Growing up an immigrant in the US, writer Vietan Wynne tried to make sense of the

Vietnamese story.

There was these two very different versions of history and memory that were going around and I was growing up very

confused about what the actual history was.

So that set me off in a project to become a scholar and to become a writer about the past.

The Pulitzer Prize winning author on why we need defiant storytellers and scholars of Memory Now.

In the end, it's the narratives, it's a story

that's helping define this country and our place in it.

I'm Naila Boodoo and from Axios,

this is one big thing.

It's been a hectic and sometimes overwhelming summer of news,

which is why today we wanted to take a step back with a different

perspective on what's been in the headlines.

Kamala Harris's nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate secured last week made history as the first Asian American and female black presidential nominee.

That shaped a recent conversation I had with the writer Vietan Wynne, who's interested in the role

memory plays in all of our stories, but especially Asian Americans, including his own Asian American story.

He was a young child when he fled Vietnam with his family to escape the war.

Once settled in California, literature and art provided refuge,

and a spark of inspiration.

I was reading dozens and dozens of books and watching all these movies and realizing this was a war called the Vietnam War and yet it was actually an American war.

And that

the contrast between how Americans were experiencing it,

...