In this episode, we discuss the life and legacy of Nguyễn Quí Đức. Born in Da Lat, Vietnam in 1958, Đức arrived in the United States at 17 as a refugee of the Vietnam War. He would go on to become a journalist, translator, writer, and radio producer, working for the BBC in London, KALW-FM in San Francisco, and for NPR. He was the host of Pacific Time, KQED-FM Public Radio’s national program on Asian and Asian American life.
In addition to his journalistic work, Đức also published the hugely influential family memoir Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family in 1994. Đức’s National Public Radio series on Vietnam won the Citation of Excellence from the Overseas Press Club of America. In 2006, he received the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for his contributions to journalism.
For this episode, we are joined by two writers who knew Đức personally and who co-founded the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is a writer, professor, and Executive Director of DVAN. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a writer, professor, and Pulitzer Prize winner. Learn more about them in the episode description below. Pelaud and Nguyen, along with Lan P. Duong, edited the recent collection The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora, released in April 2025.
Isabelle and Viet are interviewed by Nate King, Content & Exhibits Manager at the American Writers Museum. This conversation originally took place May 20, 2025 and was recorded over Zoom.
About our guests:
ISABELLE THUY PELAUD is Professor in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and co-Director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). She is the author of This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (2011) and the co-editor of the award winning Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora (2014). Pelaud was also featured in the latest issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly 78: The Make Believers.
VIET THANH NGUYEN is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, Nothing Ever Dies, and, most recently, To Save and to Destroy. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen is Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.