Viet Thanh Nguyen: In writing The Committed, I wanted to set it in Paris because I wanted my narrator to confront French colonialism. Why is this the place you’d like to be right now in real life? Obviously it’s France in the ’80s, but reading The Committed didn’t make me immediately want to go to Paris.
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Over Zoom, Nguyen gave a two-pronged take on subjects ranging from Frantz Fanon, whose theories fuel much of the novel, to the current uptick in violence against Asian Americans, a side effect of coronavirus discourse that continues a Western tradition of othering people of Asian descent.Īpril Yee: Reading The Committed, I got a picture of France as a place full of armchair liberals and microaggressions. It turns out the protagonist’s tendency toward the dialectic is shared by his creator. The Vietnamese mafia’s goal is to prime privileged and empowered whites for blackmail-including a pretentious politician named BFD who Nguyen says was modeled, in part, on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or DSK. The protagonist’s “two minds” allow him to weigh theories of communism and revolution even while engaged in the rather bloody work of capitalism in his newly adopted role as a gangster, delivering drugs for a Vietnamese mafia that battles an Algerian one. A family-less name is also appropriate for the unacknowledged child of a French priest in Paris, the protagonist grapples with the memory of his missing father. It is a joke on gullible immigration authorities as well as a commentary on what it means to move through France as a person of Vietnamese descent, anonymized by a colonially inflected gaze. After encountering and enacting violence in Vietnam and the United States in The Sympathizer as a dual agent, the protagonist gets a fresh start as a refugee in France, where he tells authorities his name is Vo Danh-or vô danh, “anonymous” in Vietnamese.