Refugee writer Viet Thanh Nguyen graced the stage of the Grand Theatre on Sept. 25 as part of the “Big Questions Forum” series hosted by Salt Lake Community College’s humanities department.
Claire Adams, an associate professor of humanities at SLCC, introduced the forum, acknowledging colleague Sahar Al-Shoubaki for her bravery in approaching Nguyen at a separate event and inviting him to speak.
Humanities professors and students as well as other interested attendees provided a palpable energy in the theater, erupting into applause as Nguyen first appeared on stage for his keynote address.
“Some part of me has never forgotten what it means to be a refugee,” Nguyen said while introducing the topic of the night, “Surviving and Thriving in the 21st Century.” His keynote focused on what it means to be a refugee as well as the power of storytelling, with each concept being told through the lens of his own experiences.
Dismantling the ‘us vs. them’ mentality
Nguyen shared his personal conflict over a common perception regarding refugees.
“It’s very difficult for me to say ‘us versus them’ [because] sometimes I am ‘us’ and sometimes I am ‘them,’” Nguyen said.
Nguyen told the audience that the idea of a “refugee crisis” must be reframed into a “refugee challenge.”
“What if refugees are not the crisis? What if we are the crisis?” Nguyen posited, questioning whether it is “us” as citizens whose actions produce refugees that “[are blamed] for bringing disorder into our societies.”
To reiterate his point, Nguyen shared a memory from his youth, describing a sign he saw outside of a storefront which stated “another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese.” He said he couldn’t fully comprehend the sign’s message at the time, but now, he sees it as an age-old story of natives blaming outsiders for the “ills and problems of society that existed long before those refugees, immigrants, and those newcomers came.”
Nguyen explained these memories, of which he has many, eventually taught him to reframe the narrative through storytelling. He quipped of the “emotional damage” evident from such experiences and how they made him a great writer and fostered the stories that he has written.
Healing through storytelling
Although Nguyen stated that his journey began when he found an escape within library walls, he said it “would take [him] years and years to get to an understanding of why [he] really wanted to be a writer.”
His journey continued beyond the library and transformed into an attempt to better understand his own history — by watching Hollywood films about the Vietnam War.
“It’s an exercise I would recommend to no one, especially if you’re Vietnamese or Asian,” Nguyen joked.
It wasn’t until he came across a scene in “Apocalypse Now,” a 1979 film depicting the Vietnam War, that he realized the problem with nationalistic storytelling.
“I was rooting for the Americans, up until the moment they massacred Vietnamese civilians [in that one scene],” Nguyen said. “I was split in two: was I the American doing the killing, or the Vietnamese being killed?”
Nguyen said he pondered this question at only 11 years old but then suppressed the memory. It would not resurface until college, when a professor asked him to detail a movie scene that influenced him in some way.
As he spoke, Nguyen made clear that the memory — and his recollection of its impact on him whilst in college — served as a catalyst for his understanding the power of storytelling.
“Stories can destroy us,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen told the audience that in that moment as a college student, he realized why he wanted to be writer: not only to tell a different version of a common narrative about the Vietnam War, but to fight against injustices toward refugees at home.
Nguyen said the idea of a scarcity of narratives from a refugee’s perspective led him to use his writing to become a powerful storyteller.
“If you have ever said, ‘It’s just a story,’ you have narrative privilege,” he said.
Nguyen then explained how all wars are fought twice — “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” he said — and how war stories are civilian stories as well.
Nguyen’s civilian refugee story
Nguyen recalled his earliest memory of fleeing from Vietnam with his family at four years old, after the Vietnam War.
Nguyen and his family arrived in Pennsylvania at one of the four refugee camps that were set up at the time to receive and house Vietnamese refugees. Individual members of his family had to be sponsored by an American family to leave the refugee camps, which resulted in the temporary separation of his family unit.
Nguyen remembered when the children from his sponsor home offered him chopsticks and asked him to demonstrate their use. Nguyen said he remembers being “embarrassed” because he didn’t know how.
“What they were showing me was hospitality,” he explained, before using the story as a segue for the idea of refugee gratitude.
Nguyen brought up the “complicated question” which refugees and other immigrants have often been confronted with: “Aren’t you grateful to this country for having welcomed you in, for having rescued you?”
“Absolutely yes,” Nguyen responded to the rhetorical question.
“I wouldn’t be here if weren’t for the beauty of this country, but I also wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the brutality of this country,” he said, quoting his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Sympathizer.”
Nguyen then read a phrase from a character in his book to solidify what he said was considered a “controversial” point.
“I am grateful for having received American aid, but maybe I wouldn’t have needed American aid if we hadn’t been invaded by the United States in the first place,” he read.
Nguyen broached the topic of how US citizens are consumed with the need to rebuff refugees in order to assimilate them into the “American Dream” and American society. He described how he has seen this happen with refugees not feeling comfortable in identifying as a refugee, but rather as immigrants.
“Everyone knows not to mention they are a refugee, and to say that they are immigrants [instead]. ‘Refugee’ is a conversation killer, but ‘immigrant’ is a conversation starter,” he said.
He then gave an example of a lecture he gave to a refugee program at an American high school. In the lecture, Nguyen said he asked the crowd, “How many of you are refugees?”
While the question was intended as an icebreaker, Nguyen said he was then confronted with a silent crowd. That is, until he asked the question, “How many of you are immigrants?”
“This was a program about refugees and yet no one identified as one,” he told the crowd at SLCC.
The problem, according to Nguyen’s keynote speech, is that being a “refugee” immediately has negative connotations for Americans, and clouds peoples’ ability to see the humanity in each refugee’s struggle.
“If [a refugee] has done good things, it is because they are a human being; if they’ve done bad things, it’s because they’re a human being,” he said emphatically.
Nguyen suggested that the real fear of a “refugee crisis” is the thought of looking in the mirror and realizing the issues we already face in US society, and within each individual American, is the actual problem — not refugees, or immigrants, coming into the country.
By reframing the ideology of a “refugee crisis” into a “refugee challenge,” Nguyen said one may overcome the duality of the issue and begin to look at the mirror’s reflection, which would lead toward solving the many real crises within American society.
Q&A focuses on Middle Eastern conflicts
After Nguyen’s keynote speech, Al-Shoubaki joined him on-stage for a Q&A segment where the audience was able to submit questions anonymously.
Nguyen reacted to one question about the role of educators in speaking on the “televised genocide in an era of submission, doxing, and institutional neutrality.”
“Well, I think the obligations are pretty clear,” Nguyen said. “I think, number one, support your students. … The second obligation is for the faculty to protest the administration.
“For those of us, you know, who are educators, we should teach it. We should [teach] not just Palestine, [but] we should teach [about] genocide. We should teach these contradictions. We need to recognize the contradictions of humanism in genocidal behavior,” Nguyen continued.
Another question from the audience read, “How do you find home in contested spaces, and can those spaces ever be home again?”
Nguyen answered by discussing the idea of releasing or overcoming sentimental value regarding the idea of “home.”
“I think there is value in homelessness,” Nguyen said, explaining that warm and loving homes are not always available due to a societal fault. “Humanism allows inhuman behavior; a sentimental attachment to home has never prevented us from looking away. That’s a complicated relationship; we know we need homes, but we also need to recognize the value of identifying with those who don’t have those kinds of opportunities.”
Al-Shoubaki also asked if Nguyen’s feelings were the same as when, in a previous interview, he defined home as language and storytelling.
Discussing his writing process, Nguyen described how painful and “visceral” yet healing it was to write his own story and the power he feels in being a storyteller.
“It’s a very powerful notion,” Nguyen expressed.
Referring again to the idea of narrative scarcity, Nguyen said while he has written many award-winning books such “The Sympathizer,” a writer’s duty is not to care only if other people care. The accolades were not the end goal, he said, but instead, it was to tell stories that he felt needed to be told.
SLCC crowd reactions
As the event concluded, the crowd dispersed with an energized, hopeful feeling. A group of audience members gathered outside of the Grand Theatre and spoke to The Globe about their insights.
Zach Johnson, a participant, said he enjoyed the idea of reframing the refugee “crisis” into a “challenge.” Johnson said the recent age demographic, Millennials and members of Gen Z, have heard this terminology frequently over the past 20 years.
“It turns it back on us, on the white European American to say, ‘No, this is not a crisis for you, you are the crisis,’” Johnson said.
Another audience member, an SLCC student named Abby who wished to have her last name kept private, said that Nguyen’s comment “If it’s just a story to you, you live in a privileged narrative,” spoke to her.
“It’s not just a story,” she continued. “[Nguyen] is a human with human experience and a human life of trauma and survival … [so it’s important] to see that lens of ‘Okay, this is not just a storytelling. This is not just an author.’”
“[It’s] stepping outside of sympathizing and looking at our shared humanity,” she added.
Marjorie Wilson, another SLCC student who was present for the speech, agreed with Abby’s sentiment, stating how important it was for her to “sit and hear the honest story of others in order to learn more.”
Loved hearing Nguyen. There is something in his ability to see two sides without losing his center that is very healing — that is somehow the skill we have dire need of in our fractured world. As someone who lived through the time of the Vietnam War, his work has brought me a closure that — well — Apocalypse Now never did.
Solid summation of the event in this article.
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