Book Discussion Group, Saturday, June 3, 2017, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Ban Me Thuot, Viet Nam (now spelled Buon Me Thuot). He came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family and was initially settled in Pennsylvania. In 1978, his parents moved to San Jose, California, and opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores in the city. He attended St. Patrick School and Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose. After high school, he briefly attended UC Riverside and UCLA before settling on UC Berkeley, where he graduated with degrees in English and ethnic studies. He stayed at Berkeley for a Ph.D. in English, moved to Los Angeles for a teaching position at the University of Southern California, and has been there ever since. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002) and the novel The Sympathizer, from Grove/Atlantic (2015).

Awards for The Sympathizer include:

• The 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
• The Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
• An Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America.
• The First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction.
• The Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association.
• A California Book Award.
• The Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association.

It was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. The novel made it to over thirty book-of-the-year lists, including The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com, Slate.com, and The Washington Post. The foreign rights have been sold to twenty-three countries.

I fully confess to having cut and pasted this, not my own writing. Full bio here.

In the following video, Viet Thanh Nguyen reads from The Sympathizer and answers questions about it. The video is almost an hour long. I would have embedded a shorter video, but all the ones I could find were in Vietnamese.



Long before "Vietnam" became shorthand for an American war of choice (a war the Vietnamese people call "the American War," it was the name of an ancient and interesting country. For background, follow the link for a compressed history of Vietnam.

The evacuation of Saigon

This is a picture of Nguyen Cao Key, one-time Prime Minister and then Vice President of South Vietnam at his liquor store in Westminster, California. Ky later enraged other Vietnamese exiles by returning to Vietnam and urging reconciliation and asking western businesses to do business with Vietnam.

The General?

The Sympathizer is so packed with complexity and different themes that I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about, but just in case we have trouble getting started, here's something that is reputed to loosen stubborn tongues. Maybe this will motivate you.