This is Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos.

When the writer Viet Tanwen's first novel, The Sympathizer, was published in 2015.

It was an explosive hit. The novel was a quick bestseller. It won the Pulitzer Prize for

fiction, which is rare for a debut novel. It was a book of the year almost everywhere.

And Viet went from a little-known professor at the University of Southern California to a public

figure. That meant that Viet's criticism of American culture became really public, too.

The sympathizer is a spy story and an immigrant story. It follows its main character

from Vietnam to the U.S. at the end of the Vietnam War, and like Viet, his protagonist is very

wary of how the war is misunderstood in America. This spring, the Sympathizer has gotten an even

bigger audience because it was recently released as an HBO miniseries directed by the Korean filmmaker Park Chan Wook.

And all of this comes just a few months after Viet published his memoir, a man of two faces, which is about his own experience growing up in America as a refugee.

Viet is with us today speaking from his home in

Pasadena, California. Viet, hi. I'm so happy to have you on the show. Hi, Lila. Great to be back

here with you. Great to have you. I will start by telling listeners that you and I have met before.

We met a few months ago at a restaurant near your home because I was writing a feature about you

for lunch with the FT, one of the FT's famous weekly traditions.

It's nice to see you again.

I think when it came out, you were offended that I wrote that you were wearing a dad's sweater.

Yes, that was pretty offensive, actually.

And the other footnote to this is I saw my friend in London,

and he showed his hard copy of the interview in Financial Times, and he said, wow, you chose a

really cheap restaurant to have lunch in. Apparently, I could have splurged, and I had no idea.

...