Viet Thanh Nguyen: “A Disturbing Book Changed My Life”
“Book banning” is not new, but in the past year or so, challenges to books have popped up in headlines with more frequency. The latest, of course, is a school board in Tennessee removing Maus by Art Spiegelman from classrooms. But let’s see…we also have school district north of Seattle removing To Kill a Mockingbird from its required reading list and a mom in Texas has a fixation with a passing reference to anal sex in Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author of the Pulitzer-winning The Sympathizer, contributed an Opinion piece titled “A Disturbing Book Changed My Life” to Sunday’s New York Times. He starts out describing the book Close Quarters by Larry Heinemann and how its themes affected him.
“As a Vietnamese American teenager, [the book’s portrayal of Vietnamese people] was horrifying for me … [but] I didn’t complain to the library or petition the librarians to take the book off the shelves…Instead, years later, I wrote my own novel about the same war, ‘The Sympathizer.’”
I’m going to employ some really rudimentary classifications here, but I sense that “the left” seems to think it’s always “the right” who are upset about books. Not so. The author is quick to point out that “Book banning doesn’t fit neatly into the rubrics of left and right politics.” That school district that’s removing TKAMB from its 9th grade required reading list is doing so partly because of racist tropes. In this case, it would seem that it’s “the left” that wants to separate a book from go-to, must-read status.
“By banning books, we also ban difficult dialogues and disagreements, which children are perfectly capable of having and which are crucial to democracy,” writes Nguyen. Here’s the great thing about books: They do so much more for idea-exploration than scrolling (and sharing) the meme-heavy tone of much of contemporary discourse. (Like, for instance, is removing a book from a reading list different than removing it from the library? What’s the difference between a “ban” and a “challenge”? Discuss!)
PS: This is one of the most thorough essays I’ve read about the topic. Read it here.
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