{"id":14283,"date":"2023-10-11T11:42:14","date_gmt":"2023-10-11T18:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/?p=14283"},"modified":"2023-12-10T08:22:32","modified_gmt":"2023-12-10T16:22:32","slug":"washington-post-review-by-lisa-ko","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2023\/washington-post-review-by-lisa-ko","title":{"rendered":"Washington Post | Review by\u00a0Lisa Ko"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nguyen\u2019s \u2018A Man of Two Faces\u2019 tackles war, colonization, death and more, but still manages to be playful<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent interview<\/a>, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen spoke about his \u201cpervasive preoccupation\u201d with the power of storytelling and his relationship to otherness. He contends with both in \u201cA Man of Two Faces<\/a>,\u201d his formally audacious new memoir, which was recently longlisted for the National Book Award for nonfiction. It is a vision of storytelling as not only internal work but also political work. Beginning with fragments of his early life, he asks, in a verse-like passage: \u201cWhere, on the thin border between\/ history and memory, can I re\/ member myself?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nguyen, who was born in 1971, was 4 when he fled Vietnam with his parents and older brother for what he terms AMERICA\u2122. His 16-year-old sister, whom he would not see again for nearly 30 years, was left behind. At a military base in Pennsylvania, the rest of his family was separated to live with American sponsors. Reunited after several years, they eventually settled in San Jose, and opened the city\u2019s second Vietnamese grocery store, where, when Nguyen was 9, his parents were shot and injured during a Christmas Eve holdup, the aftermath of which he excised from memory. As a newly politically active ethnic-studies student at the University of California at Berkeley, he published an essay about what it was like to grow up in \u201cWhite America.\u201d It landed him a spot in the writing workshop of the famed author Maxine Hong Kingston, but he writes that he slept through it every day. (Years later, she told him he had been the worst student in the class.) He earned a PhD in English, started teaching at the University of Southern California and wrote his first novel, \u201cThe Sympathizer<\/a>,\u201d which won the Pulitzer in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The success of \u201cThe Sympathizer\u201d transformed Nguyen into a \u201cProfessional Refugee\u201d lauded for \u201cgiving voice to the previously voiceless,\u201d but in \u201cA Man of Two Faces,\u201d he indicts the paucity of diversity and representation in politics, and advocates for abolishing the very conditions of voicelessness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his memoir, Nguyen writes that childhood left a \u201ca sediment of confusion and emotion that requires decades \u2026 to sift through,\u201d and that it was through this process of sifting that he learned how to be a writer. He incorporates cultural criticism \u2014 one chapter details how watching \u201cApocalypse Now<\/a>\u201d was a turning point that made him question whether, if he had been in the movie, he would have been \u201cthe Americans killing? Or the Vietnamese being killed?\u201d \u2014 with meditations on his roles as a parent, son and refugee, digging deeper into memory as the book progresses (\u201cCan you go where it hurts?\/ Can you cut to the bone?\u201d) as the \u201cunexploded ordnance of the past, a mine buried in the mind,\u201d gradually comes into focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stereoscopic structure of the personal and the cultural challenges us to reflect on how the formation of self involves stories told about us as well as those we tell ourselves. In Nguyen\u2019s case, this requires vigorous self-interrogation and self-inventory: \u201cAre you, a refugee, the\/ colonized or the\/ colonizer?\u201d It\u2019s not either-or.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Vietnam, Nguyen\u2019s parents were among the 800,000 Roman Catholics transported from the country\u2019s north to its Central Highlands by the Americans and French, part of a CIA-encouraged effort to resettle a region where Indigenous Montagnard people already lived. And coming to the United States as refugees meant \u201cbecoming shareholders in the war machine, the\/ ultimate condition of our citizenship.\u201d Writing about Tou Thao, the Hmong American police officer who was convicted of aiding and abetting manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd, Nguyen confesses, \u201cPerhaps \u2026 you are more alike than you care to admit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The subject matter is serious \u2014 war, colonization, Nguyen\u2019s mother\u2019s decades-long illness before her death in 2018 and his inability to recall particularly painful times when she was hospitalized \u2014 but there is a playfulness as well: changing font sizes; taking liberties with layout; writing with sardonic humor; sharing a list of one-star reviews of \u201cThe Sympathizer,\u201d which Nguyen calls a \u201cNot So Great American Novel.\u201d Forsaking a traditional prose format for discrete paragraph-length chunks of text set apart with line breaks, Nguyen occasionally aligns alternating paragraphs left and right to mimic a dialogue between opposing voices, even anticipating potential criticism: \u201cGet over it, snowflake, a reader mutters.\u201d (At other times, the stylistic choices make for a more awkward, choppy tone: \u201cDis-placed. Dis place. Dys-place.\u201d) \u201cYou\u201d is a stand-in for \u201cI,\u201d providing necessary distance for a writer who confesses to avoiding feelings by hiding behind academic theory. \u201cYou, the reader, never the text.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow do you separate yourself\/ and your memories from History?\u201d Nguyen asks. The answer is, you don\u2019t. His most emotionally powerful writing revolves around his parents, whose journey into old age was \u201cepic and yet quotidian.\u201d Ba, a stern man whom Nguyen feared and respected, never discouraged him from becoming a scholar and writer. And while M\u00e1\u2019s illness and death will not count as one of war\u2019s casualties, \u201ccivilian stories can be war stories too.\u201d The memoir fully coheres in its final section, exemplifying its author\u2019s call for the importance of truth-telling, sharing both \u201cprivate secrets\u201d and \u201copen secrets,\u201d an act that comes with risks \u2014 writers who fall outside the dominant culture are expected to show their grief but not explain why it exists. \u201cWriting is the only way I know how to fight,\u201d Nguyen writes. \u201cAnd writing is the only way I know how to grieve.\u201d Sharp and affecting, this book is both: a weapon, a lamentation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nguyen\u2019s \u2018A Man of Two Faces\u2019 tackles war, colonization, death and more, but still manages to be playful In a recent interview, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen spoke about his \u201cpervasive preoccupation\u201d with the power of storytelling and his relationship to otherness. He contends with both in \u201cA Man of Two Faces,\u201d his formally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":14179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[208],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWashington Post | Review by\u00a0Lisa Ko - Viet Thanh Nguyen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2023\/washington-post-review-by-lisa-ko\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Faithe Nguyen\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2023\/washington-post-review-by-lisa-ko\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2023\/washington-post-review-by-lisa-ko\",\"name\":\"Washington Post | Review by\u00a0Lisa Ko - 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