Hoa Xuande in the closing scenes of Episode 1 of “The Sympathizer.” The series and how it depicts the Vietnam War have been a topic of discussion in California’s Vietnamese community. Never before has a television series garnered so much excitement, attention and concern among California’s expatriate Vietnamese community, the world’s largest, as “The Sympathizer.” HBO’s seven-part espionage thriller depicting …
All Wars Are Fought Twice Enlarge this image toggle caption Nik Wheeler/CORBIS Nik Wheeler/CORBIS "All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory," writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen. A refugee from the Vietnam War, Nguyen calls himself a scholar of memory — someone who studies how we remember events of the …
Viet Thanh Nguyen had no intention of writing a sequel to “The Sympathizer,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a French-Vietnamese undercover agent working for Communist forces during the end of the Vietnam War. During the virtual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, Nguyen and his 7-year-old son, Ellison, joined Caldecott Medal winner Thi Bui and her 13-year-old son, …
