Ding Ding TV covers “A Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen”

On November 6th, “A Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen” was held at San Jose City Hall Rotunda. The event was moderated by Cathy Park Hong and organized by The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Ban Mê Thuột, Viet Nam. He came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family and was initially settled in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, one of four such camps for Vietnamese refugees. From there, he moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he lived until 1978.

Seeking better economic opportunities, his parents moved to San Jose, California, and opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores in the city.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor and a novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

His debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. Nguyen is a regular contributor, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, covering immigration, refugees, politics, culture and South East Asia.