A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and professor Nguyen (English and American studies and ethnicity, Univ. of Southern California; The Sympathizer) pens his first memoir, exploring the dualities of being Vietnamese American and his reckoning with the painful legacies of the United States’ Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1924. Nguyen’s family fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975, when he was four years old. He focuses much of his narrative on his parents, whom he refers to collectively in Vietnamese as Ba Má, and his coming-of-age in suburban San José, CA. Nguyen’s portrait of Ba Má, who owned a Vietnamese grocery store, is both tender and tinged with sadness, as his elders’ unresolved trauma related to war and displacement comes to light. Nguyen deftly examines the paradox of Vietnamese people seeking asylum in the United States, the country that made them refugees in the first place. While he has only intermittent glimpses of the devastations his parents witnessed and survived before and during his childhood, his mother’s neurosis diagnosis and consequent stay at a treatment facility during his college years force him to confront painful memories.