The Pulitzer Prize-winner on his dual identity, on memory and forgetting, and his memoir, A Man of Two Faces for The Hindustan Times
What is the significance of the words ‘memoir’, ‘history’, and ‘memorial’ in the book’s subtitle?
Compared to mine, the more interesting lives were led by my parents. They were refugees twice over and lived through war and colonisation. So, A Man of Two Faces is also about my parents, the Vietnamese refugee experience, the histories of Vietnam and the US, and the war that brought these two countries together and produced me as a refugee.
I had to delve into my experiences, but they had to be put in relationship to the larger struggles of my parents and the Vietnamese refugee community. To explain my individual
experiences and those of my parents, I had to get into the history of war and colonisation — what the French did to Vietnam, what the US did to Vietnam, what the Vietnamese did to each other, and so on.
Finally, the book is a memorial because I wanted to pay my respects to my mother. I hope that the triangulation between memory, history, and memorialisation acknowledges both the importance of the individual story and the communal experience.
It’s necessary to construct our memorials because often civilians’ lives and deaths are not memorialised. Memorials are instead erected for soldiers and generals. One of the core arguments of this book — and throughout all my work — is that war stories are not just the stories of soldiers, but the stories of civilians as well.
Besides the overall structure of the book, each chapter is stamped with a duality that helps the text appear both as a story and a dialogue. What was behind this choice of presentation?
The title of this book itself comes from my novel The Sympathizer’s opening line. While the novel was premised on duality, the duality was itself autobiographical. I experienced that duality growing up in the US. But I didn’t want to write about that in terms of my own life at the time, so I created a spy, who could embody the feeling that I had growing up — that I was a spy: an American spying on my Vietnamese parents and a Vietnamese person spying on the rest of America.
To write A Man of Two Faces, I had to pretend that I was writing this memoir from the voice of The Sympathizer, so the character that I created, which was loosely inspired by my life, became a vehicle for writing my autobiography. That duality has always been there — both internally within myself and between my fiction and nonfiction. At a visceral level, it felt right to me that this book is not to be constructed as a conventional prose memoir; and that there was a poetic style to this. All this emerges from my relationship with my memory, which is more fragmentary and fluid.
You note that at an academic reception, a Vietnamese scholar tells you you’re not Vietnamese. Americans question your “authenticity” as well. In the book, you invent a way to position identity — “Quiet American” and “Ugly American”. What compels diasporic people to demand authenticity of their own and what made you invent a new vocabulary to present the dichotomy of being an American?
This pressure for authenticity is not something that exists only for a diaspora. Most cultures have predilections for authenticity, for the idea that there is wholeness, that there are origins that we can return to. But the desire for authenticity is aggravated by two things: one is displacement, when you’re severed from your supposed roots, which leads to a diaspora, and the other is when — even if you have not been forcibly displaced or even if you have not moved — you feel that your country or your culture has been displaced. The diasporic population in a new country, in the host country, is caught in a no-win situation. They’re expected to prove their authenticity, but if they prove that too much, they’re not allowed to be authentically wherever they’re supposed to be in this new
country. Then, if they become too authentically a part of the host country, the people of their diaspora might question their authenticity.
Now, the problem with all this is that typically the blame for the problem of authenticity (or inauthenticity) is put squarely on the shoulders of a diasporic person. The problem is that it’s understood as purely an individual or a cultural issue that can be resolved at the level of the individual. I don’t think authenticity actually can ever be addressed in that fashion. To demonstrate that the authenticity issue is not only a diasporic issue but it’s also an American problem, I came up with a new vocabulary. Who is the authentic American? Is it the Quiet American, as represented in my argument by Barack Obama? Or is it the Ugly American — represented by Donald Trump? Both of them are authentic aspects of a US that is at the very core already inauthentic because it’s built around a contradiction between what the Quiet American and the Ugly American represent. The former is the spirit of democracy and freedom, and the latter is the representation of violence, genocide, colonisation, enslavement, and warfare.
A guide to writing the immigrant saga that you present in the book satirically exposes the complicity of the publishing industry to put select narratives on a pedestal, calling them publishable and marketable while ignoring others. What are your thoughts on this?
A memoir by itself — especially by a minority, a person of colour, or a refugee — in the context of the American dream, and all of the mythologies that Americans have about themselves, is too easily captured by what your question describes, which is that the minority or a diasporic person is supposed to inhabit their otherness and speak only about and through their otherness. The individualistic nature of the memoir facilitates this commodification of the other because history is not stripped out but instead treated
as simply a background or a contextual matter. For the most part, the host society wants a marketable, consumable narrative of the other so that they can digest it as entertainment or as a temporary catharsis.
Then, there are conventional ways of writing a memoir (or a novel). For example, “show, don’t tell” — dramatize a story, but don’t explain too much. This memoir works both sides of that, the showing and the telling. There’s a lot of drama going on in the memoir, but there’s telling as well. That’s why the memoir uses devices or strategies like satire or propaganda provocation to directly address the reader, telling them what is going on.
Towards the end of the book, on writing your mother’s story, you deliberate on the idea that’s central to writing — “Who gets to tell a story?” It seemed like while you owned your story, you also helped translate your mother’s. What are the kinds of thoughts that plagued you while deliberating on whether you should be telling her story?
Writing a memoir is inevitably an act of self-exposure. But since most of us don’t exist purely by ourselves, exposing oneself also oftentimes involves exposing others whom we have relationships with and there’s no way of getting around it. So, a part of a memoir’s power lies in how honest the memoirist can be. But to achieve that kind of honesty, a memoirist must betray other people who may not want to have their stories told (or incorporated) into the memoirist’s story. That’s an artistic, personal, and ethical dilemma that’s inherent in the nature of the memoir.
My mind was plagued with many thoughts about these challenges as a son, a writer, and a literary scholar because I think a lot about these ethical, personal, and aesthetic complications. For example, if I had only written my mother’s story, then that betrayal would’ve been much more palatable to mainstream audiences because it would’ve been just about my mother’s personal story and struggles, but not the larger context of war and colonisation, the US and Vietnam.
So much in your memoir is centred on forgetting — voluntary and involuntary. Were you exploring the duality of writing from memory?
Memory and forgetting are inextricably intertwined. I don’t think you can talk about one without the other. Whether we’re talking about it as an individual process for each of us, or whether we’re talking about it as a collective national memory, the mind has to clear away things — forget things to allow us to remember certain things. So, there’s a background and there’s a foreground.
In another book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press) I’ve written about the ethical imperative to remember in certain kinds of ways, but I think there’s possibly an ethics of forgetting as well. When are we allowed to forget? I think we construe forgetting as a negative matter. But there are justifications for forgetting and there are inevitabilities of forgetting. Every nation has contradictory events in its history. In the US, for example, it’s genocide and slavery, to name a few. The US, I don’t think, has collectively worked through the problems of its past, so it has not earned the right to forget its past. And this past keeps returning because it hasn’t been worked through. Likewise for individuals: I think that the past probably has returned at an individual level for me because I had not worked through my memories.
I needed to acknowledge that I had inadvertently forgotten things that were very troubling to me. There’s also a part of the memoir where I allowed myself to forget, knowing that I had forgotten. It was when I visited my mother during her third visit to a psychiatric facility. I remember the fact that she went to the psychiatric facility. I remember some of the details, but there was a lot of it that I couldn’t recall, and, unlike the second time when she visited a psychiatric facility, I didn’t make notes. I didn’t have an essay written to describe this time. I could’ve gone and talked to my older brother and tried to reconstruct with his help what had happened but because this entire memoir was about the nature of memory and forgetting, I felt that I could simply leave that blankness in my memory. Forgetting, voluntary or involuntary, can be ethical or unethical — it’s all determined by contingency and circumstance. We choose to remember and forget things — a memoir itself is an example of ethical remembering and ethical forgetting.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be
found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
