The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The
Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide
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.
