In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Viet Thanh Nguyen – author of the new book A Man of Two Faces. A Memoir, A History, A Memorial – reflects on the ambiguities and contradictions of growing up Vietnamese-American in the aftermath of what is called the Vietnam War in the US; explains what motivated him to seek a new balance between remembering and forgetting in his new book; shares his ethical considerations regarding the revelation of secrets; shows why self-representation is not enough; and discusses how his dialectic Marxism wavers between Groucho and Karl. Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses the ethics of remembering, his special brand of dialectical marxism, and how to go beyond self-representation for RevDem, The Review of Democracy
Ferenc Laczo:
Welcome to the newest conversation here at the Review of Democracy. I am Ferenc Laczo. I will be your host, and it is my distinct pleasure to be discussing with Viet Thanh Nguyen today.
Welcome to the show, Viet, and thanks so much for joining.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Hi, Ferenc. Thanks for having me.
Ferenc Laczo:
Brilliant to have you. By way of an all too brief intro, Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor based at the University of Southern California, who has published among many other books, the scholarly volume, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and The Memory of War.
He’s also a well-known novelist, who received the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, The Sympathizer, among a host of other awards, and which will also serve as the basis of a TV series to be released in the coming month. To my mind, Viet is one of the most exciting writers of both fiction and non-fiction these days, and I’m thrilled to have the chance to discuss with him today.
Now, your newest book, Viet, is titled, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, and this book may be read as an extended interrogation of yourself and your past. You remarked that for many years, you seemed incapable of examining yourself and writing has, in fact, emerged as your preferred mode of dealing with various emotional difficulties.
Now, this new book, you aim to go also where it hurts and remember things you may have forgotten or may have tried to forget. So what motivated you to want to do this, to try to achieve a new kind of balance between remembering and forgetting? And would you perhaps say that your approach to writing and to emotions has actually changed in recent years?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’m pleased to say that I have grown as a human being over the last few decades. It would be kind of sad if I remained the same person I was when I was 19 years old and a passionate college student. And in fact, the very roots of this book, A Man of Two Faces do come from my 19-year-old self, when I had written an essay for a writing class at my university concerning my mother and what had happened to her, which was a very difficult experience for my mother and certainly for me and the rest of the family who watched it happen, which was that she went to a psychiatric facility.
And I know I put that essay away for 30 years and didn’t look at it again until the pandemic, and dug it up and re-read it, and realized for the last 30 years, it wasn’t that I’d forgotten that my mother had gone to this psychiatric facility, but that I had remembered it happening when I was a little boy.
But when I reread the essay, I realized that it actually had happened when I was 18 years old and I’d written about it a year later. And so somehow over the 30 years, even as a full-grown adult, my memory had completely changed some of the most important facts of this event. That was important for me to see that in my own words because I am a scholar of memory, of war and memory, of remembering and forgetting, of the ethics of memory and the relationship between how much we should remember and how, and much we should forget, and how.
Here was evidence that this was not purely a theoretical or scholarly issue for me, but something that was intensely personal. And so I felt that I really needed to investigate my own processes of memory and forgetting and uncover this story. And that was finally, I think just an urgent mission to carry out, both as a son, and as a human being, but also as a husband and a father, and as a writer, who has come to understand that art is very important for writing obviously, but so are emotions.
And here I had buried these emotions, these feelings for so long. And as you said, the memoir is very much about going where it hurts because the pain is part of what fuels the writing and gives it substance.
Ferenc Laczo:
That’s fascinating. And actually my next question ties in very closely with what we have just been talking about. You write on these pages, “Honesty or betrayal, sometimes telling the secret is both.” And you also state that, and I’m quoting again, “I have been silent for so long about so many things that now and then, I find it hard to know when to choose silence or speech.”
So could I ask you how you have actually decided which themes to address, which episodes to depict in this volume, and what were some of the more difficult decisions concerning what to include and what to exclude?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think most writers probably at some point confront those issues, the relationship between honesty and betrayal and between silence and speech. And if as a writer, you’ve never felt that tension, then you might be missing a serious part of an ethical sense of what writing and art should be doing or has a freedom and the power to do. And I have no regrets about not writing this memoir earlier, for example. Because, in fact, I think my mother passed away in 2018, and really it was her passing away that I think gave me the freedom to write the memoir, which is very much about her and what she went through, not just one trip to a psychiatric facility, but three trips to a psychiatric facility.
Her passing away gave me the freedom to speak about her in a way that I never, I think, would’ve allowed myself to do while she was still alive. That doesn’t make the betrayal of her secret or secrets any less I think, but it does make the pain of that betrayal less for her, since she’s not here to witness that. And so I feel that tension between honesty and betrayal very, very seriously. Because I felt that one of the reasons for me to write this book was it’s important to tell my mother’s story because she’s my mother and everything that she underwent and my feelings for her as a really extraordinary person.
But I also felt the compulsion to write about her because I think that in all honesty, she was also very ordinary. That many of the things that happened to her 40 years, for example, of famine, colonization, war, being a refugee twice, this happened to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. And so I’ve encountered many stories of people who underwent very similar experiences to my mother who were Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees.
So in telling her story, I also felt that I was also telling that larger story of the collective refugee experience and how it ties to other kinds of collective experiences like war and colonialism that Vietnam and the United States have been involved with. And so the urge to break silence, to be honest and to risk betrayal, I felt had enormous personal emotional stakes, but also had these political collective stakes as well, which was even more reason to engage in this betrayal.
Because when the book ventures outside of my family to talk about Vietnam and the United States, I think a lot of, or a substantial number of Vietnamese and Americans would regard me as someone who’s also betrayed their nations as well, with the critical things that I have to say about these countries.
Ferenc Laczo:
The prominent theme in this book is the hyper visibility of what is called the Vietnam War in the US, and how that hyper visibility contrasts very sharply with the invisibility of Vietnamese people, their frequent erasure from narratives and the lack of proper recognition of their suffering and tragedies. Right? In the US, people tend to remember, so to say, their own victims, meaning US American victims of this war, but not the much larger number of victims who have fallen in Vietnam itself as local citizens.
Propagandistic and often racist depictions of this war and also US-inflicted violence more generally, these things really rightly outrage you, I would say, and this shows very clearly in this book. But at the same time, you admit that having arrived in the US as a refugee child at the age of four and having grown up so to say in the shadow of Hollywood, which obviously has a massive global impact, divorce saturated imagination, which is again a very particularly masculine imagination, had a highly significant impact on you too.
So having said all that, could I ask you to talk a bit about the ambiguities and the contradictions of growing up US American Vietnamese, Vietnamese American in such a refugee family in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War? And could you in connection with that, perhaps try to characterize your special or specific positionality and whether you would say that this very interesting mix has enabled a kind of special perspective on the world for you?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I grew up in this tangle of emotions and loyalties that came about by coming to the United States as a refugee when I was four. And this tangle of emotions and loyalties, I think basically stems from this sense of obligation to my parents and to the Vietnamese refugee community. Because I think I understand them pretty well and feel their pain and their loss from becoming refugees, from losing their nation and feeling that they’ve been, in some ways, erased from the world’s memory.
So it wasn’t just a military defeat for the South Vietnamese, but it was also a defeat in symbolism and discourse as well, rendering them invisible and inaudible except to each other. Now, Vietnamese refugee communities have their own press, their own artists, their own TV shows and all these types of things, but they’re only communicating with each other mostly in Vietnamese and in ways that are suppressed by the Vietnamese government, and also ignored by Americans as a whole.
And so I felt a huge obligation to tell the stories of Vietnamese refugees. At the same time, I also felt growing up as an American, a sense of obligation and loyalty to the United States as well, having lived here. And yet the growing into intellectual and political and artistic consciousness for me entailed the recognition that loyalty is a way to demand silence. That we refugees, we were expected to be grateful for our rescue.
And I think this is, for me, an important thing to recognize and to deny. Because certainly I’m grateful for the life that I have in the United States. However, I’m also very aware that my life in the United States would not be possible without all other kinds of actions of racism and imperialism and colonialism that have made American privileges possible and with which I am implicit at the very least.
And so to become a writer for me was to try to figure out how to hold power to account, whether that be Vietnamese communism, or American nationalism, or even South Vietnamese melancholic nationalism. Because I think on the one hand, the act of representation, telling our stories is really crucial. And also at the same time, we can get caught in that trap of representation. So that, for example, in your question, you talked about sort of the ways by which the United States fought this war in Southeast Asia, but then also controlled the discourse of memory afterwards as well, which makes it, I think, very easy for someone like me to fall into a trap of representation where I insist that I just want to tell Vietnamese stories and I want to hold Americans accountable for what they did to us or to other Vietnamese people in Vietnam.
And I think the evolution in my thinking and my writing over the last 20 or 30 years has been actually to recognize that while that claim is important, it’s extremely limited. Because what that does is that it tempts people like me and other so-called minorities to accept our very narrow situation as victims of a liberal conscience in the United States or any other imperial or formerly imperial country.
And so for me, I think it’s been very crucial to develop an artistic and political sense we should be paying attention to. Not just ourselves and our own sense of victimization or our own sense of guilt, if we happen to be the colonizer, but that position of being the victim is always shifting. And so in A Man of Two Faces, it was actually very important for me not just to hold the United States to account for example, or not just to criticize the excesses of Vietnamese communism or the excesses of South Vietnamese nationalism.
But to also talk about how, from my perspective, Vietnam is also a settler colonial country. Now, that is something that not a lot of Vietnamese people would say. Because it’s very common that we’re aware of how we’ve been colonized or victimized, but we do not want to talk about what we’ve done to others. And so ethically, it was very important for me that this book not just be about a Vietnamese sense of victimization or my own sense of victimization, but also a recognition of the complexities of power and how it is that even for victims, we can occupy the position of victimizer as well.
Ferenc Laczo:
Now, you also explain how you had to construct an Asian American literary inheritance for yourself in addition to the genealogy of the Anglo American European cannon that you actually knew much better when you were entering your university studies and how anti colonial revolutionaries, public intellectuals, committed writers, and also some galvanizing teachers on campus soon became your heroes.
You also clarify that you left UC Berkeley with four misdemeanors, three diplomas, and two arrests, as well as an abiding belief in solidarity, liberation, the power of the people, and the power of art. Right? These are very powerful statements in the book, I found. And while much of the book is clearly political and also theoretically informed, right, you of course write also as a scholar.
And this layer of the discussion is very, very evident, at least certainly it has been very evident to me. The discussion of your activism and your academic life, or your academic work, is I would say, relatively brief on these pages. So could I ask you why you have chosen to write relatively little about your academic trajectory and some of the more concrete forms of your political engagement?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
There’s actually more of that recounting of my academic life in an earlier draft of the memoir. But my editor thought it was pretty boring. He was very gentle about that. I mean, outside of academia, I don’t think many non-academics care very much about intellectual history. And so I think I have to save that for a different kind of article or short book.
But for the purposes of this book, what I thought of was that my primary identity outside of my personal life, being a father and a husband and a son, my primary identity is as a writer. Everything else is actually secondary, whether it’s as an academic, or a scholarly writer, or as a critic, or as a novelist, or as a essayist, or even as an Asian American.
All of these are subsidiary to writing, which for me is my real home outside of my family. Writing, language, art. And so I had to think of A Man of Two Faces as, first and foremost, a work of art in which all of those issues that you mentioned are present. I think it’s important to say that. Because, at least in the context of the United States, I think our American mainstream liberal notions of art are kind of narrow from my point of view.
You’re not really expected to talk about theory and politics in a work of art. And yet many of the works of theory and politics that I get excited about are ones in which the intellectual foregrounds the role of language and structure in their own writing. They turned active theory and criticism into a work of art, and vice-versa. A lot of the art that I get excited about is pretty explicit about their politics as well.
And I’m driven by the conviction, contra of many liberal writers and readers and critics, that in fact, it’s possible to do art and writing and politics together and theory at the same time. Now, it’s hard to do it. So this is my attempt to do that. So in doing that, certain things had to be excised. So, for example, I thought about naming the various teachers that I had, who were very important to me when I was in college.
But that would just get to be a little unwieldy from the perspective of art. So I have to save my gratitude for something else. And so what was really important was not so much the details of my trajectory through four years of college and five years of graduate school and so on. But instead, sort of the essence of the intellectual and political and artistic fire that I took out of that experience and have carried with me.
Ferenc Laczo:
Now, in closing, I wanted to ask you about something that I think is very, very striking about this book and much of your previous work as well. You say that you’re a dialectical Marxist, you write in the book, but only if the dialectic waivers between Groucho and Karl. And you also cite, for example, your novel, The Sympathizer on these pages, “I calmed the tremor in my gut. I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creatures in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.”
Now, this, to me, is one of the sharpest and funniest remarks I have ever read, I should say. And I think your book more generally also combines some really heavy themes, some really powerful, emotional themes, and some powerful critique with plenty of jokes and some genuinely hilariously funny moments. So I wanted to ask you how you see the relationship between political and humorous writing and humorous literature? And would you say that your jokes, your way of being funny has a political role and a political function?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Absolutely. But first I want to say that the role of jokes and a self-awareness of the satirical realities around me was one of the very key ways by which I survived academia, which tends to be a very humorless and unself-aware place. And when we talk about white men in suits, I’m certainly talking about people of the military industrial complex, but I’ve encountered some pretty scary white men in suits in academia as well.
So I think humor has been very crucial to my own survival within academia, from preventing me from becoming one of these white men in suits. I’m absolutely serious that I’m a Marxist, if we talk about both Karl Marxism and Groucho Marxism. Because in fact, I think the role of comedy and satire is absolutely crucial to politics. It’s certainly a very political tool to use comedy and satire to demonstrate the absurdities and the hypocrisies of power no matter where they manifest.
Whether it’s the petty politics of academia, or whether it’s the really scary politics of war and nation-state nationalism and imperialism. But it’s also important, I think, humor and the Groucho Marxism to enable us to be self-critical. Because looking at the history of Karl Marxism, I think it’s fairly clear that when Karl Marxism becomes a part of state nationalism, the politics of orthodoxy take over.
And this happens to every ideology. So it’s not unique to Karl Marxism, and it’s not unique to capitalism. It’s simply that power itself is its own way of being. And it’s utterly predictable that we see the corruption of power taking place in colonial and imperial nations. But it’s also enormously disheartening to see the corruption of power and the maintenance of ideological artistic political orthodoxy in decolonizing situations as well, or formerly revolutionary movements taking over nations and states.
And so that tragedy, I think, is something that I feel obligated to look at as much as the tragedies that are enacted by colonizing and imperialist nations. And so comedy and satire are crucial, again, just for survival in institutions, but also as a method of political critique, but also of artistic form. Because as you mentioned, my books deal with some really heavy issues from racism and imperialism, and colonialism, histories where millions of people die.
And while we can absolutely treat all of that very seriously, and many writers that I admire do treat these things completely seriously. I think there’s also a crucial space for humor and satire to help readers cope with the heaviness, but then also to use those things as political tools in and of themselves.
Ferenc Laczo:
Thank you so much for that illuminating response and the entire conversation today, Viet.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Ferenc, it’s been a pleasure.
Ferenc Laczo:
The pleasure has been all mine. I have been discussing with Viet Thanh Nguyen today, whose amazing new book is titled, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. I hope you have enjoyed our conversation, apropos this exciting new publication. Until the next conversation, here at the Review of Democracy.
