One of the best students in my undergrad journalism class, a young Vietnamese woman, fulfilled a diversity-essay assignment by celebrating novelist and political activist Viet Thanh Nguyen as a voice for the Vietnamese diaspora.
In a pithy three pages she echoed Nguyen’s standard argument that American “exceptionalism” often functions less as a democratic ideal than as a rhetorical justification for intervention and coercion abroad, particularly in Asia.
She correctly explained that he sees COVID-era hostility toward Asians not as an isolated phenomenon, but as part of a much older continuum of racial anxieties and “Asian hatred.” Central to his worldview is the idea that Asians in America have occupied an unstable place from the beginning: welcomed when their labor proved useful, especially during the railroad era, but later recast as economic and cultural threats, even as Asian women became heavily sexualized stereotypes in popular culture and racist fantasy.
In The Sympathizer, a novel set against the collapse of South Vietnam and the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Nguyen depicts the United States as a country whose self-image as a liberating force often collided with the destruction, manipulation, and moral ambiguities produced by war itself.
For all of his elegance, however, the theories he espouses often strain for coherence because they attempt to pull so many different historical experiences into one overarching case for the prosecution. His arguments hopscotch from nineteenth-century labor violence and anti-colonial theory to Hollywood mythology, Vietnam, white masculinity, and modern hate crimes, often blending memoir, pop culture, and lurid history into a single indictment of American exceptionalism.
Still, the student made a valiant effort to trace the emotional and historical logic behind Nguyen’s work and to explain why it resonates with many younger readers trying to make sense of anti-Asian hostility in America.
The following is my gentle reply to her. I thought my subscribers might find it interesting because she clearly represents a new generation of Asian Americans desperate to understand a political environment that reeks of intolerance and resurgent racial violence.
Dear (student’s name),
You wrote a thoughtful and carefully argued essay and earned an “A” grade. I especially appreciated the seriousness with which you engaged Viet Thanh Nguyen’s work and the broader questions of identity, memory, race, and belonging that he raises. Your essay showed genuine effort to understand why his arguments resonate with many Vietnamese Americans and Asian Americans, particularly those who have experienced prejudice or who feel that certain dimensions of Asian history and identity have been marginalized in American public life.
At the same time, if you ever revisit this topic, I would encourage you to consider another perspective as well — namely, whether Viet Thanh Nguyen, despite his considerable gifts as a novelist and stylist, is always the most reliable or balanced guide when he moves from literature into political and historical interpretation.
There is no question that the United States has a long and painful history of discrimination toward Asians, especially during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those injustices were real and deserve serious study. But Nguyen often frames American involvement in Asia primarily through the lens of colonialism, systemic racism, militarism, and exploitation, sometimes in ways that strike me as more ideological than historically grounded.
For example, in discussions of American soldiers and Vietnamese women during wartime, Nguyen suggests relationships were fundamentally shaped by fetishization, domination, or racialized contempt. Yet that interpretation leaves little room for the more complicated human reality that war zones often produce — fear, loneliness, intimacy, attachment, even genuine love across cultural boundaries. In every war, armies attract camp followers and informal economies. Vietnam was no exception. But it is difficult to reduce thousands of relationships and marriages to simple expressions of racial hatred or objectification.
In fact, one could argue that genuine affection, intimacy, and marriage across racial and cultural lines often represented the breakdown of prejudice rather than its reinforcement. The evacuation of tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees in 1975 — followed by the resettlement of well over a million Vietnamese in the United States — also reflected something more complicated than contempt or hatred. Whatever America’s flaws, those actions suggested obligation, attachment, compassion, and a willingness to absorb and protect former allies during a moment of catastrophe.
I would also encourage you to place Vietnam within the larger history of violence in Asia itself, instead of viewing Asian suffering primarily through the prism of Western or American oppression.
During World War II, millions of Asians suffered and died at the hands of Imperial Japan, itself an Asian power. Chinese civilians were massacred at Nanjing. Filipinos, Malaysians, Koreans, Vietnamese and others endured occupation, forced labor, starvation, and systematic brutality. American soldiers fought and died in enormous numbers to contain and ultimately defeat that aggression. After the war, the United States underwrote the reconstruction of Japan itself rather than attempting to destroy or permanently subjugate it.
None of this erases racism in American history. But it complicates the argument that American relations with Asians can be explained primarily through racial hatred or colonial contempt.
The same complication exists within Vietnamese history itself. Nguyen often focuses heavily on American wrongdoing while giving comparatively less attention to the enormous violence inflicted by Vietnamese communists upon fellow Vietnamese. The postwar reeducation camps, political executions, suppression of the press, destruction of libraries, and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese citizens were atrocities carried out by Asians against fellow Asians.
Long before the arrival of American combat forces, Vietnamese communists had already embraced a violent revolutionary doctrine (calling for “wars of liberation”) borrowed largely from Soviet and Chinese models. Immediately after defeating the French colonialists, these same ideologues wantonly slaughtered tens of thousands of their own fellow Asians in the north as part of a brutal “land reform program.” They also violated the Geneva Accords by keeping cadre in the south after promising to withdraw them. Then, year after year, they infiltrated Asian troops into a fellow Asian state to battle fellow Asians and their American allies. They did so in the belief that the population would rise up in support of communism. That uprising never materialized.
These realities are worth remembering because they complicate any interpretation that treats the Vietnam War primarily as a story of American racial oppression directed against Asians. Much of the bloodshed in Vietnam came from ideological and political struggles among Vietnamese themselves.
Another point worth considering is that Nguyen’s understanding of the war comes largely through culture, film, and inherited narrative rather than firsthand experience since he evacuated Vietnam with his parents while he was still very young. Much of the intellectual framework he employs emerged from Berkeley-era radical politics and from antiwar cultural criticism shaped by filmmakers and writers who themselves often had limited direct knowledge of Vietnam. That does not invalidate his work, but it does mean his perspective is not the only legitimate Vietnamese perspective — nor necessarily the most historically grounded one.
Ironically, in The Sympathizer, Nguyen also embraces a stereotype that circulated widely during the war: the idea that Vietnamese were fundamentally ambivalent, divided, or incapable of clear loyalties. In trying to critique American stereotyping, he reproduces another version of it himself.
There is another irony here that may interest you. If you check the postscript of The Sympathizer, you will discover that Nguyen acknowledges drawing on my own book, Decent Interval, as one of his sources. In conversations with me, he has indicated that some of his characterizations were influenced by real people I had known during the war, including Nguyen Van Tai, a deeply committed communist operative I once interrogated, and Pham Xuan An, the celebrated Vietnamese double agent who posed as a trusted colleague of American journalists while secretly working for Hanoi.
What struck me then — and still strikes me now — is that these men were not symbols of racial victimhood at the hands of Americans. They were highly disciplined revolutionaries who participated in a brutal struggle against fellow Vietnamese. Nguyen Van Tai, in particular, was no ambivalent figure wrestling poetically with divided loyalties. He was a hardened ideologue whose movement helped oversee violence and repression directed primarily at other Asians — fellow Vietnamese — in pursuit of political victory.
That history sits somewhat uneasily beside Nguyen’s tendency to frame suffering in Vietnam chiefly through the lens of American racial attitudes.
I should add that I regard Nguyen as an exceptionally talented novelist. His literary achievements are real, and his prose can be brilliant. My reservations concern less the quality of his fiction than the certainty and ideological rigidity that accompany his broader historical and political claims.
None of this is meant to dismiss your essay. On the contrary, your paper succeeded precisely because it engaged difficult questions seriously and sympathetically. I only wanted to suggest that there are other ways to interpret both Vietnamese history and the American-Asian experience, interpretations that may lead to a more complicated picture than the one Nguyen presents.
That tension itself may ultimately be one of the most useful things to explore in studying writers like Nguyen: not simply whether they are persuasive, but how their assumptions, experiences, and political frameworks shape the stories they choose to tell. FS
To avoid over-personalizing my note to the student, I left unmentioned one of the most prolific architects of Asian-on-Asian violence, whose depredations struck very close to home for me.
The Chinese members of my own extended family suffered terribly during the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, a stark example of state-sponsored Asian-on-Asian violence wholly divorced from any immediate American inspiration. In terms of sheer magnitude, Chairman Mao Zedong’s barbarous treatment of his own people for more than five decades stands in a blood-soaked class by itself and deserves to weigh heavily in any discussion of organized violence against a single racial, cultural, or political community.