Fresh Air - 'The Sympathizer' Author Viet Thanh Nguyen

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer has been adapted into a series on HBO/MAX. It's set in Vietnam during the last days of the war, and in LA, just after. The narrator becomes a consultant to a Hollywood film about the war. The novel is written from a Vietnamese perspective. "It's my revenge on Francis Ford Coppola, my revenge on Hollywood, to try to get Americans to understand that Vietnam is a country and not a war," he told Terry Gross in 2016. Nguyen's family fled their village in South Vietnam in 1975, when it was taken over by the North. Also, David Bianculli reviews Let It Be, the Beatles film restored and rereleased after being shelved for more than 50 years.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. Incouley. I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. I was cursed to see every issue from both sides. A sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. I was cursed to see every issue from both sides.

The Sympathizer, a new series on HBO and Max, is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. His book is set during and just after the war in Vietnam. It's told in the form of a forced confession, written by a spy who worked for the North Vietnamese, going undercover as an aide to a South Vietnamese general and his staff. It appears that part of his crime is sympathizing with the suffering on both sides. That sympathy is, in part, a function of his own divided self.

The character's mother grew up in the north of Vietnam. His father was a French colonialist in Vietnam. Let's hear a clip from the series. The narrator, the sympathizer of the title, has fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon and arrived in the United States. This is his second time in the country after attending college in the States ten years earlier. He's visiting his old campus and is interviewed by a student journalist who asks him if, during the war, he appreciated the support of student anti-war activists. Not so much. We were all marching. You know, we were on your side. Really? And which side was that? Uh, the side of the Vietnamese people.

Oh. Which people? The people in the north or the people in the south? Well, all of them, I guess. Guess we all look the same after all, right? I mean, I could be Viet Cong, for all you know. Undercover. How would you know? I'm not, of course. I love America.

Viet Thanh Nguyen tells part of his own story in an essay at the back of his book. His parents grew up in the north of Vietnam. When the country was divided in the mid-1950s, with the north under communist control, his parents fled to the south. When the south fell to the north in 1975, the family fled to America. Viet was four years old. He is now a professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Terry Gross spoke to Viet Thanh Nguyen in 2016. Viet Thanh Nguyen, welcome to Fresh Air. Why did you want to write this novel from the point of view of a spy?

Well, when my agent told me I should write a novel, the first thing that came to me was a spy novel, and partly it was because it's a genre that I really enjoy, and I wanted to write a novel that was actually entertaining, that people would actually want to read, because I knew that I would also be dealing with a lot of very serious political and literary matters. And then the other inspiration for that was that there really were spies in South Vietnam that rose to the very highest ranks of the South Vietnamese bureaucracy and military.

And there was a very famous spy named Phạm Xuân Anh who was so important that during his time as a mole, he was promoted to a major general by the North Vietnamese. And he was friends with people like David Halberstam and all the important American journalists. And they had no idea that he was a communist spy who had studied in the United States. So all these factors were in my mind. The war in Vietnam was central to your whole family's story. Your parents are from the north of Vietnam and fled to the south in the mid 50s when the country was divided. They were teenagers then. Why did they choose to leave North Vietnam and flee to the South in the mid-50s when the country was divided. They were teenagers then. Why did they choose to leave North Vietnam and flee to the South? Well, they were part of a great migration of about 800,000 North Vietnamese Catholics who had been persuaded by their parish priests that the communists were going to massacre them or

at the very least persecute them. And that idea had been promulgated by the CIA, by Colonel Edward Lansdale, who became famous for helping the Philippines suppress a communist insurgency in the 1950s. And then he brought his talents to South Vietnam and he became the inspiration. So it was rumored for Alden Pyle and Graham Green's The Quiet American. So that was the history behind why my parents had decided to flee. And they came from a region in North Vietnam that was famous for producing hardcore revolutionaries like Ho Chi Minh, who was born 30 minutes from their home village. And it was a region famous for producing hardcore Catholics. And so my parents were among the hardcore Catholics.

Did your parents were teenagers when they left North Vietnam for the South? Did their families come with them? Well, my mother's family did go. So all my aunts on that side of the family and my grandparents on that side of the family went. My father's parents and his siblings decided to stay in North Vietnam. And the human consequences of this were that my parents left in 1954 to go south. My parents would not return to a unified Vietnam until the early 1990s, which meant my father didn't see his own relatives for 40 years. My mom, because her family came to the south and then, you know, she left in 1975 when Saigon fell,

she wouldn't see her siblings again for 20 years. So in 1975 when Saigon fell and your parents' town had already been taken over by the North Vietnamese, your family fled. So it was you, your parents, and your brother? Yeah. I mean, the story was that in March 1975, my father had gone to Saigon on business. And my mother was at home in with myself, my brother, and my adopted sister, who was the oldest sibling. So March 1975, the Communist Army invades, seizes the town, cuts off all communication. My mother can't communicate with my father. So she takes her

life, our lives into her hands and decides to flee the town on foot with my brother, who is 10 years old and myself, who was four, and leaves behind my adopted sister, who was about 16, to take care of the family property because she believed, and reasonably so, that we would be back because this is the way the war had happened for the last 10 or 15 years. You know, seesaw battles, and people would leave, and they'd get to go back. Well, of course, we never got to go back. And my mom walked downhill to Nha Trang, that port town of about 150 miles south, and the best I can say about that is that at least it was all downhill, and that I don't remember any of it, even though my brother does, and says it was horrible,

and the historical accounts that I've read indicate that it was chaos, and death, and lots of it, even though my brother does and says it was horrible. And the historical accounts that I've read indicate that it was chaos and death and lots of civilians and Southern Vietnamese soldiers dead along the way. We caught a boat from Nha Trang to Saigon, met up with my father, fortunately enough, and then a month later, the communists came and took Saigon. And according to my brother, you know, we tried various ways to get out of the city, went to the airport, couldn't get out. Finally, we made it onto, we found a barge, but we got separated. So again, my father was somewhere else. My mother was with us. And without knowing where my father was, my mother decided to get on that boat.

And then later we discovered my father had gotten on that boat too. So my parents have always been risk-takers, and for us, most of the time it's worked out. Most people form their earliest memories at around, I think, the age of four, three or four, so your earliest memories have to do with the war and with trying to escape and with being separated from your father. How do you think that affected your view of the world? Or you're just like your basic identity?

Well, I have vague images of pre-April 1975 Saigon, which are not reliable. You know, for example, I thought I remembered that when we were on that boat leaving Saigon that sailors were shooting at smaller fishing boats that were trying to come up to us. And my brother said, no, that never happened. But then I read somewhere else that it did happen. But my most reliable memory really begins after we had come to the United States. And all Vietnamese refugees, in order to come to the United States, were settled in these refugee camps. And ours was Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. And in order to leave one of these camps, you had to have sponsors take you. No sponsor would take my family of four. So my brother went to one family, my parents went to one family, and at four years old,

I was sent to live with a white family. And that's when my memory begins of being separated from my parents. And even though that was only for a few months, it was really traumatic for me. And it's taken me a long time to understand how deeply traumatic that was, that that experience remains an invisible brand stamped between my shoulder blades. And in many ways, I've spent a lifetime trying to make sense of what that trauma has meant to me. Did the family you were staying with take good care of you? I think I stayed with two families, if I remember right. I think the first family was in a mobile home. They were young. They had no idea what to do with me. And now being the father of a

three-year-old, I can just imagine what kind of a terror I was at four years old, separated from my parents in a strange household. So then I was sent to another family with children, and they did take very good care of me. I remember them, you know, with fondness, but also remember that, you know, they tried to make me comfortable. And one of the ways that they did that was to give me a pair of chopsticks, and they all had chopsticks. And they said, show us how to use chopsticks. I had four years old, I had no idea how to use chopsticks. And I felt very badly about that. And, and that was, I think, my first initiation into the sense of being culturally and racially different than other Americans. What happened to your 16-year-old adopted sister who was left behind?

Well, you know, she had to take care of the house, take care of the family business. And when the communists were already there, I mean, basically what they did was they seized the property, kicked her out. And then she was forced to join a volunteer youth brigade. They were called volunteers. Obviously, they weren't. And sent to, you know, rebuild the country. So eventually she came back from that. She found a husband, got married, had kids.

When I went back to Vietnam in 2004 for the second time, I finally was able to meet her. And she'd been a presence in my life because I remember, you know, we had a photograph of her when she was probably 16, black and white photograph, and she was beautiful. And when I was growing up, I was always haunted by that face, her face, and thinking, why is she there and not here? I have no memory of her, but her memory obviously persists in the family. And that sense of loss and of haunting had always stayed with me. And I also knew that she had been one of the people that my parents had been sending money to for decades to help keep her alive. And my own family, my parents are very, very strict, very hardworking, very upright. And then I went to Vietnam and I met her and she was beautiful and she was wearing fashionable clothes and she had makeup on and her hair was well done and she laughed and smiled a lot. And I was really happy to find someone in my family who knew how to have fun.

That's funny, actually, that the sister who gets left behind at the end of the war, you know, facing who knows what kind of doom. She's the one who knows out of a good time. Yeah, well, I think that's one of the reasons why my parents think she's adopted and my brother and I are not, because my brother and I are not good at having fun. So after, what, about three years or so, your family moved from Pennsylvania to San Diego. So there was a significant population of Vietnamese people who were in California. And they migrated to different cities. And what happened was through their personal connections, they started to send the signal out that California was a good place to live. The weather was nice. The economy was good.

There were excellent welfare benefits. And Vietnamese people who had been scattered all over the country by deliberate government policy in order to encourage assimilation, many of them heard that message and came to California and to other places like it, such as Texas. And that's how we ended up. But that was one of the reasons why we ended up in San Jose. The personal connection was that when we fled Ban Mituot, the person that we had fled with was a very good friend of my mother's, a single woman who was an excellent businesswoman. She made it to San Jose. She opened possibly the first Vietnamese

grocery store there. And she told my mom, you know, that they definitely needed to come to San Jose to just have a better economic opportunity. And that's why we went. And we went there, we worked for this family friend in her grocery store. And within a few months or maybe a year, my parents opened their own Vietnamese grocery store not far away. What are some of the things your parents sold in the Vietnamese grocery that you couldn't get in a supermarket? Well, rice. I remember that my dad had built these racks and racks that were just stocked full of rice up into the rafters. And I remember going there after school and hiding up in these rafters amid these sacks of rice

and all kinds of, you know, Vietnamese fruits and things like fish sauce, nuc mam, which is the lifeblood of Vietnamese cuisine. And there was always a certain kind of odor in the Vietnamese grocery store that I came to recognize, which was the scent of rice and fruit and spices that you could not find anywhere else. A certain kind of mustiness, which I assume might have been alien to Americans, but to Vietnamese people was the smell of comfort. Your family fled South Vietnam to avoid the violence or persecution, but you're right, the violence they sought to escape caught up with them because after they opened up their Vietnamese grocery store,

they were shot one Christmas Eve during a holdup of their store. What happened? I don't know. I was very young when that happened, and I was probably less than 10 years old because I remember it was Christmas Eve. I was watching Scooby-Doo Christmas. My brother got a phone call, said to me, hey, mom and dad have been shot.

And I had no reaction. I just wanted to watch my cartoon. It's not as if I didn't care. I just didn't know what to do with that incident. And then I remember my brother yelling at me because I didn't react. And it was really difficult, you know, to try to understand what was happening to my parents and to my brother and myself there, that there was violence. It was partly violent because my parents were shopkeepers, and this is what happens to immigrant shopkeepers.

They get robbed, they get beaten, they get shot all the time. But it was also the fact that I think a lot of Vietnamese refugees to the United States brought violence with them. There was a lot of domestic violence, a lot of domestic abuse. People were traumatized. They were hurt. They were scared. And the men faced downward mobility and alienation. And, of course, they took it out on their families, their wives and their children.

And these children, a lot of them joined gangs. I was in a so-called gang when I was in the second grade. I mean, it wasn't a real gang, but I got to this public high school. There were Vietnamese kids there and immediately we split up into gangs to fight each other. younger Vietnamese American boys who formed real gangs with guns and terrorized the Vietnamese community with this new phenomenon called home invasions. And they did this because they knew that these families kept money and gold at home and that these people were vulnerable. And my parents always told me, watch out for Vietnamese people. Do not let them into the house because they may rob us. And ironically, what happened was that one day someone knocked on our door when I was 16, and he was not Vietnamese, he was a white guy. And because he was a white guy, one of my parents, I think it was my father, let him in. And that man had a gun. And that man pointed that gun in all of our faces. And it was only because my mother ran out into the street screaming that our lives were saved. Wow. It seems just so tragic that you have this community of Vietnamese people who have so much in common. They fled the country for the same reason. They're living together in a community to, in part, to avoid the kind of hostility they may face in the larger American culture.

And then they hurt each other. Well, it was a revolutionary war. It was a civil war, depending on how you look at it. And what that means is that Vietnamese people were already hurting each other in Vietnam. They had a long tradition of doing that, even before the French came. It's a hierarchical feudal society. The Vietnamese were already exploiting each other, and then that was exacerbated by colonialism and American occupation or intervention, however you want to describe it. And so it was ironic and not ironic that when they came to the United States, they would do

the exact same thing to each other. Because in Vietnam, during the war years, in order to survive in Vietnam, you had to exploit each other. It was a country that was corrupted by American aid, and people brought those habits of corruption and brutal competition with them to the U.S., and they also brought the memories of Vietnamese people brutality towards each other in the very same community, as you said, that was created in order to protect each other. But that is one of the basic facts of ethnic communities in the United States. They gather together for comfort. But these people who know each other and love each other so well also know where the weak spots are. So I want to get back to your parents being shot when you were 10. So you were watching Scooby-Doo Christmas and you kind of initially paid no attention to it. You just wanted to watch your cartoon and you don't know the circumstances of

the shooting. I understand you were 10 then, but many years have elapsed since then. You've never asked your parents to tell you what happened? Yeah. I've asked my parents certain kinds of questions that I thought were the important ones, you know, about their life in general. And then there's certain things that I have, I don't know if I've passed over them deliberately or not. I just, why reopen old wounds? I think that that's been my parents' attitude towards many issues. And I think back to this one particular incident, I'm like, they shot. And they weren't shot badly. I mean, they were released from the hospital the next day. But do I really want to go there? Do I really want to talk about this incident? I mean, it's for me to know something, but it's for them to maybe safeguard and protect.

What I do know, in general, is that their life as shopkeepers was intensely difficult. They literally worked seven days a week every day of the year, except Christmas, New Year's, and Easter, and they literally worked 12 to 14-hour days. They would work at the store, and then they would come back. They would cook dinner or barely cook dinner. Dinner was a really horrible experience. And then I would help them do the checks and tabulate the accounts.

And by the time I was 10 or 11, I was helping to do the accounting. And it was a hard life. And I sympathize with this idea that maybe we shouldn't ask our parents to have to relive the difficult things that they've survived. Were you afraid in the store after that? I hated that store. You know, I am thankful to my parents that they were not the kind of, I mean, they made me do certain kinds of things, like do the accounting and all of that, but they rarely actually made me go physically to the store to help them do that kind of work,

and I didn't like being there. And I think they didn't make me do these kinds of things because they wanted me to study. They sacrificed their lives in order for my brother and I to always have food, to always have clothing, and to always have an education, and to have religion. Those were their priorities. But they didn't want us to become shopkeepers and to do their kind of work. So fortunately, we were protected from that.

Viet Thanh Nguyen speaking to Terry Gross in 2016. After a break, we'll continue their conversation, and I'll review the new restoration of the Beatles' 1970 movie Let It Be, now streaming on Disney+. This is Fresh Air. Do you remember when you started realizing that there was an enormous conflict in the United States about the war in Vietnam and that the war had really divided

America? Well, I knew that we were different as Vietnamese people really early. And, you know, soon after I came, we came to San Jose, California, my parents had opened this grocery store. And I walked on that street, and I saw a sign in the window that said, another American business driven out by Vietnamese people. So that was my first sense that somehow we had arrived in a place that looked at us as different. And then not long after that, the VCR arrived on the scene. And I was about 10 years old.

We got a VCR. And one of the first movies that I remember watching was Apocalypse Now. I was probably about 10. And I think that was the first indication also that I had that there was something called this war and that this is how Americans saw this war as one that had divided them. And that was my first glimmering that there was something like a civil war happening in the American soul and that we as Vietnamese people were caught up in that. Because I watched that movie as a good American boy who had already seen some American war movies, John Wayne and World

War II, and I was cheering for the American soldiers until the moment in Apocalypse Now where they started killing Vietnamese people. And that was an impossible moment for me because I didn't know who I was supposed to identify with, the Americans who were doing the killing, or the Vietnamese who were dying, and not being able to speak. And that moment has never left me as the symbolic moment of my understanding that this was our place in an American war, that the Vietnam War was an American war from the American perspective, and that eventually I would have to do something about that. Well, you kind of work that out a little bit in your new novel,

because the main character, the spy, after the fall of Saigon, when he comes to the U.S., he ends up being an advisor on a film called The Hamlet that's very much modeled on Apocalypse Now. It's like your fictional version of Apocalypse Now. And in the acknowledgments for your book, you mentioned a whole bunch of books and movies that you read or watched that have to do with Apocalypse Now. So your spy is like an advisor on this movie. What is expected of him? Well, he's an advisor on this movie, which is certainly clearly alluding to Apocalypse Now,

but it's really a compilation of all the movies that I'd seen about the Vietnam War. Because Apocalypse Now is actually a great movie, even though it traumatized me and it's a problematic movie. But so many of the movies that were made about the Vietnam War were not that great. And the Hamlet is going to be one of these films. But his job on this film is to be the authenticity consultant. And, you know, his basic understanding of this is that Hollywood is interested in the authenticity of details when it comes to others. So they have to get the right costume down, for example. But they're not interested in the authenticity of the people that they're dealing with. So all of these Vietnamese people who've been brought in to have roles in this American epic about the Vietnam War literally have nothing to say.

Their function is to literally just be stage props for an American drama. And my narrator understands this. He understands it very intellectually and viscerally, that what is happening here is that Hollywood is the unofficial ministry of propaganda for the Pentagon, that its role is to basically prepare Americans to go fight wars by making them focus only on the American understanding of things and to understand others as alien and different and marginal, even to their own histories, right? And so his belief is that he can somehow try to subvert this ministry of propaganda, this vast war epic that is going to continue to kill Vietnamese people in a cinematic fashion, which is simply the prelude to actually

killing Vietnamese people in real life. So he believes that he can try to make a difference. And of course, the humor and the tragedy is that he can't. You know, one of the things you say about the war and Hollywood is that like, this is one war where the losers get to write the story. Yeah. And that's one of the tremendous ironies, you know, that the United States lost the war in fact in 1975. But for the very same reason that the United States was able to wage a war in which it lost 58,000 American soldiers, which is a human tragedy, but was able to create the

conditions by which 3 million Vietnamese people died of all sides, and 3 million Loasians and Cambodians died during those years and in the years afterwards, for the very same reasons that the industrial power of the United States is able to produce this vast inequity of death. That's the same reason that the United States in the years afterward, through its incredibly powerful cultural industry, is able to win the war in memory. Because wherever you go outside of Vietnam, you have to deal with American memories of the Vietnam War. Inside Vietnam, you have to confront Vietnamese memories. But outside, wherever I've gone and talked about the Vietnam War in memory, one of the first questions that I get is, what do

you think of apocalypse now? So that's what we have to confront, right? That American soft power is tremendously powerful, and it goes hand in hand with American hard power. Of course, so many of the movies made about Vietnam are about the divisions in America, about whether it was a just war or not, and whether American soldiers committed atrocities or not. Yeah, and this is one of the things that people have a hard time getting their minds around. I often get questions, people saying, well, if you look at these Vietnam War movies, Americans come off really badly. And my response to that is, yes, that's true, but they're still the movie stars. And given an option between being a virtuous extra who gets to say nothing and being the demonic antihero who occupies center stage,

I think everybody would choose being the demonic antihero, occupies center stage, I think everybody would choose being the demonic antihero. And that's what's happening. The basic reality of the Vietnam War that Americans can't get around is that it was, in many ways, a really bad war. And so Hollywood has at least acknowledged that much. But the way that it has contained the meaning of that war is to make Americans the stars of this drama and relegate the Vietnamese to the margins,

even though in reality, the Vietnamese paid the heaviest price. And that is one of the ways by which cultural power, soft power, prepares Americans to do the same things over again. That now, as we confront the same parallel or analogous situations in the Middle East, the irony is that, you know, it's mostly people from these other countries that are dying, but Americans are preoccupied with their own experiences. That's an exact replication of the mindset that got us into Vietnam, and that has now allowed Americans to remember the Vietnam War in a certain way that makes it an American war.

Do you see your novel, The Sympathizer, in part as an answer to that, as an alternative way of seeing the war, a way of seeing it through Vietnamese eyes as opposed to through American eyes. You know, absolutely. It's my revenge on Francis Ford Coppola, my revenge on Hollywood. And, you know, my lonely, small effort, not even lonely and small, many Vietnamese American artists and writers are doing very similar things to try to get Americans to understand that Vietnam is a country and not a war. And they're also trying to get Vietnamese people to understand this war in a different way too, because the Vietnamese understanding of it in Vietnam is equally problematic from a very different way. But we write novels, and what that means is my novel, even though it won this prize, is just a book.

And Hollywood produces $200 million, $500 million blockbuster epics that will totally destroy my book. Well, at least your book won the Pulitzer Prize. At least, yeah. Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizerizer has been adapted into a new series on HBO and Max. Terry Gross spoke with him in 2016. More after a break. This is Fresh Air. Your novel is written in the form of a confession, the confession of a North Vietnamese spy whose name we don't know. And I'm wondering if you read any confessions before writing this book,

or if you read what you describe as the discourse of study groups, committees, and parties. Parties as in Communist Party, not like New Year's Party. Right, exactly. Well, you know, I certainly knew that the confession or the autobiographical self-criticism was a really important part of Chinese and Vietnamese communist efforts to re-educate, that's a euphemism, re-educate the people that they had defeated. And I hadn't actually read any of those, but I'd heard about them repeatedly. And I had read autobiographical accounts of people who had survived these kinds of re-education camps or re-education experiences. So I had a pretty good idea of

what these kinds of autobiographies would look like. And to me, it seemed like this was a great literary form to try to adapt and to integrate with the spy story that is a part of the novel, because the confession certainly has other roots. The Christians have been writing confessions since St. Augustine at the very least. And it meshed very well with the idea of a political confession too. And my narrator struggles with both what it means to be a communist and what it means to be a Catholic. Another reason why the confession became really important to the novel is that it's a confession written from one Vietnamese person to another Vietnamese person who is the interrogator. And what that meant was that what I could do in the novel was to construct an implied audience of Vietnamese people. So it was Vietnamese people talking to

Vietnamese people, which is not how minority literature typically works in this country. Typically, if you're a minority writer in this country, you're expected to write towards the white audience. I mean, the literary industry is 89% white. They're the first line of defense in terms of getting published in this country, and minority writers understand that. And I really did not want to write this novel with a first audience of white Americans. I wanted to write it with a first audience of other Vietnamese people, and I knew that this would fundamentally change the way that the novel was written and how it would situate the American readership. You write that your parents are prosperous. Your brother is a doctor who leads a White House advisory committee on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

You're a professor, you're a novelist, you're a Pulitzer Prize winner, but you say our family story is a story of loss and death, for we are here only because the U.S. fought a war that killed three million of our countrymen, not counting over two million others who died in neighboring Laos and Cambodia. Do you often think about what your life would have been like if your family had stayed in Vietnam? Well, of course, because I have my sister's story as an example, and I have the stories of many, many Vietnamese people who stayed behind or were left behind, who are relatives of people who came to the United States or to other countries. And of course, for many of them, it was a really, really difficult time and a really horrible experience. And I know that when I talk about these kinds of things in this context, that what people are hearing in your audience is that my family and myself are examples of

the American dream. We've made it, right? And I really resist that idea. I mean, obviously, we're successful, and we're successful partially because of the opportunities that America has offered. But again, it's only possible because of a war that the United States waged in Vietnam. And there are so many Asian immigrants and refugees who have come from countries like the Philippines, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, who are here in the United States because of wars that the U.S. waged overseas. And the difficulty for Americans and for these refugees and immigrants is to think about both of these kinds of things at the same time. Economic opportunity domestically in the United States for some Asian immigrants

and refugees, not all of them, that are made possible because of foreign wars that the United States have waged abroad. And the way that I think about it is that I have to insist all the time that I'm not an immigrant and that the story that I'm telling in my novel is not an immigrant story. I'm a refugee. And the story that I'm telling is a war story because one of the ways that the United States tries to contain the meaning of these histories is to think that all these Asians are here because they're immigrants and that their story begins once they get to the United States. But again, my understanding is that many of these Asians are here because of the consequences of wars, and many immigrant stories and refugee stories need to be understood

as war stories. So your first name is Viet, which is, I think, a very common name for people from Vietnam. It's also the first half of the name of the country that you were born in, Vietnam. What does Viet mean? Viet just means the name of the people. So my parents chose for me a very nationalist and patriotic name, and in combination with my last name, Nguyen, I'm basically John Smith in Vietnam. But what's also interesting is that, you know, I've always understood that even as common as that name is, my name is for Vietnamese people here in the United States. It's obviously for many Americans, for most Americans, a very foreign name that they have a hard time getting their tongue around.

But I've never changed my name because I think for whatever reason, as ambivalent as I feel about coming from Vietnam, especially when I was an adolescent growing up in the United States, as ambivalent as I felt about it, I also felt that I was Vietnamese. And whether or not Vietnamese people accept me as Vietnamese or see me as authentically Vietnamese, I always felt that there was a part of me that had been marked by being born in Vietnam, that had been marked indelibly by being a refugee, by war, and that I would not give up my name for anybody. My parents, for example, I think are more pragmatic.

They've adopted American names legally, even though they're very Vietnamese. Really? Your parents changed their names? Yeah, they have. They've changed their names. I mean, in the Vietnamese community, they go by their Vietnamese names, but they're very pragmatic. As business people outside of that community, to do business, they go by their American names on their driver's licenses. And I had that option when we became citizens to change my name. And I thought, hmm, maybe I can be Troy.

Whatever name I tried. So nothing sounded right. Nothing sounded right except my own name. So I've always stayed with it despite the the minor costs that might have entailed in terms of not seeming to be quite as American as everybody else. But obviously, the ambition is to make Americans say my name, to make Americans recognize that this is also now an American name. It is also now a French name. It is also now an Australian name. My surname Nguyen is the fourth most popular surname in Australia. You know, we've transformed the countries that we've come to. And the people who live in these countries will

eventually be able to say our names in the same ways that they say Coppola. Well, Viet, thank you so much for talking with us. And congratulations on winning the Pulitzer. Thank you so much for having me, Terry. It's been a pleasure. Viet Thanh Nguyen, speaking with Terry Gross in 2016. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, is now a limited TV series on HBO and Max. He has a new memoir, A Man of Two Faces, and a children's book titled Simone. Coming up, Let It Be, the 1970 documentary about the Beatles, has been out of circulation for half a century,

but now it's back, newly restored, and streaming on Disney+. I'll have a review. This is Fresh Air. Disney Plus has just begun streaming a newly restored documentary film that has been out of circulation for more than 50 years. It's called Let It Be, it stars the Beatles, and its restoration was overseen by director Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings films. In 2021, he used outtake footage from the same movie to create his nearly eight-hour documentary miniseries version, Get Back, also released by Disney+. Three years ago, when Peter Jackson got to tackle the video and audio outtakes from the original

Let It Be film by Michael Lindsay Hogg, Jackson wasn't just restoring images and sound. He also was restoring the reputation of a long-neglected chapter in Beatles history. The footage for the Let It Be film was shot in January 1969, but the movie itself wasn't released until the following year, after the Beatles had shocked the world by breaking up. So at the time, Let It Be, a little less than a 90-minute movie, was seen largely as the chronicle of a musical divorce, a dark film, both visually and emotionally. But Jackson's nearly eight-hour Get Back miniseries disproved all that,

showing other happier scenes that lightened the mood, while also making the sound and images much more crisp and clear. Now he's using his same post-production tricks to polish the original Let It Be. And yes, even for those fans who devoured all the hours of Get Back, this buffed-up Let It Be is a must-see TV treat. And time brings a new perspective on the events in the movie, allowing us to focus not on the acrimony, but on the creativity.

On Disney+, Let It Be is preceded by a brief prologue filmed earlier this year, in which Peter Jackson and Michael Lindsay-Hogg put the original film project into context. So I was going to do a concert movie with the Beatles, and they hadn't been in public, they hadn't performed for 1966.

But then after about ten days, we're not doing a concert anymore, we're doing a documentary. And so this footage that you were shooting just for a sort of a little lead-up trailer type piece ended up being a large part of what you had to craft a film from, and you never actually shot it with that in mind. As a concept, though, Let It Be was about as ambitious as it gets. The Beatles planned to compose,

rehearse, and perform the songs for a new album, all in the space of one month, because drummer Ringo Starr had to leave at the end of January 1969 to co-star in the movie The Magic Christian. And the Let It Be camera crew would capture it all, in an effort to show the creative process in action. Jackson's Get Back dug out several of those astounding moments of creation when sifting through the outtakes. Paul McCartney discovering the chords to Get Back, and George Harrison struggling with the lyrics to a new song called Something. In the restored Let It Be, the images are lighter, and the mood seems to be, too. But the happier moments were there in Let It Be all along. When McCartney and John Lennon are rehearsing the two of us,

they're face-to-face, singing into the same microphone, and the two of them start flubbing the lyrics, which is understandable since they're still writing them. But they keep going and laughing, and by the time McCartney gets to the bridge, he's loose enough to launch into an impromptu Elvis impression. We'll be right back. When I have memories, long ago there were roses. To the square place God's garden and summer, in the sun. Almost 55 years ago, when the original Let It Be came out,

what stood out most were the moments of tension, like when Paul asks George Harrison to play his guitar a certain way. Yeah, okay, well, I don't mind. I'll play, you know, whatever you want me to play. Well, I won't play at all if you don't want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I'll do it. But now the songs are familiar, the film feels much more joyous, and the fact that the Beatles pulled their whole creative concept off by staging an impromptu mini-concert on top of their Apple headquarters now seems almost miraculous. In less than a month, they wrote an album's worth of music,

learned it, recorded it, and performed some of it live. Both the Get Back and Let It Be documentaries climax with that rooftop concert, which ends when police arrive to shut down the noise. And we can finally see for ourselves that Jackson lived up to his pledge, as much as possible, to not duplicate the images from the Let It Be film. Lindsay Hogg had 10 cameras in use that day, five on the roof, one on the building across the street, three at street level, and one hidden camera in the Apple reception area. Both films capture that same seminal

event, but from different angles. And with the same perfect, triumphant conclusion. Yeah, get back! You've been out too long You've been singing on the roof today And that's no good Because you know your mommy doesn't like that

She's got time You've got to have your rest and get back Oh, get back Come on then, yeah, yeah Now get back Get back Get back to where you were Get back

Thanks, Mo. I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves. I hope we pass the audition. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. On Monday's show, feminist punk icon Kathleen Hanna. With her band Bikini Kill, she helped form the so-called Riot Grrrl movement, challenging the sexist punk scene in the 1990s.

She'll talk about helping girls at her shows deal with sexual violence while dealing with it in her own life. Her new memoir is called Rebel Girl. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shurock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and John Kelsey.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli. I dig a pygmy by Charles Hortry and the Deaf Aids. Phase one in which Doris gets her oats. To a bus riding nowhere Spending someone's All that You and me Sunday driving

Not arriving On our way Back home On our way back home. We're on our way home. We're on our way home. We're going home. We'll see you next time. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. What if everyone at work were an expert communicator? I have memories. partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data. Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.