Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen

Publisher: ‎ Belknap Press, 2025

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Reviewed by Shawn Wong*

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In 2024 Pulizter Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen delivered six lectures as part of Harvard University’s prestigious Norton Lecture series.  To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other brings together all six lectures into one book where Nguyen offers the reader a personal and scholarly reflection on what it means to be the “other” in literature, politics, and society. The book comprises six essays: “On the Double, or Inauthenticity,” “On Speaking for an Other,” “On Palestine and Asia,” “On Crossing Borders,” “On Being Minor,” and “On the Joy of Otherness".

 

As Nguyen writes in his Preface, the book “(Weaves) between criticism and autobiography (and) reflects my career as a scholar and my self-education as a writer, which began with being a refugee and the son of refugees…”  These powerful stories, he writes both “save” and “destroy.”  Nguyen’s essays interrogate the terms refugee, immigrant, and migrant along with the terms exile, migration and displacement and how the borders of language and identity are crossed as an insider or as an outsider.

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Part of this investigation is a more expansive view of what it means to be an Asian American in America in this moment and how it differs from when the term was invented in the Sixties, perhaps reaching out to a more global sense of solidarity.  These essays articulates, what Nguyen calls “the urgency of building literary and worldly communities” and  “writing through otherness…creating beauty from horror and tragedy, a beauty found in both art and solidarity.”

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* Dr. Shawn Wang is the Byron and Alice Lockwood Professor in the Humanities, Department of English, University of Washington, Seattle, USA.

Contact: homebase@uw.edu