Book Review - A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Born in Vietnam and raised in America, Viet Thanh Nguyen interrogates his dual identity and the fallibility of memory in his latest book, A Man of Two Faces. Developed from a series of essays, lectures and interviews between 2015 and 2022, the book borrows its title from the opening line of Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel The Sympathizer: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” Positioned as a memoir, history and memorial, it relates Nguyen’s family’s experience of war and exile to wider themes of refugeehood, colonisation and racism. Nguyen was four when his family fled Vietnam in 1975. After arriving in America, they needed sponsors in order to leave the military base in Pennsylvania. Shockingly, Nguyen and his brother were separated from their parents (who he refers to as “Ba Má” — Vietnamese for “mother and father”). It clearly scarred him. “Being taken away from your parents is burned in between your shoulder blades,” he writes, “a brand you do not usuall