We’ll speak with Pulitzer Prize winning Vietnamese American writer, Viet Thanh Nguyen.Īsian Americans as a whole, have immediately concluded that this is of course, a shooting that is driven by racist and sexist fantasies and inclinations that are deep seated not only in this particular shooter, but throughout American society and throughout American history. Seven of them women, six of them of Asian descent. And now, in the wake of a violent and fatal shooting, white America is still trying to deny our humanity and existence.Īmy Goodman: Protests condemning racism and hate crimes against Asian Americans continue following last week’s deadly shootings in Atlanta, where a 21 year old, white, gunman, attacked three Asian owned spas, killing eight people. His other books include “The Refugees” and the edited collection “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.”Īmy Goodman: From New York, this is Democracy Now!īee Nguyen: We have lived in the shadows, invisible, overlooked, stereotyped and relegated as second class citizens. “He’s always going beyond the surface binaries to look underneath.” Nguyen is the chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Nguyen says his protagonist is “a man of two faces and two minds” whose ability to see beyond Cold War divisions makes him the perfect figure to satirize the facile stories people tell themselves about the world. Titled “The Committed,” the book is a sequel to “The Sympathizer,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016. His new novel tells the story of a man who arrives in France as a refugee from Vietnam, and explores the main character’s questioning of ideology and different visions of liberation. Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses why he chooses to use the term “refugee” in his books, and speaks about his own experience as a refugee.
Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks how refugees are created as a result of foreign policy with Democracy Now!.