Researching Viet Nguyen

Viet and Duc were born on February 25, 1981, in Kon Tum Province, Tây Nguyên, Vietnam. Viet was the elder and Duc was the younger of the two brothers. Their relatives claim that "the reason they became conjoined twins is the influence of Agent Orange that the U.S. military used as a defoliant during the Vietnam War". His mother was farming in the area doused with Agent Orange a year after the Vietnam War had ended. She also drank water from a well in that area. After that, Viet and Duc were born. On October 4, 1988, Viet and Duc were separated in the hospital in Ho Chi Minh City with the help of the Japanese Red Cross after Viet went into a coma.

Duc first entered junior high school, then dropped out and learned computer programming in a school. Now, he works at a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. On December 16, 2006, he married Nguyen Thanh Tuyen in Ho Chi Minh City.

Viet's health problems continued after the separation, and he died due to liver failure and pneumonia on October 6, 2007, at the age of 26.

Nguyen attended the University of Louisville, playing on the men's soccer team in 1994 and 1995 and again in 1997 and 1998. He played sixty-nine games, scoring fifteen goals and adding eleven assists, during his four-year collegiate career. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology. In 1995, Nguyen played for the United States men's national under-20 soccer team which failed to qualify for the World Youth Championships. In 1999, the Seattle Sounders selected Nguyen in the territorial round of the A-League draft. Nguyen spent six seasons with the Sounders before retiring and entering the coaching ranks.

In 2011, he came out of retirement to play for the Tacoma Stars of the Professional Arena Soccer League.

Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and many other accolades. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. Nguyen is a regular contributor, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, covering immigration, refugees, politics, culture and South East Asia. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.