” A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial” by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was turned into an HBO limited series. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, his most recent books are A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial; To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other; and the edited volume The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. All of them have been published by Hachette India.
How do you even begin to describe a book that is gut wrenching, relevant, and absorbing to read? I read it more or less in one fell swoop, despite many false starts. It took a while to read the first few pages and get my bearing. But once I had figured it out, I just read and read and read. A Man with Two Faces is very moving, very thought-provoking and it truly helps decontstruct the concep of America as everyone seems to think that they know. It is told from the point of view of a Vietnamese refugee whose parents flee at the time of the Vietnam war. Viet Thanh Nguyen is fours-year-old. But he seems to carry within him the experience of being a Vietnamese and a successful American. He has broken many barriers by being accepted for who he is, his views, his writing, and his opinion pieces. He has been true to his identity and not allowed anyone to tell him otherwise. All the while he also recognises the intense sacrifices his parents made for the sake of their two sons. Both of whom ended up living the American dream, but at what cost. Their mother quite literally had had to be institutionalised not once, but twice, and finally passed away a woman trapped within herself. It is a heartbreaking account of her downward spiral. Yet, what is extraordinary is that her younger son, the writer, recognises with acute sensitivity what it takes for a woman to live many lives in one. He refers to her marriage at the age of seventeen as the first time she was a refugee when Vietnam was split into two and then the second time, when she fled Vietnam for the USA. Throughout the text, he is able to draw comparisons between the freedom she had in Vietnam, including earning her livelihood and being able to drive a car, but in the USA, she was handicapped by language and ultimately, her existence was circumscribed by the provision store that she ran with her husband and her domestic chores. It broke her, piece by piece.
There is much else in A Man of Two Faces. It is a combination of sophisticated criticism and a witnessing to modern events in the USA. Also, what it takes to be an immigrant.
The writing style at first is peculiar to engage with. But as one proceeds through the book it becomes fairly obvious that these were previously published essays that are now interspersed with present day commentaries and observations by the author. It makes for an interesting visual arrangement on the page, almost like literary art. At the same it, it is like the reader is privileged to be privy to a dialogue. Ultimately, it illustrates the very title of the book wherein the two faces of the author — the public and the private are in constant engagement with each other in the prose format. Fascinating!
Read an extract from the book published on Moneycontrol to coincide with the fifty years of the conclusion of the Vietnam War on 30 April 2025.
Here is the TOI Bookmark conversation on Spotify:
Read it and you wil not regret it.
26 May 2025
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