TO SAVE AND TO DESTROY

A noted novelist and essayist writes of his life as an “other.”

In this contribution to the noted Harvard lecture series, Nguyen—best known for his novel The Sympathizer—writes of the contradictions that come with being an immigrant who has not just mastered the English language but also worked his way through the corpus of English literature and teaches it at a top-tier university. Some of these contradictions are subtle, some even humorous, as when he finds his books, in a Paris bookstore, shelved under “Anglo-Saxon Literature.” As an Asian American and, as Nguyen notes, often the only one in the room, he still finds himself pulling away from the label “minority”: “I am not a minority if I think of myself as being part of a world, a globe, where white people are the minority. I am also not a minority if, when I am writing, I write first of all to myself, ­because I contain multitudes.” So, too, do his lectures contain multitudinous voices, with quotations from writers who have stood in a critical relationship with the dominant society: Aimé Césaire, Alice Walker, Derek Walcott, Edward Said. As an other, Nguyen rejects being a standard-bearer for the “voiceless,” citing Arundhati Roy’s observation that the voiceless are really “only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” For all that, he declares, he stands among “the Vietnamese, the Asian, the minoritized, the racialized, the colonized, the hybrid, the hyphenated, the refugee, the displaced, the artist, the writer, the smart ass, the bastard, the sympathizer, and the committed—­all­ those out of step, out of tune, out of focus, even to themselves”—and who have in his stories an able interpreter.

A provocative exploration of the writer as storyteller, anthropologist, and knowing outsider.