Viet Thanh Nguyen
REFUGEES, LANGUAGE, AND THE MEANING OF ‘AMERICA’
Thursday, April 7, 2022, 7 p.m.
Kathryn Mohrman Theatre
In collaboration with the Asian Studies department, Forever Foreign: Asian America Global Asia, and the Problem of Anti-Asian Racism. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor at the University of Southern California and an award-winning novelist, creative nonfiction writer, scholar, teacher, and essayist whose columns are regularly published in The New York Times. Nguyen and his family came to the United States in 1975 as refugees during the Vietnam War. Growing up in America, he realized that most movies and books about the war focused on Americans, while the Vietnamese were silenced and erased. He was inspired by this lack of representation to write about the war from a Vietnamese perspective. In his first novel, “The Sympathizer” (2017), which won the Pulitzer Prize, Nguyen creatively reimagines the Vietnam War. His second novel, “The Committed” (2021), is a much-anticipated follow-up to the first, has received widespread acclaim, and has been described as a “masterwork” and “revelatory.” Nguyen’s book “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War” (2016) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Nguyen received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2017.