Norton Lecture Series: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ‘On Crossing Borders’

On the frigid night of Feb. 20, Sanders Theater buzzed with excitement, seats creaking with attendees of all ages. A reverent hush fell upon the audience as Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen took the stage for his fourth Norton Lecture, titled “On Crossing Borders.” Nguyen approached the podium with visible excitement.

“Norton Lecture number four!” he exclaimed. As his voice echoed across the expansive, darkened theater, Nguyen’s deeply compelling narratives and humorous interjections still resonated and engaged the audience in his stories.

Indeed, Jesse McCarthy’s effusive introduction praised Nguyen’s engaging, intricately woven pedagogical and personal lectures. “The experience of each requires the integrity of the performance,” he said.

Nguyen began with a series of lighthearted anecdotes about his father’s love for filet mignon and enthusiasm for French wine. He chronicled his father’s more somber border crossings: leaving his “childhood home” for southern Vietnam after the partition, immigrating to America, and recently passing away. These familial connections bookended Nguyen’s lecture, creating a searing emotional thread between Nguyen’s personal histories and broader literary and political questions.

Nguyen began his thought-provoking case for resisting realism and representing immigrant justice with a reflection on these familial ties.

“Does my father’s journey away from home and back to it, a half century later, deserve the name of an epic? If not, what form should my father’s story take?” Nguyen asked.

Nguyen first drew upon writer Amitava Kumar’s criticism for how certain border-crossers are often “praised” as “heroic.” He discussed how each individual’s story became interwoven with the cultural narratives that laud these travelers. With his astute commentary, he explored tensions within migrant identity: Celebrated by residents of their home countries, refugees may feel the need to simultaneously participate in national narratives of the host country’s conquest and support their community back home.

With a humorous, self-aware aside about his own struggles with short stories, Nguyen discussed the protagonist of author Jhumpa Lahiri’s story, “The Third and Final Continent,” as an example of the heroic migrant who participates in the “shadow-free national epic” of hospitality towards border-crossers. Leaning into the discomfort of reflecting on his father’s death, Nguyen meditated upon how Lahiri’s protagonist imagines “migration as an experience of death.” Faced with the “incomprehensibility of death,” Nguyen discussed realist literature’s insular inadequacy in the face of something so unimaginable. Thus, for Nguyen, understanding migrant mortality allows us to push against the “linear optimism of American myth-making” which celebrates the heroic migrant.

Harvard Kennedy School student Aliza Amin, who taught Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent” as a teaching fellow for Kelly Mee Rich’s Global Fictions course last semester, found Nguyen’s remarks on the story novel and incisive.

“He picked up on something I did not think about before, which was the idea of the migrant participating in the conquest of America by affirming it as life-giving,” said Amin. “It really challenged my reading of not just Jhumpa Lahiri, but thinking about how migrants also participate in nation building.”

On conventional realism, Nguyen said: “Can realism show me what whirls inside my father’s head?” Nguyen thus refused realism’s insistence on the reassuring, “knowable other” which does not threaten the Western nation’s narrative of innocence. Instead, he opts for a representation of the migrant as an “unknowable other” that ruptures nationalism and its ideals.

Faced with this formal dilemma, Nguyen concluded with thoughts on literary innovation and hope for alternative forms of refugee representation.

“My sense that realist linearity might not be sufficient in telling all the stories of migrants, border crossers, and my father led me to writers who have dealt with memory by foregrounding the act of remembering itself.”

According to Nguyen, authors like Gloria Anzaldúa, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Behrouz Boochani exemplify this generic transcendence, as he invites the audience to explore their works on borders.

Nguyen eloquently nodded to the inventive ”migration surrealism” of his interlocutor, poet Ken Chen, as it combats the enormity of “sublime trauma.” Nguyen described the horror of this conflict in relation to colonialism.

“The absolute terror of colonialism which is too gargantuan to be represented, words whose monument deforms our mouths as we speak them, events too much to even bear glimpsing,” he said.

His closing remarks reiterated his faith in refugee writers to reclaim their subjectivity by crossing genres and resisting nationalist and realist models.

For Harvard Kennedy School student Ivana Tú Nhi Giang, simply seeing her former professor Viet Thanh Nguyen as a Norton lecturer was a powerful and necessary representation of refugee stories.

“It's cool that he's been recognized by Harvard and by so many other outlets. Just the reality of having a Vietnamese American person give these lectures in Sanders Theater at Harvard is really powerful, just like it was for me as an undergrad to take a class with a Vietnamese American professor,” she said. “It's just really special.”

Indeed, with this intimate and impactful fourth lecture, Nguyen has built upon the corpus of his lucid Norton Lecture series by suggesting — and exemplifying — more empowering and evocative modes of representation for refugee experiences.

—Staff writer Emma E. Chan can be reached at emma.chan@thecrimson.com.