An insightful and thought-provoking memoir with humour, lyricism and sharp critique of colonialism, nationalism, and racism as Nguyen shares his experiences as a refugee, child of refugees, and as a writer of colour. With unconventional structure, Nguyen’s writing is masterful and powerful. It will have you underlining every other sentence and crying by the very end.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir, "A Man of Two Faces", talks about his life growing up as the son of Vietnamese parents who came to the U.S. to escape a country torn apart by war. He was only 4 years old and has some limited memories of his time as a refugee having been separated from his parents. Most of the baggage he carries relates to growing up as the son of two refugee parents trying to succeed in an America that was stacked against them. This book is a complex combination of personal experiences and a political statement about the racism and injustice that refugees experience while pursuing the “American Dream”. It’s extremely personal but also focuses on broad injustices in the areas of colonization, occupation, and immigration. It’s written in a stream of consciousness style with the beautiful writing one has come to expect from Nguyen. It’s a challenging read and leaves the reader with a lot to think about.

Wow what a book. I really liked how the author simultaneously told his own life story and also had larger discussion about refugees, colonialism, racism etc. The writing style was also just so easy to read and follow even with some of the heavier topics.

Touching, heartfelt, and informative this is my favorite memoir for this year.

A Man of Two Faces is the memoir of Pulitzer Prize winning author of Viet Thanh Nguyen, but it feels much more like an essay collection following his life. He begins with his escape from Vietnam, that he does not remember, and ends with an essay about his elderly father. While written as essays in paragraph form, it feels like poetry. His writing is soft and smooth yet making sharp points that pop the balloon surrounding the ideas of American Exceptionalism. The writing will make you gasp at its beauty while grabbing your chest in despair at his points. It's incredible, and as someone who has never read Nguyen's fiction, I cannot even begin to see how this form of writing translates to fiction, but I'm going to pick it up. I highly recommend this book.

Thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Of course the author of novels The Sympathizer and The Committed and short story collection The Refugees has his own story to tell. Viet Thanh Nguyen's fiction is acerbic, poignant, philosophical and very very funny. The humor preps the reader, softens the reader, for the hard truths that follow. Nguyen employs that same technique in A Man of Two Faces: a Memoir, a History, a Memorial.

It's a memoir, and so much more. It's a study of identity, of those characterized as "other", those without a voice. Is that why he became a writer? Nguyen critiques America's (and Vietnam's) history of colonization, militarization, capitalism, etc. with an eye towards a reckoning, an acknowledgement of the past. There's both criticism and admiration for America (AMERICA™️) calling it a country of "brutality and beauty, of horror and hope". Two sides to the countries, two sides to the man.

A Man of Two Faces is a fascinating read. The pages flew by. We're fortunate to have his voice.

My thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the ARC. A Man of Two Faces was published in October 2023.

“A handful of bad memories can be more indelible than a lifetime of good memories or mediocre ones. We noticed the scar, not the skin. Being taken away from your parents is burned in between your shoulder blades, a brand you do not usually see until you examine yourself with the mirrors of your own writing”. And once again, by engaging with the specific, Nguyen gets universal.

Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about his experience as a refugee growing up in the States with the additional challenge of a mentally ill mother. The rhythm of his account takes some getting used to with its shifts and turns and word play, but he covers all the imaginal bases from colonialism to the difficulties between generations in a new country to white supremacy, but also including the love of the family he came from and the family he created in this powerful memoir.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a conflicted American. You can read that conflict in his Pulitzer-winning novel, *The Sympathizer* and its sequel, *The Committed.* He spells it out in memoir form in this, his latest book, much of which he writes in the second person 'you' point of view:
"You have become used to living a secret life, with two faces and two selves," he says of himself. "You are me but seen from a slight distance, or the greatest distance, which is the space between one and one's self."
This book is about Nguyen's life as a son and father. It's about the reverberations of war, what it means to be a refugee, and all the baggage "the American Dream" is lugging behind it. It's both a laser-focused political treatise and the deeply personal history of a man and his calling as a writer. I left this book feeling conflicted, too, as I think Nguyen intended. I also left this book better aware of the racism and dualities that refugees face, the distinctions between refugees and immigrants, and the promises America keeps and breaks with these communities without apology.

[Thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for an opportunity to read an advanced reader copy and share my opinion of this book.]

I enjoyed The Sympathizer, and was looking forward to reading Nguyen's autobiography. I sympathize with him and so many of our nation's immigrants and found his story compelling. I could not complete the book, not due to Nguyen's writing or the book's content, but my inability to stay focused on all the cultural issues that he has encountered.

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read A Man of Two Faces.

I enjoyed The Sympathizer by this author and the same edgy tone creeps into this memoir. A deeply heartbreaking story.

90% political screed about how "America (trademark)" is a racist, white nation dominant, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee country. Everyone who is not white is the other, at most a second-class citizen. I agree with what he says, but so what, many before him have said the same thing just as well or better. He's a good writer but where's the memoir?

This was my most anticipated book of the year. I ordered three copies before it was published. One for the library I work at, one for myself, and one as gift. I am only part way through, but it has not disappointed.

a Man of Two Faces was such an interesting memoir. Nguyen can WRITE! I liked his reflections on being an immigrant, an "other", as well as thoughts on war.

Nguyen is one author I never skip out on. I know when I pick up one of his books, I'm going to be emotionally devastated, but also incredibly moved by his words. His memoir continues that pattern! I've fallen more in love with his words. I don't know how he can just write sentences that manage to make me feel so many different emotions all at once.

📝 "Don't be a voice or the voiceless. Abolish the conditions of voicelessness." I'm tempted to quote every sentence 🤭

Imagine putting all my favorite nonfiction books into a blender—MINOR FEELINGS (Cathy Park Hong), HOW TO READ NOW (Elaine Castillo), BITING THE HAND (Julia Lee), A LIVING REMEDY (Nicole Chung)—add a dash of Regina George's Burn Book. The result? A MAN OF TWO FACES, one of my all-time favorite reads (& my 300th read of the year)!

Nguyen's compelling memoir/essay delves into the history of Việt Nam, the refugee experience, the essence of the American dream, and more. Describing Nguyen's brilliance feels like trying to capture lightning in a bottle; I worry that my review won't do justice and the depth & nuance encapsulated in TWO FACES will be lost. So if y'all just want to stop here and go preorder this book right now, I totally get it 🤣🙈

Nguyen ingeniously weaves the theme of "two faces" throughout, dissecting complicity within his Vietnamese-American community to only wanting "good immigrants," reflecting on being "saved" by America without unwavering gratitude, exploring the complexities of war refugees rebuilding lives on stolen indigenous land, and playing the obedient son while harboring deeper sentiments. I particularly appreciated Nguyen's views of escaping communism yet hoping for a more equal society in America, and how he processes these complex feelings, knowing all that his parents & older brother had to endure.

As a war refugee severed from his roots, Nguyen details the profound dismembering of his lineage & past and the disremembering of Vietnamese people when only viewed through the white gaze. In the rest of TWO FACES, he blends comedy, pop culture, history, literature, and personal anecdotes to reconstruct himself from this visceral loss via re membering: acknowledging his parents' sacrifice, dissecting the ingrained white supremacy in Eurocentric media, and relearning history through different perspectives centering on decolonization.

I started crying 10 pages in and sobbed through the final quarter of the book 🙈 What resonates most is Nguyen's profound gratitude for his parents' sacrifice and how he memorializes their generational/cultural disparities, not through the (unfortunately overwritten) trope of conflict, but through their love that isn't always expressed through words. There are also heartwarming moments about his wife and children that had me audibly aww-ing 🥹

TWO FACES delves into Nguyen's honest (and unhinged) views of immigrants writing for the white gaze, and I'm here for all the chaos 👏👏👏 From explaining specific food, including generational conflict, to the quintessential American dream narrative, Nguyen pulls no punches when analyzing how deeply colonization has affected how we consume and produce media.

TWO FACES extensively references THE SYMPATHIZER, including when someone asked Nguyen when the novel would be translated into English (🙄) & one-star reviews (cue the Burn Book vibes 🤣). Nguyen shares his motivation for crafting the Pulitzer-winning story and the sources inspiring certain scenes (yup, that squid scene 🙈). You might want to prioritize THE SYMPATHIZER if you haven't read it yet.

I hesitated to start TWO FACES due to THE SYMPATHIZER's academic tone, but this memoir strikes a perfect balance between literary critique, biography, sarcasm & humor. I raged, I laughed, I sobbed, and bookmarked basically every page 😂 It's a must-read, a book that will linger in my thoughts, one I'm eager to revisit countless times, and the perfect 300th book of the year. As my Goodreads review declares, if you only read one nonfiction this year, let it be A MAN OF TWO FACES.
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What a tour de force ❤️‍🔥

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen new memoir, A Man of Two Faces, was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award, with the National Book Foundation hailing “it as a complex meditation on Nguyen’s life as a father and a son, and an exploration of the murkiness of memory and necessity of forgiveness." As a fan of his fiction might anticipate, Nguyen does not provide the typical linear unfolding of his personal history, although the reader learns that his family fled Viet Nam in 1975 when Nguyen was 4 years old, leaving behind his sixteen-year-old adopted sister to “guard the family property” (as he later explains, “[e]very Vietnamese family has photos of those left behind.”). After arriving in Harrisburg, PA, where they were separated as no single sponsor was able to take in the entire family, the family settled in San Jose, CA. His parents were refugees (not as Nguyen emphatically explains immigrants, expats, or migrants) who could not speak English but were able to purchase a house for cash in San Jose. They owned and operated (in other words “worked relentlessly”) a humble Vietnamese market which was inaccurately described in the local newspaper article about Nguyen’s elder brother who graduated as valedictorian of San Jose High as a “miniature department store.” Nguyen attended a Catholic school and pokes fun at his image: “A Vietnamese boy wearing Irish-green corduroys and an Irish-green cardigan with a shamrock on its pocket.” Although his brother attended Harvard, Nguyen was rejected from every college he applied to except one (his “last-choice university”) because he had a B+ average “otherwise known as an Asian F.”

Interwoven in this background are his thoughtful reflections on war (he offers sharp appraisals of Vietnam War films such as Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, and The Green Berets (the latter a “work of propaganda so spectacular and atrocious that only the Third Reich or Hollywood could have produced it”); racism (the refugees from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine receive a hospitable welcome because they are white; Americans exported their racism in Viet Nam which explains why the Vietnamese despise the Amerasian or Eurasian children of Black fathers), colonialism (which is always about land and when truly successful, is not recognized by the colonizers as colonialism), and the United States (America TM). Nguyen’s tangents are sharp, thought-provoking and often humorous (Tippi Hendren visited refugees at Camp Pendelton and asks her manicurist to train some of the women which is how, nearly fifty years later “Vietnamese make up 58 percent of the nail salon industry in this country”).

He cites diverse individuals, including Richard Pryor, Theodore Roosevelt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip Roth, Rambo (“as part of the indoctrination of our love for white saviors”), Virginia Woolf (whose room of her own was financed by her aunt in Bombay, India, an English colony), Karl Marx, Groucho Marx and Donald Trump (who slashes refugee quotas and who views Asians as “the Other, nobody and nothing, unseen until you are seen everywhere.”) He reflects on the way that older Vietnamese people ingratiate themselves with white people to “make up for not being American,” and the pushback he received when he wrote about Thanksgiving for the New York Times and described it as “both heartwarming family ritual AND celebration of genocide.” Undoubtedly, there will be some who will feel that Nguyen does not fully appreciate AMERICA TM, but he acknowledges that he is an “ingrate” refugee who concedes that being a “refugee gives you the requisite emotional damage to be a writer.” Thank you Midtown Scholar and Net Galley for providing me with this outstanding memoir of the refugee experience by one of our leading writers.

A MAN OF TWO FACES: A MEMOIR, A HISTORY, A MEMORIAL by Viet Thanh Nguyen is an absolute colossus of a literary feat in which Nguyen weaves in personal narrative with cultural commentary on America, colonization, refugee and Asian American experiences, the war in Vietnam, literary criticism, and so much more.

This book is elite; it has a permanent place in my heart and mind. I want to eat its pages, consume them ravenously and digest them so that Nguyen’s words become part of me on a cellular level. I want to shout out whole paragraphs from the rooftop because people need to sit down and let the man SPEAK.

What makes this book so powerful isn’t just that I could relate to so much of what Nguyen writes about, from immigrant children trying to repay the sacrifices of their parents to the Othering of certain groups by those in power to how memory and forgetting affect the stories we hold close, but the way he says these things with blazing ferocity, unrelenting vision, and sharp-tongued wit. I didn’t know I needed this so much in my life until I found myself banging my fist on my desk and shouting “Yessssss!” repeatedly.

Nguyen plays with form and structure in ways that could spin wildly out of control in the hands of a less gifted writer, but he’s able to jump from topic to topic and circle back around with the precision and artistry of an Olympic gymnast on a balance beam. Nothing is safe from his eviscerating pen. As much as Nguyen excoriates America’s role in global bloodbaths and ongoing racism, he also engages in deep self-examination.

Along with Julia Lee’s BITING THE HAND, this is a book I want everyone to read. Steven Yuen’s famous quote (“Sometimes I wonder if the Asian American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you”) hit home for so many of us. With books like this, we demand our visibility and our place in America™. Thank you @netgalley @groveatlantic for the eARC. I’m immediately buying a signed copy of this one.

VIet Thanh Nguyen is an author who was catapulted into fame with *The Sympathizer*, a hyperkinetic yet fully coherent book that bridges many genres. Since then, the author has pieced together *A Man of Two Faces*, subtitled *A Memoir. A History. A Memorial*, which says much about its contents.

Nguyen has used different sources and interviews to form his remembrance of growing up, his parents, his upbringing, the American (in Nguyen's words, 'America' is a word that nearly always suffixed by the trademark character) way of life, the American Dream, and much, much more.

> In Vietnamese, your name is more distinctive, Nguy ễn Thanh Việt, with Thanh, your father’s first name, grafted onto yours, distinguishing you from all the many others, including quite a few criminals, named Nguyễn [fill in the blank] Việt. Reborn on paper in AMERICAtm you become Viet Thanh Nguyen. The diacritical marks, part of a Romance language alphabet created by Portuguese missionaries and promoted by French rulers, are somehow too foreign for Westerners when attached to Vietnamese names and words. But accent marks on French words? Bien sûr.

Not only does Nguyen lay out the complexities that come with being born and raised in a different country than the one from which one's parents originate, but he deftly lays out a landscape of racism, prejudice, adolescence, adulthood, piecing together parts of dead family members, and, all the while, doing this beautifully by constantly weaving in and out of different themes of life.

> And so what if San José has a song and you don’t, Harrisburg? No one needs directions to San Francisco. Dionne Warwick herself admitted, It’s a dumb song and I didn’t want to sing it. Still, her song won a Grammy, sold millions, was a global top ten hit in 1968. While people sang along to their home hi-fis or in the comfort of wood-paneled station wagons, American soldiers commanded by a Mexican American captain murdered 504 Vietnamese civilians in Mỹ Lai, three years before my birth. My country continues killing innocents. On the day I first revise these words, the “Pentagon Admits to Civilian Casualties in Somalia for Third Time.” The victim is Nurto Kusow Omar Abukar, dead five months earlier in the town of Jilib, in a strike targeting members of the Shabab, an extremist group linked to Al Qaeda. Nurto Kusow Omar Abukar, eighteen-year-old girl, initially reported as a terrorist by AFRICOM, killed by a GBU-69/B small glide munition manufactured by Dynetics, which provides responsive, cost-effective engineering, scientific and IT solutions to the national security, cybersecurity, space, and critical infrastructure security sectors. My brother says he knew one of the children, a former classmate. Years later I visit Sơn My, as the Vietnamese call the village of the massacre. Cement pathways wind through the village, marked with trails of footprints symbolizing the absent dead, the living ghosts. I am careful not to walk in their footprints.

> Impossible odds! Heartwarming stories of reunion and success! (Ignore the ones not reunited, the ones not successful). BUT— and this is a big BUT —you refugees lack one crucial element Hollywood needs: You. Are. Not. White.

This is not a book that deceptively revels in self-loathing. It's a clear view into the muddled world of trying to form life as an intelligent person who is typecast and stereotyped even as people read your surname. Subject to scrutiny in ways that white people will never understand.

There's a lot of wondrous and required anger in some of the pages.

> It’s a terrifying device. The thermobaric bomb crushes caves with a super-hot blast that can destroy internal organs as far as a quarter-mile away. Its explosion is designed to tunnel through convoluted caves and pulverize anyone hiding as deep as 1,100 feet inside, and then incinerate whatever remains. From being bombed to inventing bombs—the AMERICAN DREAMtm! And don’t forget when Tippi Hedren visits fellow actor and friend Ki ều Chinh (who could also play your mother in the movie of her life) at Camp Pendleton and takes such pity on the refugees that she asks her manicurist to train some of these women. And this is how, nearly fifty years later, you Vietnamese make up 58 percent of the nail salon industry in this country.

> Most Vietnamese people can’t tell the difference between Latino populations, but then again, many Latinos use “Chino” to describe any Asian who looks like they might be Chinese. You are not so offended. The Latinos who call you Chino have never physically or verbally assaulted you or made racist movies about you.

Nguyen balances stories of John Wayne America pastiche with more modern versions of racism.

> When the usefulness of Chinese workers is finished with the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, politicians, journalists, and business leaders demonize them to appease white workers who feel threatened by Chinese competition. In Torreón, Mexico, in 1911, a local mob murders more than three hundred Mexicans of mostly Chinese and some Japanese descent. White mobs in AMERICAtm also lynch Chinese migrants and drive them out of many towns. In downtown Los Angeles in 1871, not far from where you live now, a mob of several hundred murder eighteen Chinese men and boys. In 1875, Congress passes the Page Act, aimed at keeping Chinese women out. Anti-Chinese feeling climaxes with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the country’s first racially discriminatory immigration law. The Chinese become the nation’s first illegal and undocumented immigrants. What does it mean to be illegal when the law is unjust?

Nguyen' sentences are often short, effective, provocative. Stirring. Even his words on his life pack information.

>After my mother’s death, Lan thinks we should have another child. Má, whom Lan has come to think of as her mother, would want that. As for Ba Má, they long ago ceased calling Lan their daughter-in-law, telling Lan that they love her as a daughter. Three hundred fifty days after Má’s death, Simone is born. If Ellison was named after one great writer, Simone is named after Simone de Beauvoir and Nina Simone strong, heroic women who faced a violent world with philosophy, politics, writing, music, and song.

There's a lot of dark comic relief in this book. Gallows humour in heaps. I appreciate this as laughter gets stuck in one's throat, but it's truly effective.

Where Nguyen's writing really shines is where he deftly returns to some passages in later stages and manages to weave together a feeling of life, the everyday experience of being an outsider, without showing off. It's an effective trait that writers like David Foster Wallace likely dreamed they could ever harness, and here it is, embalming the pages.

In all, Nguyen's memoir, rebel yell, history class, killing of America, and love, is very worth reading. It's a Venn diagram of love, hatred, history, and family; when do those areas cease to intersect? Nguyen dove in; here are the results.

Excellent book, covers so many important topics in poignant and funny ways. I can’t wait to read his other books now. Wickedly smart whips about his life.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's family fled Vietnam in 1975, amid heart-wrenching chaos, leaving a 16-yr old adopted daughter behind, and then separated further in the camps. After reuniting in America, the hard-working parents ran a store, and the two brothers assimilated. This book is just as much loving tribute to his own family, as it is scathing diatribe about historical colonizers' duplicitous scheming and hypocrisy, and a deep dive on the Asian double stereotype of Model Minority and Yellow Peril. As a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, American Studies professor, and noted cultural critic, Nguyen's citations are brilliant, encompassing film, music, history, etymology, as well as the literature.

If I had read this book first, I would have been able to give The Sympathizer so many more stars. Both books are about Vietnam, but somehow I found this one much easier to follow, and learn from. A Man of Two Faces is based mostly in California, a place I am wholly familiar with; and maybe the introspective tone is better suited to memoir than to fiction? I found the sections comparing and contrasting refugees to exiles to expats to migrants to immigrants to displaced people to be most fascinating.

An incredibly well-written and insightful memoir that blends critique of the so-called "American Dream". The style of writing and format of the book was well thought out as well. I enjoyed this book so much - I laughed, cried, and nodded along to the discussion of identity and what being a refugee means, the history of war and colonization, and commentary of current social issues and what the future holds. In addition to these key themes, I appreciated the authors story of his parents and the conversation around what and where home is. I highly recommend this book.