years national book awards will be announced on november 16 in new york city. many of the authors have or will be appearing on book tv. you can watch watch them on our website, booktv.org. >> book tv on c-span's twos live coverage of the wisconsin book festival continues to. now we'll discuss the books "nothing ever dies" it is a finalist in this year's national book award in the sympathizer, which was awarded the pulitzer prize for fiction. this is live is live coverage on book tv. >> tonight's book festival i'm here as it's a tremendous up pleasure to introduce the next speaker, and to think you first of all the library foundation, humanities and all the other sponsors this is probably a good time to remind you to make sure yourself silent. everybody reaches for their side cell phone immediately. the book festival is asking people to talk about their experiences using the #, wi book festival. so # wi book fast, all one word. thus on the other side of this wall. we have a remarkable author with us. you get people who are accomplished as literary authors and people who are accomplishes nonfiction authors and he has actually pulled off major accomplishments in both realms of basically the last year with another book coming. by the next are the two books he will talk about tonight, "the sympathizer" and "nothing ever dies", and of course he is the chair of english and american studies and ethnicity at the university of southern california. he has not only won a pulitzer prize, but his books, you read the reviews and they are stunning on both of them. the new york times called "the sympathizer" a remarkable debut of novel and they talk about "nothing ever dies" as a powerful reflection as how we choose to remember and forget. in addition to buying his books i would urge you to read the blog that he and edits. >> so please welcome our author. [applause] thank you everybody. thank you for coming tonight, last year in madison in 2008 when i was here for the summer studying at the university instead in vietnamese. back then i was looking in an undergraduate apartment. it brings me back on a slightly different scale. when i see her 2008 what i was doing instead in vietnamese because i was working on these projects about vietnam. i was traveling to vietnam and doing fieldwork and i was writing short stories but i not yesterday writing the sympathizer so i thought i would start up reading one of the first paragraphs and "nothing ever dies" and it will give me a sense of who i am a what i'm doing. >> i was born in vietnam, but made in america. i, i, myself among those vietnamese made by these deeds attempt to buy these words. i, cells among those americans who often do not know what to make of vietnam and want to know what to make of it. americans as well as many people the world older mistake the world with honor dishonored the case may be. this confusion no doubt lead to some of my own uncertainty about what it means to be a man with two countries, as well as the inheritor of two revolutions. today, the vietnamese of american revolutions and effexor memories and understand the hardening of their arteries. for those of us who consider ourselves to be inheritors of one or both of these, we have to know how we make memories and how we forget them. so we can beat their hearts back to life. that is the project, or at least the hope of this book. so those words are actually pretty good description of what i have tried to do in the sympathizer as well. and "nothing ever dies" is really the sequel of bae-3. there's a lot of things that i cannot say "the sympathizer" because at the novel and you can't say and step out of character. but you'll find that in "the sympathizer" which is how we remember, how we remember, how we forget, why we go to war, the prince of recognizing our inhumanity as well as our humanity. and what are the possibilities of peace and reconciliation. in "the sympathizer" i address those in a more dramatic and fictional way. in "the sympathizer" i can get away with say a lot of things without having to engage in footnotes. same thing, their outrageous things and you just have to accept them. and that is part of the joy and the liberty of writing fiction. "the sympathizer" is a novel of a communist spy the south vietnamese army in april 1975. he is in saigon and it's about to fall or be liberated depending on your point of view. because he is a communist spy he does see both perspectives and he tells you from the first paragraph that is is one talent, the ability to see both sides. the remnants of that army and to spy on the efforts of taking the country back which really did happen and this time period, what happens when the vietnamese refugees get to the united states as they are put into refugee camps before they are dispersed and resettled. he ended up ended up in camp pendleton and south california and i ended up in fort indiantown. in pennsylvania. so this next part of the reading comes from the sympathizer when he is in that camp. he's writing a letter to his aunt and he's going to tell her what life is like for these new refugees in southern california. if allowed to stay together i told my aunt, we could have incorporated ourselves into a respectably size self-sufficient colony, a temple on temple on the buttocks of the american politics. i think that's pretty poignant. [laughter] sufficiently collective to elect our own representative to the congress and have a voice in our america. a a little saigon as delightful, delirious, and dysfunctional as the original. which was exactly what we were not allowed to stay together but instead dispersed by your craddick -- for example to places like madison wisconsin. they don't choose to come here, but they thought it would be nice to get people all over the country because they would be integrated. wherever we we found ourselves, we found each other. we did our best to contract the culinary staples of our culture. since we we are dependent on chinese markets we had an unacceptably chinese tinge. if you know anything about vietnamese people, they hate chinese people. so. so this is a serious problem. there is another blow that left us with a sweet and sour taste of unreliable memories. just craft enough to evoke the past, just just long enough to remind us that the past was forever gone. missing along with the proper variety, subtlety and complexity of our universal, solvent fish sauce. oh. fish sauce, how we missed it. how nothing tasted right without it. this pungent liquid condiment of the darkest cp hue was much downgraded by foreigners for a supposedly horrendous wreak. giving new meaning to the phrase, there's something fishy around here. for we were the fishy ones, we use fish sauce the way transylvania's were close of garlic to ward off vampires. so we establish a perimeter with those westerners who could never understand what was truly fishy was the nauseating stench of cheese. [laughter] i guess i should say cheese kurds. and a little digression i'm staying in a nice hotel, edgewater. and they're very kind, in some ways they delivered a plate of food to my door when i got there and of course there is cheese. if that was fermented fish compared to curdled milk. we kept our feelings to ourselves, sitting close to one another on sofas and scratchy carpets. our knees touching under crowded kitchen tables and chewing on trite squid. until her jaws ached, trading stories are heard second second and third hand about our scatter countrymen. this was the way we learned that the plan turned into slave labor by farmer in modesto. and the girl who flew to smoking to marry her g.i. sweetheart and was sold to a brothel. the wood aware with nine children who went out to a minnesota winter and lay down and the smell until he was buried in frozen. and the regretful refugees who petition to go back to vietnam, never to be heard from again. and the girls inheritor when disappeared in the baltimore streets. and his young son who was arrested for child abuse in houston, and the husband who slapped his wife and was jailed in raleigh and the men who escaped and left wives behind in the chaos. and the women who escape but left husbands behind and the children who escaped without parents and grandparents and the families missing one, two, three, or more children. sifting through the dirt we pan for gold. the baby adopted by millionaire, or the girl who elected president of her high school class in baton rouge. , or the movie star you love so much, dear aunt who circled the world from airport to airport, no country letting her and after the fall of saigon. none of her american movie star friends returning desperate phone call until, with her last time she snaked. who flew her to hollywood. so it was that we slipped ourselves in sadness and rinsed ourselves with hope. and for all that we believed, almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refuse to believe that our nation was dead. this story is true, the movie movie star was -- she is very famous of the enema and you may have seen her in the joy luck club. on a footnote to this to be hedren, puts on the people that she met that she thought i would be a good idea to take a personal manicures to the refugee camps and teach these women how to manicure so they would have the potential earning a living in this country. and we now on 51% of the nail salons in this country. on one hand that's a positive note on immigration on another hand that could and up on a trump campaign ad. i'm in madison right? [laughter] so you have to make a living, our narrator. one of the things that he does is he gets out of camp goes to los angeles and becomes the authenticity consultant on the making of a movie that is going to be an epic movie shot in the philippines. this is made up in my imagination. so he meets with the director of this film and it's given the director some notes as we call them in hollywood. the director director is only known as the older two or. while the your has gone on little while longer and that more subdued fashion and pointing out that the lack of speaking parts were be means people in a movie set in vietnam might be interpreted as cultural insensitivity. to not think it would be a little more realistic i said? a a little more authentic? so a movie set in a certain country for the people in that country to have something to say instead of letting your school play direct as it does now, cut to villagers speaking in their own language. do you think it might not be decent to let them actually say something instead of acknowledging there some kind of sound coming from their mouth's? could you have them speak a heavy accented english, you know what i mean. ching chong english, just to be sure that there speaking so that americans can understand. he grimaced. i said very interesting, good stuff, loved it without a question, what was it oh yes, how many movies have you made? none. zero. zilch. not a. nothing, and and however use it in your language. so thank you for telling me how to do my job now get the hell out of my house and get back when you have made an movie or two, maybe then i will listen to one or two of your cheap ideas. i confessed to be angry with him. but was i wrong and be an angry question this is the case we acknowledge he did not even know that it was something the french catch altar for the dozen of minorities. so the movie was called hamlet about green berets who are defending these -- from the vietcong who are known in the screen play as king kong because they are so bad. so what if i said to him, i wrote a screenplay about the american west and it's called all the latest indians. you would want to know whether the caliber was under the navajo, apache or or , likewise i would want to know, whether we speak of the group or the young, or the tape. let me tell you a secret he said, are you ready? here it is, no one gives a -- expletive. it was like without hair, how can i be so dense and deluded, i may believe with simultaneous pickpocket it. hollywood did not just make movie monsters, it was his own for movie monster smashing me under its foot. i failed, and he would make the hamlet as he intended with my countrymen serving nearly as raw material from epic about white men hitting good people from bad yellow people. i pitted the french from the naïveté of the country in order to exploit it. hollywood, it was much more efficient, in the countries that wanted to exploit. i was mad and by my helplessness. had arrogance sparked something new of the world for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors. courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created, with all due respect with global domination. hollywood high priest understood neatly the observation of satan that it was it better to rule and help in serving heaven. better to be billing, loser, or antihero then virtuous extra. so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage. it was forthcoming, all the vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the rules of the poor, the innocent, innocent, the evil, whether corrupt. our fate was not to be merely mute, we were to be struck down. i've had several meetings with hollywood people and i've asked them if they were offended by this characterization and it's a no. so if you know anything about vietnamese people and i will grossly stereotype them because i'm one of them. would you know that we love to sing, drink, and dance. so soon after arriving as poor refugees in southern california and getting out of the refugee camp one of the first things that my people did was open a nightclub, true story. that nightclub became the basis of paris by night witches a song and dance extravaganza which is in about 130 iterations and video dvds and shut locations like paris, las vegas, and so on. and it's a spectacular show in the 80s and 90s who's better than anything produced and to be struggle back into vietnam. on the gray market. so they go to the nightclub and encounters one woman he should not to fall in love with, the daughter of his boss, the general. known by one name, like john, paul, george, ringo, and mary, because i'm a screwed up catholic, wanda stepped on stage, black lace lace gloves and thigh-high leather boots. my hard would've paused at the boots, the heels or the flat smooth slice of her belly. linked between miniskirt and bustiers. but the combination of all three rest in my heart altogether and beat it with the vigor of a los angeles police squad. [laughter] they didn't laugh at that in los angeles, it was easily limping by her torch song. she turned on the heat with her first number, the unexpected i love you to want me. i think most people are thinking i want you to want me, it's not the case, it is i love you to want me. if you are in the 1970s or 80s you knew who the person was. i heard this before some only by men. i love you to want me was a theme song of the bachelors and unhappy elite married males of my generation. whether in english original or the french a vietnamese renditions. what it expressed was unrequited love. we men of the south love nothing more than unrequited love. cigarettes, coffee, and coconut. all i wanted to stipulate myself in an night with her to remember forever and ever. everyone in the room should my motion as we washer didn't know where this went the microphone. her voice enough to move the audience or rather, to still us. nobody talked, nobody stirred, except to resist cigarette or glass. in utter concentration not broken for next, slightly more upbeat number, bang bang, my baby shut me down. while this version of bang, bang, learned english was french and vietnamese. the last night at the french version echoed the vietnamese version, we will never forget, the tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable. masterfully weeding together with two lovers who regardless of having known each other since childhood or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. bang, bang, was the sound of the pistol firing into the heads. for we cannot forget love, we cannot forget were, we cannot forget lovers, we cannot forget lovers, we cannot forget enemies. we cannot forget home, and we cannot forget saigon. we cannot forget the caramel flavor of ice coffee with coarse sugar. the bowls of noodle soup even while -- on the sidewalk. the strumming of a guitar while we swing on hammocks under the coconut trees. the whisper of the do we lovers sing in the most seductive words in our language at night. the working man who slept in the streets, kept were only by the members of their families, the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city. the sweetness and firmness of the mango plucked from the tree. the girls refused to talk to us and only pined for more. the the men who died or disappeared, the streets are blown away from bonds bomb shells. the the secret grove that we spy and bathed and splashed with the innocence of the bird. the barking of a hungry dog and abandon village. the sight and sound of brookins hollowing by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers. the stickiness of one shirt by afternoon. the stickiness of one's lover by the end of lovemaking. the stickiness of her situation. and while the list could go on, on, on, and on, the point was simply this. the most important thing we can never forget was that we could never forget. i went with a couple of paragraphs at the very end of bae-2. it's a nonfiction, critical work but also narrative that a narrative that is about my life and my family remembering and forgetting intertwined together making us who we are. one, and another never without the other. remember, so much has been forgotten or silence. while personal memory is faulty. through my youth had a memory of soldiers fighting onto another boat as we floated on the south china sea, i was four. my brother, seven years older said the shooting never happen. as an adult, i remember my mother being hospitalized when i was a child. a few years ago i discovered a member had had written in college, i read in my own words that she was in the hospital at that time, not your. her illness, and that strange word with its patients had made me feel like i was a fighting child. that feeling is what i remember. as for my father, it's pointless to ask him about the past. his relationship with the pastors to muffle it. at least in my presence. i visited his homeland, i have never visited my own origin, the town where i was born because he has forbidden it. more than once he said you can never go back there. too many people will remember him and persecute me or so he believes. his father survived the holocaust, and he says, i had no clue as to how to find the places my father had been telling me he grew up in. and he wasn't much help except to tell us not to go at all. because they kill jews there. using the present tense, they kill jews there, don't go. he was afraid for us. everyone must believe in memories that do not die. there's not a nemesis that retain our final force. while i disobeyed my father many thanks, cannot in this one thing but the junction is too strong, the specter of the unknown past, what is it that he remembers of this place? what will he not tell me, what if he is right? this absence of the forbidding presence is the opposite of memory. perhaps some things will never be remembered, yet also never forgotten. perhaps some things will remain unspoken, yet always heard. perhaps i will only visit i was born after my father has passed on. then, it will be too late to see what it is that he remembers, with the memory at last expired. this is the paradox of the past, the trauma of loss, of war, where the unknown, no conversation except that which cannot be finished. >> . . . nod [inaudible] >> um, i think there's a distinction between forgetting and reconciliation. i think people in many -- in both countries have forgotten or tried to forget and that is problematic. you can try to forget. it's goal to come back at you, and likewise the history of war, too so we look back on our own civil war, that was over 150 years ago. i don't know if we have forgoning and the leg georgias of the war entrenched in our society, and 0 feelings and structures and systems. so when comes to the vietnam war the americans have not reconciled with the past. they tried to rewrite the past. gone from bag bad war to being a not so bad war. maybe a good war. eh. now the narrative, bipartisan narrative, democrats and republicans and president obama, too, this was failed war -- sorry, we lost but we tried our best with the best of intentions, noble exemptions, and we should remember our soldiers because they fought for freedom and for each other. that's literally what is president obama said. and this kind of narrative is being used, increasingly dominant in popular culture and politics and government, state department, it's really strong. i go to washington, dc and given talks there, and sat next to an american ambassador. the american policy people really do believe in northwestern exceptionalism. they do -- american exceptionalism, and they do. and the practical impact of that is that this means now instead of learning negative lessons from the vietnam war, 20 years ago, it was don't get involved in anymore foreign wars now the lesson the pentagon can't to track from vietnam is we can do this better. we can learn from our mistakes and do better. now we don't carpet bomb niche deep. drone strikes -- bomb anymore. we do drone strikes. in vietnam, a lot of american tourists and veterans go back and they're awestruck by the fact that vietnamese people welcome them with open ares, including veterans. went backive a gentleman of your age, not a veteran, favor. we did tour together. went to what they call martyr cemetery where the soldiers are buried he was taking pictures and a family was there celebrating debt -- death day. they have alcohol. and vietnamese people like to drink and they said, come and have a shot with us. let's make peace. they ignored me. and that tells you something so americans, welcome back because the vietnamese people, generally, and the state have reconciled with americans. they want your money, okay? don't be naive. but also genuine friendship. but if you're a vietnamese american overseas who fled the country and come back, it's much more problematic. it's like the civil war. war between brothers and sisters. we have not forgotten that. and that's what it is like there as well. >> in the back? >> there's a mic. you're supposed to go up there. >> so that mean if you have a question, try to line up. >> you teach writing. >> i don't teach writing. >> you don't. >> no. >> question is, what do you do? an individual relationship with every student 0 universal lessons you preach? >> the thing is that writing -- talking about fiction writing or nonfiction writing in the country is taught through the wright walk shawn mod which is a professor and writing students and you read their work and the writing students criticize that piece of work. i think this is a model of the blind leading the blind. and in the end of the sympathizer i have a little joke in there where one thing that happens in reeducation camps, chinese or vietnamese, if you're a prisoner you're forced to constantly write your confession. and then you have to self-criticize. and everyone listens to your confession and criticize is you. thought this is similar to a writerring walk shawn. --shop. and the i'm not making this up. there's a book out there called "work sho of emother fire" which argues that perhaps the cia had a hand in the development of the writing walkshop. serious. the cia had a hand in promoting modernist art in europe because it exemplifies the possibilities of freedom and democracy. in other words, you should be paranoid. so, if i were to teach -- i don't like writing workshops. i -- if i were to teach writing it would be in the context of a larger goal itch don't like the writing model in the u.s. writing workshop. i think it's an apolitical form of politicizing distribution. in the writing workshop you're taught technique like character, narration, time, setting. for me, i was interested in history and politics. no one taught me how to write about history and politics. took me 20 years to right "the sympathizer" because there's no streaks how to deal with these things. so in other words, that's why i think it's an apolitical form of instruction that believes you can separate technique from the history in which technique is developed. some when teach writing i teach in the context of theory and criticism. students can write and we read criticism and theory, and i argue that you really need to think of yourself not simply as one who will tell a story but someone who has a point that they want to make, give you're not that kind of a writer i'm not that interested because i find a lot of professors teach those kind of write whore only want to tell stories. so hopefully that answers your question. >> there is a book you recommend? on writing? >> stephen king is pretty good. seriously. >> with a couple of the books i've read about vietnam and the war there some of the people, one of them he channeled both his father who fought with the south, the south army, and channeled his own personal experience. is there any person or any individual with which you drew inspiration for your characters in "sympathizer." >> you're talking about andrew's book. the -- >> um, the one where the ashes are. >> that's -- i'm friends with him, too. great book. great books. >> i thought it was -- >> when i was writing this book i had a short list of novels that were important to me. the most important one actually was -- a novel and an author that whenever i talk about him no one has heard of this man except for a polish journalist who came to interview me. antonio -- and the portuguese think he should have won the noble nobel prize and the book is called "the land at the end of the world." he was a medic who fought in the portuguese war in angola. their vietnam war. and i was deeply influenced by the tone. a novel about being soaked in melancholy and sorrow and i was influenced by the style. it's a short novel but i can only read two or three pages at a time because it's so dense, like poetry. and i wanted to to proximate mate nat my own writing so i would read two of three pages of newscast it started writing. when i started to feel really excited could i sit down and right. so i was channeling him but i'm not as good. this is one reason why the prose in the book -- it's dense. it's dense with images, very attentive to language and word play, and that was one of the reasons why that particular book. >> thank you. >> thanks. >> what a privilege to hear you read and speak. so my question is really about wanting to hear more about your views on how traumatic events in history should be commemorated or not, and this comes from, as you know, the discussion on a lot of campuses, including mine, where there's a discussion on who should be recognized and what lens we should use, the lens of today, the lobes of then to figure out what should be remembered and what should be forgotten. so i'm just curious to hear, given that you thought so much about this, what your views are. >> thank you. i'll give you a good example and a bad example. the good example, one of the very rarest of memorials is the okinawaian peace memorial. basically in okinawa there was a huge battle fought during worm war 2 some something like 200,000 people died, japanese and american soldiers and civilians living on the island and it's a beautiful memorial and it commemorates every single person. you very rarely encounter memorials are monuments to war that remember more than one side, and the reason is obvious women want tomorrow our on side and what happened to us and screw the other guy. these are our enemies. we don't need to remember them. so memorials and monuments always, always, always, help to us remember and forget at the same time. remember our humanity and forth that be humanity of the other side. a negative example. so, bob kerry, former senator bob kerry, presidential candidate bob kerry, was forced to confess in the early '90s because he was navy seal in the vietnam war. he was forced to confess bus "the new york times" was going to report on thissents dent and he owned up to it that he led other team into a village in south vroom and the killed 20 unarmed women and children and old people. this really happened. not a matter of dispute. and recently the harvard university wants to start up the first private american university in vietnam called fulbright university in vietnam, and bob kerry was the person they selected to be the head of the board of trustees. and the way it was pitched was that this is a gesture of reconciliation. look at this poor guy, he suffered, yes, he might have been responsible for this, but wouldn't it by great if he came came back and was the head hoff she is jess cure of peace and reconciliation in terms of a university. and deep live divide the vietnamese people. some people said, yes, that is reconciliation, some people said, no, that's not reconciliation. read an op-ed in "the new york times" and said if this happened this is would actual reb come sillation. first he should to the village and apologize to survivors. give these people scholarships to the university. it's important have bob kerr glass chairman of the board of trustees for your university you want to reconcile with the past and what he did but a monument on the university to the people who died. never will happen. so five recommendations altogether, never heard back. and nothing ever died. i argue basically that it's universal that we want to remember our own humanity and forget the humanity of others and if we're good liberal wisdom want too remember our humanity the humanity of others. for h the most difficult thing to do and thing that could actually move us towards peace and reconciliation is to remember our humanity, and our inhumanity. this is what makes us human beings. we like to think, war is savage, war brutal, but why do we keep on fighting wars over and over? we say war is hell but every generation we fight wars or multiple times in one generation, is the case now, and he reason why is because we don't believe we can be inhuman. so, for example, drone strikes. from the american perspective this ahumane operation. who would disagree with getting a drone like we didn't carpet bomb you, right? you should appreciate that. but in the perspective of getting hilt bay drone strike, no, no, no. right now we're doing drone strikes in seven different countries and this is not a state of war for us, if one put a drone strike on the u.s. territory that would be immediately a state of war. this kind of thinking that is propagated by thinking here tsunami their inhuman. very difficult to think of ourselves as human and inhuman at the time if we could do that and acknowledge it's not simply other people that do terrible things but our side does, too, our family members, too, our country has done this and not just america. all country us. vietnam. vietnam can't acknowledge this either. >> so, i have -- i'm reading it and what i noticed at first is really funny. i kind of like -- it's like a thriller at as well, especially the early chapters. can you comment on that? it's a little unique. >> yeah. well, i wanted to write a serious novel, but serious novels are boring. i'm a professor of english. i read boring books for a living. and i acknowledge that a lot of things we call serious literature can be boring. i also am a fan of ona, genre literature. i'm a believer in that we have a genre that doesn't call itself a john a which is literary fiction if if you reed enough literary fiction you realize it's a genre, it's really boring. but if you read explicitly described genre fiction like deckty novels, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, romance novels, you rafaelize that the best of these books are better than the average of literary fiction and they're very entertaining if don't read these books anymore because if i did i'd literally be up all night reading them. it's like candy. have too stop myself from reading these books and genre fiction in this country on the average is actually mere political than literary fiction. i think that's because there's no -- again, i go back to the idea that the writing work shop propagates a certain set aside literary fiction. it removes politics. and in scientific i just read 20 years later, red mars, by kim stanley robin sign, about the colonization of mars. a full-blown political manifesto about what it would mean to rebuild human civilization on another planet and hugh it is -- we'll fuck that up anyway. it's a really interesting book. and it's much better than most of literary books i've rather. so i wanted to write a book that is serious and also entertaining. so other writers use the supply onremarks like john he krar and joseph conrad and that's what wanted to fight into. that was very explicit. i knew it would be a spy novel. i didn't know it would be funny. i've read joseph her, catch-22, loved it. never saw are thought it could be funnity. read the journey into the night which major influence on me, and i created a character and inhabiting his voice and the narrative or the novel is an alcoholic, a womanizer, he is half vietnamese and half french and everyone calls him a bastards and he is -- torn up and very smart but he is too smart for his own good. the wheel combination means that he actually turned out to be pretty funny. and that is the reason why is because there's a lot of things that are funny in our world. we just learned not to laugh at them. because we've grown up and become adults, normalized to he hypocrisies and absurdsities of our council culture, and he is half drunk and bitter and cynical and full of himself, and is able to see these hypocrisies and absurdities and to call them out. and hopefully that's funny. >> i feel like i raved this book and actually learned a lot about the vietnam war, which i didn't learn in school. i was wondering if there was a message or idea that you had for the younger generation that might be reading this book. >> you're making me feel old. i don't like piety. who cares that i think passing on to the younger generation. there are different things. part of it i've already said. refuse to believe the absurdities and the hypocrisy. when you hear presidents speak. even itch you like them, you to the their full of -- whatever caw cows produce here. be cynical and artistic -- sarcastic. i'm a figure of authority and i say to younger j. racing, don't believe it because authority invests in itself and the novel debunks that authority. i believe c-span wants you to do that. yeah. i'm sorry. you're on tv. and i have said four-letter words. don't know what's going to happen to that. >> you made comments about trump earlier and you're active on twitter. i'd like to hear more commentary if you're willing to how maybe some of the threads in your book are political or what you think about contemporary politics. >> wow. i blogged nor "new york times" for the presidential debates, all three of them, and it hurt. it really hurt. the first -- i swear to god the first sometimes i was serious, and had to take notes. but the third debate i had my bottle of scotch by my elbow and it helped. basically my thinking is that obviously i don't like trump. obviously i think he's very bad. for our society. but he does articulate and represent something like 40 to 45% of the american population. which goes to show that we have a lot of work to do. and i think it's important to have these dialogues and conversations and important to respect people and listen to what they say. believe in all that. then also important to struggle and make change because if we listen to people from 150 years ago we would still have slavery if we kept having conversations all the time. so we all have to make a decision. yes, bipartisanship, yes, get along with our fellow citizens, but we also have to work for change. my greatest fear is that now the contrast is so bad that people will simply accept hillary clinton. i hope she wins. i really do hope she wins, but i'm of the political -- i'm on the political spectrum that thinks that hillary clinton, like president obama before her, will probably be very good for civil rights, human rights, domestic rights, social equality and so on, but her economic policies may not do that much to redress the deep-seated grievances that have angered supporters of trump and a good portion of the democratic part and almost certain she'll continue the same kinds of foreign policy that means we're con directing drone strikes in other countries and that's something we -- the domestic political scene in this country really helps americans forget, is that america is a global power and what it does has global ramifications and america -- the united states of america acts in its own self-interest when its comes to what is happening overseas. and we're -- and the ending of the novel is about complicity. and we're all complicit and that's actually how wars propagate. the citizenry goes along with the leadership. >> so, it's been a couple of minutes since you said what i wanted to respond to. i'll paraphrase. you said that maybe you're a little ambiguous about imparting your wisdom to the younger generation. but i can't help but believe that possibly some of your drive to write these stories has to do with the stories you were told about your history and i think that sometimes as the older generation, we don't necessarily tell the stories of our family's history as much as maybe i was told from my parents' generation and i'm wondering whether or not you felt a responsibility to somehow pass along the information that you were told about your history. >> i know that's absolutely right. think that growing up in the united states in -- with my own family who are refugees and feeding the refugee community in san jose i was deeply aware they had a lot of stories. a lot of pain. and they had lost a lot. and i was also aware that american society as a whole did not know these stories and did not care to know these stories. and so when americans speak of the vietnam war, they are really speaking of america's vietnam war. they really -- americans on the whole are. the the tick with -- empathetic with americans and that's why americans will remember that 58,000 american soldiers died in the vietnam war and have no idea that 3 million people vietnamese people died and have no idea that the war was fought in laos and cambodia and three million more miami died in those countries. so i felt it was important for know become a scholar and a writer who could tell these kind of stories in fiction and nonfiction because so much more needed to be said, and even after the sympathizer came out people would say to me, we had these neighbors and we had no idea that some of these things had happened to them. so even 40 years later this work still needs to be done. and its connects to a larger sense i have about what writing can do. i never would have become a writer simply to be a writer for writing's sake. became a writer and scholar because i believe justice and i believe that story-telling and talking about stories as a scholar and critic can be acts of justice because one way we commit injustice anywhere, this country elsewhere, is by erasing people from stories and by using stores to shape a very self-serving narrative about our country and our culture, whatever that happens to be. so then it becomes an act of justice to tell different kinds of stories and that's why i hope i can do. >> i think i want to challenge something you said or disagree with it. i was a high school english teach ever for a 30 years, and i taught -- wanted my students to be skeptical. i taught a unit, i used to cull literature war, and then that included a lot of stories about vietnam and other periods of war. good sin from a strange mountain, by butler. those types of stories. and so i wanted my students to be skeptical but you said cynical, too, and i have to disagree with you on that because i didn't want misstudents to be cynical because i thought that was a dead end. it's oning there to be skeptical and move on or look for the truth or to look to change things, but cynicism was a dead end because it's too easy. so you -- i'll give you a chance to respond to that. >> i respect high school english teachers. maybe you can e-mail me -- >> i'm retired now. >> -- on my grammar. what did you say? they periodically e-mail me and chastise me for my mistakes in grammar. these are very long e-mails. >> i did notice that in your book. >> not all english teachers. you're right i. think you're right itch think a dose of cynicism is healthy because a dose of corruption exists in our society, and you need the cynicism to recognize the corruption, and that it's not simply so-called third-world countries that are corrupt, we're corrupt, too, except our corruption works in a particular fashion so it's acceptable. you buy your golf club membership so you can pal up to the senator and get your deal, whatever. but you're right. think you need to be able to hold two ideas in your mind at the same time, and you need to be able to recognize corruption and injustice and be cynical and enraged about it and periodically given to despair. that's human. and you need to have a sense of justice and hope and a sense of the long view. and in my response, i was tilting too far towards one side and not the other. so thank you, sir. >> we agree, then. it's a great book. >> we're done, right? thank you so much. [applause] >> thank you to all of you for coming tonight. we'll be back in half an hour with allen martin and at has obscura. the books are for sale. thank you so much. [inaudible conversations] >> you have been listening to author see it thanh nguyen hitches nonfiction is a finalist for a the national book award. booktv will be covering the ceremony in november and it will air at 11:00 p.m. eastern time on november 19th. now in 30 minutes well bring you the final author event of the day. ella morton talking about heir book "atlas obscure a" but let's go back over to the author signing area and watch very it thanh nguyen sign books and then we want to show you another interview from the university of wisconsin. [inaudible conversations] >> her first book? wow. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> like a politician, kissing babies. >> i know. one two, three. >> thank you so much. >> glad to be in northern california. >> take care. see you. >> hi. >> thank you so much. >> tough for coming. >> for all you've done here. >> my pleasure. >> may i jump back there as well. >> sure. >> take a picture. have to be a -- giving you the last line of the novel. >> thank you.

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