Would ultimately learn that in fact, it was the sky as is actually represented in the actual universe. But, by age 11i knew enough about reading books from the library, books my parents bought me for my birthday that by age 11i had an answer, what do you want to be when you grow up. That pretty much shut them up. If you said i want to be a doctor, uncle or aunt betty is a doctor, you say astrophysicist and they walk away. To this day, im a little bit scared for having not known a night sky until i saw one in the hayden planetarium. When i go to majestic sights and i look up at the night sky i say to myself, it reminds me of the hayden planet. [laughter] [applause] we will see you at the year end review in january, have a good night. Here is a lock at some of the staff picks from politics and prose bookstores in washington, d. C. Olivia lang, employers the so solitary lives, the great derangement and argues Climate Change is being ignored. Pulitzer price winner in the gene. Another staff pick from washington, d. C. s politics and prose bookstore is grunt by mary who reports on the science thats being used to improve the safety and effectiveness of americas military. Atlantic magazine contributor shady argues, islam is essential to understanding middle eastern politics in islamic exceptionalism and in ordinarily well, psychiatrist peter looks at the Science Behind antidepressant medications. Many of these authors have or will be appearing on book tv. You can watch them on ourct website, booktv. Org. [inaudible conversations] its really a tremendous pleasure to be able to introduce the next speaker. Vi et thann nguyen. This is a good time to make sure 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 wi book festival. Wibookfest. All one word. Books are for sale on the other side of the wall. Viet thannnguyen is a wonderful author. Le he has pulled majorr accomplishments in both realms within basically the last yearli with another book coming, next year the two books coming out. Of course, hes the professor of english in american studies and ethnicity at the university of Southern California and his books not only one a Pulitzer Prize but the books, you read reviews and they are stunning on both of them, New York Times called sympathizer a remarkable debut novel and nothing ever dies as a powerful reflection on how we chose to remember and forget. Rion as i would unfortunately to read his blogs that he edits, but youre here viet, welcome. [applause] thanks, everybody, thanks for coming tonight. Last year in madison in 2008 when i was here nor the entire summer actually studying for the university, studying vietnams and i was living in undergraduate apartment. It brings me back actually on a slightly different scale. What i was doing the reason i was studying vietnamese is because i was working on the projects about vietnam. I was traveling to vietnam, i was doing field work there and, of course, i was writing short stories but not yet writing the sympathizer. R. I thought i would start byri reading the first paragraph or one of the first paragraphs, nothing ever dies and the memory of war. Itll give you a sense of who i am. I was born in vietnam but made in america. I count myself on one of those vietnams, i also count myself on those americans often did not know what to make of vietnam and what to know what to make of it. Americans as well as as many people of the world over tend to mistake vietnam honor for dishonor as the word may be. This confusion led to some of my own uncertainty of what it means to be a man of who countries as well as inheritor of two revolutions. Today revolutions manufacture memories only to upset the hardening of arteries. Those 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 are pretty good description of what i tried to do in the sympathizer as well and nothing ever dies is really the nonfiction sequel to the sympathizer and there are a lot of things that i couldnt say in the sympathizer because you can step out of character and nothing ever dies is a study, why do we go to war, the importance of recognizingg inhumanity as much as humanity t and what are the possibilities of peace and reconciliation and in sympathizer i try to address those questions too but in a more dramatic or fictional way and in sympathizer writing a novel i can get away in with a lot of things. Thats part of the joy, the liberty of writing fiction. So sympathizer is a novel about a communist spy in the south Vietnamese Army in april 1975, its about to fall or liberated depending on your point of view. He does see both perspectives and he tells you from the very first paragraph that thats his one talent. The ability to see any issue from both sides. His mission is to flee to the United States and spy under efforts to take the country which really did happen in this time period and what happens when the veitnamese refugees are put into camps. He ended up in Southern California and i ended up in Fort Indian Town Gap in pennsylvania. The next part of the reading comes from the sympathizer when hes in that camp and hes writing a letter to his supposed aunt and hes going to tell her what life is life for these new refugees in Southern California. If allowed to Stay Together, i told my aunt, was could have incorporated ourselves into a respectably size colony, a pimple on the but toks of politics. I think thats pretty funny, bui thats just me. Of the [laughter] have a voice in our american. A little sigon as delightful, t dysfunctional as the original which was exactly why we wereer not allowed to Stay Together because were dispersed by bureaucratic fiat, for example, the places like madison, wisconsin. They didnt chose to come here. Theyll be integrated. Where ever we found ourselves, we found each other. We did our best but since we were dependent on chinese markets, we had a chinese tinge they hate chinese people. They left us with sweet and sour taste just enough to evoke the past and just long enough to remind thaws the past wasat forever gone. Along with the proper variety, complexity of universe, how we missed it, now nothing tasted right without it. The liquid of the darkest was much by foreigners horrendous and we were the fishy ones. [laughter] in our case establish a perimeter with westerners who could never understand what was truly fishy was the nauseateinga cheese. I guess i should say cheese kurds. [laughter] they are very kind in some ways, they delivered a plait ofv food to my door when i got there and, of course, there was cheese. What was formed fish compared to curdled milk . We kept our feelings to ourselves sitting close to one another on prickly sofas and chewing on squid in the cud of remembrance until our jaws ached. This was the way. Es we learn that had the plan turned into slave farmer in modesto. The widower with nine children who went out to minnesotan winter and regretful refugees on guam who petition to go back to vietnam never to be heard from again and the girls seduced by heroin and buddhist who spanked the young son and arrested for child abuse in houston and the husband who slapped his wife and was jailed for Domestic Violence in raleigh and the men who would have escaped but left wives behind in the chaos and the women who had escaped and left husbands behind and the children who had escaped without parents and grandparents and the families missing one, two, three, or more children. Sitting through the dirt, the mechanic who bought a Lottery Ticket in arlington and became a multimillionaire or the girlon elected president or the boyl elected from harvard, still in the tracks of the sneakers or the movie star you love so much who circled the world from airport to airport. No country letting her in after the fall and none of movie star friends returning phone calls until with her last dime shean v snagged. It was that we sat ourselves in saddens and rinsed ourselves with hope and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refuse to believe that our nation was dead. The story is true, the movie star was famous movie star in vietnam and you might have seen her in the joy luck club. It took so much pity on the vietnam people that she met and thought it would be a great idea to take a personal manicurist and taught them how to manicure and now we own 50 of the nail salon in the history. On the other hand, it could end up on Trump Campaign ad. [laughter] im in madison, right . He has to make a living, our narrater. He goes to los angeles and becomes to authenticity consultant on the making of a movie about thats going to be epic in vietnam and shot in philippines and this is made up in my imagination and hes giving director some notes as we call them in hollywood and the director is only noun known as the otour. Pointing out that the lack of speaking parts for vietnamesespeaking people for a movie set in vietnam might be cultural insensitivity. Do you not think it would be more realistic, authentic, maybe for the people in the country to have something to say instead of having screen play direct as it has now cut the villagers speaking in their own language, do you think it might not be decent for them to Say Something instead of simply acknowledgingh that theres some kind of sound coming from their mouth, could you not have them speak heavily accent english, chingchong english, american audience can understand . And. [laughter] and said very interesting, great stuff, loved it, but i had a question, what was it . Oh, yes. How many movies have you made . None, zero, zilch, nada, nothing, however you say it in your language. Thank you for telling me how to do my job and get the hell out of my house and come back when you have made a movie or two, maybe then i will listen to one of your two cheap ideas. E i confessed to be angry but was i wrong . A french catchall term. The movie is called the hamlet, green berets who are defending in hamlet from the veitcon who have known as king kong because they are so bad. What i said to him, i wrote a screen play about the American West and simply caught all the natives indians. You want to know whether the navajo, comanche, let me tell you a secret. You ready . Here it is. No one gives a shit. He was amused by my wordlessness. To see me without words is like seeing one of those egyptian sea lions without hair. How can it be so dense, how can i be deluded. Hollywood did not just make horror movie monsters, it was his own horror movie monster smashing me under its foot. I had failed. Epic about white men from good yellow people from bad yellow people. Me i pity the french, hollywood, was much more efficient. [laughter] inventing the country they wanted to exploit. I was maddened by my helplessness. Has arrogance marked something new in the world for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors courtesy of the most Propaganda Machine ever created, with all due respect to joseph and the nazis who never achieved global domination. Madison, right . It was better to rule in heaven than to serve heaven, better than loser or antihero than extra so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage. In all the vietnamese would come out. Our fate was not to be merely mute. We were to be struck dumb. I had several meetings wither hollywood people. Ive asked him if youre offended by the characterization . They said, no, there you go. [laughter] seems to be accurate. All right. So if you know anything about southern vietnamese people, you know that we love to sing, to drink and to dance. So soon after arriving as pooron refugees in Southern Californiaw and getting out of the refugee camp and get to go los angeles, one of the first things that my people did was to open a nightclub. True story. That nightclub became the paris of paris by night, which is a song and dance which is now 130 iterations shot in paris, las vegas where the vait vietnamese sing and dance. These things were being snuggled in vietnam. Encounters the one woman he should not fall in love with, the daughter of his general. There you go. John Paul George Ringo and mary because im a screwed up Catholic Lana stepped on stage, leopardprint min skirt andloves thighhigh boots. Naked in between mini skirt andh bustier. Rest i [laughter] they dont laugh about that in los angeles. Its a little too close to reality. She turned on the heat with her first number, the unexpected id love you to want me. Most people think most americans think im referring to i wantne you to want me but thats not the case. If youre a vietnamese person who knew who this person was and i had heard this before some only by men. I love you to want me was a song of the bachelors of unhappily married males of my generation whether in english original or superb french and vietnameselisr renditions. We men of the south love nothing more than unrequited love. After cigarettes, coffee and conac. All i wanted a night to remember forever. Every man in the room shared my emotion as we watched, her voice enough to move the audience or rather to steal us. Nobody talked and nobody stirred except to raise a cigarette or a glass and concentration not broken for her next slightly more upbeat number, bang, bang, my baby shot me down. T me [laughter] the last line of the French Version echoed the vietnamese version, we will never forget. In the pop song, the rendition was one of the most memorable. Masterfully love and violence in the story of 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 pistol firing into our heads. For weak not forget love, weak not forget war, we cannot forget enemies, we cannot forget homet and we cannot forget the caramel flavor of ice coffee with sugar, bowls of needle soup while squadding, the whisper of a lover saying the most seductive words in our language. The working men who slept on the streets, kept warm only by theve memories of their families. The refugees who leapt slept on every sidewalk of every city and mango plucked fresh from the tree and the girls talked us and the men died and disappeared. The streets blown away from bomb shells, the innocence of the birds, candle light on the walls of waddled huts and abandoned village, the wreak, the sight and sound of orphans howling by the bodies of their mothers and fathers. The list can go on and on. The point was simply, this most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget. Im going to end with a couple of paragraphs from the very end that nothing ever dies. Th its a narrative, its a nonfiction critical work but also a narrative thats partially about my life and my family and this is how i end it. Remember and forgetting together making us who we are, one never without the other. I like to remember but so much has been forgotten or silenced. My own personal memory is faulty. Through my youth i had a memory of soldiers from our boat to another boat as we floated on the south china sea. I was 4. My brother is 7 years older says the shooting never happened. As an adult i remember my mother being hospitalized when i was a child. I discovered a memoir that i had written in college. I read in my own words as she was in the hospital at that time not years before. Her illness in that strange with patients had made me feel like i was a frightened child. That feeling is what i remember. As for my father its pointless to ask him about the past. His relationship to the past is to muffle it at least in my presence. Although i visited his homeland i have never visited my own origin, the town where i was born because he has forbidden it. He has said to me, you can never go back there. Too many people will remember him and persecute me and so he believes. I think of what the cartoons said of his father who survived the holocaust, i hadnt a clue as to how to find the place my father told me he grew up in and it wasnt much help except to tell us not to go at all because they kill jews there. They kill jews there, dont go. He was afraid for us. My own believe in memories that do not die. And while i disobeyed my father in many things, i cannot in this one thing. But its too strong. What is it that he remembers of this place . What has he not told me . What if hes right . Its the opposite of memory. Perhaps some things may never be remembered and yet also neverrth forgotten. Perhaps some things will remain unspoken, perhaps i will only visit where i was born after my father has passed on, then it will be too late to see what it is that he remembers, memory having expired. This is the paradox of the past of trauma, of loss, of war, a true war where theres no ending but the unknown, no conversation except that which cannot be finished. I think back to my fathers father and what happens to his remains. The vietnamese think a person should be buried twice. I think people in many in both countries have forgotten or tried to forget and that is problematic. You can try to forget. Its goal to come back at you, and likewise the history of war, too so we look back on our own civil war, that was over 150 years ago. I dont know if we have forgoning and the leg georgias of the war entrenched in our society, and 0 feelings and structures and systems. So when comes to the vietnam war the americans have not reconciled with the past. They tried to rewrite the past. Gone from bag bad war to being a not so bad war. Maybe a good war. Eh. Now the narrative, bipartisan narrative, democrats and republicans and president obama, too, this was failed war sorry, we lost but we tried our best with the best of intentions, noble exemptions, and we should remember our soldiers because they fought for freedom and for each other. Thats literally what is president obama said. And this kind of narrative is being used, increasingly dominant in Popular Culture and politics and government, state department, its really strong. I go to washington, dc and given talks there, and sat next to an american ambassador. The american policy people really do believe in northwestern exceptionalism. They do american exceptionalism, and they do. And the Practical Impact of that nt to we can do this be