On Friday afternoon, the César E. Chávez Library at San José City College hummed with anticipation. Students, faculty, administrators, and classified professionals settled in their seats to politely listen to the heartfelt introductions of the man who stepped to podium next, Dr. Viet Thanh Nguyen—Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer.
“Good afternoon, San José City College,” he began, his voice buoyant with humor and caffeine. “If I speak a little fast, it’s because I just had a café sữa đá at Tây Hồ.” Laughter rippled through the audience. But within minutes, that laughter gave way to reflection as Nguyen began to unspool a story that was as personal as it was historical—a story of displacement, belonging, and the enduring power of truth.
A Refugee’s Beginning
Nguyen was four years old in 1975 when his family fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. Like thousands of others, they were resettled in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania. The family’s first American experience was separation: one sponsor took his parents, another took his brother, and yet another took him. “My earliest memories are of howling and screaming as I was being taken away,” Nguyen recalled.
Those memories, he told the students, were the foundation of his life’s work. They were also the first lesson in how America defines compassion through control. He rejoined his family after two months; his brother waited two years. “He likes to remind me that’s how we know Mom and Dad loved you more,” Nguyen said, smiling.
“Suffering is the same everywhere,” Nguyen said. “What changes is who has power and who gets to forget.”
The family eventually landed in San José, where they opened one of the city’s first Vietnamese grocery stores, Saigon Moi, on East Santa Clara Street. At the time, downtown was a neglected stretch of cracked sidewalks and empty storefronts. “No one wanted to open businesses there except for Vietnamese refugees,” he said. “For a while, you could live your whole life on East Santa Clara Street and never speak English.”
But that fragile prosperity came with peril. Nguyen recounted how his parents were shot in their store on Christmas Eve and how the family was later robbed at gunpoint in their home on South 10th Street. “I grew up an eyewitness to the eyewitnesses,” he said. “My parents were the ones who lived through forty years of war and colonialism. I inherited the trauma secondhand.”
The Library as Sanctuary
If his parents’ store embodied survival, the San José Public Library offered escape. “My father would drop me off every Saturday morning,” Nguyen said. “I’d be waiting outside before the doors opened.” Inside that quiet, air-conditioned cube—long before it became part of San José State’s Martin Luther King Jr. Library—he discovered Dickens, Austen, and Baldwin.
He remembered writing his first story in third grade, Lester the Cat, about a bored city feline who finds love in the countryside. The library gave it an award. His parents were too busy to attend the ceremony, so the school librarian took him, buying him a hamburger along the way. “That librarian changed my life,” Nguyen said. “Libraries are where I learned that books could save you.”
That conviction framed the reason for his return. Nguyen was at San José City College to celebrate the library’s five curated collections that reflect culturally relevant education and community representation, including the Asian Pacific American Curriculum Collection, now home to materials highlighting the stories of immigrant and diasporic communities—including one named in his honor. As he looked around the Chávez Library, he admitted feeling overwhelmed. “I rarely get to speak in San José,” he said. “To be here, where so much began, is emotional for me.”
Becoming a Writer, Against the Odds
Nguyen’s parents, both devout Catholics with minimal formal education, had imagined a different path for their son. “We didn’t even have a Bible in the house,” he joked. “The only book I remember was the telephone book.” When he told them he wanted to study English at UC Berkeley, he softened the blow with a lie: “I told them I was pre-med. When that failed after eleven weeks, I said pre-law.”
At Berkeley—the “University of Communists,” as he fondly called it—Nguyen found what he’d been missing in San José: politics, art, and the fire of activism. “I was radicalized the moment I stepped on campus,” he told the crowd. Reading Asian American history was, for him, an awakening. “I had no idea about Japanese internment camps or the Filipino-American War. I became an activist overnight.”
He smiled recalling those years: “I graduated with two majors, three degrees, and four misdemeanors.” His activism was focused on what was then a radical notion—diversity in academia. “In the 1990s, people thought including Toni Morrison on the syllabus would destroy Western civilization,” he said. “Forty years later, some people still think that.”
The Ethics of Offense
That same conviction—to tell difficult truths—has shaped his literary career. His debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for its biting portrayal of the Vietnam War through the eyes of a communist double agent. But success came with backlash. “I set out to offend everyone,” he said. “And I succeeded. Americans tell me to go back to Vietnam, the Vietnamese government bans my book, and conservative Vietnamese Americans hate my guts.”
Nguyen insisted that offense is not the opposite of art—it’s evidence of its necessity. “You cannot tell the truth if you’re not willing to offend,” he said. “Our job as writers, librarians, and educators isn’t to make people feel good—it’s to tell the truth, even when it hurts.”
He offered a story that drew both laughter and silence: “A student once told me, ‘My parents hate you—you’re the second most hated person in our house after Joe Biden.’ ” He grinned. “That’s when I knew I was doing my job.”
Radical Empathy
As his voice softened, Nguyen reflected on what empathy means in an age of division. “When I was four, I was separated from my parents. I told myself it didn’t matter. I had to move forward.” But years later, watching his own son at the same age, he realized how deeply that separation had scarred him.
“So when I saw children in cages at the U.S. border in 2017, I knew those children,” he said. “That pain doesn’t go away.” For him, being Vietnamese American means identifying not only with one’s own community but with all who are marked as “other.”
“You cannot tell the truth if you’re not willing to offend,” Nguyen said. “Our job as writers, librarians, and educators isn’t to make people feel good—it’s to tell the truth, even when it hurts.”
He warned against what he called “the mythology of the good refugee.” “In 1975, Americans didn’t want us here,” he said. “We were seen as dangerous. And yet, decades later, some Vietnamese Americans look at new refugees—brown people, Muslims—and say, ‘We were the good ones; they’re the bad ones.’ ” He paused. “That’s not true. We were never the good refugees. We were just human.”
The Courage to Tell the Whole Truth
During the Q&A, a student asked how Nguyen found the courage to tell stories that risk alienating his own community. He credited Catholicism—“suffering and martyrdom are great preparation for being a writer”—but also honesty. “The truth hurts, not only others but yourself,” he said. He described revisiting an essay he’d written as a 19-year-old about his mother’s stay in a psychiatric facility. “I put it away for 33 years because it terrified me,” he said. “During the pandemic, I finally finished it. That’s what writing demands—offending others, and sometimes offending yourself.”
Another student asked whether his radicalization at Berkeley was fate or chance. “I think I was ready for it,” he replied. “San José in the 1970s felt like a cultural wasteland. I wanted a bigger world, and Berkeley gave me that.”
His final reflection was global: from Vietnam to El Salvador, from Gaza to the U.S. border. “Suffering is the same everywhere,” Nguyen said. “What changes is who has power and who gets to forget.” He urged students to see beyond national boundaries. “Governments divide us because united people are dangerous. The more we see ourselves in others, the harder it becomes to dehumanize.”
A Return, and a Reckoning
After the program ended, SJCC Librarian Lisa Brigandi and Ethnic Studies Professor Cindy Huynh presented Nguyen with a framed print of his parents’ grocery store—Saigon Moi—reimagined by student artists. Beneath it, a temporary plaque introduced the collection bearing his name. Nguyen looked at it for a long moment. “I’m so grateful,” he said quietly.
As he left the lectern, students crowded forward for photos and autographs. Many carried copies of The Sympathizer, The Refugees, or Simone.
Outside, the late-afternoon sun poured through the glass walls of the Chávez Library, illuminating the faces of students—many children of immigrants themselves—who had just heard their own stories refracted through Nguyen’s.
“I’m back in the community that raised me,” he had said earlier, “and I know some of my stories hurt. But that’s what it means to tell the truth. You speak it beautifully, and you speak it whole.”
In that moment, amid laughter and applause, San José stopped being a “cultural wasteland.” It became what it always was for Nguyen—the soil from which a writer grew.
