Viet Thanh Nguyen (born 1971)

My daughter had read The Sympathizer and recommended it to me. I thoroughly enjoyed it and then wanted to see what else Viet Thanh Nguyen had written, which led me to Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. I have read a lot of books about Vietnam, but this book was packed with so many paradigm-shifting ideas that upon finishing it, I immediately started reading it again. After a year of other books, I am back to re-reading Nothing Ever Dies for the third time. This book gives so much to ponder and illuminates so much of my personal experience and the meaning of Other Streets.

"The war has burned itself into many of us, including myself, seared at too young of an age to know exactly where the scar is. Those born too young to remember with clarity, or to remember anything at all, may still see the war's afterimages lingering on their retinas, a result of what W.G. Sebald so memorably calls 'secondhand memory.'"...At times, these memories are intimate legacies bequeathed to us by families and friends who saw the war firsthand; other times, these memories are Hollywood fantasies, the archetype being Apocalypse Now..." (Chapter 4, page 103)

So for most Vietnamese-Americans too young to remember the war like Viet Thanh Nguyen or Ocean Vuong, they do have the memories "bequeathed" by family and friends. But as a Vietnamese adoptee who grew up without a Vietnamese family or community, I only received the Hollywood ones: The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and all the lesser movies that I eagerly consumed. As an American consumer, I identified with the complicated American protagonists, not the Vietnamese characters, who were almost always one-dimensional, non-speaking roles: villains and victims.