![]() ![]() “And so, ironically, the United States itself has been responsible for circulating an image of the war in Vietnam as a bad war,” he says. “And here, the French got lucky, because what the Americans did in Vietnam, they recorded a lot of photographs and full-color television and movies. “The version that we get in popular culture is really a romantic version,” Nguyen says. Though French involvement in Vietnam is much less familiar to many. The French, Nguyen realized, had in the course of their colonization done as badly by Vietnam and its people as the Americans. “But the French got off easy, so I thought, time to write a sequel to offend the French, and that’s partly what I set out to do with ‘The Committed.’” “And, you know, in that book I set out to offend everybody, by which I mean the Americans and Vietnamese on all sides,” he says. “The first book deals a lot with racism and war and colonization, but the focus is on the United States and on America ideas and principles, as well as Vietnamese ones. “We continue a lot of the action from the first book, but it’s also a sequel in the sense of continuing the ideas that the first book interrogates as well,” Nguyen says. Where the first book shifted between Vietnam and Southern California, “The Committed” takes place in Paris, a city in a country that had colonized and oppressed the Vietnamese people. ![]()
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