A MAN OF TWO FACES: A MEMOIR, A HISTORY, A MEMORIAL
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
Corsair, Rs 999
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book is a sensitive and a searing memoir. It deals with the
lingering shadow that war casts on its survivors. The book brings together articles, interviews and lectures that the author wrote and gave over a period of seven years. The fragmentary origins of the memoir are quite noticeable as is the author’s remarkable ability to distil memory and silences into words that cannot be ignored. Instances of intimate personal history are peppered throughout the text and the reader is expected to glean relevant bits of information from them. The escape from his birthplace, Buon Mê Thuôt, in Vietnam at the age of four in the spring of 1975, experiences at the military bases in the Philippines, Guam and Pennsylvania, and the temporary separation from his parents when families of newly-arrived asylum-seekers were divided among the homes of different American sponsors are just some bits of personal history that the author talks about in detail.
While the terrain that the memoir sets out to cover is quite expansive, the stretches of impersonal polemics are so unspecific that they risk lacking originality. For instance, regarding Donald Trump’s nicknames for Covid-19, Nguyen writes, “The Chinese virus or the Kung Flu takes aim at the Chinese, but to some, all Asians look the same.” Similarly, on the myth of capitalist meritocracy, he writes, “As the model minority, you may have worked hard to get what you have, but so do all the people suddenly deemed essential workers in the age of the global plague” and “Slave masters called enslaved people lazy even as they worked them to death.” Such information is not new; it offers little that is not known about essential workers and slavery.
Nguyen is thrown into an existential crisis after watching movies like Apocalypse Now that deal with the Vietnam war. Through the examples of such movies, the memoir tries to answer an important question: how can an individual be both a killer (an American) and the victim (Vietnamese)? Interestingly, throughout the book, the author refers to the United States of America as “AMERICA™”. He notes that violence lies concealed behind America’s sunny countenance. In fact, violence is one of the running themes of the memoir.
Written in a language free of jargon, A Man of Two Faces is full of emotions and focuses primarily on cultural power. Besides exploring themes like memory and forgetting, the book scrutenises the pledges that the US readily makes and breaks. The book will leave its mark on those who have been forced to leave their homes and live in exile.
