In the early days, one of Viet Thanh Nguyen's mentors at Berkeley, Maxine Hong Kingston, did not think he knew how to "[get] to the center of things" in his writing, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author notes in his new memoir A Man of Two Faces.
But years before he came into his own, Nguyen had already intuited he would not want to tell a classically American, individualistic story where his ethnic heritage is simply a backdrop for his personal struggle. He instead hoped to tell one that would juxtapose his trajectory with other lives affected by unruly forces.
