A Man of Two Faces

Viet Thanh Nguyen arrived in Pennsylvania as a four-year-old Vietnamese refugee in 1975, separated for months from his parents at the Fort Indiantown Gap refugee camp. The family eventually resettled in San Jose, where his parents ran a grocery store and were shot during a Christmas Eve robbery. A Man of Two Faces is the Pulitzer winner's memoir about that childhood, his mother's eventual mental-health collapse and institutionalization, his own life as a Vietnamese-American writer caught between the country that took him in and the country he was taken from, and the racial-and-political reckoning he has built his career around. Nguyen writes the book in fragments, with poetic line breaks and second-person address.