A conversation between Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen and the writer Cathy Linh Che, who is Core Faculty in Poetry at the Antioch MFA.
How do we make art in times of oppression? Do artists have a responsibility to explore questions of democracy, censorship, and human rights? In this conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen talks with poet and Antioch faculty member Cathy Linh Che about their experiences of democracy as Vietnamese American immigrant writers whose work engages vistas of American democracy amidst the legacy and representations of the Vietnam War. Listen to this edited version of their live conversation in the Antioch Works for Democracy speaker series to hear their ideas about immigrant identities, the after-effects of war, and the role of artists and writers inside of our societies.
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To learn more about this event and the larger Antioch Works for Democracy initiative, visit the Antioch Works for Democracy libguide. You can also watch a full-length video recording of the event on our Youtube channel.
Visit Antioch’s website to learn more about the MFA in Creative Writing program that Cathy Linh Che teaches in.
To hear more voices from the Antioch MFA, you can listen to our roundup episode, Big Idea: How Creative Writers Work, and our interview with MFA Chair Lisa Locascio Nighthawk, S5 E9: Creative Writing Offers a Chance to Take Yourself Seriously.
We invite you to read the books mentioned in this episode, including An Asian American A to Z: A Children's Guide to Our History and Split by Cathy Linh and The Sympathizer: A Novel and A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
This conversation between Viet Thanh Nguyen and Cathy Linh Che was recorded as part of the Antioch Works for Democracy speaker series on September 5, 2024 via Zoom. It was released on October 9, 2024.
The Seed Field Podcast is produced by Antioch University
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Editor: Nastasia Green
Web Content Coordinator: Jen Mont
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Additional Production Help: Karen Hamilton, Amelia Bryan, Adrienne Applegate, Jamila Gaskin, Harold Hale, Margaret Morgan, Laurien Alexandre, and Melinda Garland.
S7E3 Transcript
[00:00] Cathy Linh Che: I find personally this election utterly demoralizing, even though one should know better, but I don't know. I'm going to pass it to you before I get in trouble.
[00:10] Viet Thanh Nguyen: I'm going to get in trouble too.
[Laughing]
[00:18] Jasper Nighthawk: You're listening to the Seed Field Podcast, the show where Antiochians share their knowledge, tell their stories, and come together to win victories for humanity. I'm your host, Jasper Nighthawk. For this season of the podcast, we're focusing on some of the most exciting events from our university's year of pro-democracy action, Antioch Works for Democracy. Today, we're excited to share a conversation about democracy, war, and identity between two writers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and scholar, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and the poet and Antioch faculty member, Cathy Linh Che. These two writers spoke several weeks ago, and their conversation was so crackling with questions of ethics and freedom in times of oppression. It was so rich with insights about democracy and immigrant identity and the after-effects of war. And also, it engaged with the role of artists and writers inside of our societies. It seemed natural for us to share it here. Let me quickly introduce the two speakers. The first speaker, Viet Thanh Nguyen, is the author of the novel, The Sympathizer" a best-selling book that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Just this year, "The Sympathizer" was adapted into an HBO miniseries by one of my favorite directors, Park Chan-wook. The Sympathizer was definitely Viet's breakout hit. It's a novel about immigration, identity, and the after-effects of the Vietnam War, told from a Vietnamese point of view. But that was nine years ago, and in the intervening almost decade since The Sympathizer came out, Viet has published another novel, a memoir, a book of short stories, two children's books, and so much more. The other speaker, Cathy Linh Che, is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She currently serves as core faculty in poetry at the Antioch MFA in Creative Writing. She is the author of the poetry collection, Split, which won the Norma Farber First Book Award. And she also wrote the illustrated book, An Asian American A to Z, A Children's Guide to Our History. We're going to link to some of these books in our show notes. In 2025, she'll be publishing her second full-length poetry book, Becoming Ghost. And her video project, "Apocalypse," a collaboration with Christopher Radcliffe, is an installation about Cathy's parents, who, while stateless in a refugee camp in 1976, were hired to play extras in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Before we roll the tape, I wanna give you a heads up that this is an edited version of the full event. And we have removed the first part of the event where Cathy and Viet both read excerpts from their work. If you're interested in hearing those sections and also hearing their entire unedited conversation, we're including a link to the full video of the event on our YouTube page. Please also note that partway through the conversation, Cathy and Viet start taking questions from the audience. And you'll hear the voice of Antioch MFA Chair, Lisa Locascio Nighthawk, who led the Q&A. All right, let's get into this. Here's Viet starting the conversation off by talking about the importance of poetry and fiction and memoirs in relation to these bigger questions of democracy, war, and identity.
[03:41] Viet: I think there's a faith that both of us have in the power of the literary arts, whatever forms we've chosen, that this still matters in a democracy where we're allowed to acknowledge or we've seized the opportunity to demand that the race should be recognized and that voices be heard, that literature matters in mounting rebuttal. Our tools or our weapons, whatever metaphor you want to use, are small in terms of budget or cost or whatever. I like to say that poems cost nothing except the poet's life and who cares? Who cares about that, right? But it's precisely the fact that no one cares. And I'm speaking
[04:18] Cathy: I love it. No, I mean it.
[04:22] Viet: But American poets, if you talk about the American world, American poets, I believe, were the first artists to respond in the anti-war movement. It wasn't Hollywood, it wasn't filmmakers, it wasn't even novelists. And so when we talk about democracy, war, and identity, here it is, it's like poems, it's poetry that's trying to carry that spirit alive of our humanity, what our supposed democratic project is. And I say supposed because every time in "A Man of Two Faces" when I say America or the American dream, you don't see this, but the text is capitalized and there's a trademark symbol. Yes, technically, I guess we're a democracy, but we failed so many times in so many ways, our own people who live in the country, and we failed many of the countries that we've interfered in.
[05:10] Cathy: Yeah, I mean, my first question was going to be about the topic of writing and democracy and we're entering an election year. So it's a very fascinating thing for our industry. I love that poetry for the most part exists kind of outside of the market. It exists sort of within a gift economy. Somebody can make a little bit of money on it, but it's not enough to sustain you. So most poets do it because they love it. They do it because they can't do anything else. They're drawn to it. There's something primal about poetry. There's something connected to the spirit that really feels, it feels like a necessary act that doesn't necessarily bring you great fame or reward at the end. So there's something I find extraordinarily pure about it. And there's nothing that pure, right? But I just think that it is not surprising because when we think about even the early Asian-American movement, the literature that accompanied that, for the most part, a lot of those early magazines always had a poetry folio. So that is also a way where it is the voice of protest and it is a voice of clarity and a voice of movement. So I don't think that it's only poetry that can do it obviously, because it's not the most popular art form, but it is a component of, you know, and I'm thinking about at this moment, the poets who are being killed in Gaza and how many poets we've lost as a result of people who in their poetry are speaking to humanity or speaking protest, and they are targeted for speaking the truth, poets and journalists. And there's so much about writing writ large about our periodicals and the ways that they use language to obfuscate, obscure, take away blame from a particular agent. All of these things are within our language. So there is something very powerful about the rescue of language, about naming something with clarity and with the level of precision that has to take place when you're writing that feels to me like a corrective. So that's part of what I think about when I think about poetry. And I, you know, I'm going to say, yeah, America TM democracy, because I find personally this election utterly demoralizing, even though one should know better, but I don't know. I'm going to pass it to you before I get in trouble.
[07:36] Viet: I'm going to get in trouble too. (all laughing) To your first point about, you know, the power of poetry, but literature in general, you know, we live in a crassly materialistic society, capitalist society, and there are many of these kinds of societies all over the world. And we're constantly being told that literature doesn't matter. You know, what matters is like finance and business. And if you have to talk about art, it has to be like very expensive art or movies or music or video games or whatever. No one cares about literature. At the same time that this mechanism is happening about the commodification of culture and so on, and literature is not supposed to be a commodity and no one cares, we're living in an era of book banning and book burning. So in fact, people do care.
[08:19] Cathy: People do care.
[08:21] Viet: They marginalize it, but they're so scared of it that books are symbolic of ideas of subversion, right? And so when it does matter, as you said, with poets of Gaza, then they must be eliminated. And the books here must be eliminated. The conditions we're living under here are obviously not as extreme as what's happening in Gaza. I think there's a symbolic continuum in the literary world between outright slaughter in Gaza and sort of the symbolic erasure and suppression fighting here, which points to the fact that what's happening in Gaza, Israel's war in Gaza and the destruction of Israel's democracy by Israelis themselves is connected to the erosion of our democracy here because we support our government and many people support the Israeli project. So about democracy, yeah, I'm demoralized too in terms of electoral politics. I do think that as much as this election matters for Americans and all of our various interests and causes and all of that, I don't think it's going to make a huge amount of difference to the rest of the world in terms of American power. You know, because in "The Man of Two Faces," I talk about the fact that we have quiet Americans and ugly Americans. Ugly is obviously Donald Trump, but the quiet American, whether it's Bill Clinton, the Clintons, or President Obama, or maybe President Harris, they'll still kill you. Now, they'll do it with like liberalism and politeness and whatever, but they'll still kill you with drone strikes and $20 billion in aid and bombs. Going back to literature and what it can do, yes, we as writers should be engaged in electoral politics, although I've refused to do it for this election, but literature's power in terms of democracy is exactly as you've said, which is to tell the stories that matter, to tell the truth that no one wants to hear, and to quote Federico Garcia Lorca, to stand with us on the side of those who have nothing. And that's a very simple moral test. You stand with those who have nothing. And if you make excuses and obfuscate, blah, blah, blah, then you've chosen the wrong side. And as you pointed out, part of what literature does is not simply the content. I mean, obviously we do need stories and poems that talk about the content of suffering and marginalization and the people who have nothing, but your focus on the fact that literature has a relationship to language, to the truthfulness of language is absolutely important, because as we see with this war in Gaza, language is, I think, I don't know if it was Orwell who said it, but it's the first, truth is the first casualty, right? But language is wonderful, because it's used by using language to prevent us from accessing truth that the moral corruption of our societies are happening by preventing us from acknowledging the truth of what is happening, in my opinion, in Gaza. And so our focus as writers on making sure that we don't use cliches, that we do use to participate in the fatuousness of our democratic rhetoric when it's hypocritical, that still matters. I still really believe in that. And again, I think that's why books are being banned and possibly burned sometime in the near future.
[11:19] Cathy: Yeah, I have to agree that poetry, or I'll say literature writ large is deeply powerful. And there are books about how the CIA had something to do with the creation of the Iowa Writers Workshop. So the idea was that there was an interest in moving away from essentially communism and toward individualism, and how can you do that, but through culture? So to instill within, it really is about our stories and our imaginations that if we look inward and we look at only our own personal lives, if we look closely at who we are and do a lot of introspection only, then that erodes a sense of communitarianism, I think. And that's a concept. I also know that there are other countries that they have the money. I'll just give an example, like Singapore. It's the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia. There is a governmental interest in the arts, and there's also a governmental interest in censoring the arts, right? And controlling what arts are produced. But the idea is that the arts create a sense of deep culture that you can be powerful with them on the world stage, not because of your money, and not because of the land you own necessarily, but because of the way that your ideas and your sense of prestige ripples out. I just do think that literature is utterly powerful. It is not powerful because of money alone. It's not powerful just because of the way that empire can use it, but it is powerful. And it's not just about truth-telling, because I don't think that all literature is about truth-telling. I think sometimes it is about exploration. Sometimes it is about the imagination. And I think that's also an amazing tool, because even as, like I said, electoral politics can feel demoralizing, having a space wherein we can imagine new possibilities and new futures, and it doesn't have to be new, but that give you a sense of possibility, it's utterly, for me, a space of freedom.
[13:29] Viet: Interesting you bring up Vietnam in that example. I have such conflicted feelings, because... (both laughing) The dichotomy between Vietnam and the United States, supposedly communism and capitalism, it's a tired binary because...
[13:39] Cathy: It doesn't really exist, I would say, at all.
[13:40] Viet: Right, because it's... So here we're living through a time of extreme opposition and so on, and conflict, whether it's domestic American politics or whether it's international scene. And yet at the same time, history shows us that oppositions are oftentimes completely intertwined with each other. And so Vietnam is a ostensibly communist country, but it's obviously very capitalistic, and I pointed out, and yet, but it also still engages in certain kinds of censorship and suppression that's very, very vivid. I don't think there's even a whole lot of literature to suppress because it's been effectively suppressed for so long that they're suppressing people who write blogs and not even just blogs about... The people bloggers are not saying, "We oppose communism or the Vietnamese government." They're saying, "Look, we don't like "your ecological environmental policy," and they're being sent to jail for that kind of stuff. And that obviously has ripple effects across all of Vietnamese society about what people think they can say and can't say, whether it's through everyday life or politics or in their art. And I just can't help but think that that does have an erosion on the quality of the art. Now, maybe it's different for visual arts versus narrative arts and poetic arts, but I have some serious concerns about how vital the Vietnamese art scape can be if there's this really active suppression of democratic spirit going on. Now, that being said, and I'm not saying that just to demonize Vietnam, because if we look at the United States or the West, Western Europe, there's all kinds of censorship taking place.
[15:05] Cathy: Yeah, absolutely.
[15:07] Viet: People are getting fired. They're losing opportunities for their art. They're losing prizes. All this kind of stuff is going on right now. The fact that there are negative attempts to suppress people's voices in their politics, in their art, is enormously frustrating and discouraging, obviously. And obviously for some people, it's like threatening to their lives and livelihoods. But at the same time, I mean, part of me is writing things good. You know, like, it doesn't matter. It means that people are paying attention enough to try to stop us, stop writers and other artists from speaking out.
[15:44] Cathy: Yeah, I mean, like I was thinking, I would be proud to have one of my books banned at some point, you know? I will say there, I mean, in the United States or elsewhere, that means I'm probably saying something that is on the side of justice or something that is like, that threatens empire, actually. That is going to threaten capitalism or empire or a sense of who gets to be a person. You know, I think that is probably why books are being banned in the US, at least. I don't know what happens when books are banned and censorship is upon us, but I think I've noticed, for instance, when I was in Singapore, I was noticing a very robust underground. There was a room, it was packed full of people who were listening to spoken word because they knew that this was not allowed in larger society. And there's certainly utterly frightening about the rise of fascism in the US and the rise of censorship, the way that our universities and our governments are censoring what you can say and what can't say. That is very scary. But I also am looking at places where censorship is strong, and I do think that those powers must be overturned. And while censorship is upon us, there's still this powerful underground. I don't think people can accept it, you know, ultimately. I think that there's always ways around truth-telling or censors, whether it be slant or directly or through underground pockets.
[17:20] Viet: In the United States, we've been talking a bit about Israel and Gaza and the Palestinians, but in the United States, most banned books so far have been books by Black authors and by LGBTQIA authors. And that says something about what is at the core of American phobias? What are the sins of our own history? And what are the binaries that are so rigid that some people cannot let them go? So it's not only about war and imperialism, although those are very central to the democracy of the United States. But as you were implying also with the Vietnamese example, people are unsettled by questions of very personal identities and sexualities as well. So Lisa, do you have any questions from the audience for us?
[18:03] Lisa Locascio Nighthawk: I just want to say what an absolutely thrilling conversation. I've just been enjoying listening to you both so much. Amy, who's one of my colleagues at Antioch asks, "What can we learn from your brilliant writing and scholarship about the American war in Vietnam and the American myopic view of that war that can help us, parenthetical white Americans, avoid the same colonialist, racist, and xenophobic views about other conflicts around the world now and in the future?"
[18:29] Viet: You know, I think I have spent a lifetime trying to extract, to identify and extract out of myself American mythology and ideology. I think it's, even for people who consider themselves to be liberals, let's say, or maybe even further radical to the left, I think it's really hard to understand how deeply internalized it can be to hold an American-centered point of view. I've seen so many instances within myself of how I've fallen prey to that reflexive American-ness inside of me. It's taken several books to try to understand what that ideology, what that mythology is, and how to think about the complexities of power, as I think Cathy and I have been trying to articulate in our conversation. It's never just one issue, it's many issues, and they're always intertwined because our country was founded not just on one form of oppression and power, but on multiple kinds that were taking place simultaneously. And this idea that we're the best country on earth, the greatest country on earth, even those of us who might be skeptical about that, I still think, you know, that's why I preface my comments about Vietnam by saying, "Hey, you know, I wanna be critical of Vietnam, but not fall into the trap of reflexively lionizing or valorizing American democracy and its values and so on." All this is to say, I think it's such a lifelong project to do this kind of work, and we're not alone. The issues of solidarity and coalition are so crucial in terms of recognizing that so much of what Cathy and I have been talking about, I think, have been dealt with by other people generations earlier. And so very little of what we've been saying, I think, is new to American history and the problems that it's confronted. It's just that we exile, we erase the people who have brought up these kinds of issues before, but their written legacies, I think, and other legacies still remain with us, but we have to do the work of finding those books and identifying our genealogy and our solidarities.
[20:25] Cathy: I love that. Thank you, Viet. I would say along those lines, the Vietnam War gave rise to a whole generation of people who participated in protest and solidarity movements and coalition building. And so the term Asian American was born out of the anti-war movement. It was born out of Asian American coalition building, and it was alongside the Black Power movement. The fact that my parents and I are in this country are probably a direct result of the civil rights movement. The Immigration Act of 1965 opened the doors for that. So much of what happened during Vietnam also created the effect of empowering people and having people come together. So I think that there is something to that.
[21:16] Lisa: We have a question from Nia Nguyen who asked, "Have both your and Viet's books been banned or burned?" But I feel like you kind of addressed that, Cathy. And I'm–
[21:26] Cathy: Yeah, Viet, you go, because my book hasn't been banned yet, but I have a children's book, an Asian American A to Z, which talks about solidarity. It says "Free Palestine" in it, so we'll see.
[21:36] Viet: So, you know, most of my books are not allowed to be published in Vietnam. I mean, as far as I can tell, there's no official list of banned books in Vietnam, but everybody seems to understand there's certain things you can publish and certain things you can't. So, you know, I've had a translation of "The Sympathizer" ready to be published in Vietnam with a Vietnamese publisher since about 2016 or 2017. And everybody's too scared to publish that book. And a couple of other books of mine as well. In the United States, nothing's been banned. And I think it's interesting to think about one possibility why, which is when we talk about the Vietnam War, which a lot of my writing is about, my writing is about much more than the Vietnam War, but people identify that with me because I'm Vietnamese. Therefore, that's the only thing I can talk about. And if I talk about the Vietnam War, people say, "Well, he's talking about the Vietnam War." When you actually read my writing, I think it's actually about connecting the Vietnam War to so many other wars and so many other issues in the long history of the United States. I don't think people are going to ban books that are critical of the Korean War or the Philippine-American War or the Vietnam War because Americans don't care. They've forgotten about these wars. There's so many wars that we have forgotten in American history. And so I think we've internalized how natural war is to us that it doesn't even bother us. We don't remember these kinds of things. And that's why I think there are more books banned by Black authors and by queer authors and trans authors because those actually do speak very immediately to how history is completely wrapped up in a way that feels extraordinarily personal to a good number of Americans.
[23:07] Cathy: I'll just say, in the US, you're provisionally allowed to exist in a safer way than in other times. So at any point, the US could pivot and say, "Okay, Japanese-Americans, you actually, you should be incarcerated," right? So there is a kind of sense that whatever it is right now that we are allowed to do and say, that can be taken away at any moment if you are suddenly identified as the enemy. So I do think that our ability to write and speak and say whatever we want, I find it to be fairly provisional at this moment.
[23:43] Lisa: We have a couple more great questions. This question is from Nat Lam Nguyen who asks, "You mentioned the censorship issues. Sure, we have censorship all over the world, but I think the biggest difference is consensus of citizens saying the nationalism wave of Vietnam has strengthened ever since the death of Nguyen Phu Trong. Hence, there's a yearn of citizens asking for a stricter censorship in the name of patriotism. Using barriers as a metaphor, is it moral for a country to build the barriers as a result of their citizens' request because that's still considered democracy, right? Or is it self-destructive for any barrier as their self-determination would be lost? Is it too Eurocentric of morality if we got to decide the democracy in our name of intellectualism?"
[24:27] Viet: I actually have thought about this because we're in a democracy, right? So it's supposed to be majority rules, but it's also supposed to be protection of minorities. However you choose to define the minority, it could be obviously racial, gendered, sexualized, or ideological or anything else. And so that's a very difficult balance to try to strike because in the example that Lam Nguyen brought up, I think, yes, you can have a democracy that then turns to oppression, right? Like you could have people vote in a party or a government and so on and say, "Yeah, we're cool with that party or government putting people in prison, oppressing them in some way." That's not even a hypothetical example. That has happened and is happening right now. And yet at the same time here in the United States, some of us would say, "Look, if we just had a national majority vote, why don't we just do that? Democracy rules, right?" And yet we still wanna protect these minority interests. There's no exact answer to the question. It's simply to say, this is when we bring up democracy, this is exactly the mechanism we have to build in, to be conscientious about, to be ethical and political about, and moral about too. That yes, majority rules, but minority protection, that we cannot violate our own principles. And that's the other issue, obviously. What are the principles?
[25:41] Cathy: Yeah, just to say that I think that I'm curious as to what this idea of censorship for the greater good looks like. What does that mean if the majority wants greater censorship? What are the aims of that censorship? These are just a series of open-ended questions that I'm curious about. My suspicion is that that deserves a lot of interrogation.
[26:05] Lisa: Thank you both. Clara asks, "As a Vietnamese American growing up in Boston, I've witnessed firsthand our food and culture move from things that we were bullied about to being trendy. Are there any thoughts that either of you could share regarding how we as people of color motivate ourselves to keep raising our voices within American democracy/capitalism at the risk of our stories being consumed as aesthetic or trend?"
[26:28] Cathy: In some ways, as a writer, you can only control your own intentions and the words on the page. But once you release it, how it interacts in the world, that's not something I have total control over, but I do have total control over my sense of interrogation and my sense of engagement with the larger question of what is the purpose of my writing? And that can shift over time, but if I'm writing in order to find fame and success through the commodification, then that's worth noting. For me, I think of writing as pleasurable. It's for me, it's a personal thing for me. And it's also mission-based because I believe that what I'm trying to do is to write into silences. If somebody's going to eat that up and decide it's delicious, that's up to them. The writing should be complex enough so that if they try to do that, maybe they're also getting some sort of something else in addition to it.
[27:23] Viet: I think when we're excluded, right, what we want to, it's a very human impulse to want to be included. And then you're being oppositional aligns with the struggle for inclusion. So I think Clara's question points to what happens when you've actually gotten that inclusion. For me, the Groucho Marx question is always the best one. Like, "Why would I want to belong to a club that would want to have me?" So once we're in the club, I'm like, "Wait, have I been co-opted now? This club that I've been criticizing now lets me in?" And so at that point, it is worthwhile to appreciate that we are more visible. That does make an impact. That does make a difference culturally, psychologically, politically. I do appreciate that more people know what Vietnamese food is, for example, and I don't have to explain as much and so on and so forth. However, even in the food example, in the question of commodification, what's raised is the fact that inclusion is not merely about appearances and representations. I mean, if you have a Vietnamese restaurant and all of a sudden people like to eat your pho, are you paying your workers enough? Are you replicating structures of exploitation and so on and so forth? And likewise for literature, I think the parallel issue is we are witnessing a moment in which 30 or 40 years ago, there were barely any Vietnamese American writers writing in English. And now we're producing so many that I'm having a hard time keeping up. And we're doing that partly because, yes, we have a lot of literary talent, but partly because Vietnamese Americans have gone through exactly what Cathy implied earlier, the workshops of empire. Many Vietnamese Americans descend or come from a particular elite class or a particular majority ethnic background. It's not as if just because we're a minority, we're completely underprivileged. We're transferring structures of power from Vietnam to the United States. We participate in the structures of power. In the United States, those of us who didn't become engineers, lawyers or doctors, some of us became writers. It's as much a model minority track as being a doctor, lawyer or engineer. And so we have to recognize that part. And we have to recognize that I'm grateful for how much Vietnamese American literature we're producing, but I mean, how much of it is still oppositional and still contestatory. I don't wanna get into that exactly with the limited time we have here, but it does offer at least a choice. Now, Vietnamese Americans or any other minority or any other group don't have to simply say, we'll take it simply because it's from our people. Now we can make gradations of judgment. And it is bittersweet to make that gradation of judgment, but it's also better, I think, in the long run. We'll have better Vietnamese restaurants, some of them, and we'll have better Vietnamese American literature, some of it, if we're able to make that judgment on ourselves and our own people and our own artwork and culture.
[30:07] Cathy: Yeah, and I'll just say one additional thing. It's good to have so many Vietnamese American authors in conversation with one another, because just as Viet says, face it, many of us come from specific, kind of an educated class in Vietnam. My parents did not. And I'm also sort of like, my dad comes from a racial minority in Vietnam too, indigenous minority too. So there is room for so many of us. So that can be sort of thinking about that rather than thinking about sort of appeasing some mass audience that doesn't really see you. I think that is useful.
[30:44] Lisa: I have one more question. It's from Asan who says, "Can you speak to the role major and indie publishers "are playing in service to or in resistance to empire? "From the outside and as someone who has grown up "witnessing the culture's war in the war on terror, "it's hard to see where literary conglomerates "play a vital role in producing friction "for empire and capitalism, "especially given how consumptive it all feels."
[31:10] Cathy: I don't know. I mean, I will say that my first book was published by an independent publisher. My second book and published by an independent publisher. My first publisher, Alice James Books, publishes only poetry. If you're going to only choose to publish poetry, you're not doing a great job at capitalism. I'm sorry, you know, like you're just not, but it's a choice and it's an artistic choice to move into. And Haymarket Books is an independent publisher and they are very politically leftist, right? And so they actually don't do capitalism that great either in some ways, right? My third book will be under a big five press, which is much more diverse in terms of the stories and the politics and the ways that they think about it. And they are much more of a business. And being a business, I don't think that their mission is to disrupt empire. I think their mission is to reap the most money they can and make a profit, you know? So I think that there is a difference between the independent houses and what they are doing and what they feel free to do. And so taking more risks with poetry and experimentation and with writing that might get banned somewhere, I think that there isn't going to be as much concern about, well, this will alienate these audiences this way, or this is too experimental or strange. We're not going to take it on. In fact, some of that, sometimes like within those spaces, finding something utterly new, different, strange, but great is a win for them.
[32:40] Viet: I'm published by university presses, but also my fiction and nonfiction comes out from Grove Atlantic, which is an independent press that is a larger one. So it works nearly like one of the larger publishers. I'm very lucky to be in sort of what I think of as a sweet spot between the commercial, the independent. But last thing in this vein of the independent press, let me just make a pitch or a shout out to the many literary collectives that are out there that are not doing the work of the commercial. They're sustaining and supporting writers and artists by giving them opportunities, by giving them fellowship, but also the social world of literary fellowship and artistic fellowship that are keeping the spirit alive and met through many different kinds of programs and nurturing independent voices, new voices, oppositional voices, all the kinds of things that may eventually be co-opted by the big five, but oftentimes will not. And so when we're talking about democracy and identity, the United States is a very capitalistic country, but nevertheless, there is a streak of the avant-garde and the radical and the independent and so on that exists at the level of the literary. People recognizing that they are not supported by capitalism and by big institutions have created their own enclaves and collectives through these artistic societies. We've had them for a very long time. We have them today. If you're a writer, editor, somebody in the literary and artistic worlds, and you're not participating in one of these types of collectives and you feel isolated and alone, well, they exist out there for you to also find solidarity with.
[34:19] Cathy: And also maybe that it's a call for you to create it yourself.
[34:25] Viet: That's a good note to end on.
[34:26] Cathy: Yeah.
[34:27] Lisa: Thank you so much.
[34:28] Cathy: Thank you so much, everybody.
[34:30] Viet: Bye.
[34:32] Jasper: You can learn more about this event and the entire Antioch Works for Democracy initiative on the Antioch Works for Democracy website. We'll include a link in our show notes. We'll also include a link to the YouTube recording of the full unedited video of the event. And we'll link there to the MFA in creative writing. In case you're a writer interested in joining conversations like this one in a structured low residency two-year degree program. We're linking to all of the books that Cathy and Viet mentioned in this episode. And we're also going to link to two other Seed Field podcast episodes. A roundup about how creative writers work and an interview with Lisa Lakasho-Nighthawk, the chair of the MFA, whose voice you heard reading out questions. That one's a great interview. If you haven't heard it yet, I strongly recommend. We post these show notes on our website, theseedfield.org, where you'll also find full episode transcripts, prior episodes and more. The Seed Field podcast is produced by Antioch University. Our editor this season is Nastassja Green. I'm your host Jasper Nighthawk. Our web content coordinator is Jen Mont. Our work study interns are Stephanie Perrettes, Lauren Arianzale, Grace Kurfman, Danny LaPointe, Lisa Wisner, Tywana Shambly, Natalie Obando, and Diana Dinerman. We received additional production help from Karen Hamilton, Amelia Bryan, Adrian Applegate, Jamila Gaskin, Harold Hale, Margaret Morgan, Laurien Alexandre, and Melinda Garland. Thank you for spending your time with us today. That's it for this episode. We hope to see you next time. And don't forget to plant a seed, sow a cause, and win a victory for humanity. From Antioch University, This has been the Seedfield Podcast. you