Book Review of To Save and To Destroy: Writing as An Other

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s To Save and to Destroy is a collection of his Norton lectures where he uses his generational stories of continuous immigration throughout Vietnam and the United States to explore how writing, with both internal and external experiences, shape our own identities, and forces that come into oppression, silence, and Otherness. In other words, the book depicts how he himself is seen from multiple others: “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” (p. 104).