Linh Dinh is one of my favorite writers, and you may get an inkling of his appeal from a terrific new interview with him published this summer in The Pacific Rim Review of Books. Here’s an excerpt:
The two cultures I’m most familiar with, the U.S. and Vietnam, are tremendously fake, but in different ways. During the Vietnam War, the Hanoi government also called the South Vietnamese “ngụy,” or “fake” (This term “ngụy” is frequently translated into English as “puppet,” but it actually means “fake.”) One of my favorite lines of all time is Elias Canetti’s “She saw behind everything. Behind that, she saw nothing.’ So my motto is, “You’ve got to see behind what’s behind,” you’ve got to see beyond the so-called authenticity behind the fakeness.
Linh has posted the whole thing, including some material that was cut from the published interview, here. Well worth reading!