I used to think it was my re-memory, you know, some things you forget, other things you

never do, but it's not. Places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone. But the

place, the picture of it stays. And not just in my re-memory, but out there in the world.

What I remember is a picture of floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't

think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did or knew or saw is still out there. Tony Morrison,

11.

My own memories began very concretely in a refugee camp a few weeks after the fall of

Saigon. We were actually boat lifted out of Saigon, and then airlifted from Guam to Pennsylvania,

and ended up, you know, in a military base for Indian town gap in Harrisburg. And that's

where my memories begin.

Viet Tonwyn was four years old when his family escaped from the Vietnam War, boat lifted out of

Vietnam, then airlifted to a new life in the United States. The war fundamentally defined

his life. Even though his memories of it are hazy. Before the end of the war, all I remember

because I was four years old are just these fragmentary images, which I don't even know what

they really happened. For example, being on a boat and seeing sailors shooting at a smaller

boat approaching us. My brother, who was seven years old, has never happened. So I have

to trust that his memory is right, and my memory is wrong.

He has to trust it, even though what his brother says contradicts Viet's own memories. And

that tension has animated his writing.

I'm a professor, a scholar, and a writer of fiction and nonfiction, probably best known

for my novel, The Simplifyzer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016, as well

as its sequel, The Committed Collection of Short Stories, called The Refugees, and a

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