San José State Student Involvement hosted the first Spartan Speaker Series event of the year on Sept. 10 at the Student Union Ballroom on campus.
The Spartan Speaker Series invites notable individuals such as authors, critics, and activists to discuss issues that have an effect on the students at SJSU, according to SJSU Student Involvement.
The event featured the author of the novel, “The Sympathizer” and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, who spoke about his time growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in the Bay Area.
Nguyen's talk centered around the themes of memory, identity and the lingering effects of war.
“So much of my work is actually really concerned with memory and forgetting,” Nguyen said. “Both in my own life, my family’s lives, and the lives of the United States and Americans.”
He recounted how his parents, like many other Vietnamese refugees, opened a grocery store in a downtown area that few others wanted to invest in at the time.
“This is a time when most people did not want to come downtown, and it was Vietnamese refugees who came in because they had no choice but to open up businesses,” Nguyen said.
As he was living in San José for a while, Nguyen began to notice the discrimination his people faced in the town.
“You could walk the blocks in downtown San José, and you would never be able to avoid Vietnamese businesses,” Nguyen said. “So that was really important for me to grow up in this kind of Vietnamese refugee community.”
He recalled a time where his family’s grocery was shot on Christmas Eve. Nguyen began to reflect back on the moment of the challenges of being Vietnamese in the Bay Area.
Among the attendees at the event was Sheila Phong, junior business major , who found Nguyen’s insights both moving and timely.
“I came to this event because I wanted to hear from someone who not only shares my heritage but also understands the struggles my family went through after the Vietnam War,” Phong said.
In Nguyen’s discussion, she learned about the experiences of Nguyen’s time growing up as a Vietnamese.
“My identity was shaped by (the Vietnamese) community, by the fact that I was growing up in a population of people who had just left Vietnam and were deeply traumatized by the experience,” Nguyen said.
As Nguyen spoke about his experiences, he recalled that the Vietnamese people felt a sense of loss and anger.
“People were still fighting the war in their minds. They were still finding the war in the community. I could go to any kind of community event like death,” Nguyen said.
San José now sees a large growing number of the Vietnamese community decades later.
According to CBS News, San José has a population of 160,000 members of the community and is the largest population of any city that is not in Vietnam.
Furthermore, as an Asian American, Nguyen understood that to be an Asian American in American society or anywhere.
“You can't separate it from the ways that racial formations, capitalists and colonization have impacted all these different groups,” Nguyen said.
As an award winning author, Nguyen hopes for other refugees like him to have their voices heard in telling their stories through writing.
He said refugees don’t get to speak about their story and are spoken for by other people like journalists.
“I could write stories about people who were like my parents,” Nguyen said. “I wanted to make this country, the United States, more welcoming, more inclusive of people like me.”
Nguyen said he hopes for change and sees that refugees like him can make an impact on their story for other individuals to understand or even relate to.
Phong said that learning history like this isn’t just like learning history from books.
“Hearing someone like (Nguyen) speak about his personal connection to the war and its impact on Vietnamese Americans makes it so much more real and urgent,” Phong said
He ended off his talk with making a point that history may either be forgotten, or we never knew it in the first place to forget it.
For Nguyen, his return to San José was not just a professional engagement but an emotional homecoming.
“San José has been home to me for a long time,” Nguyen said.
