She was born in a northern Vietnamese village during French colonial rule, came of age amid an escalating war that ravaged her homeland and scrambled to get her young sons onto a boat during the Fall of Saigon in 1975. So the author broadened the focus of “A Man of Two Faces” (Grove Press, 2023) to encompass the “epic” life of his late mother, Linda Kim Nguyen. But he didn’t think his own story - about fleeing Vietnam when he was 4 and growing up in Silicon Valley in the 1980s - was compelling enough when it came time to write his memoir.
Since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2016, San Jose-reared novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen has become one of the leading voices of the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States.