Viet Thanh Nguyen Q&A: 'My earliest memory? Being taken to school on a Vespa'

New Statesman​

14-05-2025

Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Buôn Ma Thuot, Vietnam, in 1971. He is an award-winning novelist and professor of English and American studies. His debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
What's your earliest memory?
Being taken to school on the back of a motorbike, later confirmed to be a Vespa.
Who are your heroes?
In childhood: Spider-Man. Now: my mother and father.
Which political figure do you look up to?
I don't think we should look up to political figures, who are often flawed and often have to make compromised choices, or outright bad ones. We should look to political movements, whose collective virtues can outweigh individual failures.
What book last changed your thinking?
Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine.
What would be your 'Mastermind' specialist subject?
I know how to read and write and I love stories and poems, so literature, from the perspectives of both readers and writers.
In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
Being born in the United States in the mid 1950s was probably nice. Too young to go to war, too old to really confront the worst of the climate catastrophe to come; part of a wealthy country that still had a vibrant middle class. Of course, this answer is much more true if you are white, male, able-bodied. So the real answer is that I don't think it's so much about time and place but about resources. If you have wealth and privilege, most places and times were probably pretty good times, until the revolution came.
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Who would paint your portrait?
My daughter. She's five.
What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
About my writing: focus on the process, not the outcome. My partner told me that and she was absolutely right. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it took three decades of process to become a writer. The process taught me humility and that art is a discipline and a calling, akin to a spiritual path – not a profession or a career, which is important but only secondarily so.
What's currently bugging you?
I was tempted to say Trump, but I think he's more of a symptom. What bugs me is the lack of a powerful, global, unified left movement that can so far match the billionaires, their politicians, and the arms and fossil fuel industries.
What single thing would make your life better?
World peace. But more realistically, if everyone could just read a book a month, I think the world would be a better place. And even that seems unrealistic.
When were you happiest?
Right now, with my family, which is my real home.
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
Writer. It was pretty good this time around.
Are we all doomed?
Yes and no. That depends on how you define 'we'. The human species will adapt, get wiser, and survive, I hope. But not all of us will survive, given the inequalities between nations and within them. That makes it urgent that the definition of 'we' is as inclusive as possible, so that more of us can be saved. If we are willing to sacrifice the least and the weakest of us, there is the distinct danger that we are perpetuating conditions that will inevitably doom all of us.
'The Cleaving' edited by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan P Duong and Viet Thanh Nguyen is published by University of California Press
[See also: Martin Freeman Q&A: 'My childhood hero was Jesus as portrayed by Robert Powell']
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