community. But what happens within a family is a different matter. You can absorb the public memory—this is how we understand our history—and yet your family itself can be silent on their own individual traumas.

That’s a very common experience. I’ve met so many people who talk about the fact that they know something historically traumatic happened, but they don’t know what happened within their own families. So there’s public speech, but private silence. It’s not true for everybody; I’m just saying that it’s true for a lot of people. When I encounter the children of American Vietnam war veterans, for example, that idea of silence, typically around the fathers and what they have been through, but sometimes mothers, too, is a very common experience as well. So that creates a dissonance that compels different reactions for the first and second generations. The second generation wants to know and has internalized that they can’t ask questions. The first generation has a silence and sometimes goes to the grave with those silences. But on both sides, there’s this tension around the silence. It’s very much the absent presence; even if nothing is said, it’s going to shape the entire dynamic and energy of the family. A lot of Kingston’s work is about silence, silence that compels speech or compels action. And I think that that is very true for families but also possibly for larger communities, whether we’re talking about a subculture or a diaspora community or the nation. The things that are not said will determine so much speech and action around the void in the middle.

AK: I’m thinking of this once more in terms of Holocaust remembrance. A common thing was that people who actually live through the camps didn’t really talk a lot to their children and the whole idea of Holocaust remembrance didn’t necessarily crystallize until some time had passed. In the book, you write about visiting Vietnam a couple of times, but you don’t talk about battles, you don’t talk about the major events of the war. So do you ever feel a sense of reluctance or ambivalence about writing about the big thing that history books are about? Is that a thing that you’ve dealt with in writing this book or your previous work?

VTN: The Sympathizer and Nothing Ever Dies definitely deal with the big, horrible things. Nothing Ever Dies is about going back to Vietnam and listening to all the battlefield sites. I do think of my work as having a set of themes and concerns and the books themselves can be thought of as being linked around these themes and concerns, whether it’s history and memory or the more particular or the formal nature of genres and writing.

All these things are interconnected, but not each book has to deal with all of it at the same time. And so because I did Nothing Ever Dies, I didn’t have to cover the same territory in The Man of Two Faces. And in fact, when I wrote Nothing Ever Dies, it’s pretty much a straight scholarly book written with a lot of narrative flair because I wanted non-academics to read the book. But most of it is field visits, theory, philosophical meditations about memory, and some autobiography scattered throughout. And my mother appears briefly at the end. That set the stage for me to write A Man of Two Faces, which is pretty much the reverse. Nothing Ever Dies and The Sympathizer allowed me the emotional and writerly space to write this book.

AK: I want to turn to a question that you raised in the book about “narrative plenitude.” Or the reverse, a paucity or a dearth of narratives about certain groups. You tie this to the moviemaking industry in Hollywood and how Americans receive history in this prepackaged way. Can you just talk about what you mean by narrative plenitude, and how that relates to your work as a whole?

VTN: Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I did experience narrative scarcity without knowing it, in the sense that I grew up aware that I was Vietnamese and aware that the only stories about Vietnamese people that I encountered outside of the Vietnamese refugee community were Hollywood stories in which we came off very, very badly.

There are different versions of narrative scarcity. I mean, there are some versions of narrative scarcity where your stories don’t appear at all, so there’s absence. And then there are some versions where you do appear and it’s horrible. I experienced both of those versions because outside of the horrible version, there’s also nothing else about these people. And at the same time, I also experienced narrative plenitude because I would go to the library every weekend and there would be more than enough narratives, books, stories to fulfill me.

I’ve lived with that tension my entire life as a reader and as a writer. I do want to deal with the narrative scarcity around Vietnamese representation and misrepresentation, and yet, at the same time, that doesn’t mean that I somehow am not fulfilled narratively by the whole world of literature that already exists.

For me, the questions of narrative scarcity and narrative plenitude are not only about narratives or stories. They’re also about the economies that make scarcity and plenitude possible. For me, when I say narrative scarcity and narrative plenitude, I’m certainly demanding a world of more fulfilling stories, but I’m also working toward more fulfillment of life in general, economic life, social life, political life, without which we cannot have full representation.

AK: At one point in the book, you write that you have been kidnapped by literature, by books, by English. And I was reminded of this quotation from a book I just read, The Vulnerables by Singrid Nunez. In that book, she talks a lot about the writers she goes back to, and she writes,

At some point early on I must have understood that all the great writers whom I so loved, all those white Europeans whose works I revered and hoped to emulate, I must have understood that they—either for reasons of my class, or gender, or mixed race, or for being a crass, shallow American—would have looked down on me. But I can’t remember this ever mattering to me.

“Now,” she writes in her skeptical tone, “in our brave new cultural world, I keep being told that it’s the only thing that should matter to me.” She’s also contending with this mix of feelings around this subject. I want to hear your thoughts on it.

VTN: I’m a big fan of Sigrid Nunez. I think in A Man of Two Faces I express a very similar sentiment, where I talk about going to the San Jose Public Library and eventually realizing that almost none of what I was reading was literally about me. But I fell in love with literature. I fell in love with stories. I was connecting with these literally dead white male writers, or sometimes dead white women writers from different countries, all writing in English most of the time. And it didn’t matter that when they were writing, they were not thinking of somebody like me. That was the power of art and storytelling and literature, that you could be writing for a completely different audience. And yet your words and your stories would connect with someone from a radically different experience.

I think that’s exactly what Nunez is talking about, because, in fact, through my writing and through my education as a PhD in English, I have become a part of this canonical tradition. And yet I’ve encountered people in this canonical tradition who have literally looked down on me because I don’t fit the right image, or I don’t speak the right discourse. And so I don’t think she’s very far-fetched in speculating that if she or I were to encounter some of these famous writers, we would just be anomalies to them. But that does not in any way discredit the power of the literature. I would hope that my books are not just for people who are exactly like me but that they would speak to people from radically different experiences now, but hopefully in the future as well.

Nunez is saying that there’s a switch in the mood where literature is only supposed to speak to a particular experience relevant to the reader. And what she’s describing in this twofold process is, for me, the conundrum of being a so-called minority, who should be the recipient of the whole world of literature but is sometimes reminded that they are actually only their identity. It’s very easy as a so-called minority to say, well, I just want to be without an identity, because that’s what literature promises. And I completely reject that, because that position ignores the reason we even have this back-and-forth, which is because of an entire history of colonization and conquest that cannot be separated from civilization. That’s the dilemma.

So I’m not saying we shouldn’t read dead white male literature, to use that term, but we should read it with this acknowledgement that civilization and colonization, canon and barbarism, go hand in hand. And that kind of sophistication is oftentimes missing in the coarsening of the discourse, which either blames dead white men or blames minorities for being stuck with their identities.

AK: I noticed you mentioned a little sarcastically in the book how The Sympathizer is being televised, and if you don’t want to bother reading it, you can always just watch the show. I want to get your thoughts on how that process has been—fruitful, positive, weird? What has it been like to see something through to the screen?

VTN: Well, the funny thing is that I’ve recently seen two movies that have been based on novels, American Fiction and Poor Things. So now I’m guilty of the same failure. I like Poor Things, but there’s been some controversy, since it really does not do what the novel does. So now I have to go and read the novel. I had the same feelings about my own adaptation of my own work. A lot of people, probably numbering at least in the hundreds of thousands and maybe millions if we’re lucky, will never read the novel, but they will watch the TV series. And so the book will have a whole different life as a story on TV. The reason I agreed to do the adaptation is because I did want the story to reach a larger audience and because I realized the power of Hollywood.

Hollywood requires hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars to do something. It’s also a hugely collaborative enterprise, and it’s weird for me to be a part of something that is not simply something that I do by myself alone in a room. It’s not my TV series, it’s our TV series, in which I play a very small part. And there are hundreds of very talented, intelligent people working on this production. Of course, I hope that it’s good. But it’s also humbling because you can have all of this money, all of this talent, all of these individuals, and something can still go wrong. Just as something can go wrong with writing a book as well, despite my best intentions. I satirized Hollywood and now The Sympathizer is being made by Hollywood.

AK: You’ve come full circle.

VTN: I was on the set on the day they were shooting the movie. So there’s a bunch of people working, shooting a bunch of people pretending to be making a movie. And people were literally going around confused as to which crew was which. And that was a very funny embodiment of the ironic dilemma that The Sympathizer has been caught up in, and myself too.