A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial

"This is another book that brought home to me how creative nonfiction has become. In terms of form, it’s very unusual. He refers to himself as ‘you’ throughout. So he talks about ‘your own failure, your this, your that’ when he means ‘I’, rather than the reader. Again, it’s a meditation on his parents, who are Vietnamese Catholics. They came to the United States and ended up in California, where they raised their two sons. It’s about the experience of being a migrant. What decisions do you make as a second-generation migrant? Do you embrace your parents’ mother tongue? Do you embrace English? For someone who ends up being a prize-winning author, this is a key decision. What’s the relationship with writing? What’s the distance that comes with your parents? It happens with every adolescent, but it happens in very different ways for migrant families, because it’s about the breach with the ancestral culture. How far does that go? What sort of things are remembered, and what sort of secrets are kept? He describes this from the perspective of the narrator but, as I said, in the second person. He’s playing a distant observer of his own emotions, feelings and choices. It’s not a formal, linear narrative at all. You feel you’ve entered into the stream of consciousness of somebody who is having this experience. And, curiously enough, it tells you more about the experience than it would have done with another narrative form. It seduces you into his thinking, his frame of mind, and his emotions in ways that are really illuminating. Migration is a highly contemporary and contentious subject. I found it very illuminating not about migrants as the objects of political discourse, but migration as the subject. For that reason, I and my fellow judges felt it really earned its place on the shortlist. Again, it’s a very original approach to memoir, that encompasses history, drama and indeed contemporary politics—although not entirely frontally. It’s not just about migration, it’s also a meditation on memory and reality and ‘what is truth?’ But it situates those questions that we all share in a context of biculturalism, of displacement, and of relationship with the past. It does a bit, although it’s mostly after that. There are visits back home. Those are told in the context of the relationship either of the parents or of the next generation to what is meant to be the ancestral past. That’s not entirely linear, because already in Vietnam, the parents had been moved to another province as part of a political movement. So they weren’t exactly leaving home in the straightforward sense. Also, when they get to the United States, they very determinedly set their eyes on the future rather than the past. They do revisit, but very little. It’s a functional relationship in which they have obligations to family back in Vietnam, which they discharge, but you don’t have the sense that they ever imagine returning. People who migrate under other circumstances often imagine returning, but you don’t get the sense that this family does. It is a rupture, but it’s not a rupture that they try to repair. They set their face to the future."