The narrator returns to the United States, where he was educated, one year after Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency in the aftermath of Watergate. The Sympathizer begins during the fall of Saigon on Apand follows the lives of Vietnamese refugees, dispersed throughout the United States, after they fled from the North Vietnamese Army’s takeover of South Vietnam and the subsequent reunification of Vietnam under Communist rule. In 2017, Nguyen became a MacArthur Fellow. The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016 and Nothing Ever Dies was a finalist for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction. Additionally, he has published numerous essays and reviews and has edited an anthology on the emerging field of Transpacific Studies. In 2017, Nguyen published The Refugees, a short story collection. Other non-fiction works include Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. The study spans one hundred years, from 1896 to 1996. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America examines how Asian Americans have used literature as a political tool.

Nguyen’s first publication was a work of scholarship. He then went on to a teaching career at the University of Southern California, where he is currently the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, as well as Professor in the Departments of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature. He remained at Berkeley for his doctoral studies and earned a PhD in English in 1997.

After graduation, he enrolled in and briefly attended both the University of California, Riverside and UCLA, before settling on the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned degrees in English and Ethnic Studies in 1992. Patrick School, a parochial elementary school, and Bellarmine College Preparatory, both of which are in San Jose. Their efforts, however, secured Nguyen a preparatory school education. On one Christmas Eve, they were both shot in an armed robbery. Nguyen recalls that his parents often worked twelve to fourteen hour days, in what was then a rough neighborhood.

The family then moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania before settling permanently in San Jose, California in 1978, where they opened a Vietnamese grocery store. They first lived in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, where there was a camp for Vietnamese refugees. Viet Thanh Nguyen left Vietnam with his family in 1975.

The sympathizer