A Man of Two Faces

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 witand incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as afather and a son.

At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICATM. One Christmas Eve, whenNguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parentshave 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 existentialcrisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and theperson being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed backin Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much hisparents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly abouttheir comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds arereopening.

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.