Viet Thanh Nguyen: Ripping Children from Parents Will Shatter America’s Soul

Pulitzer prize winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen has written a beautiful op-ed in the Washington Post on the US policy of separating children from their parents at the border. He shares his own traumatic story of having been separated from his mother at age four, when his family came to the U.S. as refugees after the fall of Vietnam.  Nguyen traces the history of family separation policies in the U.S., whether during slavery, the Native American genocide, or through mass incarceration policies that deprive children of their parents.  He also critiques Vietnamese-American leaders, including the current mayor of Westminster, CA, for failing to stand with immigrants today, given that the City of Westminster was one of a number of Orange County cities that took action against California’s sanctuary law.

“I wonder whether whoever decided to take me from my mother considered her pain. Maybe they only saw her alienness and her lack of education, which happened because she was born poor and a girl. Perhaps they never saw that in Vietnam she had been a successful businesswoman. But even if she hadn’t, what difference should that have made? Are people who are less successful not human or deserving of the right to hold on to their children? Our answer to that question says everything about us.”

-JKoh