Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Lasting Impact of the Vietnam War 50 Years Later
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Viet Thanh Nguyen came to the United States as a four-year-old refugee after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Eventually, his family settled in San Jose's burgeoning Vietnamese community, and his parents became the owners of a local grocery store.

He went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, and he's now a professor at USC. We'll talk about the legacies of the Vietnam War 50 years after it came to an end, how they're interwoven with Nguyen's own family life, and how writing has helped him understand the experience of being an other in America. It's all coming up next, right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

It's been 50 years since what we call the Vietnam War came to an end. Saigon fell April 30th, 1975. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen's new collection of essays to save and to destroy writing as an other is not about the Vietnam War per se.

per se, but it's not not about the Vietnam War. He writes,

The answer found in this work is that you probably don't get the privilege of that separation. This morning, we'll explore the legacy of the war and Wynn's attempts to metabolize his own complex inheritances. And of course, we want to invite you into the conversation to explore your complex inheritances from Wynn.

Vietnam and the Vietnam War. You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. You can send your reflections to forum at kqed.org or find us on social media. Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the novels The Sympathizer and The Committed, as well as the memoir A Man of Two Faces. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

So, you know, you grew up in San Jose in a large or at least growing Vietnamese community with parents who ran a grocery store. Like, what are the memories that stick with you from that time of your life?

It was a very difficult time in many ways because obviously we were refugees and my parents had to rebuild their lives, which meant working in this grocery store 12 to 14 hours a day almost every day out of the year. And it was a very difficult life for me to witness. And the impact on me was obviously that my parents didn't have a lot of time to spend with me. They were trying to save our lives by working.

And our lives were also saturated by this sense of loss and, I don't know, sadness from being refugees and having fled our country. You know, you've said in the past that you actually hated being in the store with them. Why was that?

It was a dark and depressing place for me. It was an alien place. Everything was in Vietnamese. I was a kid struggling with my identity and feeling out of place, being reminded that being from Vietnam was something very strange to my classmates who would make fun of my Vietnamese background. Then I would go to the store and surround Vietnamese people with the Vietnamese language and

and eating these goods. And it was, you know, it was not like a 7-Eleven. It was not bright and clean and well-lit. It was, you know, full of rice and fish sauce. I look back now with great love and affection, but as a child, it was hard to deal with. Yeah. And, I mean, did you take refuge in sort of American culture, books, movies, etc.?

Yes, that was my salvation. I would go to the library. We didn't have any books in the house. I mean, the only place I could go to read was at the library. And I would go every Saturday and I would borrow a backpack full of books and bring it home and read all of it by the next Saturday. And besides that, there was TV. I didn't get to go to the movies, but I watched a lot of TV and grew up immersed in all the popular culture that everybody was watching at that time. So it was a combination of both

high culture from the library and popular culture from TV. Maybe for those who haven't read your books, you could fill us in on the path that you took, you know, to San Jose. There were kind of really different stages of the conflict in Vietnam that kind of pushed your family across borders. I mean, we have a long history of that. My parents were born in the north and they fled south in 1954 when the country was divided.

So when South Vietnam lost the war in 1975, my parents became refugees for a second time, and I became a refugee for the first and so far only time. And we had a very dramatic refugee story, and I'd like to say I was there for the Fall of Saigon, for example, but since I was four years old, could I claim to be an eyewitness?

I mean, everything has been told to me from other people's perspectives, but you know, we had to flee from our hometown in March of 1975 because it was the first one captured in the final communist invasion. And we left my 16 year old sister behind. At four years of age, obviously I knew I had a sister, but then I forgot about her. I wouldn't remember I had a sister until we got a letter from her when I was 11 or 12 years of age, which was a shock.

But before then, you know, we fled to Saigon by boat, and then we had to get on another boat to leave Saigon in April of 1975 when the communist army caught up to us. And then we were flown to the United States and ended up in a refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. Wow.

I mean, you write in the new book, To Save and to Destroy, Writing as Another, you write about bare life of refugees. And you're kind of using this philosophical term. I mean, what is that? What did that mean, bare life?

That term comes from the philosopher George Agamben, and he was describing what happens to people in, first of all, Nazi death camps, but he also extends that to concentration camps and refugee camps. And for him, fair life means that you are biologically human, but in a camp, you're stripped of the things that make you human to other people. That's your dignity, your hair, your clothes.

And so you're better-lifed because even though you're technically alive, you're vulnerable to things like starvation, torture, genocide, because...

Other people don't see you as human anymore. And that's a common theme in a lot of, obviously, in literature of concentration camp divisors, but also refugee camps, people who have been to refugee camps talk about the dehumanization. Even if they're being rescued, they're being dehumanized at the same time because they no longer have the protections of citizenship and national identity, and everybody looks down on them. Yeah.

You know, when you start to establish life in San Jose and the Vietnamese community, how did you see people trying to kind of reassemble their full humanity from this state that they had been in as refugees, this bare life? Well, I think for a lot of people, they tried to put that experience of bare life behind them. And it's traumatic to be forced to flee from your household.

and to be on the brink of death and to lose your country. So in San Jose and in other places like it, what the refugees did was

besides trying to find jobs obviously and survive that way, they rebuilt all of these community institutions like the Catholic Church. I grew up, you know, going to Vietnamese Catholic Mass every Sunday. They built community organizations like Catholic community groups. They built, my parents, you know, they built a grocery store and they called it the Saigon Mui.

Which means literally the New Saigon, but they never translated that. So that store became the hub for so many people, and people still tell me they remember going to that store to get their goods, but also to speak the Dithymese language and be surrounded by Dithymese people. So that and other rituals, like having our annual death celebration. So the community rebuilt as fast as they could. Yeah. County, you know, they called their community Little Saigon.

Yeah. You know, I went back to an older short story that you wrote. You referenced it in the new book, too, called War Years. And it really has at its core this kind of collection that a woman has taken up to send money back to back to the old country, back to Vietnam for a supposed kind of guerrilla force.

How much do you think the community that you grew up in truly believed that they might be able to go back home in some way, be able to go back to Vietnam, reclaim Vietnam? And how much do you think they realized that their lives would be in the United States from then on? I think a lot of people...

did not think they would be in exile forever. My parents, for example, when I was growing up said, "You're 100% Vietnamese." So they were really intent on making sure that I didn't fully transform into an American or even transform at all.

And my parents were peaceful people. They were mostly interested in, you know, God and capitalism. But there were a lot of other people who, you know, former military people and government people, who I think really were believers in this idea that one day the tide would swing and they would be able to go back and reclaim their country.

And I remember going to one of our debt celebrations and there was a whole exhibit of these men in their camouflage uniforms in the jungle. It was like Thailand. And we were raising funds to help these men go back and invade Vietnam. So that image always stayed with me. And of course,

Growing up in that community, there was always men in uniforms at these celebrations. There was a South East flag being waved. There was an anthem being played. And so there was this distinct sense that we were a nation in exile. I mean, you know, Saigon might have fallen 50 years ago and the war sort of ended for Americans in some sense. And one thing that was really inescapable in that story, War Years, is the sense that

The war can't really be over because it's sort of porous to people are more porous to the nation. You know, the nation in Vietnam continues to go family still there. Like the war doesn't really end in the way that it does sort of in the American popular imagination.

No, that's absolutely true. I mean, I think for Americans, the war didn't really end either in an emotional sense. And, you know, you would see the Vietnam War movies of the 1970s and 19 through the 1990s. For some Americans, the war hadn't ended. But for the Vietnamese refugees, there was a much more visceral, I think, because there was so much anger there.

and melancholy in the community. And I think some of that was expressed very explicitly through this idea of a nation in exile. But I think a lot of the pent-up emotions were worked out or not worked out in different ways. People had unprocessed trauma. They took it out on each other in

in different kinds of ways within their families, but also in the community at large. So I grew up with the sense that the Vietnamese refugee community was really troubled in a lot of ways. There was a lot of violence, for example, in the community. There was a lot of poverty. And of course that shaped people's lives and their sense of not being American. I grew up, when my parents said Americans, they meant other people. They never meant us. We were always Vietnamese.

We are talking with Viet Thanh Nguyen, author and professor at USC. His latest book is a collection of essays to save and to destroy writing as an other. His previous books include the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer. You know, we want to hear from you. I mean, how did your family or community process this?

the Vietnam War and its end. We'd love to hear from you. You know, the number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. The email is forum at kqed.org. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We'll be back with more right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking with Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of celebrated books like The Sympathizer, The Committed, and his memoir, A Man of Two Faces. How are you reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War? The number is 866-733-6786. Email is forum at kqed.org. And I'm Alexis Madrigal.

One listener writes in to say, you know, I'm Vietnamese American. For the upcoming 50th anniversary of the war ending, I feel cynical. We learned nothing and are repeating the same mistakes. I thought it would be a celebratory year. Instead, I'm feeling deep grief. How are you feeling?

My feelings are pretty similar. I mean, besides the grief, I just have a sense of exhaustion. Like I did all these interviews with 40th anniversary of the end of the war as well, and now we're doing it again for the 50th anniversary. So it's very ritualistic to do this. And I agree with the listener. What have we learned? I don't know whether they're speaking about the Vietnamese people or Americans, but just from an American point of view, it seems to me that we've learned all the wrong lessons as a country from the American border to Vietnam.

I think that the lessons we should have learned would be don't interfere with wars of liberation and independence. Don't invade other countries. And we've done all those things since then. We went to Iraq and Afghanistan and we're supporting Israel in Palestine. What's the

what Israel is doing in Gaza. And that causes me huge despair and grief. And I see a direct line from the Vietnam War to what's happening today with American support of Israel. So, yeah, I know people want to have this 50th anniversary conversation as a way to sort of maybe putting a cap on our history and moving forward. But I really think that we need to think as a country about how

Yeah, we're repeating the war gag.

Do you feel any differences in the way that people, what you're being asked about the 50th anniversary versus the 40th? Do you feel like there is, I'm not even suggesting there's progress here. That's not what I'm trying to say. But do you feel like there's at least change or is it truly like a cycle of reflection where sort of every 10 years people attempt or at least think they're going to learn something and then do not?

Oh, I'm very cynical at this point. I really do think that it's more cyclical. I think one of the reasons why we're having a 50th anniversary conversation is the 50th is a very important date because obviously the generations that lived through the war itself, they're fading away. And maybe at the 40th anniversary, I could assume, for example, that my students, because I teach a class on the Vietnam War,

would have a sort of cultural memory award by watching movies, but my students now are all post-9/11. They're all born after 9/11. Almost none of them

had even watched a movie about the Vietnam War, and it's in the top school, so it literally is industry for them. They may know one or two facts about the war, but in my class, it's the first time they're getting a lot of exposure. So I think that in some ways, having the 50th anniversary conversation is really a way of signaling, this is almost over. I mean, now we can really treat this as a textbook matter and not as a matter that actually involves real living people.

What about, you know, I know that you do a lot of work and even host a podcast for a group called the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network. What about what are, you know, second generation or even third generation, you know, Vietnamese artists saying to each other about this, you know, 50th anniversary?

it's hard to generalize because obviously it's a very diverse community, but I think that for the second and the third generation, it is history. It's not, it is emotional because

The war affects our parents and our grandparents. We absorb those feelings, but it's not quite as personal for the second or third generation that didn't grow up even witnessing what their parents and grandparents went through. So for me, the experience of the war is very intimate because it shaped my life, obviously, but I could see it in my parents' lives.

But if you're born to someone who's Vietnamese American and they themselves were too young to really remember the war, then that impact of the war is going to be quite muted. So I think for someone in the second and third generation to think about the war is really, again, a matter of maybe paying your respects to your parents' and grandparents' generation, but the war is not as powerful for them.

And that in many ways, I think there's nothing to regret about that. I'm excited for the fact that the second and third generation, whether they're writers or other kinds of artists, oftentimes are doing things that have nothing to do with the war. And that's the way it should be. Yeah.

Yeah, it almost feels, you know, one of the things you really grapple with in this book, you know, I'm thinking about the beginning of the second essay here. You are going to talk about your mom living this kind of epic life and that it's almost like the genre of the story that you witnessed was something quite epic of crossing, you know, borders and oceans and survival and everything.

your own kids, I mean, your father, like their dad will be a Pulitzer Prize winning professor at USC, right? I mean, that's a, it's a different like genre of story. Yeah.

Inevitably, it has to be. Again, I just saw the devastating impact of the war and its losses on my parents. For example, my mother lost her mother soon after we came to the United States, but she couldn't attend the funeral, obviously. She had to grieve from this distance, and it was devastating for her. I was really too young to comprehend it, but the emotions wound their way into me.

Watching what happened, I mean, my memoir, "May Have Two Faces," and then the second essay in the book, "To Save and to Destroy," are all about my mother and how she went to the psychiatric facility three times in her life, and how can anyone understand whether that was simply some individual part of her or whether that was also shaped by these devastations or the refugee experience and colonialism.

And my own children, they only know that intellectually. You know, they didn't witness this with their own eyes. So they only hear it from the stories I tell them and they roll their eyes. And, you know, like these are the stories they're hearing. And, you know, my son is old enough to remember his grandmother, but my daughter isn't. And so how can't they bear the same emotional weight that I bear? Yeah.

Let's bring in a caller here. Let's bring in Hamayat in Fremont. Welcome. Hi, good morning. Oh, go ahead. I wanted to ask the professor if he sees any parallels between the war in Vietnam and the war in Afghanistan, because my family was in Afghanistan in the early 90s.

Early 80s my dad was in medical school when the Cold War started and then we came here in the 90s and he basically started from scratch and just Started working to support us and we really never got any time with them either Because they were always busy like every day of the week even weekend So my question to the professor is does he think there's any parallels and similarities between the two wars? Thank you

Yeah, thanks, Amman. What do you think, Fiat? Well, I think that refugees share a lot of common experiences in Jephthah. And it's gratifying for me to hear from people who are from Iran or Afghanistan that they can see a lot of similarities in their refugee experiences than the enemy's refugee experiences.

But when it comes to the war in Vietnam and then the wars in Afghanistan specifically, I think there are parallels as well. And I think it's really unfortunate. One of the things I really hate is how the Vietnam War has turned Vietnam into the name of a war, but also into an allegory or an analogy. So when the Soviet Union fought their war in Afghanistan, it became, you know, Afghanistan became the Soviet Union's Vietnam, for example.

Or when Vietnam got caught in the war in Cambodia, it became Vietnam's Vietnam. So I hate that idea. But there are some, obviously, similarities with Vietnam and Afghanistan, especially, you know, in the last war in which the United States got involved. The United States came in, you know, installed, you know, American-style military and political policies and all these American ambitions. That's very similar to what the United States did in Vietnam.

And when the war went badly for the United States, but also obviously the Vietnamese and the Afghans, what did the United States do? They blamed the Vietnamese and the Afghans. The United States said, "Oh, the Vietnamese are poor fighters, they're not devoted to their own cause, Americans are more willing to sacrifice their lives and their resources than the Vietnamese." And the Americans said the exact same thing about their Afghan allies when the war effort collapsed there as well.

And so, you know, it's a very similar situation of the United States going into countries and trying to impose its will and its style and then becoming frustrated when those things don't work out because Americans never understood what was happening in Afghanistan or Vietnam in the first place. The last thing is the sense of betrayal.

Like, I think a lot of Vietnamese refugees did feel betrayed by the United States, but could not really say that out loud because they were also at ultimate rescue by the United States as well. It's a common dilemma. And the sympathizer, I say, it's great that we received American aid, but maybe we wouldn't have needed it if we had been invaded by Americans in the first place. And I think maybe that sentiment might exist in the Afghan community too. Yeah. Yeah.

One of the things that I love about your work is it sort of grapples with the – that there are two political realities here. One is sort of Vietnamese people and Vietnamese Americans inside the United States dealing with the local politics, but also the politics sort of back home and that many people –

who came were ended up being on the sort of losing side of the war in Vietnam, like a civil war in Vietnam. You know, one of our listeners, Susan writes in to say, many of us were students and first got involved to end the war against Vietnam. We were part of an era of fairly bold action for the time and felt we were part of helping end America's genocide and

Looking, I mean, your character, you know, particularly in Sympathizer, but in general, there is this complexity of Americans assuming, particularly student protesters and protesters in general, assuming that Vietnamese people that they run into were on the same side with them in some sense.

Well, that is the irony, right? I mean, a lot of the Vietnamese refugees who came to the United States were pro-war. I mean, they were not, you know, on the same side as the anti-war protesters.

It's important not to generalize because there were, you know, I mean, it's a diverse community. And, you know, even before 1975, there were Vietnamese international students in the United States and they were divided too. Some of them were pro-Southern regime. Some of them were anti-Southern regime. So the very complex situation, but there's no doubt that the majority of people who fled as refugees after 1975 were deeply anti-communist and would not have found a lot of

sympathetic relationships with anti-war American protests. Yeah. Let's bring in Stephen, who wants to talk about The Sympathizer. Welcome, Stephen. Hi. This is a lighter question, but I thought his book, The Sympathizer, was absolutely brilliant. And I think it should be compulsory reading in American literature.

classes in high school. However, and this happens exponentially more than not, I thought that the adaptation of the book for Max diluted the story for me by injecting Robert Downey in his quest to get an EGOT to play five different characters. I thought that

It disappointed me. But again, the book was fantastic. It was a superb book. So congrats to Viet. And I would imagine that his students learned a lot from him. So thank you. Thank you, Stephen. It's fascinating, Viet, because I went back and I listened to some of your older interviews before The Sympathizer had been Hollywoodized. And

And you had a very fraught relationship with Hollywood. I mean, I assume you still do in this sort of propagandistic elements of Hollywood production. So how did you feel about having your own work sort of go into that particular kind of cultural meat grinder?

Sure, but first let me say Robert Downey Jr. is a great guy. He sends me a Christmas package every year. He's fabulous. We're in the belly of the beast. What are we supposed to do? I grew up watching these Hollywood Vietnam War movies, but also Hollywood movies in general. I was deeply shaped by them, as I think most Americans are. And I was deeply shaped in a negative way in regards to the Vietnam War movies, where

the racist and sexist depiction of Vietnamese people really troubled me, and they troubled a lot of Vietnamese people. And so when the opportunity came to adapt the book into a TV series, I thought, yes, there are all these complications. I recognize the irony of what it means for me, who's been so critical of Hollywood, to agree to this. But I also thought, here's an opportunity.

This is an enormously expensive production. It'll have a wide reach. And if we do a decent job with this, there will be young people watching this, you know, Vietnamese and otherwise, who will learn something. And maybe what they will learn is, I don't have to tell the story yet. The story's already been told, so I can do something else. And so I thought the risks were worth the dangers that were posed by working within this belly of the beast. Mm-hmm.

You know, reading about you watching Vietnam War movies, I was also just thinking about myself as a kid. And I was obsessed with Vietnam War movies. Even, you know, I think I saw Platoon when I was like eight, you know, and trying. I actually think for me as a kid growing up in 1980s and 90s,

It was difficult to see an America presented that wasn't like the Top Gun version. So it was almost like Vietnam War movies for people who are not Vietnamese had a different effect. And I understand them to be problematic, but like Apocalypse Now, I know that you both have problems with it and also were fascinated by it as a movie version.

How do you think Hollywood has evolved, if at all, in its sort of ability to do complex portrayal of other cultures and American culture at the same time? Oh, I think the answer is it hasn't done very well. I mean, if we look at how it deals with the Vietnam War, it's gotten marginally better. Like a movie like the adaptation of The Quiet American from 10 or 15 years ago is certainly better than a lot of previous Vietnam War movies.

But that took, I mean, it's delayed. It took decades for Hollywood to even get that level of sophistication. Or if we look at, you know, the representations of Japanese people, it took like 50 or 60 years before Clint Eastwood could make letters from Iwo Jima, for example.

And so the delay is really, really long. And I think it's because Hollywood is so expensive. I compare Hollywood movies to aircraft carriers. It takes a lot to turn an aircraft carrier. Whereas with books, the only thing that books cost are writers' lives, and no one cares about that. So books can be very... Authors can be very responsive very quickly. So I'm pessimistic here, because if we look at the representation of Muslims and Arab...

for example, it's still horrifying what's happening in that regard. And because we have such a tense relationship with Muslim and Arab countries and peoples, Hollywood representations are awful in that way. So yes, Vietnamese representation is a little bit better, but that has to be put in the context of how generally bad Hollywood is dealing with non-white people. Yeah.

Chris, one of our listeners writes in to say in the late 70s in the Central Valley of California, we had a huge influx of Southeast Asian kids. At that time, I worked in the public schools with immigrants assisting with English as a second language for kids aged 7 to 12 years.

Thank you.

generations. And these days, I tell my grandkids about the folly of war. We're talking with Viet Thanh Nguyen, author and professor at USC. Latest book is a collection of essays to save and to destroy writing as an other. His previous books include the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, The Committed, and the memoir, A Man of Two Faces.

How are you reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War? How was your family or community affected by that war? And how do you make sense of your own complex inheritances? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-8255.

That's 6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email forum at kqed.org with those. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, etc. We're KQED Forum. And of course, there is the Discord as well. We'll be back with more with Viet Thanh Nguyen right after the break. Stay tuned.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking with Viet Thanh Nguyen, who is an author, of course, a professor at USC. He's got a new book of essays out called To Save and To Destroy, Writing as an Other. And we're taking your reflections on your own complex inheritances. Forum at kqed.org, numbers 866-733-6786. And this is Thoa in Palo Alto. Welcome. Welcome.

Yes, good morning. A pleasure, you know, to be able to share my experience on this podcast about the 50th anniversary. I am in my mid-60s right now, and in 1975, I was 17 years.

born and raised in Saigon. So I have seen, you know, a lot of things going on around me. I left the country in 1985 to be in Paris. I was raised in the French school in Vietnam.

So once I landed in Paris, you know, I turned the page, you know, on my country. I applied for this French citizen and I continue my life, you know, as almost a French person, a French person, you know, in a Vietnamese body. And I have

to be married in 1997 with an American. And so I've been living in Palo Alto, you know, since and during my whole life for some reason because of my education. Maybe I was in a French-Vietnamese school. I felt half French, half Vietnamese, but I closed my Vietnamese side. So I always felt like I'm a fake French person until two weeks ago.

No, a month ago, I went back to Vietnam all by myself for two weeks, and it's completely different. I felt closer and... Sorry, I feel a little bit emotional. No, no, go ahead. Take your time. All of the fear, the anxiety, the frustration, everything that I felt during my time living there...

it's gone. And I felt big closure and I felt really receptive with the country and I was so excited and so glad to find my country again. Sorry again to be so emotional. And I think that's

The country right now, you know, with the young generation, they're very professional and friendly. And they receive tourists and Vietnamese like myself coming back with open arms. It's really, really nice. So the two weeks I spent there, every single moment from Saigon to Hanoi, for me, it was

It was surreal. It was like I was living in a dream. And the feeling of having my country back, that I can call myself Vietnamese, that I can, that's where people ask, oh, you, yes, I'm Vietnamese. Yes, my country is Vietnam. So it's,

It's something that it's hard to explain. And my plan in the future is to bring my American husband and my two daughters, you know, to introduce them, you know, to my country. Thank you. Yeah, no, I appreciate you sharing that experience. I mean...

Viet Thanh, I mean, this is interesting. I mean, people begin to go back. I believe you first go back or your family does in the early 1990s, right? What do you think being able to go back to Vietnam fairly easily can do? Obviously, it had a huge impact for our caller there. Did it do that for you or your parents or was it a more mixed experience?

I'm so glad for our caller that she had that experience. And I think there's just so many different responses that people have when they return. And it depends on them, their individual circumstances, and the time that they go back. Because, again, I grew up being told I was 100% Vietnamese. And then my parents went back in 1994, the very first chance they could. And then when they came back, my father said,

We're Americans now. So whatever they encountered there was the complete opposite of what happened to our color. But that was also, what, 40 years ago. When I went back for the first time in 2002, I told myself I am not going to figuratively fall down and kiss the soil of my homeland because I didn't believe in this notion of authenticity that, you know, we're Vietnamese and we'll always be Vietnamese and so on, which I think, you know, a lot of Vietnamese people do believe.

Because I had grown up as someone who felt quite alienated from the Vietnamese community. People thought I was whitewashed, a banana, and so on. And I like to think that I was whitewashed before my time, because now, if you look at the current generation of Vietnamese Americans, they're much more like me. Didn't speak Vietnamese very well, saw themselves as Americans, see themselves as Americans, and so on.

So when I came back to Vietnam, it was with a certain kind of optimism but also cynicism that I would not become fully Vietnamese just by returning. And that's what happened. I had a great time in Vietnam for many reasons, but I also had the distinct sense that I was not fully Vietnamese. And absolutely, the Vietnamese people are welcoming, but there's also tension there, especially maybe more so 15 or 20 years ago that

sometimes people would look at me and think, well, why did you leave? Why were you so lucky? Or why did you decide not to stay? And are you American or are you Vietnamese? And a lot of that was very conditional, I felt, depending on the circumstances. If people wanted to bond with me emotionally, I was Vietnamese. If I was paying for things, I was an American. So there was still a lot of tension around history and money and politics. Well, and it's interesting too, because I think many people

immigrants and children of immigrants have exactly this experience, right? I mean, there's also that very specifically alienating experience of being able to mostly sort of able piece together what's going on in another language that you don't actually speak that well, so you can't contribute to that conversation. And it always... I feel like some of my early experience of that in Mexico almost contributed to my devoting myself to hyperfluency in English. Do you think that...

these kind of linguistic components of your upbringing, you know, being surrounded by Vietnamese in one context and English in another, did contribute to you being like, I am going to master this language of the United States? Absolutely. I felt like I had to make a choice about who I was. And a lot of that was going to happen through language. And so I think subconsciously probably felt that I had to

choose one language. And for me, that language was going to be English rather than Vietnamese. Yeah, yeah. Let's bring in, we actually have Brian Vo, who is one of our fellows here at KQED. And Brian, you know, we got kind of an experience of someone who was in the

their 60s, kind of going back to Vietnam. You're of the next generation after me and Viet. So what has your experience been like of kind of learning your story's family and kind of the immigration story that you've heard? Yeah, thanks, Alexis. Well, with my story, it gets quite complicated because as the children of the refugees, I

they don't really want to share their stories or they don't bring up their stories. So a lot of kids get kind of left out of the messaging and a lot of the pain and they just see kind of like

the struggles with the trauma as they grow up with their parents and a lot of them start to resent it. But I was kind of lucky that even though I had that, my parents also shared their stories of like trying to escape Vietnam. Their aunties, my aunties and uncles like traveling by boat illegally to try to get to Thailand or some other Southeast Asian country to escape the communist, the North communism. And so I think that kind of,

kind of pull away from each other is difficult for my generation to kind of understand. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting what you're saying, just like this idea that the trauma doesn't go away, but maybe some of the narrative that was attached to the trauma goes away, leaving just a hole, I guess, in the experience of the family. Yeah. Because like with the family being kind of already kind of broken up from the start,

Yeah.

What do you think as you hear the next generation talk about what experience there? Well, I think for some, there's going to be that secondhand trauma, the secondhand memories that they absorb from their parents. That whole idea that when you live through this kind of experience, it can't really be transmitted to another generation. The other generation is inevitably going to change having grown up in different circumstances.

And so I think there is a level of incommunicability about experience that these generational differences signify. But at the same time, you know, those of us from a later generation have heard our parents' stories, and we have at least sort of an intellectual understanding of what they've been through. And so that does...

shape us and it means that we feel, many of us feel, that we still have to pay respect to what our parents and grandparents have gone through, even if we disagree with the conclusions that they draw from that. So now we see a lot of political differences, for example, between the first and second generation around exactly who we are as Americans, do we support Donald Trump and so on. These are really divisive kinds of political issues that are actually related to the trauma of the Vietnam War.

Yeah. One of our listeners, Sharon, wrote in to say, you know, asking you to speak to the fact that many refugees who fled their countries to be free of communism came to the U.S. abjectly fearing the left and so turned to the right.

We in here. A couple other listeners are shouting out documentaries and films that they like. One says, shout out to Bay Area local Barbara Sonneborn for making Regret to Inform, a 1998 documentary about the impacts of the war as told through the stories of several Vietnamese and American widows. Nations may win wars, but the individual fighters and civilians caught up in them lose no matter what side wins.

there on Another listener says, you know America's involvement in the war in Vietnam was based on ignorance fear and racism to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War everyone should see the 1974 film hearts and minds and everyone should also see the Errol Morris film the fog of war about Robert S McNamara finally admitted how much of a mistake America's involvement in the war Was do you do you agree with either those recommendations? I?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I teach both of those in my Vietnam War class. I mean, The Fog of War is a really disturbing documentary to watch because, you know, this Robert McNamara was in charge of so much during the peak of the war and he was bringing in these attitudes from World War II and around mass bombing and things like that that would have tremendous impact on the lives and deaths of so many Vietnamese people and of course the deaths of American soldiers as well. He felt obviously very responsible for

or how his own participation in deceiving the American public would lead to many unnecessary deaths on both sides. And Hearts and Minds is still a really provocative documentary. It's one of the few American documentaries or even movies that I think really try to treat the South Vietnamese sympathetically, but also critically at the same time. But Peter Davis, the maker of that documentary, isn't critical of Southern Vietnamese people out of a racial sense.

or an orientalist sense, he's critical of South Vietnamese corruption and other kinds of failures within the South Vietnamese regime and nation. But he's also enormously sympathetic to the losses that the South Vietnamese had to endure during the war as well. Do you want to maybe shout out a couple of individual Vietnamese American artists who you think are doing interesting things with the things that they've inherited from the U.S. and from Vietnam?

There's so many, which is a good thing that there's so many, but unfortunately recently the artist Dinh Qu Le passed away in Vietnam, but he was probably one of the best known Vietnamese diasporic artists and his work really grappled with the history of the war and of Vietnamese people.

A younger generation artist would be Andrew Tuan Nguyen, who's really getting a lot of attention now for his installations and his movies, which deal with the past in a very complex way. And one of the things I want to point out, of course, much of our discussion is locked down into the relationship of Vietnam to the United States.

But the history that produced us as a diaspora also involves the French, also involves other colonized countries like Senegal and Morocco, whose troops were sent to Vietnam. And Andrew's work deals with that as well. And this is so amazing to think about the fact that when Senegalese troops went to Vietnam, some of them took on Vietnamese wives or partners. They had children and some of those children were taken back to Senegal. Can you imagine being a part of a small...

mixed-race Vietnamese Senegalese community. And so Andrew's work deals with some of these complexities of history.

One reason I wanted you to talk about some of those folks is you actually have several different appearances coming up. You're going to be in conversation with Soleil Ho at the Mill Valley Public Library on April 10th. You're also part of an upcoming anthology, The Cleaving Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora, and you'll be at the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network event on Saturday, April 26th of this year, of course.

Do you want to talk a little bit about that anthology, The Cleaving, Vietnamese Writers and the Diaspora?

Yeah, and by the way, April 11th, we'll be at McCants Institute in San Francisco talking about the cleaving. You know, basically what happened is I was a hungry, young Vietnamese American when I was in college, starving for Vietnamese stories. And I thought, I'm going to become a writer, but I also wanted to help and build a Vietnamese artistic community. And so this was the origins of me hoping to form a group back then called Ink and Blood, which then eventually became the more professional-sounding Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network.

Yeah, I like it too. But anyway, so here we are with D-DAN some 30 years later. And, you know, we do a lot of things like residencies and fellowships and, you know, literary events and so on, all with the ambition of not having voices for the voiceless. I really resist that idea that as writers, we are voices for the voiceless.

Because if you know any Vietnamese people, they're really loud. So it's not that they're voiceless. Their stories have been suppressed. And so that's what the mission of D-Van is. And the Cleveland, this anthology, it has like 35 different Vietnamese writers of the diaspora in dialogue with each other. And that's not even the total number of writers that we have. And it's just really, I think, a landmark anthology because it points to how important literature and storytelling has been for the Vietnamese diaspora to claim its place in all the different countries we've ended up in.

stuff in. Are there any particularly interesting crossovers between different countries and Vietnamese Americans? You know that there are large Vietnamese populations in Canada, France, Australia, Germany. So we have all of these people. We have a fascinating conversation between Kim Twiggy of Canada and Ocean Boone of the United States. And one of the interesting things to think about is like

Vietnamese diasporic literature is actually probably more widely known globally than Vietnamese literature from Vietnam. That's really unfair, but it reflects how Vietnam is still sort of isolated culturally in some ways, and that's partly self-inflicted because of Vietnamese government policies. But it also means that the Vietnamese diasporic literature has been translated into many different languages and is so widely accessible.

I thought it was really interesting. We include Van Nguyen in this book. She's from Israel. I mean, did you know that 300 Vietnamese refugees ended up in Israel in the 1970s and early 1980s? And they produced a poet in the figure of Van. Wow, did not know that. So if you're intrigued by that, as you probably should be, that book is The Cleaving Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. We, of course, have been talking with Viet Thanh Nguyen, who's an author and professor at USC.

His latest book, aside from that anthology, is the collection of essays to save and to destroy writing as an other. Previous books, Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, book The Committed, and the memoir A Man of Two Faces. Casey over on the Discord just wants to say, looking forward to reading Wynn's new book, just wrapped up The Sympathizer, The Refugees. It's a great series of short stories too. His writing is deeply existential and interesting.

humane. And as a researcher in identity and culture, the themes are very relevant to me. Yeah, Dunwin, thank you so much for joining us this morning. A bit all the hubbub of the schedule. Thanks so much. Alexis, it was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you also to Brian Vo, Forum intern, for joining our conversation. Thanks so much, Brian. Thank you, Alexis. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Hey, it's Glenn Washington, the host of the Snap Judgment podcast. At Snap, we tell cinematic stories that let you feel what it's like inside someone else's skin. Stories that let you walk in someone else's footsteps. Storytelling like you've never heard before.

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