One of the most-watched shows on HBO currently is the spy thriller The Sympathizer, the story of a young Vietnamese spy who flees to the US as a refugee in the late ‘70s, just as the Vietnam War was ending.
The miniseries is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by author Viet Thanh Nguyen, who himself fled Vietnam with his parents at the age of four.
Though The Sympathizer is fiction, the themes Nguyen explores are central to both his own lived experience and those of many other immigrants in America. Growing up in Northern California, Nguyen felt neither Vietnamese nor American. Nguyen’s parents worked around the clock to survive and to send money back to relatives.
More: Viet Thanh Nguyen on being a refugee and being unwanted (Press Play)
“My parents told me often that we were 100% Vietnamese,” says Nguyen, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. “At the same time, I was also watching TV and reading books in English and becoming an American, and I felt very American by the time I was 10 or 11 or 12 years old.”
Nguyen’s latest book, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, further explores the challenges, trauma, and complexities of his childhood and how he ultimately comes to lean into and embrace his own identity and duality.
““I've learned to embrace the fact that my authenticity is my inauthenticity,” he says. “It's that paradox, that contradiction of duality that was so discomforting when I was a kid and an adolescent that I can fully embrace now.”
Nguyen talks about the power of good stories, his skill as an observer, and how his sense of straddling two worlds has stayed with him.
“In my parents' very Vietnamese household, I was an American spying on them,” he says. “When I left that household to go into the rest of the United States, I was a Vietnamese spying on Americans.”
More: Viet Thanh Nguyen on his 2021 novel The Committed (Bookworm)
Though much of what Nguyen writes about is painful and traumatic, he resists the idea that his writing process is a form of therapy.
“There's nothing wrong with using writing or other forms of art as therapy, it can be very beneficial. But I don't know that I want to be healed through my writing, because if we think of writing as therapy and you're healed, then there's no more need to be a writer,” he says.
More: Viet Thanh Nguyen on The Sympathizer (Scheer Intelligence)
In his book A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, author Viet Thanh Nguyen explains that “my parents were business people, anti-Communist, devoutly Catholic, and look at me. I'm a writer. I'm an atheist at least, a socialist probably more, and so how did that happen? But their sacrifice enabled me to become a writer because I have watched them sacrifice in that grocery store 12 to 14 hour days and every day of the week, and so their model of sacrifice was hugely influential on me as a writer.” Viet Thanh Nguyen pictured here, says that “stories are not only about narratives, and plots, themes, and symbols, but are also about emotion, about characters undergoing certain kinds of challenges and their responses to those challenges, and there was no place for those emotions to come from, except within myself.” Photo courtesy of Hopper Stone.
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