![]() Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, verbal and physical assaults against Asian Americans have increased. And so there is every legitimate reason to say that refugees are refugees forever, just as much as veterans are veterans forever. The effects of war and displacement and a loss of one's country affects refugees for decades - often until the end of their lives. What refugees have been through are, in fact, war stories. Now refugees in my opinion are just as much survivors of war as soldiers are. When we look at soldiers, veterans of wars, we understand that war's effects last for decades, even after wars are finished. I'm still someone who's affected by my refugee experiences and still trying to work those things out. You still call yourself a refugee, although your actual flight ended decades ago. So I'm going to write this novel partly to interrogate that mythology and that seduction and to write a novel about Paris that is not about romantic Paris, but is instead a novel about the gritty immigrant and refugee Paris. I think the mythology of France, and Paris in particular, is so powerful and so seductive that even someone like me who is who is deeply critical of French colonialism is still seduced by this mythology of French culture. The Committed is very much my attempt to write a novel about the France that Americans and much of the world, including me, have a hard time seeing. Did you have French readers in mind when you wrote it? So I think Americans have a very hard time getting over their own ethnocentrism in looking at this experience. But we have to remember, about 3 million Vietnamese people died during this war. What Americans get wrong about this war is that they think of it as purely an American war in which the Vietnamese are the bystanders of the drama - even though around 58,000 or so Americans died in the war, which is a tragedy. I think it is important to make this intervention into American memory. find it oftentimes very surprising and very shocking. So in order to even hear what the Vietnamese have to say about their own history and their own war, most people have to go to Vietnam. What is missing in the US narrative?Īmerican memories and American stories circulate all over the world, whereas the Vietnamese, their narratives have not. With your novels, you also wanted to create a new narrative about the Vietnam War. But I felt that when it came time for me to be a writer, I wanted to assert what my experience was like, as in the experience of Vietnamese refugees and other Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in the United States. But the literature that I read was almost wholly the literature of white Americans and of European culture and the Western canon - all of which is important. I grew up with a deep love of literature, which was really my salvation as a refugee coming to the United States. You said in an interview: "I wanted to write a novel that was a so-called minority novel." Can you elaborate? I wanted to explore both him as a person, but also him as a revolutionary, as someone who was devoted to revolution but disillusioned with the communist revolution. But by the end of the novel I discovered that the main character, the Sympathizer himself, had not let go of me. When I wrote The Sympathizer, it was meant to be just a novel by itself. Was the story intended to be a trilogy from the start? The author spoke with DW about The Committed as a "minority novel," and about being forever a refugee. It tells the story of a young man displaced from communist North Vietnam who resorts to drug dealing to survive in capitalist Paris in the early 1980s. His second fiction effort, The Committed, published this year, continues his trilogy on the impact of Vietnam War through Vietnamese eyes. The same year, his breakout novel, The Sympathizer, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Having found sanctuary in literature as a youth, the Vietnamese-American went on to become a professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and the author of non-fiction books like Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, published in 2016. Viet Thanh Nguyen and his parents fled to the United States in 1975 from war-torn Vietnam.
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