Join the Library\, Loyalty Bookstores\, an d the Vietnam Society for an evening with Pulitzer Prize winning author Vi et Thanh Nguyen for his new memoir A Man of Two Faces. In convers ation with novelist Lysley Tenorio\, Nguyen.
\nCopies of the book wi ll be available for purchase and signing\, and a limited number will be gi ven away courtesy of the DC Public Library Foundation. \;
\nWith insight\, humor\, formal inventi on\, and lyricism\, in \;A Man of Two Faces \;Viet Thanh Nguyen re winds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood\, colonization\, and ideas ab out Vietnam and America\, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and inci sive analysis\, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a f ather and a son.
\nAt the age of four\, Nguyen and his family are fo rced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê\; Thuá»™t and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed w ith a family on his own\, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José\;. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny faç\;ade of what he calls \;AMERICA&trade\;. One Chris tmas Eve\, when Nguyen is nine\, while watching cartoons at home\, he lear ns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store\, the Sà\;iGò\;n \;Má»›i\, a place where he sometimes he lps 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 \;Apo calypse Now \;throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be b oth American and Vietnamese\, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam\, a nd ultimately visits her\, he grows to understand just how much his parent s have left behind. And as his parents age\, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care\, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening\,
\nProfound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinkin g about cultural power\, \;A Man of Two Faces \;explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory\, the promises America so r eadily makes and breaks\, and the exceptional life story of one of the mos t original and important writers working today.
\n\nA bout the Speakers:
\nViet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of \;The Committed\, which continues the story of \;The Sympathizer\, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction\, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection \;The Refugees\; the nonficti on book \;Nothing Ever Dies\, a finalist for the National Book Award\; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing\, \;The Displace d. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Et hnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellow ships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angel es.
\nLysley Tenorio \;is the author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune and the story collection Monstress\, which was named a book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the recipi ent of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship\, a Whiting Award\, a Stegner fellowship\, the Edmund White Award\, and the Rome Prize from the American \;Academy \;of Arts and Letters\, as well as residencies from the MacDowell Colony\, Yaddo\, and the Bogliasco Foundation. \; H is stories have appeared in The Atlantic\, Zoetrope: All-Story\, and Ploug hshares\, and have been \;adapted \;for the stage by The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the \;Ma-Yi \;Theater in New York City. \; Born in the Philippines\, he lives in San Francisco \, and is a professor at Saint Mary&rsquo\;s College of California. \;
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