Nguyen Ngoc Ngan cast up on a beach as his family drowned. He began writing fiction on the spot.
Fleeing Viet Nam made him a writer. Writing in Vietnamese rather than English made him an author about life rather than about Viet Nam.
He hosted not only the nightclub show Paris By Night for decades but also the thousands of video hearths families have gathered around inside and out Viet Nam.
He lives, as I do, as many literary and scholarly and scientific people do, out of easy reach of any one Vietnamese community. Some communities have reached out at his books,
whose sale supported his publisher and all the Vietnamese-language booksellers among the dispersed. The haters said he was an antenna,
an informant to the Communists. That is what they say about anyone who succeeds. The Communists think that any of us who do intellectual work around Viet Nam
are with the Central Intelligence Agency, who threw a serious scare into them by almost winning the war by a campaign of extermination. Look, in our thing, if no one has called you some kind of spy you aren't doing your job.
Pay no attention to any of that bullshit. Please do watch as I read, slowly, many times, over months maybe years my favorite work of art sometimes,
one weird anti-Communist novel, about how a refugee goes back over there and raises havoc because he has so few morals he does not even grasp that he is wicked.
Don Quixote, you could say, as asshole. A Graham Greene novel in Vietnamese, Catholic like that one, funnier, more horrible and wise.
Please consider demonstrating your attention by signing up to these Viet Nam letters from free. About 20 people have since we launched in February.
I am thrilled. Think of it as 20 attending 3 lectures a week. Twice as many as I taught Vietnamese literature to at Yale when I didn't know a thing.
2 hundred, as I lectured to on general anthropology at Chapel Hill, would be as much as I need. Please consider patronizing the others at $50/year.
Please consider subsidizing the whole circus at $250/year. We now run at less than half of what the Internal Revenue Service of the United States considers a small non-profit.
All that now is the cost of employing me. I did this work 30 years without salary or budgets. That left a trail of wreckage and nearly killed me a few times.
So now I am making it pay, one step at a time. Once we have me covered we will give me a budget to contract other work. Why, you may wonder, don't I just start calling
my vast list of lifelong friends who could fund it all without noticing. Well, because for instance I don't know Ngan and think he might not think much of me,
as half his community thinks poorly of him. That's what Viet Nam is, a occasion of visceral disagreement. I am the one who can handle that.
Why I get the big bucks. Why I will not put any of my friends on the hook for supporting, say, my good friend and close colleague the Vietnamese poet who has become a vocal anti-Semite.
I want readers, who are no more responsible for the editor or the authors than they are for what is on the news. So, if you read, you are doing what is needful.
If you will also support all readers well then thank you very much. Please give it some thought. No hurry. The inner circle are bankrolling this one sharing my hopes to expand.
Since we give you nothing in exchange we are not already giving everyone, the American war machine supports your charity by encouraging you to deduct any gift from your income before tax.
Promotional copy:
Nguyen Ngoc Ngan cast up on a beach as his family drowned. He began writing fiction on the spot.
Fleeing Viet Nam made him a writer. Writing in Vietnamese rather than English made him an author about life rather than about Viet Nam.
He hosted not only the nightclub show Paris By Night for decades but also the thousands of video hearths families have gathered around inside and out Viet Nam.
He lives, as I do, as many literary and scholarly and scientific people do, out of easy reach of any one Vietnamese community. Some communities have reached out at his books,
whose sale supported his publisher and all the Vietnamese-language booksellers among the dispersed. The haters said he was an antenna,
an informant to the Communists. That is what they say about anyone who succeeds. The Communists think that any of us who do intellectual work around Viet Nam
are with the Central Intelligence Agency, who threw a serious scare into them by almost winning the war by a campaign of extermination. Look, in our thing, if no one has called you some kind of spy you aren't doing your job.
Pay no attention to any of that bullshit. Please do watch as I read, slowly, many times, over months maybe years my favorite work of art sometimes,
one weird anti-Communist novel, about how a refugee goes back over there and raises havoc because he has so few morals he does not even grasp that he is wicked.
Don Quixote, you could say, as asshole. A Graham Greene novel in Vietnamese, Catholic like that one, funnier, more horrible and wise.
Please consider demonstrating your attention by signing up to these Viet Nam letters from free. About 20 people have since we launched in February.
I am thrilled. Think of it as 20 attending 3 lectures a week. Twice as many as I taught Vietnamese literature to at Yale when I didn't know a thing.
2 hundred, as I lectured to on general anthropology at Chapel Hill, would be as much as I need. Please consider patronizing the others at $50/year.
Please consider subsidizing the whole circus at $250/year. We now run at less than half of what the Internal Revenue Service of the United States considers a small non-profit.
All that now is the cost of employing me. I did this work 30 years without salary or budgets. That left a trail of wreckage and nearly killed me a few times.
So now I am making it pay, one step at a time. Once we have me covered we will give me a budget to contract other work. Why, you may wonder, don't I just start calling
my vast list of lifelong friends who could fund it all without noticing. Well, because for instance I don't know Ngan and think he might not think much of me,
as half his community thinks poorly of him. That's what Viet Nam is, a occasion of visceral disagreement. I am the one who can handle that.
Why I get the big bucks. Why I will not put any of my friends on the hook for supporting, say, my good friend and close colleague the Vietnamese poet who has become a vocal anti-Semite.
I want readers, who are no more responsible for the editor or the authors than they are for what is on the news. So, if you read, you are doing what is needful.
If you will also support all readers well then thank you very much. Please give it some thought. No hurry. The inner circle are bankrolling this one sharing my hopes to expand.
Since we give you nothing in exchange we are not already giving everyone, the American war machine supports your charity by encouraging you to deduct any gift from your income before tax.