Dies vietnam and the memory of war. [inaudible conversations] tonights wisconsin book festival. Im here as a member of the board of the wisconsin humanities council, and its really a tremendous pleasure to be able to introduce the next speaker and to thank, first of all, the Madison Public Library the library foundation, humanities council, all the other sponsors. This is probably a good time to remind you to check and make sure that your cell phone is silent. Everybody reaches for the cell phone immediately. And the book festival is asking people to talk about their experiences using the hashtag wibookits wi book fest. All one word. Books are for sale afterwards out in the, just on the other side of this wall. Viet is really a remarkable author. You get people who are accomplished as literary authors and people who are accomplished as nonfiction authors, and hera has actually pulled off major accomplish bements in both accomplishments in both rell are ms in basically the last year with another book coming. The two books hell talk about today, the sympathizer and nothing ever dies. Hes, of course, the chair of english and professor of english and american studies and ethnicity at the university of Southern California. And his books hes not only won a pulitzer prize, but his books, you read the reviews, and theyre just stunning on both of them. New york times called the sympathizer a remarkable debut novel and kirkus talks about nothing ever dies as a powerful reflection on how we choose to remember and forget. In addition to buying his booksw i would urge you to read his, the blog that he edits. But youre here to hear viet. Welcome. [applause] thanks, everybody. Thanks for coming tonight. I was last here in madison in 2008 when i was here for the entire summer be, actually, studying at university or, studying vietnamese. And back then i was live anything this undergraduatesin apartment. So its nice to be back on a slightly different scale. And actually, when i was here in 2008, what i was doing the reason i was studying vietnamese is because i was working on these projects about vietnam, you know . . Becaus i was travel aring there, doing field work there, and, of course, i was writing short stories, but i had not yet started writing the sympathizer. So i thought i would start off reading one of the first paragraphs from nothing ever dies, because itll give you a sense of who i am, what im doing, and this is actually a commentary on both of the books. I was born in vietnam but made in america. I count myself among those vietnamese displayed by americas deeds but tempted to believe in its words. I also count myself among those americans who often do not know what to make of vietnam and want to know what to make of it. Americans as well as many people the world over tend to mistake vietnam with the war named in its honor or dishonor as the case may be. This confusion has no doubt led to some of my own uncertainty about what it means to be a man with two countries as well as the inheritor of two revolutions. Today the vietnamese and and american revolutions manufacturh memories only to absolve the hardening of their arteries. For those of us who consider ourselves to be inher or to haves of one or both of these revolutions or who have been influenced by them in some way, we have to know how we make memories and how we forget them so that we can beat their hearts back to life. That is the project or at least the hope of this book. So those words actually are a pretty good description of what ive tried to do in the sympathizer as well. And nothing ever dies is really the nonfiction sequel to the sympathizer. There are a lot of things i couldnt say in the sympathizer because its a novel, and is you really cant step out of character, and youll find that in nothing ever dies which is really a study of how we remember, how we forget, why do we go to war, the importance of recognizing our inhumanity as much as our humanity and what are the possibilities of peace and reconciliation. And in the sympathizer, i try to address those questions too, but in a more dramatic, in a more fictional way. And, obvious, in thehe sympathizer, writing a a novel, i can get away with saying a lot of stuff without having to engage in footnotes. [laughter] and saying outrageous things and you just have to accept them. And thats just part of the joy and, you know, the liberty of writing fiction. So the sympathizer is a novel about a communist spy in the south Vietnamese Army in april 1975, and hes in saigon as its about to fall or be liberated, depending on your point of view. And because hes a communist spy in the south Vietnamese Army, he does see both perspectives, and he tells you thats his one talent, the ability to see any issue from both sides. His mission is to flee with the remnants of that army to the United States and spy on their efforts to take the country back which this really did happen in this time period. And what happens when the vietnamese refugees get to the United States is they are put into refugee camps before they can be dispersed and resettled. He ended up in camp pendleton, and i ended up newtown gap this pennsylvania. In pennsylvania. So this next part of the reading comes from the sympathizer when hes in that camp. Hes writing a letter to his supposed aunt, and and hes going to tell her what life is like for these new refugees in Southern California. If allowed to stay together, i told my aunt, we could have incorporated ourselves into a respectablysized, selfsufficient colony. A pimple on the buttocks of the american body politic. I think thats pretty funny, but thats just me. Mple on [laughter] sufficiently collective to elect our own representative to the congress and have a voice in our america. A Little Saigon as delightful, delirious and dysfunctional as the original. Which was exactly why we were not allowed to stay together, but were instead dispersed by bureaucratic fiat. For example, to places like madison, wisconsin. This is one of the reasons why you have so Many Health Care mong people hmong people here. Wherever we found ourselves, we found each other. We did our best to conjure up the culinary staples of our culture. Ch but since we were dependent be on chinese markets, our food had an unacceptably chinese tinge. [laughter]es if you know anything about seat seat ma please people, they vietnamese people, they hate chinese people. [laughter] it was another blow that left us with a sweet and sour taste of unreliable memories just correct enough to evoke the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone. Nd missing along with the proper variety, subtly and complexity of our universal, solvent fish sauce. [laughter] oh, fish sauce. How we missed it. How nothing tasted right without it. In this pungent liquid condiment of the darkest sepia hue was much denigrated by foreigners for its supposedly horrendous can reek, lending new meaning to the phrase, theres something fishy around here. [laughter]. For we were the fishy ones. We used fish sauce the way villagers wore cloves of garlicc to ward off vampires. In our case to establish a perimeter with those westerners who could never understand what was truly fishy was the nauseating stench of cheese. [laughter]we est i guess i should say cheese kurds. [laughter] and the little digression. You know, im staying at this very nice hotel, edgewater, and theyre very kind in some ways. They delivered a plate of food to my door when i got there and, of course, there was cheese, okay . [laughter] what was fermented fish compared to curdled milk . Out of deference to our hosts, we kept our feelings tour ourselves, sitting close to one another on prickly sofas and scratchy carpets, our knees touching, chewing on dried squid and the cud of remembrance until our jaws ached, trading stories heard second and thirdhand about our scattered countrymen. This was the way we learned that the clan turned into slave labor by a farmer in modesto and the naive girl who flew to into cane and was sold to a spokane and was sold to a brothel. And the [inaudible] who laid down in the snow withth mouth open until he was buried and froze beening. And the regretful refugees on guam who petitioned to go backre to vietnam never to be heard from again. S and the spoiled girl seduced by heroin who disappeared into the baltimore streets, and the devout buddhist who spanked his young son and was arrested fors. Child abuse in houston. And the husband who slapped his wife and was chest candidated for and the women who had escaped but left husbands behind and the children who had escaped without parents and grandparents and the families missing, one,ne two, three or more children. Sifting through the dirt, we panned for gold. The story of the baby orphanhr adopted by a kansas billionaire or the mechanic who bought a Lottery Ticket in arlington and became a multimillionaire, or the girl elected president of her High School Class in batten rooming, or the boy accept baton rouge. Or the movie star you loved so much, dear aunt, who circled the world from airport to airport, no country letting her in after the fall of saigon. None of her american movie star friends returning her desperate phone calls until, with her haas dime, she snagged township by head drone tippy hadron who flew her to hollywood. We rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost a all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead. Be the story about township by hadron are was true. This story is true, the movie movie star was she is very famous of the enema and you may have seen her in the joy luck club. On a footnote to this to be hedren, puts on the people that she met that she thought i would be a good idea to take a personal manicures to the refugee camps and teach these women how to manicure so they would have the potential earning a living in this country. And we now on 51 of the nail salons in this country. On one hand thats a positive note on immigration on another hand that could and up on a Trump Campaign ad. Im in madison right . [laughter] so you have to make a living, our narrator. One of the things that he does is he gets out of camp goes to los angeles and becomes the authenticity consultant on the making of a movie that is going to be an epic movie shot in the philippines. This is made up in my imagination. So he meets with the director of this film and its given the director some notes as we call them in hollywood. The Director Director is only known as the older two or. While the your has gone on little while longer and that more subdued fashion and pointing out that the lack of speaking parts were be means people in a movie set in vietnam might be interpreted as cultural insensitivity. To not think it would be a little more realistic i said . A a little more authentic . So a movie set in a certain country for the people in that country to have something to say instead of letting your school play direct as it does now, cut to villagers speaking in their own language. Do you think it might not be decent to let them actually Say Something instead of acknowledging there some kind of sound coming from their mouths . Could you have them speak a heavy accented english, you know what i mean. Ching chong english, just to be sure that there speaking so that americans can understand. He grimaced. I said very interesting, good stuff, loved it without a question, what was it oh yes, how many movies have you made . None. Zero. Zilch. Not a. Nothing, and and however use it in your language. So thank you for telling me how to do my job now get the hell out of my house and get back when you have made an movie or two, maybe then i will listen to one or two of your cheap ideas. I confessed to be angry with him. But was i wrong and be an angry question this is the case we acknowledge he did not even know that it was something the french catch altar for the dozen of minorities. So the movie was called hamlet about green berets who are defending these from the vietcong who are known in the screen play as king kong because they are so bad. So what if i said to him, i wrote a screenplay about the American West and its called all the latest indians. You would want to know whether the caliber was under the navajo, apache or or , likewise i would want to know, whether we speak of the group or the young, or the tape. Let me tell you a secret he said, are you ready . Here it is, no one gives a expletive. It was like without hair, how can i be so dense and deluded, i may believe with simultaneous pickpocket it. Hollywood did not just make movie monsters, it was his own for movie monster smashing me under its foot. I failed, and he would make the hamlet as he intended with my countrymen serving nearly as raw material from epic about white men hitting good people from bad yellow people. I pitted the french from the naivete of the country in order to exploit it. Hollywood, it was much more efficient, in the countries that wanted to exploit. I was mad and by my helplessness. Had arrogance sparked something new of the world for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors. Courtesy of the most efficient Propaganda Machine ever created, with all due respect with global domination. Hollywood high priest understood neatly the observation of satan that it was it better to rule and help in serving heaven. Better to be billing, loser, or antihero then virtuous extra. So long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage. It was forthcoming, all the vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the rules of the poor, the innocent, innocent, the evil, whether corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute, we were to be struck down. Ive had several meetings with hollywood people and ive asked them if they were offended by this characterization and its a no. So if you know anything about vietnamese people and i will grossly stereotype them because im one of them. Would you know that we love to sing, drink, and dance. So soon after arriving as poor refugees in Southern California and getting out of the refugee camp one of the first things that my people did was open a nightclub, true story. That nightclub became the basis of paris by Night Witches a song and dance extravaganza which is in about 130 iterations and video dvds and shut locations like paris, las vegas, and so on. And its a spectacular show in the 80s and 90s whos better than anything produced and to be struggle back into vietnam. On the gray market. So they go to the nightclub and encounters one woman he should not to fall in love with, the daughter of his boss, the general. Known by one name, like john, paul, george, ringo, and mary, because im a screwed up catholic, wanda stepped on stage, black lace lace gloves and thighhigh leather boots. My hard wouldve paused at the boots, the heels or the flat smooth slice of her belly. Linked between miniskirt and bustiers. But the combination of all three rest in my heart altogether and beat it with the vigor of a Los Angeles Police squad. [laughter] they didnt laugh at that in los angeles, it was easily limping by her torch song. She turned on the heat with her first number, the unexpected i love you to want me. I think most people are thinking i want you to want me, its not the case, it is i love you to want me. If you are in the 1970s or 80s you knew who the person was. I heard this before some only by men. I love you to want me was a theme song of the bachelors and unhappy elite married males of my generation. Whether in english original or the french a vietnamese renditions. What it expressed was unrequited love. We men of the south love nothing more than unrequited love. Cigarettes, coffee, and coconut. All i wanted to stipulate myself in an night with her to remember forever and ever. Everyone in the room should my motion as we washer didnt know where this went the microphone. Her voice enough to move the audience or rather, to still us. Nobody talked, nobody stirred, except to resist cigarette or glass. In utter concentration not broken for next, slightly more upbeat number, bang bang, my baby shut me down. While this version of bang, bang, learned english was french and vietnamese. The last night at the French Version echoed the vietnamese version, we will never forget, the tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable. Masterfully weeding together with two lovers who regardless of having known each other since childhood or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang, bang, was the sound of the pistol firing into the heads. For we cannot forget love, we cannot forget were, we cannot forget lovers, we cannot forget lovers, we cannot forget enemies. We cannot forget home, and we cannot forget saigon. We cannot forget the caramel flavor of ice coffee with coarse sugar. The bowls of noodle soup even while on the sidewalk. The strumming of a guitar while we swing on hammocks under the coconut trees. The whisper of the do we lovers sing in the most seductive words in our language at night. The working man who slept in the streets, kept were only by the members of their families, the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city. The sweetness and firmness of the mango plucked from the tree. The girls refused to talk to us and only pined for more. The the men who died or disappeared, the streets are blown away from bonds bomb shells. The the secret grove that we spy and bathed and splashed with the innocence of the bird. The barking of a hungry dog and abandon village. The sight and sound of brookins hollowing by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers. The stickiness of one shirt by afternoon. The stickiness of ones lover by the end of lovemaking. The stickiness of her situation. And while the list could go on, on, on, and on, the point was simply this. The most important thing we can never forget was that we could never forget. I went with a couple of paragraphs at the very end of bae2. Its a nonfiction, critical work but also narrative that a narrative that is about my life and my family remembering and forgetting intertwined together making us who we are. One, and another never without the other. Remember, so much has been forgotten or silence. While personal memory is faulty. Through my youth had a memory of soldiers fighting onto another boat as we floated on the south china sea, i was four. My brother, seven years older said the shooting never happen. As an adult, i remember my mother being hospitalized when i was a child. A few years ago i discovered a member had had written in college, i read in my own words that she was in the hospital at that time,