Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor and novelist best known for his debut novel The Sympathizer, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016. His latest work, A Man of Two Faces: A memoir, a history, a memorial, follows his parents’ journey growing up in a divided Vietnam and later having to flee their chosen country when South Vietnam was defeated in 1975.
Listen to the full podcast here.
Transcript:
0:06
I’ve spent a lot of time reading memoirs.I don’t know how how memoirs work in in India, but in the United States there is there are conventions around memoirs and autobiographies that they’re supposed to be holistic, they’re supposed to be linear.
0:21
They are reconstructions of lives, examine retrospectively.So there’s a wholeness to a lot of memoirs as as people look back upon themselves and try to make sense out of themselves.And there’s a a beginning in the middle and an end.And if you are an immigrant, A refugee, A minority, an outsider of some kind in the United States, these expectations of memoir and autobiography have another layer and dimension, which is that whatever trauma, whatever historical tragedies that have shaped you and sent you into the United States, all of those have to be resolved in some way into the memoir of a making of an American, which is itself a holistic narrative.
1:01
Hello and welcome.You’re listening to TOI Bookmark, a time special presentation in which we speak to personalities from the world of books and literature.I’m your host, Jaya Bharacharjee Rose.It is with great.
1:19
Pleasure.I welcome Viethanwin.His novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was turned into an HBO limited series.The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, his most recent books are A Man of Two Faces, A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, To Save and to Destroy Writing as Another, and the edited volume The Cleaving Vietnamese.
1:49
Writers in the diaspora.We are.Here to discuss.A Man of Two Faces, which has been published in India by Hachette India.Welcome Viet.Welcome to TOI bookmark.Hello Jay, it’s such a pleasure to be here with you.Indeed, it’s wonderful speaking with you after following your work with absolute admiration for many years.
2:13
Thank you Viette for making the time.It’s my pleasure.So let’s start.I mean, I’m sure this is a question you’ve been asked many times.How did this book A Man of Two Faces come about?Why write a memoir?In all honesty, I never wanted to write a memoir.
2:32
I didn’t think my life was very interesting.I thought my parents lives were interesting.They had these dramatic, epic lives that the outlines of which I think many people are familiar with when they hear about Vietnam or about countries that have been subjected to war and colonization and division.
2:49
And so my parents were part of this refugee generation that grew up during famine in the 1940s and then were forced to flee as refugees in 1954 when Vietnam was divided in two and then were forced to flee in 1975 when South Vietnam, which was their new chosen country, was defeated.
3:08
And I went along with them, and I was an eyewitness to their struggles.And so I always thought their stories were interesting.But I had this banal existence as a young Vietnamese American child growing up in the United States of the 1970s and 1980s.
3:25
And I turned my energies to writing fiction where I could dramatize the kinds of artistic and political concerns that I had.But I think at a certain point in the last few years, I realized that I had probably been much more damaged emotionally by the refugee experience than I had ever understood.
3:43
And I wanted to excavate that.And the starting point for that was during the pandemic when I went into my archive and I read, I reread an essay that I had written in college for one of my professors, Maxine on Kingston, about my mother going into a psychiatric facility.
4:00
And while I hadn’t read that essay in 30 years, I certainly remembered that I had written it and I’d remembered that I’m a mother had gone to a psychiatric facility.But I thought that it happened when I was a little boy.Rereading the essay, I discovered that in fact, my mother had gone into this psychiatric facility when I was 18.
4:19
I wrote about it when I was 19, a full grown adult, and somehow my memory had changed the circumstances so that I had become a little boy instead of an 18 year old.And when I reread the essay, I also realized I’d forgotten almost every single detail that I had written down.
4:35
And this was a signal to me that there was something I needed to investigate in my own memory, in the story of my mother, in my inability to grapple with her drama and her life.And that this essay of 10 pages that I’d written when I was 19 was something that I needed to finish now as an adult.
4:55
Interesting, because I mean, that’s.It’s quite powerful.How you came about?To write this because.That’s a lot of emotions to contend with and to sit down and write those words on the page.And your opening sentence now explains the power it it encapsulates.
5:12
Where does memory begin?I have struggled with that question for so long.Maybe for everybody, that’s an important question.And where does memory begin?But I think if you are displaced or if you’ve been traumatized in some way, so maybe you’re not a refugee.
5:29
Maybe you’re simply somebody who grew up in some kind of traumatic situation.But those of us who whose memories are wrapped up with trauma, I think often times have a hard time recalling exactly when our memories begin, whether those are the memories of the trauma or whether those are the memories of our displacement.
5:49
And in my case, I left Vietnam when I was four years old as a refugee.So my refugee origin story is wrapped up with the beginnings of my memory.And the fact that I was a refugee is wrapped up with history.I wouldn’t be a refugee if if it hadn’t been for the history of the American war in Vietnam and before that the the colonization of Vietnam by France.
6:10
And so memory and history are completely entangled for me.And in this book, I try to deal with both of those issues.I certainly try to deal with my own faulty memories.I try to deal with the the memories of my nations, whether they are Vietnam or the United States.And I try to deal with the fact that these memories are embedded in history.
6:28
And when it comes to nations, nations always have selective memories and selective histories and individuals are no different.And so this memoir memoir deals with the intersection of the collective memories and histories of nations and the individual memories and histories of my family and myself.
6:45
Oh, you do that absolutely stupendously, not just in in the way in the manner in which you write.And you’re so clear and so hard hitting at times about dissecting, deconstructing this whole thing, this whole experience of being a refugee.
7:02
But what really intrigued me?Because I was trying to grapple.With reading this book in the first few pages, I was stunned.By the arrangement of.Words.I was stunned at the.Way you had obviously.I mean, I don’t know if that’s true, but they seemed like previously written essays into which you had inserted your.
7:20
Present day observations and commentaries.So thus had created a form of literary art of.Presenting a dialogue and at the same time deconstructing a lot of the.Theoretical stuff that you.Gain and and how do you unpack it and present your identity as you?
7:38
Who you are.I’ve spent a lot of time reading memoirs.I don’t know how how memoirs work in in India, but in the United States there is there are conventions around memoirs and autobiographies that they’re supposed to be holistic, they’re supposed to be linear.
7:56
They are reconstructions of lives, examine retrospectively.So there’s a wholeness to a lot of memoirs as as people look back upon themselves and try to make sense out of themselves.And there’s a beginning in the middle and an end.And if you are an immigrant, A refugee, A minority, an outsider of some kind in the United States, these expectations of memoir and autobiography have another layer and dimension, which is that whatever trauma, whatever historical tragedies that have shaped you and sent you into the United States, all of those have to be resolved in some way into the memoir of a making of an American, which is itself a holistic narrative.
8:34
All the ruptures of the other worlds outside of the United States are somehow turned into dramatic fodder that becomes resolved with this reconciliation of a person who becomes an American.I wanted to contest all of that because that’s not actually my experience.
8:50
Those narratives are are marketable experiences and those are the expectations for of the memoir of genre in general, but also specifically the so-called ethnic memoir.But my own experiences were one of duality.I always felt myself to be a self and an other, a Vietnamese and an American, someone who was always existing in the conditions of what WEB Dubois called double consciousness, looking at oneself through one’s own eyes and the eyes of another.
9:18
And I wanted the this book not to simply say those things which the book does do, but to express those things through the arrangement of words on the page, as you pointed out.I wanted the reader to feel some of my own confusion and some of my own duality, my struggle with the language and the form of my own story, because I felt that was the honest way to tell my own story.
9:41
I felt that if I were to tell my story in the conventional fashion, A-Z, linear and so on, that that would actually be a fiction.And this was supposed to be non fiction.So the challenge was how can I take a non fiction form and use the language and the shape of the words and the, you know, the arrangement of the lines and so on to evoke these experiences of fragmentation and confusion, but also clarity, as you point out for the reader.
10:11
Because I think through all the confusion and fragmentation, I was able to achieve some clarity about myself and also my place in relationship to Vietnam and the United States.Oh, that, you know, definitely were because after one had managed to read the first few pages and understood what you were trying to do, or at least grasped the beginnings, by the time 1 finishes reading the book and I read it more or less.
10:34
In one fell swoop.Because.Then it was impossible to extricate myself from this conversation that you were having with yourself and.It was a privilege.And an honour and.To be Privy to this dialogue.That you were engaged in, and it was.
10:50
Absolutely stupendous to know.That a memoir could be written in this manner, in this, in this way, without any.Theatrics, but yet.Using the the art form of theatre to have a dialogue but presented in a in a.Static text so that the reader.
11:06
Was at the liberty you had given the reader the.Choice to.Deconstruct if they wish.To or just read it for what you were.Saying and doing there, it was such an amazing experience to.Read your book well, Thank you so much for that.I love the theatrical comparison and certainly is a dialogue between myself, myself as a younger person, myself as an adult writer.
11:27
Looking back, the roots of this were actually in my novel The Sympathizer.And when I wrote The Sympathizer, that is a novel about a spy who was a man of two minds, and it is not autobiographical in any way except for the fact that it takes the emotional issues that I described growing up as being someone who’s both Vietnamese and American.
11:46
I took those feelings that I felt so strongly as a young person and still do in many ways, and I put them into the character of a spy, and that became extremely dramatic.And then when it came time to write A Man of Two Faces, I thought the way I should do it was to pretend that I was my own spy, the fictional character that I had created writing about me.
12:06
That was the method I needed to use to get enough distance from myself in order to look at myself, examine myself.And so it was actually a lot of fun.The memoir obviously deals with some serious issues, but writing the book for the 1st 2 thirds, 3/4 was actually a lot of fun giving in to myself, my own creation and writing about me as a a creation as well.
12:27
I wanted to have fun writing this book just as I had fun writing The Sympathizer, even though The Sympathizer is also about very serious issues.And so there’s something in these books in which the form of the books, the form of the writing itself stands in contrast to the content.
12:43
The content can be very serious, but the form can be very playful.And it’s that contrast that I hope is compelling to the reader, that even as you’re dealing in the case of a man of two faces with war, colonization, the refugee experience, mental illness, even as you’re doing that, you’re also hopefully pulled along by the playfulness of the language.
13:05
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.And that that multi layering that you do and I’m so glad to hear.You say that you.Actually had fun writing this because the the multi layering that you do and the the many.Aspects.
13:21
Of not just your American experience, but trying to understand your Vietnamese origins, the context, and presenting it to a modern day reader.But who today is?Let’s face it.Assaulted by so many different ways of getting information.
13:37
Creative or otherwise, it is quite a task for a writer.To sit down and present their view and their history and.What you do is also provide a.Commentary on contemporary events, isn’t it?Absolutely.I mean, I think that memoirs can do different things.
13:55
I mean, so in the most conventional sense, memoirs are an investigation of the of 1’s interior.And I hope this book does do that.But I was, I was also thinking about another tradition of memoir in which the memoirist is always embedded in a community, in a family, in politics, in history.
14:13
And so the unfolding of the self in the investigation of the self is inseparable from the investigation of politics and history and context and so on.Because as I looked at my mother, for example, and thought about how she had gone to psychiatric facilities 3 times in her life, one of the most basic questions for me was why?
14:33
Was this something that was inherent in her body, in her mind?Or was her break?Were her breakdowns the result of being hammered by history, living through 40 years of terrible traumatic events?And I don’t, I will never know the answer to that question.
14:50
But in order for me to write a memoir about myself and about her, it couldn’t simply be an investigation of our own individuality.It also had to be an investigation of the history that had produced both of us as well.And I respond very strongly to these kinds of memoirs that are aware that the self cannot be separated from history.
15:08
The self cannot be separated from the family.The child cannot be separated from the parents.And all that is taking place in a man of two faces.It absolutely is.And you seem to demonstrate exactly what you believe in because it’s somewhere you say you know, of course, but I mean, you all know it, but.
15:29
You say it specifically.Personal is political.And then you make this, you make this statement, but it’s just a throwaway statement.It’s tucked in there.Just do as if.To underline the fact, don’t forget.That this will always.Stand true and this whole.Edifice that you create this whole.
15:46
The commentary.That you create is absolutely.I mean, I found it magnificent because you suddenly made clear.How it was possible to speak?With, with strength, with.Power.And with a a kind of calmness which emanates from whichever energy it is.
16:07
It may be rage.It may.Be whatever it is.But there’s a calmness to engage in a.Dialogue.Beyond just.Yourself with others.And that is what you bring together.It’s incredible what you do on the pages.Well, I’m flattered.Thank you so much.
16:23
Yeah, there are many emotions that are that are happening in this book and as in as in all my books, I think.But the the metaphor I’ve always I’ve used sometimes is that emotions are are a piano, are a keyboard.You have the whole range to play with and that’s what I tried to do in The Sympathizer.
16:40
It’s sequel that committed and in this book as well to give readers a vast range of emotions.There’s certainly what I semi satirically call in in this book, the sob stories that are expected of immigrants and refugees to the United States.
16:55
We’re expected to sell our trauma and there is real trauma and there are real tears and there are real sobs and all of that.There is real anger as well as I consider this issue of, of how it is that we ended up as refugees in the 1st place, you know, for American audiences, for UK audiences, as they look at their immigrant and refugee populations, I think there is the expectation that these refugees arrive and immigrants arrive almost without history.
17:21
Or if there is history, that history is somewhere far away.And then they arrive in these new nations and they’re expected to simply be grateful, when in fact we would not be here in the United States as refugees if it hadn’t been for the American interventions into Southeast Asia.
17:36
So there’s reason for anger there, but then there’s also humor.There’s a lot of jokes in this book.I think Survive humor is a survival mechanism and satire of the more powerful and the abuses and the hypocrisies of the powerful.The abuses and the hypocrisies of the of the powerful are not funny, but the satire of them can be very funny.
17:55
And so that way humor can be both a form of Comic Relief, but also a very political form of provocation and entertainment as well.And all that I think is happening in A Man of Two Faces as I try to figure out different ways to to grapple with our existence as refugees in the US, It’s that our existence is not simply set in one kind of tone, but there are many different tones that are happening, and the full complexity of our humanity has to be conveyed through all of those tones.
18:27
It’s an interesting analysis that you offer of emotions being like a keyboard, like a piano, because.It just fits perfectly.But these explanations that.You’ve offered so far, is that the reason?Why you chose?The title that you.Did how did the title come about?
18:43
Because.You do talk.About it page A 181 onwards you do talk about it in greater.Detail but.How did you hit upon this?All blame goes to my editor, Peter Blackstock.Peter Blackstock is this young genius.You know, he bought my novel, The Sympathizer when no one else wanted it.
19:00
Literally 13 out of 14 editors rejected The Sympathizer.And Peter, that was a 14th editor, and he was, I think, 26 years old when he bought the book.And Peter’s very interesting because I never met Peter Blackstock before he bought the book.And I thought, oh, and he has an English accent.
19:16
This is an English person.And it turns out Peter is actually part Malaysian.He’s mixed race and he he went to Oxford, but he did Slavic studies, you know, he studied Russian, all these really interesting things that set set him apart from your typical American editor.So when it came to the title of this book, I offered Peter all kinds of suggestions for the title of the book.
19:39
And the one that he fixated on was not even the title I offered.But my friend the writer, Leila Lalami read the the the the the memoir and manuscript.And she said, oh, I think the title should be A man of two faces, which is part of the opening line of The Sympathizer, which goes I’m a spy, a sleeper, A spook, a man of two faces.
19:59
And as I mentioned, the origins of that are are autobiographical.And Leila detected that.And so I just mentioned it to Peter in a throwaway fashion.And Peter said that’s the title of this memoir.And I said, I hate that title.I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think that should be the title of this of this book.I was, I would just keep sending Peter titles and he would keep rejecting them.
20:16
And in the end, I just had to trust in Peter that this is the function of the editors to tell the writer when the writer is wrong.So, so that’s that’s the origins of the title of the book.But in Peter’s thinking, and I think he’s probably right in this, the a man of two faces, although it is about me obviously is about is also a statement about a universal condition, that duality is a universal condition.
20:39
Now duality as a universal condition can be experienced individually.I think all of us have probably experienced some moment of being unsettled from ourselves.But that is different from duality as a collective and imposed condition.
20:54
That is some external force comes along and marks us as part of a group, which is the experience of racialization or colonization.And so the the book is very much about that duality, not simply as a, as a individual universality, but as a, as an imposed collect condition, which itself can be universal.
21:13
I’ve just been so moved by encountering people who are not Vietnamese who say, oh, this, the narrative of this really speaks to us as Afghans or Palestinians or Armenians.And I, I hope there is something about the, what we’ve been discussing in terms of the themes of the book, the range of emotions, the, the play with language and the, the, the fragmentation of the self and the relationship of the self to a collective that I, that I hope are universal for so many people from different places, especially places that have been shattered by history in some way.
21:47
Oh, absolutely.That that absolutely comes through because there are moments in the narrative that make you think, oh, this sounds familiar.This attitude of parents sounds familiar.This is absolutely understandable.Why does it need an explanation when you realize you’re speaking to an American audience?
22:04
By the way, I know Peter, we were together in Sydney on a visiting international publishers delegation.So I can ABS.I was chuckling.Because I can absolutely imagine his reaction being what it is.It’s spot on.It’s spot on and it’s perfect.
22:20
I’m so glad he’s your editor.He has that kind of knack for finding for believing in in his authors.And it’s a rare quality.So you’re blessed to have him on your in your corner, but totally no.
22:36
But the the other thing, now that you that now that you’ve mentioned about all these inputs from Peter and from Laila Lalami, etc, It makes me wonder how many.Edits did you put?Your memoir through because you know, while there’s this range of emotions, some of them lurking just beneath the surface, the overall tone that you seem to.
22:55
Adopt is of.Not cool and dispassionate, but it’s.Just kind of a distancing you allow.The reader to insert themselves and engage and.Understand your emotions.How did this come about?I wrote one draft of the memoir and it didn’t feel quite right.
23:14
I wrote it fairly quickly during the pandemic.I can’t remember exactly how long.It took me something like a year, year and a half and maybe less.And then I, I thought the last quarter, the last third of the memoir may not be working.And probably the reason why it wasn’t working was I, I had simply taken pieces of an earlier manuscript I had written about my mother and I, I just dropped it in at the very end of the book.
23:38
And then I workshopped it with a group of selected friends and colleagues, including Layla.There’s about 20 or 30 people, fellow professors, some of my graduate students and, and other writers.And it was a very productive session.But also one of the conclusions was the conclusion wasn’t working.
23:54
There was just something thick and awkward about it.And my agent, Nat Sabel also felt the same way as well.And so that’s why I, I said earlier, writing the 1st 2/3 or 3/4 of the book was easy.It was a lot of fun.But then going back to revise the manuscript for the second for the first time and going back to that conclusion, the last quarter or last third, it was so difficult.
24:17
And this is because the book winds up all that all the things that I’ve been talking about in terms of my mother’s psychiatric visit, psychiatric commitments to facilities, all that comes up mostly in the in the last third of the book.It was emotionally the most difficult thing for me to deal with, which is probably why I just dropped in a makeshift component earlier.
24:41
So I had to go back after the comments from the workshop and just go back and rewrite that last third that that rewriting the last third probably took as long as, you know, the writing the entire first draft, because I had to think through myself, think through the the history of my family that I was dealing with, think through the language that I was going to use.
25:03
And hopefully it still comes off.Hopefully it doesn’t come off laboriously, even though the process of writing the end, the last third of the so the book was laborious.And then finally I took the entire package and I gave it to my wife, who is always my primary reader and in, in the entire writing of this memoir, my wife, Llan Umm, who’s a poet and a professor and a scholar, had said to me, do not put me in this book.
25:28
So I said, fine, I’m not going to put you in this book.So she read the, the the second draft and then she said, why am I not in this book?So I had to, I was like, well, I had to go back and, and write a very short chapter about her and our children.
25:44
And that is the penultimate chapter of A Man of Two Faces.And of course, she was right.The book is a narrative about also in the end, a narrative about myself and my attempts to cope with the emotional damage of being a refugee.And in my particular case, the the reason why I thought my life was so boring is because the emotional damage for me was simply a turning off of my emotions.
26:06
I had to become very numb as a child, watching what my parents were going through in order to survive.And it has taken me decades to understand that I did this to myself and decades to try to awaken myself to feeling, which is necessary as a human being, as a husband, as a father, as a writer.
26:24
And so yes, in the end, I had to write that penultimate chapter about my wife and my children because they are my home.That’s very beautifully said, and that is it doesn’t come across as being laborious to read.It comes.Across as the perfect.
26:40
Ending it also it is in those.Few pages that it.Becomes clear that you recognize the difference between your upbringing and the upbringing that you’re giving your children and the.Security that they have.Compared to what?
26:55
I mean, you also have the security, but you also have this history.To contend with they have more.Is it a stable?Position, I don’t know, but it’s it comes across very beautifully that this is home now and there is a sense of I don’t know whether writing this memoir.
27:17
Helped.You come to terms with the kind of.History that you had.In your parents brought with them and you.Grappled with a sense.Maybe you had a sense of dislocation, I don’t know.But there is a.Sense of peace which descends upon the text and you as we read these final pages.
27:36
It’s as if you say you come home home.Yes.I mean, I think hopefully after writing a memoir, the writer has a greater understanding of themself or themselves.And I think I do have a greater understanding, not a not far from a complete understanding of myself, greater understanding of my parents, greater understanding of our home.
27:55
Far from complete, however, I think that I have so much more empathy and compassion and love for my parents through the act of writing this book.And as I say in the book, for better and for worse, writing is how I think.Writing is how I feel.
28:10
Writing is how I fight.Writing is how I mourn.All of that brought me closer to my own history, to my memories, to my parents.And yet the emotions are still there.I just did an interview today with a filmmaker who’s doing a documentary about the emotional after lives of the Vietnam War for Vietnamese refugees.
28:28
And we spent a couple of hours talking.And I was giving her answers about my life that I’ve already written about through in this book.And yet even in giving those answers that I’ve already written about, I could my voice.I was still overcome many times with emotion in describing the very events of this book.
28:46
So yes, in in some ways come to come to peace, certainly as a writer and as someone who has constructed A narrative.And yet these emotions that I describe in the book, both the expressed emotions but also the suppressed emotions are still embedded inside.They’re still very powerful.
29:02
And in writing a memoir, I did not want to.I’m glad I wasn’t.I did not dispel those emotions.I think perhaps sometimes people think when you write a memoir or when you write some kind of a story, somehow you heal yourself.That’s a complicated idea.And some sense is, yes, maybe I have come home in certain ways and I’ve redefined home for myself.
29:22
But I, I never want to forget the potency of those emotions, the depth of these feelings and memories.They’ve made me who I am.They’ve, they provide me with motivation for my beliefs and for my writing.And they provide me with a framework for for trying to be a a better person and a better father to my children.
29:40
In any other context, I would find that to be incredibly sappy and sentimental.But in my own life, I’m glad that I can try to be a better person and a better father to my children.Very.True, I didn’t think writing a memoir would.Have this.
29:56
Magical effect of healing.In fact, it kept making me wonder at your AT.Absolute how?Much effort it’s taken you to write some of that stuff.It’s not easy.Whether it healed or not, I wouldn’t know.I and I do not even wish to explore that because.
30:13
It’s an individual experience.And there will be moments in life when you will reflect upon what you’ve written, and it may open up another bag of memories.So redefining.Home is probably the.Way to think about it and really thank you very much for saying all that you have yet.
30:30
It’s such a pleasure.Having you on Ty.Bookmark.It’s been a delight.Talking to you about this book, Jaya.Thank you so much.That was Pulitzer Prize winner Viethan Nguyen on TOI Bookmark.This is your host.
30:46
Jaya Bharacharjee rose signing out for now, but do keep listening to TIME special presentations to hear more such conversations from the world of books and literature.We featured national and international authors including Gyan Pete and Padma Sri, awardees, Nobel laureates, Booker Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, diplomats, best selling authors, debut writers and legendary writers across genres and languages.
