The event featured Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen discussing his book The Sympathizer and his experiences with Vietnamese refugees. As a refugee himself, this gave him a unique perspective when writing his book. He stressed that refugees are not the same as immigrants; refugees are the unwanted, and often the casualties of wars. In making a connection to the current refugee crisis, Nguyen believes Vietnamese Americans should support Syrian refugees because the Syrians are going through the same experiences as they once did. Vietnamese refugees are the lucky ones; many, like Nguyen, have been able to achieve success in their new home, but the shadow of the Vietnam War still haunts them. They try to deal with the war by burying the past, but this silence is damaging and …show more content…
When Nguyen was growing up he enjoyed American war movies produced by Hollywood. It was not until he saw the movie Apocalypse Now that he began to question Hollywood; seeing the American soldiers, who he was supposed to support, killing people who looked like him made him question his own identity as a Vietnamese American. Many Vietnamese were killed in their civil war, and now they were being symbolically killed again in movies. Nguyen considers Hollywood to be a part of the military industrial complex that drives the American desire to invade other countries. His main point was about getting people to listen to the Vietnamese people. Since people only think of the soldiers when they think of the Vietnam War, the civilians are its forgotten casualties. It is this lack of understanding of the Vietnamese that Nguyen wants to rectify. In his book, Nguyen portrayed the Vietnamese as both human and inhuman in order to make them seem like real people. This is in response to entities like Hollywood who portray them as nameless target practices for the American protagonists. The Vietnamese are not voiceless, but they can not be