On June 13, 2018, Viet Thanh Nguyen posted: “Ellison’s first, and hopefully not last, co-creative effort with me. VTN: It was a real joy. I think almost everybody has become a writer by literally thousands of hours. So I think the Pulitzer has, in every way, transformed my status as a writer, and it’s made me want to live up to that status, to use the Pulitzer for good and for other purposes. USC PAM Event: Southeast Asian Refugee Narratives, December 9, 2020 Unfortunately, you know, in my life now, I have to read a lot of books that I would not necessarily pick up except that I’m reading books because I’m doing favors for other people and writing blurbs and things like that. So people have said things very critical to me in an audience. And, in fact, life will constantly throw obstacles in your way. The refugee writers, simply by acknowledging that history, introduce some troubling elements into the American story. Your personal memory of displacement cultivates sympathy and empathy in you; remembering the best of humanity allows us to form an ideal that we can hope and work for. Record Details Catalog Search. I don’t ask. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he and his family fled to the … ISBN 13: 978-1-68335-207-5. Viet typed out Ellison’s responses, and I edited questions and answers for pacing and coherence. TM: What book (or books) are you reading now? In order to post comments, please make sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled, and reload the page. What’s more: the multigenerational collaborative book project has the potential to inspire artists, writers, parents, and children to collaborate with one another. And that if you are, in fact, a minority in this country, you need to do both at the same time. Home > Shop Our Shelves > Non-fiction > The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives > Viet Thanh Nguyen The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. TM: That brings me to my next question. I think that African-American writers have created, in the United States, the body of literature that is both most politically committed and yet also most aesthetically elevated. Catapult, NY, 2019. The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (Hardcover) By Viet Thanh Nguyen (Editor) $25.00 . Hopefully he’ll remember the experience. VTN: To the ones whose minds and hearts are closed? I think it’s very difficult because writers live and work oftentimes in environments and an entire marketplace that are different from the environments and marketplaces of people who are opposed to immigration and to refugees, for example. Categories: Other Social Sciences. What was their feedback like? It was kind of awe-inspiring to watch how casually Hien approached the compositions and the character designs. But besides that, I think, going back to our earlier conversation about how I situate myself in terms of other bodies of literature and so on. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he and his family fled to the United States. So, for example, while I knew that the Fall of Saigon had happened and I knew the general outlines of that, I still had to go and read 10 or 15 books on the Fall of Saigon in order to construct first 50 pages of the novel at a level of novelistic detail that would be compelling for the reader. But it’s also up to me to challenge readers who would not be able to see that. I don’t have a problem with that. Now, the problem is, where the refugee and immigrant narratives overlap is that many refugee writers still, in the end, even as they acknowledge the refugee origin, including American intervention, often end with settlement in the United States. — Unsettling the American Dream: The Millions Interviews Viet Thanh Nguyen Because I had studied writers like Herman Melville and William Faulkner, I wanted this novel to gesture at these major novels and their major concerns, their major themes about American literature and culture. I’m exaggerating a little bit. EN: Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man: For Whom the Ball Rolls. I thought. Viet Nguyen, called “one of our great chroniclers of displacement” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker), brings together writers originally from Mexico, Bosnia, Iran, Afghanistan, Soviet Ukraine, Hungary, Chile, Ethiopia, and others to make their stories heard. So that even when immigrant stories talk about how difficult life in the United States might be because of racism or economic challenges and so on, nevertheless, the very existence of the immigrant story itself—the immigrant novel that we’re reading—is evidence of the success of the immigrant story and the American dream. Search . VTN: Yeah. And I wanted to write an entertaining novel—that was also a very serious novel at the same time—and a novel that would grapple with politics, history, and obviously the Vietnam War. When I read Chicken of the Sea, written by Viet Thanh Nguyen and his now six-year-old son, Ellison Nguyen, and illustrated by Thi Bui and her now teenage son, Hien Bui-Stafford, I remembered the years I worked with students at the literary nonprofit 826 Valencia and 826LA. Du Bois, the quote that you just mentioned to me, and Du Bois’s notion of the inevitable twoness of the Negro that he sees himself through his own eyes and those of others, is also true in many ways for Asian immigrants and Asian Americans. And sometimes, rarely, the conversations will be face to face. VTN: Both. Department of English More details to come on this collaborative project with artist Thi Bui and her son Hien providing the illustrations, and Ellison and me working on the story (which was his idea).”. TM: I really enjoyed the introduction you wrote for The Displaced. Sweetness – The New Yorker, Toni Morrison. For me, the challenge is the same. Viet, you described the residency as a “huge moment” for Vietnamese diasporic writing. Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer Viet Thanh Nguyen called on 17 fellow refugee writers from across the globe to shed light on their experiences, and the result is The Displaced, a powerful dispatch from the individual lives behind current headlines, with proceeds to support the International Rescue … It’s no doubt that African-American literature has been very influential on me. University of Southern California Like everyone, I was hooked from the beginning: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” This distinctive perspective challenges the binary thinking that people often have. And in Vietnam, the case was similar. The refugee story introduces other elements that can unsettle the immigrant and American dream story. Format: Paperback . Currently, the two groups cannot even have a conversation with each other. And so I think there are all these layers of insulation that I have that other people, particularly women and women of color, may not. These elements include, most critically, the fact that many refugees that come to the United States have come because of something the United States has done in their country of origin. I only want to ask this question: What do you hope to achieve with this sequel? TM: Hien, I find that the illustrations pair so well with the story. After an extensive nominating process, the board chooses the winners from a list of finalists in each category and may additionally give a… (read more), Viet Thanh Nguyen gives a keynote speech at the “Transcendients Community Celebration: Challenging Borders” for the Japanese American Nation Museum The Transcendients Community Celebration: Challenging Borders, a free one-day event, kicks off on Saturday, March 7 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Japanese American National Museum. Hien: My mom was coloring that day. And so I’m trying to bring all these different strands together. In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience. So I’m about a year and a half behind in delivering my novel to my publisher. So we endure and sacrifice a lot. Can you say more about how you balance historical fact with fiction? He views the customary writing adage “Show. So that would be writers like Dostoevsky, Louis-Ferdinand Celine from the 1920s in France, Antonio Lobo Antunes from the 1970s in Portugal. Their 17 contributions are as diverse as their own lives have been, and yet hold just as many themes in common. The interviewer would like to thank Alyssa Asquith and Philip Kurian for their generous and thoughtful contributions to the interview. It’s also nice to wear a slightly different hat than I normally wear as a parent. Thanks to Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation for funding this site. Or when I go give lectures, I have to go sometimes to very red parts of the country. So the work of changing hearts and minds is oftentimes not just at the level a book, but also at the level of personal interaction and going out there and having these kinds of conversations, trying to meet people where they’re coming from. But after the novel won the Pulitzer Prize, all of a sudden, all these Vietnamese-Americans that never read the book and might never read the book were suddenly proud of me. If you are oblivious to this issue then the following books mentioned are just what you need to have an insight into what it feels like to be side-lined in a new country that you call home. But social movements do.”. You have to endure rejection, obscurity, mockery, miscomprehension, apathy, that no one cares that you want to be a writer. VTN: I spent 20 years writing that short story collection The Refugees, and I think I exercised a lot of muscles, but maybe very different muscles and I never really coordinated everything together. For example, the anxiety that because there are so few stories about us, we have to write our stories to make our own community look good, whatever that community is. Yes, I’m the type of person who has Google alerts set up for multiple writers (Claudia Rankine, Renee Gladman, Amina Cain, and Tiphanie Yanique, to name a few) and, if they are on Facebook, I receive notifications when they post, which is how I found out about Chicken of the Sea. For this book, I drew fast and didn’t really look at anything to copy; I just drew from my imagination. And so it is actually gratifying to see sometimes that people, like even childhood friends of mine who would not read my books, get Time. Writing this historical novel, I had an easier time probably than a lot of other historical writers would writing about events that are more widely known. Language: english. He is aware of the underrepresentation of minority groups in literature, but he also understands that great fiction is much more than making one’s community look good. The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You. But I was exercising muscles. VTN: Art, community, fatherhood all bring challenges, but if they are done right, they also bring great joy. At a time when democracies around the world keep making bad decisions and young writers feel the urge to facilitate social changes, Nguyen’s role as one of the leading public intellectuals in the literary world is both inspiring and motivating. You see that also in the work of someone like Chang-Rae Lee, in the thoughtful Native Speaker. That could be an awkward question to ask. As a writer and a reader, I find joy in literature, and of course I want my son to enjoy what I do. And so The Sympathizer is unique, I think, in this landscape by refusing the immigrant story, using the refugee narrative to demonstrate these contradictions of American intervention, and directly confronting the actual war in Vietnam, in a way that Americans are not used to. That’s a trap. Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer Viet Thanh Nguyen called on 17 fellow refugee writers from across the globe to shed light on their experiences, and the result is The Displaced, a powerful dispatch from the individual lives behind current headlines, with proceeds to support the International Rescue … Putting all of these elements into his character made these theoretical ideas very organic as the plot unfolded. The Millions: Ellison created Chicken of the Sea shortly after his time at a six-day writing residency where 10 Vietnamese diasporic writers gathered at Djerassi Resident Artists Program. But I couldn’t pay attention to that either, not to write the novel I wanted to write. VTN: No, that’s a completely different skill set for journalists. So that’s where the man with two minds came from. And sometimes these conversations will have an immediate dead-end, because the other person is so angry that we can’t have a conversation. And the title comes from Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The displaced : refugee writers on refugee lives / edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen. In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience. So that meant that I had read some of the modernist and classical literature of the West. Los Angeles, CA 90089-0354 I love having a little kid at writers’ or artists’ retreats—while it’s harder for the parents, it’s a wholesome addition for everyone else and pure joy for me to have someone to play with when I need to escape from my brain. EN: Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules—. I wanted the novel to deal with both cultural divisions—the so-called East-West divide—but also ideological divisions between capitalism and communism in the Cold War. It was actually relatively easy to construct the plot of the novel, because almost all the events are drawn from history. You said that if the story had begun in the States and ended in the States, it would have been all about the life and death of the American dream. And even in the context of the publications I write for, like The New York Times, Washington Post, or Time, they’re certainly not leftist, and sometimes they’re not even liberal. Featuring original essays by a collection of writers from … And the major challenge was to put in enough historical detail so that the events would be convincing without writing a history book where there would be too much information. If so, how? And I want to write a novel that lives up to The Sympathizer, both in terms of its entertainment, but also its politics. 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