Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

Forced," of course, is a euphemism with the exact opposite meaning, like "pacification," which usually involved a great degree of homicidal force on rambunctious natives.

I could not help but feel moved by the plight of these poor people. Perhaps it was not correct, politically speaking, for me to feel sympathy for them, but my mother would have been one of them if she were alive. She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.

The truth, in this case, was that at least a million people were working or had worked for the Americans in one capacity or another,

Now there's nowhere to go but America. There are worse places, I said. Perhaps, he said.

Such an interesting English expression "dog eat dog", since dogs don't really eat dogs (dogs do eat shit, but that's another story).

as we heeded the call of the Katyusha rockets, hissing in the distance like librarians demanding silence.

Racist love is still racist.

Ah contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity!

Whatever people say about the General today. I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, which makes him not so different than most.

Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory's laminated floor?

We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts. Have

Merde! The single most useful word in the French language, easy to pronounce and eloquently expressive of conditions from the literally fecal to the unpleasantly existential.

I'm a loser for believing in all the promises your America made to people like me. You came and said we were friends, but what we didn't know was that you could never trust us, much less respect us. Only losers like us couldn't have seen what's so obvious now, how you wouldn't want anyone for your friend who actually wanted to be your friend. Deep down you suspect only fools and traitors would believe your promises.

What if he's not a spy? We'll be killing the wrong man. Then it would be murder. Bon sipped his beer. First, he said, the General knows stuff we don't. Second, we're not killing. This is an assassination. Your guys did this all the time. Third, this is war. Innocent people get killed. It's only murder if you know they're innocent. Even so, that's a tragedy, not a crime.

The workers of the world have to see that capitalism is only interested in profit, not them, and that it will inevitably reduce them to slave labor as it maximizes profit.

I was doing my best imitation of a Third World child on one of those milk cartons passed around elementary schools for American children to deposit their pennies and dimes in order to help poor Alejandro, Abdullah, or Ah Sing have a hot lunch and an immunization. And I was thankful, truly! But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.

After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else's freedom and independence. Ten

What drives a fourteen-year-old to swear a blood oath to a blood brother? And more important, what makes a grown man believe in that oath? Should not the things that count, like ideology and political belief, the ripe fruit of our adulthood, matter more than the unripe ideals and illusions of youth? Let me propose that truth, or some measure of it, can be found in these youthful follies that we forget, to our loss, as adults.

talent is something you use, not something that uses you.

refugees know that their subhuman status as the waste of nations is confirmed by having to live in their own waste).

I feared death and I loved life. I yearned to live long enough to smoke one more cigarette, drink one more drink, experience seven more seconds of obscene bliss, and then, perhaps, but most likely not, I could die. All

We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same. Likewise, we often deceived over selves when we thought we saw ourselves most clearly.

Never mock another culture's food or drink; it is a mortal sin.

Nothing is sacred, and nothing is everywhere, just like God, for whom nothing is only another name.