The Daily Orange is a nonprofit newsroom that receives no funding from Syracuse University. Consider donating today to support our mission.

Viet Thanh Nguyen entered the Zoom call from his home in Los Angeles, sitting in front of a bookshelf that held multiple copies of his upcoming book, “The Committed,” which will be released March 2.

The author spoke Tuesday night as a part of the University Lecture Series for Syracuse University and SUNY-ESF students, faculty and staff. He spoke of his experience as a Vietnamese refugee and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Sympathizer.”

Growing up as a refugee in San Jose, California, Nguyen’s memories about his heritage only came from his parent’s stories and Hollywood pop culture, he said.

“Pop culture is powerful and shapes all of us, especially if you are a minority of some kind,” Nguyen said. “You are either misrepresented or not represented at all.”

During the lecture, Nguyen addressed different ways one can raise awareness of the recent attacks on the Asian American community. He clarified that this discrimination already existed before the pandemic and urged the audience to find both short-and long-term solutions.

Some of the solutions Nguyen discussed include holding the people responsible for the attacks and asking for a more expansive imagination about a social revolution where policing is not the automatic response.

“This is about having a more just society where there are more resources for everybody,” he said.

Nguyen also spoke about his experience at the University of California, Berkeley, and how he became a student activist after taking Asian American classes there. After learning that his parents lived through a terrible famine and a war, Nguyen was inspired to act on the issues and discrimination often experienced by Asian American individuals and refugees.

He wanted to make sense of his parent’s experiences through his writing, which led to the creation of his book, “The Sympathizer,” in 2015. He was able to write the novel about war even though he didn’t fight in Vietnam because of the history passed down from his parents.

To finish the talk, Nguyen took questions from audience members. One student talked about how their parents don’t tell them about their past experiences living in Vietnam.

The author responded by giving advice about the importance of self-educating on the history of one’s family culture. He learned a lot of his own family history by learning about the events that took place in Vietnam in 1975 and thinking about what his parent’s lives must have been like, he said.

Nguyen’s personal discoveries opened his eyes to how the manipulation of Vietnamese people ultimately helped him to understand his reason for being in the United States. The anger that resulted from that realization turned out to be a good thing, he said.

“If you are angry, use it to change yourself and society and for something productive,” Nguyen said.

Published on February 16, 2021 at 11:26 pm