Now we come to an end, with so many things I have not yet touched on when it comes to salvation and destruction, on writing as an other and writing about otherness. Over the course of these lectures, I have aged, and with this year, as with every passing year, I cannot help but hear the distant rumble of “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” My beloved, beautiful four-year-old daughter heralded this chariot, not long ago. Over dinner, she smiled at me with her eyes lit up, then leaned close and said, “Daddy, you’re old. You’re going to die soon. I love you. Will there be a funeral?”
She probably will not remember these words. But I will, because they touch on what I have kept for the end, the lightest and the heaviest subject: the joy of otherness. This topic of joy is heavy, because I am a pessimist. And when it comes to otherness, the associations are often gloomy, revolving around victimization and marginalization or trauma and erasure, all subjects in which I revel. But it is no wonder that some who are othered would rather feel joy than pain. They simply yearn to be human, although humanity itself comes with a heaviness inherent.
In the end, we cannot escape from otherness, because otherness exists within us and our humanity. Fernando Pessoa, who was born and died in Lisbon, wrote that “To live is to be other,” foreshadowing Derrida’s concept of otherness as being elusive, and evoking, perhaps, the idea that otherness is more important as a principle and an orientation, rather than an identity, which can be self-serving. Can we therefore find a degree of joy in our inevitable otherness, versus trying to do the impossible and dispel our otherness and our others, especially when doing so often involves shame and violence?
The reserve of our own mystery to ourselves and to our closest others is a source of consternation, but also, potentially, joy.
If that is a heavy subject to shoulder, Italo Calvino offers some guidance for how to bear that burden, at least for writers, although I think his lessons have wider meaning. In Calvino’s Norton Lectures, Six Memos for a New Millenium, he examined the opposition between weight and lightness, and chose the latter: “When the human realm seems doomed to heaviness, I feel the need to fly like Perseus into some other space. I am not talking about escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean…the need…to look at the world from a different angle, with different logic, different methods of knowing and proving.”
He challenges us to explore that human realm with a light touch, calling for “the sudden nimble leap of the poet/philosopher who lifts himself against the weight of the world, proving that its heaviness contains the secret of lightness, while what many believe to be the life force of the times—loud and aggressive, roaring and rumbling—belongs to the realm of death, like a graveyard of rusted automobiles.”
I have groped my way intuitively through this graveyard as I attempted to become a writer, grappling with Very Serious Subjects and Very Important Literature. Otherness was a major concern, but it was the alterity of sociological, political, historical categories: race, class, gender, nationality, and so on. What I had not grappled with was the otherness of those who had been right next to me from my origins, my mother and father, my older brother, my oldest sister, whom we had left behind in Việt Nam at the end of war, where, in the aftermath, the victors dispatched her to labor on a youth brigade to rebuild the country, a fate that could have been mine.
Perhaps partly because of this fear of understanding my siblings and my own parents, I had no desire to be a parent, to test myself with children and my own family as my parents had been tested by me and my siblings. Writing was the only creative act that interested me, not fathering, and so when I learned that my first child was due to arrive—I panicked. My life, as I knew it, was over, and it hardly seemed fair, for I had not yet finished my novel. But my son’s impending birth focused me, and I completed the draft a few days before his birth. For the next few months, I revised the novel at night while this strange new being slept, so small and light, yet so heavy on my conscience and my soul.
He lay swaddled and immobilized on the futon in his mother’s office while I sat at her desk, keeping an eye on Little Oedipus as I wrestled with sentences, word choices, rhythms. Anytime my heir stirred, which was often, I stuck a bottle of formula in his mouth, a story over which he now chortles. I rewrote and kept vigil until three in the morning. Then it was my turn to sip on my formula—single malt Scotch—until five in the morning, when his mother took over. So it was that we fattened our son and kept him alive.
My infant son was my other, perhaps still is an other to me in a wondrous way, as I must be some looming other to my daughter, intimate and yet incomprehensible. I think I know my son very well, but perhaps I do not know him at all. And why would I want to know him, or my daughter, completely? It is impossible that they would know me absolutely. The reserve of our own mystery to ourselves and to our closest others is a source of consternation, but also, potentially, joy.
Becoming a father frightened me more than anything, including writing, which caused me much anguish that I willingly embraced. Writing, like God, is an incomprehensible other that can inspire as much as torment. Writing requires faith as well as a willingness to abide mystery, the unknown source from where creativity emerges. Still, much of creativity springs not from magic or mystique but from dull discipline, as in Haruki Murakami’s idea that writing is mostly a matter of routine, even punishment, until it is not.
In his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami compares writing to running, particularly marathons, including the original marathon route in Greece, and even running an ultramarathon of sixty-two miles. I run a few miles on a treadmill in my basement next to the washing machine and dryer, watching instructors on my phone exhort me to reach my goal with clichés so trite I would be appalled to write them. Nevertheless, the exhortations work, encouraging me to run a few more miles, which inspires me to think I can write a few more pages.
Perhaps Murakami’s novels themselves express that relationship between the mundane and the mysterious, his narrators rather unremarkable, even his prose somewhat flat, all contrasted against a moment when the surreal or the weird disrupts the routine and reveals a parallel world that might swallow up a character. In his novel Sputnik Sweetheart, for example, a woman on vacation finds herself stuck on a Ferris wheel. She can see her apartment, and using binoculars to look into her room, sees herself or someone exactly like her having sex with an unknown man. This external shock of an inexplicable world bifurcates her internally and leads to a sense of losing another self that she has just discovered.
Oneself as another, oneself as the other—perhaps one reason for my fascination with these manifestations of otherness is because of how much the creative process seems to be a relationship both to the puzzling, occasionally sublime world outside of ourselves and the haunting otherness inside ourselves. The primal scene of witnessing one’s own otherness can be traumatic, with the treatment of our others being sometimes vicious and violent, exploitative and murderous. But willfully accessing one’s otherness through something like a creative act possesses elements of joy, at least for me, even if that access can usually only be found through hard work, tedious routine, and a degree of pain. I acknowledge the pain, even if I resist romanticizing it, for the fetishized suffering of the individual male artist is not deserving of more attention than the pain of manual labor or of actual childbirth, which canonical art has usually treated as a minor theme.
The grand cliché of tortured artists struggling with the mystery of creation, of their own otherness, could be deflated by the possibility that writing on average is less painful, dramatic, and life-risking than laboring, whether that means toiling in fields or mines or enduring pregnancy and childbirth. A series of small clichés composes the romantic idea of the genius artist: the procrastination, the self-flagellation, the periodic reminders from agents and editors that writing is as much business as art, the constant inflation and deflation of the ego as writers veer between delusions of grandeur and paroxysms of despair. These clichés accumulate in their banality, but it is the pedestrian nature of writing—one step after the next, over and over—that allows access to those fleeting moments of joy found in the otherness of creation.
Reflecting on my parents, whose devotion to capitalism and Catholicism I rebelled against, I can see now, with the forgiving distance of time, far removed from the dim recesses of the SàiGòn Mới, that they were creative people. Entrepreneurs. Are founders of small businesses any less inspired than writers who publish in small magazines? The reverse is also true, that the contributions of such writers, their ability to access the joy of otherness through writing, is no less important than what capitalists accomplish. The creativity of my parents enabled my inventive urges, and their hard, arduous labor, grounded in the unglamorous and dangerous reality of a grocery store where they stood all day, made it possible for me to sit in a chair, gaze at a screen, and fiddle with my word count in between doses of social media.
The act of creativity, whether that of my parents or me, is carried out in the face of vast indifference. The monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, in Fragrant Palm Leaves, expressed something similar when he stood before the Vietnamese landscape: “The forest was so immense, we felt minuscule. I think we shouted to overcome our feeling of being utterly insignificant.” Shouting into the wilderness is what the act of creation can feel like, our human voices measured against the vast powers of the natural and mystical worlds. Even a fabled spiritual leader like Thích Nhất Hạnh needed to shout sometimes, not as an aberration from spiritual discipline but perhaps the periodic expression of it, as the occasional book from a writer expresses years of quiet and self-controlled labor.
I imagine a parallel exists between creative and religious discipline. The religious rely on the daily drills of rituals, texts, and prayers to remind themselves that God exists, with God and the divine being our human way of trying to understand the ultimate act of creation—how we and our world came into being. My parents prayed every day, and although I do not believe in their God, I am moved by the fact that when my mother died, she could still, despite her diminishment, recite the Lord’s Prayer with my father. Contemplating her passage into some other realm, I take comfort in Thích Nhất Hạnh’s words about his own mother’s death: “For the first four years after she died, I felt like an orphan. Then one night she came to me in a dream, and from that moment on, I no longer felt her death as a loss.” My mother has visited my brother in a dream, bringing him comfort, but she has never come to me, another mystery I do not understand.
Thích Nhất Hạnh continues about his mother: “I understood that she had never died, that my sorrow was based on illusion…She did not exist because of birth, nor cease to exist because of death. I saw that being and nonbeing are not separate. Being can exist only in relation to nonbeing, and nonbeing can exist only in relation to being. Nothing can cease to be.” I do not remember if I had read Thích Nhất Hạnh’s words before I wrote my first novel. But the conclusion of The Sympathizer also concerns nothing, when the narrator reflects on the famous slogan of Hồ Chí Minh: “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.”
Those words helped motivate a revolution that freed Việt Nam from foreign interference and unified a country, as well as forcing my parents to flee. Nearly thirty years later, I returned to a Sài Gòn of the early 2000s still struggling with economic inequality and some disillusionment with the promises of communism, where I heard a sarcastic, possibly bitter joke that I would then include in the novel’s conclusion: “What is more precious than independence and freedom? Nothing.”
Some readers interpreted the ending as nihilistic, but that is not correct. To take inspiration from Thích Nhất Hạnh, nothing only exists in relation to something, and vice versa. God is only one of the most obvious examples of a nothing that one portion of humanity has turned into something, an otherness that elicits sacrifice and murder, joy and suffering, love and hate. Unlike me, who saw nothing when it came to God, my mother and father could see something. And my father, now having forgotten almost everything, can still say the Lord’s Prayer. All one has to do is prompt him, and from somewhere deep inside the words emerge, unforgotten because of his life of discipline. I find it joyful to know that a deep well of otherness exists inside of him that I cannot detect, one that gives him life and hope.
I admire my father’s discipline, the relentlessness of it that delivers a believer to the final destination, which is a confrontation with one’s own otherness, carried out utterly in private and with that greater otherness that God symbolizes. I underestimated my father in some ways, as I grew in height and vanity until I was taller than he was, more fluent in English, more capable in the ways of the West and the canon of its high culture. And he was aware of my underestimation of him, as perhaps many parents know of their children’s misjudgment of them.
Once my father and I found ourselves sitting in my car running an errand, and he suddenly said to me, “Remember that time we went to France and you told the French border officer that I did not speak English?” That trip had happened a decade before, but my father had obviously waited for his opportunity to let me know he had held on to the slight. He then picked up a book I had with me, Lost in the City, a collection of short stories by Edward P. Jones, who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Known World. His short stories had moved me deeply and helped shape my own short story collection. My father read the opening paragraph of the first story, “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” one of my favorite short stories, and translated it for me.
The story is about Betsy Ann, the girl of the title, and her single father, Robert, who live together in Washington, DC, the setting for all the stories of Lost in the City. Jones paints a portrait of an intimate Black neighborhood of 1957, “in those days, before the community was obliterated” by the construction of a railroad over the next four years. Betsy Ann’s mother has died in childbirth. The doctors “cut open her stomach and pulled out the child only moments after Clara died, mother and daughter passing each other as if along a corridor, one into death, the other into life.” A lonely child, Betsy Ann turns to raising pigeons as an act of love and mothering. The family friend who gives her the first pigeons calls them his “babies,” with him as their “daddy.”
Betsy Ann’s relationship to her pigeons is likewise maternal, and “the idea of being on the roof with birds who wanted to fly away to be with someone else pained her.” Robert tries to protect Betsy Ann from the further mortal perils of life by checking the pigeon coop for dead pigeons before she wakes up each morning, but in the end, neither can protect the pigeons from an attack by rats that kills most of them. When the last of the surviving pigeons flies away at the end of the story, “She did nothing, aside from following him, with her eyes, with her heart, as far as she could.” The ending is poignant but perhaps carries a hint of joy, for flying away is as normal as can be, a move of life and independence that should be celebrated even as the break causes pain. When I graduated from high school and left for college, I was only joyful. I never looked back, perhaps fearful of being drawn back into my parents’ world, and I gave not a thought to what my mother and father might have felt. I only cared that I was at last free, unburdened, escaping from a house of claustrophobic love.
I suspect that in the end what my writing will uncover about my self, or my many selves, is that I am authentic only to my own inauthenticity.
“The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” explores the same territory of family cleaving, where cleaving brings people together and cleaving also splits them apart. The story is clearly about the natural cycle of birth and death, of parenting and letting go, drawing parallels between Robert’s love for Betsy Ann and her love for her pigeons. While the killing of the pigeons and the death of Betsy Ann’s mother are tragic, they are also part of this natural cycle. The railroad’s destruction of the Black community, however, is not natural but is an outcome of a racial order that marginalizes and devalues Black life and love. Even in foregrounding the creeping sense of otherness between Robert and Betsy Ann, who gradually pulls away from her father as she grows up, Edward P. Jones is careful to show how the larger forces of otherness that have damaged and shaped Black life continue in their malevolence.
He does so with a light touch, despite the gravity of how white-dominated urban policy has shattered Black communities in many American cities. That light touch is also evident in the opening passage that my father pointed to as we sat in the car, slightly tense in our father-son relationship: Betsy Ann’s “father would say years later that she had dreamed that part of it, that she had never gone out through the kitchen window at two or three in the morning to visit the birds. By that time in his life he would have so many notions about himself set in concrete. And having always believed that he slept lightly, he would not want to think that a girl of nine or ten could walk by him at such an hour in the night without his waking and asking of the dark, Who is it? What’s the matter?”
Betsy Ann is my son’s age now. At nine or ten, she learned to tiptoe past her protective father, as my son may yet learn to deceive me, as I myself snuck out of my parents’ home as a teenager while they slept, all of us pigeons yearning to fly the coop, buoyant and weightless, at least until death. “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” moved me through the way it evokes the intimacy of the relationship between parent and child, the father’s tenderness and the way it was unspoken, which reminds me very much of the way my parents interacted with me. There is estrangement in the father and daughter’s apartment, however, the sense that they each have parts of themselves that the other will never know. That sense of otherness between loved ones may be infused with sadness and melancholy, but perhaps also some joy at the possibility of discovering ever additional layers within others and oneself, until at last one reaches a truth about oneself.
For me, that search has unfolded through two forms of creativity. One form is as a father who reproduced himself in his children, an act both unsurprising and always surprising. I do not mean to be sentimental about this reproduction. Everybody has been a child, but not everybody should be a parent. Not everyone is equipped to deal with the otherness of children, and I may yet fail, a prospect that worries me as much as the possibility of my own potential failure as a writer. The other form of creation that has compelled me to look within myself is writing. As Edwidge Danticat has put it, reflecting on her art as a writer, “I exploit no one more than myself.” Self-exploitation, self-exploration—both are crucial to the act of writing, which I think always involves a confrontation with one’s self, even if one writes about others.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his Norton Lectures, This Craft of Verse, had this to say: “I have toyed with an idea—the idea that although a man’s life is compounded of thousands and thousands of moments and days, those many instants and those many days may be reduced to a single one: the moment when a man knows who he is, when he sees himself face to face.” I do not know if Borges ever found himself face to face with himself, and I do not know if I have seen my genuine, authentic face either, even though I have looked at myself often, in the mirror and in my writing. Suspicious of authenticity—having been accused of being inauthentic many times—I suspect that in the end what my writing will uncover about my self, or my many selves, is that I am authentic only to my own inauthenticity.
The poet Theodore Roethke put his relationship of author to self another way in one of his poems, where he wrote:
Being myself, I sing
The soul’s immediate joy.
In my case, that is the joy of otherness, an awareness that even seeing oneself face to face means that the very notion of otherness is present.
__________________________________
From To Save and To Destroy: Writing As An Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Copyright © 2025. Available from Harvard University Press.
