Transcript: Revisiting the Vietnam War 50 years later, with novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and author Mai Elliott
Ian Bremmer:
Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you can find extended versions of my conversations on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are looking back at the Vietnam War as the world marks 50 years since the last American helicopters left Saigon. For the Vietnamese people who sided with the Communist North, it represents a long and bloody struggle for national reunification and independence and victory over foreign imperialism. For those in the South, it symbolizes a lost homeland, a shattered republic that launched a mass exodus and the making of a resilient diaspora, especially in the United States. For American leadership, the Vietnam War is a cautionary tale of unclear objectives, political interference, and the limits of American power and guerrilla warfare. But this is also a tale of economic rebirth that rivals the success stories of post-World War II Europe. Today, Vietnam is one of the strongest and most stable economies in all of Asia, and it is a close American trading partner, too.
That's quite a transformation, and I want to get to all of that and more with my two guests today. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese American professor and author whose best-selling novel, the Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a TV series. Mai Elliott is a Vietnamese author and researcher whose memoir The Sacred Willow tells the story of one Vietnamese family across four generations. And they both join me now.
Ian Bremmer:
Mai Elliott, Viet Thanh Nguyen, welcome to GZERO World. There's so much I want to discuss with you and Mai, I wanted to start, if you could talk to me a little bit since you were a grown woman in Vietnam when the war broke out. Tell us a little bit for those of us that weren't there, what it felt like, what your experiences were.
Mai Elliott:
Well, the war was fought mainly in the countryside. So people living in the big cities like Saigon, we were somewhat insulated. But I experienced the war through my interviews with the insurgents and the North Vietnamese fighters for the RAND Corporation, for a research project for the Defense Department. So I was living the war in real time through their eyes, and my most immediate experience with the war was when I visited a ward full of war victims, and that was the closest I came to what the war was doing to the people of Vietnam. And of course in Saigon, there were a lot of beggars who were maimed by the war or orphans who were living in the street and refugees who were pouring into Saigon and living in horrible conditions. So I experienced the war through them more than through direct experience.
Ian Bremmer:
How would you say your view of these fellow Vietnamese, did it change your view of the war? Did it change your view of the nation? Did it change your view of the world as, I mean, such a unique opportunity that so few of your fellow countrymen and women had?
Mai Elliott:
Yeah, so I came from a very anti-communist family. So of course, my family was for the war and welcomed the American intervention, and I shared the view that the war had to be won and the communists had to be defeated. But as I lived the war, through my interviews with the insurgents and the poor peasants who were caught in the war and seeing the victims of the war in Saigon, in the streets of Saigon, in the hospital, I began to change my views because I thought that it was unjust for the peasants to pay for the cost of the war, while people like us who had so much to lose if the communists had won, were somewhat insulated from having to pay the price for it. So eventually my views changed and I wanted the war to end. And I didn't care who won the war. By the end of it, I just wanted the war to end.
Ian Bremmer:
I'm going to turn to you, Viet, but I have to ask you one quick follow up there. When you came to that conclusion, did you discuss that with your staunchly anti-communist family at the time? And what were those conversations like?
Mai Elliott:
I have to admit that I didn't dare to talk to them about it, because I think it would've upset them very much. That I was in fact kind of betraying my family, and I was too scared to talk to them about it. Especially to my father who was so afraid of a communist victory because he thought that he would be killed and all of us would be killed. So I kept it secret from them. I never told them about my anti-war activities in the United States, visiting Congress and trying to convince congressmen and women to stop funding the war. But I never talked to my family about it. I was too cowish, I guess, cowardly to talk to them about it.
Ian Bremmer:
Viet, you were four years old when Saigon fell. So I mean, I don't mean to cast dispersions, but you're a little generationally different here. Your first memories would've been in a refugee camp in the United States, but obviously you knew your family. Talk, maybe start a little bit with the dynamics there about the conversations you were having that you remember from your earliest life with the people that you trusted the most, that raised you, and what that made you think about the war that they had just gone through.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, we fled along with the 130,000 other South Vietnamese refugees in 1975. And I'm pretty sure almost all of them were deeply anti-communist because many of them came from the political and military classes. My parents were actually merchants, so they were not a part of the politics of the military, but they were still very anti-communist because they were Catholic. And so I grew up steeped in anti-communism and in Catholicism, in Vietnamese refugee communities. And I felt that we were a community that had lost so much. People felt they had lost a country. Many people, including my own, had left family members behind. There was a lot of melancholy, rage, anger, bitterness, sadness, the whole gamut of emotions. And out of that, people were still trying to rebuild their lives, their shattered lives.
So I just remember growing up with an awareness of how much was at stake here, that because we had lost so much and we were trying to rebuild, I was watching my parents work 12 to 14 hour days almost every day of the year in their grocery store. And that experience was very similar to what everybody else was undergoing at the same time. And we also, for many of us, had to worry about the relatives we had left behind. So my parents were also sending money back as early as they possibly could, and there was this sense that we were still tied to Vietnam, even though we've been cut off from it as well.
Ian Bremmer:
What brought you together with the members, the relatives that were back in Vietnam, and what drove you apart?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think it was a very tragic situation. I was too young to remember this, but my mother, soon after she came to the United States, her own mother died. Can you imagine your mother dying and you're separated by thousands of miles and you're not there to mourn her? It was devastating for her, and she ended up in a psychiatric facility because of that. And she did recover eventually, but stories like that I think were not unusual at all. Life went on back in Vietnam, and that meant life and death and everything had to be experienced vicariously, and it would take time before people could start communicating with each other because communications were cut off.
Ian Bremmer:
How would you say the average American misunderstood what you were going through? Misunderstood the impact of the war?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
You have to understand that in 1975, I believe that surveys revealed that the majority of Americans did not want to accept refugees from Southeast Asia. So that's Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. I think there were a lot of misperceptions of who Southeast Asians were because the exposure that Americans had to these countries were purely through the ideas of war. They were seeing the country through photos, television reportage, movies, and so on. And Vietnamese people did not appear, I think, in a very complicated fashion in these representations. We were victims or we were the Viet Cong and so on. And all of these things were saturated with a whole legacy of racism and Orientalism that Americans were already bringing to their idea of Asia in general.
So there was a lot of obstacles to overcome for Americans to really understand the new Southeast Asian refugees among them as human beings. And so I think there was a lot of misunderstanding. A lot of incomprehension. Just as Americans were unaware of the complexities of the cultures, of the countries of Southeast Asia that they were getting involved in, Southeast Asian refugees coming into New American communities would also find similar levels of incomprehension. It was one thing to end up in California, which we were lucky to do, but imagine ending up in Minnesota or Wisconsin or other parts of the country that had very little exposure to Asians. It was a challenging experience all around.
Mai Elliott:
I think that at the beginning, the Americans were not informed about what the war was all about. I think that among the people that I associated with, these analysts, thinkers from the Rand Corporation. So they were very sophisticated and they understood the war better than the policymakers in Washington, for example.
And at the beginning, they all went into Vietnam with this view of the Cold War that the fight against communism was an existential threat that they had to fight. But as they understood more about the war, what it was all about, they came to the conclusion that the war was futile and that it was time to get out. But of course, there were people with different viewpoints at Rand. But at least the ones that I dealt with, most of them understood that it was a mistake for the United States to get involved in this and that it was, the United States was destroying and harming the people they came to defend or they thought they were coming to defend and that the war was futile and that it was time to get out. So I think that a case in point was somebody like the Daniel Ellsberg, who was a hawk when he went to Vietnam but eventually turned into a dove because of what he learned in Vietnam.
Ian Bremmer:
We are 50 years on. The average American policymaker today doesn't have a lot of personal experience with Vietnam. What's a lesson, Mai, that you would like Americans in power today to understand and take away from the experience of the Vietnam War?
Mai Elliott:
I think that the main lesson would be for them to think very, very hard before intervening militarily in another country. For example, like in Vietnam, it was a civil war between the communists and the non-communists. Of course, with foreign backing, the Soviet Union and China on the one hand, and France, and then the United States on the other hand. But basically it was a war, a civil war between two groups of people in Vietnam, the communists and the non-communists, who had very different vision for what their country should be in the end. And so the United States intervened in a civil war and it paid a heavy price.
And I think that we should think very, very carefully before getting involved in any situation, especially in a ground war. Because a ground war, when you send troops into a foreign country, the people there immediately think of you as foreign occupiers, and then they resist. And eventually it just becomes impossible to get out. Easy to get in, but very, very difficult to extricate yourself. So I think that I wish that the American policymakers would think very, very carefully before sending ground troops anywhere.
Ian Bremmer:
So Viet, I've been to Vietnam and I've been impressed and even a little surprised by how incredibly welcoming the Vietnamese people are to Americans. Sort of individually and broadly frankly. And also of President Trump when he went there during his first term. Given the staggering mistakes that have been made and the recency of the war, how do you think that's come to be?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think it's because relative to Vietnamese history, the period of American involvement in Vietnam was kind of short.
Ian Bremmer:
Compared to China, for example.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, compared to China. I mean long for Americans, obviously. The war in Vietnam officially for the United States was about eight years in terms of having ground troops in there. Which is again, long for the United States, but very brief for the Vietnamese. And so the Vietnamese will always say, obviously, that China colonized us for a thousand years. It's always been the refrain. And of course, China is the vast presence to the north of Vietnam that continues to determine so many of Vietnam's economic and political and military concerns. So I think that Vietnamese are pragmatic when it comes to the United States. Yes, there was an awful war. And if you go visit the military and the history museums in Vietnam, there is quite an accounting of what the United States did. But that's all framed within this other narrative of, well, we have the need to develop the country economically. We have the need to develop allyships and partnerships that will allow us to survive in this environment with China, and so on.
And then the other thing I think to remember is that as much as the Vietnamese have been willing to reconcile with the United States at the level of foreign policy and economic policy, and with tourists and veterans who are returning, the tensions with their diaspora are significant. So there's a Vietnamese diaspora of around 4 million people compared to a population of about 95 or a hundred million Vietnamese people in the homeland. The diaspora exists mostly because of the war and its consequences. And for a long time there has been many significant tensions between Vietnam and these diasporic populations.
Some in the diaspora remain anti-communist, would like to see political change in Vietnam. Obviously the government does not like that kind of a stance. The government does not like to bring up difficult histories of things like re-education camps or the so-called "boat people," that there was an exodus of refugees. There are interpersonal emotional tensions sometimes within Vietnamese families. So that terrain, as you would imagine after a revolutionary war and a civil war, even if we look at the United States as an example, that terrain between Vietnamese people can be, not always, but can be a fraught terrain.
Mai Elliott:
I think most Vietnamese in the United States remain very strongly anti-communist. At the beginning, it was very, very difficult for anybody to express any sympathy for Vietnam or to advocate better relationships between the United States and Vietnam. Things have changed now. The ties have strengthened a lot of Vietnamese, the younger generations in particular, have returned to Vietnam to do business, to visit, to renew ties with the old motherland. But things have changed a bit, but not completely. I think a lot of Vietnamese in the United States would like to see the communist regime fall, but there's nothing they can do about it.
But I think there's still a lot of antagonism, though there's also a lot more realism, especially among the young, that Vietnam, bad as it is, it's developing in the right direction economically at least. And so I think that it's getting better. The views of Vietnam is getting better among the young. I found that when I did a documentary with Ken Burns, and I went around with him visiting Vietnamese communities to promote the film. And the young generations usually approached me and wanted to learn more about the war, about the history of the country, and they had a more friendly views of Vietnam than their parents were.
Ian Bremmer:
Vietnam's been in the news of late, of course, with not only the United States putting significant tariffs on the country, and then most of that with a ninety-day reprieve. But then of course, Chinese President Xi Jinping heading to Vietnam, greeted at the airport by the president, signed some 45 significant economic deals. And Vietnam's principle trade partner is China, not the United States. Viet, how do you feel about the dynamic, the tensions today between the United States and China over Vietnam? Do you think it's going to likely change the trajectory that Vietnam is on?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, as I mentioned earlier, Vietnam has always had to contend with China, and that was true even during the Vietnam War period. And afterwards, was China an ally or was China an antagonist? Things switched. So China supported Vietnam during the war against the United States, but immediately afterwards, China invaded Vietnam in 1979 due to other issues with Cambodia.
So it's always been a complex terrain. Vietnam has always tried to negotiate its stance relative to China. So in this instance, obviously, I think where the United States has at least proven itself to be temporarily antagonistic with Vietnam around the tariff issue, it makes sense for Vietnam to have an alliance with China. So I think that terrain is unpredictable, what's going to happen. And it depends on how China and the United States negotiate and what kind of conflicts happen and occur between them. I really cannot predict what will happen if we go beyond trade war into actual war between China and the United States. I mean, that is just a nightmare scenario for all the countries around that region. And so I think people in Vietnam are understandably nervous about how these power plays will occur between these two superpowers.
Ian Bremmer:
But a level of, "Hey, we've got problems with the US, so let's make sure we have a little more stability with China, irrespective of what we think of them." Is that what I'm hearing you say, Viet?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think there's a degree of pragmatism that's involved. And it is in tension with other issues because periodically there will be a resurgence of Vietnamese nationalism in regards to China, like is China infringing in our autonomy, et cetera, for various kinds of reasons. So again, it is a difficult terrain that the Vietnamese government and Communist party has to play between this long history of anti-Chinese sentiment and Vietnamese nationalism, along with the need to, again, position China and the United States against each other.
Mai Elliott:
I think that Vietnam has a bifurcated relationship with China and the United States for its own national interests and security concerns. So as a Vietnamese analyst put it beautifully, he said that if Vietnam gets too close to China, it risks being dominated by China and it will lose its country. If it gets too close to the United States and exposes itself more to the liberal democracy viewpoints that the United States advocates, it would lose its regime. So it wants to be close to the United States to counter Chinese expansion, especially in the South China Sea. But on the other hand, it wants to stay very close to China. Because China is a communist country with a socialist system dominated by the Communist party, which Vietnam is and would like to remain. So I think that Vietnam will follow this kind of policy for a long time because of these two overriding concerns for its existence and survival.
Ian Bremmer:
So this is the first show we've ever done on Vietnam. It's 50 years after the war. It felt like an appropriate time. What's the thing that you would like viewers to truly understand? To keep with them, not forget that is relevant going forward, a lesson learned, an importance, a line in the sand? I mean, where would you like to go with that, Viet?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The Vietnamese like to say that Vietnam is a country, not a war. So that's the first lesson, I think. For Americans, the obsession is still the history of the war, its impact on the United States, and all of this. Obviously very important, but Vietnam is a country. It has its own unique history is going to determine its own path. But the second thing I'd like to say, and it's affirmed something that Mai said earlier, which is what military and political lessons should the United States have learned from Vietnam? And I agree. I mean, the lessons that the United States should learn is do not get involved in wars of independence and liberation and do not put your troops on the ground in situations you don't understand.
And unfortunately, history has already demonstrated that the United States has not learned those lessons. From my perspective, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9-11, these were direct sequels to the war in Vietnam, and both of them ended disastrously for the United States and for many Iraqis and Afghans as well. So the recent American history is not positive in terms of whether the military and political establishments of the United States have learned the appropriate lessons, which is I think the major reason why we need to keep on revisiting this history.
Mai Elliott:
I think that the thing to remember is that Vietnam is where the United States would've wished it to be. A friendly country in a way, in many ways, and a country that is integrated into the world economy and a country that is stable. And so that's the irony of the war, is that we intervene to create a country that is now where it is without American intervention.
And I think that... You asked the question why Vietnamese are so friendly with the Americans. I think that that's because we've always made the distinction between the American people on the one hand, and what the government was doing in Vietnam. And I think that Americans go to Vietnam now, and it's just like any other country, actually. I saw an ad many years ago, which tickled me, which said that the Vietnam is now one of the most secure country in the world to visit for Americans. And so I think it is helpful for the United States to help make Vietnam stay independent and yet not expect it to be an ally in the sense that of Korea, South Korea, or Japan. Because Vietnam has its own balancing act versus China. It'll always have to be afraid of what China will do and try not to provoke it. And so I think that the lesson is to treat Vietnam as a friendly country, but don't expect it to be yours openly, your strong ally in Asia.
Ian Bremmer:
Mai Elliot, Viet Thanh Nguyen, thanks so much for joining.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thank you.
Mai Elliott:
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
MUSIC:
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Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official? Why don't you rate and review GZERO World five stars. Only five stars, otherwise don't do it. On Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tell your friends.
