‘No translations, no apologies’: novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen explores the duality of self and other in Lane Lecture

Standing before a packed crowd at the Stanford Faculty Club on Feb. 25, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen delivered a lecture on writing unapologetically and truthfully.

“It’s such a crucial psychological moment for so many artists [to decide] you’re going to create just for yourself and everybody else can listen in,” Nguyen said.

Best known for “The Sympathizer,” “The Refugees” and more, the author spent his Lane Lecture Series talk charting his journey to taking ownership over the relationship between being a minority writer and the truth he owed his community. 

Nguyen recalled growing up in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania — one of four American camps for Vietnamese refugees. He grew up hearing stories upon stories, all told in Vietnamese. But what changed Nguyen’s life wasn’t just hearing the stories; it was how the stories connected members of the refugee community to their pasts. 

“Everyone suffered from some element of survivor’s guilt,” he said, and “everyone” included him. 

For audience member Annie Lau, a 2025 Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI) fellow who attended the lecture partly because of her own history as a Vietnamese refugee, “everyone” included her, too. 

“I had a conversation yesterday with my brother, and I said to him, ‘Why were we chosen to live when we should have died three times? What is our responsibility because we survived?’” Lau told The Daily. “At minimum, we don’t waste our life. I don’t know what it’s like to live without this question.”

For Nguyen, the discovery of his adopted sister who had been left in Vietnam prompted that same question.

“I grew up then, after that point, thinking about this other person who could have been me,” Nguyen said. “I wanted to find a voice; to tell these stories that I felt weren’t being told, in English.”

Despite identifying the engine for writing, Nguyen struggled to honor his writing on his own terms. 

The author first described writing his short story collection, “The Refugees,” feeling overwhelmed by the task of challenging the misrecognition between his audience and his reality. 

“It was so damn hard to just write a short story that I couldn’t figure out how to do that,” Nguyen said. And so, he found himself apologizing to, translating for and catering toward his audience.

Nguyen built toward his central argument of the lecture: Writers are often expected to translate and apologize. They are expected to soften whatever history might make the audience uncomfortable, Nguyen said. But when one does this, they remain “minor.” 

Nguyen gave an example of translation: a Vietnamese writer inserting the definition of pho in his writing. “Imagine if F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote ‘I made a sandwich, two slices of bread between which there’s something delicious.’ He would never do that,” Nguyen said. The audience laughed at the bizarreness of that sentence, which became one of the lecture’s most illuminating points. 

And so, after spending years trapped by audience anxiety, Nguyen said he wrote his 2015 Pulitzer-winning novel “The Sympathizer” following just two rules: no translations, no apologies. 

Nguyen cited writer Toni Morrison as inspiration, as she chose not to move toward the center of American literature, but to pull it towards her, he said.

The crucial psychological shift for every writer, Nguyen described, is the moment they decide to write for the smallest possible audience — themself — and let others listen in.

To attendees who were in the middle of writing projects themselves, this principle landed with force. 

For Lau, the timing felt serendipitous: “I literally wrestled with that the week prior,” she said, describing a moment in her own writing where she had debated whether to explain an unfamiliar Vietnamese dish in her writing. “I didn’t want to, but I felt compelled to,” Lau said. “When he said no translation, I felt like it gave me permission not to translate.”

JJ Yore, another DCI fellow, interpreted the principle more broadly. “Wherever you come from, whatever your background is in the United States, you need to assert your place as belonging and being a full-fledged part of the culture,” he told The Daily.

Nguyen’s writing reflects on his struggle to confront what he considers the fundamental contradiction of America: that “the beauty is made possible by the brutality,” he said. His attempt to understand this contradiction forms the foundation for the rest of his work and keeps him writing.

Nguyen ended his lecture with the person who started it all: his mother. It took him thirty years, he said, to return to an essay he wrote at Berkeley about his mother’s visit to a psychiatric facility. That essay, finally confronted, became the seed for his memoir, “A Man of Two Faces.” 

He read from the memoir’s closing pages about his mother’s final hours, reciting the Lord’s Prayer for the last time. Nguyen leaned in close to tell his mother in Vietnamese that he loved her. When her breathing finally stopped, it was midnight.

“I remember Má loved me, everything else I can forget,” Nguyen concluded. 

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