Nhi Mundy's Determination Makes Things Happen

Three times Nhi Mundy ('24GS) tried to see Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen speak. Three times it didn’t happen. Then, last summer, she met him at a book signing.

“I thought that would be enough, just to check that off my list,” she wrote. But now, Mundy is working as Nguyen’s researcher ten hours a week, corresponding with him in California, where he lives, and looking forward to meeting with him in New York in April.

None of the success was an accident. Mundy does not give up. She makes her goals happen.

“I read his book 10 years ago and knew I would meet him someday,” she said in an interview.

In 2016, Viet Thanh Nguyen won a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, The Sympathizer, the complex story of a Vietnamese refugee caught between two cultures and two ways of thinking.

Like Nguyen, Mundy was a refugee whose family fled Vietnam with the boat people after the fall of Saigon. She studied his path, seeing it as a kind of blueprint she could follow.

Her path took several twists before she settled into today’s serious writing. She had a career in fashion. She raised three children, now grown. She became an entrepreneur and restaurateur and fell into publishing, founding and editing two magazines covering the Delaware River Valley.

Then, Mundy, who has a bachelor’s degree in fiction from Columbia, applied for Hunter College’s highly selective writing program in creative nonfiction. Hunter rejected her application.

So, she tried again the next year. She impressed the professor who interviewed her and began studying nonfiction writing at Hunter. This year she won the Sainsbury Research Fellowship, which allows a student to work with an established author. Mundy asked to work with Viet Thanh Nguyen, found his contact information and asked Hunter’s administration to seek Nguyen’s help.

“And somehow, it happened!” Mundy wrote on her Linkedin page.

Now she is working with Nguyen on his latest novel, the third book in the trilogy that began with The Sympathizer. The first book was a many-layered historical fiction novel set in Vietnam and then the United States, a passage they both made.

Mundy is learning to write historical fiction, weaving research into “novelist descriptions” and imagining ways information can be used. “I’m starting to realize that a story can be much more rich,” she says.

Mundy continues to write her own story, a memoir inspired by Nguyen’s autobiographical work. She brought her work to CFF’s Wednesday workshop where memoirs are critiqued as fiction. She hoped for good writers who are also good readers who give lots of feedback.

In one chapter, Mundy wrote about a Kansas Christmas with her family. She described her mother, whose legs were “built like tree trunks, with green veins that thread across her pale skin” and “wide lips tinted in rose; concentrating eyes warmed by the color of clay.”

“Nhi is able to write about family with an unsentimental eye for detail,” CFF president Ken Schept commented.

The memoir will serve as her dissertation at Hunter. She’s already talking to an agent who is excited and wants to see the book published – but first needs to see it completed, Mundy says. She’s writing two chapters a month.

Mundy is again using what she learned in her days as an entrepreneur, taking “baby steps to get to the other side.” That’s the approach she recommends to others.

“You will be rejected,” she says. “Try and try and try and try. Try again.”

Composite image background: Lê Duy Thận (黎維祳) | Vĩnh Hựu (永佑), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons