“To Save and to Destroy”: Viet Thanh Nguyen on New Book Exploring Otherness, Refugees, Gaza & More

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to shift a little bit to talk about your book, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. The book is based on a series of talks you delivered, the Norton Lectures at Harvard, which addressed the question, “What does the outsider mean to literary writing?” Could you give us — begin by giving us a summary of your answer to that question?

VIET THANH NGUYEN: Yeah, the book touches on the — I mean, it’s based on the question of otherness, and I think otherness is a universal condition. I’m sure we all have, at one time or another, felt ourselves to be odd or alienated or not fitting in in some way. But the difference for certain people is that otherness is constantly imposed on us. That’s, for example, conditions of racialization or queerness. These are identities that we don’t necessarily choose, although we eventually might, but they are imposed as blanket conditions.

And so, that dynamic has been evident throughout American literature and culture. I think most of our major artists and writers probably have felt other in some way, sometimes just simply as idiosyncratic or eccentric or weird in some ways, that turn them into artists. But we have a significant tradition of writers of color, queer writers, feminist writers, and so on, who have come out of these conditions where they have been marked as part of an entire population. And that condition of otherness is obviously very troubling in a lot of ways, very sometimes disabling, but the friction produced between being an other and looking at the center of power in American culture, looking at the ways by which there are some people in some populations that rest very comfortably in their notions of their own selves, that distance between self and otherness has been enormously productive in producing some of the most powerful and memorable forms of American culture, whether we’re speaking of music from Black people or whether we’re speaking of the literatures of so many populations, from Jewish Americans and now to Asian Americans, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: If you could also talk about the joy of otherness, as you put it? In the last chapter of your book, “On the Joy of Otherness,” you write about your experience being a father and conclude by telling the story of your sister, to whom your book is dedicated.

VIET THANH NGUYEN: I think there’s such a range of emotions when it comes to otherness. Certainly, at its most extreme version, when otherness is used to justify exploitation, domination and murder, the experiences of otherness can be deeply traumatic and terrifying, also, again, generative of cultural and psychological responses that are embedded throughout American culture. And other times, otherness can be more moderate and can be embedded in very, very intimate relationships within our own family, for example. I’ve said in the book that sometimes the other is the one who is closest to us, and perhaps many of us have had that relationship, where it’s our mother or our father or our siblings who are the ones that are most estranged from us or most confusing or puzzling to us. Now, that can be extremely discomforting, obviously, but sometimes that otherness is also something more gentle.

The fact that, for example, I have children who are 5 and 12 years of age, they’re sometimes other to me. Sometimes I look at them, and I think, “Who are these strange people that I’ve participated in giving birth to and raising?” I love them, but they’re also quite different from me, as well. And that kind of otherness, there is joy to be found in that, because I honestly did not want to become a father, for various reasons, because — partly because I was afraid of having these new, strange others in my life. But those others of my own children have taught me enormous things, most importantly, for the purposes of this book, the importance of playfulness, that looking at children who don’t know any rules, who do whatever they want, can be frustrating in a lot of ways for parents, but, from an artistic perspective, that spirit of playfulness, of childlikeness, is something that we absolutely need to internalize and learn again and again as rule-bound adults.

Now, when it comes to my sister, I — I had a sister. And in 1975, when we fled from Vietnam, we left her behind. And at 4 years of age, I certainly knew I had a sister, but by the time I was 10 or 11, I forgot that I had a sister. And when this letter showed up from Vietnam with a picture of this beautiful young woman, I asked my parents, “Who is that person?” And they said, “That’s your sister.” And that took me by surprise, took me — gave me a shock. And so, I grew up, from that point onwards, aware that there was an other in our family, an absent presence, who I would not see again for another 20 years or so, and who I would not see after that for 20 further years, until she came to the United States last year. She timed her visit perfectly. She showed up literally the day before the premiere of my TV series, and I had the opportunity to take her to a Hollywood party, where we were the first ones to arrive, and the next person to arrive was one of the stars of the show, Robert Downey Jr., who took photos with us. And I told my sister, “This happens all the time for people who come to Hollywood.” So, after all of the tragedy of our family history, there was joy, I think, in that moment of having my sister arrive for a little bit of the American experience

AMY GOODMAN: In October 2023, you were among more than 750 writers who signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, after which the 92nd Street Y here, 92NY, a major role cultural institution in New York City, canceled your speaking engagement there. This led to major turmoil at 92NY, with many staffers resigning in protest. In your book, you address Israel’s war on Gaza in the third chapter, titled “On Palestine and Asia.” And you talk about how you see the opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza as comparable to the global protests against the Vietnam War. Can you talk more about that? We interviewed you right at the time you were being canceled here.

VIET THANH NGUYEN: That certainly wasn’t something that I asked for or wanted. I signed that letter out of an impulse of conscience and conviction. Upon hearing one of the Israeli ministers describe Palestinians as “human animals,” I knew immediately what that rhetoric was referring to. It’s a colonizing and genocidal rhetoric in which an entire population of people are separated from humanity, and therefore exposed to the worst that we could do in terms of our so-called civilization. That dynamic has already been well illustrated in books like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

And so, what I think we, collectively, as a world, have witnessed in the case of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and of Palestine and what the Israeli military has done since October 7th, with the support of the United States, is to use that rhetoric of civilization and to use this idea that the West is an overwhelmingly powerful force to inflict tremendous and, I would argue, genocidal violence on a population of people and to kill a vast number of civilians, for the most part. So, I think it is a situation that for many people outside of Palestine and outside of Israel, that we can clearly see that there’s a vast disjuncture between the professions of — the rhetorical professions of Israel and the United States and what we’re actually witnessing from Palestinians themselves.

And one way in which this war is comparable to the Vietnam War is that, for the world, the Vietnam War became the first television war or the first living room war. People could turn on their TVs at night and literally see images of Vietnamese people being burned by napalm, for example. And this was utterly shocking at that time. And I think there’s a similar or parallel degree of shock here when we can see Palestinians using their phones to beam out the images of what it’s like to be subjected to a mass bombing, random bombing, to see people being blown to bits, including children. It is a shock to the conscience, and it has mobilized a significant degree of global sentiment against Israel and the United States that I don’t think we’ve seen since the 1960s and early 1970s.

And the consequences in the United States and elsewhere has been a radical degree of disagreement between those who support Israel and those who are opposed against it, and the mobilization of enormous amounts of political pressure against the people who have been opposed. And this, again, recalls the deep divisions internally within the United States and other countries during the Vietnam War. But I think one difference that’s important is that now, under the Trump administration, there’s been a weaponization of antisemitism, which is a real problem, but a weaponization of antisemitism to be directed against anybody who supports Palestine, but even now, under the Trump administration, the weaponization of antisemitism in Palestine against anybody that the Trump administration disagrees with.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and I wanted to ask you — in terms of Israel, you noted in a recent interview that some research you had done more recently, you discovered that after Jimmy Carter cut off aid to the Salvadoran military government in the late 1970s because of its human rights abuses, that Israel stepped in and supplied the weapons to that Salvadoran military. As much as 83% of El Salvador’s weapons were coming from Israel as a favor to the U.S. government.

VIET THANH NGUYEN: Yes, that was a shock to me — I have to admit my own ignorance in this matter — that Israel was a key player in Central America — not just El Salvador, but Central America in general in the 1970s and 1980s. I think what had happened is that Israel had built up its military arms industry, obviously, as a consequence of occupying Palestine. Israel became very good at certain things, like making weapons and engaging in counterinsurgency strategies against Palestinians and Arabs. And so, Israel started to export its weapons. It needed to sustain its own arms industry, and it found Central America, but other places, as well, like South Africa, to be good markets for its battle-tested weapons, weapons tested against Palestinians. Israel was also exporting advisers. It was exporting strategies. So, for example, the Guatemalan military turned to Israeli advisers in order to help devise their counterinsurgency strategy against their Indigenous populations, which resulted in enormous numbers of deaths, including what has been called a genocide in the early 1980s. So, in some ways, Israel has long been a junior partner to the United States when it comes to military and foreign policy. Places and moments where the United States might not want to be involved very explicitly, Israel has stepped in to supply the weapons and the advisers and the technology and the strategies that the United States might not have wanted to do for themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Viet Thanh Nguyen, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, professor at the University of Southern California. His latest book, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, also co-editor of the new book, The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. We’ll link to your op-ed in the Los Angeles Times today, “Americans are still learning the wrong lessons from Vietnam.” Viet Thanh Nguyen is on a national book tour. He’ll be here in New York, in Brooklyn Thursday night at the Center for Fiction and at Rizzoli Bookstore in Manhattan on Friday.

That does it for our show. Democracy Now! has job openings. Go to democracynow.org to learn more. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.