In Conversation with André Dao

This interview was adapted from an event during André Dao’s visit to the University of California—Berkeley on October 23, 2025. André Dao is the author of Anam.

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Sydney Van To: How did you come to write this book?

André Dao: The story of Anam began for me as a very simple, even naïve, project of family history. I thought I would write a nonfiction book about my grandfather, who was imprisoned for ten years without charge or trial.

I made a few mistakes right away. One of them was telling people I was going to write this book. One of the people I told was an editor who said, “That sounds great. You should be able to finish it in about six months, and then we can sell it.” When I wasn’t able to do it in six months, I thought, Okay, maybe I’m not supposed to be a writer. Clearly I can’t do what’s expected of me. After a failed draft, I put it away for a long time. It wasn’t until much later, after I had let go of not just that manuscript, but of the idea of being a writer at all, that I came back to it. I started working on it alongside other things, and it became a kind of container for different thoughts: about my family, but also about everything else.

It was as this container of thoughts that the manuscript really came to life for me. It became a site of experimentation with this idea of myself. I realized that what I was putting into the container was a version of who I might be, and that I could return to it the next day and try out a different version. A version of me who asked my grandfather a different question. A version more interested in Vietnam than I had been as a teenager. A version who acted better or worse than I did in real life. So that’s what it became for me. What began as a straightforward nonfiction project evolved into something quite different, something much harder to categorize

SVT: There’s an unusual logic to the process that you’re describing. How is it that by foregrounding yourself in this confessional and experimental mode finally made your grandfather writable?

AD: One of the problems with the early versions of the manuscript was that I was trying to tell history. My grandparents had lived through a long, turbulent period of Vietnamese history, and I had gathered a huge amount of historical detail. I thought that including all of it would make the book more truthful. But there wasn’t really anything holding it all together. And beyond that, learning all that history actually distanced me from the people I was trying to understand—my grandparents. I eventually realized I had to insert some version of myself into the manuscript, partly as a technical device to hold it together, to give it a present-day narrative in which a student is thinking about his grandparents and trying to write their story.

But through that process, putting a version of myself in there also helped me—helped my narrator—relate to these otherwise abstract figures of the grandparents, these suffering grandparents, in a way that felt necessary. Maybe another writer might have found it easier to do the imaginative work required to picture what their lives were like, but I had to overcome a real suspicion toward that kind of imagination. I was worried about what it would mean to invent or imagine too much. That might be because I started from a nonfiction, oral-history approach of speaking to them, recording conversations. To then imagine or expand scenes from those conversations felt very difficult at first. I had to go through a long process of experimenting before I found a way to do it that I was comfortable with.

SVT: Were you also considering certain limits or downsides to autofiction before you committed to it as a genre?

AD: I’m not sure I ever fully committed to it as a genre. Once I reached the point of sharing the work with people, when I had a finished version of the book that was close to what it is now, the question came up: is this autofiction?

When I was writing it, I wasn’t really thinking about whether or not I was writing within that genre or tradition. To the extent that I did think about it—I was this writer from Melbourne, in Australia—I didn’t mind. That label of autofiction made it feel like I had some connection to New York, and gave it a slightly less provincial air. Of course, that’s both a bit flippant and also revealing of a kind of racialized anxiety about writing about Vietnam, about my Vietnamese family, and about how that would be read by friends in the Melbourne literary scene. At the time, many of them were really into autofiction and autotheory coming out of the U.S., mostly by white authors. I remember wondering: Am I writing an Asian Australian memoir, or something with more cachet in that world?

So yes, I’d be lying if I said those thoughts didn’t cross my mind. But I don’t think they drove any creative decisions. They were more like questions that surfaced once the book was done and we were asking: What is it? What should we call it? Thankfully, my publishers in Australia and the U.K. weren’t too fussed about the label. They said, “Call it what you like. We’ll sell it either way.”

SVT: In Anam, your narrator comes to realize that he’s been investing his hopes in history in the wrong way. “The past is not a home,” he says. But neither your narrator nor your novel is simply rejecting history, or the concept of history. Anam is after a history that is usable—but usable in what way?

AD: Yes, the past is not a home. But also, you can’t have a home without the past, right? I think he comes to that realization by the end: that in order to imagine a future worth living in, you have to have some account of the past. So, “usable,” in that sense. And one of the things that interested me, both when I was writing this book and in my academic work, is the question of what the constraints are on the past, if it is given that kind of plasticity. Because if you start from the position of “I want a usable past, I want a history that can give me the future that I or my community need or want,” that can sound as if the past is entirely transformable, that we have no obligation to any actual history, that we could just make things up.

Which brings me back to that earlier discomfort I had about imagining my grandparents’ lives. What constrains me in imagining their thoughts, their feelings, their actions? Once I started down that path, I became really interested in how fiction itself shapes those constraints. At first, calling it fiction felt liberating. When I was approaching it as nonfiction, I thought I had to stick to the facts and was really limited by them. Once I called it fiction, I felt free. I could tell the story I wanted to tell. But not long after, I realized that by calling it fiction, I was now responsible for every single choice. I couldn’t rely on saying, Well, that happened—that’s why it’s in the book. Everything became a decision.

So I began reaching toward some kind of ethical response to that problem: what constrains these choices? What should constrain me? For example, what would stop me from imagining my grandfather as having never been complicit in the South Vietnamese regime? I could do that, and it would give me a certain kind of inheritance—a version of the past that makes him more noble, and gives me something more admirable to pass on to my children. That’s one example of how that might work. But something in me resists doing that. And I became really interested in the nature of that resistance—what it is that constrains me, ethically, from inventing a past I wish had been true.

SVT: Let’s shift to the aspects of your novel that makes it not just autofiction but autotheory. Your narrator is especially attracted to phenomenologists and those who inherit the phenomenological tradition: Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and even Maggie Nelson. Why phenomenology?

AD: During the long period I was working on the book, I was also doing many other things. One of them was a long oral history project with people who had been refugees and asylum seekers imprisoned by the Australian government. Sitting with them, doing long interviews about their experiences in detention centers and prisons, I often felt an impulse to remove myself entirely—as an ethical act. I didn’t want to take up space. I wanted, in a sense, to annihilate myself in the face of the other. At the time, in my limited understanding of Emmanuel Levinas, that idea of a total ethical regard for the Other resonated with me. It seemed to answer something I was struggling with about what it meant to do this work. To listen to people whose suffering was so much greater than anything I could imagine.

But the process of writing this novel complicated that for me. I came to see that the gesture of completely annihilating yourself in the face of the other isn’t necessarily the most ethical response. Partly because it’s impossible, but also because it obscures the power and responsibility you still have. Even in that oral history project, our attempt to make ourselves—the interviewers—absent from the final work turned out to be a flaw. We were present. We shaped those conversations and the narratives that emerged from the prisons. We also shaped how those stories were received by the Australian media, which was part of our role: to help those stories resonate with a broader public. That was the political work of the project. By pretending we didn’t exist, we may have been obscuring the very power and responsibility we carried. So I think I came away from that earlier position with a more complicated understanding of what ethical presence means. It’s not really an answer to your question, but it’s what comes to mind when I think of Levinas, at least.

SVT: The novel also draws on a wide range of Catholic intellectuals that were important to the narrator’s grandfather: St Augustine, Thomas Merton, Max Scheler, Simone Weil. Your narrator is initially alienated from this religious worldview which can lean toward utopianism and mysticism, but becomes more receptive to it by the end of the novel. What does Catholicism offer your narrator?

AD: One thing that Catholicism offers the narrator is a source of authority, something he misses. It’s the authority he grew up with, the framework that grounded everything. So, for all the questions we’ve been talking about—ethical responses, moral choices—there was once an authority that guided him, and then that authority was lost. But he still yearns for it; he feels the loss deeply.

And then, quite naturally, in thinking about his grandfather, who was a Catholic intellectual, he comes to realize that the version of his grandfather he’s been writing is a secularized one. To really understand him, he has to try to understand Catholic theology. There’s a particular moment when the narrator recognizes this, when he recalls something his grandfather always said, a phrase that had seemed almost too familiar because it was repeated so often in the family: “I forgive my captors.” It’s the kind of thing you almost expect someone to say because it appears in books and movies, the sort of thing a saint would say or do. But then he realizes he has no idea what that actually means, how someone could truly feel that way and believe it, and how it could be more than just a rhetorical gesture. That realization leads him toward Catholic thinkers, as he tries to make sense of something that had always seemed ordinary—or maybe not ordinary, but intuitively right—yet now appears as something almost impossible. And that’s what draws him deeper into Catholic thought.

SVT: What did South Vietnam come to look like through your conversations with your grandparents?

AD: There are two images that I really got out of the conversations with my grandparents. The one from my grandfather was this sense of an extremely paranoid surveillance state. But then from my grandmother, I actually got this sense of glamour. She had such a different relationship to her history than he did. For her, Saigon in the ’60s was, in a way, this glorious time. Partly, I think, because of what happened afterward, it was a period of relative freedom for her.

She enjoyed talking about fashion, and she enjoyed talking about the fact that she had a little revolver she carried around with her. She just had a very different way of talking about her life than my grandfather. Whereas the version my grandfather gave me was much more about the war machine, a place defined by conflict, for my grandmother it was a place where she lived, socialized, and gossipped.

SVT: I noticed that one of the writers that you mentioned in your sources was Nguyễn Huy Thiệp. How did writers from the Đổi Mới period influence this book?

AD: I came across The General Retires because I was searching for Vietnamese literature, and that’s simply what came up. I was sort of self-taught in that sense. I hadn’t formally studied Vietnamese literature. I did look at people’s syllabi to try to find a tradition, but I really didn’t know where to start. In that sense, I probably would have read The General Retires without even knowing the full context or background of Đổi Mới, just being taken with the picture of post-war Vietnam he painted there.

It was only later, as I gained a slightly better understanding of that history, that I could link it back to the earlier period in the North, when there was also a brief, relaxing flowering of literature. I began noticing patterns—another possible Vietnam that might have existed, but was closed off very quickly. That appealed to me, partly because even just knowing that these other possible Vietnams existed was a revelation for someone who grew up in Melbourne in a fairly typical Vietnamese refugee family, which told a fairly one-dimensional story about what Vietnam was, its trajectory, and its lack of freedom. To have a sense of other revolutionary trajectories was something I felt drawn to.

Once I read about Trần Đức Thảo, I was especially struck. He was on the cusp of great fame in France as a philosopher, and he gave that up to return to North Vietnam to fulfill his revolutionary duty. Then came a period of relative liberalization, and then it was closed off. There’s something about that path of duty, hope, and the closing off of hope and love that resonated with me. I found it also linked to my grandfather’s many trajectories, even though often politically opposite. These patterns, these periods of openness followed by their rapid removal, felt very significant to me.

SVT: The novel grapples with the contested meanings and memories of Vietnam, the contested hopes for Vietnam, and the betrayal of those on both sides of the civil war. Perhaps we can conclude with a question that your novel raises: “I think of how all the old people in the posed stills looked the same as each other. They wore the same clothes, probably used the same hair dye. Yet they had once been on opposing sides of a bitter, brutal struggle. Not just as bystanders, but as active, passionate protagonists. They had imagined better worlds and put their bodies on the line to bring those worlds into being. Neither world came to be: their plans went awry, as all plans do. Now those bodies they offered up are in more or less the same state of decay. Their imagined worlds have converged into this one, disappointing to all. So what, in the end, had been the difference?” Is that a question you can try to answer?

AD: I recently finished reading Blue Dragon, White Tiger by Tran Van Dinh, one of the early Vietnamese American novels published in English, recently republished by DVAN and Kaya Press. The novel tells the story of a South Vietnamese diplomat who becomes a communist spy, grows disillusioned with communism, and then flees post-war Vietnam to return to America. At the very end, he says: “It would be henceforward the spirit of the historic Vietnam that he held in his heart, not the political one—the mystic Vietnam, not the vulgar and brutal one.” I thought, okay, that’s basically what I was trying to get at with this idea of the mythical Vietnam he was carrying with him.

It doesn’t exactly answer your question, but it felt affirming to me. Forty years ago, someone was already exploring this idea of a contested memory, a place everyone carries with them. That character carries a mythical Vietnam that will be contested by the other Vietnamese refugees on his boat, not to mention the Vietnamese people he’s leaving behind. I don’t have an answer for what the difference is, but I’m struck by how powerful the idea of the mythical, imaginative Vietnam that remains for everyone involved in the conflict, whether they “won” or “lost.” Winning doesn’t mean you got the real thing, and the others have to make do with the imagined place. Everyone is still dealing with the imagined place.