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USO Indo-Pacific and USO Europe | Middle East | Africa will host our monthly Overseas Virtual Book Club discussing "The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen on May 9th at 2000 JST on Zoom

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hhttps://register.uso.org/4111BMB7/4a3I8XJUXT

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The Pithy

Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He has been interviewed by Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Seth Meyers, and Terry Gross, among many others. He is also the author of the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. His most recent publication is Chicken of the Sea, a children's book written in collaboration with his six-year-old son, Ellison. His next book is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer, coming out in March 2021.

The Professional

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a University Professor, Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002) and the novel The Sympathizer, from Grove/Atlantic (2015). The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), a California Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. The novel made it to over thirty book-of-the-year lists, including The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com, Slate.com, and The Washington Post. The foreign rights have been sold to twenty-seven countries.

He is also the author of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War from Harvard University Press (2016, foreign rights to four countries),which is the critical bookend to a creative project whose fictional bookend is The Sympathizer. Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction, examines how the so-called Vietnam War has been remembered by many countries and people, from the US to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and South Korea. Kirkus Reviews calls the book "a powerful reflection on how we choose to remember and forget." It has won the the John G. Cawelti Award for Best Textbook/Primer from the Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association and the Réné Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Comparative Literature from the American Comparative Literature Association. Foreign rights have been sold to four countries.

His next book is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer, coming out in March 2021.

Other books include The Refugees, a short story collection from Grove Press (2017, foreign rights to fourteen countries), and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, which he edited. He has written for The New York Times, Time, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and other venues. Along with Janet Hoskins, he co-edited Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (University of Hawaii Press, 2014). His articles have appeared in numerous journals and books, including PMLA, American Literary History, Western American Literature, positions: east asia cultures critique, The New Centennial Review, Postmodern Culture, the Japanese Journal of American Studies, and Asian American Studies After Critical Mass. Many of his articles can be downloaded here.

He has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2011-2012), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2008-2009) and the Fine Arts Work Center (2004-2005). He has also received residencies, fellowships, and grants from the Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the James Irvine Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

His teaching and service awards include the Mellon Mentoring Award for Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students, the Albert S. Raubenheimer Distinguished Junior Faculty Award for outstanding research, teaching and service, the General Education Teaching Award, and the Resident Faculty of the Year Award. Multimedia has been a key part of his teaching. In a recent course on the American War in Viet Nam, he and his students created An Other War Memorial, which won a grant from the Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Teaching and the USC Provost's Prize for Teaching with Technology. It is also archived at the USC Library.
View his full CV
The Personal

Viet was born in Ban Mê Thuột, Viet Nam (now spelled Buôn Mê Thuột after 1975, a year which brought enormous changes to many things, including the Vietnamese language). He came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family and was initially settled in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, one of four such camps for Vietnamese refugees. From there, he moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he lived until 1978.

Seeking better economic opportunities, his parents moved to San Jose, California, and opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores in the city. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, San Jose had not yet been transformed by the Silicon Valley economy, and was in many ways a rough place to live, at least in the downtown area where Viet's parents worked. He commemorates this time in his short story "The War Years" ( TriQuarterly 135/136, 2009), and in a video essay for CBS.

Viet attended St. Patrick School and Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose. After high school, he briefly attended UC Riverside and UCLA before settling on UC Berkeley, where he graduated with degrees in English and ethnic studies. He stayed at Berkeley for a Ph.D. in English, moved to Los Angeles for a teaching position at the University of Southern California, and has been there ever since.

People not familiar with Vietnamese culture sometimes have a hard time pronouncing his surname. The wikipedia entry on Nguyen has audio pronunciations of the name in Vietnamese. He favors the southern pronunciation of his name, which with the full diacritical marks is Việt Thanh Nguyễn. For those in the United States, though, the Anglicization of Nguyen leads to further issues. Is it pronounced Noo-yen? Or Win? It's never pronounced Ne-goo-yen. The Win version is closer to the Vietnamese and seems to be the favored choice for Vietnamese Americans.

Other Activities

Viet is actively involved with promoting the arts and culture of Vietnamese in the diaspora through two organizations.

The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), for which he is the co-director, stages film festivals, youth arts groups, and literary festivals and events that center around the voices of Vietnamese in the diaspora.

diaCRITICS is DVAN's blog for which Viet is the publisher. It features book, film, and art reviews, essays and commentaries, interviews with artists and writers, travelogues, and more, all dealing with the cultural production of Vietnamese in the diaspora.

Viet is also on the steering committee for USC's Center for Transpacific Studies, which encourages the study of how cultures, peoples, capital, and ideas flow across the Pacific and between Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. He and colleague Janet Hoskins edited an anthology on Transpacific Studies from the University of Hawaii Press.

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Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION * EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL * ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR LITERARY EXCELLENCE * FIRST NOVEL PRIZE, CENTER FOR FICTION * GOLD MEDAL, FIRST FICTION, CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD * ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN LITERATURE AWARD

"A magnificent feat of storytelling. A novel of literary, political and historical importance." - Maxine Hong Kingston, author of Fifth Book of Peace

"Magisterial. A disturbing, fascinating and darkly comic take on the fall of Saigon and its aftermath and a powerful examination of guilt and betrayal. The Sympathizer is destined to become a classic and redefine the way we think about the Vietnam War and what it means to win and to lose." -T. C. Boyle, author of T.C. Boyle Stories I and II

The novel, The Sympathizer, begins in April 1975, as Saigon is about to fall to communist invasion. Soon enough it does, and the war is over. Or is it?

Black comedy, historical novel, and literary thriller, The Sympathizer follows a nameless spy who has infiltrated the South Vietnamese army and flees with its remnants to America. His mission: report on their efforts to continue their lost war. As the aide to a general who refuses to admit defeat, he observes the struggles of the Vietnamese refugees to survive in a melancholic Los Angeles. Among them, the general believes, are communist agents. So our spy's double life continues, hunting communists while helping the general organize a covert army. Their mission: to invade Vietnam and take it back.

Neither America nor a double life is new to our narrator. He is Eurasian, his father a French priest, his mother Vietnamese. He has been a double agent since his teenage years, and in his college years, he studied in California, the better to learn American culture. His war is a psychological one, but as he slowly realizes, much of that war is fought within himself, a man in between races and countries. As he tells us from the beginning: I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.

The Sympathizer will be published by Grove/Atlantic in spring 2015, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.
IndieBound
"It is a strong, strange and liberating joy to read this book, feeling with each page that a broken world is being knitted back together, once again whole and complete. As far as I am concerned, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer -both a great American novel and a great Vietnamese novel-will close the shelf on the literature of the Vietnam War."
-Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

"Read this novel with care; it is easy to read, wry, ironic, wise, and captivating, but it could change not only your outlook on the Vietnam War, but your outlook on what you believe about politics and ideology in general. It does what the best of literature does, expands your consciousness beyond the limitations of your body and individual circumstances."-Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War

"Not only does Viet Thanh Nguyen bring a rare and authentic voice to the body of American literature generated by the Vietnam War, he has created a book that transcends history and politics and nationality and speaks to the enduring theme of literature: the universal quest for self, for identity. The Sympathizer is a stellar debut by a writer of depth and skill." -Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"I think I'd have to go all the way back to Nabokov's Humbert Humbert to find the last narrative voice that so completely conked me over the head and took me prisoner. Nguyen and his unnamed protagonist certainly have made a name for themselves with one of the smartest, darkest, funniest books you'll read this year." -David Abrams, author of Fobbit

"Audaciously and vividly imagined. A compelling read." -Andrew X. Pham, author of Catfish and Mandala

"Viet Nguyen is a writer with a capacious imagination, a finely honed craft, an elegance with language and a voice both fluid and fiercely honest. Weaving genres, entertainment and a nuanced political sensibility, Viet transports the reader into a world at once familiar and new, at once unsettling and yet intriguing. A gorgeous book that carries the weight of history and the intervention of fiction effortlessly." -Chris Abani, The Secret History of Las Vegas and GraceLand

" The Sympathizer is a remarkable and brilliant book. By turns harrowing, and cut through by shards of unexpected and telling humor, this novel gives us the conflict in Vietnam, and its aftermath, in a way that is deeply truthful, and vitally important."-Vincent Lam, author of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures and The Headmaster's Wager

Category: News

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PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION * EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL * ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR LITERARY EXCELLENCE * FIRST NOVEL PRIZE, CENTER FOR FICTION * GOLD MEDAL, FIRST FICTION, CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD * ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN LITERATURE AWARD "A magnificent feat of storytelling. A novel of literary, political and historical importance."

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Viet Thanh Nguyen (@viet_t_nguyen) on Instagram

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Author of Pulitzer Prize winner THE SYMPATHIZER; National Book Award finalist NOTHING EVER DIES; THE REFUGEES; and THE COMMITTED

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From Viet Thanh Nguyen's website, vietnguyen.info

Alexandra Da Dalt discusses the impact of Viet Thanh Nguyen's talk about refugees, immigrant, communities of color, and writing in this piece for Rain International.

"The xenophobic tendencies of American society, which have always been with us, are experiencing a resurgence."

To celebrate the release of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refu

Read more of this blog post "

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Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the novel The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015). He also authored Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian ...

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The Sympathizer | Official Trailer | Max

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'The Sympathizer' Cast & Creators on Adapting The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel

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Sandra Oh & The Sympathizer Cast Talk Ghosting & Aliens | The Sympathizer | HBO

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'The Sympathizer' stars on 'different perspective' of Vietnam War

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Asian American Literature Today | Viet Thanh Nguyen at the Library of Congress

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Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses 'The Sympathizer' | Harvard Book Store

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Viet Thanh Nguyen on 'The Sympathizer' | AACES at Yale University

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Viet Thanh Nguyen reads 'The Sympathizer'  | Asian American Writers' Workshop

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Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses the Vietnam War on “The Heat”

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Pulitzer Prize Winner Viet Thanh Nguyen for 'The Sympathizer' | The Victoria to Uyen Show

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1. Discuss the relevance of the title, The Sympathizer. Who do you think the author wants the reader to sympathize with? What are the different ways throughout the book that the author demonstrates sympathetic characters and situations?

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1. Discuss the relevance of the title, The Sympathizer. Who do you think the author wants the reader to sympathize with? What are the different ways throughout the book that the author demonstrates sympathetic characters and situations?

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2. Guilt is a theme throughout the novel. What is the role of guilt in the lives of the characters? Does it compel them to try and right past wrongs, or make them more culpable? Or both?

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2. Guilt is a theme throughout the novel. What is the role of guilt in the lives of the characters? Does it compel them to try and right past wrongs, or make them more culpable? Or both?

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3. “Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world.” Do you agree or disagree with this assessment? Provide examples of movies you have seen that accomplish this.

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3. “Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world.” Do you agree or disagree with this assessment? Provide examples of movies you have seen that accomplish this.

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4. On page 274, Ms. Mori declares “you must claim America” what does she mean by this? Do you agree or disagree with her? Do you think this is how refugees and immigrants feel once they come to America? Explain your answers.

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4. On page 274, Ms. Mori declares “you must claim America” what does she mean by this? Do you agree or disagree with her? Do you think this is how refugees and immigrants feel once they come to America? Explain your answers.

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5. On page 15, the narrator says about Man and Bon: “These men were better than any real brothers I could have had, for we had chosen each other.” Discuss the role family plays in the lives of the different characters in the novel.

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5. On page 15, the narrator says about Man and Bon: “These men were better than any real brothers I could have had, for we had chosen each other.” Discuss the role family plays in the lives of the different characters in the novel.

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6. At the end of the novel, the narrator “graduates” and is finally allowed to meet the commissar. How does the narrator react when he learns who that is? What was your reaction to the reveal?

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6. At the end of the novel, the narrator “graduates” and is finally allowed to meet the commissar. How does the narrator react when he learns who that is? What was your reaction to the reveal?

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7. After everything that the narrator has been through his last words are a passionate celebration of life “We will live!” Why do you think the author chose to end the novel on such an optimistic note? Were you surprised by the ending? What are your thoughts about what is happening in the last chapter?

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7. After everything that the narrator has been through his last words are a passionate celebration of life “We will live!” Why do you think the author chose to end the novel on such an optimistic note? Were you surprised by the ending? What are your thoughts about what is happening in the last chapter?

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1. How does the series compare to the novel? What are some similarities and what are some differences?

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1. How does the series compare to the novel? What are some similarities and what are some differences?

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2. What do you think of the actors and their portrayals of the characters? Who is your favorite and least favorite character in the series?

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2. What do you think of the actors and their portrayals of the characters? Who is your favorite and least favorite character in the series?

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3. Episode one opens with this context: "In America it is called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam it is called the American War. It was a bloody war between the North, led by the communists who defeated Vietnam's long-time French colonizers; and the South, backed by the Americans who took over from the French. All wars are fought twice. The First time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." What are your thoughts on this statement? 

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3. Episode one opens with this context: "In America it is called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam it is called the American War. It was a bloody war between the North, led by the communists who defeated Vietnam's long-time French colonizers; and the South, backed by the Americans who took over from the French. All wars are fought twice. The First time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." What are your thoughts on this statement? 

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4. What did you know about this period in history prior to viewing the series/reading the novel? Has your perspective changed in any way?

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4. What did you know about this period in history prior to viewing the series/reading the novel? Has your perspective changed in any way?

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5. "Homeland" describes a person's native land. For the Captain he is said to have two homelands, Vietnam and America. What is your homeland? Can you/do you have more than one?

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5. "Homeland" describes a person's native land. For the Captain he is said to have two homelands, Vietnam and America. What is your homeland? Can you/do you have more than one?

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6. Throughout the series, The Captain experiences several conflicts because he is biracial, bilingual, and a child born out of wedlock. How have these issues changed or stayed the same since the 1970s?

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6. Throughout the series, The Captain experiences several conflicts because he is biracial, bilingual, and a child born out of wedlock. How have these issues changed or stayed the same since the 1970s?

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7. Do you think the series will end the same as the novel? What do you hope is revealed in the series that is not discussed in the novel? 

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7. Do you think the series will end the same as the novel? What do you hope is revealed in the series that is not discussed in the novel? 

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"Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything"