This was not the first time that a songwriter was inspired by the work of  Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen. In 2016 pop punk hitmakers Blink 182 released a song called “The Last Train” that was inspired by his novel The Sympathizer. But for Viet, a song by Thao Nguyen felt different.

““To have another artist spend time with your work is obviously terrific,” Viet said, “But I don’t know Blink 182. Thao is different – I know her work, I know her, and I think we’re part of the same milieu in terms of Vietnamese American, Vietnamese diasporic artists.”

At a live LitQuake Festival performance in San Francisco, Viet gave a wide-ranging talk about belonging, grief, and the frailty of human memory. With emotion in his voice, Viet told the audience that his mother was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility when he was young. For many years Viet believed that this had happened when he was a small boy, but he recently re-read an essay he had written about it in college.

“I realized I had forgotten every single detail of that experience, including the fact that I wasn’t a small boy,” Viet said. “I was eighteen years-old.”

The experience was so traumatic, Viet explained, that it made him feel like a little boy. That was the emotional truth of the story. With empathy and grace, Viet suggested that something like this may be at the heart of the current political struggle over America’s history. The Left focuses on the often-excruciating and brutal historical truth, while the Right centers a more hagiographic and triumphalist emotional truth.