A Man of Two Faces Quotes

“Another joke! Communists are somewhat socially acceptable at the school, but those who try to convert you as you walk through Sproul Plaza are more likely to be Evangelical Christians.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial

“Perhaps writing can be beauty and
light and also rage and anger.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“Thanksgiving can be both lovely reunion and implicit acceptance of genocide. A polite silence. Some of your readers are not convinced.
How dare you politicize Thanksgiving!
We are only giving thanks for how
the Indians helped the Pilgrims! But if we really want to be thankful:
Why not give back the land?
Pay reparations and land taxes?
Engage in truth and reconciliation?
Or simply remember history?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“AMERICA™ always needs new Others to provide the cheapest labor, to absorb the racism, to shame older Others for not working hard enough and not singing loud enough in the American chorus. If Pryor’s language still shocks, still violates the border of the unspeakable, then perhaps that is because he refuses the piety of polite language or censored words to describe the inherent, fundamental, obscene violence and murderousness of American life, one that has always required both the death of Others and the disremembering of those deaths.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“A handful of bad memories can be more indelible than a lifetime of good memories or mediocre ones. We notice the scar, not the skin.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial

“You tell yourself don’t be a voice for the voiceless. Abolish the conditions of voicelessness.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial

“Stories are not just there to entertain, to make you feel good, to reflect a positive image of yourself. Stories are also there to shake you, unnerve you, make you see yourself anew.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial

“Your emotional reaction is testimony to the power of Apocalypse Now, to director Francis Ford Coppola’s artistic vision and commitment. Stories are not just there to entertain, to make you feel good, to reflect a positive image of yourself. Stories are also there to shake you, unnerve you, make you see yourself anew.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“In retrospect, you understand that this is white fantasy.
Only the white man/son can kill the white man/father,”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“Self-hatred makes the mastered meaner and crueler than their masters. The self-hating will take out their hatred on those who remind them of themselves.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial

“You imagine, but you do not feel, what Ba Má suffered, because while you can imagine being separated from your son, you cannot feel what that feels like. The gap between imagining an emotion and feeling it is the distance between empathy and experience.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“The writer’s dilemma:
be scarred enough to be a good writer,
but not so scarred as to be truly fucked up.
You have achieved the magic balance!
Congratulations!!!”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“And now it is difficult, having forgotten so many parts of yourself and those you love, to re member your many disremembered pieces.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial

“This is his land now, next to Má. But what to call this place if it is not their homeland? Their chosen land.
Their settled land.
Their refuge.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“And so just for now,
just for the time that I have
with these children and Lan—
I want to create a home with them,
and even if it is a home in which I can never
forget the losses of my past and the losses
of my present, it can be a home to which
one day they will want to return.
Or so I hope. And if it is not
such a home, then one day may they write their own memoir.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“Fatherhood, I think, has made me a better writer.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“As the novelist Rabih Alameddine, also an American, among other identities, says: Those of us who fall outside the dominant culture
are allowed to speak as the other, and
more importantly, for the other.
. . . I get Lebanon.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“The open secret of AMERICA™ is that we
do not call colonization by its name.
Instead, we give colonization
another name: the AMERICAN DREAM™”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“The open secret of AMERICA™ is that white people founded it on
colonization, genocide, slavery, war, and white supremacy,
all of which continue shaping the self
and the Other.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“Americans, who continually struggle to be greater than the sum of their parts, live in a culture of forgetfulness, that fifty-first state of Denial. This is a country where so many would rather not remember what the poet William Carlos Williams calls the orgy of blood from which the nation was born and that still soaks the land so many citizens, including those who were once refugees, continue to profit from.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“The result is that you can examine a text closely as a doctor of letters, but you are utterly incapable of examining yourself. You, the zoologist, never the beast. You, the reader, never the text. What if you are both?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“And because you cannot, or will not, you
give up and give yourself wholly over to
Theory. Not hard to do, because when
you offered yourself first to English,
you cut off your mother tongue.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“You always stand somewhere inside
and outside of every language you
encounter. Orphaned in Vietnamese.
Clumsy in French. Adopted in English.
Mastered by Theory. Awed by Fiction.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“But your twentysomething self is genuinely inspired by the conviction that theorizing is a way of plunging beneath the surfaces of texts, things, the world, to understand how art, power, and politics operate. You set out to master this discourse that criticizes the world through criticizing the text. By the end of your doctorate,
the discourse masters you.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“So-called minorities must always know the minds of the so-called majority. But they assume they need know nothing about you. Their ignorance is a privilege, a luxury you cannot afford.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“As a literary critic, you want to criticize colonialism, capitalism, and racism and to study literature by people of color, especially Asian Americans. You tell your English department chair, one of the most famous American literary scholars in the country, that you want to write a dissertation on Vietnamese American literature. He gazes at you with mild concern through his glasses and says, You can’t do that. You won’t get a job. Perhaps true, perhaps not. But you are outraged. The right response is not to accept the status quo but hope to transcend it. If not today, then in the future. Your department, however, believes in tradition and the canon, requiring you to read Beowulf through Chaucer and Shakespeare, the Romantics and the Victorians, the realists and modernists, so you can talk to your entire profession.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“The comma indicates you had more to say. But you never write another word. Because you are not yet a writer. Because you do not like this person in these pages, though this person is you. This person incapable of feeling, of loving.
This person you do not care to remember;
this person you fear you still might be.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“you died now and had to choose an eternal memory, it might be this moment in a photograph when you speak your mother tongue, your mother the most powerful woman in the world, both of you unaware of all the future holds as you walk toward your father. A memory you do not remember.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“What does it matter that your parents never say I love you during your childhood. What does it matter that they rarely spend time with you, squeezed as you all are in the classic immigrant and refugee dilemma: the more parents sacrifice for their children, the further apart they grow from them. Sacrifice is love.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

“The powerful want to deal with you one at a time. You immigrant. You refugee. You minority. You native. You token. You. You tell yourself: Don’t be a voice for the voiceless.
Abolish the conditions of voicelessness.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces