A Man of Two Faces: Memory, History and the Duality of Human Experience

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Excerpts from the interview:
Q: How did this book, A Man of Two Faces come about? Why write a memoir ?
A: In all honesty, I never wanted to write a memoir. I didn't think my life was very interesting. I thought my parents’ lives were interesting. They had these dramatic, epic lives, the outlines of which I think many people are familiar with when they hear about Vietnam or about countries that have been subjected to war and colonization and division. And so my parents were part of this refugee generation that grew up during famine in the 1940s and then were forced to flee as refugees in 1954 when Vietnam was divided in two, and then were forced to flee in 1975 when South Vietnam, which was their new chosen country, was defeated. And I went along with them. And I was an eyewitness to their struggles. And so I always thought their stories were interesting. But I had this banal existence as a young Vietnamese American child growing up in the United States of the 1970s and 1980s. And I turned my energies to writing fiction where I could dramatize the kinds of artistic and political concerns that I had. But I think at a certain point in the last few years, I realized that I had probably been much more damaged emotionally by the refugee experience than I had ever understood. And I wanted to excavate that.

Q: It's quite powerful how you came about to write this, because that's a lot of emotions to contend with and to sit down and write those words on the page. Where does memory begin?
A: I have struggled with that question for so long. Maybe for everybody, that's an important question. Where does memory begin? But I think if you are displaced or if you've been traumatized in some way, maybe you're not a refugee, maybe you're simply somebody who grew up in some kind of traumatic situation. But those of us whose memories are wrapped up with trauma, I think oftentimes have a hard time recalling exactly when our memories begin, whether those are the memories of the trauma or whether those are the memories of our displacement. And in my case, I left Vietnam when I was four years old as a refugee. So my refugee origin story is wrapped up with the beginnings of my memory, and the fact that I was a refugee is wrapped up with history . I wouldn't be a refugee if it hadn't been for the history of the American war in Vietnam and before that, the colonization of Vietnam by France. And so memory and history are completely entangled for me. And in this book, I try to deal with both of those issues. I certainly try to deal with my own faulty memories. I try to deal with the memories of my nations, whether they are Vietnam or the United States. And I try to deal with the fact that these memories are embedded in history. And when it comes to nations, nations always have selective memories and selective histories, and individuals are no different. And so this memoir deals with the intersection of the collective memories and histories of nations and the individual memories and histories of my family and myself.

Q: As I was reading the book, I felt you had created a form of literary art, of presenting a dialogue, and at the same time deconstructing a lot of the theoretical stuff that you gain, and how do you unpack it and present your identity as who you are. How did that process come about?
A: I always felt myself to be a self and an other, a Vietnamese and an American, someone who was always existing in the conditions of what W.E.B. Du Bois called double consciousness – looking at oneself through one's own eyes, in the eyes of another. And I wanted this book not to simply say those things which the book does, but to express those things through the arrangement of words on the page. As you pointed out. I wanted the reader to feel some of my own confusion and some of my own duality, my struggle with the language and the form of my own story, because I felt that was the honest way to tell my own story. I felt that if I were to tell my story in the conventional fashion, A to Z, linear and so on, that that would actually be fiction. And this was supposed to be nonfiction. So the challenge was, how can I take a nonfiction form and use the language and the shape of the words and the, you know, the arrangement of the lines and so on, to evoke these experiences of fragmentation and confusion, but also clarity, as you point out, for the reader. Because I think through all the confusion and fragmentation, I was able to achieve some clarity about myself and also in my relationship to Vietnam and the United States.

Q: It is quite a task for a writer to sit down and present their view and their history and what you do is also provide a commentary on contemporary events, isn't it?
A: Absolutely. I think that memoirs can do different things. So in the most conventional sense, memoirs are an investigation of one's intention, interior, and I hope this book does do that. But I was also thinking about another tradition of memoir in which the memoirist is always embedded in a community, in a family, in politics, in history. The unfolding of the self and the investigation of the self is inseparable from the investigation of politics and history and context and so on. As I looked at my mother, for example, and thought about how she had gone to psychiatric facilities three times in her life, one of the most basic questions for me was, why was this something that was inherent in her body, in her mind? Or were her breakdowns the result of being hammered by history, living through 40 years of terrible, traumatic events? And I will never know the answer to that question. But in order for me to write a memoir about myself and about her, it couldn't simply be an investigation of our own individuality. It also had to be an investigation of the history that had produced both of us as well. And I respond very strongly to these kinds of memoirs that are aware that the self cannot be separated from history. The self cannot be separated from the family, the child cannot be separated from the parents. And all of that is taking place in a man of two faces.

Q: How did the title come about?
A: All blame goes to my editor, Peter Blackstock, who is this young genius. You know, he bought my novel The Sympathizer when no one else wanted it. Literally 13 out of 14 editors rejected the sympathizer, and Peter was the 14th editor. And he was, I think, 26 years old when he bought the book. When it came to the title of this book, I offered Peter all kinds of suggestions for the title of the book. And the one that he fixated on was not even the title I offered, but my friend, the writer Leila Lalamy, read the memoir in manuscript, and she said, oh, I think the title should be A Man of Two Faces, which is part of the opening line of The Sympathizer, which goes, “I'm a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” And the origins of that are autobiographical. And Layla detected that. And so I just mentioned it to Peter in a throwaway fashion. And Peter said, that's the title of this memoir. And I said, I hate that title. I don't think that should be the title of this book. But in the end, I just had to trust in Peter. In his thinking, and I think he's probably right in this, the A Man of Two Faces, although it is about me, is also a statement about a universal condition, that duality is a universal condition.