Phong Nguyen is a writer and teacher of fiction. His most recent work, "Bronze Drum" (2022) is a historical fiction novel exploring two warrior sisters in ancient Vietnam. Nguyen has also produced work in experimental fiction ("Roundabout: an Improvisational Fiction"), spinoffs ("The Adventures of Joe Harper"), alternate history ("Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History"), and dirty realism ("Memory Sickness") among others. Nguyen is also a professor and Miller Family Endowed Chair of Writing at the University of Missouri. The following interview is between Phong Nguyen (PN) and the 2023 Head Editors of Kiln: Nick Quay (NQ) and Amanda VanNierop (AV).
AV: Bronze Drum is your newest release—the story of two warrier sisters in ancient Vietnam. What inspired you to write about this historical period?
PN: It’s a story that I’ve always wanted to write about, since I was young. It’s a story that I grew up with. My father would tell me various stories when I was young, and it wasn’t specifically to impart Vietnamese culture, they were just the stories he was interested in. And one of those stories was the story of the drum sisters. It was part of my personal canon of stories, you know, the kind you grow up with that your parents tell you. Nobody I knew at school knew who [the sisters] were… When I went to college, none of my professors knew who they were… I found it very clear that I would need to write the story myself if I wanted to read that story. It took me quite a long time to feel prepared to write that story. I’ve written four books before this and two of those are novels, but the scope of [Bronze Drum] is much larger, the canvas is much larger. And so it took me longer to feel up to the task of telling the story.
NQ: Throughout the story, the bronze drums symbolize the Vietnamese pride and culture that were silenced by the Han. If we were to extend the metaphor, what might these drums symbolize today?
PN: [The drums] are still around. They’re still discovered and they represent this history. Archeologists will find them buried or in remote places in Northern Vietnam, and [the drums] do represent the pride of the Viet people and the history of the Viet people. They represent a time which was very different and pre-Confucian in terms of influence. Right now, modern day Vietnam is still very influenced by Confucianism and centuries of Chinese rule. I’d say [the drums] still continue to represent the pride of Viet people, but they also represent their history.
AV: You’ve said in previous interviews that you’re more of a storyteller than a historian. How do you balance that line between preserving historical facts and what would make a good story?
PN: So, I thrive on research. I enjoy research. I’m stimulated in particular by historical research, so it’s inevitable that that is going to find its way into my work. That being said, as a storyteller, when I come to write, my allegiance is always to what makes a good story. And so that means I will depart from the historical count or the national myth from Vietnam (which themselves are different from each other) in order to tell the story that I want to tell and to produce the effects in the reader that I want to produce.
AV: Do you receive a lot of criticism from historians then in regards to that type of writing?
PN: I work closely with historians to write the book, and I think historians understand there’s a difference between what they do, which is history, and what I do, which is writing novels. I think the confusion comes more from readers who see historical fiction and have a certain unfounded expectation. Most writers of historical fiction are not trying to give an accurate historical record, but are trying to tell a good story with the context of history. In this case, I didn’t feel that I was doing an injustice to history because I am opening up a dialogue and a conversation about these sisters and this moment in history that is not widely known in the West. My hope is not that this becomes a definitive version of that, but that this starts a conversation in which people have varying perspectives and opinions and ideas about the Trung sisters.
AV: At the end of the day, I feel that’s what literature should be doing in the first place—starting that dialogue.
PN: That’s right.
NQ: How do you feel the different characters' ideals of peace affect the overall message of the story?
PN: That’s a good question. I’ll push back on the idea of the “overall message” of the story, because I feel there are multiple things that one could take from the book. There’s a note at the beginning of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain that says, “You can’t find a moral in it, you can’t find a plot in it, because there are many morals and many plots and so on…” That’s not how he puts it [laughter], but that’s paraphrasing. I think that one thing that was a challenge for me as a writer is that I believe very much in advocating for peace, yet this is a story of war—a story of a war that becomes necessary in order to get rid of the oppressive rule of an empire. It becomes more about how they lived and why they wanted to preserve the way that they lived. In the end, it becomes more about what is preserved and what endures, and about forgiveness as well.
NQ: Additionally, how do you think the transition from war to peace affects a culture in the years following?
PN: In the context of the book, they didn’t have much time for peace. There is only about two years of peace before an army is sent to quell the revolution. In their case, the transition and their failure at fending off the second invasion had to do with not shoring up allies. There’s a lot of relevance to what’s going on today in terms of the turmoil that we’re experiencing within the United States and the necessity of fighting for the things we believe in as opposed to simply… My generation grew up with a much softer version of political activism, and I think the reason for that is it wasn’t as dire of a moment. We’re in a more dire moment that requires a greater ferocity or more anger to translate that anger into momentum and activism. Hopefully it’s not to the scale of fighting on a battlefield like they are in the book, but that kind of anger and reclaiming one’s rights when a government or institution has taken them away—it becomes imperative that that softer approach isn’t going to yield any results or change.
AV: We’re currently in the process of developing a theme for the magazine this year, and one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot, especially coming off of the pandemic, is the role that art and literature plays in the world. As a writer, what role do you believe literature plays? If it plays a part at all?
PN: I have a rather hopeful and ambitious view of what literature can do, and I don’t know the degree to which that view is informed by the fact that that is what I do, so I think of it as more important than it is. I go back and forth: sometimes I think what we do is humble and passive entertainment, and then at other times I think of examples in history when literature has had tremendous influence on the shape of society’s thought. You’ll hear this a lot from writers about the power of empathy and the ability to think outside of your narrow categories of identity and imagine yourself as some other character for the duration of a story. I think that’s a powerful phenomenon. Whether or not it has that global influence or not, it’s good to wield that power as though it has that kind of influence.
AV: It’s enough to play that role yourself.
PN: Yeah, because if you don’t, you’re sort of wielding a weapon without the proper training to make sure you’re wielding it safely. It’s almost counterintuitive, because it could be paralyzing as a writer to say, “This is important.” But I think it’s useful to have that view because it allows you to think through the dimensions of the book or story that you’re telling that you could otherwise be ignoring.
AV: Not so much, “It’s my sole job to save the world,” but instead, “The work that I’m doing is important.”
PN: Or if it is or if it isn’t, it’s useful to believe that.
NQ: What was the process of putting your mind inside the characters in order to write the story?
PN: That question is put well because it was and always is for me a matter of inhabiting characters and trying to see them from within. For me, the process was very much about their siblinghood—about these two sisters and their relationship to one another. Their closeness and the distance created by their differences establishes who they are in their relation to one another and in their relation to the world. I always find it fascinating how, with our siblings, we always define ourselves against them; we say, “You’re the academic one, so I’m the creative one,” etc. And yet, we share a background, DNA, and a whole host of similarities. I read a passage that said that Trung Trắc was more skilled in military strategy and Trưng Nhị was more of a warriar, and so for me that implied other differences. Inhabiting them was imagining them as individuals but also imagining them in the dyad of the twin sisters.
AV: As a professor of creative writing, is the process you go through with developing a student’s work different from your personal process?
PN: I feel that the writing process is highly individual, so I hesitate to take my template and say, “Do this.” I’ve been teaching for 20 years and I’ve seen so many different ways of learning and writing that are all successful. Even something as basic and fundamental as “write every day.” I know authors who are extremely skilled and successful who don’t write every day—it’s not part of their practice. Even the most obvious things have counterexamples. I don’t try to dictate how students write, so much as get them to broaden their aesthetic range and horizons. I find that more useful towards creating writers who are making deliberate choices as opposed to just working according to some default mode. That’s more important than being directive of the way that they write. If [formulas] are useful, I don’t discourage it, but at the same time, trying to wedge all my stories into a particular form is not useful for me.
AV: You have written a variety of forms and genres. What has been the most challenging?
PN: What I’m doing now is the most challenging [laughter]. And what I’m doing now is writing a book based on real events of my life and my family’s history. That is a challenge because I’m representing people that I know. If you’re trying to convey the presence of a person, you’re going to fail at that—people just have such a presence, and it’s this ineffable sense of certain people bringing with them a certain kind of comfort or energy. Those things are so elusive, so I’m finding this to be the hardest project I’ve ever worked on. But I’m comfortable doing departures—each book being different from what came before it. That’s what excites me about a project. This one is exciting and scary.