{"id":1566,"global_id":"pdxbookfest.org?id=1566","global_id_lineage":["pdxbookfest.org?id=1566"],"author":"1","status":"publish","date":"2023-09-06 15:49:47","date_utc":"2023-09-06 15:49:47","modified":"2023-10-04 17:36:10","modified_utc":"2023-10-05 00:36:10","url":"https:\/\/pdxbookfest.org\/event\/viet-thanh-nguyen-a-man-of-two-faces\/","rest_url":"https:\/\/pdxbookfest.org\/wp-json\/tribe\/events\/v1\/events\/1566","title":"Viet Thanh Nguyen: A Man of Two Faces","description":"

Viet Thanh Nguyen will be joined in conversation with Tommy Orange<\/a>, author of There There<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a special event at Portland Book Festival which requires an add-on ticket<\/a> to attend.<\/h3>\n

With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in\u00a0A Man of Two Faces<\/i>\u00a0Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban M\u00ea Thu\u1ed9t 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 resettle into his own family in suburban San Jos\u00e9. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny fa\u00e7ade of what he calls\u00a0AMERICA\u2122. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the S\u00e0iG\u00f2n\u00a0M\u1edbi, 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\u00a0Apocalypse Now<\/i>\u00a0throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he 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 realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening,<\/span><\/p>\n

Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power,\u00a0A Man of Two Faces<\/i>\u00a0explores 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.<\/p>\n

Get your General Admission Festival Pass today<\/a>!<\/p>\n

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Or, get the full, all-inclusive festival experience. An UMBRELLA PASS<\/a> includes:<\/b><\/p>\n