Interview of Viet Thanh Nguyen - The Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) Perspectives Oral History Project

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Date: March 25, 2023
Interviewer: Yvonne Kwan
Interviewee: Viet Thanh Nguyen (1971 - )

Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Viet is an Asian American Studies and English professor at USC whose academic activism and scholarship include narrative critique and critique of US imperialism. capitalism, war, violence, and representation.

Transcript of Viet Thanh Nguyen

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Timeframe 00 >> 02:40

Viet Thanh Nguyen, I was born in Buon Me Thuot, Vietnam in on February 13th, 1971, although my legal documents say March 13th.

(Interviewer) Is there a story behind there that you would like to share?

I believe from what I've been told, it was simply the chaos of the refugee experience. And when you enter a camp, you have to go through all the bureaucratic procedures and not a surprise. My dad made a mistake. I have an adopted sister in Vietnam who is 12 years older than I am, and I have an older brother by seven years who is here in San Francisco. My parents were born in the same village, a region of Northern Vietnam. And that's where they met. And according to the to the story that my father told, which my mother endorses, they were a love match, not an arranged marriage. I'm not sure how common or uncommon it was, but my father certainly enjoyed telling stories about how he dated the various ladies, you know, and surveyed them for their various abilities. And my mother rose to the top because of her, both her beauty but her acumen and determination as well, which is accurate for what would happen afterwards. My father's name is Joseph Thanh Nguyen, or Nguyen Ngoc Thanh. He was born again in this village of North Vietnam. Whose name is. I've written it down, but I can't remember off the top of my head. I think it's Duc Tho. I believe that he graduated from high school. He was born in 1933. So then he would have graduated from high school in the early 1950s. And he's basically been self-taught in a lot of different kinds of occupations. But most notably, he was a tailor and that was his rise to to financial success.

(Interviewer) And also way perhaps so sharply dressed all the time. Yah?

Well, I think it's due to growing up in San Jose. It's hard to be a Vietnamese American boy of the 1980s in San Jose without trying to look your best.

(Interviwer) And then how about your mother? You said that they grew up in and around the same area, but can you also state her name and date of birth or your birth?

Her American name is Linda Kim Nguyen, but her Vietnamese birth name is Nguyen Thi Bai and she was born in 1938. No, let me think. Uh, 19, 1935, 1935, 1937. I don't know. And, you know, she never, as far as I understood, had an education beyond grade school. And so she, too, was a self-taught entrepreneur.

Systems & Power Timeframe 02:40 >> 06:18

So that obviously they both had. My parents both had family in North Vietnam, their respective parents and siblings and so on. And in 1954, when the country was divided and there was a mass migration of refugees, Catholic refugees South, because my parents were Catholics, my mother's family decided to go and my father and mother had just gotten married in 1954. And so my father decided to go as well. But no one else in his family did, so he left behind his parents and his three younger brothers and his younger sister. He would not see them again until 1994. So that would be a 40-year separation for him. But my parents then migrated south with about 800,000 other Vietnamese Catholics to South Vietnam. I believe that they were initially resettled around the Dalat area. And my understanding from what research I've done is that the Southern government under Ngo Dinh Diem had a concerted effort to recruit Vietnamese Catholics to come south and to use them to help build a power base for the Diem regime, which was a Catholic regime in a primarily Buddhist country. So my parents were part of that. And again, from what I understand from my limited conversations with my parents, they were they were given resettlement money to begin as farmers around Dalat, but they were not actually farmers, so they didn't really enjoy this. So they moved again to Buon Me Thuot, which is in the Central Highlands, and their move was made possible by selling the land that the government had given them and then arriving in Buon Me Thuot with some capital from which then they started their business. So I think that my again, my understanding of Vietnamese Catholic resettlement history is that it is tied up with what I would consider to be the colonization of the central highlands by people like my parents and by me. You know, we're part of the ethnic majority in Vietnam, but much of the Central Highlands is not actually Kinh people, but various so-called ethnic minorities. Certainly, I think when I was growing up, it would be a hit and miss affair with my parents would tell me stories or not. Oftentimes they would not tell me stories. And when they did tell me stories are often rather horrible. So I grew up with this understanding that the past was a very difficult experience for my parents, for obviously war and colonization related region reasons.

And I do remember distinctly, for example, you know, my mother choosing to tell me a certain story once, and I was probably in high school, still living at home in San Jose about how in order to survive when they first came south in the 1950s and she was a young woman, you know, she had to pick up buffalo dung to help the for, for, whatever, whatever, whatever you could do with that, right, to help survive. And my father said, why tell that story? Don't talk about that. And so it was interesting that what my parents chose to talk about and what they didn't want to talk about, but nevertheless, certain kinds of horrific stories slip through. And then in the last few years, far too late, I have I've made an effort to talk to my father about the past, but by then he was already in his early to mid-eighties. And in some ways he was, you know, more forthcoming, willing to talk about certain things. But I think I've also missed my opportunity. His memory is starting to go. But my my brother's also engaged in this kind of project of trying to get my my brother, my father to talk. So maybe one day my father, my brother, my older brother will write a more documentary history of the family.

Systems & Power Timeframe 06:18 >> 09:41

I don't remember very much at four years of age of a few fragmented images, but I can't trust my memory that those things actually happen and I can't put a narrative on them. So my memory, my narrative memories really begin as a refugee in the United States because we were settled in Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania probably, I assume, by May or June of 1975, because we fled, I believe, on April 30th. So we had a very difficult refugee flight experience. And we were, you know, we fled by boat, but we were not the so-called boat people that would come that would come later. But we fly by boat from Saigon in April 30th, 1975. And I have a vague image, for example, on that boat of a man giving me or my mother milk when I was four years old and obviously in need of that.

And, you know, I have no idea if it's true and true or not. But this is why I don't like milk. It's my association of milk with refugee experience. Who knows? But my narrative memories really began just basically a few weeks or a few months later in that refugee camp. And there are flashes of the time in the barracks. And I recently went back to Fort Indiantown Gap, and the barracks looked pretty much like the flashes of my memory. But the most coherent memories really began from being taken away by me from my parents, because in order to leave the refugee camps, you had to have an American sponsor you. But there wasn't an American willing to sponsor all four of us, my parents, my brother and me. So we were split up. My parents were taken by one sponsor. My older brother was taken by another sponsor, and I was taken by a third sponsor. And by sponsor I mean Americans. And I think they were all white Americans. So my earliest really cohesive memories are, you know, screaming and howling as I'm being taken away from my parents. That was an an apparently unusual experience because not too many families were actually split up during the the sponsoring experience, sponsorship experience. I'm not sure why that happened to us.

(Interviewer) And when were you reunited?

I'm not certain. I my brother tells me that that I was brought home a few months later. And because he says my mother, my mother couldn't bear to be separated from me for that long. My older brother, who was seven years older, didn't come home for two years. So he had a much you know, I don't know, it was deemed, I guess, that he could survive on his own better than than I could. I remember two sponsor families. I think I remember the first sponsor family was a young couple and they probably had a mobile home or a trailer for my father, I can recall. And I didn't stay there for long. And I went to a second sponsor family that was a family with a house and they were blond. I remember that. And and I remember that, you know, they tried to make me feel at home by providing me with chopsticks. And everybody had chopsticks. I have no idea where in 1975, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, they got chopsticks, I assume, at a Chinese restaurant. And they wanted me to show them how to use chopsticks. And I didn't know how to use chopsticks. I'm not sure exactly sure when in Vietnamese childhood you learn how to use chopsticks. But at four I didn't know. I felt very embarrassed about that. And so those were some of the early memories. My brother went to another household, I think in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was maybe half an hour away. And I think he had sort of an all-American, you know, entry. I remember that, you know, he played on the football team, for example. So he was older. He was ten or 11. He didn't speak any English, but he assimilated extremely quickly.

Systems & Power Timeframe 09:41 >> 13:41

My parents are Catholic and anti-communist. I mean, those two things almost go hand in hand in in South Vietnam. And so what happened was that my family was fairly well-off. By 1975, my, my, my, my father and mother started off extremely poor. But from 1954 to 1975, they basically, again, self-made entrepreneurs and they became wealthy. They owned a home and a business, a car, and they had plans to buy a house in Saigon for my brother, for my brother and me to have our education there, and they had quite a bit of gold. So they were obviously very afraid of the communists coming to power and taking that property away. But in March of 1975, my father went to Saigon on business to buy the house, leaving behind my mother, my adopted sister and my brother and I. And in early March of 1975, the final invasion of South Vietnam happened, and Buon Me Thuot, our hometown, was the first one captured in the final invasion. And so our lines of communication were cut off. And so I believe my mother just had to make, obviously, some very difficult decisions. And the difficult decision, I assume, was to leave my adopted sister behind at 16 to safeguard the family property while she fled with my brother and me, and one of their good friends would eventually come to San Jose with them and open businesses here.

So that was one side of the story. My adopted sister would then go on to have a very challenging life in Vietnam as a result, but I don't believe my mother thought that we wouldn't be coming back. I mean, the war had gone back and forth for quite a long time. At this point. I believe that she thought she didn't believe that we were just going to flee the country. So she wanted to get to Saigon to find my father. So we fled along with many other people because at this point, the entire South Vietnamese army in the Central Highlands has collapsed. So the roads are crowded with South Vietnamese troops and with civilians trying to flee in every way they could. I reconstructed this later from research, but my brother was old enough to remember, and so he remembers that it was violent and he wrote a short story in which you include seeing dead paratroopers hanging from trees, for example. And the research that I've done demonstrates that there was all kinds of, you know, gunfire and shelling and things like this taking place. So it's a frightening experience. And I think we walked and then my mother hired someone to carry me. We made it to Nha Trang, which is about 180 kilometers down down a hill from from Buon Me Thuot.

And in Nha Trang that that was also collapsing. And so everybody was trying to get onto a boat out of Nha Trang. Also from my research, a terrible, difficult, violent time as everybody was desperate from soldiers to civilians and the few Americans that were still there. So many people didn't make it getting onto those boats very dangerous. But we did. And we made it to Saigon and then there we were able to rendezvous with our father. So this would have been, I assume, mid-March or so. And so then the next 4 to 6 weeks would be about trying to get out of of Saigon. So I have no memory of any of this, actually. But my brother says that, in fact, we did all of the usual things and we tried to get out through the airport, couldn't do it. We tried to go to the embassy, American embassy, couldn't get out, finally made it to the the docks. And there I was told my father was separated from us. That is my mother, my older brother and me, and completely on their own. My father just decided to jump on a boat without knowing what happened to us. And my mother decided to jump on a boat without knowing what happened to my father. So this is very typical of my parents; I'm sure was extremely difficult for them, but they've always been able to make these life and death decisions when necessary. And we were very fortunate because these were two separate boats that left the docks. But eventually they were we were each of these boats was picked up by a larger ship, and that was where we were reunited.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 13:41 >> 17:18

I think it's I think memories are transmitted in a few different ways. Certainly within my own experience. Again, I have none of these memories that that I've described. I've been describing about the refugee experience. But I was told bits and pieces over 20 or 30 years that my parents would just drop here and there or that my brother would find and then transmit to me. So there's an oral transmission of memory that takes place. Then there's also the transmission of a feeling, which I think also constitutes a memory, even when people don't say things, how they behave and what they refuse to say constitutes a feeling that gets absorbed in the household. And then again, this is not unusual, you know, So, for example, I don't believe I'm not certain that I remember that I had an adopted sister. I left when I was four. So I have no memory of what she looked like. And then at some point, a photograph shows up at our house and appears I don't remember the photograph arriving in the mail or anything like that. But one day, all of a sudden in our family photo album, I'm looking through it and I see a photograph of a young girl. This is my adopted sister. I think it made a deep impression on me because I think at that time then I started to understand about some of this unspoken family history, and I don't think that's an uncommon experience. I think it's very common, for example, for Vietnamese refugees to have left people behind in one way or another, either because people were killed or people were literally left behind.

And so photographs constitute memories as well as why in every Vietnamese household, you refugee household that I ever visited, you would always see these black and white photos of the past where people left behind. And these are unspoken memories. Like, you know, I would look at this photo, for example, like, who is this? Who is this person? What is our relationship? What happened to her? And at that age, I wasn't capable of asking any of these kinds of questions. I was left to dwell on this by myself. And that's a memory. And that's that would be a gap that I would try to fill in over the years that would really it would really bother me. This absent presence in our house and an absent presence is memory. It's history. That's that's lodged itself in the family household. And then the community propagates memory as well. So I grew up going to a lot of Vietnamese public rituals and occasions that we were Catholic. We went to the Vietnamese Mass every Sunday. Not that I understood anything, but the rituals were really important. Everything was in Vietnamese, for example, we had to pray, and I was forced to join the Vietnamese Catholic Scouts, and I was forced to go to a Vietnamese Catholic Sunday school, which was actually the best way to guarantee that I would never learn the Vietnamese language.

But the point is that all of these institutions enforced the feeling of memory that we are Vietnamese, and we're connected to the homeland and to the Vietnamese language. So the language bears this memory. And then at the New Year's or Tet celebrations, there would always be the singing of the National anthem. There would be all your older men wearing military uniforms. And so I grew up aware that there was this past that people are really concerned about this. Well, I wouldn't have called it nationalism. I think I knew that word. But clearly there was a nation that they were concerned about, a nation that they had lost, and that was wrapped up in patriotism and militarism and the need to still wear uniforms and wave the South Vietnamese flag. So all these things, you know, growing up in this very Vietnamese refugee community transmitted that sense of cultural memory.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 17:18 >> 20:50

Well, memories take place in the private and the domestic spaces within one's own one's own live life. And the life of the family and the house. Right. But the public enactment of memory is very important to people. And if you're a part of the majority society, the public enactment of memory takes place all the time. So there's always movies and documentaries and acknowledgments of your particular culture when you are a so-called minority, those public affirmations have to be very deliberately cultivated. And so that's why it was so important, I think, for the Vietnamese refugee community to have public gatherings. That's why they wanted to have a church and a mass and speak the Vietnamese language. That's a performance of memory, right? And that was why it was important for them to to build their own church. My, my, my father and mother were really credit crucial in the building of the Vietnamese Catholic Center, for example, and White Road. It was very important for them that they buy their own space, not just borrow one from the Catholic diocese, for example. And so in different ways, different parts of the community have sought to build these public spaces. So it's not just churches, but the entire creation of economic zones where Vietnamese stores are dominant. That's a public performance of memory, that's economic survival, but it's also public memory.

So it's very important, I think, for the Vietnamese refugee community to have signs in Vietnamese untranslated on Santa Clara Street. And my parents were one of those people, you know, So in 1978 or so, they opened, I think, the second Vietnamese grocery store in San Jose. They're very good friend who my mother fled with, opened the first Vietnamese grocery store, and my parents called this Vietnamese grocery store, the Saigon Muoi, and it was not translated. So you'd only see that sign. And it never occurred to me at the time to ask, why didn't we translate it? It was just very natural that it was simply the Saigon Muoi and there were all these stores up and down Santa Clara Street and the side streets of downtown San Jose where Vietnamese refugees were opening these stores. Sometimes they had French names like the Le Se Me Beauty Salon or Le Se Me Cafe, and sometimes they had they had most of the time they had Vietnamese names. Okay. And then one day when I was about, I don't know, 10 or 11, I was walking down the street, I think, and I saw a sign in another store window that said another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese. And of course, I didn't really understand that and I didn't know the word racism or anything like that. But that person was reacting against the arrival of Vietnamese people and are very visible, are very audible presence as Vietnamese speaking, Vietnamese looking people. That's a performance of memory that the Vietnamese community was doing by creating these businesses and so that they would extend, for example, to Tully Road and Lion Plaza and all these kinds of places. And then of course, Tet celebrations and all of that. So the development of of of deliberately targeted memory spaces like the Viet Museum is just the outgrowth of that. It would just take time for the community to develop enough economic and social resources before they could find the ability to build something like the Viet Museum. But these spaces are very contested, very contested, are contested by non-Vietnamese people, and then within the Vietnamese community there's tremendous contestation over what gets acknowledged publicly.

It's very politically fraught. And so that's how we know that these public performances and acknowledgments matter because people invest their entire identities, their cultures, their beliefs in what to name districts, what to name, buildings, so on.

Systems & Power Timeframe 20:50 >> 27:32

(Interviewer) Do you want to give a little bit more about that? Because you know of the contested naming of the region right there on Story and the such? There was, you know, is it Vietnam town? Is it Little Saigon? So how does that play out, particularly in the context of Santa Clara County?

So I grew up well aware that to be a Vietnamese Catholic or not in San Jose was to be also anti-communist. There was simply no other choice. And so that's one of the reasons why seeing these older men wearing military uniforms at all the public occasions and the waving of the South Vietnamese flag was very important. It reinforced Vietnamese nationalism and anti-communism at the same time. And so the community, I think, is deeply paranoid as a result, and understandably so, given everything that happened to them in Vietnam and the loss of what their country and property and identities and careers and all of that. And so that paranoia becomes a part of the nationalism and the patriotism and that paranoia extends itself to the smallest things. So it was not possible, for example, in 1980s San Jose to express any kinds of sentiments about reconciliation with Vietnam. I mean, there were literally editors and reporters being shot and killed for doing this and not being censored. But certainly across the nation, there was at least five cases of this happening. So that paranoia was being enforced, you know, by violence and by by my discipline.

And so by the 2000s, as the Vietnamese American community has fully settled into San Jose and has the capacity to do economic power and to build things and so on, then it becomes not just a question of pure individual economic survival. Then the question arises of the community, the identity of the community, What's what gets acknowledged publicly. By that time when this whole new development was being done on Story Road, I had checked out of San Jose, you know, and my first inkling that there was a problem is that when I would I would go back and I would visit my in-laws for dinner for example. And then they started talking about this economic development and the naming of it and how some people were communists. And it got to be a very passionate conversation. And honestly, I checked out because it seemed so ridiculous, you know, to me personally, but it was not ridiculous to some of my in-laws and certainly to other Vietnamese people in the community that and again, I have an inexpert understanding of this because I'm not invested in the paranoia. But there was one faction advocating one name. And I think that faction was seen by the other faction as having ties to the to the Vietnamese government or Vietnamese corporate companies and so on in Vietnam. And so that therefore, this would be perceived as an outpost of the Vietnamese Communist Party, or at least Vietnam. And I think that that is tied in with the recognition that the community has changed, like during the seventies and eighties and nineties.

I think almost everybody in the community was a refugee or a descendant of a refugee. But now in the last 20 years or so, let's say you have immigrants. People have come over here for different reasons. Some of them do carry anti-communist feelings, others don't. And you have international students. So the population of Vietnamese America has diversified in certain ways. And so I think the paranoia is it has recognized that the community is changing and that in this particular case of that, that particular economic development, it became a political battle over the identity and the future of the community to try to prevent it from becoming more international, more connected to what was happening in Vietnam. And of course, for a different population of Vietnamese Americans, that seems totally ludicrous. You know, yes, of course, we should acknowledge the past, but we should acknowledge reality and the present, which is, however we feel about the Vietnamese Communist Party, perhaps we should still be able to reconcile in different kinds of ways, which would include economic reconciliation. Now, that, again, is anathema to a certain segment of the Vietnamese American community.

I don't think my parents ever spelled out for me what the biggest challenges were for resettling in San Jose, but obviously it was obvious to me as a little boy and as a young adolescent that it was economic, it was just pure economic survival. Um, refugees that come here, most of them had come pretty poor. My parents were lucky in that they managed to take some of their wealth with them, so they actually had capital to start off with. I mean, so for example, when we arrived in San Jose, my parents bought a home on South 10th Street in cash. You know, I mean, I sometimes I wonder what the realtor thought when these Vietnamese people brought out the cash and just paid for the house without a mortgage. So they had more economic advantages in some people, but nevertheless, they opened that grocery store, the Saigon mine, and they had to work in that store every day, you know, for 14 hours a day, 12 hours a day. And then they come home and they cook dinner. And then afterwards, we worked for two more hours processing all the revenue and so I was helping with that, right? So I was quite aware and I was watching my parents go through this every day and get up early. You know, that I was watching my parents, you know, get shot and I wasn't there when they were shot in their store, but I certainly knew about it.

And so, I mean, pure economic survival laced with racism directed against the Vietnamese community and just the awareness that there was also potential violence. Like I remember you know, when we speak about paranoia, it wasn't just anti-communist paranoia. My parents, I remember, you know, were telling me when we when we first arrived in San Jose, don't call the police. The police are not our friends. Right. But I think a sign of our assimilation was, you know, five or six years later, we called the police when our house was robbed at gunpoint. You know, then there was Vietnamese gangsters. That was a huge deal in the 1970s and 1980s. Right. There was there was total paranoia about young Vietnamese men and what they would do. And they were also trying to survive as well. And also, I'm sure, being deeply traumatized by various ways, by the legacies of the war and what happened to their families. So all of that was, to me, definitive of 1970s and 1980s San Jose, that it was this a community that was trying to get an economic foothold in the city and create opportunities for themselves and their children. So it wouldn't be until the nineties and 2000 that we would even start to think about politics and, and, you know, civic life and things like that outside of institutions like the church.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 27:32 >> 31:04

Well, I arrived in San Jose at the age of seven, and I had been in Harrisburg for three years, and my memories of Harrisburg are actually very positive, you know, because ironically, my parents were not working very much at the time. They had, you know, these working class jobs. And so they actually they were actually home. And so I had a good memory of that. Then we come to San Jose. My parents opened the grocery store, and then for the next ten years, that's their entire life. And so for me, my experience of San Jose is that it's all wrapped up with the Saigon Muoi, with the duress, the struggle, the total focus on money. Um, you know, my parents, my mom, for example. But, you know, you know, we'd sell a bag of rice and we just made a quarter of that bag of. Right, That 25 lb bag of rice made a quarter off of that, you know. So I was that, that deeply impressed itself upon me that, you know, that even though we were actually, I think financially better off than a lot of people, we didn't feel that way because my parents were just so paranoid that everything could collapse. Right. And that's the refugee mentality so absorbed. That refugee mentality has never really gone away. And so, you know, what else about being a kid in San Jose to me was a time of deep loneliness because my parents weren't around. My brother went off to college and so I found solace in the San Jose Public Library and read a lot.

These are the roots of my becoming a writer through all this reading and this sense of isolation and loneliness and then I was also deeply aware of being Vietnamese and living in this Vietnamese refugee community and not really, I mean, having very ambivalent feelings about it, because on the one hand, it's great, you know, being a Vietnamese person, you know, you got the food and the culture and songs and and all of this. And then on the other hand, it's not so great because you have a lot of of of, for example, the threat of violence from within families. Because, you know, I mean, I certainly was aware that not all families were happy families in the Vietnamese refugee community. And I was aware that, you know, of these gangsters and so on. But then I was also aware that there was a total enforcement of conformity in the Vietnamese refugee community. And I was a young, nascent rebel. I didn't you know, I just I was a nonconformist, is quite hard to put into words, you know, That's why I became a writer. But I was not fond of the flip side of Vietnamese cohesiveness and warmth, which is conformity and orthodoxy and authenticity. Like, you know, if you were Vietnamese, you had to speak Vietnamese. You you had to behave in a Vietnamese way. I really hated that, really hated being trotted out to, you know, genuflect before visitors and all of that. And, you know, and all that is wrapped up with obviously, the fact that I knew I was an American at the same time. So all this Vietnamese stuff is very strange to me, even though it's also very intimate. But again, I was also, again, deeply opposed. I developed this as a young boy, this allergy to authenticity, because Vietnamese people in my experience would always try to enforce authenticity. They tell you, this is Vietnamese, that's Vietnamese, that's not Vietnamese, you're Vietnamese, you're not Vietnamese, you know?

Timeframe 31:04 >> 35:09

So we settled eventually on South 10th Street, one house away from the two way entrance ramp. So that's a very busy thoroughfare. Even now, when I come back to San Jose and visit, I still, even though my parents live out by Eastridge, my dad lives up at East Ridge, I still whenever I visit downtown San Jose, I still get to drive past old house every time and I just get back on the freeway. So that neighborhood, when we moved in in 1978 or so, was the neighborhood, from my memory, of white working class people like our neighbors on both sides were these older white people who were basically World War Two generation. They were very friendly to us. And then, you know, there are a lot of apartment buildings and ramshackle homes on 10th Street. So I don't think the economic level of the neighborhood was high. Even to me, it felt sort of like working class. And besides the white working class, there were also what we would call Mexicans. I had no idea they were all Mexican immigrants or Mexican Americans or whether they came from different countries in Central and Latin America. But we just called the Mexicans.

And actually my best friend Cheuy, his useful lived on the other side of the 280 freeway and we both went to school together at Saint Patrick on Santa Clara and Ninth Street. So we would, you know, walk back from school all the time. So I was aware that, you know, there were white ethnic working class people, Mexican immigrants and their kids like Cheuy, and then the Vietnamese refugees, most of whom didn't live in homes, they lived in the apartment buildings. And I would sometimes, you know, visit some of the people that we knew. And, you know, even I could tell they were poor, you know, in very barebones apartments that they were in overcrowded with people. And I was aware of that. Most of them were going to the public schools, Lowell Elementary, for example, down the street on Seventh Street. I went to that for about a year and a half, and then my parents wanted me to go to Catholic school. My brother was forced to go to public school. But, you know, he's lucky he got to go public school his entire life. I would've preferred that. But by the time I was in the fourth grade, my parents had felt economically comfortable enough that they sent me to Saint Patrick instead. So I left behind that world of Vietnamese South 10th Street, and that area is densely Vietnamese. All those kids, again, were going to the public schools. So I went to Saint Patrick not that far away, 30 minute walk, and that was that school at the time was half white and half Latino, Filipino and other kinds of Asians. There's a handful of us who were Vietnamese.

If you visit now, Saint Patrick is almost entirely people of color. So there's been a whole shift and I don't know what's happened, but there's been a whole shift in the ethnic makeup of downtown San Jose from the from the late seventies and eighties where there were white people. Now, there don't seem to be that many people there anymore, you know, So you know, that person who put up that sign in the window that said another American driven out of business wasn't wrong. You know that the 19 late 1970s would portend a whole new wave of arrivals coming from Vietnam that would reshape downtown. They my parents worked a lot. I don't remember them taking any time off between 1978, 1979, when they opened the Saigon Muoi and 1988 when I left for for college. Yeah, no, no vacations, nothing like that. When we were in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, again, the first three years when we were poor. And with that time we actually took vacations to Atlantic City, New York, you know, picnics, these kinds of things. That's why I sort of remember that time with much more fondness than this hardscrabble struggle for existence, where there was simply no time to take any time off from the store. So it wouldn't be until the early nineties that my parents would when, you know, the store had done well and they actually gave up the Saigon Muoi, rented it out. Then my parents started to take vacations without me, so they would go to Israel, Rome, Vietnam in 94 when the country really went. The US lifted the embargo in Vietnam, you know, but I wasn't there to enjoy these experiences for my parents.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 35:09 >> 37:47

So I grew up in a very multicultural San Jose in downtown and south 10th Street, very aware of that. But then when I went to high school and went to Bellarmine College Preparatory, which, you know, even at that time it was very clear I was being sent there. Number one, because Saint Patrick was a feeder school to Bellarmine, as all the local Catholic schools were. But number two, because it was the reputation of being the best high school in San Jose and at the time the mayor of San Jose was from Bellarmine. My feet, my classmate Sam Liccardo would become the future mayor of San Jose. And then I believe the current mayor of San Jose who just got elected is also a Bellarmine graduate. I mean, this was old money for San Jose, this school, as I was being sent there and that totally changed my life because I went from multicultural working-class San Jose to San Jose where the kids were driving BMW and and things like that. You know, there was mostly white high school and there were some of us who were of Asian descent and we knew we were a difference. Every day we gather in a corner of the campus for lunch, and we would call ourselves the Asian Invasion. So that was the extent of my political and racial consciousness at the time. And yet, you know, I had grown up steeped literature from the same as a public library just reading everything I came across. And then when I went to Bellarmine, I had a very elite education. So I was reading everything from, you know, the Communist Manifesto to the Sound and the Fury to Ulysses. This is high brow stuff. And but it was all white stuff. And so that both of those factors would be really crucial in making me a writer, you know, the immersion in reading stories as an escape, but also an immersion in the Canon Western canon.

And then eventually when I went to school at Berkeley, the recognition that the Western canon doesn't include me, that I'm not white, you know, which I do, but I do have a language for it. And to want to Brooklyn became an Asian American. So I think San Jose, uh, had a tremendous impact on me as a writer. But I would say in a negative way. In other words, I think San Jose left me deeply disturbed. Um, I don't know if traumatized is the right word for it, but I was certainly a I certainly have an intense ambivalence toward San Jose because of all the all these many factors of being a Vietnamese refugee, of watching what happened to my parents, of my encounters with whiteness in the city. So San Jose, I think, turned me into into a writer by giving me the requisite emotional damage necessary to become one.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 37:47 >> 41:09

I think the impulse to just want to be something without the adjective, journalist or writer, but not an Asian American journalist or writer is a very human impulse. And it's it's an a very understandable impulse. We look around, we're like, well, that white guy or whatever, that's he's just a writer, so why shouldn't we have that privilege? And that that's absolutely right. However, we don't live in that kind of a society. And so when we posit these things as either choices, I can be a writer or an Asian American writer, for example, that's a false choice, and that's true of any profession you want to talk about. It's a false choice because it doesn't understand how the very question itself is an outcome of the fundamental contradiction of the United States, which is that this is a country built on ideals of freedom and democracy and equality, and also built on settler colonization, genocide, enslavement and continual war. We've been at war and throughout our entire history. For most Americans, they don't want to recognize the contradiction. They would much rather recognize the American dream, which is our euphemism for settler colonization in this country, and our refusal to recognize the fundamental contradiction of this country, which is why we can have a President Obama for one set of terms and then a President Trump for the next set of terms. Some people were surprised by that. I wasn't. I was like, this has happened because the impulse to have a Trump has always been there in American history and likewise, therefore, this contradiction between the between the ideal and the reality is what produces this discomfort for some people who want to just be the writer or just be the unmarked kind of person, but they're never going to get it. They can aspire to it. And the aspiration is important because it reminds us of what the country should be. But it's also an illusion because the country will never be that until it recognizes what it was built on, which is blood and so to be marked as an Asian American writer is not an identity. When we call it an identity, we would call Asian Americans anything, an identity. We've fundamentally misunderstood what it means to be a racialized person in this country, to be a racialized person in this country is to be marked by the history of blood and bloodshed in this country. And so to reduce it to an identity is simply to reduce it to some kind of a choice that we're making. You know, we have this choice of food or this choice of community or something. And that is one thing about what it is, but it must again, how we wouldn't have Asian Americans in this country unless it were for warfare and colonization. So I call myself a writer, and I also call myself a Vietnamese refugee writer and an Asian American writer. All of these things can exist simultaneously, and that's the challenge. So when people say you have to be one or the other, they're refusing possibility of recognizing that we have to be all these things, multiple things at the same time because these multiple things gesture at different past and different possible futures. So the person who says, I just want to be a writer or a journalist, they are gesturing towards the future. I want to get there. I want to have to. But we're not going to get there just on that impulse. We only going to get there if we also embrace the racialized identities that many of us don't even want, but we have to take on in order to be able to shed that identity at some point in the future.

Timeframe 41:09 >> 46:17

When I was growing up in San Jose, like every other little kid and young person, I was into movies and TV and comic books. I remember, you know, my my part of the sign of our increasing prosperity is that my parents bought a gigantic for us gigantic TV, which meant 25 inches. 25 inches. And I was watching it so much, my dad got upset and said, You're watching too much TV. And so then he he unplugged the TV and taped over the outlet, which was like, I was like, what does that even do, you know? So when he wasn't home, I just tape the outlet and plug the TV back in. So I was, you know, come home from school and I would just be watching all these sitcoms that were being aired every afternoon or the classic 1950s, 1960s sitcoms. That was a part of my growing up. That was my window into what I thought of as Americana. Like, all the shows were about white people. And so I thought I thought, this is a weird this so exotic was not like the life we have. What's being shown on these TV sitcoms and dramas. And my parents were watching like Dallas and Three's Company at night. Now, how these deeply Catholic people could watch Three's Company and laugh, I don't know. But they totally enjoyed these kinds of of shows. And I was also, of course, reading a lot of books and listening to the radio. And and these were, again, my portals of Americanization, of listening to Top 40 music, For example, I was watching music videos on TV.

And so my life revolved are resolved in terms of media around being a book nerd on the one hand, but also spending all this time with mass media as well. And comic books. I was a comic book collector. And, you know, part of the problem for me was I was poor at any money. My parents didn't give me an allowance. I had some I find ways to scrape together some money to buy comics. I was like my greatest ambition at the time. And then, of course, you know, I couldn't afford to go to movies, so I couldn't go to movie theaters or anything like that. I didn't have any friends who would take me. So most of my movie watching was done at home and I don't know what it was. Around 1982, my father brought home a VCR, and this was a totally brand new thing, right? So this is actually really cutting edge to a VCR and this is before the era of Blockbuster, I think.

So we would go to a Vietnamese video store on Santa Clara Street, and then it was really close. We just walk there from from the Saigon Muoi, and it was a narrow little shop and had all the videos behind the counter and the titles were printed in a binder so I could look the computer and look. I would watch Star Wars, Bruce Lee movies, things like that. And then, of course, I found Apocalypse Now because I was really into war movies. And so somewhere in the early eighties, I watched Apocalypse Now. I think it was my first encounter, possibly with an American movie of the Vietnam War. And it was a deeply shocking experience for me because I was totally fascinated by war.

But my education had been completely in things like World War One, World War two, the Korean War, And with the Korean War, you know, things are starting to edge a little closer to the Asian thing or with World War Two, you know, movies about Japan. But this was very clearly about Vietnam. And I understood by then at 11, 12 years of age that I was Vietnamese and that had something to do with this war, you know, because my classmates at school with tease me about it. You know, these non-Vietnamese kids would make fun of my name. Hey, is your last name Nam, for example, or hey, did you carry an AK 47 in the war? Okay, so there's something going on here. So watching that was very interesting because, you know, I was cheering for the American soldiers. I was an American up until the moment that they murdered Vietnamese civilians. And it was a deeply shocking experience. I think that I didn't know what to make out of it. I think that I was split in two because I couldn't reconcile these two things. I identified with the American soldiers, but then these Vietnamese people were being killed and there was no room in this movie for Vietnamese people to speak or say anything intelligible. They were all we were obviously these total aliens. So who was I? And so I didn't have a language or an ability to make sense out of that. So I just put that away. So then eventually, when I was in college, that movie resurfaced for me, and I was finally able to put into words why that scene was so disturbing, you know, because it was a manifestation of racism, warfare, imperialism, sexism. And it was Vietnamese people being objectified, silenced and killed. So that awareness that media was bringing racism into my life gradually grew. Because, of course, in the 1980s, if you listen to the radio, sometimes you'd hear, you know, anti-Asian jokes from the deejays, for example, or you turn on the TV and late at night there would be, you know, Breakfast at Tiffany's with Mickey Rourke. And so all of these these little pinpricks of racism were there in all the media, the TV and the radio and and the movies that I loved. And so I had to try to figure out how to make sense out of all of that, who was I in this society and all again, all that was being delivered through pop culture.

Timeframe 46:17 >> 51:15

My older brother, who is seven years older than I was and who came to the United States with no English in 1975. By 1982, graduated as valedictorian of San Jose High, I think possibly the worst high school in San Jose or one of the worst high schools in San Jose and went to Harvard, which is what you're supposed to do when you're Asian, when you're a Vietnamese refugee. There's a total American dream narrative, but also an Asian American model minority narrative as well. And then I went to Stanford Medical School, so I went to the best high school or the most elite high school in San Jose was kind of a mediocre student. I was I was not terribly motivated. You know, I probably was probably unhappy at home and again, had some kind of I think I probably had some at least incipient awareness of my alienation from this very elite education, this white environment at school. So I was not terribly motivated and I ended up being rejected by almost every college I applied to, including Harvard and Stanford, and went to my last choice college, you know, which was UC Riverside. My parents were very upset. You look at your brother, look what he did, and now you're going to go. We haven't heard of this school before.

And actually, it was probably the the best thing that ever happened to me in the sense that I was very upset going to UC Riverside. And this is totally unfair to UC Riverside, which is a very good school. But I was very disappointed in myself, and I got there and I was like, and right before that summer, before I believe, I went to visit Berkeley with my then girlfriend and the moment I stepped onto Telegraph Avenue and then crossed the street into Sproul Plaza of the Berkeley campus, I felt immediately at home like this is where I should be like somehow I understood this. There's this whole intellectual, cultural, political vibe. I could just feel it and it was me. So I decided when I got to Riverside I would work my hardest to transfer. And so I became a straight-A student. I transferred to UCLA for a quarter after my freshman year at Riverside. Then I transferred to Berkeley in the middle of my sophomore year.

So that's how I arrived at Berkeley in the spring semester of 1990. It was like, Wow, this is my dream school. And I've I've, I feel I feel like I've finally found my home when I got there. I wrote my first book, uh, when I was in the third grade. You know, there was an opportunity to do so, and I wrote Andrew Luster the Cat. And then, you know, the public library gave me an award for Lester the Cat. And that put the idea in my head that I could be a writer. Um, and throughout the next 15 years or so, no, nothing for the next ten years or so, up until college, I would, you know, write little bits here and there. I'd write bad poetry, I would write bad teleplays things like this try to make a stab at writing short stories and everything. So I, yeah, did have this idea that I wanted to be a writer. I didn't really know what it involved. I would read books about writing and I thought, Wow, this just seems so intimidating. What these writers are saying, How do I become a writer? And then, you know, when I got to college, what happened was that, um, I tried to get into writing classes, writing workshops, and that I did succeed in getting into writing workshops at Berkeley with some very well-known writers, Maxine Hong Kingston and Bharati Mukherjee. And, you know, for me, the issue was that I wanted to become a writer more and more. That was very clear. I remember in my first quarter at UCLA telling my my poor college roommate, you know, look at Scott Fitzgerald. He wrote and published his first novel when he was like 24 or 25. That's going to be me. He was so impressed. Right. And of course, I was just I had no idea what that involved, but I wanted that.

But I also was very pragmatic as well. I knew that I had to please my parents who were paying for my education. I was very lucky. They paid for everything. And so I knew that I was also, by the time I got to Berkeley, a very good student. I was an English major and ethnic studies major. I was nearly perfect grades and was a very good writer of academic essays, and I was getting a lot of affirmation from my professors. So when I graduated from Berkeley, I didn't want to go get a job, so I had to figure out where I was going to go to graduate school. And honestly, it was I was either going to go to law school, MFA program in Creative Writing, or an English Ph.D. program, and I just did a very rational calculation which top five what where am I most likely to get into the top five program? And this is the model minority impulse. Like again, the specter of my brother, you know, like he did all this, now I have to do this. And so it was basically graduate school in literary studies. I knew that I could probably get into a top five program. That's exactly what happened. And so I did want to become a writer, but I just wasn't you know, I wasn't emotionally prepared for it, artistically prepared for it, psychologically prepared for it. So that would have to wait for a while while I became a scholar and a professor.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 51:15 >> 54:55

When I got to UC Riverside for my freshman year, there was an ethnic studies requirement and the class that I took was Intro to Chicano Studies, which to me felt very natural because I grew up in California and it's like a Chicano, everything everywhere, you know, And my my best friend from grade school was Mexican American. So and I took that class and I thought it was really, really illuminating and taught me a lot about Chicanos, Mexican Americans and so on in the United States. And then when I got to Berkeley, I took Intro to Asian American Studies because I was very curious about this idea of what is an Asian American? And I was totally blown away. This discourse was taught by Ronald Takaki. He had just published “Strangers From a Different Shore,” the first comprehensive history of Asian-Americans. We've bought the book in his class. He actually had a bookseller come to the class with, you know, trollies of books. And we paid for that. That book. So that class really, really changed, changed my life along with my my involvement with Asian American activism on the Berkeley campus because it gave me a whole vocabulary and a history for understanding who I was in this country, or at least one dimension of myself.

And so I was an English major from the very get go from from the beginning my freshman year. But I never thought that I could make that into my life because it seemed very alien to my life. We were reading obviously canonical European Anglo literature and I couldn't, you know, I thought, I can't go home to my parents who barely understood what an English major was. I held them off first by saying I was pre-med as well, which I genuinely did premed for 11 weeks. And then. And then. And then I did a and then. Then I thought about going to law school and I told them off for like four years, but I couldn't think that I could do something with an English major if it was all about Dickens and Austen and the romantic poets, which were who were great.

But, you know, what's the connection with my life? And so taking Asian American studies and Chicano studies made me feel like, Oh, I'm reading books by Chicano writers. I never heard it before. Asian American writers are never heard of before. They're writing about people that are like me in one way or another. And so I wanted to add a second major, and I thought, okay, I can be an Asian American studies major at Berkeley or I can be an ethnic studies major at Berkeley. And I chose ethnic studies because that was a very deliberate decision on my part out of a recognition of the importance of solidarity and coalitions that, of course, I needed to learn about Asian Americans, but I also needed to learn about all the other racialized minorities in the United States as well. And so that was a that was a life changing decision on my part to become an ethnic studies major. And it meant that I was exposed to intersectional histories and it meant that I was exposed to all kinds of literatures by Asian-Americans and by African Americans. It meant that I began to have this beginning of an understanding of the history of colonization and my place in it.

So and then I also started to encounter Marxist professors in the English department at Berkeley. There weren't many, but there were a couple of the classes with them, you know, and and, you know, we were we were thinking through colonization and Marxism and their relationship to literature. So all those intellectual strands within the English department intersected very well with the the Marxist materialist basis of ethnic studies as well. So I was just very lucky to be at Berkeley at this time because we had so many great scholars who were foundational in these fields of postcolonial and ethnic and Asian American studies. I don't think I would have become the scholar and the writer that eventually became, if it hadn't been for that very happy conjunction of those two majors.

Timeframe 54:55 >> 1:02:17

So I arrived at Berkeley in 1990, January 1990, and this was, I think, a moment where I felt I didn't know where we were historically in this country because the sixties were clearly defined by the Vietnam War, civil rights struggle, things like this. And then the 1980s were defined by Ronald Reagan and by what I would retrospectively understand as the period when America, the United States of America, was really fighting the Vietnam War again in memory. There was so many movies that the Hollywood was making about the Vietnam War. These were the classic American war movies of Vietnam that I watched most of those things. And then 1989, you had the the the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the theoretical end of the Cold War. And so by 1990, where were we? We were in this moment of American triumphalism. Right. And at Berkeley, getting involved with radical politics and everything, I think we there was a sense that we missed the boat, figuratively speaking. Like what was really cool were the sixties, like all our professors had had had came from the sixties, which to us felt like ancient history. But there were some of them who had actually been at Berkeley in the sixties or San Francisco State. And and, you know, I remember distinctly Ling-Chi Wang of ethnic studies telling me the the nineties will be like the sixties again. Like, okay, all right, we're here for this. So that that's what that's what we we wanted to, you know turn Berkeley into a revival of the sixties in the nineties but the political causes didn't seem as as important you know because we'd seen the civil rights legacy from the Black power and Asian American power from the sixties and in the eighties, you know, people the graduate students who were there in the eighties were telling us, Oh yeah, we had the anti-apartheid struggle in the eighties. Now that seemed like something really important. What are we doing? What were we protesting in 1990? We were protesting for faculty diversity and affirmative action, which are important things, but they don't have the same gravitas as anti-apartheid apartheid or anti-war or black power and Asian American power. So I think we we we we young, you know, students, college students were very serious about turning ourselves into activists, taking very seriously this, ah, politicization, thinking very seriously about how our future careers would intersect with our political convictions. And then 1991 happened, and in 1991 there was Operation Desert Storm, and I was 20 years old. And we were really scared, actually. I thought, Oh, we're going to go to war. And the wind up to the war took a long time. So as a lot of time to think about what could possibly happen, I was like, Well, I signed up for Selective Service like you're supposed to do. If this war drags on for a while, who knows what could happen? And so there was you know, I participated in anti-war protest, and that started to feel very real because this is a real, real, real war with real stakes for for those of us who were of draft age. And then, of course, the war was very, very short, at least that phase of the war.

But, you know, I, I basically finished my undergraduate career at Berkeley in 92, right after Operation Operation Desert Storm. I entered graduate school with an intense political consciousness and awareness, and all of those political ambitions were then rerouted into the study of literature. And so I feel like, you know, for me, what's happened in the last 30 years or so has been an intellectual and artistic journey for me to understand the political ambitions and energies of a 20 year old kid, 19 year old kid, college student who I would never want to be again, but whose idealism was is very important to me. And so the idealism, the political convictions of that moment of 1990, 91, 92, when I was willing to get arrested, which I was twice at Berkeley for political reasons, that that ambition is something that I try to channel into the writing and the scholarship and the nonfiction and so on that that that that sense that, you know, I believe that the world should be a certain way. Now, how we achieve that, I think, you know, I'm different than I was in 1990 or 91, but I conviction that the world should be a certain way and that art and scholarship and criticism can help us get there. That that was boy, that impulse was born in a night from a 19-year-old. And I'm still I still believe that he was right.

I was always very strategic and pragmatic, and it was my inheritance from my parents. You know, I we had to be economically stable, and we had to take care of our futures and everything. So in fact, when I went to graduate school in 92, I was I was very clear. I had heard about something called tenure, like tenure. You know, you don't get fired if you have tenure. I want that. So I decided that I was going to get my Ph.D. in five years and I would get tenure and then I would then become a writer, become a full time writer that no one could fire me at that point. And so my plan worked exactly as I as I supposed I did finish my Ph.D. in five years, get a job, got tenure six years later, and had published my first academic book. And the sad thing about that was that in fact, I had not understood that becoming an academic would discipline me that I was making. It wasn't just that I was going to use academia as a steppingstone to become a writer, but academia would use me and transform me. So by the time I got tenure, I had actually become a different person. I had become deeply professionalized as an academic, and I was still writing about Asian American literature and politics. But in this very highly theoretical academic way, which in an academic context is highly rewarded, I got tenure and so on, but it produced a book that I thought when I had it, I never wanted to write another book like that again. And if I did have to, I would leave academia because I just found it to be such a labor. And I felt that that's this is not the person I actually want to be. And so from that moment onwards, in my early thirties, I set off on that quest to become the writer. And it would take, I think, another dozen years before I would be able to accomplish that goal while I was trying to inhabit academia at the same time.

But but to become a writer was also a way for me to again, to revisit that 19-year-old in his political, theoretical, artistic convictions and to try to remake myself into a scholar who could also produce scholarship that would be meaningful to not academics. Because mostly academics read my first book, but I'm really kind of pleased that there are not academics who have read my second academic book “Nothing Ever Dies”, and that there's a lot of non-academics who read the stuff that I write for magazines and newspapers and so on. And so I don't regret having become an academic because it provided me with a lot of theoretical tools that I used in my writing. But I have needed to, to, to reconstruct myself and become an academic, not like the conventional academics. Yeah.

Timeframe 1:02:17 >> 1:09:51

I think I was deeply moved by a great number of literary texts that I was reading in college. You know, I felt that encounter being the literature of Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison and Maxine Hong Kingston and other Asian American writers like Theresa [Hak Kyung] Cha, David Henry Wong and Jessica Hagedorn were all very, very meaningful for me because they demonstrated that in fact, artistic power and excellence of it, indisputable kind could be accomplished while talking about history and politics and race and gender and colonization and enslavement all at the same time. And that was then my ambition. You know, I, I decided that I, I had enough of a of a literary taste or thought I did that I understood that there was there was a hierarchy of taste, there was good literature and not so good literature, and that I did not want to become the writer of color or Asian American writer who was going to be published and read simply because he was writing about Vietnamese people but maybe wasn't writing anything that great.

So I wanted I wanted to set a very high standard for myself. And then I went to graduate school and I became a specialist in American literature. So I read a lot of American literature. So, you know, reading people like Melville and Faulkner were very important to me because I could totally see that these guys, these are white guys, but they're doing something incredible with their books. They're taking on all of the United States and its complexities. And I could see the entire genealogy of American literature from Benjamin Franklin up until Toni Morrison. And I thought, I want to be in this genealogy again. My desire was not this compensatory desire. Well, you know, we don't have Vietnamese or Asian American stories, so as long as as long as I can publish, that's good enough. That was not it was like I want to take on all of American literature because, you know, it's not enough that we have Asian-American literature, for example. It's not enough that we tell Vietnamese stories. That's what we're given. But I wanted to use that opportunity that multiculturalism seems to offer us. Well, you get your little slot to talk about Vietnamese refugees, for example, and I wanted to take that and then leverage it against all of American literature and culture because I want to demonstrate that a writer of color in an Asian American writer and a Vietnamese writer was also a writer in the sense that I could take on all of the United States.

And that is not what is expected of us. So we have Vietnamese American literature, for example. But it's very clear to me from my sort of scholarly point of view that we are expected to write about the Vietnamese refugees and the American dream and how sad the Vietnam War was, you know, but we're not expected to take on American imperialism and colonization. We're not supposed to say those words. And I say those words in my fiction and nonfiction. Now, I know that a lot of people are probably pick up my books expecting the American Dream narrative, expecting the you know, sad refugee story. And they come to my lectures expecting the same thing. And then I give them my version of the United States. And I feel that that's been my project. You know, and that should be, you know, the project of so many of us is to refuse the little slots that we're given to use them to our advantage, but to refuse to be to be put into them because we get our little rewards in our little boxes. Right. But we have to break out.

So when I was growing up, I never heard of Asian American literature. I think the only Asians that I remember reading about in literature were like the Chinese of Pearl Buck's Good Earth, for example. And that was sort of amazing for me, you know, when I was a kid to come across a Vietnamese American novel in the San Jose Public Library, “Blue Dragon, White Tiger”, I found this, like in the eighties or so by Tran Van Dinh. And I had never I was like, What is this, a Vietnamese American author with a Vietnamese American book? You know, it wasn't a great novel, but it was there. It existed, right? And then I got to college and I read all these Asian American writers. And that course on Asian American literature taught by Elaine Kim was sort of a condensation of, you know, 50 or 60 years of Asian American literary history.

And so we were reading we had a dozen books. Doesn't authors. And nevertheless, after 1990, when I took their class, every time a publication by an Asian American would happen, it was a huge thing. There wouldn't be very many, right? So the moment that there would be like an Asian American novel that would come out, I would rush to buy it from the bookstore. And so you would be lucky. I would be lucky if we would see an Asian American book published once or twice a year. Okay. Now you fast forward to the present. And I can't even keep up with Asian American literature. I mean, there's there's literally dozens of books published every year by someone of an Asian-American background in all kinds of different genres and so on. Writers are winning all kinds of literary awards and so on. And I am in general, of course, ecstatic about that. However, I think that there's there's a way to to understand what's happening as in a more complicated fashion, rather than just celebrating the emergence of an Asian American literature that is probably the the place where Asian Americans have most succeeded in culturally representing themselves up until now, you know, as we speak, you know, Ke Huy Quan just won the Oscar for best supporting Actor and so on.

But before that, you know, it was like, you know, there was very occasional artist representation in Hollywood, but it's literature that we really told a lot of different stories. But one way to complicate that is to me, that Asian American literature is itself a manifestation of the model minority issue. Now, on the one hand, the stereotype of the model minority as well. We become engineers and doctors and lawyers and so on. But what happens when we don't become engineers and doctors, lawyers, we do other college things. We become creative writing majors; we get MFA. That's also a model minority track too. I think it's still higher education, it's still credentialing, it's still the pathway of legitimacy. And so now, you know, we've we're reaching a moment where, like there are lots of Asian American writers and most of them come through the MFA programs and through the universities.

And that's great. But it's also, you know, we need to recognize that this means that we are a part of where Asian American literature is a part of this larger ecosystem of capitalism, corporate publishing and ideology in which the narrative of the American dream is still the narrative in which Asian-American literature is understood. So you can do that crudely or you can do it subtly. Usually we try to do it subtly. Writers aren't supposed to be crude, but nevertheless, Asian-American literature, I think too often is not very interesting or dangerous, because of course, it's interesting that we tell the stories of specific populations, specific people whose stories have not yet been told because of a particular family or ethnic group and so on. So yeah, we're fulfilling that function of producing ever more stories. But I'm a little cynical because I think that ideologically a lot of Asian American literature is rather not, again, a dangerous because it accepts the terms of this model minority situation that Asian Americans find themselves in.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 1:09:51 >> 1:15:11

You know, it's it's hard to be a writer, period. You know, like I spent 17 years or so writing of short story collection called The Refugees and it took that long because it was just so hard to write a short story. You would imagine it's easy, it's short notes and incredibly difficult to learn that art. And so to tell a writer, you know, the whole you you it's not just enough that you learn the art. You also have to learn the critique, like you have to learn American ideology so you can subvert it. That's asking a lot of writers, and yet that's what I think we should do, you know, Of course, I think we should learn the art, learn the technique, learn the craft that we're technically as good as we can be. But all of that technical precision, I think, is is not enough in terms of my kind of a project. And like I said, my kind of a literary project is to contest all of American literature and of the United States. We're not going to do that if we don't have a critique of where we're at in this country as Asian Americans and what function literature can can do.

So for the budding young Asian American, the Southeast Asian writer, I would say let's think beyond just making a contribution, think beyond filling a gap, think beyond, you know, representing your people, that all that is important. But again, that's the box. That's a slot that's being offered to you. And that's why some people I think, in to of intuitively understand that. And that's why some people say, I don't want to be a writer or I don't want to be an Asian-American writer or Asian American journalist. I just want to be a writer or a journalist. And what they're saying is that they want to be they don't want to be put in that little box. But unless they also have a critique of why that box exists, it's not enough. So I think writers, young writers should be ambitious. Set yourself a very high goal. It might take you a long time to get there, but if you aim low, you're going to stay there, you know, and so be ambitious again. Of course, you want to tell the story of your people if that's your ambition. But go beyond that. Go beyond that. You know, I don't think the great artist wanted to tell the stories of their people. The great artists wanted to make great art and contest the great ideas and contest the, you know, you know, ask the big questions. And just because you're an Asian American or Southeast Asian writer, it's it's your territory is not just being Asian American or Southeast Asian. That's important. But you can totally blow that away by asking the big questions, becoming the artist that confronts the entire country in the entire canon and the entire genealogy that we find ourselves in.

I think representation is important. Representation matters as the slogan goes, but I always want to qualify qualified representation matters, but it's not enough. People forget the second part. So then when when they see themselves represented because of a successful movie or because someone from their group becomes elected or becomes visible in some way, you know, we would be very excited, right? And yet in as much as representation matters when we have been poorly represented or not represented at all, the fact of the matter is that simply because someone like me has written a book or has a public face or persona or something doesn't mean I'm going to agree with that person. Why should it? I mean, like when Obama, President Obama gets elected, half of the United States was not excited about that. And they have the right to their opinion. Okay. And likewise, in the Asian American or Southeast Asian context of an Asian American in Southeast Asian becomes representative in some way. Good for them. Good for all of us in general. But it doesn't mean I have to like what they do. It doesn't mean that we agree. And in fact, most times I don't.

Most of the times I find myself disagreeing with a lot of Asian American and Southeast Asians, and that's the way it should be. Because I think part of the sign of our maturity as a community and as a people is that we can disagree with each other, that we don't feel like we constantly have to accentuate the positive and silence the negative, because from the perspective of art, you know, you're not going to produce good art from consensus or by trying to please everyone and you shouldn't have to. And so I fear that slogan representation matters short circuits people's thinking by by saying, well, that means we can't say anything negative about whether it's Crazy Rich Asians or Everything Everywhere, All at Once. Just to use two examples, we should be strong enough to absorb and deal with criticism and disagreement, even when it's internal. That's healthy. And I'm not sure we're healthy yet because I think there's still so many circumstances where we still feel so anxious and we don't want to hear any criticism of everything everywhere all at once. I understand the impulse, but I also think it's very disabling at the same time. So we have to go beyond representation matters and ask what else do we need for a just and equitable society. Because for me to become an Asian American or Vietnamese American, it was only partly about representation. It was mostly about anger at a recognition of injustice that we would not be here as Asian Americans or Vietnamese Americans if it hadn't been for war and colonization and bombing and invasion and all of these things. Representation is going to solve that problem, you know? And so what else do we need to make sure that these wars and colonization and bombings don't continue to happen? Representation is not going to solve that problem.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe nan

I think the history of the United States shows us that there have always been coalitions and there's always been challenges around coalition building, right? We go back to the 17th century and the arrival of indentured servants and African slaves on the continent, and they were already forming coalitions at that time. And of course, the force of colonization and domination is there to erase the memory of earlier coalitions or the possibility of coalitions, and to encourage us to to identify only with ourselves and not with others. And so this is part of the one of the ways where I think identity is both powerful and also detrimental. Of course, we want to have a Vietnamese American or Asian American identity, but what happens when that identity is used to be instead of allowing us to form an empathetic relationship with another subordinated group, what if we use it or whatever encouraged to use it to not be empathetic? And that's an equal reality in terms of the cultural politics and real politics of the country today. So I think that understanding that the struggle in this country for justice and equality and all of that is a centuries long struggle is on the one hand, potentially very depressing and another and kind of liberating because then you that my understanding is we're not going to solve these problems around coalitions and solidarities, for example, in the next 20 years or 50 years or even 100 years, you know, we've certainly, for example, been able to move beyond the era of Chinese exclusion from 1882 until the present moment.

There's been real political change. You know, Asian Americans are now 6% or so of the American population from that period of Chinese exclusion. And yet that Chinese exclusion era still lingers with us and we still have the phobia, the potential for the country turning against Chinese and Asians. So we both these realities exist at the same time and along with other realities involving other groups in the country. And so I think that having that historical and political consciousness is what we need in order to both, again, build coalitions and solidarities and continue to rebuild them. Because part of the reality is that these coalitions of solidarities will keep getting erased, destroyed, forgotten. And we have to rebuild them over and over and over again.

Oh, I think there's so many ways for us to carry out that kind of educational process. I mean, obviously we can do it in courses and schools and universities, which is why today in the United States, the terrain of education is so deeply politicized. So Ron DeSantis in Florida, I think he's wrong in a lot of ways, but he's right in one way in which he understands that education is actually a political battleground. And he's right because we ourselves think of education as a political battleground. I was politicized in a university classroom and that's what the right wing is afraid of. Rightly so, rightly so. And so education, history, all these things are not irrelevant subjects. If they were irrelevant, why are we having such huge political battles over what gets taught in the curriculum? What kind of books going to be banned and so on. So all of the furor in the country right now against so-called critical race theory wokeness against, you know, the seduction of ideas in books that need to be banned. All of that, for me, affirms the importance of what we do as educators, scholars and writers. So as depressing as it is to be subjected to some of these attempts at state sponsored cancellation, at, you know, the level of the government and school board, school boards and so on.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe nan

On the other hand, it's affirming what we do matters. And so we continue that battle, we continue that fight. And then, of course, we continue that fight in so many other areas as well. That's why it's important to have elected politicians. It's important to have activist organizations. That's important to to have the conversations at the dinner table. It's important here in San Jose to have the to have the battles being fought within the city as well. Right. Because when I was growing up in San Jose, there was no Asian American consciousness. And yet here I am being interviewed about the history of being interviewed as part of a project about the history of Asian Americans in San Jose. Well, I should have known about that. Maybe my life would have been different in 1985 if my high school actually had acknowledged that there were Asian Americans here.

Like my first writing assignment, I believe in high school for the school newspaper was to go write about the brand new Fairmont Hotel that had just been built in 1986, 87 or so. And I went there and a very impressive hotel. I wrote about it. I had no idea that the Fairmont Hotel was built on top of the old Chinatown of San Jose that had been burned down. So now you've go and I think there's a plaque about it. But you know that that history was not in my school. That history was nowhere for for, for for me to find it. And so there's still so much more work to be done in terms of making that history available, easily available as easily available as a bad movie to the American population.

I became an activist in college, and there's a great romance, I think, among us student activists about activism in general. And we're thinking about the the 1960s, for example, and what people had gone through at that time. And then we were thinking about the existence of community organizations outside of campus in which very committed people were working in Chinatown, for example, and I think for me and for me and I think others, there was a sense of guilt, like, what are we doing on a college campus being activists? Can we even call ourselves that? We're not even doing real activism as a people in the these these community organizations who are doing the real work of activism. We're just wannabes, you know, And I think we should give all due credit to professional organizers, community organizations, people who are doing all kinds of unrecognized work, uncompensated work and so on. That's that's very important activism. But I also have a view. I also get a sense that if we define activism only in that sense, then it's kind of discouraging to everybody else. Like, Oh, if you don't give your entire life over to a community organization, then you're not an activist. I don't think that either or binary really helps us, you know?

So I prefer to think of activism as a spectrum of possibility. And I think I sort of and I also think that activism is also something that if you want to be an activist or be actively engaged or involved, it's a lifelong project that's going to go have its ups and downs, right? And so for me personally, so for example, I had to go through a period of professionalization. I had to get my degrees and get a job and you have stability. And then I could think about other ways of taking my political convictions and activating them. For me, it was mostly through my writing and my art, but that may seem to be a very bourgeois and intellectual kind of work relative to, again, community activists. And maybe it is, but I don't know if it's beneficial to feel guilt or to have a hierarchy in that way, but rather we should recognize that there's multiple opportunities for people to be politically engaged and active, because I think that in fact, the books that I've written and also the books that many other writers have written have had an impact on people. And the reality of it is that if I become a community activist, I might have been able to reach a few hundred or a few thousand people. But as a writer, I can reach hundreds of thousands of people. So does that count or does it not count? I don't know. That's how I just find myself to myself.

But I think I think about that wide spectrum of possibilities of activism about how people can get involved. So you don't have to do 40 hours a week as your full time job as a political activist. If you have five or 10 hours of you have a week or five or 10 hours a month, you can be an activist during that time period. And that's what we should be getting people to think about, right? That there's a wide variety of opportunities for people to be politically engaged. And again, your in your involvement will vary. And so I feel like I've been I'm more politically engaged now at my age than I was in my twenties or thirties because I have more opportunities. I have more of a right to use the term platform, you know. So now the kind of work that I'm doing has it has a greater impact than what I did when I was a college activist, right? So I don't I don't really like to call myself an activist, though, because it seems kind of pretentious for me, just as I didn't like to call myself a writer for a long time until I felt like I earned the title. So I just prefer to think of the fact that there are many ways for us to be actively engaged, whether or not we call ourselves activist or not. Right.

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