UCI Illuminations, an arts and culture initiative established by Chancellor Howard Gillman, hosted Pulitzer Prize-winning author and University of Southern California professor Viet Thanh Nguyen on Feb. 3. The event supported Illuminations’ year-long theme of “For a more perfect union?” and was introduced by UCI Libraries Southeast Asian Archive curator Dr. Thuy Vo Dang.
The event was co-sponsored by the UCI Humanities Center; the Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion; the Office of Inclusive Excellence; UCI’s Southeast Asian Archive; UCI’s Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association; and the UCI Vietnamese American Alumni Chapter.
Nguyen began by recounting some of his formative childhood memories, and he noted that he still identifies as a refugee. He and his family were placed in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania when Nguyen was the age of four, where he was soon separated from his parents and brother.
“That’s where my memories begin. Howling and screaming as I’m being taken away from my parents. That memory stayed with me like an invisible brand,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen spoke about the importance of language in regard to the perception of outsiders. Referencing the use of terms such as “illegal immigrants,” “asylum seekers” and “displaced persons,” Nguyen pointed out that refugees are a stigmatized population.
“We as Americans have used language to try and insulate ourselves from what we as a country have done to others,” Nguyen said. “In the United States, the American Dream is such a strong idea that most Americans cannot imagine themselves in the place of refugees. They cannot imagine that this country is the sort of place that would produce refugees.”
Still, Nguyen is careful to call himself a “refugee.”
“When I call myself a refugee instead of an immigrant, I’m locating myself. Not just in Vietnam or in Asia, but in a history of war,” Nguyen said. “We didn’t just come here. We were driven here and were used as an alibi. Our gratefulness [of being rescued] masked why we needed to be rescued in the first place.”
He then discussed the importance of leaving out the phrase “thank you” in his novels “The Sympathizer” (2015) and “The Committed” (2021).
“To say thank you to America for rescuing us was an act of apology for our existence,” Nguyen said. “But we didn’t need to prove our humanity. To prove our humanity only proves our inferiority because people of the so-called majority take their humanity for granted. Why and what do we need to prove?”
Nguyen later talked about the U.S. at large, noting the “painful contradiction” between being both a refugee and a citizen in a country “waging forever war.”
“I think we have very successfully colonized this country, only we don’t call colonization by its name. We call it instead the American Dream,” Nguyen said.
He argued that the American Dream becomes a vehicle for the ideology of American exceptionalism, and that the immigrant is the “alibi” for the American Dream in this ideology. Nguyen concluded his talk by talking about the meaning of “America,” acknowledging both a “refugee’s yearning to be inside” and the “outsider’s exclusion from it.”
“[America] is a country of both brutality and beauty, horror and hope. This duality is disturbing to some but allows for a truer understanding of the country. And it is achieved not only through experience but also through language,” Nguyen said.
For the Q&A portion of the event, Nguyen was asked about the recent surge in anti-Asian violence and pointed out the “deeply ambivalent position that Asian Americans occupy.”
“The root of anti-Asian violence is not purely [found] within the United States,” Nguyen said. “A lot of it comes out of pure racism … This racism comes out of the fact that the United States as a global power has been built on fighting wars in Asia and the Pacific. And racism has been absolutely essential in that.”
Nguyen was also asked about the practice of italicizing foreign words.
“There is an important need to reject it. We who are different are constantly expected to translate ourselves. White writers don’t translate themselves because they expect everyone to understand what they’re talking about, as they should. Likewise, I expect my readers to come to me,” Nguyen said.
The event concluded with Nguyen discussing trauma and the possibility of overcoming it.
“So many of us are aware that the experience of being a refugee, an immigrant, has deeply traumatized our grandparents, our siblings. We often don’t have a language for describing that,” Nguyen said. “We were bound by the normality of the traumas that characterized our family history. One way we can deal with trauma is to take over the narration of trauma. To be able to tell a story, to re-narrate a story, is crucial.”
UCI Illuminations will continue to host events throughout the rest of the school year.
Chrissy Park is a Campus News Intern for the winter 2022 quarter. She can be reached at chrip10@uci.edu.