Last year, acclaimed Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen published To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, a collection of six essays adapted from the prestigious Norton Lectures that he delivered at Harvard in 2023–2024.
Writing and otherness are the central themes of the book. What does it mean to write as an other? To read as an other? What is, or should be, the relationship between self and otherness? Such are the questions that Nguyen is invested in in his latest book. And while his reflections upon these questions center around his own experiences as an Asian American and refugee, he demonstrates, importantly, that such questions are pertinent to all of us, whoever we are and wherever we live, ethically, socially, and in some sense, existentially.
The insights that Nguyen offers in To Save and to Destroy are simultaneously theoretically sharp and intimately tender, a result of his seamless blending of autobiography and theory. Maneuvering between artful storytelling drawn from his own life and readings of critical and literary texts, he lets each shed light on the other. The result is a deft hybrid between art and criticism, combining the best strengths of both — a quality that great lectures most often have. That said, Nguyen’s book does not read like a lecture, and nor does it attempt to lecture at us. Rather, it simply asks to be heard, asks for its readers to think, feel, and reflect alongside its author.
For those who have read Nguyen’s previous works, the particular hybrid genre of To Save and to Destroy may strike as new, but it may oddly feel familiar as well — after all, Nguyen’s fiction has arguably always been theoretical, and his non-fiction, as his latest memoir A Man of Two Faces can attest, literary. Anyone who finds pleasure in reading theory as literature and literature as theory, To Save and to Destroy will be a delight to read, intellectually rich without being burdensome.
As it may already be apparent, the subtitle of Nguyen’s book, “writing as an other,” contains within it a multitude of meanings that he weaves through and together. To start, Nguyen is interested in two forms of otherness: one that is experienced via marginalization and domination, a form of otherness deeply personal to Nguyen as someone who came to the US as a young refugee from Vietnam, and a second form of otherness, perhaps more universal, that resides in the deepest parts of all of us. Nguyen explains:
By others, I mean those who are outcast from or exploited by the powerful norm of their societies, or those who have moved voluntarily or have been moved forcefully from one place to another, or those who have been dominated in their own homes by outsiders whom they would consider to be others. By others, I also mean ourselves, for as Toni Morrison points out in her Norton Lectures, The Origin of Others, otherness emerges from within the mysterious and unknown, or at best partly known, territory inside us all, a nexus of fears and desires we project onto those whom we label strangers, foreigners, enemies, invaders, threats.
For Nguyen, as the last part of the quote above makes clear, the two forms of otherness, while distinct, often intertwine in troubling ways. A central question of the book then, is how one should relate to the other, both within and outside the self. In the book’s preface, Nguyen explains that his lectures are an “attempt to think through what it means to write and read from the position of an other, which is for me the starting point of an ethical and political art.” If ethics and politics concern the question of how one should relate to others, the task of thinking through “writing as an other” is the starting point for ethical and political art precisely because it is in otherness that self and other meet, struggle, and relate.
In this respect, the chapter “Palestine and Asia” stands out, the corresponding lecture of which he delivered not long after the October 7 attacks in 2023. In raising the question of the significance of Israel-Palestine for Asian Americans, Nguyen comes to the following forceful conclusion.
Being Asian American is not the only dimension of myself. I cease being an Asian American if and when Asian Americans cannot emerge from self-defense, inclusion, and a limited solidarity bound by race and nation in order to embrace an expansive, global solidarity. My Asian Americanness matters less than my ethics, politics, and art. Together they constitute a repository of a stubborn otherness that resists the lure of a domesticated otherness satiated by belonging. For Asian Americans, inclusion is crucial but complicated when it means belonging to a settler and imperial country that promotes the colonization and occupation of other lands. What is the worth of defending our lives if we do not seek to protect the lives of others? As for whom we should feel solidarity with, the answer is simple, albeit difficult: whoever is the cockroach. Whoever is the monster.
Nguyen’s point is that belonging cannot, and should not, come at all costs, taking precedence over one’s ethics, politics, and art, nor over the pursuit of “radical solidarity” that cannot be bound by race or nation, but must extend to those who are most oppressed and dehumanized beyond our immediate communities. Importantly, Nguyen is not calling for a rejection of belonging or Asian American identity, but rather a transformation in how such belonging is understood in the first place — the values it should entail and the forms of solidarities it should call for. And such reworking of what Asian Americanness ought to mean is precisely what Nguyen seeks to engage in in deliberating upon, and performing, writing as an ethical and political act.
If, on the one hand, Nguyen is interested in “writing as an other” as an act, he is also interested in “writing as an other” as a noun, an object that “is itself an other to the writer.” This is, in fact, literally the case in the chapter “On Speaking for an Other,” in which he recounts rediscovering essays that he wrote long ago as a freshman in Berkeley for Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing seminar, specifically about his mother’s breakdown and her eventual commitment to a psychiatric ward. In rereading his own essays decades later, Nguyen realizes that his memories of the event were wrong, with crucial parts distorted or even entirely blacked out. He realizes that his mother had been committed to the psychiatric ward when he was a college freshman, not as a child as he thought for decades. He also learns about a hole in his bathroom door that he fails to recollect even after rereading his writing. His father had knocked it through in order to reach his mother who had locked herself in the bathroom out of a paranoiac fear that someone, or everyone, was trying to kill her.
If writing is other, it is in part because language itself is always already other, foreign, even in the form of one’s mother tongue, a point that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida elucidates in “Monolingualism of the Other,” a text Nguyen explicitly invokes. But writing is other also because it reflects the otherness that is an inherent and irreducible condition of existence itself. As Nguyen reflects upon the aforementioned episode, he writes, “if the experience was so unsettling that I had to write about it, it was also so unnerving that I had to forget about it until my mother died two days before Christmas Eve in 2018.” In some sense, Nguyen’s trauma was itself an other within himself that he could not bear nor confront — which is why he “had to” write about it, “had to” in order to externalize it into words on a page so that it could be stored away and forgotten.
As Nguyen explains, the experience of being a refugee is often one that must inevitably face the question, “will they live or die, be saved or destroyed?” But what about in writing? As the title of Nguyen’s book indicates, in “writing as an other,” salvation and destruction do not necessarily exist in binary opposition but rather in odd cohesion. In writing about his mother, and in rereading his writing, what has he saved? destroyed? The memories of his mother, both, no doubt, but perhaps also himself — a contradiction only if we cling onto a notion of self that excludes from itself otherness.
But even as the encounter with otherness — both of one’s own as well as of loved ones — can be deeply unsettling, traumatic even, Nguyen insists that such an encounter can also possess unexpected joys. In the last paragraph of the book, Nguyen describes his sister Tuyết, whom his family abandoned in fleeing Vietnam (and who, as was unknown at the time, was adopted), visiting San José to see their sick father, whom she had last seen three decades ago.
Love was what brought my sister to the United States, to see her brothers but most especially, I think, our father. After Los Angeles, my sister flew to San José to visit him, whom she had not seen since his last visit to Việt Nam thirty years before. Our father spends his days in quiet contemplation, and when I return, he either does not recognize me or pretends to recognize me, his other, as he is other to me. I warned my sister that our father would probably not know who she was, but this did not appear to deter her. When she walked into his room, she told me later, she asked him if he recognized her. In a moment of reunion and recognition that I think of as manifesting the joy of otherness, he murmured an assent. Then our father said, “Vui lắm.” And my sister was content that our father said he was very happy.
The otherness of Nguyen’s sister, the otherness of his father, the otherness of their encounter with each other — in this extraordinary scene, a multitude of layers of otherness overlap and collide, each bearing its own painful history. Yet in this encounter, we witness the emergence of a plurality of joys too, each felt differently by his sister, his father, and Nguyen himself. The “joy of otherness” resounds here, but it also remains opaque, not least of all because it remains unclear what their father exactly meant by “Vui lắm.” Perhaps he recognized Tuyết. Perhaps he was happy to see her regardless of who she was. Perhaps he was joyous for a different reason altogether.
But perhaps the question of why does not matter so much. If the joy of otherness, and the multitude of joys that reverberate from it, cannot but be opaque, it is because the joy of otherness is itself also, ultimately, deeply other.
