is very important to this if it's if going to use the metaphor of a public square how is that square designed you know, who gets to stand on a pedestal who's been locked down in the gutter? what are the acoustics? i mean, think i think there's a lot to do there. and i think that's probably, you know, a role for either philanthropy in the us or the public, you know, public funding in to to to make sure that supported. unfortunately i'm getting the wrap up sign here thank you for everyone who's here today. thank you to everyone who's watching on c-span. please see peter and natalie downstairs when they sign their books.

and thanks for being with us for live coverage. the 2024 national book festival in dc, a couple more hours of coverage up next. in about 20 minutes, you'll hear from author marie arana talking. her book, latino land. but in the meantime, we are on our book tv set here in the convention center by viet tan to win. he is pulitzer prize winning author of the sympathizer, which came out in 2016. but his newest book is a memoir, a of two faces. you also it a memorial. what do you mean by that? peter is such a pleasure to be here with you on c-span tv. well, it's a book that about me, but mostly about my parents. the occasion for writing the memoir was when my mother passed away in 2018. i don't think i would have ever have dared to write a memoir, would have included her life and my father's before she passed away. so the book is a testament to her a memorial, her, and to

everything that she lived through, everything that she accomplished in the book. they are referred to as bob marley the sea. and my saying that correctly. ma had a little bit of a rough time in her later life, didn't. she was a very successful. she came out of poverty in a rural in vietnam, became a refugee, made a fortune twice. and then when she came to united states, she and endured all of these travails of refugee life and she became mentally ill. and so it was a very traumatic experience for her and for our family, of course, and certainly for me, watching what had happened to her visiting her in the mental hospital for the first time, which was a very difficult for me and something that i would put aside and not try to deal with from for many, many decades. it was the asian american psychiatric hospital. psychiatric of the of a larger hospital. and this was the 1980s in san jose. and so it was this very striking to realize that there were so many people of asian descent who

were in fact afflicted in some way by mental illness and were most of them refugees. you know, i was i was 17 or 18 years old, and i was completely terrified to go into the psychiatric ward and to see people afflicted as poor people were. i wasn't asking anybody any questions. i was just trying to cope with was happening to my mother. viet thanh nguyen we kind of missed the lead. who what do you mean by faces? well, i grew up in united states. i was born in vietnam but came as a refugee 1975, and i was raised in a very vietnamese household in a vietnamese refugee community. and my parents told me, you are 100% vietnamese. and at the same time, i was constantly being exposed to american culture. so i felt like an american spying these vietnamese people. but when i my parents household, i felt like i was a vietnamese spying on americans. and that sense duality was something that has always stayed me. you write that you got very adept at keeping secrets and silence while home. what does that mean?

well, i was raised by very devout vietnamese catholic parents who wanted me to be a good boy, and i was not a good boy. and i was rebelling against being vietnamese and against being catholic and against my parents. but i didn't want to confront them because i knew that they were looking for my best interest. they loved me, but they were very, very strict and didn't want to, you know, offend them for all the sacrifices that they were making for me and my brother, my sister, who we had left behind in vietnam, all the vietnamese relatives in vietnam. so lied. i kept secrets from my parents so that i could live my life and keep them happy at the same time. when you talk in this book, you talk about coming over here. but that's not a big part of your story. do you have any memories of vietnam? i have only flashes of memory because i came when i was four years of age. and even the memories that i think i had, i rely on them. for example, i remember we were on a boat leading saigon, and on the last day in april 1975, and i remember on a barge and a

smaller of refugees trying to come up to us, and i remember sailors shooting at this boat. and so i told my brother, who was seven years older, and he said that never happened. but how does he know he was only ten or 11 years old himself? so the unreliability of memory is one of the things that this memoir explores. what should we know about your parents in vietnam? what do we know about my parents? what should we know about what should we know about my parents in vietnam? that they were very, very young they were born in the 1930s or are very young when they when they had to deal with colonialism, with poverty, with being of a rural background, with having the country divided 1954, they had just gotten married. my father was 21. my mother was 17, and they became refugees for the first time. what we should know, is that what they went through was incredible, but was also completely typical for hundreds of thousands of vietnamese people who were living through war and colonialism during time. when you talk about being mentally colonized, to whom are you referring? i am referring to both americans and the french.

mean, i know very well historically and factually what the french did to vietnam, which was terrible, and what the americans did to vietnam, which in my opinion was terrible, and yet i'm completely seduced by american pop culture by american. i am an american. and when i go to france, i'm completely seduced french culture, even though i understand where french colonialism comes from. so the power of mental colonization is not to be underestimated. and i think it's just as powerful as physical and violent colonization. did your parents become americanized? as i said before, they assured me that we were 100% vietnamese, and yet, 20 years after the end of the vietnam war, when the united states reestablished relations with vietnam, my parents took that opportunity, go back to vietnam for the first time. and when they back, it was thanksgiving. and over thanksgiving dinner, my father said to me, we're americans now. so i think that was an unusual experience that they had these fixed ideas about what. vietnam was like, but when they finally went back to a changed

vietnam, they had to confront how americanized they had actually become. did he say that to you in english or in vietnamese? i'm pretty sure that was in vietnamese, yes. viet tan nguyen who is bruce smith? when i was very i went on a field trip to the monterey language institute, which is the army's post for a training soldiers in different languages. and i had a very poor grasp of vietnamese at that age because i was an american and there was a young american soldier there, red haired, wearing a vietnamese aliya who studied vietnamese. and so he said, we'll translate your vietnamese name into english. and the english equivalent that he he could come up with was bruce smith. so that's my alter ego. and have you have you changed your name since you were born? when my parents became citizens, when i was around 12 years of age, they actually changed their legally. so my parents became joseph and linda, these people who said they 100% vietnamese and, they

offered me the chance to change my name. and i thought about it for quite a and i went through various names in my mind i thought, what if i were named troy? it just didn't right. to me, this person who himself to be american but still knew he was vietnamese in a very fundamental way. so no, i resisted changing my name in. reading this book, it's not written in a typical manner. i mean, you've got it's almost poetic in a sense. is that a fair word to use? i think that's fair. i also think of it as being playful. and what happened to me is that i became a father i have children. they love children's literature. i had to relearn children's literature through them. after 30 or 40 years away. and what i discovered that children love to play and that there are no rules in children's and that children's authors do whatever they want to do. but adult authors were constrained by all kinds of and rules. and so in this book really wanted to give in to that playfulness and that inner child. well, something that you do with the book is whenever you're

referring to the u.s., it's america in capital letters trademark. why do you do that? well, i think because greatest contribution to the world is. this is we, the new world. that's what we represent to the rest of the world, for better and for worse. and we have come to own the name of america. we have to remember that the united states of america is not the only american country out there. there are a lot of people from other american countries will tell you we are a part of america too. but in the global imagination, the united states that owns america. do you feel like an american? do you feel like you're accepted as an american. i think that i am american and i'm accepted by many americans as american. i don't think i'm accepted as american. everybody in the united states. and i think my relationship to america, united states is a very complex and contradict one just as the united states itself is a complex and contradictory country. we're a country that's given us president obama and president trump. it's not surprise that emerged out of the central of the united

states, which is that we're a country founded on democracy and equality and liberty and a country on genocide, colonization and enslavement. and i live in the middle of that contradiction. we're going to put the numbers on the screen. we've got a few minutes left. viet thanh nguyen case, you a question you would like to ask him in 2016. you wrote the sympathizer won the pulitzer, became a series on hbo. how did that change your life? the pulitzer obviously everybody should win a pulitzer is fantastic. it has changed my life for the better in so many ways, but it hasn't me as a writer, i think, because i wrote the sympathizer, i wrote it for myself, and ironically, because wrote it for myself, it was a story, a vision that that resonated with a lot of other people. and so i've tried remain maintain that conviction that this is where the power of story comes out of. if one is true to one's own vision. what do you mean you wrote it for yourself? i, before the sympathizer, had written a collection of short stories called the refugees, which was published after the

sympathizer. i think it's a pretty good book, but it is a book that is in many ways written not just for myself, but for other people, for my parents, for vietnamese, for reviewers, for editors and so on. and so forth. and at the end of that experience, which took me over a decade, i felt that that was enough. now i needed to write not the opinions and estimation of others, but for myself. and i think that's a turning point that a lot of writers have come to. of course, we're seduced by the by what the world wants from us. but in the end, art has to emerge from inner self. viet thanh nguyen is, the sympathizer. historically factual. is it based on experience or is this come out of here? almost everything that happens in the sympathizer happened in real life and one of the interesting things that that i come across is when people read it or watch the tv series and they're like, hollywood just made that up. but no, this really happened. and of course, what we can as

human beings is so incredibly weird that we can't believe that these things actually took place. what does come out of me, however are the emotions within the sympathizer. those are my emotions. i want to read from a man of two faces. to be creative without being critical risks, being a lack of politics is the politics of the dominant literary world. many american writers to certain open seeks books, the open secrets dearest acknowledge its presence. if tell on the open secret, we anger the many who do not. it called out the open secret of america trademark is that white people founded it on colonization, genocide, slavery, war, and white supremacy, all of which continue shaping the self and the other. i think it is an open it's an open secret by definition is something that we can actually

say. so the various words that i've used, i think many americans do know of those words. but have we fully confronted what that means as americans? how we o of our contemporary reality to these things that have happened and these things that have happened are not actually only in the past, but in the present. i think that is part of the open secret of who we are as a people. and there are many americans who totally reject those that i have just used. they completely deny that this is a part of american. the one thing i want to ask about is a lack of politics. is the politics of the dominant american literary world. a lot of people would say that literary the literary world is very political. i think in some ways, yes. and in some ways no. i think that even interjecting the very of politics into a literary discussion controversial. i've been criticized by by people like george packer and phil clay for taking on this

particular stance because there are writers who would say no you have to separate literature from politics. so a certain way american literature is political because course writers are dealing with race and gender, things like that. but to be explicit, oddly political, to foreground that act in the very nature of the writing and your proclamation of yourself as a writer. i think that's still actually pretty controversial. what's day job? my day job. i'm a professor i still teach people. and what you teach tomorrow. on i start teaching my graduate seminar on writing as an other and in the spring teach my undergraduate survey of american war and memory in vietnam. 150 undergraduates, many of whom are southeast asian refugees, their descendants, and many of whom are military veterans, american military veterans or rotc training to go off and serve in the american military. how did you get that gig? because i care about this history and of americans are not unusual in having a habit of

forgetting their very contradictory past. so we have fought wars as a country. and most of those wars americans choose not to remember vietnam war happens to be one of those. so i think it's an important act of pedagogy, of democracy to teach class for people such southeast asian refugees and military people. and although i didn't intend it to be the case that courses now a requirement for the rotc at, my university, which is the university of southern california, when did you when your first writing award? i was in the third grade, about eight years of age. and our teacher, you should we should all write a book and draw it. and i wrote and drew a book called luster the cat, which was about an urban cat stricken with ennui who, runs off to the countryside and falls love and san jose public library decided to give a book award for luster the cat. and i'm forever grateful the san jose public library for

encouraging me and setting me on the path to more than 30 years of misery in trying to become a writer. it was a role of maxine hong kingston. your life. i went to berkeley at 19 years of age, a very passionate person who wanted to be a writer. i took maxine kingston's writing seminar. she was one of the most famous writers in the country at the time. i was 19 years old. what did i care? in a class of 14 students, i would come in and every day i would sit this far away from maxine kingston. and every day i would fall asleep. and at the end of the semester, she wrote me a note and she said, you seem to be very alien. you should make use of our universities excellent counseling services. and of course i didn't do that. i became a writer instead. did she encourage your writing, though, at some point she asked questions. oh, absolute i mean, i think as a as a writer and as a professor as a teacher, i'm so encouraged by looking back upon my failure as a student. and upon maxine's taking me

seriously, even though i fell asleep in her class every day. what she told me in that letter was you need to ask questions. here it is. you come into my class, you don't ask anybody questions, you fall asleep. but to be a writer, you have to be awake. you have to be engaged. you have to ask questions. you have to be inquisitor. and it took me decades and decades to that lesson. and so as a professor and as a teacher, i hope that when i look at my class and i see people falling asleep, i think maybe they're absorbing something. and 20 or 30 years later they'll realize they actually took away something from my class. you spend a bit of time in your new memoir, a man of two faces being of miss saigon, the that keeps coming back in in the book, what? when i was a student at u.c. berkeley, miss saigon came out and wrote an op ed criticizing it for telling a very stereotypical racist, sexist story about americans in vietnam

and vietnamese people and course casting a white man in the role of a eurasian character. and then a few years ago, i wrote an op ed for the new york times, exactly the same thing when saigon was really revitalized and put back on the road again. and to me, it just demonstrated that, in fact what we're confronting as asian-americans, asians, as vietnamese people, in terms of the racist and sexist projections onto us has been enduring and is still a reality for today. that's very much what so much of my work responds, including the sympathizer and the tv adaptation. let's take a call. let's hear from robert in arkansas. robert, good afternoon. you're with author on the win. thank you. what an honor? i'm a service from boone county, arkansas which would define me as a hillbilly. and i appreciate so much of this because i understand, too, had parents that were very strict, very, very loving and great

parents. but i lived two lives and at some you break out into the life that you want to be in. the point i want to make. what we're looking is opportunity, and it appears that opportune beauty has come to you. but along with that comes personal ambition and appreciate so much your statements, your coming together. and you think and as we think of the country as a puzzle, i think you're a tremendous piece in this puzzle of what the country really is. thank you very much. thank you so much, robert that really means a lot to me. you know, as a writer we put our books out in the world, we put our words out into the world. we never know who we're going to to find who they're going to contact. so delighted that i i've met you through my books. a reader in an arkansas when i was young and growing up, i went to the santa state public library. i read as much as i could. that library, none of those books think were written specifically for me, a young vietnamese refugee. and yet those books connected

with me. so i totally understand your experience as a reader. text message from laura in virginia is the sympathizer a tv show true to the book? i think the sympathizer is the tv show actually pretty true to the book? and the reason why? because we were very careful in our collaborators for that tv show, starting with lee fishman, the producer who is israeli canadian, don mckellar, the head writer who is a white canadian. park chan wook, who is a korean. and i think the most important common denominator besides their esthetic visions, which really vibed with mine, is that none of them are americans. and i think americans are so up hung up on their version of the vietnam war that it's really hard for americans to get out of that point of view and having not who have experience american power come in and help me collaborate on the making of that series that was so crucial. vietnam to win is the author, the sympathizer, which won the pulitzer in 2016, became an hbo series 2024. but