Book Extract | A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Excerpted with permission from A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen, published by Little, Brown/ Hachette India.

When does memory begin? What memory is it that I seek?
And where, on the thin border between history and memory, can I remember myself?

Memory begins with Ba Má, their images like photographs, their story like a movie, the kind found in the black box of a VHS tape, in an era when I have long ago gotten rid of my VCR.

All our parents should have movies made of their lives. Or at least my parents should. Their epic journey deserves star treatment, even if only in an independent, low-budget film. Beautiful Joan Chen in her prime would play my mother; the young heartthrob Russell Wong, my father.

So what if neither actor is Vietnamese?
We’re all Asians here.

Joan Chen did play a Vietnamese mother in the big-budget Heaven and Earth, Oliver Stone’s biopic about Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese peasant girl caught in the whirlwind of a terrible war. Sexy Russell, with his chiseled cheeks and pouty lips, could have been a movie star if Hollywood ever cast Asian American men as romantic leads. His slicked-back hair reminds me of my father’s in a black-and-white headshot from the 1950s, his hair agleam. I, whose unending obsession with the styling and maintenance of my hair begins at sixteen, should have asked Ba, when he could still remember, what hair product he used. I could try to fix my own hair in that same fashion, the way I tried on my mother’s gray sweatshirt after she died and discovered that I could fit inside its void.

In this movie flickering in my mind’s musty theater, the songs are composed by the legend Trịnh Công Sơn and sung by his equally legendary muse with the smoky voice, Khánh Ly. Their collaborations constitute the soundtrack of nostalgia and loss for Vietnamese exiles and refugees, played on cassette tapes at forty-five minutes a side, filtered through a haze of cigarette smoke and accompanied by Hennessy VSOP cognac. Wong Kar-wai directs in his typically moody, seductive way. The lighting? Dim. The mood? Romantic. The color scheme? Faded Polaroid.

And the actor who plays me? A cute little boy with big black eyes.
After the movie comes and goes, he is never heard from again. No one remembers his name.

Perhaps Wong Kar-wai and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle could cast their cinematic spell on our house by the freeway in San José, stained a dark brown perhaps meant to evoke tree bark, built from wood and shingle, stucco and silence, memory and forgetting.

Imagine the realtor’s shock when my parents, refugees not fluent in English, paid in full with cash.

For most refugees and immigrants, life is rented rooms or rented homes, overcrowded apartments or overstuffed houses, extended families and necessary tenants. Cluttered rooms. Bare lives. This is how Fae Myenne Ng describes immigrant living in her novel Bone. Her setting is an unexotic Chinatown, but at least it’s in coastal San Francisco. Who has ever written about provincial San José, an hour’s drive away, or shined the light of cinema on it? At least Dionne Warwick celebrated the city with a song: “Do You Know the Way to San José?”
Of course it’s not as good as the songs about San Francisco.

Our street didn’t even possess a name, like the Mango Street of Sandra Cisneros. Just a direction and a number, South Tenth, black iron bars on the windows. Our countrymen from the old world must have installed those bars, since they could not be opened from inside, trapping us in the event of fire. I blame our countrymen, always taking the shortcut. When some of them pour a cement patio for us, they forget to smooth it, leaving a surface with the texture of the moon.

With a classic San José flourish, the people who buy the house from us later pave the lawn for more parking. My mother used to recline on that lawn, posing to have her picture taken by my father. Our American photos are almost always in color, unlike most of our Vietnamese photos, where a glamorous haze illuminates my parents. My mother, on a grassy slope by a church, is resplendent in one of her many áo dài. My father, slim as one of today’s Korean pop stars, leans with his hip against his Toyota sedan.

His sunglasses have disappeared, dust blown away in all the lost detritus of our past. I could wear them now, be just as fashionable on Sunset Boulevard as he was with his automobile.

Most people owned only motorbikes, if they had even that much. Even today in the place where I come from, more people drive motorbikes than cars. As one joke puts it:
What do you call a Vietnamese minivan?
A motorbike.

In a black-and-white Nick Ut photograph on my living room wall—not the one of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, burned by napalm, running and screaming—a man drives a motorbike, fleeing a battle, two boys in front of him, wife behind clutching another boy, two more boys behind her, staring at Nick Ut’s camera.

In a flickering single frame of memory, a family employee drives me to preschool on a motorbike. You stood in front of him on his Vespa 50, my father told me a few years ago. I wish I had a photograph of me with the wind in my hair, a perfect shot for Wong Kar-wai to capture as we zoom past sun-browned men pedaling their xích-lô or driving three-wheeled Lambretta taxis. Seat belt? Car seat? Helmets? Ha! This was Việt Nam!

Viet Thanh Nguyen — A Man of Two Faces
Published by Little, Brown/ Hachette India, 2025. Pb. 385

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024

"A triumphant memoir" — Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide.

With insight, humour, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.

At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICA™. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun.

Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.

Resonant in its emotions and clear in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.

30 April 2025 marked fifty years since the conclusion of the Vietnam War.

About the Author

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer (Pulitzer Prize winner); its sequel, The Committed; the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies (National Book Award finalist); and editor of the refugee writing anthology The Displaced.

The Sympathizer was adapted into an HBO Original Series featuring Robert Downey Jr. Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. He is a regular op-ed contributor to The New York Times, covering immigration, refugees, politics, culture, and Southeast Asia.

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the first Asian American elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board in its 103-year history.

He lives in Los Angeles.