Poured Over: Viet Thanh Nguyen on A Man of Two Faces

By Jenna Seery / November 7, 2023 at 6:00 am

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new memoir, A Man of Two Faces, is an unconventional and impeccable personal narrative that tackles the author’s own life alongside larger themes of culture and colonization. Nguyen joined us live at The Grove to talk about understanding his own story through writing, his interpretations of memory and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.         

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.     

Featured Books (Episode):
A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and we are taping live in Los Angeles. And I’ve been waiting to say that for about three years. Thank you all for joining us tonight. Viet Thanh Nguyen needs no introduction, but I’m going to do it anyway. Because I love this dude. And I love his work. And you guys clearly love his work too, because I’m watching all of these smiles happen. And I’m very, very excited to have this conversation. dude, thank you so much for joining us. I’m so thrilled to be here with you. So I grabbed a line from the memoir, because I do this, “Born in the year of the pig asn Nguyen Thanh Viet, reborn in AMERICA all caps trademark as Viet Thanh Nguyen. History performs your caesarean, as it does for all refugees to America, all caps trademark, delivering you is that mythological subject, the amnesiac, rootless, synthetic new American.”

I love this line. I love this book so much. And here’s the thing, if you’ve read The Sympathizer, if you’ve read The Committed, you know, Man With Two Faces, none of this is a surprise. Right. I mean, this is driving The Sympathizer. It’s driving The Committed. But I want to ask you about the subtitle, a memoir, a history a memorial? Because I mean, honestly, we’ve been talking about this book as a memoir for what, three years? Four years? Yeah. But let’s start with the subtitle.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

The subtitle is the way it is because I really resist writing memoirs, I’m sure you’ve all read memoirs, I’ve read memoirs. And for me, part of the idea of the memoir is that is supposed to be about the individual and the individual’s trauma. I mean, honestly, I hope none of you ever feel the need to write a memoir, because if you do, it means something bad has probably happened at some point. And you know, part of the idea of the of the memoir, but for writing, for reading it is to get that revelation, like what has happened to this person or their family that so screwed up. And it is in the book, it is about me and my family, and I’m pretty screwed up and had to discover that I was in denial most of my life. I’m a perfect, perfectly normal, well-adjusted person. And my wife said no you’re not. And I was like, okay, maybe I should reconsider. But I also resisted writing the memoir, because especially if you are happened to be a person of color, immigrant, refugee, Asian American, and you write a memoir, in the American context, it’s really hard to overcome the framework of the American Dream, which basically means for you, as a writer, we know you’ve suffered, we know your parents and grandparents have suffered, we know that you’ve suffered even in the United States, as great as of a country as we are, we know that immigrants experience racism, etc. But hey, look at you, you wrote a memoir, congratulations, you’re the living proof of the American dream. And that is something that I felt I could only overcome by actually acknowledging it. I think if you don’t acknowledge it in the actual writing, then it’s so easy for people just to superimpose that ideological layer on top of what you’re saying. So I wanted to put that in the subtitle to tell you it’s not just a memoir, it’s also a history because it’s about my vision of the United States, which is not everybody’s vision. And it’s a memorial because it’s about my parents, especially my mother and what she went through. And the other problem here is that when you write about Asian mothers, or Asian, anybody, you know, again, the idea is they suffered so much, you know, and then the temptation for a writer, I think, is sometimes, especially the children to treat your parents’ story as if it’s extraordinary. And your parents’ stories are extraordinary. But they’re actually also really ordinary. Like everything my mother went through and my father went through when I talked to other Vietnamese refugees, they all went through that, if you are a Vietnamese refugee, or the children of refugees, and nothing bad happened to your family, you’re exceptional, like it’s normal, that you went through something horrible, or your parents did. And so I wanted to acknowledge that that my mother’s story was extraordinary for her and for me, but normal, because of what history did to us.

Well, and this is something we really need to do in in any Asian community, right? We don’t talk about this stuff, we need to start talking about this. And we need to start claiming our stories back. But one of the things that I do love about this memoir is I recognize the voice, right? I was telling the backstage I was like, dude, I’ve even read your PhD thesis, which if you guys want to read it’s available, you can do this.

VTN

I was just saying my best friend from high school said to me, I keep that book by my bedside to help me fall asleep. So just fair warning.

It is fair warning, but I like to do my homework before I sit down with a writer right? And especially if you know Viet’s work, there’s not a lot that’s going to necessarily be a surprise in the memoir. Okay, how many of you have read Refugees, the short story collection? Okay. Some of you have homework to do. All I’m saying is it’s totally worth getting. But there is a short story that I’m going to ask you to riff on a little bit that is based on a very scary thing that happened with you and your mom and your dad at home in San Jose.

VTN

When my parents came to San Jose, California in the 1970s as refugees they opened a Vietnamese grocery store. And you know, it’s a typical refugee shopkeeper story, you know, the work, they’re constantly downtown and San Jose in the 70s and 80s was not a safe place for anybody, especially for Vietnamese people and shopkeepers. And so my parents was shot there in the store on Christmas Eve, when I was nine, that opens the book. And then when I was 16, you know, the gunman came to our house and broke in and with my mother and my father and me, and said, Get down on your knees. And my father and I being the men that we are got down on our knees. And my mother being the woman that she is ran past him, screaming out into the street, and basically saved all our lives, because then he turned around and tried to follow her and my dad slammed the door shut behind him. So for me growing up, this was normal. I had no other frame of reference for this, because again, this was happening to other Vietnamese refugees, too. This was part of the stories, my parents always say, don’t open the door to strangers, because Vietnamese gangsters can come in. This is the era of the home invasion in San Jose. And of course, my mother opens a door because it’s a white man there instead of a Vietnamese person, my way of coping with that was to pretend that I was normal, that this was normal. And that I was never going to write about this stuff. Because it was boring, right? You know, like, real people wrote about whatever it is that white people experienced, or whatever it is that we Vietnamese refugees experience. It took me a long time to write that story. Because again, I felt like our lives were not worth writing about. And so I had to work my way up to the autobiographical. And then to actually write this memoir, again, was to acknowledge that what seems so normal and trivial to me, is normal and trivial. But you know what, that’s the stuff of the memoir, all of you have normal, trivial stories, but they matter to you. And that’s the challenge of being a writer is to go there that seems so normal and trivial and realize how powerful it is.

I mean, yes, but also, why would we separate history from a personal memoir, I don’t think you can separate the two.

VTN

I was deeply inspired by my teacher, Maxine Hong Kingston, who you probably have heard of, at least, and hopefully read, but I do recount how, of course, I was the worst student in her class at Berkeley, she told me to my face, you were the worst student in the class.

From Asian F to the worst student in Maxine Hong Kong is going to be…

VTN

A B plus, that’s the Asian F, right? I was like, Oh, my God. I mean, it sucks to say that stings to get the B pluses. Oh, my God, I know what this means. When I got the B plus. And in her book, The Woman Warrior, on page five of The Woman Warrior, she says very directly Chinese Americans. I mean, she addresses her audience. This is for those of you who are writers or readers, you know, the question of the audience is very important. Do you know who your audience is? And if you don’t know who your audience is, then you default into the implied audience, which is the white audience. So I think Maxine was being very smart in 1976 by saying Chinese Americans, that’s her audience, and she says Chinese Americans, how do you know what in you is Hollywood? And what in you is peculiar to your family? And I took inspiration from that. And so this book, there’s a direct paraphrase are where I say Vietnamese people, Vietnamese refugees, Vietnamese Americans, how do you know what is history? And how do you know what is just your own personal trauma? And I think for so many of us, we don’t know, we don’t know where to draw the line? I mean, would we normally be this screwed up? Or is it because we went through war and colonization and refugee experience and all that other kind of stuff that totally messed up our families?

And I think that’s true across Asian America. I don’t want to limit it just to I mean, certainly, Vietnamese Americans have been defined in a very different way. But, you know, if you look at sort of the Japanese American experience, certainly the Chinese American experience, you know, the Hmong community, but there is still to me a cohesive Asian America and not just as a political identity, it’s more a matter of saying, Hey, I recognize there’s something in my story and I grew up in the suburbs of Boston. Okay. So like Boston Chinatown, three blocks, one place to get dim sum. Like my grandmother would send us nori from Tokyo. We weren’t in California, we couldn’t get out here. So we had to rely on my grandmother to keep us in seaweed. So it’s all of these things, though, where you’re constantly aware of being the other, right. And there’s this piece of America all caps trademark, that really wants to make sure that if you’re considered other that you remember that, first and foremost, regardless of what your other is, I’m not saying it’s just limited to Asian American, but there is this idea that the other and it does make some fine writers. Sorry about that. I mean, you did get a Pulitzer out of it.

VTN

Well, yes, I did. I like to think I deserved it. You know, in all honesty, I’ve been on both sides. I’ve been on many jury committees now. And all that kind of thing, I serve on the Pulitzer board now to get you know, and the reality is, of course, it is not just about merit, because there’s a lot of worthy writers out there and worthy books. So what does it mean to get a Pulitzer Prize or any other prize? There are so many social, political, economic factors coming into play, and I’m very aware of that, right. And so this book is also about what it means to be a writer and an Asian American writer because you’re absolutely right. It’s an honor just to be Asian and Sandra Oh said that and it means that we can get nori, we can get boba, we all this kind of stuff at h Mart. And that’s awesome. And there’s a common Asian core, you know, BTS is great and all this kind of thing. And I’d like to say, though, to the younger generation, have my students 20 Something people, Look, you got all these kinds of things, why are you still screwed up? You know, I mean, because I go to talk to a lot of college campuses, and there a lot of college students who say I have the model minority crisis, my parents want me to do this. And I want to do that I have an identity crisis. And so from the 60s to the 90s, which is my generation, right to the present generation, the same stuff happens all over again. Why is that the case? And so in the book, I say, look, it’s I don’t suffer from an identity crisis. I suffer from a political crisis, right? We wouldn’t be here, you or I, right? If it wasn’t for colonization, and global warfare, and all these other kinds of things. It’s not east versus West in terms of like culture, its politics.

And I get to add a layer to it. Because I’m Japanese and Taiwanese. And if you know, you know, so if I’m in Taipei, anyone over the age of 60, speaks Japanese to me. I’m like, Hi, I’m an American. It’s okay.

VTN

I just want to add to that, because, you know, in the American context, one of the ways in which our otherness is aimed, ironically, is to keep it very American centered, right? So you’re allowed, again, you’re allowed to be Asian American, in this country now, as long as you’re an American. So what does that actually mean? It’s very, very problematic, because when I became an Asian American in college, I was very self-righteous, you know, against racism, and all that kind of stuff. And then I realized, eventually, you know, to be an Asian American is not just about struggling for our empowerment, if we’re also struggling for inclusion, what are we asking to be included in? We’re asking to be included in the war machine? How do we reconcile that? And so, you know, for me to be a writer and an Asian American writer means also grappling not just with what the United States has done, but what we do when we participate in the United States. And then also you brought up Japan and Taiwan as one other history. Yeah, I bring up in this book, the fact that I think that the United States is a settler colonial country. And it’s a real problem for refugee and immigrant to come here, because then we’re like, oh, we’re achieving the American dream, as settler colonizers, so we can be both a refugee and an immigrant and a colonizer. And then I go back to Vietnam. And I think my parents, I think, were colonizers too, because they went from the north to the south in 1954, along with 800,000 other Vietnamese Catholics, and they were settled in indigenous land in the central highlands, with the aid of the government and the CIA in the US. What is that? Well, how do we reconcile our existence if we think of ourselves as so-called minorities here in the US, and we have to empower ourselves with this much more complicated history that’s transnational, in which we’re not innocent. So that’s part of what the book tries to grapple with to,

Oh, tries — definitely does, does really well, in fact, but I want to talk about memory, because you’re also talking about the structure, the book isn’t a stand, like if you’ve had a chance to open it and just flip through it, you’ll see there’s a lot of whitespace, there’s a lot of textual change, there’s a lot of do we call it poetry, you’ve talked about being a field poet.

VTN

I’m a terrible poet. But let’s say its poetry inspired, okay? Poetry inspired.

All respect to the poets in the audience. But you’re doing things with language to mimic how fraught Your memory is. And I think this is really important to call out the way you can’t separate the personal and the sort of global history right, you cannot separate that you also can’t separate language and memory and story, because sometimes they collide in really weird ways. And sometimes they collide in ways that are determined by other people. And I think that’s part of the problem that sometimes we encounter when I’m trying to tell story.

VTN

One reason I resist the memoir or resisted the memoir is because oftentimes, when you encounter a memoir, you’re encountering this sort of holistic reproduction of a life from beginning to wherever it ends up. And it’s very seamless and that’s not how I experienced my life, where my memories even today, like when I try to think back up on my past, it’s a bunch of fragments, and then I’ll try to reassemble it and turn it into a narrative. But in a sense, it’s actually very fictional. Because you’re creating a narrative of yourself, that isn’t exactly how you actually experienced it. I don’t know how many people actually have a whole, you know, film reel playing in their head. That’s a coherent narrative. I mean, mine is all screwed up. And then I also think about how you know; history blew up our lives. Our families were destroyed, our communities were destroyed, were blown up all over the world with the diaspora and all that kind of stuff. We were forced across borders, borders were crossed when colonizers came into wherever our country has happened to be. And then here in literature were expected to hew to borders. I don’t get it. There’s novels, there’s memoirs or short stories or poems, and somehow we’re supposed to understand that there are these rules and conventions that dictate what we’re supposed to do. So when I wrote the book, I was like, Why does prose have to look like prose who said that you have to have paragraphs and you have to like have, you know, left justification. These are just conventions. And so I wanted to disrupt that partly for out of fun, because a lot of fun to write the book but also as my formal response to the fact that our lives and our communities were shattered.

Right. This is also the guy who remember has reinvented the spy novel has reinvented the crime novel, right? The Sympathizer is essentially a play on genre. The Committed is a play on genre, you’re mixing genres. In fact, I mean, you sneak in some big ideas and some literary theory, there’s some literary theory in The Committed, that’s not a bad thing, so not a bad thing. That is not a bad thing. But I want to work in a couple of questions from the audience. One of the things I’m thinking about in terms of memory and language, you talk about being separated from your family, when you were four, you go through the Philippines, to Guam, to Pennsylvania. And when it comes to the point where you’re trying to get out of this camp, no one’s willing to take your entire family. So your parents go one place, your brother goes another place, and you are sent at the age of four, I just want to be clear, at the age of four, you are sent to live with strangers. And obviously you have very little memory of this. But what’s the thing that you carry today, from that experience?

VTN

When I was growing up, I was certainly remembered vaguely that I had been separated from my parents at four years of age. And again, that was just normal. I was like, well, it does not happen to everybody. So I just had to, you know, try to cope with that and not think about it, then I had a child, a son, and he turned four and as at the same time that this is 2017. This is literally the same time when the Trump administration was, you know, ripping children from their families at the border and losing them in the system and everything. I’m looking at my son at four thinking about what’s happening at the border. And thinking, if that happened to me as a parent, which I’d actually never thought of before, I’m so self-centered, I’d be totally traumatized by that experience. But then I look at him at four years of age. And when you’re a child, everything is enormously magnified. Right? I realized that actually, it was probably deeply traumatic for me at four years of age to be taken away from my parents. And that’s your entire world. When you’re four, and you’re, you’re separated. So even now, I find it kind of hard to articulate and talk about it. I’ve talked to so many refugees with their own variations of particular stories where you just have to not think about the past, if you want to move forward and not just be totally screwed up, you just have to acknowledge that these terrible things happen to you whatever they happen to be, and that you’re not going to look backwards. And so I just did not look backwards until I became a writer. And I remember Maxine wrote me a letter at the end of our seminar, and she said, You should really go seek counseling. No, I’m Asian. I don’t seek counseling.

Yeah, we don’t do that. We don’t have feelings. Yeah, that’s not part of the factory preset.

VTN

So I became a writer. But that was how I you know, but as a writer, that was how I tried to co write my GED. Yeah, my other writing teacher said you don’t cut to the bone. Though I was 20 years old, it took me 30 years to learn how to cut to the bone, through the writing to try to get back to these originary traumas.

If I think about the stories in The Refugees, which took you what 17, 18 years to really get together. Now, granted, they’re published after The Sympathizer, but you wrote The Sympathizer at a much quicker pace, two years, I mean, two years compared to 17. Right. But when I look at the difference, in voice, and craft, and willingness, I can still see you sort of standing back from the work and the difference between The Refugees. And Man of Two Faces. It’s not that they were written by two different people. It’s not that but the willingness you have to dig in, to what you don’t know. It’s really impressive. It’s really, really impressive, because it’s not the kind of work that you can just sit down and be like, Oh, it’s Tuesday, I think I’m gonna write about this thing. It’s more like you have to sit. And then you have to walk around with this stuff. And you sort of have to play with it a little like, you’ve just rolling it around in the back of your brain, until the story reveals itself. And you talk about English coming to you with both conscience and memory. And the combination for a young person is kind of it does get a little easier. The older you get, right, but you’re sitting down to write it.

VTN

So I don’t want to be sentimental about this, okay. But I became a father, that really did change me a lot. And you have to, you have to remember, I never wanted to be a father. It was because I thought it would be the end of my life and becoming a father and looking at children. What’s really interesting to me is seeing how unrestrained they are. And sometimes that’s a pain. But it’s also very inspiring, because they have not yet learned to care about rules, genres, expectations, that kind of thing. And then they become older, and they do. And so you’re telling them coloring the lines and you’re telling them they read their books in school and their teachers are telling them about literary genres and things like that, and they learn and they become writers like I did. So when I wrote The Refugees, I was extremely self-conscious about the short story, like how do I write a good short story and what are the rules? How do I get published in the New Yorker, which I never did. I was aware of audiences and expectations and judgments and norms and all that I think my entire writing career was first about trying to learn those rules. And then about unlearning them. And unlearning them is actually extremely difficult, because it’s about unlearning all the social and literary conventions and political conventions that I’ve acquired over my lifetime. And I felt that was necessary in order to get deep inside, you know, because again, these conventions prevented me from getting deep inside. And number one, finding the right forum to talk about things, but then also, again, finding the ability to sort of destroy the American Dream, which I felt had totally inhabited me. And I point this out, because even many of us, I think, who say why don’t believe in the American dream? Or are you sure? I mean, there’s an ironic American Dream, which most people in this room probably disavow you know, that’s the rah rah rah and wave your flag. But the ironic American dream, that’s really hard to get out of yourself.

Okay. Can we talk about the model minority here? Do we wait? Because I mean, that’s alright. Listen, model minority is part of it, right? And it drives me up a tree, it drives me up a tree.

VTN

This is very intelligent audience. You all know what the model minority is. And you all know, you’re supposed to say Asian Americans are not the model minority. And we need Asian American writers, because they’re not the model minority. They’re not the engineers and the lawyers and the computer scientists and all that. And I think no, Asian American writers are, in fact, the model minority too. Because maybe I would love your expertise here as part of the book selling world. My friend, Min Song has a book called The Children of 1965, where he argues as demographics, the reason we see a boom in Asian American literature in the last 20 years or so is because it’s the children of immigrants who came in 1965, who grew up and went to all the good schools. And so no, they didn’t become engineers. But they did the equivalent. They became English majors at very good schools. And then they went to get their MFAs at a very good MFA programs. And they’ve been programmed to become writers. So it’s the flip side of the, you know, the tech startup dudes in Silicon Valley. But it’s the same thing as mirror image with the model minority writer.

I think there’s a piece of that, which is absolutely true. It just, it does make me a little nutty. I would like to see us be able to be people, and to be a little messy, and to not necessarily do this sort of tract kind of thing. And I say this is a person who did not do the track. Oh, did not do the track, career bookseller. And I love what I do.

VTN

I think that it’s totally possible to do it. But I also think that we need to be cognizant of again, how deep seated the ideology is that subverts even this effort as Asian American writers to resist what’s been happening.

I also had a safety net, though, yeah, I had a safety net. So I think there’s a difference when you have the freedom that comes with knowing that you can make a decision that’s actually yours, but not have to decide between whether or not you’re going to eat or pay your rent. Class is something we’re not great about talking about in general in America. And that’s certainly part of the American dream. But one of the things I do love about A Man of Two Faces is the way you blow up our approach to success, our approach to truth telling, right? I mean, you dig in, and you tell things that you very specifically say, well, my parents would really super not like me to tell these. And guess what, I just put them all in a book that anyone can buy and read, and your parents ended up making a really nice life for you and your brother. And you guys were not, you know, working in the store after school kind of they kept you in a place where you could study and do your thing and eat a lot of TV dinners and watch cartoons and be you kind of thing. And yet, there’s a piece that’s missing. And in a way you’ve been able to change that with your kids. Right? You’ve got two kids now, there’s a shared language. You can read to them, they can say, Hey, Dad, read me a book. There’s a connection there. I mean, you talk about how when you were a kid, you go to the library, you get a whole backpack full of books, and the more you read, the further you got from your parents. That’s a wild idea, right? That is a totally wild idea that somehow reading and expanding your world shifts your relationship with the people who put you on the planet,

VTN

When you brought up class is true, not just for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, but also anybody who has through their education, it creates a distance between themselves and the people, they raise them who they grew up with, and that so it’s inflected by class, also by race and nationality and everything like that. And so yeah, that’s part of the pain of becoming a writer for some of us. I don’t want to generalize you know, there’s different kinds of writers get the kind of writer I’m talking about the so-called literary writer, I feel that that’s who I am. And I was lucky because I was traumatized just enough to be that kind of a writer but not traumatized so much that I’m a terrible human being. I think that’s a very true, my parents, you know, I felt like I had a safety net to because even though I grew up feeling like we were sort of working class because I didn’t get the toys that I wanted and whatever. And because we, you know, my parents getting shot at the same time, there was never any worry really about any money. And even though my parents like neglected me, in many ways, they also, were not the stereotypical Asian immigrant parents who verbally abused me, you know, they actually said, they actually were actually very nurturing verbally. And so I recognize how important that actually is. And so you were thinking about having this shared language with my children. Absolutely. So I actually try to replicate what my parents did, which is actually to be affirming to be affirming, you can do all other kinds of things to your kids to try to discipline them into whatever kind of person you want. But to affirm them is actually really super crucial to give them a sense of self-esteem, so that they can, you know, emotionally withstand a lot of things that will happen to them, because I’ve known so many people who have been damaged, deliberately or not by their parents, simply because, you know, if your parents are immigrants and refugees, and they’re just struggling to survive, and they’re coming home, they’re gonna say things that they don’t mean to say, necessarily, but they’re gonna hurt. I talked about how history ripples through me, emotionally, for most of us. For many of us, that’s how we experienced history. It’s not that we’ve directly witnessed war. But those of us who are children and grandchildren of refugees and immigrants, that history ripples through us emotionally, because our parents or our grandparents witnessed that screwed them up, makes them do and say things they may not have done if that history hadn’t happened to them. And so then we become the beneficiary of good or bad of the emotional damage that they experience.

I want to toss in a couple of questions about memory here for a second, I was trying to figure out how to do this your workstation, a continuous theme of memory, what inspires your different interpretations of memory? And your new slash previous works? Anything you haven’t explored yet?

VTN

Oh, gosh, I think that I would just use that Maxine Hong Kingston class as an example, you know, I was 19, I wrote an essay for Maxine about my mother and her commitment to the Asian Pacific psychiatric ward. And then that was a very difficult essay to write. And then I put it away into a box. And I didn’t look at it again, for 30 years. For those 30 years, what I thought was, my mother went to the psychiatric ward when I was a little kid. And then I opened up that box, I read the essay, and I realized, no, she went the year before when I was 18. But the effect of it was so terrifying for me made me feel like a little kid, that my memory just completely changed the facts of things. And so that was a very vivid illustration, for me that memory is is completely unreliable, our memory will do all kinds of things to protect us in whatever way it can happen to us when we’re fully functional adults. And so memory is an incredibly tricky thing. And I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s been such a preoccupation for me, because memories, there are at least two versions of memory. One is the memory that you actively seek out, you can sit down, you’ll think about something, try to recall it. And then another version of the memory is memory that seeks us out, you know, that could be random things, random, trivial things, things that you did last week, but also horrifying things as well. And that dynamic of memory is I’m so fascinated by that, because I think it’s a personal dynamic, but it’s also a collective cultural, national dynamic, it helps explain a lot of the things that have happened to us and that we are doing as Americans, for example, and then to answer the second part of the question, you know, at a certain point, I realized that, in fact, I had a sister, I was 12 years older than 12 years old, right. And I think my first memory of her actually happened when I was it was probably the early 80s. And maybe it was 10 or so we got a letter in the mail. And I remember was a photograph of this young woman, a black and white photograph of his very attractive young woman. And I was told that this is your adopted sister. I was like, what? And I don’t, I’m pretty sure I didn’t ask any questions. Because again, this is the way things are, all of a sudden, you have an adopted sister. Now I knew I had one, obviously, when I was four, but I didn’t have any memories of her, and then also in this photograph shows up. And so then from that point onwards, you know, I was aware that we had an absent presence in this house of somebody we had left behind, again, not unusual for refugees and immigrants, some people make it and some people don’t. And I think that for maybe for a lot of refugees and immigrants, but certainly for me, there’s a sense of alternate realities and parallel universes where if something different happened, our parents made a different decision. Our lives will be completely different, you know, and my brother at certain points, said, you know, my mom and dad didn’t leave us behind. It’s because we’re their children. And meaning the adopted sister, adopted daughter did not count in the same way. I mean, that’s really horrifying to think about.

There’s also the girl child thing. I mean, my mother got to come to the States because she’s bookended by a boy and a girl on either side of her and they’re like, oh, sure, you want to go to America. Okay.

VTN

And so the question is, what else could I write about? I swear to God, if I ever had to, I never want to write another memoir. But if I did, it would probably be about finally going to Vietnam and having met her once in person, but I mean, having a much more extended contact but also to go back to where I’m not supposed to go to because we fled from our town, which was the first town overrun in the final invasion of 1975. And my father has said, you can never go back and I’ve never done it, you know. So that would probably be what I would write about.

And it may just show up in a novel. I mean, there’s an undercurrent of you in every single not every story every night, like, I promised you guys, when you pick up A Man of Two Faces, you’re going to understand that so much of this guy is on every single page of every piece of fiction he’s ever written. And it’s wild to me how much you were willing. I mean, you’re much looser on the page in A Man of Two Faces, but at the same time, even the shift in town between The Sympathizer and The Committed, right, when we go from spy novel that’s slightly reserved, are we playing with Graham Greene? Are we playing with John Le Carre, a to this filthy crime novel, and I say that in the best possible way, built the crime novel set in the 80s in Paris, and now we’re here and you’re like, Oh, I’m just gonna put it on page. Everything is gonna be here. So I’m going to work in another question has writing about memory made it easier to understand the two worlds one lives in or has it opened a new set of complexities?

VTN

I think it’s left me with this awareness that I’m completely unreliable, and untrustworthy to myself, I’m going to try to be reliable and trustworthy to my friends and family and so on. But part of the experience of writing A Man of Two Faces, was to realize that I’ve been deceiving myself for a very long time. And I don’t think that’s actually that unusual. I mean, I think part of the argument I make in the book is, you know, the greatest distance that I experienced was the distance with myself, and how so much of myself has been a process of shrouding and hiding, and all of that just to protect myself. And then to become a writer was learning how to try to pin down what that hidden self was. So I mean, A Man of Two Faces, there is the illusion that that that has happened, I have no idea if it has or hasn’t. So I hope that it hasn’t, because the endless investigation of the self, which if I’d done it as as a series of memoirs would probably be just totally boring. But if I do it as novels, where it’s not really me, you’re seeing but some chance muted version of me is much more interesting.

You did say we were getting a third novel at some point. Right.

VTN

At some point.

I mean, it’s not like you promised us a due date. But I mean, you did say The Sympathizer and The Committed are part of a trilogy. You did say that. Yes. And that was like two years ago when we’re talking.

VTN

Well, then I had to write this book.

You accidentally wrote a memoir.

VTN

And now I’m writing a series of lectures. But after that, I’ve got to write the third novel. And honestly, there’s a real pragmatic consideration number one, I promise now people know about it. But number two, there’s a TV series. And if it’s successful, that hopefully, they’ll actually produce seasons two and three, you know,

Which means we need more materials, right? Well, yeah, we need that. We’re not handing that over to HBO, they can go to the source first.

VTN

it’d be really interesting. If there was HBO wrote a novel, and then I wrote a novel, they can pick and choose.

No, this is not a choose your own adventure. I would like to stick with the actual source material.

VTN

I think one difference between the two novels are, like you say, genre novels spy and crime. And one thing I envy about straight genre writers is that once you have the formula, I think you can just keep doing it over and over again. I mean, that’s hard, but you can still follow it. I don’t think you’re gonna do that. That’s what I mean. So I can so then the third novel, The third, novels can be very different. Because it I can’t talk any further about it. But I have some ideas, but it’s because it’s different. The context is different. And the genres are just vehicles to explore his concerns and who he is. So it’ll be a quite a different genre than the spy in the crime genre.

Okay, we can be patient, maybe, kind of, I do want to quickly work in this. How did the transition from fiction to nonfiction writing feel? And how did this differ in terms of what you chose to disclose? And I feel like you’ve talked about the disclosure part, but let’s talk about craft for a second. This is not a genre book.

VTN

A Man of Two Faces? Yeah. Well, I have to say, you know, I mean, A Man of Two Faces, has a lot of influences, and I owe a lot, actually to poets, when I was very young, a teenager and so on, I fell in love with poetry, but there was English, romantic poetry. Yeah, I mean, I remember I was like, you know, Byron, and Shelley and things like this. And then I went to college and that, you know, my, I’m sorry to say my poetry professors were really boring, because they’ve killed my love of poetry. And so I didn’t understand any more like, what is the connection between poetry in the world I could see it when I was a kid, and I couldn’t see it as a young adult. And then I started to read poets of color. You know, there’s been a whole wave of really interesting poets of color, Natalie Diaz, Claudia Rankine, the author of Yellow Rain, but there’s just so many interesting writers of color, Solmaz Sharif and Ocean Vuong, and so on. And I could totally see when I was reading them what I couldn’t see when I was reading modernist poetry in college, which is that I could finally see the connection between form and politics and history. Like I can understand why these poets are breaking up the form using whitespace playing with the shape of words and things like that on the page. I could totally see why the formal experiments are related to the disruptions of history. So that’s all in A Man of Two Faces. Okay, so then the larger point is going back to the earlier point that he made about genre is I’m not that interested in genre distinctions. You know, I think of myself as a writer, not as a novelist or a short story writer or poet or whatever. I’m a writer, so everything is writing. And some of the writers that have influenced me like people like WG Sebald, the German writer, when I read his fiction and nonfiction, I can’t tell the difference. I mean, it’s amazing. And I think the reason why I can’t tell the difference is because he’s a writer. He’s just going to use writing to talk about his obsessions. And his obsessions are very similar to mine about war, and memory and genocide and trauma, and national deceptions and self deceptions. And he’s gonna use both fiction and nonfiction to grapple with his obsessions. And I think that’s very similar from here to there was it wasn’t actually very difficult to make the transition, because I think of myself again, as a writer and not as someone who’s foremost preoccupation with genre,

Safiya Sinclair, you guys know the poet Safiya Sinclair, Cannibal. Okay. If you haven’t read Cannibal, please read Cannibal. I’m late to Cannibal it is amazing. But she has a memoir out now called How to Say Babylon about growing up in Jamaica. And she talks about how for her language isn’t just the thing on the page. It’s how you embody it. And that’s what I think of when I think of your work as well. Like it isn’t just the text. It’s a little bit of swagger. It’s definitely a little bit of swagger, which is nice to see. But there’s a swing that’s happening. And there’s a connection that you’re making to this sort of larger world of literature. That isn’t just you. And if it happens to be genre cool.

VTN

The author of Yellow Rain is Mai Der Vang, by the way. And I’ll just start with her as an example of how to get answer the question, which is when you read Yellow Rain, it’s a formally very innovative book of poetry. It incorporates a lot of documents dealing with what you know, this yellow rain that was dropped on the Hmong during the war. And when I read it, I think, you know, part of the reason why I think Mai Der Vang is playing with language, but also putting these documents in the book is because it’s not just yellow rain that kills people. It’s language that kills people. And that’s what the Hmong are partly so angry about they saw this being done to them. And then scientists and experts who are not Hmong are coming in saying, no, you didn’t see what you saw. And they’re using language to do this to them. It likewise, when I’m writing, I think, language for me, it’s not just an instrument, you know, and I think somehow, the books that don’t interest me are when I feel as if the writer does not fully inhabit the language and language doesn’t inhabit the writer, you know, they’re just using the writing as a way to tell their story. And that’s fine. But what really interests me is the fact that from my experience, and you know, for me, as a refugee, I was saved by language and destroyed by language, you know, and at every turn, language really mattered. And even when I thought I was saving myself through learning English and trying to become a writer, I was also destroying myself, because the earlier example that you mentioned, the better I became an English, the more alienated I was from my parents. And you know what, I made that choice, and you get these books, but then the cost for me, and my family is this other thing. And so language for me is never innocent. And so that’s why when I write these books, it’s never secondary. I’m not just trying to tell a story. I’m also trying to figure out how I can use the language differently with each book because the story demands that the language be transformed and transforms me.

I need sentences that are cut glass, I read for language first. And if stuff happens, great, if I connect with a character, great, I do not need to like characters. I just need sentences that are cut glass. That is what I need. You’re part of my pantheon of writers who do this really, really well. But when we talk about language, I want to bring in a couple of pieces of art that don’t technically belong to you. But I went down a rabbit hole, Viet has recently written an introduction to The Lover, the Marguerite Duras novel, and actually replaced the introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston, and I rewatched Apocalypse Now for the first time in like 20 years, and I have feelings, I have so many feelings about the language in both of those things. And I have to say, going back to Duras, so you have a moment where you don’t remember if it was the movie that you saw, first of The Lover, or if it was the book that you read. I know for me, it was the book. But now having seen the movie, all I think of is that woman in the straw hat and the soldier and the boss, so annoying, but that image is really sort of stuck in my head, right? They are two fundamental pieces of art world art. I remembered loving The Lover when I was I don’t know, I must have been a teenager when I read it and thinking wow, the language, right? Like if you’ve ever read Duras, you know, she’s she saw him on the page, and she’s so angry, and she’s real. And she’s writing about class, and she is not having it with any of these French people. And it’s just great. And I know in my heart that Apocalypse Now is an anti war film. But dude, that move. And I feel like we can’t talk about them separately. Like I feel like we have to talk about them as a whole because for certain people, they have defined Vietnam. I like you like Paris more than I do. And there’s a reason I don’t like Paris all that much.

VTN

For me as a Vietnamese person born in Vietnam, influenced by these histories, France and the United States are obviously very important because these are the colonizers and occupiers that shaped us. And so Man of Two Faces is partly about acknowledging that I’ve been psychologically colonized. Like, I can’t help it. I mean, in The Committed, the narrative talks about how it gets weak in the knees at the mention of a baguette, or anybody speaking with a French accent, it’s ridiculous, you know, but it works. I mean, it’s like it’s such a, it works just as emotional and intuitive level for if you’ve been colonized. And so part of the nature of colonization, at the core of colonization, and its seductions is power. The reason why French culture seduces and American culture seduces is because these are very powerful countries, and we respond to power, whether it’s at the national level, or whether it’s in relationship to another person. And so that power can be seductive, it can be abusive, and so on. And so the French and the American National imaginations through Apocalypse Now and through Duras, and so on. And these are just symbolic of many other works. Right? Right, they have left an imprint on the global imagination, about how to think about Vietnam, either through the lens of the Dirty War, or bad war that the Americans have the preoccupation with, or through the lens of romance and seduction, and this, you know, tropical Empire thing that the French did. And so my situation relative to these entire canons that these two work symbolize is that I acknowledged that they’re actually really great works of art, right? You know, I respond as a writer to both of them very, very strongly. And then of course, the friction is how it is that I myself, for people like me may appear in these works. And you talked about the cut glass thing, in the hands of lesser artists, these two works would be really deeply irritating and there are lots of lesser artists.

We’ve seen the ones that tried to, that xerox copy is no good.

VTN

So that’s unacceptable. But the cut glass, like I forgive a lot, for good art. I think that Apocalypse Now is a racist film. And it’s also a great movie. I think these two things are perfectly reconcilable, and I can totally watch that movie again. And again, because I respect the art, even if the art is built on this…

I think that the first half is more honest than the second half. I just think it’s more honest to us as people in the world and everything else. And then that second half, I’m just like…

VTN

You said it was an antiwar movie, and I think that is a popular preconception of it. And one of the things I insist in A Man of Two Faces is that a real anti war story is actually not about the guns and the battles and all that kind of stuff. It’s about the death, it’s about the civilians, because, you know, if you watch Jarhead, the movie or read Anthony Swofford’s book Jarhead, both of them talk about how the Marines who are getting trained to go to Desert Storm, we’re watching the Apocalypse Now as a war exercise, so if it wasn’t anti war movie, it just went over everybody’s heads, you know, and that’s the point like, these movies are spectacular, and they featured guns and battles and young men dying, and nobody who’s a young man, I think, thinks they’re gonna die. No, they do. They think they’re gonna be the survivors. So that’s why it’s not really an anti war movie, that guy is going to die, I’m going to live and I’m gonna come back in glory, and the real anti war stories about those who don’t come back, those who are crippled, those are disabled, those who don’t have body parts, and so on, and about the civilians. You cannot watch massacres of civilians, for example, that have that be a pro war story in any way. But of course, we don’t as Americans are really probably anybody of any nationality, want to think about that. So we don’t actually want to hear the real anti war stories, which are the stories that have no glory in them at all.

It’s weird too, watching it, I was sort of transported back to Massachusetts in the 80s. And stuff that you would hear from people sort of just casually, and it was kids hearing it from their parents. And when it’s just it’s wild, how much that movie defined my life before I actually saw it. The pieces that people choose to carry around with them. I would love it if they all looked at themselves and figured out why those were the pieces they chose because it’s fascinating. It’s really, or the people who you know, I grew up where McGeorge Bundy is from and like, you know, I went to college with dudes who wanted to be the next, McGeorge Bundy. I’m just like, Y’all do not understand what that means. But okay, so all of these pieces, right, of what you call the war, what a lot of Americans just shorthand as Vietnam, which I’m going to take this opportunity to remind everyone it’s the name of a country, not a war. It’s all of these pieces, right? Like, you and I were both defined in very different ways by this moment in history. So for me to say that’s only a refugee story. That’s only the story of a dude from San Jose. That’s really disingenuous. It’s not.

VTN

I want to go back to an earlier question, I think about why right, and why grapple with memory and everything. And one of the reasons why is because memories shift and change over time, both as individuals, but also as countries as well. And if you live long enough, you see that happening. Okay, so I’ve lived long enough sadly, at this point. And when I was growing up, it was you could assume that people all over the world had seen Apocalypse Now. I mean, literally, I could go anywhere. I bring up the Vietnam War and people say have you seen the buck now? You know, any country? That was how powerful this generational experience The war in Vietnam was, I don’t know if that’s true any longer because I teach a Vietnam War class. To my undergraduates, they’re 20 years old, let’s say on the average, and 20 years ago, I could assume that a lot of them would have seen at least one American movie of the Vietnam War. Now, almost none of them have seen any of them. They may have heard of them vaguely by reputation. But there’s been a generational shift, I think. And that’s not just a matter of pop culture concern. It’s a matter of the national imagination, like people sometimes ask, what did we learn from the lessons of the war in Vietnam? And I think I would say we’ve learned all the wrong lessons, there was a certain period for like 30 or 40 years leading up through 911, where people would say, Okay, let’s not repeat the war in Vietnam. Again, if people would know what you’re talking about. Now, it’s really I think, the United States, every president Democratic or Republican, every Pentagon administration, they’re all about how we can fight the war better than what we did in Vietnam. That’s the lessons that Americans have learned, you know, that’s the wrong set of lessons. So I write because I feel that writers are lonely voices, trying to say, wait a minute, you know, we I understand that entire culture, the entire nation, whether it’s France, or the United States wants to forget wants to move on. Nobody wants to hear the writer raising their hand and saying, no, wait a minute, let’s not forget, but I feel that that is, in fact, unfortunately, part of my task at any rate, and no one wants to hear a broken record. But you have to have it, you have to have this ordinance scratching in the back of your mind saying Don’t forget, don’t just move on, and someone has to do it. And that someone, at least in my life is me.

Yeah. But I don’t think it’s being a broken record, when you’re claiming your seat and saying, Hey, pay attention. I think those are two different things. I think we have to keep repeating ourselves. Because otherwise, pardon me, we’re going to forget.

VTN

Well, we have to keep repeating ourselves, because our nations keep repeating themselves. Nothing that we’re seeing today, I think, is really new in the in the United States in terms of American history, it’s new to us but if you look at the cycles of American history, we’ve committed genocides on a regular basis, we’ve gone to war on a regular basis, we’ve forgotten that we’ve done these things on a regular basis. Trump, Obama is not a new dynamic in American history, as I tried to point out in the book only if our memory only goes back 10 or 20 years, would we be shocked by how we could elect a Black president and then elect Trump. But in fact, that contradiction between genocidal white nationalism and this idea of America is being democratically inclusive, that goes back to the origins of the country. That is us. And so we repeat over and over again. And so I feel like as writers, unfortunately, I don’t think we can get over the past. Because like, as Faulkner said, the past is still here. It keeps repeating the illusion is to pretend that we have moved on and that history is linear, which is what the American dream is about the ever greater union that we’re going to go towards it. But maybe we’re not maybe we’re just going in cycle.

Yeah, I’m a believer in the cycles model. Sorry, it just it feels like we’re doing that loop de loop de loop. And we just keep coming back. The good news is though, we have books we have you and I knew this was going to run long and we could keep going but we have some books to sign. So this is where I say thank you. I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over, Viet Thanh Nguyen, of course is the Pulitzer Prize winning and I didn’t get to say it earlier even though I said it was going to do it public intellectual. You can hear his series of Norton lectures which I’m very excited about Pulitzer Prize-winning Best-Selling Author, now memoirist but also historian so if you haven’t caught the other books, please go back and look at them really.

VTN

Miwa, thank you so much. Okay, this is great. Thanks. Thanks, everybody for being so patient.