Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

He winced. I had hit him where it hurt, in the solar plexus of his conscience, where everyone who was an idealist was vulnerable. Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen. The question was one of commitment.

She sold silk at the Ben Thanh market and possessed the eyes of an experienced negotiator, smooth and unreadable as the beads of an abacus.

As some men were born to handle a paintbrush or a pen, he was born to wield a gun. It looked natural in his hand, a tool of which a man could be proud, like a wrench.

IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I returned again and again to what people call my homeland, where my parents were born, as was I. But for the Vietnamese, the homeland is not simply the country of origin. It is the village where one's father was born and where one's father was buried. My father's father died where he was supposed to, as my father will not and as I will not, in the province of his birth, his mausoleum thirty minutes from Ho Chi Minh's birthplace.

A person's strength was always his weakness, and vice versa. The weakness was there to be seen if one could see it.

He's the best thing that could have happened to us, I said. And that was no lie. It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.

a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard

The worst thing about living in America is the corruption . At home, we could contain it in the bars and nightclubs and bases. But here, will will not be able to protect our children from the lewdness and the shallowness and the tawdriness Americans love so much. They're too permissive.

Now a guarantee of happiness—that's a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.

In short, I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar, which I responded to in my usual fashion by arming myself with a gin and tonic, my first of the evening. I

A slogan is just an empty suit, she said. Anyone can wear it. I

Forgive me. I'm talking politics again. I swear not to talk about politics tonight, my brother. You know how hard that is for someone who believes everything is political.

What makes us human is that we're the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves

By now the only part of me now seating were my eyeballs.

The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just.

Neither my homeland nor America could ever be described as charming. It was too moderate of an adjective for a country and a people as hot and hot-blooded as mine. We repulsed or seduced, but we never charmed. As for America, just think of Coca-Cola. That elixir is really something, embodying as it does the addictive, teeth-decaying sweetness of a capitalism that was no good for you no matter how it fizzled on the tongue.

We were not a people who charged into war at the beck and call of bugle or trumpet. No, we fought to the tunes of love songs, for we were the Italians of Asia.

happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game,

I pitied the French for their naivete in believing that they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit. I was maddened by my helplessness before the Auteur's imaginations and machinations. His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors.

Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell.

Hovering somewhere between seventy and eighty years old, the Chair nestled in an office feathered with the books, papers, notes, and tchotchkes accumulated over a lifetime career devoted to the study of the Orient. He had hung an elaborate Oriental rug on his wall, in lieu, I suppose, of an actual Oriental.

By now the only part of me not seating were my eyeballs... An X-ray of my skull would have shown a hamster running furiously in an exercise wheel...

He responded with one of those looks of pity and amusement I was by now so used to getting, the kind that implied not only was my fly undone, but that there was nothing to see even if it was.

Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity! No one was spared, not even the Americans or the Vietnamese, who bathed daily, or the French, who bathed less than daily.