A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial Hardcover – October 3, 2023
by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 42 ratings
4.5 on Goodreads 226 ratings
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With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.
At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICATM. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.
Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.
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Print length
400 pages
October 3, 2023
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of October 2023: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, which explores the contradictions of one man during the Vietnam War and its aftermath, begins with the line (arguably one of the best openers in the past decade): “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” In his memoir, A Man of Two Faces, Nguyen trains the spotlight on his own life and his family’s experience moving from Vietnam to California, violence and racism, and the burning question that so many face: who am I? Teeming with broader stories of immigration and cultural clashes, Nguyen once again offers a thrillingly nuanced portrait of the allegiances, complexities, and aims that guide a single life. Told in paragraphs with interstitial interruptions, Nguyen mimics the intimate, interrupting puzzle of racial identity—"because AMERICA TM itself is and will always be a contradiction”—in real time. Nguyen notes that he will “excel in silence”, and yet, these books and his work, offers the award-winning opposite…a thrillingly engaging and conversational read. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
Review
Praise for A Man of Two Faces:
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Named a Most Anticipated Book by the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, TIME, Los Angeles Times, Globe and Mail, Literary Hub, Bookpage, The Millions, and Amazon Book Review
“Audacious . . . The stereoscopic structure of the personal and the cultural challenges us to reflect on how the formation of self involves stories told about us as well as those we tell ourselves. In Nguyen’s case, this requires vigorous self-interrogation and self-inventory . . . The subject matter is serious—war, colonization, Nguyen’s mother’s decades-long illness before her death in 2018 and his inability to recall particularly painful times when she was hospitalized—but there is a playfulness as well . . . His most emotionally powerful writing revolves around his parents . . . Sharp and affecting, this book is both: a weapon, a lamentation.”—Lisa Ko, Washington Post
“A Man of Two Faces is cocky and riveting—self-consciously constructed as if written for a standup audience. It also serves as a generous, one-stop primer for both his fiction and scholarly work on wars and the ethics of remembrance . . . The mother in this story is an indelible force of nature: She achieves a reconciliation with memory and history by acknowledging the pain of others and affirming her unvanquished will for survival.”—Thúy Đinh, NPR
“If the book’s fragmentary origins are conspicuous, so is the author’s prodigious gift for distilling memory, and its absence, into words that cannot be lost. Scattered throughout are the shards of an intimate personal history, leaving the reader to comb through the debris as if searching for the remains of a loved one.”—Lauren Christensen, New York Times
“Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen returns with a deeply personal and political memoir that uses the defining moments of his own life to explore his conflicted relationship with America . . . A witty and scathing look at what it means to be a refugee, an immigrant, and an American in a world that doesn’t see you as you see yourself.”—TIME
“An artfully intertwined medley of Nguyen’s essays, lectures and interviews, A Man of Two Faces is an innovative expose of the racism that shackles refugee populations of color to harmful stereotypes . . . A provocative and dynamic family portrait of America’s immigrants, shining a light on the humanity too few of us see.”—Carol Memmott, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Nguyen, one of today’s most important writers, structures his memoir around learning how to be a man through being a son and then a father. Forced to flee Vietnam with his family as a child, Nguyen grew up around violence in San Jose—his parents were shot in their grocery store when he was 9. But as he grew up and identified as American too, he wondered about this dual legacy, which so infused his Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction. Here he ponders how it has shaped him.”—Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
“Collage may be an apt word to describe this genre-bending memoir from Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur fellow Viet Thanh Nguyen. Weaving together forms that include exquisite prose, verse and photographs, this masterful memoir follows the author and his family from their home country of Vietnam as they resettle in San Jose, including explosive revelations about family, memory and loss.”—Hannah Bae, Datebook
“In this memoir, Nguyen wrestles with his own family’s experience moving from Vietnam to California, violence and racism, and the burning question that so many face: who am I? Teeming with broader stories of immigration and cultural clashes, Nguyen once again offers a thrillingly nuanced portrait of the allegiances, complexities, and aims that guide a single life.”—Al Woodworth, Amazon Book Review
“A Man of Two Faces is at its core a memoir about the education of a refugee. Nguyen starts with his early days in the United States. But as Nguyen experiences the world as an Asian American, an academic, a writer, and, eventually, a father, he becomes attuned to the conditions and contradictions that make his life (im)possible—war, displacement, the American dream, and more . . . The memoir is Nguyen’s opportunity to ask: What do we remember and what do we forget? If we forget, why do we forget and for whom are we forgetting? Ourselves? Our loved ones? Our country? And what about cultural memory, which is to say history?”—Eric Nguyen, Electric Literature
“A Man of Two Faces pursues in heroic fashion the redemptive power of the writing life. If you are going through hell, write your way through it, which is precisely how Nguyen’s inventive formal structure comes to life . . . We can almost smell the blood and ink blend on the page as he moves through his recollections, or recollections, and in the process, works his way through the hell of memory, back to the city of the Dionne Warwick song.”—Gary Singh, Alta
“Shattering . . . Nguyen is an intriguing, inventive, and perceptive writer and his mesmerizing memoir takes hold of us.”—Elaine Margolin, New York Journal of Books
“This bold and ambitious memoir from novelist Nguyen employs a dazzling hybrid of prose and poetry to explore the author’s life in America as a Vietnamese refugee . . . A savvy and complex account of coming-of-age in a foreign land.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Nguyen explores ‘the thin border between / history and memory’ in this many-faceted, stylistically complex, eviscerating, and tender montage of memoir, facts, dissent, and clarification . . . A uniquely intricate, clarion, and far-reaching inquiry into what we disparage and what we value, asserting the bedrock necessity of history, story, and remembrance . . . Nguyen’s unflinching blend of memoir and social critique will garner avid attention.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“Nguyen blazes a nonlinear, literary way through the histories of Vietnam and the US, his parents’ arduous lives in each and his own struggles to find his voice as citizen, son and writer.”—BookPage(starred review)
“A dizzying emotional and intellectual journey through the author’s life and heritage as a refugee from Vietnam, raised primarily in San Jose, California. With daring formal experimentation that blends traditional memoir, personal and critical essays, and blank-verse poetry, Nguyen tells his story as a Vietnamese refugee and American, as a person of many worlds who can live but one life, and as a proud American with many reasons to despise so much of what the U.S. has done and continues to do . . . The result is a remarkable array of deeply felt experiences, intellectual discoveries, and withering dark comedy, driven by clear, unrelenting, and head-throbbing prose that delivers a blistering call for multiracial and decolonial justice. A Man of Two Faces is a courageous and brilliant confrontation with the myriad, often debilitating, contradictions of this world.”—Shelf Awareness (starred review)
“A kaleidoscopic memoir . . . Deeply personal and intensely political . . . If the author’s criticism is understandably scathing, there is also a mischievous sense of humor . . . Nguyen indisputably captures the workings of a quicksilver and penetrating mind . . . Lyrical and biting, by one of our leading writers.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Viet Thanh Nguyen’s A Man of Two Faces is a triumphant memoir that sears through the fog of American amnesia. A vulnerable and scorching mirror to self and to nation, his book explores his family’s ‘epic and quotidian’ struggles as refugees and indicts Hollywood as propaganda that has fed the American war machine and anti-Asian racism. It is a fissured lyric on memory and a clarifying meditation on empire. Every American needs to read this essential book.”—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
“A Man of Two Faces is a searing and sensitive memoir on the long shadow that war casts on those who manage to survive it. This book is a work of love and anger and care and it will resonate with everyone who has lost a home.”—Laila Lalami, author of The Other Americans and Conditional Citizens
“A Man of Two Faces is an alchemical feat of memory, history, and theory that beautifully achieves a difficult balance: a bold and searing polemic, it’s at the same time a moving, personal tale. Above all, it’s the story of a son: but what lies at the heart of the son is the mystery of the mother. And what lies at the mystery of the mother is the history of nation, colonization, war. Through his family’s story, Viet Thanh Nguyen renders not only a powerful portrait of America but—perhaps more necessary in our current moment—also an uplifting act of mourning. Simultaneously raw and lucid, haunting and reasoned, A Man of Two Faces opens up groundbreaking ways to speak the nation’s story and a family’s pain.”—Gina Apostol, author of La Tercera
“None of the usual adjectives apply to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir—it is beyond words like brilliant and heartbreaking, because the prose rejects that kind of easy summary. This book belongs with James Baldwin, Claude Brown, Maxine Hong Kingston, and other writers whose memoirs take apart ‘the American Dream’ with laser precision. Nguyen’s tensile anger and evanescent memory is measure of the fundamental sadness of watching his family, and himself, in their dreams, set against the violence and history of this country.”—Susan Straight, author of Mecca, finalist for the Kirkus Prize
Praise for Viet Thanh Nguyen:
“A voice that shakes the walls of the old literary comfort zone . . . May that voice keep running like a purifying venom through the mainstream of our self-regard—through the American dream of distancing ourselves from what we continue to show ourselves to be.”—Jonathan Dee, New Yorker, on The Committed
“Equal parts Ellison’s Invisible Man and Chang-rae Lee’s Henry Park, Nguyen’s nameless narrator is a singular literary creation, a complete original.”—Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review (cover review), on The Committed
“The narrator’s voice snaps you up. It’s direct, vain, cranky, and slashing—a voice of outraged intelligence. It’s among the more memorable in recent American literature.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times, on The Committed
“Just as The Sympathizer transformed the hulk of an old spy novel, The Committed does the same with a tale of noir crime.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“The Sympathizer and The Committed are, to borrow James Wood’s phrase for such novels, perpetual-motion machines, their exuberance perhaps a suitable method given how vast a subject he aims to tackle. The breathless voice and sprawling plots of these novels made me think of Midnight’s Children: manic language and impossible story suit the strange truth of colonialism. Nguyen does Salman Rushdie one better by deploying the conventions of genre fiction; he gently seduces the reader into two rambling, discursive works passionately interested in war and violence, race and identity, colonialism and history.”—Rumaan Alam, New York Review of Books
“These two novels constitute a powerful challenge to an enduring narrative of colonialism and neo-colonialism. One waits to see what Nguyen, and the man of two faces, will do next.”—Aminatta Forna, Guardian, on The Committed and The Sympathizer
“One of our great chroniclers of displacement . . . All Nguyen’s fiction is pervaded by a shared intensity of vision, by stinging perceptions that drift like windblown ashes.”—Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker
“A layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a ‘man of two minds’—and two countries, Vietnam and the United States.”—Pulitzer Prize Citation for The Sympathizer
“Remarkable . . . His book fills a void in the literature, giving voice to the previously voiceless . . . Compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene, and le Carré . . . An absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet.”—Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review (cover review), on The Sympathizer
“Intelligent, relentlessly paced and savagely funny . . . The voice of the double-agent narrator, caustic yet disarmingly honest, etches itself on the memory.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal, “Best Books of the Year,” on The Sympathizer
“A fast-paced, entertaining read . . . A much-needed Vietnamese perspective on the war.”—Bill Gates, Gates Notes, on The Sympathizer
“Extraordinary . . . Surely a new classic of war fiction . . . I haven’t read anything since Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that illustrates so palpably how a patient tyrant, unmoored from all humane constraint, can reduce a man’s mind to liquid.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post, on The Sympathizer
“We’ve never had a story quite like this one before . . . Mr. Nguyen is a master of the telling ironic phrase and the biting detail, and the book pulses with Catch-22-style absurdities.”—Sarah Lyall, New York Times, on The Sympathizer
“Beautifully written and meaty . . . I had that kid-like feeling of being inside the book.”—Claire Messud, Boston Globe, on The Sympathizer
“Thrilling in its virtuosity, as in its masterly exploitation of the espionage-thriller genre . . . The book’s (unnamed) narrator speaks in an audaciously postmodernist voice, echoing not only Vladimir Nabokov and Ralph Ellison but the Dostoyevsky of Notes from the Underground.”—Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker, on The Sympathizer
“Gleaming and uproarious, a dark comedy of confession filled with charlatans, delusionists and shameless opportunists . . . The Sympathizer, like Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, examines American intentions, often mixed with hubris, benevolence and ineptitude, that lead the country into conflict.”—Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times, on The Sympathizer
“Dazzling . . . A fascinating exploration of personal identity, cultural identity, and what it means to sympathize with two sides at once.”—John Powers, Fresh Air, NPR, “Books I Wish I’d Reviewed,” on The Sympathizer
“As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift―wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity―to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls ‘a just memory’ of this war.”―Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times, on Nothing Ever Dies
“Nguyen’s lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy.”―Donna Seaman, Booklist, on Nothing Ever Dies (starred review)
“A beautiful collection that deftly illustrates the experiences of the kinds of people our country has, until recently, welcomed with open arms . . . An urgent, wonderful collection that proves that fiction can be more than mere storytelling—it can bear witness to the lives of people who we can’t afford to forget.”—Michael Schaub, NPR Books, on The Refugees
“This is an important and incisive book written by a major writer with firsthand knowledge of the human rights drama exploding on the international stage–and the talent to give us inroads toward understanding it . . . It is refreshing and essential to have this work from a writer who knows and feels the terrain on an intellectual, emotional and cellular level–it shows . . . An exquisite book.”—Megan Mayhew Bergman, Washington Post, on The Refugees
“Confirms Nguyen as an agile, trenchant writer, able to inhabit a number of contrary points of view. And it whets your appetite for his next novel.”—Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times, on The Refugees
“A short-story collection mostly plumbing the experience of boat-bound Vietnamese who escaped to California . . . Ultimately, Nguyen enlarges empathy, the high ideal of literature and the enemy of hate and fear.”—Boris Kachka, New York, on The Refugees
“The book we need now . . . The most timely short story collection in recent memory . . . Throughout, Nguyen demonstrates the richness of the refugee experience, while also foregrounding the very real trauma that lies at its core.”—Doree Shafrir, BuzzFeed, on The Refugees
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Product details
Publisher : Grove Press (October 3, 2023)
Language : English
Hardcover : 400 pages
ISBN-10 : 0802160506
ISBN-13 : 978-0802160508
Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inchesBest Sellers Rank: #736 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)#3 in Essays (Books)
#3 in Author Biographies
#60 in Memoirs (Books)Customer Reviews:
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 42 ratings
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Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; the children's book Chicken of the Sea, with his son Ellison and with Thi Bui and Hien Bui-Stafford; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is a University Professor and the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Anne Layton
5.0 out of 5 stars Are we immigrants or refugees?Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2023
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If you read this book, be prepared to question how you view American history and colonialism.
Mr. Nguyen's stories encouraged me to rethink history about immigration policies in the US. More painfully, it made me think about how we view immigrants and how we deal with them. For instance, I have read much about PTSD of returning veterans. But what about the experiences of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand? Many of them never talked about how their families were broken up, homes destroyed, and moved to a country where you didn't speak the language.
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars definitely an important workReviewed in the United States on October 15, 2023
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For those of us who haven’t experienced complete disruption of our culture, language and home to enter the refugee or immigrants world, these words are so helpful to bring raw reality to our foggy impression. I Love Ba Ma and this memoir becomes truly interesting when following their specific stories. Thanks to the author for sharing these memories.
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Stevie
VINE VOICE
4.0 out of 5 stars An Unconventional and Thought-Provoking MemoirReviewed in the United States on October 4, 2023
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen new memoir, A Man of Two Faces, was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award, with the National Book Foundation hailing “it as a complex meditation on Nguyen’s life as a father and a son, and an exploration of the murkiness of memory and necessity of forgiveness." As a fan of his fiction might anticipate, Nguyen does not provide the typical linear unfolding of his personal history, although the reader learns that his family fled Viet Nam in 1975 when Nguyen was 4 years old, leaving behind his sixteen-year-old adopted sister to “guard the family property” (as he later explains, “[e]very Vietnamese family has photos of those left behind.”). After arriving in Harrisburg, PA, where they were separated as no single sponsor was able to take in the entire family, the family settled in San Jose, CA. His parents were refugees (not as Nguyen emphatically explains immigrants, expats, or migrants) who could not speak English but were able to purchase a house for cash in San Jose. They owned and operated (in other words “worked relentlessly”) a humble Vietnamese market which was inaccurately described in the local newspaper article about Nguyen’s elder brother who graduated as valedictorian of San Jose High as a “miniature department store.” Nguyen attended a Catholic school and pokes fun at his image: “A Vietnamese boy wearing Irish-green corduroys and an Irish-green cardigan with a shamrock on its pocket.” Although his brother attended Harvard, Nguyen was rejected from every college he applied to except one (his “last-choice university”) because he had a B+ average “otherwise known as an Asian F.”
Interwoven in this background are his thoughtful reflections on war (he offers sharp appraisals of Vietnam War films such as Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, and The Green Berets (the latter a “work of propaganda so spectacular and atrocious that only the Third Reich or Hollywood could have produced it”); racism (the refugees from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine receive a hospitable welcome because they are white; Americans exported their racism in Viet Nam which explains why the Vietnamese despise the Amerasian or Eurasian children of Black fathers), colonialism (which is always about land and when truly successful, is not recognized by the colonizers as colonialism), and the United States (America TM). Nguyen’s tangents are sharp, thought-provoking and often humorous (Tippi Hendren visited refugees at Camp Pendelton and asks her manicurist to train some of the women which is how, nearly fifty years later “Vietnamese make up 58 percent of the nail salon industry in this country”).
He cites diverse individuals, including Richard Pryor, Theodore Roosevelt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip Roth, Rambo (“as part of the indoctrination of our love for white saviors”), Virginia Woolf (whose room of her own was financed by her aunt in Bombay, India, an English colony), Karl Marx, Groucho Marx and Donald Trump (who slashes refugee quotas and who views Asians as “the Other, nobody and nothing, unseen until you are seen everywhere.”) He reflects on the way that older Vietnamese people ingratiate themselves with white people to “make up for not being American,” and the pushback he received when he wrote about Thanksgiving for the New York Times and described it as “both heartwarming family ritual AND celebration of genocide.” Undoubtedly, there will be some who will feel that Nguyen does not fully appreciate AMERICA TM, but he acknowledges that he is an “ingrate” refugee who concedes that being a “refugee gives you the requisite emotional damage to be a writer.” Thank you Midtown Scholar and Net Galley for providing me with this outstanding memoir of the refugee experience by one of our leading writers.
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elysejody
5.0 out of 5 stars Intimate and PowerfulReviewed in the United States on October 8, 2023
As soon as I saw the title of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new book
“A Man of Two Faces” …..A Memoir, A History, A Memorial ….
“The highly original blistering unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer prize winning author of ‘The Sympathizer’, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide”……
I only hesitated one minute: wishing to listen to Viet read it—
but not wanting to wait - I requested an early copy from Grove Atlantic …(thank you for this treat, Grove!) - I started reading each morning while spinning my legs on our spinnaker stationary bike.
Note: I read ‘The Sympathizer’ a year before it won the Pulitzer Prize…gave it a strong 5 star rating. I was telling about how great it was, but it took Viet winning the Pulitzer Prize until most people believed me…and finally read it themselves only to be blown away, too.
I couldn’t have been happier for anyone when Viet won the Pulitzer Prize!!!
“A Memoir A History A Memorial” > was EXACTLY the type of book I wanted ‘from Viet’. My excitement was real….
turning out to be - gratefully- tremendously engrossing.
For one thing,
it’s personal and moving.
Every topic and theme covered …
no matter how heavy-loaded ….be it war,
colonization,
racism,
nationalism,
violence,
fear,
heartbreak,
loss…..
etc.
is written with inviting - readable personal intimacy.
I just love this guy. Viet is smart! Wise! Observant! Insightful!
He demonstrates a profound understanding of immigration struggles…..and is keenly politically and socially aware. He is also funny…..(personally wonderfully-open) in sharing his soul ….and he’s very likable.
This book reads pretty fast - awesome prose styling - with sweet family photos.
I’m going to dive right in and share some excerpts. …..but most……
I highly recommend this book to everyone!!!
It’s one of the best ‘personal, informative & powerful’ books by any Vietnamese American I have ever read. ….
……it has everything important:
LIFE….LOVE….FAMILY….
HISTORY….and an emotional MEMORIAL….a tribute to Viet’s Ma.
Excerpts I loved….(for a variety of reasons)….
there are plenty more where these came from…
“Do you know the way to San Jose?”
[Viet once lived less than 5 miles from me ….he ‘knows’ the way to San Jose]
“A handful of bad memories can be more indelible than a lifetime of good memories or mediocre ones. We noticed the scar, not the skin. Being taken away from your parents is burned in between your shoulder blades, a brand you do not usually see until you examine yourself with the mirrors of your own writing”.
“You never think of what your parents experience when they are forced to give you up. But when your son turns four, you finally see Ba Ma as they were then, younger than you when you at last became a father, their bodies vital, their future, old age and abstraction, they’re missing children in reality.
“Your separation from your parents eventually ends. No photo exists of your reunion with your parents. Your family photos record only the good times afterward. In one Pennsylvania photo, you pose cheerfully in shorts and sandals, somewhere woodsy” .
(loved the photo of little Viet).
“You begin to remember yourself when your son turns four in 2017. You have named your son Ellison in homage to the novelist Ralph, whose ‘Invisible Man’ impressed you deeply when you read it in college.
“You want your son to understand that the language of these writers and thinkers is his home, too, as much as America is.
You want Ellison to understand, eventually, that to be an American—
and he is an American, born and bread, eligible to be president!”
“Meanwhile, your poor son just wants to play Minecraft”.
“Seeing your son, at four makes you think of yourself at that age, when your brief separation from your parents seemed eternal. What you tried not to think about for decades resurges. A force more powerful than when your parents took you away to give your father and mother time to become self-sufficient. But a child only understands the powerlessness, the abandonment, the sound of his screaming”.
“Visiting Berkeley with your high school girlfriend, J, you fall in love with the University at first sight. From telegraph Avenue to campus, and Sproul Plaza, where the Free Speech Movement of the 1960’s had gathered in enormous numbers, you feel that this is where you have always wanted to be. Something is in the air, and it is not just marijuana”.
Viet went to UC Berkeley…. (my Alma Mater too).
“Ba Ma comfort themselves with a microwave, a stereo console with built-in speakers, a cassette deck, and an 8-track player; a wooden-paneled television with an enormous twenty-five-inch screen that serves as your personal Americanization device”.
“You rent these movies from a dark, narrow Vietnamese, video store near the SaiGon Moi, passed the Vietnamese beauty salon, the Vietnamese, café, the Vietnamese sandwich, shop, Vietnamese restaurant, their
alienness to non-Vietnamese people occasionally softened by French names: the Paris Beauty Salon, Les Amis Cafe”.
“You have taken over downtown San Jose. And made it better.”
[It’s true!!!!]
“You do not suffer from an identity crisis, because American individualism and Vietnamese collectivism war within you”.
“Hard life in the old world— poverty, war, patriarchy, homophobia, religious persecution, dictatorial regime, etc.”
“Daunting challenges in the New World— language barriers, cultural, misunderstandings, racism, and condescension, as well as starting, at or near the economic bottom, above many Black people and native people”.
“Generational conflict—parents don’t understand their Americanized children;
American born or American raised children don’t get their old world parents”.
“Your heroes are anti-colonial, revolutionaries, public intellectuals, committed writers, galvanizing teachers”.
“No longer a faceless part of an Asian invasion. You are an Asian American”.
Viet’s Ma was born in 1937.
“A poor girl in a poor northern Vietnamese village. She died in 2018”.
At age 17……
Viet almost did not graduate from high school because he nearly failed pre-calculus. (Too funny!)
I love our Pulitzer Prize Guy…..
Love this book. I hope to read more books that Viet writes about his son Ellison….and maybe a book by Ellison, himself one day.
5 strong stars….Highly recommend!!!
elysejody
====
An audacious memoir from Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of ‘The Sympathizer’
Nguyen’s ‘A Man of Two Faces’ tackles war, colonization, death and more, but still manages to be playful
Review by Lisa Ko
October 5, 2023 at 11:16 a.m. EDT
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In a recent interview, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen spoke about his “pervasive preoccupation” with the power of storytelling and his relationship to otherness. He contends with both in “A Man of Two Faces,” his formally audacious new memoir, which was recently longlisted for the National Book Award for nonfiction. It is a vision of storytelling as not only internal work but also political work. Beginning with fragments of his early life, he asks, in a verse-like passage: “Where, on the thin border between/ history and memory, can I re/ member myself?”
Nguyen, who was born in 1971, was 4 when he fled Vietnam with his parents and older brother for what he terms AMERICA™. His 16-year-old sister, whom he would not see again for nearly 30 years, was left behind. At a military base in Pennsylvania, the rest of his family was separated to live with American sponsors. Reunited after several years, they eventually settled in San Jose, and opened the city’s second Vietnamese grocery store, where, when Nguyen was 9, his parents were shot and injured during a Christmas Eve holdup, the aftermath of which he excised from memory. As a newly politically active ethnic-studies student at the University of California at Berkeley, he published an essay about what it was like to grow up in “White America.” It landed him a spot in the writing workshop of the famed author Maxine Hong Kingston, but he writes that he slept through it every day. (Years later, she told him he had been the worst student in the class.) He earned a PhD in English, started teaching at the University of Southern California and wrote his first novel, “The Sympathizer,” which won the Pulitzer in 2016.
The success of “The Sympathizer” transformed Nguyen into a “Professional Refugee” lauded for “giving voice to the previously voiceless,” but in “A Man of Two Faces,” he indicts the paucity of diversity and representation in politics, and advocates for abolishing the very conditions of voicelessness.
In his memoir, Nguyen writes that childhood left a “a sediment of confusion and emotion that requires decades … to sift through,” and that it was through this process of sifting that he learned how to be a writer. He incorporates cultural criticism — one chapter details how watching “Apocalypse Now” was a turning point that made him question whether, if he had been in the movie, he would have been “the Americans killing? Or the Vietnamese being killed?” — with meditations on his roles as a parent, son and refugee, digging deeper into memory as the book progresses (“Can you go where it hurts?/ Can you cut to the bone?”) as the “unexploded ordnance of the past, a mine buried in the mind,” gradually comes into focus.
The stereoscopic structure of the personal and the cultural challenges us to reflect on how the formation of self involves stories told about us as well as those we tell ourselves. In Nguyen’s case, this requires vigorous self-interrogation and self-inventory: “Are you, a refugee, the/ colonized or the/ colonizer?” It’s not either-or.
In Vietnam, Nguyen’s parents were among the 800,000 Roman Catholics transported from the country’s north to its Central Highlands by the Americans and French, part of a CIA-encouraged effort to resettle a region where Indigenous Montagnard people already lived. And coming to the United States as refugees meant “becoming shareholders in the war machine, the/ ultimate condition of our citizenship.” Writing about Tou Thao, the Hmong American police officer who was convicted of aiding and abetting manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd, Nguyen confesses, “Perhaps … you are more alike than you care to admit.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author of “A Man of Two Faces.” (Hopper Stone, SMPSP)
The subject matter is serious — war, colonization, Nguyen’s mother’s decades-long illness before her death in 2018 and his inability to recall particularly painful times when she was hospitalized — but there is a playfulness as well: changing font sizes; taking liberties with layout; writing with sardonic humor; sharing a list of one-star reviews of “The Sympathizer,” which Nguyen calls a “Not So Great American Novel.” Forsaking a traditional prose format for discrete paragraph-length chunks of text set apart with line breaks, Nguyen occasionally aligns alternating paragraphs left and right to mimic a dialogue between opposing voices, even anticipating potential criticism: “Get over it, snowflake, a reader mutters.” (At other times, the stylistic choices make for a more awkward, choppy tone: “Dis-placed. Dis place. Dys-place.”) “You” is a stand-in for “I,” providing necessary distance for a writer who confesses to avoiding feelings by hiding behind academic theory. “You, the reader, never the text.”
“How do you separate yourself/ and your memories from History?” Nguyen asks. The answer is, you don’t. His most emotionally powerful writing revolves around his parents, whose journey into old age was “epic and yet quotidian.” Ba, a stern man whom Nguyen feared and respected, never discouraged him from becoming a scholar and writer. And while Má’s illness and death will not count as one of war’s casualties, “civilian stories can be war stories too.” The memoir fully coheres in its final section, exemplifying its author’s call for the importance of truth-telling, sharing both “private secrets” and “open secrets,” an act that comes with risks — writers who fall outside the dominant culture are expected to show their grief but not explain why it exists. “Writing is the only way I know how to fight,” Nguyen writes. “And writing is the only way I know how to grieve.” Sharp and affecting, this book is both: a weapon, a lamentation.
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Lisa Ko is the author of the forthcoming novel “Memory Piece” and “The Leavers,” which was a national bestseller and a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for fiction.
A Man of Two Faces
A Memoir, A History, A Memorial
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