A Man of Two Faces: Viet Thanh Nguyen's Beautiful (and Searing) Memoir

Books & Bakes Update - The tension between empathy and experience in the story of a Vietnamese refugee family

Books & Bakes is my read-a-thon raising money for Cake4Kids, an organization that provides birthday cakes to underserved and at-risk children. Every Friday through Labor Day, I’ll be posting reviews and round-ups of what I’ve read and a preview of what I’m reading. Make your pledge here!

There is empathy and then there is experience.

For the past twenty-five years I’ve been part of the Vietnamese family I married into, learning about their journey to America as refugees. I’ve seen how the traditions of a homeland thousands of miles away and decades in the past have faded over generations, from the parents who spoke little English to their bilingual children who still sport accents to the fully Americanized grandkids fluent only in English and memes.

I’ve stepped into a quasi-parenting role, helping raise my nephew Andrew after the death of my brother-in-law and running headlong into the competing ideas — immigrant versus white — of how that raising should actually happen.

And I’ve learned about the various racist aggressions, micro and macro, they’ve experienced, the random taunts of “chink” and “gook,” the condescension from white Americans who hear accents as affronts, the stereotypes that vacillate between “model minority” and “threat to the nation.” When Andrew was in high school working a carnival booth in Hershey Park, a group of white teen boys yelled “Chopsticks!” at him and laughed. He told me this with his own laugh because he thought it was silly; I silently seethed with a pointless desire to track the little fuckers down and teach them a lesson.

And those are the types of feelings I have to guard against — not the desire to protect but the feeling that any pain for them also belongs to me. The empathy is mine, the experience is not.

I am not always successful.

That’s the tension I brought to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir, A Man of Two Faces, the story of his journey to America as a very young child with his parents and his fitful assimilation into “AMERICA^TM.”

His parents, Ba Má (father and mother), settle in San José and open a Vietnamese grocery store, SàiGòn Mới. Walking to the store one day, he sees a vacant shop window with a sign: “Another American Driven Out of Business by the Vietnamese.” Then, on Christmas Eve, Ba Má are both shot during a robbery at the store. While watching cartoons, he gets the news from his brother and finds himself at a loss for emotion that will follow him into adulthood:

Ba Má have been shot, he says again.

I

What’s the matter with you?

stop

Why don’t you say anything?

laughing.

Don’t you feel anything?

Honestly, no.
Is numbness
a feeling?

Your brother, seven years older, is crying.

You keep your gaze fixed
on the television, saying
nothing, which you
will excel at.

Ba Má are back at work within days.

A Man of Two Faces isn’t a standard memoir. Nguyen goes on a journey to reconstruct his own memories, trying to recover what he’s forgotten or repressed, moving from prose to blank-verse poetry and back in a beautiful flow that captures his own uncertainty at times and his white-hot anger in others.

Part of my investment in Nguyen’s story actually does come from experience. He and I are roughly the same age, GenXers who grew up in the seventies and eighties. While we grew up on opposite sides of the country, I remember the world he was fighting to both be a part of and to resist. The Vietnam war and its aftermath hung like a cloud over the country. Vietnamese refugees were a reminder of that, rarely a welcome one regardless of the stories we told ourselves of being a melting pot. Hardworking immigrants were great, as long as they were in someone else’s neighborhood.

The other investment is the one I have to struggle with. I see my late mother-in-law in Nguyen’s family stories. I see the harrowing escapes of Vietnamese friends who survived gunfire and sinking boats in Ba Má’s flight from violence to an American refugee camp. I see the endemic racism that devalues people I love in Nguyen’s experience of enduring racism in AMERICA^TM’s propagandistic media. That’s my empathy, not my experience.

I may overemphasize this empathy versus experience point, especially given that both are important parts of treating each other with love and compassion (and empathy is far too lacking in the current moment). But I have experienced white people who over-identify with cultures not their own. That way lies white savior syndromes and infantilizing grown-ass people who don’t need the condescension. And Nguyen has a whole chapter on “white and other saviors” that I have no desire to be a part of.

But I cannot recommend A Man of Two Faces highly enough. It is a gorgeously written story of loss and anger, struggle and success, childhood and fatherhood. I knew how good Nguyen was from his Pulitzer-winning novel, The Sympathizer, but this feels like an entirely different level. I was in tears by the end, not a state I often find myself with a book. I have not and likely cannot do it justice here but small moments throughout the book simply stab me in the heart:

My mother is mine and my
mother is also Other to me.

…

I remember Má loved me.

Everything else

I can forget.

Whether we come to it through empathy or experience, we have that love from the people we care about. That’s ours to keep. And to give.

Coming Up Next with Books & Bakes

Two more reviews coming up: T. J. Martinson’s western Kentucky mystery-thriller Blood River Witch and Marisa Kashino’s very dark comedy about the D.C. area real estate market Best Offer Wins.

That brings my current number of books read for Books & Bakes to four, not a bad way to wrap up the first full week! Remember, you can make your pledge at seanbuggrealtor.com/books-and-bakes. Your donations will help Cake4Kids provide birthday cakes to underserved and at-risk youth. They are an amazing organization that I’m proud to bake for.

And don’t worry, you can cap your pledge if my pace gets too fast. My goal is twenty books by Labor Day, perhaps a few more if time allows. The point is, any pledge makes a difference!

What’s on tap next? First up, I’ve started on Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters, a fantasy-comedy twist on MacBeth featuring a trio of witches — Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and newcomer Magrat — who provide toil and trouble (but only if you deserve it). Then, I’m excited to dive into Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, a novel set in post-zombie-apocalypse Manhattan and the crews tasked with clearing out the remaining undead. Whitehead is a Pulitzer winner known for his novels The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys — I love when “literary” writers do genre without the winking.