Writing, for me, can come in fits and spurts. It’s a bad habit, generally, to be undisciplined in my chosen craft like this, but that’s how it goes.
In my less productive moments, I try to at least read, just so I don’t feel like I’m losing the spirit altogether. (In my least productive moments, it’s probably web browsing, which is still plenty of reading but not exactly the kind I would like to do.) This week, I finished Viet Thanh Nguyen’s To Save and to Destroy, a series of Norton lectures done at Harvard University in 2023. The subtitle for this collection is Writing as an Other, the other meaning a whole host of similar definitions, but for Viet, applying specifically to his background as an immigrant to the United States from South Vietnam.
My perspective, as an American whose family has lived here for generations, is not as an other. Far from it, really. In that sense, I greatly appreciated reading his perspective. In one essay, he mentions that the best kind of writing is done with a voice that assumes its audience could understand what was being said completely.
He says, “I am not a minority if I think of myself as being part of a world, a globe…if, when I am writing, I write first of all to myself, because I contain multitudes. And I am not a minority if I write to Vietnamese people. Everyone else can listen in.”
I read this during a time of relative conflict between how I could fit writing and music in with my increasingly busy day-to-day life. As such, I found reading this work to be encouraging, really, to encourage me to continue shaping and honing my own voice and my own perspective within my work. That is probably a little self-centered, but it’s the truth, I suppose. But I think beyond that, this was a detailed and insightful read about writing, about reading, about the cross-cultural relationships formed in relation to perception, and the deep effect it can have on peoples’ lives. I’d recommend reading it if you can find it.
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