Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memory began the moment he was separated from his family. After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, he and his family fled Vietnam to a refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. There, they were forced to separate, as leaving the camp required each to have American sponsors to help with independent resettlements.
Nguyen’s family separation at Fort Indiantown Gap initiates a broader recollection of his refugee identity, which he wrestles with in his memoir, “A Man of Two Faces: a History, a Memoir, a Memorial.” Nguyen’s memoir was longlisted for the National Book Award.
“A Man of Two Faces” also tells the story of Nguyen’s coming of age within the Vietnamese refugee community of San Jose, California. In a second-person, stream-of-consciousness style, he revisits childhood memories and explores remembrance itself while also imploring readers to confront how war is represented through storytelling. By sharing the grief and guilt of his past, Nguyen reveals the memories he has forgotten and the ones he has tried to forget.
Invited by the Schoenfeldt Distinguished Writers Series, Nguyen visited UP on Oct. 23 in the Buckley Center Auditorium to discuss the creation of his memoir, his writing process as a whole and the journey to confronting our own histories, including America’s.
Below is a selection of quotes from the event.
On the purpose of writing
“I had some sense of what my parents were going through. I felt like I was an eyewitness to my parents’ struggle. And my solace from all of that was the San Jose Public Library, where I read everything I could get my hands on. Those stories were my form of escape and my entertainment, but they were also another reality. I think from a young age I started to understand that I wanted to make my own reality through writing.”
On family
“My parents were so busy they could not actually take me to the San Jose Public Library to get my book award [for a short story contest Nguyen had won as a child]. Instead, my school librarian took me. I’m not mad at my parents because I understood what was at stake: survival. My parents were working this hard not just for my brother and myself, but for all the relatives in Vietnam that they were sending money home to, that was what was keeping people alive in a time of desperation and starvation and rationing that characterized the 1970s and the 1980s.
“One day, this letter shows up in the mail and in the letter is a photograph of a beautiful young woman. My parents say, ‘this is your adopted sister,’ and I had no idea what to say at that moment. What was this history that I did not know, or did not remember? Who was this person? And I would spend the rest of my adolescence and my college years haunted by this photograph of this young woman, my sister whom we had left behind. So I grew up with a sense of an absent presence of a ghost in the house, of this idea that for myself, and I think for all refugees, we’re haunted by absent presences. We’re haunted by everything we have left behind.”
On war films
“I grew up with this distinct sense that all wars are fought twice. The first time on the battlefield, and the second time in memory. Memories of the Vietnamese people I was living amongst, but also the memories of these Americans who were making and watching these movies that they were then exporting all over the world as their version of the war. Very perplexing.
“The United States was haunted by its past of invasions and racism and was taking it out on people like us. This was compounded when I saw my first Vietnam War movie when I was about 12: ‘Apocalypse Now.’ I had grown up at that point as an American and I was a war fanatic. I loved American war movies, and when I watched American war movies, I rooted for the Americans. In watching ‘Apocalypse Now,’ I rooted for the American soldiers up until the moment they massacred Vietnamese civilians. At that point, I was split into two. Was I the American doing the killing? Or was I the Vietnamese being killed? It was very confusing, and I didn’t know what to do with that, so I put that emotion away until I went to school at UC Berkeley.
“I took an Asian-American film class [at UC Berkeley], and when the professor asked us to recount a scene from a movie that had really impacted us, the first scene that came to mind was this massacre scene in ‘Apocalypse Now’. When I started recounting that scene in front of the class, I found myself shaking with rage and anger. That was the moment when I realized that stories don’t just have the power to save us, which is what I thought when I was going to the library, but that stories have the power to destroy us as well. Knowing, finally, that that was the power of stories made it even more urgent for me to become a writer.”
On what inspired him to write Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer”
“[‘The Sympathizer’] was going to be a novel about a Vietnamese perspective on the Vietnam War, and I thought this was important because the way that I was going to tell this story was not to try to appeal to white readers, or American readers, but to speak first and foremost to myself, and then to Vietnamese people.
“Let’s go back to that first story I told you about Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. It would not be possible for me to stand before you, telling this story, if it hadn’t been for the colonization of this country by white settlers. And from my perspective, this country has unfolded ever since from that original moment — the founding of a country — that we as Americans, most of us, like to believe is a country of beauty, and is. It’s a country founded on democracy and equality and liberty and opportunity and capitalism and Christianity, but it’s also a country founded on brutality, as well. Genocide, enslavement, colonization and war. Both those things can be true at the same time. And that is the contradiction that has driven the United States into, from my perspective, centuries of perpetual warfare, which would eventually bring the United States to Vietnam.”
On memory itself and the inspiration for “A Man of Two Faces”
“I grew up in this Vietnamese refugee community in the 1970s and 80s and even though the war had officially ended in 1975, I had a distinct sense that the war was not actually over for any of these Vietnamese refugees. This was a community that was steeped in melancholy and anger and rage and bitterness and loss and no one but us knew about these feelings because no one cared to know.
“I had been so disturbed and frightened by that episode [Nguyen’s mother in a psychiatric hospital] that even though I was a full-grown adult, my memory transformed that incident. I felt like a little boy, therefore I became a little boy in memory. That was, for me, a very intimate confrontation with the difficult nature of memory and forgetting, which I just discussed in terms of our nation as a whole, but the individual processes of forgetting can be extremely perilous as well. So coming across that essay [about his mother] again, thirty years later, I realized I had to finish it. I hoped I had reached enough maturity to write about my mother and what had happened to her.”
Nguyen’s upcoming book, “To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other,” will be released in April of next year. A recording of Nguyen’s Schoenfeldt reading event can be found here.
Kaylee Monahan is a news/sports reporter at The Beacon. She can be reached at monahan26@up.edu.
