Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen was very young when his family fled Vietnam in 1975. So being a refugee, to him, is “completely tied up with my memory and my identity.”
His family, along with 22,000 other Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, ended up at Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania. In order to leave the camp, they each had to have an American sponsor.
“There wasn't an American family or church willing to sponsor all four of us,” Nguyen explained. Instead, his parents, his 10-year-old brother and 4-year-old Nguyen were each sponsored by different people.
“This is where my memories begin, howling and screaming as I'm being taken away from my parents.”
Those very personal experiences are infused in his writing, from his first novel “The Sympathizer,” which won him a Pulitzer Prize to his most recent memoir, “A Man of Two Faces.”
Even with the divisive language in today’s politics around refugees and immigrants, Nguyen said it’s important to remember that this is not “an exceptional moment.”
“From its very origins, this country has been built on beautiful ideals of democracy, equality, opportunity and so on. And it's a country that's been built on brutality … genocide, enslavement, warfare, colonization.”
Nguyen was in Utah as part of Salt Lake Community College’s “Big Questions Forum.” The 2024 theme was “contested spaces,” which to him are another part of an ongoing cycle and struggle.
“During my time, it was Vietnamese and Cambodian and Laotian refugees. Now it's Haitians and Venezuelans.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Pamela McCall: How does your own experience inform your writing?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: For me as a refugee, one of the crucial elements is displacement — never feeling quite at home, always aware that the home that so many people take for granted is actually very fragile and can be upended at any time by war or climate catastrophe, natural disasters, political disasters.
PM: As the political climate has become more polarized, what does this mean for people seeking asylum or refuge in the U.S.?
VTN: During the Obama administration, the refugee quota for the United States was somewhere around 110,000 people. And then during the Trump administration, that number was reduced [to] about 15,000. And I think under the Biden administration, the numbers have gone up. But I think we should acknowledge that there are many other countries who are willing or forced to absorb many more refugees than the United States. Nevertheless, even with 15 or 100,000 refugees, there are many Americans who feel that the country is being overwhelmed by refugees, which is why during one of the Trump campaign rallies, one of the signs that was being shown by many of the attendees was “mass deportation now.” So the climate, political climate, is undoubtedly very difficult. We are a country that is built on immigrants. Immigration is part of our American mythology, but so is hate and xenophobia.
PM: Utah is host to refugees from places like Ukraine and Venezuela. You have first-hand knowledge about living in two worlds. What's that been like for you?
VTN: Most people would rather live in one world. It's much more comforting to know that everybody shares your assumptions. I've never been able to make that assumption myself. When I was growing up, my parents told me I was 100% Vietnamese. But I felt I was quite American growing up in American culture, and then when I stepped outside of my parents' household into the rest of the American world, I felt like a Vietnamese spying on Americans. So that sense of duality — of being constantly inside and outside, which is uncomfortable — has been really productive for me as a writer, but also as a human being. I think it's provided me with a sense of empathy for outsiders — has provided me with the capacity to look inside and outside of the kinds of beliefs that everyone holds dear and takes for granted.
