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A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Memoir & Autobiography (2023)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 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.
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 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.
400 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 3, 2023
About the author
Viet Thanh Nguyen
37 books5,405 followersViet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the novel The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015). He also authored Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002) and co-edited Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (University of Hawaii Press, 2014). An associate professor at the University of Southern California, he teaches in the departments of English and American Studies and Ethnicity.
He has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2011-2012), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2008-2009) and the Fine Arts Work Center (2004-2005). He has also received residencies, fellowships, and grants from the Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the James Irvine Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation.
His short fiction has been published in Manoa, Best New American Voices 2007, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross-Cultural Collision and Connection, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, the Chicago Tribune, and Gulf Coast, where his story won the 2007 Fiction Prize.
His writing has been translated into Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Spanish, and he has given invited lectures in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Germany. He is finishing an academic book titled War, Memory, Identity.
He has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2011-2012), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2008-2009) and the Fine Arts Work Center (2004-2005). He has also received residencies, fellowships, and grants from the Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the James Irvine Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation.
His short fiction has been published in Manoa, Best New American Voices 2007, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross-Cultural Collision and Connection, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, the Chicago Tribune, and Gulf Coast, where his story won the 2007 Fiction Prize.
His writing has been translated into Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Spanish, and he has given invited lectures in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Germany. He is finishing an academic book titled War, Memory, Identity.
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April 12, 2023
A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, a memoir by Viet Thanh Nguyen, is one of the top books I have read in 2023. It will remain with me for many years.
It is profound, powerful, thought provoking and it holds up a mirror to how America treats immigrants and refugees.
Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016 for The Sympathizer even though fourteen publishers passed on the opportunity to publish his book. In A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, Nguyen shares how writers of color must read and be very familiar with White authors' works. White ignorance of the works of writers of color is a privilege---and there is often a lack of interest in expanding knowledge and reading books by people of color.
Nguyen's memoir is formatted like poetry and the storytelling is masterful. The topics include colonization, nationalism, genocide, war, refugees, immigrants, racism, and voicelessness and how that impacts the American Dream.
There are many visceral, memorable passages including:
* Refugees are seen as zombies of the world
* Fear and terror shape refugees
* B+ average is an Asian F
* As a model minority, sometimes you rock the boat but most of the time you row, diligently
* Stories are there to shake you, unnerve you, and make you see a new version of yourself
* Under colonization, none of us can breathe. When we recognize that, we can all struggle for
breath together.
* Thanksgiving is both a reunion and a story of genocide
* Refugees often feel betrayed because they are taken to the country that was the aggressor in their
home country and then they are expected to be grateful
* White nationalism is the US identity
* White nationalism requires demonizing racial others and subordinating women
* Anti-Asian violence increased once Trump called the pandemic the Chinese virus and Kung Flu
* What does it mean to be illegal when the law is unjust?
* MLK: Riots are the language of the unheard
* Being racist is easier than blaming capitalism
* Countries gush refugees because the country is broken or they are breaking their people
* An aerosol of racism permeates America
* There is no such thing as voicelessness. Voices are deliberately silenced or preferably unheard.
* Writing can be an act of justice
* Writer's ultimate task: find what shouldn't be written and write it
Thanks, NetGalley, for a free ARC of this book in exchange for my fair and unbiased opinion. Expected publication date is October 3, 2023.
Highly, highly recommend!
It is profound, powerful, thought provoking and it holds up a mirror to how America treats immigrants and refugees.
Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016 for The Sympathizer even though fourteen publishers passed on the opportunity to publish his book. In A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, Nguyen shares how writers of color must read and be very familiar with White authors' works. White ignorance of the works of writers of color is a privilege---and there is often a lack of interest in expanding knowledge and reading books by people of color.
Nguyen's memoir is formatted like poetry and the storytelling is masterful. The topics include colonization, nationalism, genocide, war, refugees, immigrants, racism, and voicelessness and how that impacts the American Dream.
There are many visceral, memorable passages including:
* Refugees are seen as zombies of the world
* Fear and terror shape refugees
* B+ average is an Asian F
* As a model minority, sometimes you rock the boat but most of the time you row, diligently
* Stories are there to shake you, unnerve you, and make you see a new version of yourself
* Under colonization, none of us can breathe. When we recognize that, we can all struggle for
breath together.
* Thanksgiving is both a reunion and a story of genocide
* Refugees often feel betrayed because they are taken to the country that was the aggressor in their
home country and then they are expected to be grateful
* White nationalism is the US identity
* White nationalism requires demonizing racial others and subordinating women
* Anti-Asian violence increased once Trump called the pandemic the Chinese virus and Kung Flu
* What does it mean to be illegal when the law is unjust?
* MLK: Riots are the language of the unheard
* Being racist is easier than blaming capitalism
* Countries gush refugees because the country is broken or they are breaking their people
* An aerosol of racism permeates America
* There is no such thing as voicelessness. Voices are deliberately silenced or preferably unheard.
* Writing can be an act of justice
* Writer's ultimate task: find what shouldn't be written and write it
Thanks, NetGalley, for a free ARC of this book in exchange for my fair and unbiased opinion. Expected publication date is October 3, 2023.
Highly, highly recommend!
December 17, 2023
3.5 stars
I liked this memoir and also felt a bit confused by it! What I appreciated: Viet Thanh Nguyen names and dissects colonialism, internalized white supremacy, and anti-Asian racism in the United States. Loved his critiques of media such as the horribly racist Miss Saigon. His writing about his family feels sincere and moving if not a bit sparse, too, including his deep affection for his wife and kids and the way he honors the three-dimensionality of his parents.
I didn’t love the more experimental elements of this memoir. More often than not they distracted me rather than added to the book. For example, I didn’t understand the blacking out of Donald Trump’s name (like, I abhor him too, but…) I also didn’t get why Nguyen wrote so much of the book in second person. He hints or addresses this choice indirectly (maybe directly but felt indirect to me) toward the end, though the use of the second person felt to me like a way to avoid digging into more of his own emotional arc and exploration about his life. At times, it came across to me that Nguyen just didn’t have enough bandwidth to link the different elements of his life together in a more traditional memoirish way, so he resorted to this more hybrid experimental form.
I preferred Sigh, Gone to this, though A Man of Two Faces punches up toward white supremacy and colonialism enacted by the United States in interesting ways. I’ve read a few of Nguyen’s books at this point and his writing feels a bit over-intellectualized for my taste, however, I really do respect what he’s done for Vietnamese American and Asian American representation in literature. I also hugely respect his public and uncompromising call for a ceasefire for Palestine and how he’s used his platform to speak on the dehumanization of Palestinians even though it’s cost him professional opportunities.
I liked this memoir and also felt a bit confused by it! What I appreciated: Viet Thanh Nguyen names and dissects colonialism, internalized white supremacy, and anti-Asian racism in the United States. Loved his critiques of media such as the horribly racist Miss Saigon. His writing about his family feels sincere and moving if not a bit sparse, too, including his deep affection for his wife and kids and the way he honors the three-dimensionality of his parents.
I didn’t love the more experimental elements of this memoir. More often than not they distracted me rather than added to the book. For example, I didn’t understand the blacking out of Donald Trump’s name (like, I abhor him too, but…) I also didn’t get why Nguyen wrote so much of the book in second person. He hints or addresses this choice indirectly (maybe directly but felt indirect to me) toward the end, though the use of the second person felt to me like a way to avoid digging into more of his own emotional arc and exploration about his life. At times, it came across to me that Nguyen just didn’t have enough bandwidth to link the different elements of his life together in a more traditional memoirish way, so he resorted to this more hybrid experimental form.
I preferred Sigh, Gone to this, though A Man of Two Faces punches up toward white supremacy and colonialism enacted by the United States in interesting ways. I’ve read a few of Nguyen’s books at this point and his writing feels a bit over-intellectualized for my taste, however, I really do respect what he’s done for Vietnamese American and Asian American representation in literature. I also hugely respect his public and uncompromising call for a ceasefire for Palestine and how he’s used his platform to speak on the dehumanization of Palestinians even though it’s cost him professional opportunities.
April 14, 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 everyone 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!!!
“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 everyone 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!!!
November 21, 2023
As soon as I turned the last page of Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new memoir, my first reaction was, well, silence because I was too awe-struck to speak. I sat there for quite some time, reflecting on what I had just read (to say there was A LOT to reflect upon is an understatement), but also marveling at the brilliance that I had just witnessed. Believe me when I say that this is no ordinary memoir — the content itself (with Nguyen’s eloquent yet unflinchingly honest writing style) is powerful enough on its own, but the way he plays with elements of form throughout the book honestly just blew me away. The formatting of the book is important here — the sections that mimic poetry, the clever use of white space, the different size fonts, the use of “TM” after certain words, the thoughtful (and careful) placement of words / phrases / sentences on the page to convey specific ideas, the shifting of voice and point of view, the interspersing of family photographs where appropriate, etc. (truly, I could go on and on) — all of this had the combined effect of creating a unique and powerful reading experience unlike any other. I’ve read my fair share of memoirs over the years, but I’ve definitely never read anything like this one.
As I mentioned earlier, Nguyen writes eloquently, using language and prose in a way that captivates, yet doesn’t come across as pretentious or highbrow. In fact, Nguyen writes in such a straightforward, lucid manner that, at times, I couldn’t help but feel taken aback by the brutal honesty of his words. At the same time, I also resonated deeply with much of what he wrote (even though our backgrounds couldn’t be more different). Case in point — I had actually received an advance copy of Nguyen’s memoir and started off reading the e-arc, but barely a few pages in, I was already highlighting so many things that resonated with me, that I wound up getting a physical copy of the book instead so I could have something tangible in which to make notes (I ended up using an entire sleeve of colored sticky tabs because I found things I wanted to flag on nearly every page). Something else that struck me with this memoir — Nguyen talks about a lot of very difficult topics in here (as he mentions himself at certain points, this is his family’s story, but also a “war story”), yet he also infuses the entire narrative with a self-deprecating sense of humor — the net result being a perfect balance of serious and funny that made the “heavy” topics easier to engage with. Personally, I found myself laughing and crying in equal measure while reading this book.
To be honest, I don’t think any review will be able to do justice to the brilliance of what Nguyen was able to achieve with this memoir. I initially thought about including a few quotes in this review that especially resonated with me, but there were so many good ones that I had trouble picking only a few, so I decided not to include any. Instead, I recommend anyone reading this review go pick this one up (a physical copy, as that’s the best way to appreciate this memoir with such an unconventional structure) and experience it for yourself.
Lastly, I wanted to put in a plug for Miwa Messer’s interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen on her Poured Over podcast. The conversation they had about this book was absolutely wonderful and inspiring — definitely a great supplement to the reading experience with this one!
Received ARC from Grove Press via NetGalley.
As I mentioned earlier, Nguyen writes eloquently, using language and prose in a way that captivates, yet doesn’t come across as pretentious or highbrow. In fact, Nguyen writes in such a straightforward, lucid manner that, at times, I couldn’t help but feel taken aback by the brutal honesty of his words. At the same time, I also resonated deeply with much of what he wrote (even though our backgrounds couldn’t be more different). Case in point — I had actually received an advance copy of Nguyen’s memoir and started off reading the e-arc, but barely a few pages in, I was already highlighting so many things that resonated with me, that I wound up getting a physical copy of the book instead so I could have something tangible in which to make notes (I ended up using an entire sleeve of colored sticky tabs because I found things I wanted to flag on nearly every page). Something else that struck me with this memoir — Nguyen talks about a lot of very difficult topics in here (as he mentions himself at certain points, this is his family’s story, but also a “war story”), yet he also infuses the entire narrative with a self-deprecating sense of humor — the net result being a perfect balance of serious and funny that made the “heavy” topics easier to engage with. Personally, I found myself laughing and crying in equal measure while reading this book.
To be honest, I don’t think any review will be able to do justice to the brilliance of what Nguyen was able to achieve with this memoir. I initially thought about including a few quotes in this review that especially resonated with me, but there were so many good ones that I had trouble picking only a few, so I decided not to include any. Instead, I recommend anyone reading this review go pick this one up (a physical copy, as that’s the best way to appreciate this memoir with such an unconventional structure) and experience it for yourself.
Lastly, I wanted to put in a plug for Miwa Messer’s interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen on her Poured Over podcast. The conversation they had about this book was absolutely wonderful and inspiring — definitely a great supplement to the reading experience with this one!
Received ARC from Grove Press via NetGalley.
Want to read
August 16, 2024the only nonfiction i read is memoirs by authors whose fiction i already like
October 18, 2024
12 Challenge
Recommended by DaUhn
I don't even know where to start. This took me apart, broke me, and put me back together again. I would apologize for being dramatic, but I'm not sorry.
I highlighted 100+ things as I was reading, but I won't subject you to that. Know that I was moved. I laughed. I cried. I empathized.
This is VTN's story, beginning with his parents becoming refugees, twice, in the same way my grandparents were. As North Vietnamese Catholics, they fled communism in 1954. Post-Vietnam War, they fled again.
It's a study in intersectionality. I've always felt as though I was two pieces of a whole, neither one, nor the other. This book helps me see myself a little more easily. Viet and I both have Vietnamese names, and yet struggle with our "native" language. How Vietnamese are you if you don't speak Vietnamese? How Vietnamese are you if you don't grow up in Vietnam?
There is a section that speaks on pre-1975 Vietnamese. This is the Vietnamese my parents, grandparents, and extended family speak. It is the Vietnamese I understand. The words I know for airport and bank aren't used anymore. I don't recognize the "new" ones. And yet, when my siblings and I turn to Duolingo (a terrible resource, 0/10 would not recommend) to pick up bits and pieces of our language, and ask our father about what we don't understand, without explaining, he calls it Communist Vietnamese and refuses to speak further.
Viet talks about being "the whitest" people of French Indochina. There is a sometimes spoken of hierarchy of Asians. Sometimes Vietnamese people are lumped more with East Asians than Southeast Asians. Colorism exists. Our skin is lighter than our neighbors' because China ruled/raped/killed us for 900+ years. And yet we tend to only speak of the French, and sometimes Japanese, when we speak of being colonized. And yet, in being colonized, we also did some colonizing.
The model minority myth is demoralizing. In it, Asians are separated from other minorities and shown in a semi-positive light. Nothing about this model is positive. In fact, I would say we are invisible, even as we try to achieve glory under the white gaze.
Viet even talks about the classic genres of American propaganda—the western and the World War II movie. I've never liked these genres. In fact, growing up, I always wondered why white people loved them so much. I see now these genres follow the white savior narrative. It was not until Pachinko was released that I realized it wasn't WW2 I hated, but the very Eurocentric view of it. Was this not a World War? Is Europe the world?
The next time you see an Asian American author's book shelved in Asian literature instead of American literature, ask yourself why. The only truly American literature should be Native literature. If we're shelving things this way, it only makes sense to shelve "American" literature in European literature, and we all know how much of a fuss "actual" Europeans would make.
📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press
Recommended by DaUhn
This is a war story.
I don't even know where to start. This took me apart, broke me, and put me back together again. I would apologize for being dramatic, but I'm not sorry.
I highlighted 100+ things as I was reading, but I won't subject you to that. Know that I was moved. I laughed. I cried. I empathized.
This is VTN's story, beginning with his parents becoming refugees, twice, in the same way my grandparents were. As North Vietnamese Catholics, they fled communism in 1954. Post-Vietnam War, they fled again.
It's a study in intersectionality. I've always felt as though I was two pieces of a whole, neither one, nor the other. This book helps me see myself a little more easily. Viet and I both have Vietnamese names, and yet struggle with our "native" language. How Vietnamese are you if you don't speak Vietnamese? How Vietnamese are you if you don't grow up in Vietnam?
There is a section that speaks on pre-1975 Vietnamese. This is the Vietnamese my parents, grandparents, and extended family speak. It is the Vietnamese I understand. The words I know for airport and bank aren't used anymore. I don't recognize the "new" ones. And yet, when my siblings and I turn to Duolingo (a terrible resource, 0/10 would not recommend) to pick up bits and pieces of our language, and ask our father about what we don't understand, without explaining, he calls it Communist Vietnamese and refuses to speak further.
Viet talks about being "the whitest" people of French Indochina. There is a sometimes spoken of hierarchy of Asians. Sometimes Vietnamese people are lumped more with East Asians than Southeast Asians. Colorism exists. Our skin is lighter than our neighbors' because China ruled/raped/killed us for 900+ years. And yet we tend to only speak of the French, and sometimes Japanese, when we speak of being colonized. And yet, in being colonized, we also did some colonizing.
We give colonization another name: the AMERICAN DREAM™.
The model minority myth is demoralizing. In it, Asians are separated from other minorities and shown in a semi-positive light. Nothing about this model is positive. In fact, I would say we are invisible, even as we try to achieve glory under the white gaze.
Viet even talks about the classic genres of American propaganda—the western and the World War II movie. I've never liked these genres. In fact, growing up, I always wondered why white people loved them so much. I see now these genres follow the white savior narrative. It was not until Pachinko was released that I realized it wasn't WW2 I hated, but the very Eurocentric view of it. Was this not a World War? Is Europe the world?
The next time you see an Asian American author's book shelved in Asian literature instead of American literature, ask yourself why. The only truly American literature should be Native literature. If we're shelving things this way, it only makes sense to shelve "American" literature in European literature, and we all know how much of a fuss "actual" Europeans would make.
They expect us to read their literature, but they won't read ours.
📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press
October 29, 2023
Having only read Nguyen's fiction, this was not what I expected. Loose prose, loose structure, moving fluidly from one thing to the next, though the same themes repeat. A lot of playfulness in the text itself, enough that I hesitated to move to audio even though I normally would have preferred that. This is some very heavy stuff, I had to take breaks, but that I definitely expected.
September 22, 2023
"The gap between imagining an emotion and feeling it is the distance between empathy and experience."
"This is a war story". Written in fragments, Nguyen pours his heart and soul out into the pages. With unconventional structure, the author shares episodes of his life as a refugee and child of refugees.
Beating into existence, one will remember his and his family's experiences as displaced people, shaped by terror and fear. One will remember the war footprints that leave long-lasting scars. Swallowing your identity and strangeness, one will remember the sharp exploration of the intersections of American dream and colonialism, identity and racism and capitalism. Dismembering the racism in American history, Nguyen accurately incorporates pieces of American culture and literature, with brilliant allusion to (utterly valid) minor feelings by Cathy Park Hong. One will remember the meticulous examination of America, the land of contradiction.
This is about forgetting and also remembering - the model minority and parental sacrifice that, even though it might feel like a broken record at times, are embedded into Asian American (and diaspora) experience. The emotions feel palpable as the author gradually (re-)opens his wounds, leaving an emotional damage that will take some time to recover. Stories and representation matter; and one will remember that this book is not "a voice for the voiceless", rather, "a voice for the unheard, erased".
Once again, I am in awe of the way Nguyen plays with the words, delivering, with an exquisite and evocative prose, the most powerful and infuriating truths. Witnessing their vulnerability with a satirical touch, the author doesn't allow this book to become forgotten pieces, of being erased facts and identity. One will learn to embrace their roots and all the complexity that comes with it. One will remember reading this memoir as if getting a sequence of slaps on one's face, for the way it shakes us to the core. One will remember Nguyen's inspiring journey until a Pulitzer-winning writer.
As impactful as it is candid, I will remember A MAN OF TWO FACES as the most singular memoir. Truly expectational.
TL;DR: one of the all-time favorite books/memoirs! A phenomenal piece of literature that I urge you to read.
[ I received an ARC from the publisher - Grove Atlantic Press . All opinions are my own ]
"This is a war story". Written in fragments, Nguyen pours his heart and soul out into the pages. With unconventional structure, the author shares episodes of his life as a refugee and child of refugees.
Beating into existence, one will remember his and his family's experiences as displaced people, shaped by terror and fear. One will remember the war footprints that leave long-lasting scars. Swallowing your identity and strangeness, one will remember the sharp exploration of the intersections of American dream and colonialism, identity and racism and capitalism. Dismembering the racism in American history, Nguyen accurately incorporates pieces of American culture and literature, with brilliant allusion to (utterly valid) minor feelings by Cathy Park Hong. One will remember the meticulous examination of America, the land of contradiction.
This is about forgetting and also remembering - the model minority and parental sacrifice that, even though it might feel like a broken record at times, are embedded into Asian American (and diaspora) experience. The emotions feel palpable as the author gradually (re-)opens his wounds, leaving an emotional damage that will take some time to recover. Stories and representation matter; and one will remember that this book is not "a voice for the voiceless", rather, "a voice for the unheard, erased".
Once again, I am in awe of the way Nguyen plays with the words, delivering, with an exquisite and evocative prose, the most powerful and infuriating truths. Witnessing their vulnerability with a satirical touch, the author doesn't allow this book to become forgotten pieces, of being erased facts and identity. One will learn to embrace their roots and all the complexity that comes with it. One will remember reading this memoir as if getting a sequence of slaps on one's face, for the way it shakes us to the core. One will remember Nguyen's inspiring journey until a Pulitzer-winning writer.
As impactful as it is candid, I will remember A MAN OF TWO FACES as the most singular memoir. Truly expectational.
TL;DR: one of the all-time favorite books/memoirs! A phenomenal piece of literature that I urge you to read.
[ I received an ARC from the publisher - Grove Atlantic Press . All opinions are my own ]
November 29, 2023
I’ve been avoiding books concerning “””Asian American matters””” (read: East Asian) because I felt like 1) everything had been said already 2) most books just parade out the same tired tropes and 3) don’t these people (me) have anything else to write about? After Minor Feelings, I was pretty sure nothing else was left to write about…
Viet mocks these tropes (“Incorporate food into your file, and or use excessively spiritual or natural imagery. Use food liberally as a metaphor for cultural differences and assimilation.”), but at the same time, crafts his own careful essays about identity, culture, family, in the face of war and tragedy. I liked the refusal to combine collective identity with personal identity - the Great American Novelist doesn’t have to worry that his writing represents The White Man. His individuality is already acknowledged. But for everyone else:
“Vietnamese people, how do you separate what is unique to you and your own personal trauma
from war, colonization, the division and reunification of the country?/from becoming a refugee or staying behind or being left behind?/from being the child of refugees, soldiers, witnesses, survivors?/from being the child of those who didn't survive?/from being Vietnamese?”
But just as I would hate to be dismissed as a reader of Asian issues, Viet is not just a writer of Asian issues. He says, “don’t be a voice for the voiceless. abolish the conditions of voicelessness.” He rages against the structural problems that silence both people like him (Vietnamese? Refugees? Asians?) and people not like him. But he also writes a memoir within his memorial, a story of self discovery/self consciousness which I found relatable, and a story of parental love/grief which I found emotionally devastating. I ache for his parents, though I will never know them.
Also: Viet has a very —unique— writing style… I sense that some may hate it, maybe think he’s trying too hard in some places to be profound, or doing too much when he just needs to stay in his lane, but I thought it really worked. Viet used to be a literary critic, a “doctor of letters,” and here we can see the same precise mastery of words. He moves smoothly between poetry, historical essay, and personal narrative. At times where the writing might be too serious or too devastating, he peppers in some tongue-in-cheek jokes that made me laugh even as my entire worldview shifted. Who else could write a thoughtful essay about the history of decolonization and socialist theory, then with the same gravity, write:
“Dear reader, have you ever been to a Vietnamese restaurant, wedding banquet, or family gathering? If not, your loss. If so, you know that
Vietnamese people are not voiceless!
THEY ARE REALLY, REALLY LOUD!”
I could keep going about this book, but I think this review is already getting long. I hope that all my friends read it so that we can talk about it. Some other thoughts I had were:
-viet plays with memory in very interesting ways, dissects and folds it back in on itself to question his history, his subjectivity, his intentions
-cycle of colonization/who is the colonizer? it’s not so simple as this colonizer vs. colonized dichotomy. to decolonize doesn’t just mean to invert this power dynamic. viet’s family colonized the montagnards when they fled to south vietnam. then they, colonized by the french, flee to america, where they live in land colonized by americans before them. then, what is decolonization?
-re: colonization: “it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home.”
-refugees as a “reminder of the fragility of homes and nations, a threat to the existence of nations.” refugees as the other that unites people because they can define themselves against the refugees. we must see a possibility in that void, in the nothing nation that refugees are from, of a world that exists without nations, without borders, without the body politic
-the reverberations of war in personal lives, psyches, even generations down the line, the depictions in media, how can you ever do it justice?
-viet is a hypocrite. he criticizes food as a metaphor for culture, and then writes,
No one takes rice, or eating, for granted.
“As children, during the great famine, when/there was not enough rice, your parents/had to eat manioc, the tuberous root/of the cassava tree. You find its/white fiber tasteless. A couple/of times in retirement your/father boils manioc and/eats it, smiling, out/of nostalgia.”
-one of the most powerful parts: the essay about Tou Thao, son of Hmong refugees, accomplice to murder of George Floyd. i can’t summarize the essay well enough here, but some quotes:
Ta-Nehisi Coates: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body-
it is heritage.”
“Tou Thao has claimed that heritage.”
“You come from a country of colonizers, while Tou Thao comes from a stateless people... If anyone from Southeast Asia might take the place of Black people, it would be the Hmong, subjected by American warfare and American welfare… When George Floyd is murdered, some on social media quote Fanon on the impossibility of breathing, but forget to include the Indochinese. Fanon's point is that under colonization, none of us can breathe.”
“Tou Thao shows up and turns his back.”
Viet mocks these tropes (“Incorporate food into your file, and or use excessively spiritual or natural imagery. Use food liberally as a metaphor for cultural differences and assimilation.”), but at the same time, crafts his own careful essays about identity, culture, family, in the face of war and tragedy. I liked the refusal to combine collective identity with personal identity - the Great American Novelist doesn’t have to worry that his writing represents The White Man. His individuality is already acknowledged. But for everyone else:
“Vietnamese people, how do you separate what is unique to you and your own personal trauma
from war, colonization, the division and reunification of the country?/from becoming a refugee or staying behind or being left behind?/from being the child of refugees, soldiers, witnesses, survivors?/from being the child of those who didn't survive?/from being Vietnamese?”
But just as I would hate to be dismissed as a reader of Asian issues, Viet is not just a writer of Asian issues. He says, “don’t be a voice for the voiceless. abolish the conditions of voicelessness.” He rages against the structural problems that silence both people like him (Vietnamese? Refugees? Asians?) and people not like him. But he also writes a memoir within his memorial, a story of self discovery/self consciousness which I found relatable, and a story of parental love/grief which I found emotionally devastating. I ache for his parents, though I will never know them.
Also: Viet has a very —unique— writing style… I sense that some may hate it, maybe think he’s trying too hard in some places to be profound, or doing too much when he just needs to stay in his lane, but I thought it really worked. Viet used to be a literary critic, a “doctor of letters,” and here we can see the same precise mastery of words. He moves smoothly between poetry, historical essay, and personal narrative. At times where the writing might be too serious or too devastating, he peppers in some tongue-in-cheek jokes that made me laugh even as my entire worldview shifted. Who else could write a thoughtful essay about the history of decolonization and socialist theory, then with the same gravity, write:
“Dear reader, have you ever been to a Vietnamese restaurant, wedding banquet, or family gathering? If not, your loss. If so, you know that
Vietnamese people are not voiceless!
THEY ARE REALLY, REALLY LOUD!”
I could keep going about this book, but I think this review is already getting long. I hope that all my friends read it so that we can talk about it. Some other thoughts I had were:
-viet plays with memory in very interesting ways, dissects and folds it back in on itself to question his history, his subjectivity, his intentions
-cycle of colonization/who is the colonizer? it’s not so simple as this colonizer vs. colonized dichotomy. to decolonize doesn’t just mean to invert this power dynamic. viet’s family colonized the montagnards when they fled to south vietnam. then they, colonized by the french, flee to america, where they live in land colonized by americans before them. then, what is decolonization?
-re: colonization: “it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home.”
-refugees as a “reminder of the fragility of homes and nations, a threat to the existence of nations.” refugees as the other that unites people because they can define themselves against the refugees. we must see a possibility in that void, in the nothing nation that refugees are from, of a world that exists without nations, without borders, without the body politic
-the reverberations of war in personal lives, psyches, even generations down the line, the depictions in media, how can you ever do it justice?
-viet is a hypocrite. he criticizes food as a metaphor for culture, and then writes,
No one takes rice, or eating, for granted.
“As children, during the great famine, when/there was not enough rice, your parents/had to eat manioc, the tuberous root/of the cassava tree. You find its/white fiber tasteless. A couple/of times in retirement your/father boils manioc and/eats it, smiling, out/of nostalgia.”
-one of the most powerful parts: the essay about Tou Thao, son of Hmong refugees, accomplice to murder of George Floyd. i can’t summarize the essay well enough here, but some quotes:
Ta-Nehisi Coates: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body-
it is heritage.”
“Tou Thao has claimed that heritage.”
“You come from a country of colonizers, while Tou Thao comes from a stateless people... If anyone from Southeast Asia might take the place of Black people, it would be the Hmong, subjected by American warfare and American welfare… When George Floyd is murdered, some on social media quote Fanon on the impossibility of breathing, but forget to include the Indochinese. Fanon's point is that under colonization, none of us can breathe.”
“Tou Thao shows up and turns his back.”
May 2, 2023
Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2015 debut novel The Sympathizer begins with the unforgettable lines: "I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds." When I read it, I was absolutely blown away by both the story itself and how Nguyen lays bare the insidiousness of the America-centric lens that has long informed our perception of the Vietnam War and reduced the people and land of Vietnam to being merely an exotic backdrop for an American tragedy. I had never read a book quite like it before, so when I learned that Nguyen had written a new memoir, I dropped everything else I was reading to devour it over two days.
A Man of Two Faces, a title which alludes to the opening lines of The Sympathizer, is part memoir of Nguyen's experiences as a refugee and eventually an academic and Pulitzer-winning writer, part history and blistering critique of the legacies of colonialism and imperialism that still pervade our modern culture, and part loving tribute to his parents and their journeys of trauma and dispossession — journeys that the second-generation immigrant children raised in a foreign land can never fully comprehend and rarely have the means or opportunity to probe.
This book covers a lot of ground. Nguyen calls out the pervasive racism of Hollywood and mass media in clear, evocative, and soberingly impassioned prose. He discusses the othering and erasure that people of color in America experience in a wide spectrum of ways, what it means to reclaim your identity in a country that sees Asians as model minorities or yellow perils, the internal colonization that happens subconsciously and the painstaking process of decolonizing, and the heavy mental and psychological toll that all of these things can take. This book is as powerful as it is moving. It's still early in the year yet, but this is for sure one of the best books of 2023.
A Man of Two Faces, a title which alludes to the opening lines of The Sympathizer, is part memoir of Nguyen's experiences as a refugee and eventually an academic and Pulitzer-winning writer, part history and blistering critique of the legacies of colonialism and imperialism that still pervade our modern culture, and part loving tribute to his parents and their journeys of trauma and dispossession — journeys that the second-generation immigrant children raised in a foreign land can never fully comprehend and rarely have the means or opportunity to probe.
This book covers a lot of ground. Nguyen calls out the pervasive racism of Hollywood and mass media in clear, evocative, and soberingly impassioned prose. He discusses the othering and erasure that people of color in America experience in a wide spectrum of ways, what it means to reclaim your identity in a country that sees Asians as model minorities or yellow perils, the internal colonization that happens subconsciously and the painstaking process of decolonizing, and the heavy mental and psychological toll that all of these things can take. This book is as powerful as it is moving. It's still early in the year yet, but this is for sure one of the best books of 2023.
Read
September 25, 2023no rating bc memoir/im doing a formal review but wowowow i loved this. such a unique take on memoir…voice of a generation fr fr
August 6, 2024
I found this memoir difficult to read because the bulk of it, the first 70%, is written in the 2nd person perspective. "You this" and "you that" become an imperative (a command) or an accusation.
Then he writes in 1st person for 15% in a jumbled, messily structured section which is centered around his mother's descent into full mental illness. The last 15% is a bibliography that is a nerd's wet dream.
VTN does this 2nd person approach purposely as he describes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfCUD...
He says he wants to make the reader work before he gives him/her/them a memoir's voice that is accepted or dictated by the genre. So he gives a lecture of sorts, a finger-pointing scry wrapped around some biographical (since it's not autobiographical in perspective) details.
In her interview with Viet, Thi Bui describes him as "prickly"--a very accurate descriptor. I have found him to be a combination of a smart a-hole or an a-holey intellectual. He's both.
Let me explain. He is deeply hurt and angry. That is clear. Given his intellect and verbal ability, he exercises (or tries to exorcise) this combo in such a way that both his deep wounds and bubbling rage constantly fight for center stage. This dialectic (to use his favorite frame) means that he's tearing the world around him apart while doing the same internally (mainly by hiding some wounds and showcasing others). Two faces indeed.
He seems to be hating on America (trademarked, according to him, an affectation he uses throughout). But I remain unclear what part of the US he nurtures such a grudge against. "Grudge" is the right word because it's a wound or injury that the victim actively continues to NOT let heal. It's a dog chasing its own tail. Does he blame all of the US historically? The government? Hollywood? The American public who is willingly unquestioning?
Those first 70% is an example of his wanting to push against some perpetrator, some phantom and vague audience whose attention and absolution he craves. His 5 steps to write about an immigrant saga for Western readers is creative and, I believe, very much revealing his ambivalence about wanting their acceptance and rejecting it at the same time.
His social analysis is smart. And I agree with much of it (please see the many "highlights" made). But I feel like he is making a pronouncement, giving a pedantic lecture from some unreliable or unconfident podium. The lectern shakes because of his unresolved anger and hurt.
I like, respect, honor and agree with his pro-Palestine stance. His actions have said as much as his words. He has boldly taken several progressive positions. And here, many times, his references to Native Americans feel performative, somehow obligatory for the sake of wokeness. (Elsewhere I've mentioned his troubling and unexamined anti-Chinese statements or casual mentions--this is made more concerning given how often he refers ethnic Chinese Americans in the Asian American sphere.)
I DNF'd The Committed because it had so much snark. Here, the snark factor is balanced with his pain and incisive social commentary.
This read had some artistic flairs. The formatting at times follows the structure of poems. It has creative line breaks, and passages are right justified and a few times center justified.
Interestingly, VTN never writes the last name of 45th US president. (I, too, have only referred to him as chump or "orange dung.") In the book, the space is a thick, blackened horizontal hyphen (?) or block instead of unsaid person's name.
I've long thought VTN thought too highly of himself. After reading this, my opinion hasn't changed. But I now believe he could benefit from exploring that positioning. His described learning to love (his kids, mainly) and softening that prickliness are a good start.
Then he writes in 1st person for 15% in a jumbled, messily structured section which is centered around his mother's descent into full mental illness. The last 15% is a bibliography that is a nerd's wet dream.
VTN does this 2nd person approach purposely as he describes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfCUD...
He says he wants to make the reader work before he gives him/her/them a memoir's voice that is accepted or dictated by the genre. So he gives a lecture of sorts, a finger-pointing scry wrapped around some biographical (since it's not autobiographical in perspective) details.
In her interview with Viet, Thi Bui describes him as "prickly"--a very accurate descriptor. I have found him to be a combination of a smart a-hole or an a-holey intellectual. He's both.
Let me explain. He is deeply hurt and angry. That is clear. Given his intellect and verbal ability, he exercises (or tries to exorcise) this combo in such a way that both his deep wounds and bubbling rage constantly fight for center stage. This dialectic (to use his favorite frame) means that he's tearing the world around him apart while doing the same internally (mainly by hiding some wounds and showcasing others). Two faces indeed.
He seems to be hating on America (trademarked, according to him, an affectation he uses throughout). But I remain unclear what part of the US he nurtures such a grudge against. "Grudge" is the right word because it's a wound or injury that the victim actively continues to NOT let heal. It's a dog chasing its own tail. Does he blame all of the US historically? The government? Hollywood? The American public who is willingly unquestioning?
Those first 70% is an example of his wanting to push against some perpetrator, some phantom and vague audience whose attention and absolution he craves. His 5 steps to write about an immigrant saga for Western readers is creative and, I believe, very much revealing his ambivalence about wanting their acceptance and rejecting it at the same time.
His social analysis is smart. And I agree with much of it (please see the many "highlights" made). But I feel like he is making a pronouncement, giving a pedantic lecture from some unreliable or unconfident podium. The lectern shakes because of his unresolved anger and hurt.
I like, respect, honor and agree with his pro-Palestine stance. His actions have said as much as his words. He has boldly taken several progressive positions. And here, many times, his references to Native Americans feel performative, somehow obligatory for the sake of wokeness. (Elsewhere I've mentioned his troubling and unexamined anti-Chinese statements or casual mentions--this is made more concerning given how often he refers ethnic Chinese Americans in the Asian American sphere.)
I DNF'd The Committed because it had so much snark. Here, the snark factor is balanced with his pain and incisive social commentary.
This read had some artistic flairs. The formatting at times follows the structure of poems. It has creative line breaks, and passages are right justified and a few times center justified.
Interestingly, VTN never writes the last name of 45th US president. (I, too, have only referred to him as chump or "orange dung.") In the book, the space is a thick, blackened horizontal hyphen (?) or block instead of unsaid person's name.
I've long thought VTN thought too highly of himself. After reading this, my opinion hasn't changed. But I now believe he could benefit from exploring that positioning. His described learning to love (his kids, mainly) and softening that prickliness are a good start.
August 31, 2024
“Ma nel sistema binario AMERICANO® di colonizzatore e colonizzato, tu, un rifugiato, sei il colonizzato o il colonizzatore?”
Il premio Pulitzer Thanh Nguyen Viet, che mi conquistò con “Il Simpatizzante” (letto a gennaio 2017, nella traduzione di Luca Briasco), torna in libreria parlando di sé, così come aveva fatto parlare in prima persona il suo simpatizzante.
“Quando inizia la memoria? Qual è la memoria che cerco? E dove, sul confine sottile tra storia e memoria, posso rimembrare me stesso?
La memoria comincia con Ba Má, le loro immagini come fotografie, la loro storia come un film, di quelli che troviamo nella scatola nera di una videocassetta, in un’epoca in cui ho buttato da un pezzo il videoregistratore.”
Thanh Nguyen Viet dà voce alla sua memoria, come se fosse il personaggio del Simpatizzante che parla di sé stesso, visto che come il Simpatizzante anche lui vive un senso di dualità, dovuto al fatto di vivere ed essere cresciuto in due mondi.
L’ambiguità deriva dall’essere un rifugiato vietnamita che è cresciuto e vive in America.
Attraverso questi memoir, Thanh Nguyen Viet denuncia anche il sistema americano che mettono
“I bianchi in cima, poi gli asiatici e poi i latinos, dai più chiari di pelle ai più scuri. Se in fondo ci stiano i neri o i nativi è fonte di dibattito. La minoranza modello ringrazia di non essere nera, e al fatto di non essere nativa non pensa quasi mai. Voi siete il modello più recente di minoranza modello.“
Thanh Nguyen Viet non vuole essere un «rifugiato professionista» e neppure la «voce per i senza voce», perché, come lui stesso dichiara in un’intervista:
«Non esistono persone senza voce, bensì persone ridotte al silenzio. Un'illustrazione chiara è data da ciò che accade a Gaza con i palestinesi. A volte, ad alcuni è data la possibilità di parlare, perciò ci si può chiedere: perché vediamo e sentiamo certe voci amplificate, e altre invece no? Quindi io non voglio essere una voce per i senza voce e neanche un rappresentante di qualcuno».
Vuole solo essere il depositario dei propri ricordi e citando Philip Roth “se un uomo non è fatto di ricordi, è fatto di niente.”
Come scrive Thanh Nguyen Viet, “Forse è vero.
Però il nulla è qualcosa. Nessuno dei due esiste senza l’Altro, la presenza ha bisogno dell’assenza, il positivo richiede il negativo.
Dal nulla veniamo, e al nulla torneremo.
In quanto rifugiati, siamo venuti da quel vuoto terrificante tra nazioni da cui siamo stati espulsi.
Emergendo da quel vuoto dell’Altro, come dovevamo essere visti, noi rifugiati, dai cittadini delle nazioni, se non come nulla?”
Il premio Pulitzer Thanh Nguyen Viet, che mi conquistò con “Il Simpatizzante” (letto a gennaio 2017, nella traduzione di Luca Briasco), torna in libreria parlando di sé, così come aveva fatto parlare in prima persona il suo simpatizzante.
“Quando inizia la memoria? Qual è la memoria che cerco? E dove, sul confine sottile tra storia e memoria, posso rimembrare me stesso?
La memoria comincia con Ba Má, le loro immagini come fotografie, la loro storia come un film, di quelli che troviamo nella scatola nera di una videocassetta, in un’epoca in cui ho buttato da un pezzo il videoregistratore.”
Thanh Nguyen Viet dà voce alla sua memoria, come se fosse il personaggio del Simpatizzante che parla di sé stesso, visto che come il Simpatizzante anche lui vive un senso di dualità, dovuto al fatto di vivere ed essere cresciuto in due mondi.
L’ambiguità deriva dall’essere un rifugiato vietnamita che è cresciuto e vive in America.
Attraverso questi memoir, Thanh Nguyen Viet denuncia anche il sistema americano che mettono
“I bianchi in cima, poi gli asiatici e poi i latinos, dai più chiari di pelle ai più scuri. Se in fondo ci stiano i neri o i nativi è fonte di dibattito. La minoranza modello ringrazia di non essere nera, e al fatto di non essere nativa non pensa quasi mai. Voi siete il modello più recente di minoranza modello.“
Thanh Nguyen Viet non vuole essere un «rifugiato professionista» e neppure la «voce per i senza voce», perché, come lui stesso dichiara in un’intervista:
«Non esistono persone senza voce, bensì persone ridotte al silenzio. Un'illustrazione chiara è data da ciò che accade a Gaza con i palestinesi. A volte, ad alcuni è data la possibilità di parlare, perciò ci si può chiedere: perché vediamo e sentiamo certe voci amplificate, e altre invece no? Quindi io non voglio essere una voce per i senza voce e neanche un rappresentante di qualcuno».
Vuole solo essere il depositario dei propri ricordi e citando Philip Roth “se un uomo non è fatto di ricordi, è fatto di niente.”
Come scrive Thanh Nguyen Viet, “Forse è vero.
Però il nulla è qualcosa. Nessuno dei due esiste senza l’Altro, la presenza ha bisogno dell’assenza, il positivo richiede il negativo.
Dal nulla veniamo, e al nulla torneremo.
In quanto rifugiati, siamo venuti da quel vuoto terrificante tra nazioni da cui siamo stati espulsi.
Emergendo da quel vuoto dell’Altro, come dovevamo essere visti, noi rifugiati, dai cittadini delle nazioni, se non come nulla?”
October 23, 2023
Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about his raw feelings and experiences as a refugee growing up in America (TM). Memories of his mother’s experience with mental illness are re membered and dis membered. Then more are re membered. The syncopation of the story takes some getting used to but wow! The powerful thought provocation kicks in and makes me want to do all I possibly can to be sure all refugees are warmly welcomed here. We are, after all, based on “give me your tired, your poor…”. . Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.
October 2, 2023
Although the opinion appears nearly unanimous that Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir is among the best autobiographical accounts ever written, I need to demur. For me, the “formal invention” of his memoir, as the book’s synopsis describes it, is exactly that: formal invention taken to the point of ostentation and disengagement.
The narrative, or whatever someone might want to call it, offers a collection of familial and personal facts compiled in choppy anecdotal snippets, almost as if Nguyen were assembling an endless PowerPoint presentation or a long series of social media posts about his life. Moreover, the language he employs feels mostly flat and overly expository, or sometimes mildly witty or edgy, again too much like a PowerPoint or social media post. The overall impact reads more like a textbook approach to recounting one’s life rather than a vibrant story. Lastly, his use of second person to describe himself did not impress me as innovative or clever—rather, this strategy of voice came off unengaging and show-offish.
Nguyen is among my favorite contemporary writers because I reveled, as countless readers have done, in the brilliance of his debut novel The Sympathizer, which he followed up with equally outstanding and memorable fictions with his short stories The Refugees and his rollicking novel The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer.
I wanted to connect with A Man of Two Faces, which no doubt has moments of essential facts, where Nguyen’s keen and discerning academic eye gives us vital truths about the struggles of refugees and immigrants enduring and overcoming injustice and more importantly offering their invaluable contributions to the communities they enter. Nonetheless, his off-putting style of writing for his memoir made it a hinderance for me to finish, instead of enabling me to celebrate and appreciate it as a masterpiece like I do with each of his fiction titles.
My review of The Sympathizer: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of The Refugees: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of The Committed: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The narrative, or whatever someone might want to call it, offers a collection of familial and personal facts compiled in choppy anecdotal snippets, almost as if Nguyen were assembling an endless PowerPoint presentation or a long series of social media posts about his life. Moreover, the language he employs feels mostly flat and overly expository, or sometimes mildly witty or edgy, again too much like a PowerPoint or social media post. The overall impact reads more like a textbook approach to recounting one’s life rather than a vibrant story. Lastly, his use of second person to describe himself did not impress me as innovative or clever—rather, this strategy of voice came off unengaging and show-offish.
Nguyen is among my favorite contemporary writers because I reveled, as countless readers have done, in the brilliance of his debut novel The Sympathizer, which he followed up with equally outstanding and memorable fictions with his short stories The Refugees and his rollicking novel The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer.
I wanted to connect with A Man of Two Faces, which no doubt has moments of essential facts, where Nguyen’s keen and discerning academic eye gives us vital truths about the struggles of refugees and immigrants enduring and overcoming injustice and more importantly offering their invaluable contributions to the communities they enter. Nonetheless, his off-putting style of writing for his memoir made it a hinderance for me to finish, instead of enabling me to celebrate and appreciate it as a masterpiece like I do with each of his fiction titles.
My review of The Sympathizer: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of The Refugees: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of The Committed: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
November 10, 2023
sadly i found this unreadable. basically a bunch of interviews and talking points put through a meat grinder and extruded into asian-american navel-gazing sausage. falls way short of his brilliant fiction writing.
October 8, 2023
Thank you to Grove Atlantics & NetGalley for the gifted eARC
📝 "Don't be a voice or the voiceless. Abolish the conditions of voicelessness." I'm tempted to quote every sentence 🤭
Imagine putting all my favorite nonfiction books into a blender—MINOR FEELINGS (Cathy Park Hong), HOW TO READ NOW (Elaine Castillo), BITING THE HAND (Julia Lee), A LIVING REMEDY (Nicole Chung)—add a dash of Regina George's Burn Book. The result? A MAN OF TWO FACES, one of my all-time favorite reads (& my 300th read of the year)!
Nguyen's compelling memoir/essay delves into the history of Việt Nam, the refugee experience, the essence of the American dream, and more. Describing Nguyen's brilliance feels like trying to capture lightning in a bottle; I worry that my review won't do justice and the depth & nuance encapsulated in TWO FACES will be lost. So if y'all just want to stop here and go preorder this book right now, I totally get it 🤣🙈
Nguyen ingeniously weaves the theme of "two faces" throughout, dissecting complicity within his Vietnamese-American community to only wanting "good immigrants," reflecting on being "saved" by America without unwavering gratitude, exploring the complexities of war refugees rebuilding lives on stolen indigenous land, and playing the obedient son while harboring deeper sentiments. I particularly appreciated Nguyen's views of escaping communism yet hoping for a more equal society in America, and how he processes these complex feelings, knowing all that his parents & older brother had to endure.
As a war refugee severed from his roots, Nguyen details the profound dismembering of his lineage & past and the disremembering of Vietnamese people when only viewed through the white gaze. In the rest of TWO FACES, he blends comedy, pop culture, history, literature, and personal anecdotes to reconstruct himself from this visceral loss via re membering: acknowledging his parents' sacrifice, dissecting the ingrained white supremacy in Eurocentric media, and relearning history through different perspectives centering on decolonization.
I started crying 10 pages in and sobbed through the final quarter of the book 🙈 What resonates most is Nguyen's profound gratitude for his parents' sacrifice and how he memorializes their generational/cultural disparities, not through the (unfortunately overwritten) trope of conflict, but through their love that isn't always expressed through words. There are also heartwarming moments about his wife and children that had me audibly aww-ing 🥹
TWO FACES delves into Nguyen's honest (and unhinged) views of immigrants writing for the white gaze, and I'm here for all the chaos 👏👏👏 From explaining specific food, including generational conflict, to the quintessential American dream narrative, Nguyen pulls no punches when analyzing how deeply colonization has affected how we consume and produce media.
TWO FACES extensively references THE SYMPATHIZER, including when someone asked Nguyen when the novel would be translated into English (🙄) & one-star reviews (cue the Burn Book vibes 🤣). Nguyen shares his motivation for crafting the Pulitzer-winning story and the sources inspiring certain scenes (yup, that squid scene 🙈). You might want to prioritize THE SYMPATHIZER if you haven't read it yet.
I hesitated to start TWO FACES due to THE SYMPATHIZER's academic tone, but this memoir strikes a perfect balance between literary critique, biography, sarcasm & humor. I raged, I laughed, I sobbed, and bookmarked basically every page 😂 It's a must-read, a book that will linger in my thoughts, one I'm eager to revisit countless times, and the perfect 300th book of the year. As my Goodreads review declares, if you only read one nonfiction this year, let it be A MAN OF TWO FACES.
What a tour de force ❤️🔥
📝 "Don't be a voice or the voiceless. Abolish the conditions of voicelessness." I'm tempted to quote every sentence 🤭
Imagine putting all my favorite nonfiction books into a blender—MINOR FEELINGS (Cathy Park Hong), HOW TO READ NOW (Elaine Castillo), BITING THE HAND (Julia Lee), A LIVING REMEDY (Nicole Chung)—add a dash of Regina George's Burn Book. The result? A MAN OF TWO FACES, one of my all-time favorite reads (& my 300th read of the year)!
Nguyen's compelling memoir/essay delves into the history of Việt Nam, the refugee experience, the essence of the American dream, and more. Describing Nguyen's brilliance feels like trying to capture lightning in a bottle; I worry that my review won't do justice and the depth & nuance encapsulated in TWO FACES will be lost. So if y'all just want to stop here and go preorder this book right now, I totally get it 🤣🙈
Nguyen ingeniously weaves the theme of "two faces" throughout, dissecting complicity within his Vietnamese-American community to only wanting "good immigrants," reflecting on being "saved" by America without unwavering gratitude, exploring the complexities of war refugees rebuilding lives on stolen indigenous land, and playing the obedient son while harboring deeper sentiments. I particularly appreciated Nguyen's views of escaping communism yet hoping for a more equal society in America, and how he processes these complex feelings, knowing all that his parents & older brother had to endure.
As a war refugee severed from his roots, Nguyen details the profound dismembering of his lineage & past and the disremembering of Vietnamese people when only viewed through the white gaze. In the rest of TWO FACES, he blends comedy, pop culture, history, literature, and personal anecdotes to reconstruct himself from this visceral loss via re membering: acknowledging his parents' sacrifice, dissecting the ingrained white supremacy in Eurocentric media, and relearning history through different perspectives centering on decolonization.
I started crying 10 pages in and sobbed through the final quarter of the book 🙈 What resonates most is Nguyen's profound gratitude for his parents' sacrifice and how he memorializes their generational/cultural disparities, not through the (unfortunately overwritten) trope of conflict, but through their love that isn't always expressed through words. There are also heartwarming moments about his wife and children that had me audibly aww-ing 🥹
TWO FACES delves into Nguyen's honest (and unhinged) views of immigrants writing for the white gaze, and I'm here for all the chaos 👏👏👏 From explaining specific food, including generational conflict, to the quintessential American dream narrative, Nguyen pulls no punches when analyzing how deeply colonization has affected how we consume and produce media.
TWO FACES extensively references THE SYMPATHIZER, including when someone asked Nguyen when the novel would be translated into English (🙄) & one-star reviews (cue the Burn Book vibes 🤣). Nguyen shares his motivation for crafting the Pulitzer-winning story and the sources inspiring certain scenes (yup, that squid scene 🙈). You might want to prioritize THE SYMPATHIZER if you haven't read it yet.
I hesitated to start TWO FACES due to THE SYMPATHIZER's academic tone, but this memoir strikes a perfect balance between literary critique, biography, sarcasm & humor. I raged, I laughed, I sobbed, and bookmarked basically every page 😂 It's a must-read, a book that will linger in my thoughts, one I'm eager to revisit countless times, and the perfect 300th book of the year. As my Goodreads review declares, if you only read one nonfiction this year, let it be A MAN OF TWO FACES.
What a tour de force ❤️🔥
March 13, 2024
Pulitzer Prize winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, is one of the most extraordinary, relevant, and important writers of our time. It is a shame that most readers will never crack open A Man Of Two Faces because they don't care for memoirs or historical nonfiction. I encourage you to make an exception. It is a personally contemplative and politically daring and provocative examination of the refugee experience in America.
Now in my sixties, I like to think that I have gained the life experience that allows me to evaluate things more fully. Viet Thanh Nguyen made me question points of history I thought I knew and search my deeply buried assumptions of the world and especially people different from me. This book challenged and changed me and deserves to be read widely.
I received a drc from the publisher via NetGalley.
Now in my sixties, I like to think that I have gained the life experience that allows me to evaluate things more fully. Viet Thanh Nguyen made me question points of history I thought I knew and search my deeply buried assumptions of the world and especially people different from me. This book challenged and changed me and deserves to be read widely.
I received a drc from the publisher via NetGalley.
December 31, 2024
I must say this is my favorite work of Viet Thanh Nguyen so far! There is so much I want to say that cannot be covered in a GR review, only in my spontaneous mini bookclub sessions I keep creating with anyone who would listen. Here are some of my favorite components of this memoir:
I am a sucker for the creative nonfiction / long prose essay form that Viet utilizes to tell the story; it is also weirdly similar to my own style. His narration has a poetic rhythm that carries the readers along, making it a fast and easy-to-digest read, which is important to impart such complex ideas and stories to people who may or may not share similar experience with him. He questions how to put the "I" in the plural, to be an individual that is well supported by the collective , and his narrative flow shows his care for both.
My favorite motifs of Viet's writing has been apparent since his debut novel, which is the critical analysis of the American polarizing ideology. Viet highlights and criticizes the American obsession with the extreme binaries that encourage identity conflicts and essentialist fallacies. Layers of human identities such as ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities, genders, etc. cannot be analyzed as stand alone labels, but as components that interact with one another; however, the American obsession with binaries and labels diminish the nuances.
I really enjoy how Viet explores his own meaning of being American. He echoes the same messages Americans must be familiar with American Dream™ by sprinkling in quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald's, most often from The Great Gatsby, as well as those from other ciswhite centric "classic" literature. He criticizes the systemic need to use adjectives to describe something considered exotic while preaching equality (why isn't Fitzgerald always referred to as the great white American novelist?). Additionally, to be American is to subject to the dichotomy mentioned above, such as communism vs capitalism, good vs bad, black vs white; there is no middle ground. To be American is to reject what you once were, encouraging the perpetual issue where "today's good immigrants were yesterday's bad immigrants." Like Viet, many other immigrants must feel the need to cut off one language and its roots to assimilate to another.
I could go on to talk about this book but then that'd become a podcast, so I'll wrap it here. I did not expect to be so moved by his memoir, but the journey he went through to be here and continue to fight for humanity is admirable. If I could have one dinner with any famous people in the world, I hope it's Viet Thanh Nguyen.
I am a sucker for the creative nonfiction / long prose essay form that Viet utilizes to tell the story; it is also weirdly similar to my own style. His narration has a poetic rhythm that carries the readers along, making it a fast and easy-to-digest read, which is important to impart such complex ideas and stories to people who may or may not share similar experience with him. He questions how to put the "I" in the plural, to be an individual that is well supported by the collective , and his narrative flow shows his care for both.
My favorite motifs of Viet's writing has been apparent since his debut novel, which is the critical analysis of the American polarizing ideology. Viet highlights and criticizes the American obsession with the extreme binaries that encourage identity conflicts and essentialist fallacies. Layers of human identities such as ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities, genders, etc. cannot be analyzed as stand alone labels, but as components that interact with one another; however, the American obsession with binaries and labels diminish the nuances.
I really enjoy how Viet explores his own meaning of being American. He echoes the same messages Americans must be familiar with American Dream™ by sprinkling in quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald's, most often from The Great Gatsby, as well as those from other ciswhite centric "classic" literature. He criticizes the systemic need to use adjectives to describe something considered exotic while preaching equality (why isn't Fitzgerald always referred to as the great white American novelist?). Additionally, to be American is to subject to the dichotomy mentioned above, such as communism vs capitalism, good vs bad, black vs white; there is no middle ground. To be American is to reject what you once were, encouraging the perpetual issue where "today's good immigrants were yesterday's bad immigrants." Like Viet, many other immigrants must feel the need to cut off one language and its roots to assimilate to another.
I could go on to talk about this book but then that'd become a podcast, so I'll wrap it here. I did not expect to be so moved by his memoir, but the journey he went through to be here and continue to fight for humanity is admirable. If I could have one dinner with any famous people in the world, I hope it's Viet Thanh Nguyen.
December 30, 2023
A Man of Two Faces is a complex and somewhat difficult book, mostly because that's what the story calls for. Nguyen is a child of Vietnamese refugees who flee the horrors in their homeland, only to encounter brand new horrors in AMERICA™️. Growing up, he feels the weight of his parents' expectations, which unsurprisingly conflict with the temptations of teenage life in the U.S. Nguyen is forced to confront the questions so common to children of refugees or immigrants: How do you balance parental expectations and independence, particularly when those expectations are held by people whose monumental sacrifices provided the basis for your independence? How do you give validation to your own trials and tribulations, when your parents have, objectively, faced much worse? To what extent is your parents' past also your past? How can you understand your own identity when it is split across two vastly different cultures, neither of which you truly belong to?
Nguyen tackles those questions incredibly well, and his memoir is, necessarily, about his parents as much as it is about him (I guess that's the "memorial" part). I found the book difficult partly, I think, because of the style and Nguyen's tendency to play with the meanings and spellings of words. I actually liked that technique—it makes the book feel new and unique—but if you don't tune into the style, or your attention drifts slightly, you'll find yourself frequently having to reread passages.
The book also gets preachy, which was sometimes a turnoff for me. I understand the reason: Nguyen has some well-founded criticisms of a country that effectively made refugees of his family but refused to accept them when they fled to said country. But it felt like the same criticisms were repeated a bit too much. And I'd venture that the majority of people reading this memoir probably aren't in need of that level of preaching. It's definitely not enough to ruin the book; the repetition just didn't add value for me.
Nguyen tackles those questions incredibly well, and his memoir is, necessarily, about his parents as much as it is about him (I guess that's the "memorial" part). I found the book difficult partly, I think, because of the style and Nguyen's tendency to play with the meanings and spellings of words. I actually liked that technique—it makes the book feel new and unique—but if you don't tune into the style, or your attention drifts slightly, you'll find yourself frequently having to reread passages.
The book also gets preachy, which was sometimes a turnoff for me. I understand the reason: Nguyen has some well-founded criticisms of a country that effectively made refugees of his family but refused to accept them when they fled to said country. But it felt like the same criticisms were repeated a bit too much. And I'd venture that the majority of people reading this memoir probably aren't in need of that level of preaching. It's definitely not enough to ruin the book; the repetition just didn't add value for me.
January 14, 2024
“stories are not just there to entertain, to make you feel good, to reflect a positive image of yourself. stories are also there to shake you, unnerve you, make you see yourself anew.”
i’ve read a handful of memoirs and i love them as a genre, and when they’re done well they can feel almost like a conversation with a friend. this book feels like a conversation with the smartest friend you know.
i don’t know if i can really do this book justice in a couple dozen words - it’s thoughtful, political, riveting, and sharply humorous. nguyen writes beyond just the individual narrative often found in memoir, discussing colonization and america™️ and what it is to be a refugee while also considering language and what it means to forgot. he makes stylistic choices and plays with structure in his memoir that i really enjoyed even reading it as a ebook, so i’m sure reading a physical copy would have been even more impactful.
i’ve been aware of his fiction work but haven’t read any of his novels, and this memoir feels like the perfect primer for it.
“you tell yourself don’t be a voice for the voiceless. abolish the conditions of voicelessness.”
i’ve read a handful of memoirs and i love them as a genre, and when they’re done well they can feel almost like a conversation with a friend. this book feels like a conversation with the smartest friend you know.
i don’t know if i can really do this book justice in a couple dozen words - it’s thoughtful, political, riveting, and sharply humorous. nguyen writes beyond just the individual narrative often found in memoir, discussing colonization and america™️ and what it is to be a refugee while also considering language and what it means to forgot. he makes stylistic choices and plays with structure in his memoir that i really enjoyed even reading it as a ebook, so i’m sure reading a physical copy would have been even more impactful.
i’ve been aware of his fiction work but haven’t read any of his novels, and this memoir feels like the perfect primer for it.
“you tell yourself don’t be a voice for the voiceless. abolish the conditions of voicelessness.”
October 15, 2024
a fantastic nonfiction memoir with experimental writing, full of shifting pov's, stylistic formatting choices, and an awareness that's extremely rare (yet refreshing) to see in gen x vietnamese men. highly recommended, especially for people to understand vietnamese diaspora with regards to usa.
November 12, 2023
Personal and family memoir, commentary on what it means to be a refugee, growing up while straddling cultures, the realities of war . . . all told with a lyric manner of prose that flows seamlessly. Unconventional in his approach, the author examines the dichotomies in his life: as a refugee first within Vietnam and then from Vietnam to the United States, first subjected to the disaster of American foreign policy in Vietnam and escape only to be subjected to the racism in America while being propelled to pursue the American dream. There is a lot about this book that defies convention, yet it works beautifully. Brilliant. Highly recommend.
October 25, 2023
Beautiful and brilliant
December 10, 2024
Uau! Este é um livro de memórias, biografia e autobiografia que, não deixa o leitor indiferente. A sua família era refugiada na Estados Unidos da América. Fugiram de Saigão no verão de 1975 aterrorizados e tomando a sua vida nas próprias mãos. Separados dos filhos quando foi imperioso. Um livro que nos atinge em pleno rosto sem subterfúgios ou subtilezas mas com palavras certeiras. Bem escrito é um livro em que se debate as noções de origem e pertença do autor que considera como sua pátria a escrita e denúncia os demónios a expor de um lado e outro, mesmo quando o nome aparece riscado. Um livro que critica o capitalismo, colonialismo e o racismo.
February 10, 2024
While I like his memoir more than his fiction, it's still a bit of a slog to read.
October 3, 2023
A MAN OF TWO FACES: A MEMOIR, A HISTORY, A MEMORIAL by Viet Thanh Nguyen is an absolute colossus of a literary feat in which Nguyen weaves in personal narrative with cultural commentary on America, colonization, refugee and Asian American experiences, the war in Vietnam, literary criticism, and so much more.
This book is elite; it has a permanent place in my heart and mind. I want to eat its pages, consume them ravenously and digest them so that Nguyen’s words become part of me on a cellular level. I want to shout out whole paragraphs from the rooftop because people need to sit down and let the man SPEAK.
What makes this book so powerful isn’t just that I could relate to so much of what Nguyen writes about, from immigrant children trying to repay the sacrifices of their parents to the Othering of certain groups by those in power to how memory and forgetting affect the stories we hold close, but the way he says these things with blazing ferocity, unrelenting vision, and sharp-tongued wit. I didn’t know I needed this so much in my life until I found myself banging my fist on my desk and shouting “Yessssss!” repeatedly.
Nguyen plays with form and structure in ways that could spin wildly out of control in the hands of a less gifted writer, but he’s able to jump from topic to topic and circle back around with the precision and artistry of an Olympic gymnast on a balance beam. Nothing is safe from his eviscerating pen. As much as Nguyen excoriates America’s role in global bloodbaths and ongoing racism, he also engages in deep self-examination.
Along with Julia Lee’s BITING THE HAND, this is a book I want everyone to read. Steven Yuen’s famous quote (“Sometimes I wonder if the Asian American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you”) hit home for so many of us. With books like this, we demand our visibility and our place in America™. Thank you @netgalley @groveatlantic for the eARC. I’m immediately buying a signed copy of this one.
This book is elite; it has a permanent place in my heart and mind. I want to eat its pages, consume them ravenously and digest them so that Nguyen’s words become part of me on a cellular level. I want to shout out whole paragraphs from the rooftop because people need to sit down and let the man SPEAK.
What makes this book so powerful isn’t just that I could relate to so much of what Nguyen writes about, from immigrant children trying to repay the sacrifices of their parents to the Othering of certain groups by those in power to how memory and forgetting affect the stories we hold close, but the way he says these things with blazing ferocity, unrelenting vision, and sharp-tongued wit. I didn’t know I needed this so much in my life until I found myself banging my fist on my desk and shouting “Yessssss!” repeatedly.
Nguyen plays with form and structure in ways that could spin wildly out of control in the hands of a less gifted writer, but he’s able to jump from topic to topic and circle back around with the precision and artistry of an Olympic gymnast on a balance beam. Nothing is safe from his eviscerating pen. As much as Nguyen excoriates America’s role in global bloodbaths and ongoing racism, he also engages in deep self-examination.
Along with Julia Lee’s BITING THE HAND, this is a book I want everyone to read. Steven Yuen’s famous quote (“Sometimes I wonder if the Asian American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you”) hit home for so many of us. With books like this, we demand our visibility and our place in America™. Thank you @netgalley @groveatlantic for the eARC. I’m immediately buying a signed copy of this one.
February 17, 2025
I think I was naturally inclined to like this book because I like this author and his fiction work, but this is non-fiction, so you never know. It did not disappoint. (Not to mention how readable it is!) I relate wholeheartedly as someone who came to America at age 6; rhe author came at age 4. It also resonates because I will have a mixed race son and he will need to learn to navigate both identities because I do not want him to lose touch of his Vietnamese side.
The whole book is quotable but I’m jotting down the ones that get to the core:
“The cycle repeats throughout America history: big businesses rely on cheap Asian labor, which threatens the white working class, whose fears are stoked by race-baiting politicians and media, leading to catastrophe for Asians…Americans blame the Chinese and anyone who looks like them for the loss of American jobs, even as Americans rely on chine and other Asian countries for cheap commodities that help Americans live the AMERICAN DREAM.”
“Vietnamese is your mother tongue,
But you barely talk to your mother.
Vietnamese is your native tongue,
But you left before memory.
English is your second language,
But you speak it like a native.”
The whole book is quotable but I’m jotting down the ones that get to the core:
“The cycle repeats throughout America history: big businesses rely on cheap Asian labor, which threatens the white working class, whose fears are stoked by race-baiting politicians and media, leading to catastrophe for Asians…Americans blame the Chinese and anyone who looks like them for the loss of American jobs, even as Americans rely on chine and other Asian countries for cheap commodities that help Americans live the AMERICAN DREAM.”
“Vietnamese is your mother tongue,
But you barely talk to your mother.
Vietnamese is your native tongue,
But you left before memory.
English is your second language,
But you speak it like a native.”
June 27, 2024
While The Sympathizer was not for me, it seems that VTN’s nonfiction is. VTN’s trademark intelligence, insight, and scathing metacommentary on identity, empire, race, and narration is on full display in A MAN OF TWO FACES, which I would describe as “memoir plus”: a chronological and complete retelling of his life is less important than VTN using aspects of his life as a starting point to discuss much deeper topics.
If you’ve read lots of books by Asian diaspora writers, some of the themes in AMOTF will not be new to you. The “refugee problem” is the direct product of (American) imperialism; there are generational differences in one’s claiming of an Asian (American) identity; etc.
The thing is–and this is what I appreciated the most–VTN doesn’t stop there. Through the clever use of text alignment and font sizes, VTN starts to second-guess / poke fun at his own observations of the aforementioned themes or of his memories. At times it can feel a bit much–you just want to read a straightforward memoir, dangit!–but this is also where he transcends the expectations placed on a Viet American memoir, or a social science nonfiction book analyzing Asian (American) identity. Because nothing related to identity is straightforward, even if a book wants to make us think so (and VTN definitely DOESN’T want us to think so).
Even though the formatting was sometimes offputting, AMOTF is going to stay on my shelf as a memoir with quotes and ideas I’ll be thinking about for a long time.
If you’ve read lots of books by Asian diaspora writers, some of the themes in AMOTF will not be new to you. The “refugee problem” is the direct product of (American) imperialism; there are generational differences in one’s claiming of an Asian (American) identity; etc.
The thing is–and this is what I appreciated the most–VTN doesn’t stop there. Through the clever use of text alignment and font sizes, VTN starts to second-guess / poke fun at his own observations of the aforementioned themes or of his memories. At times it can feel a bit much–you just want to read a straightforward memoir, dangit!–but this is also where he transcends the expectations placed on a Viet American memoir, or a social science nonfiction book analyzing Asian (American) identity. Because nothing related to identity is straightforward, even if a book wants to make us think so (and VTN definitely DOESN’T want us to think so).
Even though the formatting was sometimes offputting, AMOTF is going to stay on my shelf as a memoir with quotes and ideas I’ll be thinking about for a long time.
June 30, 2024
I will never get sick of this man I want ten more books now
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