With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life in A Man of Two Faces. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, Nguyen 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.
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Q&A with Thanh Tân.
In A Man of Two Faces, Nguyen recounts how, at the age of four, he 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 AMERICA™.
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.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and soon to be an HBO Original Series; its sequel, The Committed; the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is 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.
Thanh Tân is a Vietnamese American storyteller and filmmaker based in Seattle, Washington. An award-winning journalist who started her career in local television newsrooms, her reporting and writing aims to generate conversation and solve problems, resulting in work that has been featured across all platforms, from This American Life and The Texas Tribune to The Seattle Times and The New York Times. As a brand storyteller, she has traveled around the world telling true stories for Microsoft about the impact of tech and joined Starbucks in 2021 to craft mission-driven narratives about the global ritual of coffee as a means to connect people. Learn more at: https://www.thanhtan.co/
