Viet Thanh Nguyen’s keynote, 2019-04-11

{I got seated just as he came on, so I was still getting set up as he started & missed the very first bits of his talk - Ryan}

  • Shares his excitement about hearing rock music played the speakers at a conference; he would have Living Color’s “Cult of Personality” as his walk-on music

  • Discusses specifics of separation as a refugee because no sponsor would take entire family; he knows from experience how current separations at southern border are cruel and inhumane
  • Being a refugee isn’t all bad, has given him requisite emotional damage to become a writer

  • Sons wants Legos; not getting them (somewhat jokingly?) bc dad is a refugee, attempt to give power empathy

  • When he visited a Boise, ID High school for refugee program; he asked them how many of you are refugees? No one raised hands. Then: how many of you are immigrants? Hands started to raise. Seems like they intuitively knew that refugee isn’t as positive a status as immigrant. US seems allergic to refugees.
  • Politics of “refugee” term around Katrina displacement

  • Vietnamese refugee community had both good & bad elements, but weren’t “good”; they were lucky ones to be admitted. Learned violence and illegal tactics in part by situations that displaced them.

  • Binary of good/bad refugees is designed to only talk about the exceptional refugees, to make an immigration policy that will let us admit almost nobody.

  • Immigrants & refugees should have right to be as mediocre as any other American

  • In 1978 his family moved from Harrisburg to San Jose and opened maybe 2nd Vietnamese restaurant there; saw a sign in a nearby business that said (something like) “another person driven out of business by Vietnamese refugees” but that sign didn’t know the struggles & humanity of Nguyen’s parents
  • was part of an “Asian Invasion” club at his high school; talks about being irradiated by American movies and how they depicted Vietnamese; in “Apocalypse Now,” does he identify with Americans like usual or with the Vietnamese civilians that Americans massacred?

  • Cast in a Yellow Peril narrative not of his own choosing (Marx / Stuart Hall nod?)

  • representation has power.
  • Mis-, under-, bad representation can damage and kill
  • Perhaps representation alone is not enough.
  • Publishing industry is about 87% white, about the same as state of Idaho {me: and librarianship}
  • 87 white is a problem, but 87 of anything is unsettling

  • that percentage shows legacy of colonization

  • when settler never leaves is what happened in US. Successful colonization doesn’t call itself such, it’s called “The American Dream” successful treason is never called treason, successful war crimes are never called war crimes.

  • Not anti-American, he’s anti-Imperialism, racism, war

  • Don’t use the term “Vietnam” to refer to the war instead of the country. Vietnam has also colonized, in addition to being colonized

  • In Vietnam his book critical of Vietnam’s colonization of other countries isn’t being published but in the US he’s got freedom to criticize the country’s imperialism and other oppressions
  • The Sympathizer has a review that said “he’s giving voice to the voiceless” {I missed this at the time, but I think that’s what he said}
  • problem isn’t that Vietnamese people are voiceless; we’re loud! We’re just never listened to. People want a single voice, not a cacophony or chorus or community of voices. Abolish conditions of voicelessness

  • We need to shift from representation to decolonization. Highlight that decolonization has shifted wealth & privilege to the descendants of the colonizers. See traces of colonization & its inheritance in stop & frisk, etc

  • Decolonization would benefit almost all Americans, except the super rich… “I assume not many of them in this room.””
  • Gives examples of decolonization work: universal health care, higher taxes, redistribution of wealth, demilitarization, prison abolition, reparations, representation

  • Representation is the cheapest & easiest of these, so it’s the most common / popular

  • there’s a literature of decolonization (gives examples I missed) but most American lit is very apolitical

  • those like him who are highly visible have to be conscious not to become voices of the voiceless, to instead work to abolish conditions of voicelessness

  • need to recast narratives, to acknowledge contradictions & complexity

  • He’s not translated into Vietnamese yet (perhaps just that one book).

  • He loves this country, which is why he won’t leave it. Like James Baldwin, loves country & therefore reserves the right to criticize it.
  • To recast the narrative you have to know the current ones. American Dream, Make America Great Again, etc.

  • His vision of America is that it’s great in the future. When parents moved here they changed their names, then thought about changing his own. Asserting his own name is an act of claiming who we are & what our stories are. Once said his name was Joe at Starbucks but immediately felt shame. Even just having name public at Starbucks.

  • His son is named “Ellison,”” after Ralph Ellison, who’s also named after Ralph Waldo Emerson (?) a lineage of American names.

  • No one should “love it or leave it” in America. We need to tell the stories of America better.

  • Narrative scarcity is condition when almost none of the stories are about you. So there’s a burden of representation for the few stories that come along.
  • Narrative plenitude is when almost all of the stories are about you, that’s a sign that you’re part of the majority
  • need to share power & share the means of narrative production
  • Public service announcement for condition of voicelessness
  • His call for immigrant parents & those associated: you have to do better. Those of you with artistic children, encourage and grow their skills so they can write award winning autobiographies that scathingly feature you.

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