As soon as I saw the title of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new book
“A Man of Two Faces” …..A Memoir, A History, A Memorial ….
“The highly original blistering unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer prize winning author of ‘The Sympathizer’, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide”……
I only hesitated one minute: wishing to listen to Viet read it—
but not wanting to wait - I requested an early copy from Grove Atlantic …(thank you for this treat, Grove!) - I started reading each morning while spinning my legs on our spinnaker stationary bike.

Note: I read ‘The Sympathizer’ a year before it won the Pulitzer Prize…gave it a strong 5 star rating. I was telling about how great it was, but it took Viet winning the Pulitzer Prize until most people believed me…and finally read it themselves only to be blown away, too.
I couldn’t have been happier for anyone when Viet won the Pulitzer Prize!!!

“A Memoir A History A Memorial” > was EXACTLY the type of book I wanted ‘from Viet’. My excitement was real….
turning out to be - gratefully- tremendously engrossing.
For one thing,
it’s personal and moving.

Every topic and theme covered …
no matter how heavy-loaded ….be it war,
colonization,
racism,
nationalism,
violence,
fear,
heartbreak,
loss…..
etc.
is written with inviting - readable personal intimacy.

I just love this guy. Viet is smart! Wise! Observant! Insightful!
He demonstrates a profound understanding of immigration struggles…..and is keenly politically and socially aware. He is also funny…..(personally wonderfully-open) in sharing his soul ….and he’s very likable.

This book reads pretty fast - awesome prose styling - with sweet family photos.

I’m going to dive right in and share some excerpts. …..but most……
I highly recommend this book to everyone!!!
It’s one of the best ‘personal, informative & powerful’ books by any Vietnamese American I have ever read. ….
……it has everything important:
LIFE….LOVE….FAMILY….
HISTORY….and an emotional MEMORIAL….a tribute to Viet’s Ma.

Excerpts I loved….(for a variety of reasons)….
there are plenty more where these came from…

“Do you know the way to San Jose?”
[Viet once lived less than 5 miles from me ….he ‘knows’ the way to San Jose]

“A handful of bad memories can be more indelible than a lifetime of good memories or mediocre ones. We noticed the scar, not the skin. Being taken away from your parents is burned in between your shoulder blades, a brand you do not usually see until you examine yourself with the mirrors of your own writing”.

“You never think of what your parents experience when they are forced to give you up. But when your son turns four, you finally see Ba Ma as they were then, younger than you when you at last became a father, their bodies vital, their future, old age and abstraction, they’re missing children in reality.
“Your separation from your parents eventually ends. No photo exists of your reunion with your parents. Your family photos record only the good times afterward. In one Pennsylvania photo, you pose cheerfully in shorts and sandals, somewhere woodsy” .
(loved the photo of little Viet).

“You begin to remember yourself when your son turns four in 2017. You have named your son Ellison in homage to the novelist Ralph, whose ‘Invisible Man’ impressed you deeply when you read it in college.
“You want your son to understand that the language of these writers and thinkers is his home, too, as much as America is.
You want Ellison to understand, eventually, that to be an American—
and he is an American, born and bread, eligible to be president!”
“Meanwhile, your poor son just wants to play Minecraft”.

“Seeing your son, at four makes you think of yourself at that age, when your brief separation from your parents seemed eternal. What you tried not to think about for decades resurges. A force more powerful than when your parents took you away to give your father and mother time to become self-sufficient. But a child only understands the powerlessness, the abandonment, the sound of his screaming”.

“Visiting Berkeley with your high school girlfriend, J, you fall in love with the University at first sight. From telegraph Avenue to campus, and Sproul Plaza, where the Free Speech Movement of the 1960’s had gathered in enormous numbers, you feel that this is where you have always wanted to be. Something is in the air, and it is not just marijuana”.
Viet went to UC Berkeley…. (my Alma Mater too).

“Ba Ma comfort themselves with a microwave, a stereo console with built-in speakers, a cassette deck, and an 8-track player; a wooden-paneled television with an enormous twenty-five-inch screen that serves as your personal Americanization device”.
“You rent these movies from a dark, narrow Vietnamese, video store near the SaiGon Moi, passed the Vietnamese beauty salon, the Vietnamese, café, the Vietnamese sandwich, shop, Vietnamese restaurant, their
alienness to non-Vietnamese people occasionally softened by French names: the Paris Beauty Salon, Les Amis Cafe”.
“You have taken over downtown San Jose. And made it better.”
[It’s true!!!!]

“You do not suffer from an identity crisis, because American individualism and Vietnamese collectivism war within you”.

“Hard life in the old world— poverty, war, patriarchy, homophobia, religious persecution, dictatorial regime, etc.”

“Daunting challenges in the New World— language barriers, cultural, misunderstandings, racism, and condescension, as well as starting, at or near the economic bottom, above many Black people and native people”.

“Generational conflict—parents don’t understand their Americanized children;
American born or American raised children don’t get their old world parents”.

“Your heroes are anti-colonial, revolutionaries, public intellectuals, committed writers, galvanizing teachers”.

“No longer a faceless part of an Asian invasion. You are an Asian American”.

Viet’s Ma was born in 1937.
“A poor girl in a poor northern Vietnamese village. She died in 2018”.

At age 17……
Viet almost did not graduate from high school because he nearly failed pre-calculus. (Too funny!)
I love our Pulitzer Prize Guy…..
Love this book. I hope to read more books that Viet writes about his son Ellison….and maybe a book by Ellison, himself one day.

5 strong stars….Highly recommend!!!

A Man of Two Faces, 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, 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

Highly, highly recommend!