Speaker 1: Adaptation can be a dicey proposition, because if you love
Speaker 1: a book or any work of art, really, it's natural
Speaker 1: to be excited for the chance to further swim in
Speaker 1: its waters, to see that imaginative world in which we're
Speaker 1: already so invested reproduced in technicolor glory. But of course,
Speaker 1: with that enthusiasm comes a set of exacting standards, the
Speaker 1: deep disappointment of a dud bit of casting, the liberty
Speaker 1: taken with merging two characters, or excizing an extraneous plot line.
Speaker 1: But for my money, the worst crime of all in
Speaker 1: an adaptation is one that is so slavishly faithful that
Speaker 1: it sucks the flare and joy out of the story
Speaker 1: that made us love it in the first place. Books
Speaker 1: to screen can be a recipe for heartache and disappointment,
Speaker 1: But the crucial thing is that when it does work,
Speaker 1: when an adaptation sings, well, that's just wonderful. Start again.
Speaker 2: I must spuy a sleeper, a spook, a man of
Speaker 2: two faces.
Speaker 1: I is curazed to see every issue.
Speaker 3: From both sides.
Speaker 1: I is a communist agent implanted with himself. That's the
Speaker 1: opening scene from the recent HBO series The Sympathizer, which
Speaker 1: is based on Viet Tan wins Brilliant twenty fifteen Pilit's
Speaker 1: a winning novel of the same name. Its historical fiction
Speaker 1: meets spy thriller meets blackly funny exploration of the colonial experience,
Speaker 1: and it's not surprising it makes for great TV. To
Speaker 1: my mind, this is an adaptation that gets it right. Now,
Speaker 1: as new audiences discover Viet's work through the TV show,
Speaker 1: He's released his first memoir. It's called A Man with
Speaker 1: Two Faces, And as in his fiction, he's still a
Speaker 1: man with an eye on the best story. This time around, though,
Speaker 1: the whole thing cuts closer to the bow. I'm Michael Williams,
Speaker 1: and this is read. This a show about the stories
Speaker 1: we love, the books behind them, and the stories behind them.
Speaker 1: Vietan Wynn was born in Vietnam in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: After the fall of Saigon in seventy five, he fled
Speaker 1: to America with his family, leaving behind an older, adopted sister.
Speaker 1: In his move to nonfiction, A Man with Two Faces,
Speaker 1: he lays bare the details of this story, all the
Speaker 1: while pushing against the familiar beats of memoir. So that's
Speaker 1: where I wanted to start, with the kind of conventions
Speaker 1: into which Viet found himself writing for the first time.
Speaker 1: In A Man of Two Faces. You reflect a lot
Speaker 1: on their generic and category expectations of telling this kind
Speaker 1: of memoir that the refugee memoir takes a particular shape.
Speaker 1: In fact, you offer the crib notes for any aspiring
Speaker 1: writer of a refugee memoir, and I wonder how much
Speaker 1: an awareness of that tradition made you resistant to write
Speaker 1: into it in the first place.
Speaker 2: I'm very meta as a writer. I'm always thinking of
Speaker 2: the larger contexts and frames in which stories are told
Speaker 2: and received, because obviously, many of us who are storytellers
Speaker 2: have deeply held, passionately felt stories that we want to tell,
Speaker 2: and yet we confront audiences that are themselves inundated with
Speaker 2: prejudices and preconceptions about certain historical events, such as in
Speaker 2: my case, the Vietnam War, or the immigrant or refugee experience.
Speaker 2: And I'm very cognizant of the fact that then these
Speaker 2: prejudices and preconceptions shaped audience expectations. And in the example
Speaker 2: of the United States, I mean, part of the mythology
Speaker 2: of the United States is that we are the greatest
Speaker 2: country on earth, and therefore no matter what kind of
Speaker 2: difficulties people have encountered in their interactions with Americans, either
Speaker 2: through American wars or as immigrants to the United States.
Speaker 2: No matter what kind of difficulties, nevertheless, the final result
Speaker 2: is congratulations, you're an American. You've made it. Even if
Speaker 2: you criticize the United States, you're still ever of the
Speaker 2: American dream. And so that's where the refugee memoir or
Speaker 2: the immigrant memoir comes in to affirm this country. And
Speaker 2: so I had to resist it even as I was
Speaker 2: telling this story, and I wanted to make sure that
Speaker 2: readers felt the emotions that all readers want from story,
Speaker 2: but that they also were aware of why they wanted
Speaker 2: those emotions.
Speaker 1: I'm curious knowing you wanted to be a writer by
Speaker 1: far predated knowing you wanted to tell these stories.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think, like many writers, my response to stories
Speaker 2: is very visceral and very emotional. I grew up surrounded
Speaker 2: by stories in the public library because my parents were
Speaker 2: living this very difficult refugee life, working very hard, not
Speaker 2: having time to spend with their children. That was the
Speaker 2: proximity effect on me, and my way of solving or
Speaker 2: addressing that was to escape through stories.
Speaker 1: Those trips into the public library as a kid. I've
Speaker 1: heard you say before that despite their religious belief, there
Speaker 1: wasn't even a Bible in your house. You know that
Speaker 1: you went to the public library because you had to
Speaker 1: do that to go on raid. Did that create a
Speaker 1: gap between you and your family, becoming a rada?
Speaker 2: Oh? Absolutely. I referred to it as being kidnapped by literature.
Speaker 2: You know, my parents thought the public library was a
Speaker 2: safe space if you just drop your kid off and
Speaker 2: they'll be busy for twelve four to twelve hours. This
Speaker 2: is the kind of time when my parents would literally
Speaker 2: drop me off at the library a Saturday morning, before
Speaker 2: the doors even opened. They took off and I was
Speaker 2: there surrounded by dozens of adults. You know, I knows
Speaker 2: what would happen. But the more I acquired English, the
Speaker 2: more I became a better reader, The more I learned
Speaker 2: about English language literature of the Anglo American tradition, the
Speaker 2: more I became a writer, the more I became an American,
Speaker 2: the further away I was taken from my parents, And
Speaker 2: that alienation, I think is, you know, partly what motivates
Speaker 2: me as a writer and gives me the fuel and
Speaker 2: the motivation to be a writer, which led to some success,
Speaker 2: but it's also ironically the alienation that distanced me from
Speaker 2: my parents.
Speaker 1: Do you remember particular formative books in that early period,
Speaker 1: the moments where you went, I didn't know you could
Speaker 1: do that.
Speaker 2: Oh, there are many, I mean, certainly a children's literature
Speaker 2: of all kinds had a huge impact on me, from
Speaker 2: Curious George and Tintin, onto science fiction like Robert Heinlend
Speaker 2: and Isaac Asimov, and fantasy like Token, and science fiction
Speaker 2: like Dune by Frank Herbert, and then adult fiction. There
Speaker 2: are no boundaries and borders in the library, so no
Speaker 2: one could stop me from walking to the adult fiction
Speaker 2: section and reading books that would scar me for life.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, not only can no one
Speaker 1: stop you, but any kid left to their own devices
Speaker 1: in the library very quickly knows that it's a pathway to
Speaker 1: an adult world there.
Speaker 2: Otherwise tonight, oh yeah, that they're forbidden stories that their
Speaker 2: parents probably would be unhappy for them to read because
Speaker 2: there are you know, dirty words, dirty stories, that kind
Speaker 2: of thing. So, of course, Philip Roth's nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 2: novel Portnoy's Complaint made a huge impact on me when
Speaker 2: I was eleven or twelve and not capable of understanding
Speaker 2: very much about it, except that there's some echo between
Speaker 2: the life of you know, a second generation Jewish American
Speaker 2: boy shadow by the Holocaust and this Vietnamese refugee shadowed
Speaker 2: by war and both struggling with their adolescence and their sexuality,
Speaker 2: a huge impact which would eventually, you know, ripple through
Speaker 2: the Sympathizer.
Speaker 1: My first novel, the title of A Man of Two Faces,
Speaker 1: a memoir, A history of memorial comes from the sympathizer.
Speaker 1: I'm a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of
Speaker 1: two faces. What is it about that idea of two
Speaker 1: faces that so resonates with you?
Speaker 2: I think I just knew that from a very very
Speaker 2: young age as a refugee, or maybe just as an individual.
Speaker 2: But I always had to maintain at least two faces,
Speaker 2: one to my parents and one to the rest of
Speaker 2: the world. And there's probably more than just two faces.
Speaker 2: But you know, I was growing up as an American,
Speaker 2: but I was in my parents very Vietnamese household, so
Speaker 2: I felt like an American spying on these Vietnamese people.
Speaker 2: And then when I stepped out, I felt like a
Speaker 2: Vietnamese person spying on Americans in the larger world. So
Speaker 2: that was a very deeply held feeling and confusion for me.
Speaker 2: And you know, when I started to write The Sympathizer,
Speaker 2: I thought, my life is not very interesting, So I'll
Speaker 2: create a spy and put some of these feelings into
Speaker 2: him and amplify them greatly, because the spy is obviously
Speaker 2: as a man of at least two faces. And then
Speaker 2: when it came time to writing this memoir, I'm a
Speaker 2: reluctant memoirist, which I think is a healthy thing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: enthusiastic memoirists are scary.
Speaker 1: That should be automatic disqualification from my writing a memoir
Speaker 1: is wanting to write a memoir exactly.
Speaker 2: So I had to be persuaded into doing it by
Speaker 2: my editor. And the initial way for me to do
Speaker 2: it was to pretend that I was the Sympathizer writing
Speaker 2: about me. That created enough of a distance between me
Speaker 2: and myself that I could observe myself and start writing
Speaker 2: about myself. And then gradually, as the book progresses, I
Speaker 2: get closer and closer and closer to that strange little
Speaker 2: boy that I didn't understand even when I was him.
Speaker 1: That process so beautifully described. There is in part captured
Speaker 1: in the book by the decision to use the second person.
Speaker 1: Can you talk to me a bit about when that
Speaker 1: moment kind of landed with you?
Speaker 2: I wrote that book very intuitively. There wasn't a lot
Speaker 2: of planning going into it, and the book actually starts
Speaker 2: off in the first person, but by the end of
Speaker 2: the first chapter, I'd recount something that really happened. Happened
Speaker 2: obviously to my parents, which is on Christmas Eve when
Speaker 2: I was about nine years old. We were at home,
Speaker 2: my brother and I. I was watching cartoons and then my
Speaker 2: brother got a phone call and when he put it down,
Speaker 2: he said, Mom and dad have been shot. They ran
Speaker 2: a grocery store, and that's what happened that night. And
Speaker 2: I had no reaction to that. I think I was
Speaker 2: in a state of shock. And my brother said, what's
Speaker 2: wrong with you? And I think at that point I
Speaker 2: thought what is wrong with me? And I never stopped
Speaker 2: thinking what is wrong with me for many, many decades.
Speaker 2: And at that point, with my brother saying you, I
Speaker 2: switched as a writer into the you the second person.
Speaker 2: I'd spend the next I don't know two thirds of
Speaker 2: the book investigating you until I got close enough that
Speaker 2: you became I again by the last third of the book.
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful and very affecting choice in the context
Speaker 1: of the book. But of course what's clear is that
Speaker 1: you know that incident getting the call your parents have
Speaker 1: been shot in many stories my foundational trauma. Whereas for you,
Speaker 1: you know, five years before that you had had the
Speaker 1: refugee experience, you'd been separated from your parents and your siblings.
Speaker 1: You know that bit of trauma sat already underneath that.
Speaker 1: It's hardly surprising that nine year old you had nowhere
Speaker 1: to place those feelings.
Speaker 2: I think growing up these things were normal. I mean
Speaker 2: I thought, well, it happens everybody, and in fact, I
Speaker 2: think it happened to a lot of refugees. And knowing
Speaker 2: what I knew from Vietnamese refugee stories, I felt that
Speaker 2: there was nothing again unusual about my life. It was
Speaker 2: only talking to people who are not refugees and telling
Speaker 2: them some of these stories and seeing the looks of
Speaker 2: incomprehension on their faces, like wow, did you live through
Speaker 2: these kinds of things that I gradually understood that these
Speaker 2: were in fact fairly traumatic experiences. But myself and maybe
Speaker 2: like many other refugees, I survived by pretending everything was
Speaker 2: normal and moving forward and not looking back, normalizing those experiences,
Speaker 2: and so it would take decades for me to understand
Speaker 2: that in fact, they probably did have a big impact
Speaker 2: on me. I remember meeting my future wife for the
Speaker 2: first time I started dating, and at one point I
Speaker 2: told her I think I'm pretty well adjusted, and she said, no,
Speaker 2: you're not.
Speaker 1: That's what we need from the people who love us
Speaker 1: is a bit of honesty about where our self delusion
Speaker 1: kicks in, and beyond self delusion, also where our performance
Speaker 1: kicks in. I mean, part of being a man of
Speaker 1: two faces is not just having to assimilate these fractured
Speaker 1: kind of internal senses himself, but it's also about the
Speaker 1: idea of how we perform being a good refugee, a
Speaker 1: good migrant, a good citizen, a good member of the community,
Speaker 1: and the expectations around that performance are pretty acutely defined.
Speaker 2: And I think that's where the theme of having many
Speaker 2: faces continues for me personally. But I think also from
Speaker 2: any immigrants, refugees, outsiders to any society, we know that
Speaker 2: we have to put on performances, As you said, multiple faces,
Speaker 2: depending on the context. So one role from my parents,
Speaker 2: one role from the Vietnamese community, one role for my
Speaker 2: professional life as a professor and as a writer. And
Speaker 2: so I'm always wearing masks, trying to calculate how much
Speaker 2: to reveal of myself to different people, depending on different contexts.
Speaker 2: It's a survival strategy. It's a method of negotiation for
Speaker 2: anyone who feels different in some way, and that resonates
Speaker 2: very acutely with the necessary masks that a spy has
Speaker 2: to wear, as in the sympathizer, but also a writer.
Speaker 2: You know, I think myself as a writer, I'm also
Speaker 2: wearing masks because I'm also trying to constantly observe people,
Speaker 2: and in order to do that, I have to get
Speaker 2: a little bit closer to them, make them feel comfortable
Speaker 2: with me. So that's always there in my tool kit,
Speaker 2: these pretensions and performances.
Speaker 1: I also know that you're not terribly compelled by the
Speaker 1: idea of authenticity, that authenticity, to your mind, is distraction
Speaker 1: as an obsession.
Speaker 2: In some ways, authenticity is inevitable, obviously, and there's a
Speaker 2: real need for it, and I understand that, and sometimes
Speaker 2: authenticity is crucial if I want to find the best
Speaker 2: Vietnamese food in Melbourne. I believe in authenticity at that point,
Speaker 2: but I grew up with this sense that I was inauthentic.
Speaker 2: Americans would see me as not being American, some of
Speaker 2: them Vietnamese people would not see me as being Vietnamese enough,
Speaker 2: And one logical reaction that that is to desperately desire
Speaker 2: to belong, to be included, to feel authentic. So I
Speaker 2: understand that my reaction was to be distrustful of authenticity.
Speaker 2: So even when I went back to Vietnam for the
Speaker 2: first time, some twenty seven years after I had left it,
Speaker 2: I did not go back with the expectation that on
Speaker 2: returning to Vietnam I would somehow become one hundred percent
Speaker 2: Vietnamese and be restored to the motherland. I was very skeptical,
Speaker 2: and in fact that was true, like I did not
Speaker 2: feel more authentically Vietnamese. In fact, when I go to
Speaker 2: Vietnam and I speak Vietnamese, one common response is that
Speaker 2: people will say, you speak such good Vietnamese for a Korean.
Speaker 2: And so my own authenticity is to be authentic to
Speaker 2: my inauthenticity, and I think that's a powerful position for
Speaker 2: a writer to be in is to be distrustful of
Speaker 2: these notions that are so motivating to many individuals, but
Speaker 2: also to Nicheans, and Nichans committed to authenticity can be
Speaker 2: very dangerous entities.
Speaker 1: When we return, the ed expands on the idea of
Speaker 1: alienation and how proximity to history as well as distance,
Speaker 1: make from a more powerful story. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: One of the things you describe so well is not
Speaker 1: just that relationship with the emotion of the trauma of
Speaker 1: the refugee experience, but a kind of idea of conditionality
Speaker 1: about what bits of it are your story to tell
Speaker 1: and what a someone else's. So not only are you're
Speaker 1: having to cut close to your bone, you're having to
Speaker 1: cut close to the bone of loved ones who haven't
Speaker 1: necessarily given you permission.
Speaker 2: And that is a serious ethical and personal and moral
Speaker 2: and artistic problem that I think a lot of people
Speaker 2: who write about their families confront, whether they do it
Speaker 2: explicitly through memoir or nonfiction, or whether they disguise things
Speaker 2: in fiction. And I struggled with that quite mightily. So
Speaker 2: I had great difficulty writing about my own life in
Speaker 2: my family's life until my mother passed away, and then
Speaker 2: that I think gave me some license to think that
Speaker 2: now I could talk about things that would not harm
Speaker 2: her anymore. What year was it, the Cheetah twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: Twenty eighteen, And at that moment you felt liberated from
Speaker 1: a responsibility to her not to share secret.
Speaker 2: Well, it wasn't that mercenary of a position. It wasn't
Speaker 2: as if right away it was like, oh, now I
Speaker 2: can talk about all these stories that I have been
Speaker 2: holding back for so long. But there was a moment
Speaker 2: in my book A Man in Two Faces where I said,
Speaker 2: you know, it was an honest admission that even as
Speaker 2: my mother was passing away, the writerly part of me
Speaker 2: was already thinking about how to describe that moment. Not
Speaker 2: because I wanted to exploit it, but simply because, as
Speaker 2: a writer, at least my kind of writer, I'm always
Speaker 2: looking at people at situations for the potential for material
Speaker 2: or how my art can deal with it and transform it.
Speaker 2: But you know, when my mother passed away, it was
Speaker 2: simply that it took me a while to even begin
Speaker 2: to process what that meant. But also I think that
Speaker 2: was the beginning of my understanding, not that I was liberated,
Speaker 2: but simply that she would not be there to be
Speaker 2: damaged by any stories that I told, and it took
Speaker 2: me a while to get to the moment where I
Speaker 2: felt that I could write about it. I think that
Speaker 2: as a writer, I'm always dwelling on the possibility of
Speaker 2: what can and can't be told at the present moment.
Speaker 2: And that's a very personal circumstance, obviously, but it's also related,
Speaker 2: I think, to larger social contexts as well. I certainly
Speaker 2: look at my own family, my own history about the
Speaker 2: potential for stories, but as an American, I also think
Speaker 2: that there are stories that we as Americans have a
Speaker 2: hard time confronting, and we've taken a long time to
Speaker 2: tell some of these stories. And so my own work
Speaker 2: has always fluctuated between that the personal desire to confront
Speaker 2: these emotions and to tell these stories, but then also
Speaker 2: to connect that to the national experience and my interpret
Speaker 2: of the United States, the national reluctance to confront some
Speaker 2: of its most difficult emotions and traumas.
Speaker 1: And the fact that, as with any colonial motion, probably
Speaker 1: any nation, national identity is built on silences and deliberate
Speaker 1: and willful silences.
Speaker 2: And so our families. Yeah, So I mean, I think
Speaker 2: I don't know of any nation that's founded on this
Speaker 2: idea that, yes, we brutally violated some other people or
Speaker 2: conquered some other nation in order to build our own.
Speaker 2: And yet most nations, maybe all nations, have that kind
Speaker 2: of foundational violence. And then has that foundational violence is
Speaker 2: obviously contradictory to the noble ideals of a nation. So yes,
Speaker 2: we have to create mythologies and tell stories to ourselves
Speaker 2: that justify our own existence as a nation. And then
Speaker 2: those silences that you talked about, And my experience with
Speaker 2: silences is that even if something is not spoken about,
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean it's not felt. That absent presence of
Speaker 2: silence reverberates emotionally, certainly with families. I've encountered many families
Speaker 2: of refugees, but also rans where the children and grandchildren saying, well,
Speaker 2: the parents and the grandparents never talked about this experience,
Speaker 2: whatever it is, and yet we could feel there was
Speaker 2: something unspoken, and that unspoken aspect still transforms us.
Speaker 1: And again there's also that question of personal proximity to story.
Speaker 1: You know, you reflect in the book that where your
Speaker 1: parents of the children of war, the children of displacement,
Speaker 1: you're the grandchild of those things rather than the child
Speaker 1: of them, and that adds a different kind of lens
Speaker 1: through which to say those stories.
Speaker 2: I think proximity is a good word, you know, the
Speaker 2: proximity to a blast, the proximity to radiation, the proximity
Speaker 2: to whatever. Even if you're not there at the very
Speaker 2: core of something that happens, the shock waves or the
Speaker 2: effects can still impact you. Certainly impacted me and many
Speaker 2: other refugee children and grandchildren, where even if we did
Speaker 2: not personally experience the trauma of war or the refugee experience,
Speaker 2: or if we were too young to really remember those things,
Speaker 2: we saw the effects on our parents through the stories
Speaker 2: they told, the stories they refused to tell, their behaviors,
Speaker 2: which are sometimes problematic in different ways. You know, if
Speaker 2: you're not able to deal with your own trauma, what
Speaker 2: happens oftentimes you take it out on other people in
Speaker 2: various kinds of ways. So yeah, the proximity to a
Speaker 2: historically important experience is its own kind of experience, and
Speaker 2: it makes sure its own kind of story.
Speaker 1: I understand that before you submitted Man of Two Faces
Speaker 1: to your publisher, there were only two readers of it,
Speaker 1: your wife and your brother, and I'm wondering about the
Speaker 1: I mean, your brother. That must have been a nerve
Speaker 1: wracking person to share it with, given the ways in
Speaker 1: which it's quite literally a shared story, a shared experience.
Speaker 2: I mean, it was a nerve wracking experience to share
Speaker 2: the story with anybody. Honestly, I've never felt so viscerally
Speaker 2: twisted inside when people started reading this particular manuscript in
Speaker 2: draft form. But there's no doubt that having my brother
Speaker 2: read it was a particular challenge because he was the
Speaker 2: only eyewitness to what had happened to our family, so
Speaker 2: his opinion was important to me, and especially as my
Speaker 2: older and only brother. And so what happened was I
Speaker 2: gave the manuscript to him, and then I never I
Speaker 2: didn't hear from him again. And then my sister in
Speaker 2: law had to intervene and she persuaded him to read
Speaker 2: the manuscript, and he finally read it, and then he said,
Speaker 2: I got it right. You can publish this, which was
Speaker 2: very validating for me because I would have published it anyway.
Speaker 2: But it's important that he also thought that I had
Speaker 2: spoken some version of the truth. I don't know if
Speaker 2: it's his truth, but at least he could agree to
Speaker 2: that truth.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, I like that construction of
Speaker 1: you got it right is it doesn't presuppose accuracy of memory.
Speaker 1: And you're a scholar of memory. You've thought about these
Speaker 1: ideas a lot. To say you've got it right. This
Speaker 1: can go out as your record of things is lovely
Speaker 1: in so far as the things that doesn't say.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know. Memory is highly subjective, memories always fluctuating.
Speaker 2: And this is a funny thing about writing a man
Speaker 2: because I think many people would interpret a memoir or
Speaker 2: an autobiography as being based in fact. Yes, there are facts,
Speaker 2: of course, but there's always interpretation. And I think there's
Speaker 2: something quite fictive oftentimes about memoirs and autobiographies because the
Speaker 2: writer is constructing a narrative and an interpretation and trying
Speaker 2: to convince you, the reader, to trust the writer. And
Speaker 2: the problem is that you can have any set of facts,
Speaker 2: and two people who are there at the same time
Speaker 2: can have vastly different interpretations. So that's part of the
Speaker 2: fun and the challenge of writing something like a memoir,
Speaker 2: especially when people are still alive, is that the fictive
Speaker 2: quality is quite evident, at least to me as a writer,
Speaker 2: and I try to bring that out in this otherwise
Speaker 2: seemingly factual memoir.
Speaker 1: So then how do you think you will be a
Speaker 1: different novelist having written a memoir. I suspect it's worked
Speaker 1: a set of rightly muscles, a set of kind of
Speaker 1: preconceptions about how you tell story, about where you see
Speaker 1: it in relation to the story, that mean that the
Speaker 1: next novel is going to feel very different.
Speaker 2: I think there's a total continuity between the different books
Speaker 2: that I write. So, for example, and The Sympathizer, there's
Speaker 2: a scene where our narrator, the Spy, is reflecting on
Speaker 2: the death of his mother and he builds a fake
Speaker 2: tomb for her in this movie set, and he cries
Speaker 2: over that. And as I was writing that, I cried
Speaker 2: over that. And when readers read that, they often say
Speaker 2: that is the most poignant moment of the novel for them.
Speaker 2: And I think that seed of writing that fictional story
Speaker 2: helped to me to write a Man of two Faces.
Speaker 2: And so whenever I'm writing a book, I am personally
Speaker 2: transformed by it, so that I can't write the same
Speaker 2: book over again because I'm a different person. So likewise,
Speaker 2: I'm going to write the third and final novel of
Speaker 2: the Sympathizer trilogy, and there's no doubt that even though
Speaker 2: these are novels that are in some ways genre novels
Speaker 2: or spy novels, gangster novels, crime and violence and all
Speaker 2: this kind of stuff, there are also novels in which
Speaker 2: the narrator has changed over time, as I have changed
Speaker 2: over time. So there will be something different about the
Speaker 2: third novel. I have some ideas which I can't tell
Speaker 2: you about, but he's definitely a very different person, as
Speaker 2: I'm a very different writer.
Speaker 1: Do you find the trappings of genre, of the spine novel,
Speaker 1: of the gangster novel, the crime thing a useful kind
Speaker 1: of framework with which to confound expectation? You know, we
Speaker 1: think about genre writing as being about rewarding expectation for readers,
Speaker 1: but I think part of what's so wonderful about what
Speaker 1: you do in that space is you take all the
Speaker 1: various rubrics that readers expect and offer it to them
Speaker 1: not quite as they might anticipate.
Speaker 2: I think the most conventional genre stories are bound by
Speaker 2: the conventions of the genre, which is about plotting and
Speaker 2: formal expectations and things like that, and that's very rewarding
Speaker 2: because I love to read those things too, and it's
Speaker 2: like watching a game. You know what the rules are
Speaker 2: from the very beginning, and then you enjoy the variations
Speaker 2: that result. But in books like The Sympathizer in a
Speaker 2: sequel of That Committed, these are definitely genre novels, as
Speaker 2: you say, but there's multiple genres working in them, so
Speaker 2: they're not just spy novels or crime novels. They're also
Speaker 2: immigrant or refugee novels, and they're also philosophic novels, historical novels,
Speaker 2: political novels, novels of ideas. All these different genres are
Speaker 2: circulating in them, and once that happens, then the expectations
Speaker 2: can be confounded. And I think that that mixture is
Speaker 2: born out of my own personal sense of myself as
Speaker 2: being a mixture.
Speaker 1: And literary genre functions in much the same way as
Speaker 1: any tradition, any kind of social construct as well. These
Speaker 1: are the stories we tell ourselves again and again in
Speaker 1: the same way for reassurance. For whatever. The emotion in
Speaker 1: your work that I respond to so often is the
Speaker 1: anger in it, like these are clearly books driven by
Speaker 1: a sense of wanting to wanting to hold something into account,
Speaker 1: and maybe wanting to leave the reader a little bit furious.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I think that my identity as a writer
Speaker 2: is inseparable from the fact that when I went to
Speaker 2: school at UC Berkeley, the University of California at Berkeley,
Speaker 2: I became a very angry person because of a sudden
Speaker 2: all this history about being an Asian immigrant, Asian American,
Speaker 2: being an American was suddenly revealed to me that I
Speaker 2: had never known before. And that sense of anger, I
Speaker 2: think has always stayed with me. And let me qualify
Speaker 2: that by saying, I think it's a righteous anger. It's
Speaker 2: not a hateful anger. I think there's distinctions, and it's
Speaker 2: an emotion that, like every other emotion, if it's the
Speaker 2: only emotion one feels, can be overpowering. I mean love,
Speaker 2: If all you feel is love all the time, that's
Speaker 2: a little bit too much. You know, you have to
Speaker 2: qualify all your emotions. But anger is no doubt there,
Speaker 2: and sometimes it's very hot, But most of the time
Speaker 2: I think of it more as a pilot light. I
Speaker 2: keep it lit so that when I need it, when
Speaker 2: I really need it, I can turn it up for
Speaker 2: the right occasion and the right moment, whether it's some
Speaker 2: event happening in the world or whether it's demanded by
Speaker 2: the story of the novel. And if readers are infuriated
Speaker 2: at certain points, that's good, and then I try to
Speaker 2: make things easier for them by telling a joke.
Speaker 1: You're a very funny writer in ways that definitely offer
Speaker 1: atomic to some of those grief stricken moments.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course, you know, telling the joke to
Speaker 2: alleviate the tragedy and so on goes back at least
Speaker 2: to Shakespeare probably, you know, maybe probably further back, so
Speaker 2: tried in true method.
Speaker 1: I do love your account of your adopted sister, who
Speaker 1: you were separated from and who had to stay behind.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons your mother claimed to know that
Speaker 1: she was adopted was because she knew how to have
Speaker 1: a good time and you and your brother didn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. You know, we were a devout Catholic
Speaker 2: family and we do not know how to have fun.
Speaker 2: And so when I met my sister for the first
Speaker 2: time after we left, this was like twenty seven years later.
Speaker 2: You know, she was beautiful and she wore makeup and
Speaker 2: she was very fashionable, and I was like, wow, I
Speaker 2: wish all of our family was like this. But I
Speaker 2: will say that there's a PostScript to this story which
Speaker 2: doesn't appear in the book, because it happened after the book,
Speaker 2: which is last month. This adopted sister who we had
Speaker 2: left behind at sixteen to guard the family property against
Speaker 2: the communists, and of course was not able to guard
Speaker 2: the property and then was sent to hard labor as
Speaker 2: a sixteen year old, if you can imagine, for several years.
Speaker 2: She came last month to the United States for the
Speaker 2: first time, just in time for the red carpet premiere
Speaker 2: of my TV series A Sympathizer. And we went to
Speaker 2: this fancy Hollywood party where we were the first to arrive,
Speaker 2: and the second was Robert Downey Junior. And she got
Speaker 2: to have her picture taken, and I said, I told her,
Speaker 2: this is this happens all the time in Hollywood. I
Speaker 2: couldn't have scripted a better Hollywood ending for this particular story.
Speaker 1: I suspect that your mother would have been delighted to
Speaker 1: say that perhaps you had learned how to have a
Speaker 1: good time, and it's just it took you a little while,
Speaker 1: I hope, so Viet Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much.
Speaker 1: Michael VI ten Wins memoir A Man of Two Faces
Speaker 1: is available at all Good bookstores now. The adaptation of
Speaker 1: his Pulitz Surprise winning novel The Sympathizer can be found
Speaker 1: in Australia on Binge. Before we go, I wanted to
Speaker 1: tell you what I've been reading this week, and it
Speaker 1: won't have escaped your attention that the world is going
Speaker 1: to hell in a handbasket. You're probably not looking for
Speaker 1: more depressing stuff to read, but the new quarterly essay
Speaker 1: Highway to Hell Climate Change in Australia's Future is an
Speaker 1: essential read. Unfortunately, it's by climate scientist Joe L. Gergis,
Speaker 1: and she does an amazing job of summing up what
Speaker 1: the climate crisis means for Australia and what the cost
Speaker 1: of political and individual inertia is. Reading is a very
Speaker 1: small step towards doing something for the planet, but a
Speaker 1: worthwhile one. Nonetheless, you can find these books and all
Speaker 1: the others we mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore next week.
Speaker 1: I read this, I'm joined by Leslie Janison talking about
Speaker 1: her new memoir Splinters and the ways in which being
Speaker 1: raw on the page can be misunderstood.
Speaker 3: So I think that there are all sorts of ways
Speaker 3: that women writing from life. Writing gets treated as somehow
Speaker 3: less shaped by craft, intentionality, artistry, when often I find
Speaker 3: that my artistry is most challenged, that I have to
Speaker 3: bring everything I have as an artist to that work
Speaker 3: that is about the closest and most personal experiences that
Speaker 3: I've had.
Speaker 1: Read. This is produced and edited by Clare and mixing
Speaker 1: and original compositions by Zalten Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See
Speaker 1: you next week.