Titi Mary Tran/Nguoi-Viet English

Sitting on a sofa in his meticulously modern living room, Viet Thanh Nguyen looked through a window out to the street, where on a normal day one could find rows of cars parked along the pavement. Occasionally, he stopped to take a quick sip of water to keep him from coughing and to fight the sinus congestion caused by a cold, while contemplating the answers to a Nguoi-Viet Daily News reporter regarding his recent book: The Refugees.

Born in Vietnam and raised in California, Viet Thanh Nguyen is the 2016 winner of Pulitzer Prize in Fiction with his first novel, The Sympathizer, a debut of the skillful pen strokes that highlight the complexity of the Vietnam War, voicing a narrative that is fairly unfamiliar: that of a conflicted communist sympathizer.

After several Facebook exchanges and the mutual acquaintance of his partner over the past few years, Viet Thanh Nguyen agreed to an interview with Nguoi-Viet at his Los Angeles residence, nicely tucked away in a well-known Silver Lake area. As if the host was expecting the interview, the iron gate to the red-brick house was wide open. Santa Ana wind shrieked in the air on a weekend afternoon causing the leaves on his front yard to twirl into tiny tornadoes making the walk from the gate to the front double door even more elusive. Viet opened the door with a huge smile—a light hearted welcome seemed to contradict a pair of lethargic eyes on his handsomely chiseled face. Inside the main door, next to the stairs leading to the living area, a neat arrangement of adults’ shoes and two pairs of tiny children’s foot ware provided a subtle request from the host to remove shoes before entering the living room. Perhaps the couple’s young son is the owner of these adorable and fashionable little pairs of shoes.

Refugees v. Immigrants

The Refugees is a collection of short stories written before The Sympathizer. There is a very clear distinction between refugees and immigrants. While the former are forced to leave their home country to escape war, persecution, or natural disasters, the latter choose to leave for a foreign country due to urgent economic, political, social, or personal factors. Refugees often face hardships and have difficult times assimilating into the new cultures compared to immigrants, because they are usually caught in unprepared situations.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a refugee.

He confesses, “I grew up in a Vietnamese community in San Jose in 1970s, 1980s that was marked by a lot of negative things, a lot of poverty, well-fare cheating and domestic violence, and people leaving their spouses, and violence. So I think that this inevitably shapes my perception of what it means to be a refugee. It’s not a pleasant experience to be a refugee, which is something that all the Vietnamese people knew about. Mostly, other Americans don’t know about these stories, of what’s happening in the Vietnamese community. That had a theoretical impact in a sense that it set me on the road of trying to make sense out of how it is that we tell the story and how it is that we know or don’t know things about people we consider to be different than us. In our case, Vietnamese people were the ones who were different from Americans or other immigrants. And we want to challenge this reality in United States that Americans mostly want to tell stories and want to write stories about themselves, White Americans, and not about new Americans, immigrants, refugees, people like us.”

People Learn To Be Racist To Become More American

As an old adage’s says, “America is a country of immigrants,” the United States has long history of bullying the new comers. Viet Thanh Nguyen pointed out, “New groups to this country over the last century, century and a half, have become Americans, partially because newer groups coming after them are even more alienated. And because once they are here in this country, the Americans learned that they can become racists – they can become Americans by distinguishing themselves from the population that is already here, one that is subjugated some kind of a way.”

Vietnamese Americans are no different. Even though Viet Thanh Nguyen wants to challenge the idea that one must take on the racist attitude to become American, he recognizes that, “the Vietnamese people that I knew in the Vietnamese community were racists. They have very prejudicial things to say about Latinos, African Americans, and that is part of the reality of Vietnamese culture and part of the reality of how it is that Vietnamese people became Americans in this country is to absorb the attitude of Americans.” He worries that “contemporary Vietnamese people, Vietnamese Americans might not feel very sympathetic to Muslims or Syrians, and there are some Vietnamese American are doing exactly that, saying we are Vietnamese refugees. We Vietnamese Americans are the good refugees; we are not like the Syrians, that’s exactly how the process of Americanization, one dimension of it, works.”

Different from The Sympathizers, which is a novel written for Vietnamese audiences, The Refugees is a collection of short stories about Vietnamese Americans, written for a non-Vietnamese audience. Viet admitted, “When I was a young writer, I wanted to address that absence, or gap, by writing these short stories, but in doing so it meant that almost inevitably my primary audience is going to be Americans. Vietnamese people already know these stories to some extent.”

It took Viet Thanh Nguyen almost twenty years to write these short stories dealing with the inner struggle of identity issues such as racism, assimilation, and dominant v. suppressive culture to realize that he does not have to explain his own cultural and racial differences to the majority of the American population.

“I am a defiant writer,” he asserted.

“The minority in this country and in most countries often time feel that they have to explain themselves to the majority. People in the majority never have to explain themselves because they can assume everyone knows what the normative set of assumptions is. So if you’re a majority writer, you don’t have to explain. The reason why I say I am a defiant writer is because I think all minority writers should be defiant writers and that if we explain, we are going to be forever minorities. My task as a writer is to not deny the minority culture that I come from so I will write about Vietnamese people, but I will do it as if I were the majority.”

“The basic dynamic in this country is that as a minority you are given an either-or choice, typically, to be a part of majority or be a part of minority. That’s why one of the reasons why so many Asian Americans in this country either stick with their own or they assimilate with white people. They marry white people, for example. They don’t often marry Latino or African Americans, and this either-or choice is the choice that I refuse because I think that it automatically reasserts the dominance of the majority of white people, and I’m not interested in placating that population.”

“Vietnamese Americans are one among many minorities in this country that are striving to live the American Dream, which is another way of talking about a very deep set ideology among Americans. And yet at the same time the existence of Vietnamese Americans in this country is brought about by a history that contradicts the American Dream. Most of us would not be here in this country if not for the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War, you can argue and all of that, but it remains in the history of the United States as a very divisive chapter in American society, partially because it contradicts all these high flown American ideals. So we are one of the living embodiments of a deep contradiction in American history and characters.”

Americans, Viet Thanh Nguyen describes, “are forgetfully optimistic.”

The United States’ bombs dropped in Vietnam exceeded all the bombs dropped during WWI and WWII combined, including the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is no denying that Vietnam as a country and the Vietnamese as a people have a place in American history. Yet, like many other minority groups, the struggle to be recognized and thus carve out an identity in this diverse immigrant country of the United States is continuous and transforming through different stages. This process shows in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s journey to become a writer.

Viet recalls his first racial culture shock: “I remember when we got to San Jose in the late 70’s, my parents opened a grocery store in downtown and I remember walking down the street one day and seeing sign in a store window that said, ‘Another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese.’ and at the time I didn’t know what racism meant, but it disturbed me. I have never forgotten because it didn’t seem to me that my parents were driving anybody out of business – because downtown San Jose at that time was not a nice place to be. It seems to me to be wrong blaming Vietnamese people for what was happening economically in downtown San Jose, and clearly there were some kind of issues about racial culture here.”

Race Can Trump Other Issues

So Viet Thanh Nguyen chose a pen as his weapon of choice to tackle the identity and cultural issues he faced growing up. “I’m certainly a part of the majority when it comes to education, language, wealth, profession, things like this, but I’m a minority when it comes to race, and the reality of this country is that it’s still incredibly important as the presidential election just showed. Race can trump all other issues, literally. That’s why I refuse the either-or option to say I’m either minority or majority. I’m both. For writers, often they are given the either-or choice. Some minority writers decided they are not going to write about their minority background, but instead they write about the majority, they write about the white people. And that again is submitting to the false choice. I will write like a majority writer but I will also talk about Vietnamese people at the same time. Those two things need to be brought together. Those strategies are at the heart of what I consider to be an aesthetic decision I made in writing my books.”

Viet continued, “I took a long time to figure out how you do that and that’s why writing short stories collection was a key part of my education as a writer. This is how I taught myself to be a writer by writing these short stories. So I began the process thinking I want to explain Vietnamese people to non-Vietnamese people. By the time I ended the process, I thought I was going to refuse to explain and I will write about minority experiences as if I were majority and that set the stage for writing The Sympathizer which is a much more defiant and angry book than The Refugees is.”

Though Viet Thanh Nguyen belongs to the first wave of Vietnamese refugees who escaped Vietnam at the Fall of Saigon, he considers himself lucky to come to the United States when he was four years old. For older Vietnamese refugees who often carry with them the scars of war and who already have an adult identity, they will never probably be as assimilated as younger ones into American society.

I Was An Outsider

Viet was a part of the minority even among the Vietnamese communities until the accolade of his recent Pulitzer Prize award. He concurred, “Coming from someone who is younger, I didn’t have all of that cultural inheritance, either as strength or weakness. I actually felt that in relationship to the Vietnamese communities up until last year, I was minority in that community, because I was an outsider.”

The only story that is biographical in The Refugees collection is “War Years,” in which Viet Thanh Nguyen was a young boy helping his parents run a grocery store in San Jose, California, and observing the day-to-day interactions between his mother and her customers. This practice of observing certainly helps him to become certain kind of writer and certain kind of person who is different than many Vietnamese Americans and even to those Vietnamese in Vietnam. “I feel that,” Viet explained, “for me that feeling of being distant from Vietnamese community here or in Vietnam, which I am perceived as troubling because I have never fit in to this community and still don’t. At the same time, that has been beneficial for me as a writer because I know enough about Vietnam and Vietnamese communities to understand a lot of what is going on and yet I’m outside of them so I can see what their limitations are. There are so many Vietnamese people who are so deeply immersed in their Vietnamese culture that they can’t see the outside of it, and that’s a problem, and for writer it’s good to be able to see inside and outside of the culture you’re writing about.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen on Cultural Issues

In “Other Men,” one of the short stories in the collection, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s protagonist is a gay man, who is a refugee from Vietnam and who struggles with his sexuality while living with two other gay men in San Francisco. Although the story is purely fictional, Viet admitted that it is somewhat biographical in sense that he was homophobic during his high school years.

Viet recalled his experience when someone confronted his view regarding homophobia in high school. He had a job and one of the co-workers was a lesbian. Viet had no idea she was lesbian and his supervisor told him, ‘yes, she is a lesbian.’ He said, ‘really?’ and his supervisor said, ‘yes, she thinks you’re homophobic.’ He said, ‘really?’ Viet later explained, “I think that was a very interesting moment for me because there are some people when you say ‘you’re homophobic’ or ‘you’re racist’ they will automatically say ‘no.’ They would be like ‘No, absolutely not! I am a good person.’ I think that’s an unhealthy reaction because you should be interrogated. You should be capable of interrogating yourself, and in my case I was like, ‘Ok, maybe I am homophobic. I have to figure out what it means.’ Vietnamese people too will actually deny they’re racist even if they are. They think that racism is something horrifying and bad, and it is something that the KKK does. In fact, most people are racist in a much more subtle, benign, prejudicial way, and the refusal to even recognize that is itself a problem.”

Nguoi-Viet reporter asked Viet Thanh Nguyen to discuss his view on LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender) issues and if he has ever being subjected to the stereotypes existing in this community. Even his thought on the question itself is insightful, “I think people who are homophobic would refuse to question themselves by definition. Most of us are in the spectrum of 100 percent gay and 100 percent straight. We are in somewhere in between and in my case; I’m probably 90 percent straight. I’m okay with that. For example, 10 percent means I can recognize men are attractive but I don’t have much of a desire. I’m ok with recognizing that and I think that is healthy if you can embrace the fact that there is a set of gray shades for most people, but if you absolutely and fundamentally reject that possibility maybe you are not acknowledging that, and that is a real problem.”

On Marriage

The Refugees is the book that meant to describe for the non-Vietnamese about Vietnamese Americans. Yet it seems to elude one of the most critical topics for many Vietnamese people: marriage identity. When asked what he would think about inter-racial marriages, blended family, and traditional Vietnamese relationship expectations, only personal generalization was revealed. Viet Thanh Nguyen shared, “I was raised by my parents to believe that Vietnamese people and Vietnamese family are perfect because they are devout Catholics. They wanted me to marry a Vietnamese woman, because Vietnamese women are the best and the purest and all that. Yet, in my encounters with Vietnamese people, Vietnamese women and men are far from the belief. Vietnamese people are just like everybody else. I have a set of ideals and virtues for proper gender behavior for men and women, and father and mother, and mother and children. But in practice, we break those norms of our culture all the time. Vietnamese people have affairs. They behave badly toward each other, toward their children in addition to all the good stuff. That stuff happens too.”

Concluding Thoughts

However, Viet explained, “I try not to be explicit about the things that Vietnamese people take for granted because if we take something for granted, we don’t have to be explicit. Among Vietnamese people, we know that parents and children are taking care of each other in different phases of their lives. That rarely needs to be spoken out loud. If I should speak out loud, I will probably have to explain this to someone who is not Vietnamese and in the entire short collection I try not to explain it because if you explain that means you are automatically orienting yourself toward a non-Vietnamese audience. In many of these stories the relationships between Vietnamese people is governed by the unspoken assumptions of the culture. It is important to me to depict that and to assume that these patterns of relationships were normal. Because in the Vietnamese communities, they are all normal. It’s only when someone else who is not Vietnamese steps into the picture that these relationships might not be seen as normal because that other person might have a different set of assumption. And if that other person is a white member, then I as a writer have a choice to explain or not to explain.”

Interviews with great writers and thoughtful individuals usually bring about clarification and empowerment. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s talk as a Vietnamese American about identity, culture, racism, family, personal attainment through the writing process is nothing short of raising consciousness and empowering thoughtful actions. One would not be able to achieve such a level without having a deep understanding of Vietnamese American’s psyche. Perhaps this is why he chose ghosts, both living and dead, as protagonists in the first chapter of his short stories collection: The Refugees.