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How to pronounce Viet Thanh Nguyen: Viet Tang When - Pronunciations vary but the closet English is usually considered to be Nwen or When
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.
Viet Thanh Nguyen's website
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Your family immigrated to America when you were four years old. Can you tell us about your parents, and how that experience shaped you?
My parents' story is atypical for many Americans, but very typical for many Vietnamese. They were born poor in a small village near where Ho Chi Minh was born in northern Vietnam, a region famous for producing hardcore revolutionaries and hardcore Catholics. My parents were the latter. When they were teenagers in 1954, the country was divided, and they chose to flee south as refugees. My mother's entire family went, but my father went by himself. He would not see any of his relatives again for forty years, until he and my mother returned in the 1990s. My parents settled into a small town called Ban Me Thuot and worked very hard to become successful merchants. When the communists invaded the south in 1975, this town was the first one they captured. My mother decided to flee with my eleven-year-old brother and four-year-old me. She left behind our adopted sixteen-year-old sister, believing that this was just another bad turn in the war and that we would be back. We walked several hundred kilometers to the beach town of Nha Trang, got on a boat, made it to Saigon, reunited with my father...
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