By Maria Trovato

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen presented “Refugees, Immigrants, Americans: Changing Our Stories,” Oct. 23 as part of UMD’s Arts and Humanities Dean’s Lecture series.

Nguyen is the author of “The Refugees,” which is UMD’s First Year Book for the 2018-2019 academic year.

Nguyen came to the U.S. with his family as a refugee from the Vietnam War. At one point, when he was four years old, he was briefly separated from his family. Though they reunited after several months, Nguyen said the trauma has stayed with him.

“All I understood was this feeling of terror at being abandoned and that memory has never gone away for me,” said Nguyen, who refers to himself as a refugee to this day. “That’s how I know that children being taken from our border are going to be forever marked by that trauma of being separated from their parents. We can have a reasonable debate about immigration laws. We should not be having a debate about taking children away from their parents.”

Nguyen said there is a strong stigma surrounding refugees in America, so much so that oftentimes former refugees do not identify as refugees and criticize new refugee populations.

“While immigrants are often wanted in this country, refugees are almost always unwanted,” Nguyen said. “That’s why I call myself a refugee, because those of us who are refugees, who have been refugees, need to stand up and claim that identity and stand in solidarity with those who are unwanted today.”

Nguyen pointed to the binary created between good and bad refugees. He said this is problematic because it does not consider the conditions that influence people’s actions and is used to justify the exclusion of groups of people.

“The language of good refugees leads to the idea that we need exceptional refugees, which would lead to a policy where we barely accept any refugees at all,” Nguyen said.

Nguyen said the idea of a good refugee or a model minority is based on a stereotype. While this stereotype may seem harmless, it can still be used against a group of people. A group of people should not be represented by a stereotype; there should be multiple narratives present, he said.

Nguyen also discussed how Americans have a very different perception of war than refugees or people in other countries.

“War is, for most people in this world, something that involves everybody: soldiers and civilians, men and women, the young and the old,” Nguyen said. “We have to rethink what we mean when we say war, what we mean when we say refugees, what we mean when we say heroes.”

Nguyen’s book, “The Refugees,” is aimed at working toward justice and providing narratives and perspectives beyond just his own. He recalled being referred to as a “voice to the previously voiceless” by a New York Times review for his first book, “The Sympathizer.” While this was intended as a compliment, he emphasized that no single person can represent a voice for an entire group of people.  

“Justice is not about elevating voices for the voiceless,” Nguyen said. “Justice is about creating the conditions where everyone has a voice and everyone has the access to get their stories heard.”

Nguyen stressed the importance of story-telling and said that he experienced an age of narrative scarcity where there were not enough stories about different groups of people. Nguyen said that while we have overcome the total narrative scarcity era, but we haven’t fully reached narrative plentitude either.

“We will know that we’ve reached narrative plentitude when we no longer need voices for the voiceless,” Nguyen said. “In order to do that, we have to change this country, we have to change how stories are told, and we have to realize that it’s not just people like me who tell stories.”

Joanna Mak is a senior marketing major who attended the event.

“I thought that it was interesting the way he talked about war,” Mak said. “He pointed out that war is distinctly different for us being American, being a first world country, and how war is total and we are all implicated in that.”

Grace Kwon is a graduate student studying literature who came to the lecture because she is specifically interested in ethnic and cultural American literature.

“I really liked that he talked about the issues that were going on right now and how they affected his writing,” Kwon said. “Immigration issues really affect a lot more people than you think.”