What’s it like to be a refugee in this election cycle? Pulitzer winner shares thoughts at SLCC

Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks with students at Salt Lake Community College on Sept. 25, 2024 (Courtesy of Salt Lake Community College)

In a highly polarizing election year, migration and displacement has been one of the most hotly debated points among candidates and voters. The result is often a whirlwind of attacks to certain groups that could be labeled as “other.”  

But this isn’t new. It’s a pattern, said Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen in his visit to Salt Lake Community College. Depending on the times, he said, generations find ways to demonize marginalized groups every presidential cycle. It’s often a racial population, outsiders, or sexual minorities. 

“That for some part of the American population, demonization and demagoguery will always be, unfortunately, effective political strategies,” Nguyen said.

A predominant case this year is centered in Springfield, Ohio, a city that has drawn the attention of the nation after unsubstantiated claims from former President Donald Trump and his running mate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance about the Haitian community there eating domestic animals. As the group waits for the national attention to erode, some feel threatened, and some even hope to leave the city, according to Ohio Capital Journal. 

However, some have spoken about their heritage and their identity, an action that could potentially lead to change.

Nguyen visited the college in Salt Lake City to speak on “contested spaces,” or to “speak without apology, which means contesting other people’s assumptions,” and about how important it is for refugees and other marginalized populations to assert themselves and to take control of their own narratives and stories.

“If we don’t control our own narratives and our own stories, narratives and stories will be made up about us, and we will always, always, always be, at worst, negative, and at best, patronizing,” Nguyen said.

In the case of Haitian immigrants in the country, while Nguyen understands how sometimes leaving may be the best policy for some who find hostilities in their new homes, retreating from the conversation is “a very limited strategy.”

Some Haitian Americans, immigrants or refugees are staying and defending themselves, he said, which is also an effective and necessary strategy. 

“If we look at our American society, any kind of civil rights and protection that we have, if we belong to some kind of marginalized or minoritized population, has never come about from retreat,” he said. “It has always come about from political and social struggles that some other group and some other generation has done, from which we benefit.” 

Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam and wrote the novel “The Sympathizer,” has based much of his work on the experience of those who have been displaced. It’s a topic he knows well. He arrived in the U.S. as a refugee in 1975 with his family, according to his website. 

“I do think of myself in the past and present tense as a refugee,” he said. “I think for a lot of refugees, even if we’re no longer technically, legally refugees, the harshness of the refugee experience has never left many of us.”

Nguyen’s visit also comes almost three months after a new law took effect restricting diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Utah public institutions — including Salt Lake Community College, where about 39% of students in the fall of 2023 reported they were non-white, according to data from the Utah System of Higher Education.

Issues related to DEI are going to be important not only for the education of students of color, but for their existence, Nguyen said. 

As anti-DEI law takes effect, students and staffers share ‘great sense of loss’

Though the sponsors of the bill that made the DEI restrictions possible said their intent is to provide equal opportunities to all students, the concern against diversity programs fits into the “culture wars” category, something that Nguyen said has been witnessed since the beginnings of American society.

“The attacks against DEI are rhetorically being configured as intellectual attacks,” he said. “But in fact, they are a part of a long tradition of racist suppression of anybody who doesn’t appear to be white and male and straight and Christian.”

Students lined up for about an hour after the author spoke. Many talked with him about being first-generation students and their relationships with their families as he signed their books. 

Ana Belen Gonzalez Sosa, who is studying biochemistry at SLCC, read about Nguyen as part of her American identity class. As a daughter of Mexican immigrants, she often feels like both an insider and an outsider in the U.S. and in her visits to Mexico, so the author’s message resonated with her.

“I love how, throughout his readings and his writings he always says to create your own home, your own identity, your own community,” Gonzalez Sosa said, “and the ways that you’re not alone, because you are yourself, and you can always find your resources in your community.”