personal life is very uninteresting, frankly, whereas the novel is my revenge on hollywood, francis ford coppola -- [laughter] also my attempt to also tell the history of the vietnam war and the story of the vietnam war from a perspective that most americans have never heard it before, which is how their own allies, their friends, the south vietnamese experienced this. and my narrator is a communist spy who is also giving us the communist perspective on it. and when he arrives in the united states, he is telling the -- he's giving us the viewpoint of how the vietnamese see american culture which is not necessarily in a positive light. so there's a very satirical dimension of the novel as well. i get white people to think about what white culture actually looks like to people from outside of the country. but i think the topic has been hard to exhaust for me which is why i had to write a nonfiction story about it, the much larger context of a hundred years of american warfare that's been waged in the pacific since 1898 when the united states took the philippines, guam, hawaii and now iraq and be a

personal life is very uninteresting, frankly, whereas the novel is my revenge on hollywood, francis ford coppola -- [laughter] also my attempt to also tell the history of the vietnam war and the story of the vietnam war from a perspective that most americans have never heard it before, which is how their own allies, their friends, the south vietnamese experienced this. and my narrator is a communist spy who is also giving us the communist perspective on it. and when he arrives in the united states, he is telling the -- he's giving us the viewpoint of how the vietnamese see american culture which is not necessarily in a positive light. so there's a very satirical dimension of the novel as well. i get white people to think about what white culture actually looks like to people from outside of the country. but i think the topic has been hard to exhaust for me which is why i had to write a nonfiction story about it, the much larger context of a hundred years of american warfare that's been waged in the pacific since 1898 when the united states took the philippines, guam, hawaii and now iraq and be a