Hello, I'm Johnny O'Hanson, Jr.

Join me each week on In Black America

as we profile current and historically significant figures

whose stories help illuminate life in Black America.

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What's good? You're listening to Code Switch. I'm Gene Demby.

Viettenween's family brought him to the United States in the early 1970s when he was about

four years old. That's where my memories begin, howling and screaming as I'm taken away from

my parents. His parents owned a business in Vietnam, and then the war happened and upended their lives.

And they fled and found themselves trying to make a new life in this country, on the other

side of the world, and in a country that was so deeply implicated in all the bloodshed

and destruction back home.

Vietz family eventually settled in San Jose, California.

They opened a grocery store there, and Viet would grow up as an American.

To his parents' chagrin, he became an academic and a writer.

His debut novel, The Sympathizer, came out almost a decade ago,

and the story follows this unnamed Vietnamese man

and his own in between space, living in L.A. among Vietnamese refugees and even working a little

in the movie industry, all while secretly spying on those same Vietnamese American neighbors

for the communists back home. The sympathizer became a huge hit. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

...