An unconventional memoir with insight, humor, formal invention and lyricism by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen in A Man of Two Faces, rewinds the film of his own life wrestling with dual identity, entwining his family experience with racism, refugeehood and colonisation and ideas of Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son. At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Me Thu?t and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettler into his own family in suburban San Jose. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny facade of what he calls AMERICA One Christmas Eve., when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that is parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the Saigon M?i, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can you be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care. and ultimately realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.

Resonant in its emotions and clear in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.

There is a escape he does not remember from his birthplace , Buon Ma Thuot in South Vietnam, in the spring of 1975, when he is 4; the military bases in the Philippines, Gaum and Pennsylvania, the temporary separation form his parent when families of newly arrived asylum seekers were divided among the homes of different American sponsors. ” A force more powerful than your parents took you away to give your father and mother time to become self-sufficient” Nguyen writes. ” But a child only understands the powerlessness, the abandonment, the sound of his screaming”. They do become self-sufficient, and after a brief stint in Harrisburg, Pa. the Nguyens move in 1978 to San Jose, where Ba Ma- the Vietnamese construction that fuses two parents, Ba and Ma, into a single entity – open a grocery store called SaiGon Moi on East Santa Clara Street. At 8, he eats all the fried seasame-seed balls he wants and ogles the Vietnamese language martial arts novels that he will never be able to read.

“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 debut novel ” The Sympathizer”, begins. The unnamed narrator is a biracial, American-educated communist informant in the employ of a South Vietnamese general in the waning days of war. His Twin faces, North and South, East and West, communist and nationalist, white and not grant him titular sympathy that is both a blessing and a curse.

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Corsair £22, 400 pages.