However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t think it is crucial to take a side. If we are not looking for reconciliation, then it is not important to think that both sides might have equally important perspectives. We have to be able to imagine this conflict from our enemies’ point of view if what we want to do is to get past war and move on toward reconciliation and peace. It’s not enough, when it comes to trying to remember the past, to say our side is right their side is wrong. It’s important to remember that the tragedy comes when there are two sides believing that they are right. That is certainly true in the case of the Vietnam War. I think that what I do in my work is to insist that, on any given conflict, different sides would have equally legitimate views of why they went to war, at least in most cases. Could you tell us why it’s important for you to stick to this ethics of remembering? In your books, you show a willingness of not taking sides regarding the interpretation of the Vietnamese conflict. Just like his homeland, the Captain is in conflict with his own allegiances between North and South Vietnam, communism and opposition to communism. The main character of The Sympathizer, an undercover communist spy sent in mission in the West only known as ‘The Captain’, embodies perfectly the clash of ideologies and narratives that tore apart Vietnam and its people. More than 43 years after its conclusion, the conflict in Vietnam tends to be more and more perceived as a war of many perspectives or, as described by General Cao Van Vien, as “a Rashomôn 1 of one hundred witnesses, one hundred truths”. In France, he received the “Prix du Meilleur Livre étranger” in 2017.
Viet Thanh Nguyen on Identity, War, and The Sympathizer’s sequelįor his startling and brilliant debut novel on the Vietnam War, The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016.
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