Review of 'To Save and Destroy'

By Lydia Wei

Review of To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen (USA: Harvard University Press, 2025)

On April 11, the Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard University demanding key policy changes at the school—among them, the elimination of all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and the disempowerment of all faculty and administrators “more committed to activism than scholarship”—and threatening to revoke the university’s federal funding if these demands weren’t met. (Even now, the administration continues to be embroiled with Harvard.) At a time when college campuses have increasingly become major lightning rods in the culture wars—especially following the pro-Palestine student encampments that swept across universities last year—the administration’s message was clear: You will step in line with our good old “American values”. You will do what we say to you. And any aberration or subversion—classic, shifty signs of the shadowy “other”—will not be tolerated.

Such was the climate Viet Thanh Nguyen’s To Save and To Destroy—published only a few days before the demands were sent out—found itself in. Nguyen has long been a respected figure in Asian American literature; his debut Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, was lauded for its exploration of identity in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. This new collection brings together Nguyen’s six Norton Lectures, delivered at none other than Harvard itself from 2023 to 2024. In his lectures, Nguyen considers the craft of writing as the other. In a time when the other is increasingly purged and punished—from the crackdown on student protestors to the illegal removal of lawful citizens from American soil and the elimination of DEI programs—the impulse to interrogate what it means to both write and exist as the other feels more vital than ever. When we write as the other, what pitfalls do we fall into as we seek to capture its slippery reflection? 

For Nguyen, the other constitutes those “outcast from or exploited by the powerful norm of their societies, or those who have moved voluntarily or have been moved forcefully from one place to another, or those who have been dominated in their own homes by outsiders whom they would consider to be others”. There’s also an other within each of us: a mysterious, unknown territory charged with all our desires and fears. When Nguyen speaks about writing as the other, he means both other-ness dictated by society and the intrinsic other-ness hidden within us.

Perhaps it feels like a bit of writerly, navel-gazey indulgence to obsess and fret over the craft of writing. Yet Nguyen is clear about the connection between the stories we write and the violence that is ultimately enacted and reenacted in real life. In his opening lecture, “On the Double, or Inauthenticity”, Nguyen speaks about his experience watching Apocalypse Now for the first time at the age of eleven: 

This loss of my childhood illusions and innocence about stories, this scene of my otherness, takes place in the middle of Apocalypse Now, when American sailors on a gunboat come across a sampan of Vietnamese civilians. The movie is told from the perspective of Captain Willard, the Marlowe figure who journeys into the heart of darkness of white men, including himself. As a boy, I was already a veteran of watching American propaganda, which is to say war movies and westerns. I viewed this movie through the eyes of the Americans, of whom I considered myself one, until the moment the sailors massacred the Vietnamese civilians… When Willard fired a bullet into a Vietnamese woman's chest, I was split in two. Was I the American doing the killing, or the Vietnamese being killed?

For Nguyen, symbolic violence—in this case, both the image of the bullet as well as the suggestion that Vietnamese people only exist in the image of bewildered screaming victims—is what justifies and perpetuates physical violence, and vice versa. Through living, breathing images and Dolby Stereo surround sound gunfire, Apocalypse Now reenacts the violence of the Vietnam War. And though the film was released after the Americans had already retreated from the nation, its violent visuals are a reflection of the American attitudes that could justify and launch the war in the first place. After all, the fact that we could successfully imagine this violence meant that we could ultimately execute it, too.

A story is more than just a story. These collective narratives and images are a means of asserting control, and they’ve “always been weaponized by individuals and societies”. We see the living proof of this assessment all the time: a tradwife TikTok is not just an innocuous little Internet video, nor is a Joe Rogan podcast just a time-killer to listen to during the commute home. These, too, are narratives and stories, tiny consumable images and soundbites that prop up a white, heteropatriarchal vision of society and are in turn propped up by those same ideals.

So how can writers of the other rise up to this moment, when the question of who owns the car keys to the narrative matters more than ever? How can writers combat this new wave of narratives, backed by the full thrust of political power? Nguyen offers a few insights. For starters, though it may be tempting for writers of the other—especially those most subject to symbolic violence—to attempt to counter those dominant narratives by writing stories in which the other is idealized and purified, doing so is actually counterintuitive. This action reduces the personhood of the other, who must be recognized as simultaneously human and inhuman, complex yet flawed. One must be willing to accept the other without demanding that their recognition rest solely on virtue. Though well-intentioned, it perpetuates the same representation trap as the other as a one-dimensional being.

The lecture “On Palestine and Asia” is devoted to looking at the Israel-Palestine conflict and Nguyen’s calls for an “expansive solidarity”. Here, Nguyen speaks directly to Asian-American writers, whom he notes are simultaneously victim and victimizer: oppressed and marginalized within our new home country, yet also beneficiaries of this global empire that never would have existed without the violent occupation of Indigenous lands. For Nguyen, the parallels between America’s settler colonialism and Israel’s settler colonialism are evident, and he states:

The more American we become, the more we may affirm this country’s settler colonialism with our silence about how we can be citizens and colonizers at the same time. The condition of our belonging, our inclusion, is our silence.

Though Asian-American writers may hope to seek inclusion in the nation that has long excluded them, Nguyen cautions that if we succeed in gaining entry, we may “forget who still remains excluded as an other, and whether we, the included, now participate in and profit from the mistreatment of others”. For Nguyen, the silence of Asian-American writers on the subject of Palestine is unacceptable: partly because of the major impact Palestinian thinkers—such as Edward Said—have had on the growth and development of Asian-American literature; partly because Palestine itself is part of Asia; and partly because Asian-American literature itself has become “a subset of imperial literature”, making it even more crucial for Asian-American writers to push back. Ultimately, Nguyen calls on Asian Americans to practice a more expansive solidarity, one aimed at uplifting those most excluded, subordinated, and targeted by this nation—in this case, those suffering from the genocide in Gaza.

Throughout his lectures, Nguyen highlights writers who have excelled at the challenge of writing as the other. Nadine Gordimer’s Writing and Being and Amos Oz’s Fima are both powerful examples of how writers may embrace expansive solidarity to address Israel and Palestine. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee pushes through linguistic and formal borders as a way of depicting a shattered self, split by the violence of borders, invasions, wars, and colonization. And Behrouz Boochani’s memoir No Friend But the Mountains uses “minor” language—in this case, text messages sent from a smuggled, contraband phone while Boochani was imprisoned at Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island—to displace and deconstruct the “major” narratives of the Australian nation-state.

Despite the responsibilities that come with writing as an other, Nguyen also highlights the joys of the challenge. Here, in the final lecture, Nguyen turns inward: though there is an other marked, branded, and ostracized by society, there is also an other within us and those around us. This other is a mysterious well, a strange spring flowing through the center of us, which clouds our understanding of both ourselves and those we love most. In his closing lecture “On the Joy of Otherness”, Nguyen reflects on his experience as a father, his child both so intimately part of him—literally his own flesh and blood—yet so distinctly other from him: 

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. 

The other includes the mysteries of who we are and who we love. Even the ones we love most are distinctly other to us, yet this gap doesn’t have to be a source of anguish: it allows for us to continually rediscover our loved ones in all their new wonderful idiosyncrasies, how they see the world in a way only they can, and how all we can do is try to approach, approximate, and understand their views. Even the ones we think couldn’t possibly be any closer to ourselves—our very own beings—are mysteries we have to contend with: the split double-face we see in the mirror every morning, the other self that is so, so closely linked to ourselves, yet just out of reach. As Nguyen writes: “One can only come face to face with oneself if one is already at least two-fold”.

On paper, To Save and To Destroy is primarily a collection of lectures on writing. And in many ways, that’s what it is: Nguyen is, as always, an entertaining and sharp analyst of the written word, and the book is of course best suited for an aspiring writer. (The question of whether or not it reads like a lecture series is somewhat moot, because it is literally a collection of lectures.) But of course, the book is so much more expansive than simply a craft workshop. Any writer worth their salt knows that writing is not merely the practice of putting words down on a page; it’s a form of thinking, a way of observing and moving through the world. Nguyen is asking what it means to live both in an empire and alongside the mysteries within ourselves—and not just how we’ll write our way through this, but how we’ll fight, build, and live through this.

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Lydia Wei is a recent graduate of Stanford University, where she was awarded the Maclin Bocock/Albert Guerard Fiction Prize and completed a Levinthal Tutorial in Fiction under Stegner Fellow Emma Binder. She was born in 2002.

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