Viet Thanh Nguyen
From the importance of boba tea to his own experience at a prep school, Viet Thanh Nguyen shares insight and experiences in an exclusive interview with The Exonian.
"I think much of the anti-immigrant initiatives by the current administration are designed precisely to prevent this demographic shift from taking place and so I think in this environment..."
Do you ever feel that the power imbalance from white people being in the majority in America will ever go away?
I think much of the anti-immigrant initiatives by the current administration are designed precisely to prevent this demographic shift from taking place and so I think in this environment,
Demographic predictions are that the US would be a majority-minority country by around 2050. But that's assuming that our immigration laws remained unchanged. I think much of the anti-immigrant initiatives by the current administration are designed precisely to prevent this demographic shift from taking place and so I think in this environment, it's clear to the case that anti-immigrant feeling is being directed at brown people south of the border. But those of us who are not brown people shouldn't take any comfort in that. And if we were to take comfort in that, then clearly the next target is going to be brown people from other places. It's already happening, including brown Asians, but then also every other Asian group as well.
In the past, Italians used to be considered outsiders to other European settlers but then eventually became integrated into white America. Now descendants of Italian immigrants are generally seen as no different from other white people. Do you think there's a possibility that Asians-Americans will ever fully assimilate?
I think it's already happened for some Asian Americans into America, but not all of us. The most elite levels of Asian Americans have indeed assimilated into either affiliations with whiteness or could even be classified as white, or call themselves white. Now are we like Italians? That would entail our shift from our status as being a racialized minority to being an ethnic minority. Now, can that happen? I have doubts about that.
Our situation is always going to be precarious unless there's a radical change in American society. By radical, I mean revolutionary change in terms of how race and class are organized. But given the contemporary [situation], I don't think Asian Americans will become ethnic like Italians or Irish universally.
Over time in the United States, there's has formed a Pan-African American community despite initial differences between people who came from different African countries. Do you think eventually there will be a Pan-Asian American identity, too?
I think there already is one, for sure. That is more so probably at the second generation. The first generation strongly identifies with a national origin or a national culture of some kind. But it's really at the second generation—people that were born here. You go a certain suburbs and cities with really high concentrations of Asian American populations and the younger generation, the teenagers, they're hanging out in boba shops. Sometimes it's very ethnic specific, Chinese or Taiwanese. Oftentimes it's very Pan Asian.
Coming to Exeter, does any nostalgia or a personal imprint from Bellarmine come back? Do you see any parallels?
It’s been cool. It's brought back a little bit of nostalgia because I look at your curriculum and it reminds of Bellarmine. But Bellarmine was a day school and it was all boys. It was Jesuit and it's quite different than this place. I associate [Exeter] with New England prep schools of which I read of when I was growing up. And so the nostalgia that I feel upon encountering this place is nostalgia for fiction: the whole idea of boarding school, it's a very English, very New England thing. To me it was always part of this incredible world of mystery that was part of elite American sophistication, all white as well, at least way back in the day. So to come here, it's interesting to see the physical environment also to see the student body. It must have changed radically in the past 50 years since I read about it in “A Separate Peace."