His book was rejected 13 times, now it’s a hit TV show

How did Nguyen resist his novel being hammered into the genre mould when adapted to a miniseries? The first break was insisting on a 90 per cent Vietnamese cast. “There would never be an instance where someone would be speaking in English, but we knew they were actually speaking Vietnamese,” he says. His vision was also shared by cast and crew, aligned, he says, on the miniseries’ purpose, especially executive producer Niv Fichman, who first optioned the book.

Even 10 years ago, finding a publisher for The Sympathizer was difficult, as the manuscript was rejected by 13 publishers. In 2016, nobody in Hollywood was willing to option the novel.

Nguyen’s autobiography, A Man of Two Faces, published last year, clarifies just how much of his family’s upheaval found its way into his novels. As a small child, Nguyen fled with his parents and brother, leaving his 16-year-old adopted sister behind. They walked more than 180 kilometres to Nha Trang to board a refugee boat. His memory is of an “ocean of amnesia”: the journey was rarely discussed with his parents, and his and his brother’s accounts differ on fundamental points such as whether he witnessed soldiers firing on another refugee boat.

Eventually, his family settled in San Jose, opening a Vietnamese grocery store. The business became the cornerstone of family life, which approached the American dream. His parents become model American refugees: grateful, hardworking and devoutly Catholic; they took citizenship and changed their names to Joseph and Linda.

Nguyen is critical both of the American dream and the expectation of gratefulness placed on them as refugees. “We are here because you were there,” he says in his autobiography.

During a comfortable but awkward childhood, Nguyen saw Apocalypse Now for the first time, and was hypnotised by the opening when The Doors’ This is the End is set to blossoming napalm. “This is cool,” he thought. It was a later scene that shaped his literary career. When a sampan of refugees is massacred by US soldiers he asked himself: “Are you the Americans killing? Or the Vietnamese being killed?”

“It’s easy to look at the United States and say, ‘Wow, this is a really screwed up country given all these divisions and contradictions’, but Australia seems to have its fair share of these parallel structural problems.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Years later, while completing his studies at UCLA in Berkeley he tells a room full of Asian-American students how the scene affected him, and he started shaking “with rage and anger”. The adaptation of The Sympathizer now closes this “loop of influences”.

So, is he the Vietnamese or the Americans? “Nothing is a singular. Everything is multilayered,” he says today. This is a concept Nguyen returns to time and again.

The Sympathizer uses a double agent to evoke the contradictory self, one who must always be on guard, no matter the audience. I ask if this means belonging is an illusion. No, but Nguyen says he’s “very, very suspicious of the authenticity that goes with belonging. There’s always a horizon. Someone has to be on the outside.” He resolves this for himself with a linguistic sleight of hand: “The paradox of my own being is that I do believe in the authenticity of my inauthenticity.”

Even his family has histories that entwine the colonised and the coloniser. His parents moved from the North to a village in the South, occupying fertile lands and displacing the indigenous Montagnards to the rocky fringes. I ask him how he felt at this discovery. “It’s simply the logical outcome of everything that I’ve been concerned with since I became a politically conscious, artistically conscious person.”

So what complexities will he find on his first trip to Australia? Nguyen talks about the features shared between countries: allies, language and a colonial heritage. “It’s easy to look at the United States and say, ‘Wow, this is a really screwed up country given all these divisions and contradictions’, but Australia seems to have its fair share of these parallel structural problems.”

But “that doesn’t prevent me from being excited”, he says, adding, “You have one of the best accents in the anglophone world, especially for the overseas Vietnamese.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au) and Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au) The Age is a MWF partner. The Sympathizer, The Committed, and The Man of Two Faces are published by Little, Brown.