When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen kicked off on Sept. 13, his talk in Memorial Chapel focused less on the specifics of his award-winning short story collection, The Refugees, and more on its implications.
鈥淚 didn鈥檛 want to portray these people as victims 鈥 as objects of pity,鈥 he told an audience of students, faculty, and staff. 鈥淚 wanted to portray them as humans.鈥
The Refugees, required first-year reading for the 2018鈥2019 academic year, addresses the experience of Vietnamese-American refugees as modeled on Nguyen鈥檚 personal history.
Too young to remember much of his parents鈥 emigration from Vietnam during the Vietnam War, Nguyen grew up in a small grocery store they had opened in San Jose. One event he does vividly recall is seeing a sign on a recently closed store in town. It read, 鈥淎nother American Driven out of Business by the Vietnamese.鈥 In his speech, Nguyen emphasized that the sign represented, in his mind, a certain kind of story, too, a 鈥渧ery old story that鈥檚 been told for as long as we鈥檝e been around.鈥
Just as The Refugees expands its scope to include wider issues of immigrant identity and exploitation of Latino immigrants in the contemporary American landscape, so did Nguyen鈥檚 speech. Particularly, Nguyen spoke out against the concept of the 鈥榞ood鈥 and 鈥榖ad鈥 immigrant, which he believes is being used even by those within Vietnamese-American communities to accept prior waves of immigration but dismiss the current issues of refugees from Central America and the Middle East.
In addition to addressing the content of his work, the author was also able to talk about the mechanics of writing during a pre-speech craft talk with undergraduates in Lathrop Hall. Those present for the Q&A session are enrolled in English 360A (Living Writers), taught by series organizer Jennifer Brice, associate professor of English.
Nguyen noted that scope often serves as a problem for topical anthologies, where 鈥渆very other story would be a reiteration of the first. I didn鈥檛 want to do that.鈥
Later, on the Memorial Chapel stage, Nguyen ended his campus visit with a call for everyone in the audience to act as storytellers, whether professional or not, to ensure that their voices are heard as individuals.
Ahmaud Gabriele 鈥22 described Nguyen鈥檚 speech as evocative and powerful. 鈥淢y mom is an immigrant,鈥 Gabriele said. 鈥淚鈥檓 definitely going to need to talk to her about that. It didn鈥檛 even dawn on me how meaningful that is.鈥
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