Oct. 17

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Oct. 17, 1903: Writer Nathanael West born.

Q&A with author Andrew Lam

Andrew Lam, journalist, essayist, Huffington Post blogger, and NPR commentator, came to the United States from Vietnam at age 11. He is the co-founder of New America Media and the author of "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres" and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." 


Q: You have a new book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," coming out next year. Does it touch on some of the same themes as your previous works, or are you heading in a different direction?

A: “Birds of Paradise Lost” is a collection of short stories. It’s significantly different in that it’s a genre I’m not necessarily known for, being a journalist for many years. Epic loss and American conversion. In some way it’s a meditation on losses and gains for newcomers to the new shore. It’s played out in all the characters in “Birds of Paradise Lost” as they struggle to redefine themselves in the New World. In other words, it’s a story of Vietnamese refugees going through their process of integration with various growing pains and degrees of successes.  It’s different than my literary journalism because it’s all imagined, and it’s liberating for someone who had for two decades to deal with facts.
Q:  As someone who arrived in the United States at age 11 from Vietnam, what do you think of the current debate over immigration in this country?

A: It’s unfortunate that the country of immigrants turned its back on immigrants. The atmosphere after 9/11 is toxic. In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the scapegoat. He becomes a kind of insurance policy against the effects of recession. By blaming him, the pressure valve is regulated in time of crisis. Instead of a larger narrative on immigration--from culture to economics, from identity to history--what we have now is a public mindset of us versus them, and an overall anti-immigrant climate that is both troubling and morally reprehensible.

Missing from the national conversation are voices of pro-immigration reformers and civil rights leaders, who can speak on behalf of those who have no voice. Where are the leaders who can speak to the idea that it is not alien to American interests, but very much in our socioeconomic interest--not to mention our spiritual health--to integrate immigrants, that our nation functions best when we welcome newcomers and help them participate fully in our society?

Q: You have written many essays dealing with your life between two cultures. Looking back, what was the most difficult part of your adjustment to life in the United States? What was one of the easiest parts?

A: I learned English really quickly and within two years time fully integrated myself in American life. But what was difficult a few years later was to make sense of my incongruous past. How does the totally Americanized teenager reconcile with his Vietnamese childhood, one filled with extraordinary wonders and violence, with moments of high dramas—escaping from a city about to be taken over, watching his father coming home from the battlefield caked in mud, visiting scenes of battlefields in the aftermath where bodies are half-buried in rice fields, the temple dances; familial love, the insularities of clanship—all these beckon me to return.

I would say the most difficult part of my Americanization process is my struggle to appropriate my Vietnamese memories. I think were it not for my abilities to render them into stories, in words, I would be an incomplete person.

Q: When you return on trips to Vietnam, what is your sense of the attitude among your relatives and others toward American culture?

A: Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, for instance, I went back to Vietnam to make a documentary called “My Journey Home” and I did the touristy thing: I went to Cu Chi Tunnel, near Tay Ninh Province, bordering Cambodia, a complex underground labyrinth in which the Viet Cong hid during the war many years ago. There were several American vets in their late 60s there – they fought in Vietnam and lost friends. They were back for the first time. They were very emotional. They went to Vietnam to look for the meaning of the past.

But the young tour guide saw it completely different: The old tunnels had mostly collapsed, she told me. It was tourism that forced the Vietnamese to dig up the old hideouts. The young tour guide then told me: “It was a lot smaller back then. But now the New Cu Chi Tunnel is very wide? You know why? To cater to very, very big Americans.” The young Vietnamese guide does not see the past: She has a dream for a cosmopolitan future. She spoke fluent English, made lots of friends overseas due to her job and dreams of Disneyland. She crawled through the same tunnel with foreigners routinely but she emerged with different ideas. Her head is filled with the Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars and two-tiered freeways and Hollywood and Universal Studios. “I have many friends over there now,” she said, reflecting the collective desire of Vietnamese youth. “They invite me to come. I’m saving money for this amazing trip.”

I stood there looking at the mouth of the tunnel, and in the end there may never be final conclusion about that war. There can never be one story about that war. Here’s a young woman who looks at a tunnel that was the headquarters of the Vietcong and what does she see? Disneyland. The Cu Chi tunnel leads some to the past, surely, but for the young tour guide it may very well lead to the future. It’s complicated by multiple points of view, many-sided versions of the same thing, and many stories. In that sense when we talk about Vietnam we should not simplify but expand, so much so that it becomes the story of people, of human beings rather than metaphor of tragedy.

For the Vietnamese, whose population is now 90 million and two-thirds of whom were born after the war ended, America is the future. It represents the trajectory so many of their countrymen have taken and have achieved great transformation and success. America barely registers as a war to the new Vietnam – it represents what it does to all poor countries in this world: glamour and material wealth and possible cosmopolitan conversion.

Q: What do you think about Secretary Panetta's trip to Cam Ranh Bay [earlier this year] and Secretary Clinton's stop in Laos? How significant were these visits?

A: I suppose from the point of view of national interests, it cannot be helped. The futures of empires are in the balance in regards to the Pacific Region. The South China Sea carries over more than half of the world trade. Under it lie untold oil pockets and natural gas, the stuff that could make or break an empire for the next 100 years. It is why the United States has moved from a strategy of appeasement toward one of deterrence. Hillary Clinton said it as much in an essay last November in Foreign Policy titled "America's Pacific Century," which came with this sub-headline: "The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action."

For me the developing story is one steeped in irony, and a signal for a major shift in the long, if arduous, U.S.-Indochina relations. Uncle Sam’s back! Nearly four decades have passed, but America is barely recovered from its psychic wounds. Vietnam, after all, was our "hell in a small place." It spelled America's ignominy. The country known for its manifest destiny was soundly defeated by what former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once called a "fourth-rate power." Still, here we are, at the turn of the millennia, seeking a return. For Vietnam, a country that “kicked” out the Americans the new attitude is “Uncle Sam, we need you. When are you coming back”?

But such is the fate of a weak country stuck between vying empires. There can never be true independence. Vietnam has gone so far as pleading with the U.S. to let them buy high-grade weapons. In Vietnam, often I hear young people posing this question: “If we want America so badly, why the hell did we fight Americans in the first place?” It’s a question that many struggle to answer.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Well, I am working on a novel. And I would love to teach at some point. I’ve much to share.

Interview with Deborah Kalb. A previous version of this interview appeared on www.hauntinglegacy.com.

Andrew Lam

Q&A with writer Marc Leepson

Marc Leepson's books cover topics ranging from the Civil War to the American flag to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. He is arts editor of the VVA Veteran, and served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam during the war.

Q: You have written about the Civil War in your book Desperate Engagement, and you served in the Vietnam War and have written about that war as well. How would you compare the two divisive conflicts in terms of their lasting impact on the United States?

A: The Civil War was the crucible of American history. At least 660,000 Americans were killed, fighting one another on American soil. The South was devastated physically. Slavery ended, but only after the nation was nearly torn apart. The impact of that still is being felt, primarily in the South. The issue of states’ rights still is in the forefront of the national political picture in 2012. As are race relations.

The Vietnam War also continues to have a strong impact. Today’s all-volunteer force, for one thing, is a direct result of the inequities of the draft during the Vietnam War. That war also continues to resonate among the huge Baby Boom generation (also known as the Vietnam War generation), which was extremely divided then over the war. Although tensions have cooled considerably, the divisiveness engendered over that war is not far below the surface.

And, as your book Haunting Legacy points out, the Vietnam War continues today to have an impact on national politics, especially at the presidential level.

Q: In your biography of the Marquis de Lafayette (Lafayette: Lessons in Leadership from the Idealist General), you write about his experiences serving with George Washington in the Revolutionary War. Given the very different time periods two centuries apart, what is your impression of the military leadership of the Americans during the Revolutionary War, compared with the U.S. military leadership in the Vietnam conflict?

A: The biggest difference that stands out is the leadership at the top. George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental Army was primarily responsible for the victory over enormous odds. Although by no means perfect, Washington turned out to be a brilliant, courageous leader who led his men on the ground and was often very good at tactics and strategy. William Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam for much of the war, was a dismal failure in all of those areas.
Of course, there were other good military leaders during the American Revolution; Washington didn’t win it alone. But his leadership proved crucial.

As for the Vietnam War, there were excellent generals and other great military leaders. Gens. Creighton Abrams, Fred Weyand, Victor Krulak, and Lew Walt and Col. (later Gen.) Hal Moore come to mind. But their courage and leadership abilities couldn’t overcome the weaknesses at the very top.

Q: Another of your books is about the American flag (Flag: An American Biography). How did the flag's image change, or remain the same, during the Vietnam period?

A: The Vietnam War was unique in American history with respect to the American flag. Unlike all of the other wars fought by the United States in which flying the American flag symbolized commitment to the war effort, the flag’s role during the Vietnam War was vastly different. By the end of the 1960s what has been called “a cultural war” using the flag as its primary symbol had broken out in the nation, a cultural war caused by the bitter antagonism in this country over the war.

Vietnam War hawks displayed the flag as the primary emblem of their support for the war, as well as their anti-communism and their disdain for those who spoke out against the war. That was expressed in flag-accented phrases such as “Love it or leave it” and “My country right or wrong.” Doves flew the flag as well, but the message they conveyed was not support for the war.

To the contrary, doves displayed the flag upside down as a sign of distress; they created posters with the stars arrayed in the peace sign and other forms of protest; they wore American flag shirts and bandannas; they flew the 13-star “Betsy Ross” flag. The most radical elements of the antiwar movement defiantly displayed the Viet Cong flag. And some antiwar protesters burned the Stars and Stripes to protest the American war in Vietnam.

Q: How were you treated as a veteran returning from Vietnam, and how does that compare with the treatments of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan?

A: No one spat at me or called me a baby killer when I came home from Vietnam in December of 1968. But they didn’t have to; the feeling was in the air that Vietnam veterans were not welcome in their own country.

It wasn’t just from the antiwar crowd, which blamed us for taking part in the war. It also came from many of those who supported the war, who blamed us for not winning. It’s a shameful thing to think that so many Americans turned their backs on Vietnam veterans, but it happened and today many Vietnam veterans are still bitter about it. That’s the reason why Vietnam veterans often still greet each other by saying, “Welcome home.”
I guess the only good thing that came out of this has been the fact that Americans woke up to the situation in the early 1980s following the release of the hostages in Iran and the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and they began to stop blaming the warrior for the war. That set in motion the almost universal support by Americans, regardless of how they feel about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for the veterans returning home from those conflicts.

Q: Do you have a favorite time period to research, and if so, why?

A: If I had to choose, I’d say the last third of the 19th century in this country because there is a wealth of primary source material available and because the country grew so rapidly in so many ways after the Civil War.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I am working on a proposal for my next book, but the topic is a state secret because book proposals are so iffy these days. It’s more U.S. history, in the nature of a biography of a 19th century figure whose name you know.

Interview with Deborah Kalb. A version of this interview previously appeared on www.hauntinglegacy.com.



Marc Leepson

Q&A with writer Bobbie Ann Mason

Award-winning writer Bobbie Ann Mason's books include "In Country," "Shiloh and Other Stories," and "The Girl in the Blue Beret."

Q:  How did you come up with the idea for the characters and the story you write about in “In Country”?

A: I didn't start with the notion to write a novel about Vietnam. I backed into it, along the route of discovery typical to the practice of writing fiction.  I had a set of characters--Sam, her uncle Emmett, her boyfriend Lonnie, and her mother, Irene. But I didn't know what their story was. They intrigued me and I followed their antics for a while, trying to find out where they were going.  Where was Sam's father? Emmett was a bit strange, a loner, an eccentric.  Why was he wearing a skirt? I decided he was a Vietnam vet but was hesitant to go further. 

Then one day it hit me--Sam's father had been killed in Vietnam just before she was born.  At that moment I realized that she was in the first wave of the children of Vietnam vets who were coming of age and starting to ask questions.  That's when I knew there was an important story, a timeless tale.  The search for the father.  Telemachus searching for Odysseus after the Trojan War.  This time it was Vietnam. And she was a girl.  This process of writing--searching for the story, allowing the characters to develop in the imagination and letting them lead you into places you might not have thought of--is essential to many novelists, most of whom would be stumped if they had to sit down and write a list of ideas or an outline. 

In this case, I was at first intimidated by the challenge of writing about Vietnam.  After all, I hadn't been there.  I didn't even know anyone who had been there.  It took a long time of trial and error, of searching, to get into what it was about the war that left its marks on the family. So it wasn't ideas. It was more to do with imagery, behavior, memory.  The beautiful egret that Emmett remembers from the rice paddies. The songs that Sam is attracted to, the "Born in the USA" album by Springsteen.  I didn't consult books on the history of the war. Mostly I read oral histories and memoirs. Several prominent memoirs and oral histories appeared in the early eighties, as the Memorial was urged into being and veterans began to speak out. The voices in those books --such as "Charlie Company," "Everything We Had," and Mark Baker's "Nam,"--were riveting and alive. There was a common experience, a common language.  I could hear their voices as they reported their time in country.

My Vietnam vet characters came alive in my imagination because of those eloquent voices telling about the hell they had been through. When they told what it was like to arrive in Vietnam, they all had the same reference points--the heat, the smell, the thousand-yard stare on the faces of the GIs boarding the plane to return to the US.  The whole thing was something they shared, but it was difficult to tell people who hadn't been there.

Q: Do you think things have changed for Vietnam veterans since “In Country” was published in 1985, and if so, how?

A: Since 1985 the Vietnam vets have gained visibility, a position in the community. The Memorial was the greatest factor.  The NEA began a program called Operation Homecoming to welcome the GIs home from Iraq and Afghanistan.  It was meant to show that the country had learned something since the Vietnam War.  We would welcome our guys home, not spit on them. Operation Homecoming offered a series of writing workshops at military bases to help the returning GIs deal with their experience by writing about it. To a large extent this program was successful, and an anthology of poems and stories and memoirs was published. I participated in 2004 by leading a workshop at Camp Lejeune.  But what was dismaying to me was that this program that was supposed to help the GIs make a transition back to "the world" was being thwarted --the GIs were being sent back on more than one tour of duty.

Q: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial plays a major role in “In Country.” Why did you choose to highlight it, and what impact do you think the memorial has had over the years?

A: In the first chapter of "In Country" the characters are traveling to the Memorial. And then the novel flashes back to what led up to the trip. But I had basically written the novel before I knew the Memorial would play a part in it.  My husband and I went to the Memorial one day in the rain.  As we were walking down the Mall from the Capitol toward the Memorial, I could hear the characters talking as if they were coming along with me. I could imagine just what they would be saying and thinking if they were on this trip.  And when I got to the Memorial, I saw it through their eyes.  It was very emotional, very real, immediate.  The visual imagery was strong.

And then I saw my own name on the wall--Bobby G. Mason.  Someone named Bobby Mason had died in Vietnam. Perhaps it was then that I realized that I had a right to tell this story even though I hadn't been to Vietnam.  It was every American's story. I was crying, in the rain. The scene almost wrote itself. The impact of the Memorial has been so strong.  There are thousands of personal, private events taking place in front of the wall. Just the load of mementoes left there is powerful enough. If you go in the summer, late in the day, you can feel how warm the stone is, radiating heat like something alive.

Q: You have written about the enduring legacy of war in some of your other books as well. What draws you to that topic, and are there themes you hope the reader takes away after finishing one or more of your books?

A: I'm not entirely sure why I'm drawn to writing about war. As I said, I haven't been there.  One of my first short stories was called "Shiloh," and the characters go to the Civil War battleground, but they are ignorant of its history. I've never been there myself, and I'm interested in the way we tend to lose our history. I think a novel needs to have a hard substance at its heart.  It should encompass something serious and universal. And war is the most problematic of themes.  My questions are Sam's adolescent questions--how can this happen? Why? Who in his right mind would want to go to war? How do we get so deep into it that we can't get out?  This is endlessly frustrating. My sensibility is pacifistic and squeamish. War! What is it good for?  At the same time, there you have it.  The great subject. The Trojan War. The Napoleonic Wars. The World Wars. Will it ever end?

I was drawn to World War II in my current novel, "The Girl in the Blue Beret," which pays homage to the Europeans who risked their lives to shelter fallen Allied aviators.  In looking at this war, I found all the elements of danger, risk, romance, and urgency that make war irresistible as subject matter. I was forced to ask myself what I would have done in those circumstances. And I don't know the answer. I hope I would rise to the occasion. "War! What is it good for?" is a different question when it comes to Hitler. Themes and take away:  Those are two terms that don't quite suit my sensibility as a novelist because I don't like to reduce a story to a tag or abstraction. I hope the reader will remember images and scenes from "In Country"--like Emmett talking about the egret, or Sam talking to the portrait of her father about how he missed the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album and Watergate, or Sam's grandmother climbing the ladder at the Memorial to touch her son's name.  A history book can tell you about battles and strategies, but this is what a novel can do.

Q: What project are you working on now?

A: Nothing big. I'm returning to short fiction. I'm not eager to write about war again very soon! "The Girl in the Blue Beret" was a huge undertaking for me, and I am still involved with it in various ways.  In writing it, I met members of the French Resistance who had aided Allied aviators during the War.  These friendships were unexpected--precious and rewarding. So you might say my current project is learning French!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Perhaps this would be of interest: When a movie of "In Country" was filmed, in 1988, in my hometown in western Kentucky, the local Vietnam Veterans chapter was just getting organized. Some of the guys hadn't talked about the war, even to their wives.  Suddenly the movies had come to town, wanting the vets to be part of their own story on film--as actors and advisors. This was a profound experience for many of them.  Their experience was validated.  They were heard. They provided memorabilia for a scene in the movie.  Fifteen years later, they had a reunion, and they brought their scrapbooks and memorabilia from the summer of 1988, when the movie was made. And then they watched the movie.

Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview previously appeared on www.hauntinglegacy.com.

Bobbie Ann Mason

Q&A with Professor Larry Berman

Larry Berman's books include Perfect Spy, Lyndon Johnson's War, and Zumwalt. Berman is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and Founding Dean of the Honors College at Georgia State University.


Q: Your new book, Zumwalt, is about Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. What is your take on his role during the Vietnam years?

A: Admiral Elmo Russell Zumwalt, the charismatic Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and “the Navy’s most popular leader since WWII” (Time) was a man who embodied honor, courage, and commitment to those under his command. In a naval career spanning 40 years, he rose to the top echelon of the U.S. Navy, as a commander of all Navy forces in Vietnam and then as CNO (1970-1974). His tenure came at a time of scandal and tumult, from the Soviets’ challenge to U.S. naval supremacy and a duplicitous endgame in Vietnam to Watergate and an admirals’ spy ring. Unlike many other senior naval officers, Zumwalt successfully enacted radical change, including the integration of the most racist branch of the military—an achievement that made him the target of bitter personal recriminations. His fight to modernize a technologically obsolete fleet pitted him against such formidable adversaries as Henry Kissinger and Hyman Rickover.

Ultimately, Zumwalt created a more egalitarian Navy as well as a smaller and modernized fleet better prepared to cope with a changing world—a policy that has helped keep the Navy a modern and relevant fighting force. But Zumwalt’s professional success was marred by personal loss, including the unwitting role he played in his son’s death from Agent Orange.  It was Zumwalt who issued the order to defoliate the jungles.  Retiring from the service in 1974, Zumwalt spearheaded a citizen education and mobilization effort to successfully help others in securing reparations for thousands of Vietnam veterans and their children. That activism earned him the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by Bill Clinton in 1998. Today, his tombstone at the U.S. Naval Academy is inscribed with one word: Reformer.Q: How have the lessons of Vietnam been applied, or ignored, in Iraq and Afghanistan?

A: Despite the passage of time, America’s war in Vietnam remains a metaphor for defeat but also an experience from which curious lessons and analogies have been drawn.  President Barack Obama, when ramping up the war in Afghanistan, explicitly rejected the Vietnam analogy, saying, “you have to learn lessons from history… each historical moment is different. You never step into the same historical river twice. And so Afghanistan is not Vietnam.”  The president went on to say that those who think Afghanistan cannot be stabilized and that it would be better to cut losses are “basing their argument on a false reading of history.”

In T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages,” Eliot suggests that as one becomes older, the past ceases to be a mere sequence—or even development—because we accept popular or superficial explanations for what occurred and we thereby disown the past…leaving us with the experience but missing its meaning.  Thus, “the past has another pattern.” The United States is hoping to achieve in both countries [Iraq and Afghanistan] what it failed to do in Vietnam—create and sustain a government and political order that will be supported and fought for by its populace.  In Vietnam, the United States backed a client regime that was unable to muster the political legitimacy or military skill necessary to survive after our withdrawal.

Vietnam should have given us a better grasp of how unstable military power is for low-intensity conflicts and how it often leaves us supporting regimes over which we have little leverage.   The Vietnam experience should have underscored the power of local circumstances and indigenous forces to resist transformation by an intervening power.  What the United States lacked in Vietnam was not persistence, not will, nor even good intentions, but rather understanding—of Vietnamese history, culture, values, motives and abilities.  Many of the factors that made Vietnam a quagmire are all replicated in Afghanistan where the only counter-escalation open to our adversary has been broadening the insurgent base.  In Vietnam, the more troops we put in, the more Vietcong were recruited. The more we bombed, the stiffer their resolve became.

Can support for the Taliban be related to the number of U.S. troops fighting on their soil? Can foreign troops provide locals the motivation to fight against their own countrymen for a foreign power?   What Afghan institutions—army, police, government—are strong enough to survive after we leave? I agree that many of the U.S. objectives in Vietnam were noble. I think that many U.S. officials and certainly many of the American soldiers and civilians who served in Vietnam were motivated by a genuine desire to advance the cause of freedom and to defeat tyranny.  However, I also think that the nobility of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was compromised in innumerable ways by American hubris, ignorance and arrogance—qualities that often led the United States to fight and act in ways that were both counterproductive and morally deplorable.

Q: In your opinion, which president was most adept at applying lessons from the Vietnam War to his own decisions about whether to send troops into battle?

A: Allow me to use the technique employed by presidential candidates during debates and give an answer to a slightly different question.  I would say that Dwight Eisenhower’s decision not to intervene in Dienbienphu to save the encircled French garrison—the day we didn’t go to war. The Eisenhower process produced contingency plans and a wide range of options. Eisenhower regularly reformulated questions and broadened potential courses of action by considering tradeoffs and other considerations.  Eisenhower encouraged dissent and multiple-advocacy.  He understood that the worst place to send U.S. troops was to the jungles of Vietnam.

Q: What are the most striking changes you have seen over the years in Vietnam during your various trips there?

A: Vietnam is an extraordinary country to visit.  The greatest changes I have witnessed are in the area of education and the wide use of the prevalence of the English language and the number of English-language bookstores.  Of all the students I have taught, I most enjoy being in a classroom on a campus in Vietnam.  The students are so hungry to earn and appreciate the role of a teacher. English has become a commodity in Vietnam—those who speak it have a chance to earn a living for their family.

Q: Your book Perfect Spy focuses on Pham Xuan An, Time magazine reporter and North Vietnamese agent. What set of circumstances caused him to lead that double life?

A: All An ever wanted for the Vietnamese people was the chance to determine their own future, free from foreign interference. He was imbued with nationalist ideals of creating a new society based on social justice and economic equality. His dreams for the revolution turned out to be naïve and idealistic, but the power of his life story is driven by the noblest of goals for Vietnamese nationalism.  He would also pay a heavy price for holding onto his dreams. He had no idea back then that the Party he joined would turn into the brutal regime of 1975. He was not a hard-core party member and anyone who says otherwise is misinformed. He was, as Germaine Loc Swanson said, a communist by obligation.

It was in the mid-1940s when the Communist Party recruited An. The Party chose his cover in journalism and developed a carefully scripted artificial life history. In the years prior to his American journey, An befriended Colonel Edward Lansdale’s covert CIA team. In fact, it was Lansdale himself who helped expedite An’s trip by having the Asia Foundation sponsor An’s studies in the United States. From 1957-59 An attended Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, majored in journalism, interned at the Sacramento Bee and then drove across the country for an internship at the United Nations. He learned so much about American culture and the American people--their compassion, generosity, way of thinking, and their freedoms. He often spoke of how Americans taught him a new way of thinking, a way of looking at the world that the Communist Party could not do. He also said that Americans taught him about humanity.

What makes An’s life story so interesting to me is that he apparently loved living his cover; being a correspondent for a free press was a dream come true in his vision of the revolution. For over 20 years An lived a lie that he hoped would become his reality—working as a newspaper correspondent in a unified Vietnam. He developed enduring bonds of friendship with many prominent journalists like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan and with members of the American intelligence community like William Colby and the legendary Edward Lansdale. An admired and respected the Americans he met in Vietnam as well as during his time in the States. He just believed that they had no business being in his country. He came to admire Americans for their way of thinking, their values and the freedoms they possessed. He wanted his children to be educated in America because that was the place he had learned about humanity.

At first, nothing was more difficult for me in writing about An’s life than trying to understand these friendships. In order to survive, An deceived those closest to him about his mission, yet hardly anyone rejected An when they learned he had been a communist spy. What kind of man can forge such enduring friendships based on a falsehood and, when the deception is unveiled, leave so few feeling betrayed?  Why is it that so many refused to believe they had been source material for their friend’s reports to Hanoi?

Q: Anything else you think we should know?

A: The web sites are: http://www.zumwaltbook.com
   www.larrybermanperfectspy.com

Interview with Deborah Kalb. A version of this interview was previously published on www.hauntinglegacy.com.

Larry Berman

Q&A with writer Bich Minh Nguyen

Award-winning writer Bich Minh Nguyen is the author of a memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, and a novel, Short Girls. Born in Saigon, she left Vietnam as a baby with her family, and grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She now lives in Chicago and in West Lafayette, Indiana, and teaches at Purdue University.

Q: In your memoir Stealing Buddha's Dinner, food plays an important role. Could you discuss the impact food--both American and Vietnamese--had on you and your family during your childhood in Grand Rapids, and the role food can play in the lives of immigrants trying to learn about a new culture?

A: In many ways Stealing Buddha’s Dinner really is all about the role that food played in my family, my childhood, and the formation of my identity. Growing up in the Midwest in the 1980s, I wanted to be as “American” as possible, and to me Americanness came through music, television shows, movies, and food—everything from Kraft Macaroni and Cheese to Pringles to Hershey’s Kisses. I thought that if I consumed Americanness then I would become it, transforming myself from the inside out. Food also marked a sharp difference between my life at home, where we mostly ate Vietnamese food, and my life outside the home, where I wanted to be as white American as my friends. It took me many years to understand all of this! And today I don’t eat or desire all that junk food I pined for as a kid. I suppose that’s kind of when I realized I was a grown-up, or at least someone who had a better understanding of identity: when those foods no longer held symbolic power for me. But I’m still obsessed with food of all kinds. Cooking it, eating it, reading about it, traveling for it. Food—what people eat (and want to eat), and how, and why—is one of the best ways to learn about a culture and become a part of it.


Q: You write in Stealing Buddha's Dinner about a trip you made to Vietnam in 1997. Have you been back there since, and what is your sense of the dynamic between the United States and Vietnam today?

A: It seems like it’s never been easier or faster (though not less expensive!) to travel between Vietnam and the U.S. Not only does this allow family and friends to see each other more often, it also allows for a greater flow of communication and culture between the two nations. I haven’t had the chance to go back to Vietnam since my first visit, unfortunately, though I would love to do so. That first trip was incredible for so many reasons, but mostly because I was with my grandmother Noi. I’ll always remember seeing her reunite with her siblings in Hanoi; she hadn’t seen them in 40 years.

Q: You created some wonderful characters in your novel Short Girls, the story of two Vietnamese-American sisters and their family. Why did you move from non-fiction to fiction, and what do you like about working in each genre?

A: I studied and wrote fiction and poetry before I ever thought about writing nonfiction, so after Stealing Buddha’s Dinner it made sense to return to fiction. I love novels—reading them, rereading them, getting caught up in them, spending time with the characters. Fiction provides the great freedom of getting to make everything up. Though Short Girls is about a Vietnamese American family, the characters and conflicts are all fiction. At the same time, nonfiction provides the great freedom of not having to make things up—of getting to tell the truth. So to me it’s beneficial to work in two genres, because when you get exhausted with one the other one feels liberating. It’s also helped me figure out which ideas and images should belong in which genre. Some things feel too true for fiction; some memories are too hazy for nonfiction.

Q: What is different about the Vietnamese immigrant experience in the United States from that of other groups, and what is similar?

A: Pretty much all of the Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S., including my family, came here as refugees (or as relatives of those refugees); they fled Vietnam because they had lost the war. I don’t think I began to realize or understand what that meant until I was in high school and college. What it must have meant for my father and uncles to fight in a war alongside Americans, to lose that war, and to have to leave their country—suddenly, with almost nothing—and start over on the other side of the world. Still, I really think that all immigrants, regardless of country of origin, or whether they were pushed or pulled to emigrate, go through very similar feelings and experiences: outsiderness, navigation of different cultures, changes between first and following generations. Immigrants have to do a lot to adapt, from language to clothing to manners. But one thing immigrants keep is their food heritage. The keeping of this, and then the eventual sharing of it through friends, communities, and restaurants, is what defines America’s overall, and growing, food culture.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: My second novel, Little Gray House in the West, will be published by Viking Penguin by 2014. The novel is about a scholar, Lee, who stumbles across a literary secret involving Laura Ingalls Wilder’s legacy. Lee’s family has spent years moving from town to town, running Asian buffet restaurants. Lee is finishing her dissertation in English literature when she uncovers a startling link between Wilder’s family and her own. Basically I’m drawing a kind of parallel between the pioneer’s westward search and the immigrant’s westward search. I’m also working on another nonfiction book, kind of a sequel to Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.

 Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview previously appeared on www.hauntinglegacy.com.

Bich Minh Nguyen

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