Viet Thanh Nguyen Explores Memory, Family and Selfhood in ‘A Man of Two Faces’
When does memory begin? That’s the question Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen poses in the first lines of his new book “A Man of Two Faces,” which he calls at once a memoir, a history and a memorial. Memory for Nguyen begins in part when at age four he fled Vietnam with his parents and his brother, stopping at a chain of American military bases abroad and then being placed in the homes of American sponsors in Pennsylvania, temporarily separated from his family. But Nguyen also likens memory to a sandcastle and a flickering single frame of a film, highlighting the fragility of…
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