Long before Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Sympathizer, the public library in San Jose gave him an award for his debut book, Lester the Cat. Nguyen was in third grade. This “put the first seed in my mind that perhaps this could be fun to do.” So from an early age he loved to read and write for the sheer pleasure it brought him, the escapism and entertainment it can provide. But he soon realized something was missing in literature, “and what was missing in it were stories about people like me and my family, refugees, Vietnamese people, Asian Americans…and I wanted to write some of these stories myself.”
Nguyen first came to the United States as a Vietnamese refugee in 1975. When the North Vietnamese invaded the south, his family was living in a small town in the central Vietnamese highlands called Buon Ma Thuot, the first town captured by the North Vietnamese. So the family “fled on foot, made it to the nearest port city 150 kilometers away, through very terrible circumstances, throngs of refugees and fleeing soldiers, and dead people.” They safely got to Saigon, only to have to flee again a month later after North Vietnam captured Saigon. Nguyen’s family all made it safely to the U.S., which Nguyen credits to an incredible amount of luck, or from his parents’ perspective, “God smiled on us.”
Nguyen and his family eventually settled in San Jose, which at the time was the second largest Vietnamese refugee community in the United States. Being surrounded by fellow refugees gave Nguyen a sense of his Vietnamese heritage and greatly impacted his writing, especially The Sympathizer. The novel is written from the perspective of a Communist spy, something unacceptable to his Vietnamese refugee community. As Nguyen says, “I took everything I knew about this community and this lifestyle and I put it into that novel, but I did it with a difference…I wanted, in my work, to acknowledge their pain, to acknowledge their history, but I wanted to do it in a way that would also make them uncomfortable with their own assumptions. This is part of the complicated task of a writer…we can talk about our people, whoever they happen to be, but we can challenge them as well.” Continue reading from American Writers Museum
Viet Thanh Nguyen (Personal Website)
Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen: 'I'm a Utopian' (Financial Times)
Viet Thanh Nguyen Talks About 'The Committed' (The New York Times)
Viet Thanh Nguyen: 'I always felt displaced no matter where I was’ (The Guardian)
A Conversation With Viet Thanh Nguyen (Butler University)
Asian American Literature Today: Viet Thanh Nguyen (Library of Congress)
