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Fatherland 5

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen (b. 1971) was born in Vietnam but his family Viet Thanh Nguyen
emigrated to the United States in 1975 after the fall of Saigon at
the end of the Vietnam War. After three years in a refugee camp in Claire Delfino/Paris Match/Getty Images
Pennsylvania, his family settled in San Jose, California. After high
school, Nguyen received a B.A. in English and Ethnic Studies from
the University of California at Berkeley and stayed there for a Ph.D.
in English. He is a professor at the University of Southern California
in Los Angeles and is the author of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016),
the novel The Sympathizer (2015) and the short story collection The Refugees (2017). In 2017,
he was one of the recipients of the MacArthur “genius” grant.

KEY CONTEXT “Fatherland” is set in Vietnam in 2001, twenty-six years after the United States withdrew
from the Vietnam War. A long and divisive conflict involving multiple countries, it lasted more than twenty
years, ending with the fall of Saigon in 1975. The United States fought as an ally of South Vietnam against
the communist government of North Vietnam. Over 3 million people lost their lives, roughly 2/3 of whom
were Vietnamese civilians: more than 58,000 Americans, over 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and
Vietcong guerilla fighters, between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, and as many as 2
million total civilians. After the war ended with fall of Saigon, the communist government imprisoned many
South Vietnamese men, such as Mr. Ly in ““Fatherland,” in “re-education camps” in what was called the
New Economic Zone. Mr. Ly, who had been a successful businessman before the war, now runs a tour
company catering to American tourists; the tour includes a visit to tunnels the North Vietnamese guerilla
soldiers used during the war.

t was a most peculiar thing to do. Everyone shoes, and makeup that only became ever
Isaid so who heard the story, of how Phuong’s more fashionable as she graduated from a
father had named his second set of children private girls’ school, then from an elite college,
after his first. Phuong was the eldest of these followed by medical school and then a residency
younger children, and for all her twenty-three in Chicago. Mr. Ly had laminated each of the
years she had believed that her father’s other photographs to protect them from humidity and
children were much more blessed. Evidence of fingerprints, keeping them neatly stacked on a
their good luck was written in the terse letters side table by the couch in the living room.
sent home annually by the first Mrs. Ly, the The letters accompanying the photographs
mother of Phuong’s namesake, who recorded were the only communiqués that Phuong’s
in bullet points each of her children’s height, family received about the children, for over the
weight, and accomplishments. Phuong’s course of some twenty-seven years’ absence,
namesake, for example, was seven years older, Phuong’s namesake and her two younger
fifteen centimeters taller, twenty kilos heavier, brothers had never written a word themselves.
and, from the photographs included with the And so, when the first such letter finally arrived,
letters, in possession of fairer, clearer skin; it was the cause of a great deal of excitement.
whiter, straighter teeth; and hair, clothing, The letter was addressed to Mr. Ly, who, as the

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