‘On the Joy of Otherness’

This year, as with every passing year, I cannot help but hear the distant rumble of “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” My beloved, beautiful four-year-old daughter heralded this chariot, not long ago. Over dinner, she smiled at me with her eyes lit up, then leaned close and said, “Daddy, you’re old. You’re going to die soon. I love you. Will there be a funeral?”

She probably will not remember these words. But I will, because they touch on…the lightest and the heaviest subject: the joy of otherness. This topic of joy is heavy, because I am a pessimist. And when it comes to otherness, the associations are often gloomy, revolving around victimization and marginalization or trauma and erasure, all subjects in which I revel. But it is no wonder that some who are othered would rather feel joy than pain. They simply yearn to be human, although humanity itself comes with a heaviness inherent.

[When I first] attempted to become a writer, grappling with Very Serious Subjects and Very Important Literature, otherness was a major concern, but it was the alterity of sociological, political, historical categories: race, class, gender, nationality, and so on. What I had not grappled with was the otherness of those who had been right next to me from my origins, my mother and father, my older brother, my oldest sister, whom we had left behind in Việt Nam at the end of war, where, in the aftermath, the victors dispatched her to labor on a youth brigade to rebuild the country, a fate that could have been mine.

Perhaps partly because of this fear of understanding my siblings and my own parents, I had no desire to be a parent, to test myself with children and my own family as my parents had been tested by me and my siblings. Writing was the only creative act that interested me, not fathering, and so when I learned that my first child was due to arrive—I panicked. My life, as I knew it, was over, and it hardly seemed fair, for I had not yet finished my novel. But my son’s impending birth focused me, and I completed the [first] draft a few days before his birth. For the next few months, I revised the novel at night while this strange new being slept, so small and light, yet so heavy on my conscience and my soul.

He lay swaddled and immobilized on the futon in his mother’s office while I sat at her desk, keeping an eye on Little Oedipus as I wrestled with sentences, word choices, rhythms. Anytime my heir stirred, which was often, I stuck a bottle of formula in his mouth, a story over which he now chortles. I rewrote and kept vigil until three in the morning. Then it was my turn to sip on my formula—single malt Scotch—until five in the morning, when his mother took over. So it was that we fattened our son and kept him alive.

My infant son was my other, perhaps still is an other to me in a wondrous way, as I must be some looming other to my daughter, intimate and yet incomprehensible. I think I know my son very well, but perhaps I do not know him at all. And why would I want to know him, or my daughter, completely? It is impossible that they would know me absolutely. The reserve of our own mystery to ourselves and to our closest others is a source of consternation, but also, potentially, joy.

Becoming a father frightened me more than anything, including writing, which caused me much anguish that I willingly embraced. Writing, like God, is an incomprehensible other that can inspire as much as torment. Writing requires faith as well as a willingness to abide mystery, the unknown source from where creativity emerges. Still, much of creativity springs not from magic or mystique but from dull discipline, as in Haruki Murakami’s idea that writing is mostly a matter of routine, even punishment, until it is not. In his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami compares writing to running, particularly marathons, including the original marathon route in Greece, and even running an ultramarathon of sixty-two miles. I run a few miles on a treadmill in my basement next to the washing machine and dryer, watching instructors on my phone exhort me to reach my goal with clichés so trite I would be appalled to write them. Nevertheless, the exhortations work, encouraging me to run a few more miles, which inspires me to think I can write a few more pages.

I suspect that in the end what my writing will uncover about my self, or my many selves, is that I am authentic only to my own inauthenticity.

Perhaps Murakami’s novels themselves express that relationship between the mundane and the mysterious, his narrators rather unremarkable, even his prose somewhat flat, all contrasted against a moment when the surreal or the weird disrupts the routine and reveals a parallel world that might swallow up a character. In his novel Sputnik Sweetheart, for example, a woman on vacation finds herself stuck on a Ferris wheel. She can see her apartment, and using binoculars to look into her room, sees herself or someone exactly like her having sex with an unknown man. This external shock of an inexplicable world bifurcates her internally and leads to a sense of losing another self that she has just discovered.

Oneself as another, oneself as the other—perhaps one reason for my fascination with these manifestations of otherness is because of how much the creative process seems to be a relationship both to the puzzling, occasionally sublime world outside of ourselves and the haunting otherness inside ourselves. The primal scene of witnessing one’s own otherness can be traumatic, with the treatment of our others being sometimes vicious and violent, exploitative and murderous. But willfully accessing one’s otherness through something like a creative act possesses elements of joy, at least for me, even if that access can usually only be found through hard work, tedious routine, and a degree of pain. I acknowledge the pain, even if I resist romanticizing it, for the fetishized suffering of the individual male artist is not deserving of more attention than the pain of manual labor or of actual childbirth, which canonical art has usually treated as a minor theme.

Reflecting on my parents, whose devotion to capitalism and Catholicism I rebelled against, I can see now, with the forgiving distance of time, far removed from the dim recesses of the SàiGòn Mới, that they were creative people. Entrepreneurs. Are founders of small businesses any less inspired than writers who publish in small magazines? The reverse is also true, that the contributions of such writers, their ability to access the joy of otherness through writing, is no less important than what capitalists accomplish. The creativity of my parents enabled my inventive urges, and their hard, arduous labor, grounded in the unglamorous and dangerous reality of a grocery store where they stood all day, made it possible for me to sit in a chair, gaze at a screen, and fiddle with my word count in between doses of social media.

The act of creativity, whether that of my parents or me, is carried out in the face of vast indifference. The monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, in Fragrant Palm Leaves, expressed something similar when he stood before the Vietnamese landscape: “The forest was so immense, we felt minuscule. I think we shouted to overcome our feeling of being utterly insignificant.” Shouting into the wilderness is what the act of creation can feel like, our human voices measured against the vast powers of the natural and mystical worlds. Even a fabled spiritual leader like Thích Nhất Hạnh needed to shout sometimes, not as an aberration from spiritual discipline but perhaps the periodic expression of it, as the occasional book from a writer expresses years of quiet and self- controlled labor.

I imagine a parallel exists between creative and religious discipline. The religious rely on the daily drills of rituals, texts, and prayers to remind themselves that God exists, with God and the divine being our human way of trying to understand the ultimate act of creation—how we and our world came into being. My parents prayed every day, and although I do not believe in their God, I am moved by the fact that when my mother died, she could still, despite her diminishment, recite the Lord’s Prayer with my father. Contemplating her passage into some other realm, I take comfort in Thích Nhất Hạnh’s words about his own mother’s death: “For the first four years after she died, I felt like an orphan. Then one night she came to me in a dream, and from that moment on, I no longer felt her death as a loss.” My mother has visited my brother in a dream, bringing him comfort, but she has never come to me, another mystery I do not understand.

Thích Nhất Hạnh continues about his mother: “I understood that she had never died, that my sorrow was based on illusion . . . She did not exist because of birth, nor cease to exist because of death. I saw that being and nonbeing are not separate. Being can exist only in relation to nonbeing, and nonbeing can exist only in relation to being. Nothing can cease to be.” I do not remember if I had read Thích Nhất Hạnh’s words before I wrote my first novel. But the conclusion of The Sympathizer also concerns nothing, when the narrator reflects on the famous slogan of Hồ Chí Minh: “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” Those words helped motivate a revolution that freed Việt Nam from foreign interference and unified a country, as well as forcing my parents to flee. Nearly thirty years later, I returned to a Sài Gòn of the early 2000s still struggling with economic inequality and some disillusionment with the promises of communism, where I heard a sarcastic, possibly bitter joke that I would then include in the novel’s conclusion: “What is more precious than independence and freedom? Nothing.”

Some readers interpreted the ending as nihilistic, but that is not correct. To take inspiration from Thích Nhất Hạnh, nothing only exists in relation to something, and vice versa. God is only one of the most obvious examples of a nothing that one portion of humanity has turned into something, an otherness that elicits sacrifice and murder, joy and suffering, love and hate. Unlike me, who saw nothing when it came to God, my mother and father could see something. And my father, now having forgotten almost everything, can still say the Lord’s Prayer. All one has to do is prompt him, and from somewhere deep inside the words emerge, unforgotten because of his life of discipline. I find it joyful to know that a deep well of otherness exists inside of him that I cannot detect, one that gives him life and hope. I admire my father’s discipline, the relentlessness of it that delivers a believer to the final destination, which is a confrontation with one’s own otherness, carried out utterly in private and with that greater otherness that God symbolizes. 

Jorge Luis Borges, in his Norton Lectures, This Craft of Verse, had this to say: “I have toyed with an idea— the idea that although a man’s life is compounded of thousands and thousands of moments and days, those many instants and those many days may be reduced to a single one: the moment when a man knows who he is, when he sees himself face to face.” I do not know if Borges ever found himself face to face with himself, and I do not know if I have seen my genuine, authentic face either, even though I have looked at myself often, in the mirror and in my writing. Suspicious of authenticity—having been accused of being inauthentic many times—I suspect that in the end what my writing will uncover about my self, or my many selves, is that I am authentic only to my own inauthenticity.

The poet Theodore Roethke put his relationship of author to self another way in one of his poems, where he wrote:

Being myself, I sing
The soul’s immediate joy.

In my case, that is the joy of otherness, an awareness that even seeing oneself face to face means that the very notion of otherness is present. One can only come face to face with oneself if one is already at least twofold, encountering oneself in an actual mirror or in the mirror of one’s soul. And what if, to complicate Borges, one sees that one has many faces rather than just two?

Fernando Pessoa, as a person and artist, was someone who dwelled constantly on his own multiplicity. He is famous for creating many authorial selves and names through which he wrote, each one with its own distinctive character. In his best-known work translated into English, The Book of Disquiet, he wrote that “Each of us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self. . . . like a diverse but compact multitude, this whole world of mine, composed as it is of different people, projects but a single shadow, that of this calm figure who writes, leaning against Borges’s high desk where I have come to find the blotter he borrowed from me.”

Whereas Roethke sang the soul’s joy, Pessoa, working the same metaphor, hears his soul: “My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.” Roethke presumably had to hear or feel his soul’s joy before he could sing it, but he deployed the idea of a singular soul, whereas Pessoa describes his soul as a collective of musicians and instruments, paralleling his idea that the many selves inside of him lead to only one shadow. Our shadows are a part of us and not a part of us at the same time, which Pessoa recognizes when he says that “Seeing myself frees me from myself. I almost smile, not because I understand myself, but because, having become other, I’m no longer able to understand myself.”

Disquieting, indeed, to see the incomprehensible otherness within oneself, but also possibly joyful, to realize that one’s own selves are an immense, possibly endless nation. Coming face to face with that imagined community of one’s own self might be like the moment where Thích Nhất Hạnh finds himself before the vast forest and can only shout in response. For me, writing is my way of quieting, for a while, that paradoxical disturbance of being aware of my simultaneous multiplicity and insignificance. When I have not written for some stretch of time, I become an irritable, unpleasant person—disquieted. Writing is my discipline, my calling, my form of secular prayer that quiets me. I agree with what the writer Maryse Condé once wrote about writing, that it “has given me enormous joy. I would rather compare it to a compulsion, somewhat scary, whose cause I have never been able to unravel.”

The otherness of the blank page elicits joy from the writer, even if the path to that joy can be arduous, even if that joy is fleeting and must be renewed with repeated confrontations with that blankness. The white page looms like an enigmatic face staring back at me, the face of an other that can elicit both terror and empathy, both murder and love, to paraphrase the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The confrontation with the other is not easy, should not be easy, but perhaps one thing that writing teaches me about myself is that if we ultimately could look with joy on our others, rather than with fear, anger, and hatred, then we could create something new.

Ralph Ellison hinted at this possibility of transforming the self, in his case through writing. He said that “the trick here is that of creating one’s identity through the medium of one’s chosen art.” Ellison was thinking of the challenges facing not only writers but Black writers, for whom identity cannot only be a matter of the singular self but always has some relationship to a Black world that is both joyfully chosen by many Black people and painfully imposed on them by white people and others. The poet Richard Wilbur articulates something similarly paradoxical when it comes to identity and writing, if the identity is that of being a writer. For Wilbur, “When a poet is being a poet . . . he cannot be concerned with anything but the making of a poem. . . . psychologically speaking, the end of writing is the poem itself. . . . To quote Robert Frost again, ‘You do more good by doing well than by doing good.’ ”

I agree, but where is the world in all of this, the world outside of the poem and the poet as much as the world inside the poem and the poet? Wilbur anticipates and responds when he says:

And yet, of course, poetry is a deeply social thing— radically and incorrigibly social. . . . Writing poetry is talking to oneself. Yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product is something that, though it may not be for every body, is about every body. Writing poetry, then, is an unsocial way of manufacturing a thoroughly social product. Because he must shield his poetry in its creation, the poet, more than other writers, will write without recognition. . . . he is likely to look on honors and distinctions with the feigned indifference of a wallflower. Certainly he is pleased when recognition comes; for what better proof is there that for some people poetry is still a useful and necessary thing . . . like a shoe.

I love this image of the poem as a shoe, the poem as both art and craft, inspiration and labor, useless and useful, the earthly sole that cannot avoid being grounded and trod on, and the spiritual soul that remains ever mysterious to us and to others. This is not a binary, this is a fusion, a pun, a play on words between the sole and the soul, with poetry and writing at their best when they play with words, a very serious matter requiring a light touch. Shoes are serious matters, as are poems, both requiring their makers to work with delicacy and discipline. Shoes are themselves light, but carry the weight of our entire bodies. Imagine poems as the shoes that the writer has cobbled together. Anyone can fit in those shoes.

But in order for you to stand in those shoes, they must be empty. Full of nothing. When my own novels touch on the subject of nothing, some readers are disturbed. They do not understand that nothing is sacred. To say that nothing is sacred is sacrilegious, and it also means at the same time that we should revere nothing, from the vast empty expanses of the universe to the void within ourselves. From this paradox and contradiction in which nothing is in fact something, I find the unsettling, perplexing, tragicomic joy of otherness, ranging from my own individual, weird, idiosyncratic, unique otherness to the collective, systemic otherness projected onto me and my kind, whatever my absurd, negated kind is. Among my kind is the Vietnamese, the Asian, the minoritized, the racialized, the colonized, the hybrid, the hyphenated, the refugee, the displaced, the artist, the writer, the smart ass, the bastard, the sympathizer, and the committed—all those out of step, out of tune, out of focus, even to themselves.

♦

Excerpted and adapted from To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2025 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.