STORIES THAT MATTER
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam and came to the the United States as a refugee in 1975. This led him to choose the kind of theme for his novels
Books are a reflection of the world — an open window to both harsh realities and wonders of it all. They allow people to break down the borders of countries and look across their culture through literature.
All in all, books are not made just for entertainment, but for it to matter and connect us to the world.
Now on its sixth year, the Philippine Readers and Writer’s Festival continues to be a celebration of culture and literature. The festival’s theme is “Borderless: Bringing Stories from Asia to the World.” “We (writers) believe that novels matter and that literature matters,” said one of the top-billed authors of 2019, Viet Thanh Nguyen. He is also the author of The Sympathizer which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards. Nguyen was born in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam and came to the the United States as a refugee in 1975. This led him to choose the kind of theme for his novels.
The Sympathizer follows a North Vietnamese character in the South Vietnamese army who ends up living in exile in the United State. It is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal.
He also said that he wrote The Sympathizer just for himself and didn’t care about what people would think should it ever get published. He also just wanted to write a book that was meaningful for him, and that it was fortunate enough to win awards despite his initial thought for the novel.
“I chose these themes because it’s a part of my life, I don’t think that these themes are necessary to me as a writer, but these are the themes that I need to work on how to make sense that of who I am,” the author said.
“The book itself is designed to offend a lot of people and designed also to challenge people as readers. That’s good for them,” he said. His books, in short, are meant to be entertaining and compelling.
Besides being an author, he is also the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of South California. He took two years off from his job as a professor to work on the novel.
“I’d write for four hours, get lunch, go running for an hour, which was also a part of the writing process because I was (also) thinking about what I would write the next day. I would go to bed, eager to wake up to start writing. I would just have so much fun writing the book,” he shared.
For Nguyen, a good story is anything that gets the reader or viewer to want to know more about the world — and this is what he also wants the people to see through his novels.
“We fulfill this basic human need to have these stories told to us. This is something that allows novels and literature to impact people in the same way that these stories by presidents and the stories that we take for granted in the dinner table matters to us as well,” he added.
“Novels and literature are part of storytelling in general, and storytelling in general matters because we all participate in that. Our presidents tell us stories, they matter. When we tell stories around the dinner table, about who we are as families, or as countries, they matter. So, this is what I think about my novels in general,” the professor said.
As an advice to the aspiring writers in the world, “Read a lot, write a lot, suffer a lot,” he said.
His works also include The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America.
Nguyen’s recent work is The Refugees that gives voice to the hopes and expectations of people making life-changing decisions to leave one country for another and the rifts in identity, loyalties, romantic relationships and family that go with relocation.
What were the struggles in writing the novels?
VTN: Enduring misery and frustration and feeling neglect and obscurity because I didn’t know if the book was going to get published and didn’t know if anybody would like it and suffering from a lot of rejections.
What was the most surprising thing about the writing process?
VTN: Most surprising thing to learn about was I did not know my protagonist as well as I thought I did. When you read The Sympathizer, you will realize three quarter to four-fifths into the book that he has been keeping a secret to himself and honestly, I did not know that. Like, it was a secret for me too. So, I had to write to know what he was hiding for himself.
What is your writing Kryptonite?
VTN: The writing kryptonite is when I have to think about selling the book. So, writing the novel was a lot of fun for two years. But the worst moments in writing it was when I had to talk about my agent, and when I was talking to my agent, I was reminded of this issue that it’s not just a work of art, but it is also a book and a commodity, that somehow we have to sell this thing to agents, editors and publishers and I was just miserable to think about that.
How long did the world-building take?
VTN: In some instances, The Sympathizer took my entire life, because I have been thinking about these issues throughout my entire life and doing a lot of reading that eventually led to The Sympathizer. But in terms of just building the novel itself, it took three months. Because within the three-month period that I wrote the outline, the two-page outline for the book that was sort of rough, but I followed, and also it took me three months to find the opening sentence.
I told you that the sentences are the easiest part, but that is after you know what the sentences should look like. So, I knew that the opening sentence of the book is important because even though you speak about world-building, the entire world of the book is in the first sentence of the novel because that determines the entire rhythm of the sentences and, therefore, the novel.