Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese American author and scholar. He has written for the New York Times as an opinion-editorial columnist, for the Los Angeles Times as a cultural critic, and as an editor of the blog diaCRITICS for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. His best known work,The Sympathizer, has won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The critically acclaimed novel follows the story of a refugee of the Vietnam War on his journey to America. The important difference between the refugee of Nguyen's story and most others is that he is a double agent, spying on the remnants of the South Vietnamese military in America on behalf of the victorious North Vietnamese. Although the story is fictional, Nguyen obviously had a number of inspirations throughout his life which contributed to the culmination of The Sympathizer. By exploring the life of Viet Thanh Nguyen we are able to understand the reality from which this story is derived.

In academia, Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English at USC as well as a professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature. Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971. Four years later, as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, Nguyen fled with his family to the United States as refugees of the Vietnam War. They first arrived in the Fort Indiantown Gap refugee camp located in Pennsylvania. After leaving the refugee camp they moved to San Jose, California where his parents opened the second Vietnamese grocery store in the city, similar to the businesses pictured below. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1992 and 1997 respectively before moving to Los Angeles to teach at USC.

In The Sympathizer, a number of Vietnamese refugee characters open their own Vietnamese grocery stores and other businesses just as Nguyen's parents did when they moved to California. These images from Little Saigon in Westminster, CA would be very similar to what surrounded Nguyen as he grew up and what he portrays in his novel.

Viet Thanh Nguyen spent his first year in America at the Fort Indiantown Gap refugee camp in Pennsylvania. The camp housed over twenty thousand Vietnamese refugees for a little under a year while they were acclimated to American culture and more permanent living was organized. Fort Indiantown Gap was one of a few refugee camps across the country which all sought to aid, in these ways, the Vietnamese fleeing from their homeland. The other U.S. refugee camps included Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Camp Pendleton in California, and Eglin Air force Base in Florida. At these locations refugees were taught English language and American customs as a means of socializing them for U.S. society.

Through the Special Collections and Archives at UCI we have digitized a number of documents pertaining to Fort Indiantown Gap which might give some insight into what life was like living in those camps as a Vietnamese refugee in America. Above is a map of Fort Indiantown Gap and below are maps of Vietnamese resettlement distribution in Pennsylvania and across the nation (notice the high density of resettlement near Harrisburg PA and California, both places where Nguyen lived), a summarized memo of the camp, a document describing educational and sports programs organized for children, and an estimated daily budget for each refugee living in Fort Indiantown Gap. Gaining insight into the life of Viet Thanh Nguyen as a Vietnamese refugee can help us understand where the literary sentiments in his work stem from.

Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer follows the story of a Vietnamese refugee and spy during his time in Southern California. From our collection we have also digitized a number of pages from an English-Vietnamese dictionary. The words called out relate to the characters and themes of The Sympathizer and The Committed.

After receiving the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen has given a number of interviews and guest appearances on notable talk and news shows. Below is an appearance Nguyen had on the show Late Night with Seth Meyers where he discusses The Sympathizer. Additionally Nguyen had an interview on CBS This Morning where he talks about the sequel to The Sympathizer called The Committed. In both interviews Nguyen touches on his experience as a Vietnamese refugee in America.