Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen spoke to Sean O’Rourke about his memoir ‘A Man of Two Faces‘ for RTE Radio
Read below for transcript
Sean:
Nguyen was born in what was previously known as South Vietnam in 1971. Four years later, after the fall of Saigon, his family was forced to flee to the United States as refugees eventually settling in California. His first novel, The Sympathizer, was an ambitious, disturbing book that explored the aftermath of the Vietnam War through the eyes of a Communist Party spy who skips Saigon for California. The Sympathizer appeared on 30 best of the year lists in 2016, won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize. And Nguyen followed it up with a sequel called The Committed. His new title, A Man of Two Faces is a memoir that traces Nguyen’s personal journey with the title drawn directly from the opening line of The Sympathizer. A Man of Two Faces sees Nguyen delve into the core of his beam, unraveling the intricacies of his life and exploring the necessity of both remembering and forgetting.
Delighted to have Viet Thanh Nguyen join me on the program this evening. I love the idea that this is as much about forgetting, Nguyen, as it is about remembering. I think you were… Am I right in saying you’re perhaps a reluctant memoirist?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Hi, Sean, it’s a pleasure to be here with you again. Yeah, absolutely a reluctant memoirist. I think anybody who’s an enthusiastic memoirist is a person to be distrusted. I always thought my parents’ lives were much more dramatic and interesting than mine because they went through 40 years of war, famine, colonization, and being refugees twice, and all I did was become a writer. So it took me a long time to grapple with my parents’ lives and their impact on me, and the memoir is as much about them as it is about me.
Sean:
There you go, [inaudible 00:01:45] my second question on me. It isn’t about you, this is about your parents. So thank you for setting that up so well for us, but it strikes me, it is about two aspects. Well, it’s about loads of aspects, obviously, of your parents’ life. But a bit like the remembering and forgetting being part of what the memoir is about. This is as much about really examining everything that your parents did and didn’t do and said and didn’t say as it is about honoring them because it quite definitely honors them. But all of those other questions are in there and what you’re doing as well.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’ve come to understand both about my own life, but about the lives of many others, of children and grandchildren and people who’ve undergone terrible things. Is that sometimes our parents and grandparents will tell us stories about their past. And those are affecting enough because for many of us, we’ve been so far removed from these traumatic experiences of an earlier generation. But oftentimes they refuse to speak or they won’t speak, and I think that the silences, the absences themselves, transmit feeling and emotion. And at least in my case, left me oftentimes quite confused about who I was and what had happened to my parents. And that absent presence of the past and of unspoken memory, whether my parents didn’t remember certain things or whether they refused to remember certain things, whether they just didn’t want to share them with me, that really has shaped my life.
Sean:
In the writing of the book itself then did you come to realize that there are certain things that you don’t want to remember or that you can’t bring yourself into that space possibly because it’s too difficult a place to go to?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m a writer, but also a scholar, so I certainly know the importance of investigating the past and reconstructing it. And there’s a certain element of that in this book as I talk about the war in Vietnam and the shaping of a Vietnamese refugee diaspora that I find myself in and the shaping of my family. However, beyond those historical contours, every family is different, every family is individual. And what happened to my own family with my mother in particular, was that she was a wonderful woman who was very successful, but she also went to the mental facilities three times in her life. And I wrote about one of those incidences when I was in college, so I certainly knew about it at the time. I put away that essay, did not look at it again for 30 years until the pandemic. And in the intervening period I remembered that my mother had gone to this mental facility when I was a little boy.
Then I returned to the essay, read it, and realized that was when I was 18 years old. So my own memory had completely distorted what had actually happened because I think I was so deeply affected by watching my mother in this mental facility. And that gave me the understanding of how distorting our own memories can be. It’s easy to point to someone else and say, “They completely changed the past.” But in my case, I changed the past. And so I tried to reconstruct certain things, but when my mother returned to that mental facility for the third time, about 15 years ago, I could not remember a thing afterwards, and I was a grown adult. And so I’ve left certain… I did not try to reconstruct that visit because sometimes I think that for me at least, there is a blankness in my memory that has been the effect of this trauma in my family’s life. And I want to leave that blank space there because that’s how some of us do experience the past.
Sean:
For example, you say that you have no memory of your crossing the ocean, even of that what must have been an incredibly difficult journey for your parents and for you. I know you were very young at the time, but there’s nothing there from that period. Do you have a sense that it is in a box that either you or some part of yourself that’s looking after you has decided to keep closed, that you’re in agreement with that, or that you just can’t go there or you don’t have the facility to actually pick at something and see if it’s there?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I was actually present at the fall of Saigon, but I was four years old, so I wonder if I can be counted as an eyewitness to the fall of Saigon if I actually cannot remember it. And so yes, we did cross the ocean and we ended up in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania. And that’s where my memories begin because in order to leave this camp, refugees had to be sponsored by Americans. And there was nobody willing to take all four of us in our family, so I was separated from my parents. And I remember my first memories are [inaudible 00:06:31] and screaming as I’m being taken away. That’s where memories begin.
And I’m the father of a 4-year-old and a 10-year-old now. And at each of those moments when they turned four, it was the occasion for me to think about myself and about them. And I think that even if you can’t remember your life at four years of age, the emotional reverberations that have been taking place around you at 1, 2, 3, 4 years, those do shape you, those do form, as you said, a box inside of yourself. Which you may never be able to tap consciously, but which I strongly believe are there for us unconsciously. And so I do think that I was shaped by that refugee experience, even if I cannot actually remember it.
Sean:
I don’t know if it’s fair to talk about secrets in the way you’ve just described those memories that are potentially there, but in this box. For whatever reason, they’re in the box, be that consciously locked away or the subconscious holding them back for our own mental health perhaps. But you kept secrets from your parents and your parents kept secrets from you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, the definition of a secret is you don’t know it actually exists. So as far as I know, my parents hid many secrets from me. And when you uncover a secret, then it really isn’t that much of a secret anymore. But in my case, certainly I was raised by parents who were devoutly Catholic and devoutly capitalist. And they did their best to turn me into a Catholic capitalist and it didn’t work. I went to Catholic school my entire life and I turned out an atheist. And my parents were very successful business people and I turned out a Marxist. And they wanted to have a doctor, and I turned out to be a writer. So in many ways I disappointed my parents and I tried to prevent them from feeling as much disappointment as possible by not telling them certain things. So they never learned that I was an atheist, for example. And they never learned that I wanted to be a writer until in fact, I published The Sympathizer and then it became public knowledge.
So in many ways, I think secrets can be held for nefarious purposes, for purposes of deception, but sometimes I do believe that we keep secrets from our loved ones in order to protect them as well. And I think probably my parents have protected me with secrets I will never know about. And in turn, for example, with atheism, did my parents really need to know that I was an atheist? That would’ve really devastated them. So it was perfectly fine to keep that a secret from them that I was not the son [inaudible 00:08:59]-
Sean:
Yeah, I loved that idea that you articulate so well, this idea that it is about protection both ways, a two-way protection. There was an incredible sadness, and even though there was a meeting later on in life. That your parents and indeed the family as they left Saigon at that time, they had to leave behind their adoptive daughter, who she was a teenager at that time, wasn’t she?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
She was probably about 16, 15 years old. So what happened was our hometown at Buon Ma Thuot was the first town captured in the final invasion of 1975. And my father was in Saigon, my mother had to make a life and death decision. And she decided to leave with my brother and me and leave behind our adopted sister to take care of the family property. Assuming we would come back, but we didn’t, obviously, and I would not see her again for 28 years. So obviously, I knew who she was, I was four years old, but I forgot about her. Until one day when I was maybe 10 or 11, we get a letter in the mail and it’s from her. And there’s a picture of this young, beautiful woman, and that was the beginning of my knowledge that we had left somebody behind. And that’s another one of those absent presences that I felt haunted my life and shaped me as a writer because I had to grapple with these absent presences.
And I think [inaudible 00:10:20] in the back of my mind, what if I had been the one left behind? And I think that question is a common one for those of us who have been through these kinds of experiences.
Sean:
And I wonder, as you watch the news today, two particular conflicts spring to mind. Obviously, the Ukrainian Russian conflict and the number of people that have had to leave their homes in Ukraine. And also this current situation in Gaza, which had landed you into a kind of trouble, I think it’s fair to say in late 2023, when you called for a ceasefire along with 750 other writers. And one of an event that you were involved in was canceled as a direct result of that calling for a ceasefire.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think it was twofold, I did sign that ceasefire letter. And the institution that canceled me, a very famous one in New York City, 92NY, which has a very famous writer series. But it’s explicitly a Jewish institution, that’s a part of its description. But I think the other aspect of it was in addition to signing that ceasefire letter, I publicly proclaimed on Instagram that I am still committed to the cause of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, BDS, which I had signed on to around 2015 or 2016. And I think that for me, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions is a nonviolent movement, it’s better than violence. And yet the advocates for Israel and Israel itself obviously are intent on suppressing any kind of public disagreement or dissident with their particular political and military agenda.
And I, as an American feel complicit because our taxes are paying for literally billions of dollars of weapons and aid that is being sent to Israel to carry out this campaign that has killed 31,000 Gazans, or even by Netanyahu’s estimate, 28,000, if you take that number. And also, we are witnessing a situation where according to every reliable nonpartisan aid organization, 1.1 million Palestinians are on the brink of famine. And there’s enough food outside of Gaza on trucks ready to get in, but Israel will not allow enough aid to arrive. So I think it’s a moral and politically urgent scenario. And also as someone, a Vietnamese refugee, I feel for any country that is being bombed by American weapons.
Sean:
Which I wondered, obviously, that’s a very strong political standpoint that you’ve given us. And on a purely personal level, I don’t want to be in any way crass about this, but how triggering or how difficult is it for you to watch the pictures that we see on our television screens on a daily basis? Does that start to trigger memories in any type of way?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think it’s unbelievable to see what we’re seeing. It’s not even what we’re seeing, I actually have to turn the volume down sometimes because it’s actually the hearing of the cries in the parents and the children that I find incredibly affecting as well. And it is triggering because you see some of these images of survivors being pulled out of the rubble covered with soot and burned and things like this. And of course, again, I was too young to remember this, but I’ve done a lot of research into the war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. And you read about what was happening back then and you read the eyewitness reports, both of Vietnamese people, but also of foreign journalists and aid workers and so on. It’s very much the same in terms of the horrors they’re describing about being hit by American bombs or American napalm and children being killed or deformed and so on. And so, yes, it is deeply triggering and provocative for me. And so if I’m making strong political statements, it’s because I think the situation warrants those statements.
Sean:
One final question, there are about 27 final questions I want to ask you, but I just can’t do that, unfortunately. I think possibly the most repeated phrase in the book is, this is a war story, which you say several times at different points along the way. Why was that aspect of your own life and your own story so important to constantly reiterate for us the reader?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Two reasons why I think, number one, is that the war in Vietnam killed about 58,000 American soldiers and about 3 million Vietnamese people, the majority of whom were civilians. Do those civilian stories count as war stories? I think they do. I see the damages of war inflicted on my parents and so many other people in the Vietnamese refugee community who are not soldiers at all. And I think that the human consequences of that, of being bombed, of being displaced, of being turned into refugees, of witnessing things being done to other people, these are war stories. And the other reason why I make this claim is because it’s very interesting for me to think about when wars begin and when wars end. I think it’s a very human impulse to say there has to be a definitive beginning and an end to a war.
But in my experience, wars foreshadow other wars, and we don’t even know when wars really end because for Vietnamese refugees and for Americans, even after 1975, I felt the war was not actually over. People were still fighting the war over again in memory, they were deeply traumatized on all sides. And the consequences of that trauma could be very personal for their family members and relatives. But if we look at what happens at the dimension of nation states, America’s unworked trauma from the Vietnam War is still having consequences today in the kinds of wars that America chooses to fight and supports.
Sean:
And as we speak right now, there’s a news flash coming on Sky News here in Ireland, 40 dead and a more than 100 wounded in a Moscow concert hall attack. I’m hazarding a guess that we are not talking about soldiers who are in that concert hall. That civilian aspect of it, of war goes on and on in the present day.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Wars cannot be contained and war crimes are not owned by any particular country, everybody can commit a war crime. And we should always call out war crimes against civilians and children and innocence no matter who’s doing them. And we also have to unfortunately have a sense of proportion that 1200 Israeli dead and 31,000 Palestinian dead have to be held in contrast with each other.
Sean:
Viet Thanh Nguyen, I really could talk to you for another half hour, but sadly I can’t. Thank you so much for being with us this evening.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thanks for having me, Sean.
Sean:
That’s Viet Thanh Nguyen and his new book is called A Man of Two Faces. It is published by Corsair.
