Those processes of being an other for me in the United States were obviously very fundamental to shaping who I am as a person and as a writer. It was very difficult to undergo, but to become a writer who could talk about those issues was also a lot of fun. Writing The Sympathizer was a lot of fun, and I hope that the novel was enjoyable and humorous to read as well, despite its very serious politics. When I wrote The Committed, I also had a lot of fun as an outsider to France. In writing the novel itself, The Committed, there was a lot of humor, satire, and these kinds of tools to confront the tragedy of othering. This is very important to me as literary and political devices. I think I could do that in both The Sympathizer and The Committed because I had a lot of distance from the time periods that those novels described. My challenge right now is to try to find my sense of humor in describing what the United States is undergoing and doing to other countries, its own immigrants, and its own people of color, and minorities in the present. That's proving to be a little more challenging at this moment.

The whole power of the state is geared towards dividing and conquering, whether it's domestically within a state or whether it's exercising power overseas, including things like colonization, which is all about dividing and conquering. In the face of that, to engage in expansive solidarity and capacious grief is to work against the mechanisms of colonialism, militarism, and the state. It's enormously difficult, which is why it has to be rebuilt from every generation, as every generation is subject to the power of the state and its ideologies and mythologies. I think the lessons that I've extracted from this book, To Save and to Destroy, where I talk about expansive solidarity and capacious grief, are lessons that have been learned by other people before me, but lessons that I had to learn for myself and to put into my own words how I came to those lessons.

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Viet Thanh Nguyen has spent much of his life exploring the stories we tell—and the stories we erase—about war, migration, and memory. His 2015 debut novel The Sympathizer, about a communist double agent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, won the Pulitzer Prize and a long list of other major literary awards. In 2024, The Sympathizer was adapted into a critically acclaimed HBO series directed by Park Chan-wook.
He followed it with The Committed, and his latest work, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, a meditation on writing, power, and the politics of representation.

Nguyen is also the author of Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction, and the short story collection The Refugees. He’s edited collections like The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, and most recently the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston, who was once his teacher.

He was born in Vietnam, came to the U.S. as a refugee, and is now a professor at the University of Southern California. He’s received Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, honorary doctorates, and has been named a Chevalier by the French Ministry of Culture. Today, we’ll talk about his books, America’s forever wars, and how the act of writing—across fiction, memoir, and scholarship—can become both a form of resistance and a way of making sense of being, as he puts it in his memoir “A Man of Two Faces.”

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You write about the power of language and the power of literature. We should also say you are prolific with your journalism and public talks. It’s a tool to use to best reach the audience to be most effective. Can you speak about the paradoxes of otherness. With writing, you, in certain ways, ascend to an insider status, and then you wonder, who are you writing for? You have said consistently that your obligation is to speak as if “everyone could already understand what you said,” instead of just translating for a white audience or giving them something palliative rather than providing a real mirror on which not just the white audience, but all of us can confront these truths, as we are complicit in different ways.

VIET THANH NGUYEN

As a writer, I do believe that art and literature in and of themselves are important. I'm going to keep on writing novels, and one of the most important reasons why is because, as you mentioned, language is crucial. Part of the way that states and authoritarian regimes exercise their power is not just through physical violence and intimidation, but through a maltreatment of language itself. Trump is a perfect example of this. Everything that comes out of his mouth in terms of language is horrifying for anybody with any sensitivity to language. The excesses of his language in terms of insults and hyperbolic praise for his fans are perfect examples of how language is used by an authoritarian and by the state to obfuscate reality and intimidate people. That language is ugly from my perspective, and there is something about being committed to literature and to art that awakens us to the importance of beauty.

I think about what John Keats, the poet, said: beauty is truth, truth beauty. You can't separate these kinds of things. If you're committed to the beauty of language, you're also committed to the idea that language has a relationship to truth. You can see that authoritarians don't have a relationship to truth. They have a relationship to the abuse of truth and to lying, not only in content but in the form of their language as well. There is a crucial role for writers here in our relationship to language because language is one of the most crucial ways that authoritarianism extends its power.

What I've discovered as a writer is that fear is a good indicator that there is a truth. To speak the truth in a society is oftentimes an act that requires some courage.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It’s been 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, and it really feels like we haven’t learned the lessons. We now have war with Iran. I even heard the other day Jeffrey Sacks say that he thinks America is aiming in a few years to start a war with China. The signals are there, and it’s at this time, when Empire is declining, that it wants to pick fights with everyone—in actual wars, tariff wars, and wars against universities. When do you feel we will learn those lessons, and will it be too late?

NGUYEN

We're already at war with immigrants. That's the explicitly stated goal of the Trump administration. There's an internal war against these immigrants, an acceleration of the militarization of the United States domestically, which indicates how much more military aggression in terms of foreign policy the United States will exercise. But let's be clear that this is an outcome of Democratic policy too. The Democrats have been wholehearted supporters of the forever war. They have been responsible for many of the wars that the United States has fought in the post-World War II era. Democrats have also given legitimacy to extrajudicial drone strikes and the militarization of the police domestically. Even if the Republican Party under Donald Trump is accelerating things, the Democrats have also been very complicit in a lot of this as well. So yes, we are an empire that has passed its peak and is struggling to hang on via force and violence rather than diplomacy and negotiation. These are very, very bad signs and also repetitions of things that the United States has been doing fairly consistently in the post-World War II era.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Yeah, exactly. Poetry is powerful. The beauty of Baldwin's language, of your language, is powerful. But sometimes to speak to power, you need a hammer. America is just over 4% of the world population, a declining empire. All the signs are there, but it is also the largest military power. So what happens at that mix? Can it stand to be in the second, third, or fourth position?

NGUYEN

If we look at a country like France, which is in the second position at this point, we can see how difficult it was for France to lose its empire. Baldwin is documenting this. "No Name in the Street" begins in 1948 in Paris as Baldwin shows up.

He witnesses the decline of the French Empire as it loses its war in China and wages its war in Algeria. He talks about how incredibly violent France is at this time, domestically. He witnesses the abuse of Algerians, of Arabs, of anybody who does not look white in France as the French Empire turns its energies not just against the Algerians in Algeria, but against anybody who is suspect within France itself. What he depicts, what he describes, are the militarized police on the streets carrying machine guns, kidnapping people off the streets, beating them in the presence of white French people without any repercussions, spearing them away to camps, with people unable to do anything about it.

It's almost exactly like what the United States is doing today. France went through a very long period of unrest and violence as it lost its grip. Even today, we can see how the nostalgia for French empire is still dominant in terms of how domestic French politics are played out.

So, even a second-rank imperial state like France still struggles with what it means to lose global power. I think it's going to be an extremely ugly period as a first-rank empire, the United States is forced to come to grips with its decline. The United States is not willingly coming to grips with that; it is being forced to do so through the global competition posed by other countries. Whatever we think of those other countries is a different issue.

But the United States is not giving up its privileges gracefully at this point, and the consequences will be extreme, not just for the United States itself, but for every other country that it interacts with.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Well, I certainly hope so. On that point of having unlikely allies, I mean, even if it’s only for economic interests, or even if it’s only that they don’t want American soldiers to die, because that’s often the case. We saw in Vietnam the protests; it was often really just for the American soldiers and their loss of life. But if they find it too costly because of a declining empire and you can’t pay all these bills, then I am for that too—whatever gets us to that point. Talking about turning points, is this your last year as a professor?

NGUYEN 

Yes, it is. So, today is June 30th, as we’re having this conversation, by June 30th of next year, I should be finished with my professorship, which is a big deal for me because my entire identity as a professional, as a working person, as a son has been wrapped up with being a professor. This will be, I think, my 28th or 29th year as a professor.

Whereas what I really wanted to do was to be a writer. To be a professor has been my day job for nearly 30 years at this point. It's been great in some ways; it's taught me a lot and allowed me to become a certain kind of writer that I wouldn't have been if I had not had my PhD and if I had not been grappling with many theoretical, scholarly, and philosophical ideas. For that, I'm grateful. But I think I stopped learning anything from being a professor about human nature 10 or 15 years ago. It's been a matter of paying the bills for the last 10 or 15 years, which has been dispiriting in some ways. So, I will be forever grateful to being a professor.

But the larger mission has always been, as our conversation has been about, what can art do? What can literature do? What can language do? How can using these things make me a better writer? A better thinker about the human condition and my own condition? Being a professor no longer serves these ambitions.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I think it’s interesting, though. I mean, when we are teaching, we’re also always learning. In a way, being a teacher is being a performer and getting feedback or understanding what younger people’s perspectives are, especially those who weren’t alive when these wars, these essences from history, were occurring. So what has it given you in terms of that added perspective?

NGUYEN

ADD

It's very hard to get to them, and it's frustrating to expend a lot of energy on something I deeply believe in, while feeling that I can't reach half of the students in that class. It's not a new problem, but it is a problem that I can walk away from. The problem of ChatGPT and AI is something that all of society must confront, but especially teachers and professors.

But I don't have to deal with this. I can walk away from it and let my former graduate students, who are now professors, try to figure out how to pedagogically and philosophically deal with ChatGPT and AI. The mission of a professor is something that I will still carry on because, as you said, the performance aspect—the idea that you can reach audiences and impart new ideas—I do that through giving many lectures throughout the United States and through a lot of interactions with audiences here and elsewhere in other countries as well.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Yes, because your curiosity is wide. I’m glad that you brought up AI because you have an AI in the Future of Humanity Podcast, so we’ll be publishing it on that as well. I’m glad you brought up AI because it’s threatening so many things—not just the livelihood of writers, artists, journalists; it’s used for misinformation and disinformation; it’s the new great game. 

It’s in all our devices, listening to us in different ways. All the big powers are vying to dominate the AI space. What are your reflections on that and what it means for us as artists, as citizens, and as journalists trying to get to the truth?

NGUYEN

I think just from the most practical level, it's simply another new challenge to humanity that writers can write about. This has always been the case that writers have had to confront the dystopian realities that human beings have always produced. What that entails, I'm not sure, but I know there will be great novels about AI in both the fantasy and science fiction worlds, as well as in the more conventionally literary realms. The threat that AI poses in another dimension is how we make a living, for example, and that is extremely serious. That's why so many authors are deeply frightened about their work being displaced. The whole idea was that artificial intelligence would do things like displace the working class and the laboring classes.

But AI poses just as much of a threat, maybe even more of a threat, to the intellectual laborers of the world as well. There are some fields, like plumbing, where workers cannot be easily replaced by AI. But your average copywriter, lawyer, and others can be replaced easily. This dystopian reality is a new kind of mortal threat to the intellectual workers of the world. I don't know what the answer will be, but I think to consider that AI could replace us because we are, in some senses, workers, opens up a whole new dimension of expansive solidarity and capacious grief if writers and artists can think of themselves as workers too. AI is completely wrapped up with global capitalism, the extraction of profit from labor, and the transformation of everybody into the lowest-paid consumer possible, including writers and those in the arts. This is another acceleration of global capitalism that will lead us to new levels of contradiction.

The outcome is not clear because when people are confronted by the loss of their livelihoods, it doesn't necessarily make them better human beings who are going to unite in solidarity and capacious grief with others to revolt against capitalism. It could turn them into scared, anxious people vulnerable to demagoguery. This is another choice that is being offered and will continue to be offered to more people in the next decade or two.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

We’ve seen the BRICS nations grow from 12% of the world population in just a few years to over 52%. I only see it growing larger, which I think is good to counteract that power. But it must be very unsettling for America. Speaking of France, the last time you came on the show, you had just recently published The Sympathizer, and you were working on its sequel, The Committed

In The Committed, the protagonist is a man of two faces and two minds, embodying this displacement. In The Sympathizer, that's set between, of course, Vietnam and America. But now, in The Committed, he comes to France as another colonial subject—still oppressed, existing in a subordinate state where we are unwanted, unneeded, and unseen, visible to all but ourselves. 

How do you navigate those existential and political implications of describing the journey of this character despite the geographical shifts? It’s just that the situation is the same, but it’s just elsewhere. In searching to finally find a place where his multiple selves might come…

NGUYEN

Well, you mentioned the other book that I wrote or the lectures—To Save and to Destroy: Writing as An Other—and those processes of being an other. Those processes of being an other for me in the United States were obviously very fundamental to shaping who I am as a person and as a writer. It was a very difficult experience to undergo.

But to become a writer who could talk about those issues was also a lot of fun. Writing The Sympathizer was a lot of fun, and I hope that the novel was enjoyable and humorous to read, despite its serious politics. When I wrote The Committed, I also had a lot of fun as an outsider to France.

I was both an other in some ways, but certainly not in the most dramatic sense, which is what I depicted in the novel—the other who was Algerian, Arab, North African, or Black. Those experiences of otherness within France are not something a tourist experiences; they are something a tourist can only witness from afar. Some of the things that Baldwin saw, I actually glimpsed as well. Baldwin describes watching an Algerian being beaten in front of a French café, and I have to say, I saw the exact same experience with a Black man being beaten in front of a café in central Paris.

People were just watching and not doing anything about it. The police were free to do whatever they wanted. It was shocking for me to see that. At least in the United States at that time, in the early 2000s, the police had the sense to beat people in places where white people couldn’t see it happen. But in France, it was as if they’d just beat you in the streets of central Paris, where tourists could see and where white French people could see it. It was shocking; there was no humor in that. But in writing The Committed, there was a lot of humor. Humor and satire are important tools to confront the tragedy of othering, both as literary and political devices. I think I could do that in both The Sympathizer and The Committed because I had a lot of distance from the time periods those novels described. My challenge right now is to find my sense of humor in describing what the United States is doing to other countries and to its own immigrants and its own people of color, and its own minorities in the present.

You should identify with the state and what it's doing. The power of the state is geared toward dividing and conquering, whether exercising power overseas or through colonization, which is all about dividing and conquering. In the face of that, engaging in expansive solidarity and capacious grief works against the mechanisms of colonialism, militarism, and the state. It's enormously difficult, which is why it has to be rebuilt every generation, because every generation is subject to the power of the state and its ideologies and mythologies. The lessons I’ve extracted from that in To Save and To Destroy, where I discuss expansive solidarity and capacious grief, are lessons that have been learned by others before me but ones I had to learn for myself and put into my own words.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

That fluidity is so important. Now, talking about writing in another mode, you have also written a memoir, A Man of Two Faces. I’m just wondering, as someone who really confronts truths—like journalism, of course, which is a kind of truth, but also the truth through novels—how hard was it to write your way into this? You discuss the potential portrayal of telling your parents' stories, your mother’s stories. How did you grow comfortable with that, and what did you discover about your own experiences in the writing of the book?

NGUYEN

What I've discovered as a writer is that fear is a good indicator that there is a truth. Speaking the truth in society oftentimes requires courage because no society wants to have its hypocrisies, absurdities, and contradictions pointed out. This means there's always a role for a writer, intellectual, or artist to speak the truth, and there’s always the possibility of that writer or intellectual artist being penalized in some way for what they say. So as a writer, if you encounter fear in your project, it's a good sign that you're somewhere on the verge of a truth that is hard to articulate. That truth could be about your society, but it could also be about yourself and your family. This has been true for me while writing things that are more explicitly political.

For example, I often give talks to audiences in places where I think they may not like what I have to say, and I get very nervous. For example, giving a talk at West Point, the United States' premier military academy for training its military officers, I have said many of the same things to you. Before that talk, I was quite nervous and fearful. I felt it was necessary to go ahead and say these things because who else needs to hear this more than the military officers of the United States? Likewise, writing a memoir about my family and myself was the most difficult thing I’d ever done. Finishing that book brought a visceral level of agony that I had never experienced before as a writer. By visceral, I mean I felt it in my gut the first time I had other people read the manuscript besides my partner. I felt physically ill. I thought, “I’m betraying my mother. I'm betraying my family by discussing things they would rather no one know about.” Yet I felt these things were truthful and needed to be said, not out of impulsive vanity, but because I believe that what happened to my mother and family were not just private individual matters, but outcomes of colonialism, racism, and war. As a writer, the only place to go is to the truth and the place of fear.

This was 2023 when I was going to give this lecture. We had just undergone COVID, and there was a surge of anti-Asian violence and rhetoric globally from the United States, France, and many other countries.

The fact that I was due to give a lecture on the deaths of Asian Americans forced me to think about how to merge these issues of Palestine, Israel, and Asian Americans. That lecture talks specifically about the mechanism of othering, which is universal.

What was done to the Jews in Germany through antisemitism is the same kind of process being done to Palestinians in Palestine and other minorities in different locations. The trajectory from othering to genocide is clear.

It doesn't mean it's inevitable, but the logic is there from the beginning. The tragedy in Palestine and Gaza, of course, is that one population of people, who have been subjected to genocide or whose ancestors have, are now comfortable with the possibility of inflicting genocide on another population. The principle advanced by Jewish people and their advocates—to always remember and never forget—is absolutely right. However, what we see is that, in application, this principle has been reduced to a mechanism of nationalism. Always remember, never forget what was done to us, but always forget what we do to others.

That is the mechanism of nationalism. The challenge is the confusion between the two. We must acknowledge that the Holocaust was wrong and must always stand against antisemitism—absolutely true. But we believe that, while we cannot give the state of Israel and its supporters any excuse for inflicting the same thing that was done to Jewish people, there is an alignment between the state of Israel, the United States, and the Western states. Jewish people as minorities, wherever they find themselves, who are subjected to antisemitism, face a different situation than the state of Israel and what it does to Palestinians.

That's what that lecture was about. If we feel, as we should, capacious grief and expansive solidarity with the victims of antisemitism, with Jewish people whenever they experience that, then we should feel that for Palestinians when they are subjected to genocidal hatred and violence. It's very difficult to make that argument when the entirety of the Western world is aligned with Israel and designed to prevent that recognition from taking place. It is a recognition that is very challenging; I don't think it's restricted only to Asian Americans, although I do think Asian Americans should have that recognition.

VIET THANH NGUYEN

VIET THANH NGUYEN

VIET THANH NGUYEN

VIET THANH NGUYEN

For the full conversation, listen to the episode.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Katie Foster and Henie Zhang. The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast is produced by Mia Funk.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer, and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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