Adaptation can be a dicey proposition, because if you love a book or any work of art, really, it's natural to be excited for the chance to further swim in its waters, to see that imaginative world in which we're already so invested reproduced in technicolor glory. But of course, with that enthusiasm comes a set of exacting standards, the deep disappointment of a dud bit of casting, the liberty taken with merging two characters, or excizing an extraneous plot line.
But for my money, the worst crime of all in an adaptation is one that is so slavishly faithful that it sucks the flare and joy out of the story that made us love it in the first place. Books to screen can be a recipe for heartache and disappointment, But the crucial thing is that when it does work, when an adaptation sings, well, that's just wonderful. Start again.
I must spuy a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.
I is curazed to see every issue.
From both sides.
I is a communist agent implanted with himself. That's the opening scene from the recent HBO series The Sympathizer, which is based on Viet Tan wins Brilliant twenty fifteen Pilit's a winning novel of the same name. Its historical fiction meets spy thriller meets blackly funny exploration of the colonial experience, and it's not surprising it makes for great TV. To my mind, this is an adaptation that gets it right. Now, as new audiences discover Viet's work through the TV show,
He's released his first memoir. It's called A Man with Two Faces, And as in his fiction, he's still a man with an eye on the best story. This time around, though, the whole thing cuts closer to the bow. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read. This a show about the stories we love, the books behind them, and the stories behind them. Vietan Wynn was born in Vietnam in nineteen seventy one.
After the fall of Saigon in seventy five, he fled to America with his family, leaving behind an older, adopted sister. In his move to nonfiction, A Man with Two Faces, he lays bare the details of this story, all the while pushing against the familiar beats of memoir. So that's where I wanted to start, with the kind of conventions into which Viet found himself writing for the first time.
In A Man of Two Faces. You reflect a lot on their generic and category expectations of telling this kind of memoir that the refugee memoir takes a particular shape. In fact, you offer the crib notes for any aspiring writer of a refugee memoir, and I wonder how much an awareness of that tradition made you resistant to write into it in the first place.
I'm very meta as a writer. I'm always thinking of the larger contexts and frames in which stories are told and received, because obviously, many of us who are storytellers have deeply held, passionately felt stories that we want to tell, and yet we confront audiences that are themselves inundated with prejudices and preconceptions about certain historical events, such as in my case, the Vietnam War, or the immigrant or refugee experience. And I'm very cognizant of the fact that then these
prejudices and preconceptions shaped audience expectations. And in the example of the United States, I mean, part of the mythology of the United States is that we are the greatest country on earth, and therefore no matter what kind of difficulties people have encountered in their interactions with Americans, either through American wars or as immigrants to the United States. No matter what kind of difficulties, nevertheless, the final result
is congratulations, you're an American. You've made it. Even if you criticize the United States, you're still ever of the American dream. And so that's where the refugee memoir or the immigrant memoir comes in to affirm this country. And so I had to resist it even as I was telling this story, and I wanted to make sure that readers felt the emotions that all readers want from story, but that they also were aware of why they wanted those emotions.
I'm curious knowing you wanted to be a writer by far predated knowing you wanted to tell these stories.
Yes, I think, like many writers, my response to stories is very visceral and very emotional. I grew up surrounded by stories in the public library because my parents were living this very difficult refugee life, working very hard, not having time to spend with their children. That was the proximity effect on me, and my way of solving or addressing that was to escape through stories.
Those trips into the public library as a kid. I've heard you say before that despite their religious belief, there wasn't even a Bible in your house. You know that you went to the public library because you had to do that to go on raid. Did that create a gap between you and your family, becoming a rada?
Oh? Absolutely. I referred to it as being kidnapped by literature. You know, my parents thought the public library was a safe space if you just drop your kid off and they'll be busy for twelve four to twelve hours. This is the kind of time when my parents would literally drop me off at the library a Saturday morning, before the doors even opened. They took off and I was there surrounded by dozens of adults. You know, I knows
what would happen. But the more I acquired English, the more I became a better reader, The more I learned about English language literature of the Anglo American tradition, the more I became a writer, the more I became an American, the further away I was taken from my parents, And that alienation, I think is, you know, partly what motivates me as a writer and gives me the fuel and the motivation to be a writer, which led to some success,
but it's also ironically the alienation that distanced me from my parents.
Do you remember particular formative books in that early period, the moments where you went, I didn't know you could do that.
Oh, there are many, I mean, certainly a children's literature of all kinds had a huge impact on me, from Curious George and Tintin, onto science fiction like Robert Heinlend and Isaac Asimov, and fantasy like Token, and science fiction like Dune by Frank Herbert, and then adult fiction. There are no boundaries and borders in the library, so no one could stop me from walking to the adult fiction section and reading books that would scar me for life.
I was going to say, not only can no one stop you, but any kid left to their own devices in the library very quickly knows that it's a pathway to an adult world there.
Otherwise tonight, oh yeah, that they're forbidden stories that their parents probably would be unhappy for them to read because there are you know, dirty words, dirty stories, that kind
of thing. So, of course, Philip Roth's nineteen sixty eight novel Portnoy's Complaint made a huge impact on me when I was eleven or twelve and not capable of understanding very much about it, except that there's some echo between the life of you know, a second generation Jewish American boy shadow by the Holocaust and this Vietnamese refugee shadowed by war and both struggling with their adolescence and their sexuality, a huge impact which would eventually, you know, ripple through
the Sympathizer.
My first novel, the title of A Man of Two Faces, a memoir, A history of memorial comes from the sympathizer. I'm a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. What is it about that idea of two faces that so resonates with you?
I think I just knew that from a very very young age as a refugee, or maybe just as an individual. But I always had to maintain at least two faces, one to my parents and one to the rest of the world. And there's probably more than just two faces. But you know, I was growing up as an American, but I was in my parents very Vietnamese household, so I felt like an American spying on these Vietnamese people. And then when I stepped out, I felt like a
Vietnamese person spying on Americans in the larger world. So that was a very deeply held feeling and confusion for me. And you know, when I started to write The Sympathizer, I thought, my life is not very interesting, So I'll create a spy and put some of these feelings into him and amplify them greatly, because the spy is obviously as a man of at least two faces. And then when it came time to writing this memoir, I'm a
reluctant memoirist, which I think is a healthy thing. Yeah, enthusiastic memoirists are scary.
That should be automatic disqualification from my writing a memoir is wanting to write a memoir exactly.
So I had to be persuaded into doing it by my editor. And the initial way for me to do it was to pretend that I was the Sympathizer writing about me. That created enough of a distance between me and myself that I could observe myself and start writing about myself. And then gradually, as the book progresses, I get closer and closer and closer to that strange little boy that I didn't understand even when I was him.
That process so beautifully described. There is in part captured in the book by the decision to use the second person. Can you talk to me a bit about when that moment kind of landed with you?
I wrote that book very intuitively. There wasn't a lot of planning going into it, and the book actually starts off in the first person, but by the end of the first chapter, I'd recount something that really happened. Happened obviously to my parents, which is on Christmas Eve when I was about nine years old. We were at home, my brother and I. I was watching cartoons and then my brother got a phone call and when he put it down, he said, Mom and dad have been shot. They ran
a grocery store, and that's what happened that night. And I had no reaction to that. I think I was in a state of shock. And my brother said, what's wrong with you? And I think at that point I thought what is wrong with me? And I never stopped thinking what is wrong with me for many, many decades. And at that point, with my brother saying you, I switched as a writer into the you the second person.
I'd spend the next I don't know two thirds of the book investigating you until I got close enough that you became I again by the last third of the book.
It's a beautiful and very affecting choice in the context of the book. But of course what's clear is that you know that incident getting the call your parents have been shot in many stories my foundational trauma. Whereas for you, you know, five years before that you had had the refugee experience, you'd been separated from your parents and your siblings. You know that bit of trauma sat already underneath that. It's hardly surprising that nine year old you had nowhere to place those feelings.
I think growing up these things were normal. I mean I thought, well, it happens everybody, and in fact, I think it happened to a lot of refugees. And knowing what I knew from Vietnamese refugee stories, I felt that there was nothing again unusual about my life. It was only talking to people who are not refugees and telling them some of these stories and seeing the looks of incomprehension on their faces, like wow, did you live through these kinds of things that I gradually understood that these
were in fact fairly traumatic experiences. But myself and maybe like many other refugees, I survived by pretending everything was normal and moving forward and not looking back, normalizing those experiences, and so it would take decades for me to understand that in fact, they probably did have a big impact on me. I remember meeting my future wife for the first time I started dating, and at one point I told her I think I'm pretty well adjusted, and she said, no, you're not.
That's what we need from the people who love us is a bit of honesty about where our self delusion kicks in, and beyond self delusion, also where our performance kicks in. I mean, part of being a man of two faces is not just having to assimilate these fractured kind of internal senses himself, but it's also about the idea of how we perform being a good refugee, a good migrant, a good citizen, a good member of the community, and the expectations around that performance are pretty acutely defined.
And I think that's where the theme of having many faces continues for me personally. But I think also from any immigrants, refugees, outsiders to any society, we know that we have to put on performances, As you said, multiple faces, depending on the context. So one role from my parents, one role from the Vietnamese community, one role for my
professional life as a professor and as a writer. And so I'm always wearing masks, trying to calculate how much to reveal of myself to different people, depending on different contexts. It's a survival strategy. It's a method of negotiation for anyone who feels different in some way, and that resonates very acutely with the necessary masks that a spy has to wear, as in the sympathizer, but also a writer.
You know, I think myself as a writer, I'm also wearing masks because I'm also trying to constantly observe people, and in order to do that, I have to get a little bit closer to them, make them feel comfortable with me. So that's always there in my tool kit, these pretensions and performances.
I also know that you're not terribly compelled by the idea of authenticity, that authenticity, to your mind, is distraction as an obsession.
In some ways, authenticity is inevitable, obviously, and there's a real need for it, and I understand that, and sometimes authenticity is crucial if I want to find the best Vietnamese food in Melbourne. I believe in authenticity at that point, but I grew up with this sense that I was inauthentic. Americans would see me as not being American, some of them Vietnamese people would not see me as being Vietnamese enough, And one logical reaction that that is to desperately desire
to belong, to be included, to feel authentic. So I understand that my reaction was to be distrustful of authenticity. So even when I went back to Vietnam for the first time, some twenty seven years after I had left it, I did not go back with the expectation that on returning to Vietnam I would somehow become one hundred percent Vietnamese and be restored to the motherland. I was very skeptical, and in fact that was true, like I did not
feel more authentically Vietnamese. In fact, when I go to Vietnam and I speak Vietnamese, one common response is that people will say, you speak such good Vietnamese for a Korean. And so my own authenticity is to be authentic to my inauthenticity, and I think that's a powerful position for a writer to be in is to be distrustful of these notions that are so motivating to many individuals, but also to Nicheans, and Nichans committed to authenticity can be very dangerous entities.
When we return, the ed expands on the idea of alienation and how proximity to history as well as distance, make from a more powerful story. We'll be right back. One of the things you describe so well is not just that relationship with the emotion of the trauma of the refugee experience, but a kind of idea of conditionality about what bits of it are your story to tell
and what a someone else's. So not only are you're having to cut close to your bone, you're having to cut close to the bone of loved ones who haven't necessarily given you permission.
And that is a serious ethical and personal and moral and artistic problem that I think a lot of people who write about their families confront, whether they do it explicitly through memoir or nonfiction, or whether they disguise things in fiction. And I struggled with that quite mightily. So I had great difficulty writing about my own life in my family's life until my mother passed away, and then that I think gave me some license to think that now I could talk about things that would not harm
her anymore. What year was it, the Cheetah twenty eighteen.
Twenty eighteen, And at that moment you felt liberated from a responsibility to her not to share secret.
Well, it wasn't that mercenary of a position. It wasn't as if right away it was like, oh, now I can talk about all these stories that I have been holding back for so long. But there was a moment in my book A Man in Two Faces where I said, you know, it was an honest admission that even as my mother was passing away, the writerly part of me
was already thinking about how to describe that moment. Not because I wanted to exploit it, but simply because, as a writer, at least my kind of writer, I'm always looking at people at situations for the potential for material or how my art can deal with it and transform it. But you know, when my mother passed away, it was simply that it took me a while to even begin
to process what that meant. But also I think that was the beginning of my understanding, not that I was liberated, but simply that she would not be there to be damaged by any stories that I told, and it took me a while to get to the moment where I felt that I could write about it. I think that as a writer, I'm always dwelling on the possibility of what can and can't be told at the present moment. And that's a very personal circumstance, obviously, but it's also related,
I think, to larger social contexts as well. I certainly look at my own family, my own history about the potential for stories, but as an American, I also think that there are stories that we as Americans have a hard time confronting, and we've taken a long time to
tell some of these stories. And so my own work has always fluctuated between that the personal desire to confront these emotions and to tell these stories, but then also to connect that to the national experience and my interpret of the United States, the national reluctance to confront some of its most difficult emotions and traumas.
And the fact that, as with any colonial motion, probably any nation, national identity is built on silences and deliberate and willful silences.
And so our families. Yeah, So I mean, I think I don't know of any nation that's founded on this idea that, yes, we brutally violated some other people or conquered some other nation in order to build our own. And yet most nations, maybe all nations, have that kind of foundational violence. And then has that foundational violence is obviously contradictory to the noble ideals of a nation. So yes, we have to create mythologies and tell stories to ourselves
that justify our own existence as a nation. And then those silences that you talked about, And my experience with silences is that even if something is not spoken about, that doesn't mean it's not felt. That absent presence of
silence reverberates emotionally, certainly with families. I've encountered many families of refugees, but also rans where the children and grandchildren saying, well, the parents and the grandparents never talked about this experience, whatever it is, and yet we could feel there was something unspoken, and that unspoken aspect still transforms us.
And again there's also that question of personal proximity to story. You know, you reflect in the book that where your parents of the children of war, the children of displacement, you're the grandchild of those things rather than the child of them, and that adds a different kind of lens through which to say those stories.
I think proximity is a good word, you know, the proximity to a blast, the proximity to radiation, the proximity to whatever. Even if you're not there at the very core of something that happens, the shock waves or the
effects can still impact you. Certainly impacted me and many other refugee children and grandchildren, where even if we did not personally experience the trauma of war or the refugee experience, or if we were too young to really remember those things, we saw the effects on our parents through the stories they told, the stories they refused to tell, their behaviors,
which are sometimes problematic in different ways. You know, if you're not able to deal with your own trauma, what happens oftentimes you take it out on other people in various kinds of ways. So yeah, the proximity to a historically important experience is its own kind of experience, and it makes sure its own kind of story.
I understand that before you submitted Man of Two Faces to your publisher, there were only two readers of it, your wife and your brother, and I'm wondering about the I mean, your brother. That must have been a nerve wracking person to share it with, given the ways in which it's quite literally a shared story, a shared experience.
I mean, it was a nerve wracking experience to share the story with anybody. Honestly, I've never felt so viscerally twisted inside when people started reading this particular manuscript in draft form. But there's no doubt that having my brother read it was a particular challenge because he was the only eyewitness to what had happened to our family, so his opinion was important to me, and especially as my
older and only brother. And so what happened was I gave the manuscript to him, and then I never I didn't hear from him again. And then my sister in law had to intervene and she persuaded him to read the manuscript, and he finally read it, and then he said, I got it right. You can publish this, which was very validating for me because I would have published it anyway. But it's important that he also thought that I had
spoken some version of the truth. I don't know if it's his truth, but at least he could agree to that truth.
I was going to say, I like that construction of you got it right is it doesn't presuppose accuracy of memory. And you're a scholar of memory. You've thought about these ideas a lot. To say you've got it right. This can go out as your record of things is lovely in so far as the things that doesn't say.
Yeah, you know. Memory is highly subjective, memories always fluctuating. And this is a funny thing about writing a man because I think many people would interpret a memoir or an autobiography as being based in fact. Yes, there are facts, of course, but there's always interpretation. And I think there's something quite fictive oftentimes about memoirs and autobiographies because the writer is constructing a narrative and an interpretation and trying
to convince you, the reader, to trust the writer. And the problem is that you can have any set of facts, and two people who are there at the same time can have vastly different interpretations. So that's part of the fun and the challenge of writing something like a memoir, especially when people are still alive, is that the fictive quality is quite evident, at least to me as a writer, and I try to bring that out in this otherwise seemingly factual memoir.
So then how do you think you will be a different novelist having written a memoir. I suspect it's worked a set of rightly muscles, a set of kind of preconceptions about how you tell story, about where you see it in relation to the story, that mean that the next novel is going to feel very different.
I think there's a total continuity between the different books that I write. So, for example, and The Sympathizer, there's a scene where our narrator, the Spy, is reflecting on the death of his mother and he builds a fake tomb for her in this movie set, and he cries over that. And as I was writing that, I cried over that. And when readers read that, they often say that is the most poignant moment of the novel for them.
And I think that seed of writing that fictional story helped to me to write a Man of two Faces. And so whenever I'm writing a book, I am personally transformed by it, so that I can't write the same
book over again because I'm a different person. So likewise, I'm going to write the third and final novel of the Sympathizer trilogy, and there's no doubt that even though these are novels that are in some ways genre novels or spy novels, gangster novels, crime and violence and all this kind of stuff, there are also novels in which the narrator has changed over time, as I have changed over time. So there will be something different about the
third novel. I have some ideas which I can't tell you about, but he's definitely a very different person, as I'm a very different writer.
Do you find the trappings of genre, of the spine novel, of the gangster novel, the crime thing a useful kind of framework with which to confound expectation? You know, we think about genre writing as being about rewarding expectation for readers, but I think part of what's so wonderful about what you do in that space is you take all the various rubrics that readers expect and offer it to them not quite as they might anticipate.
I think the most conventional genre stories are bound by the conventions of the genre, which is about plotting and formal expectations and things like that, and that's very rewarding because I love to read those things too, and it's like watching a game. You know what the rules are from the very beginning, and then you enjoy the variations
that result. But in books like The Sympathizer in a sequel of That Committed, these are definitely genre novels, as you say, but there's multiple genres working in them, so they're not just spy novels or crime novels. They're also immigrant or refugee novels, and they're also philosophic novels, historical novels, political novels, novels of ideas. All these different genres are circulating in them, and once that happens, then the expectations
can be confounded. And I think that that mixture is born out of my own personal sense of myself as being a mixture.
And literary genre functions in much the same way as any tradition, any kind of social construct as well. These are the stories we tell ourselves again and again in the same way for reassurance. For whatever. The emotion in your work that I respond to so often is the anger in it, like these are clearly books driven by a sense of wanting to wanting to hold something into account, and maybe wanting to leave the reader a little bit furious.
Oh yeah, I think that my identity as a writer is inseparable from the fact that when I went to school at UC Berkeley, the University of California at Berkeley, I became a very angry person because of a sudden all this history about being an Asian immigrant, Asian American, being an American was suddenly revealed to me that I had never known before. And that sense of anger, I think has always stayed with me. And let me qualify that by saying, I think it's a righteous anger. It's
not a hateful anger. I think there's distinctions, and it's an emotion that, like every other emotion, if it's the only emotion one feels, can be overpowering. I mean love, If all you feel is love all the time, that's a little bit too much. You know, you have to qualify all your emotions. But anger is no doubt there, and sometimes it's very hot, But most of the time
I think of it more as a pilot light. I keep it lit so that when I need it, when I really need it, I can turn it up for the right occasion and the right moment, whether it's some event happening in the world or whether it's demanded by the story of the novel. And if readers are infuriated at certain points, that's good, and then I try to make things easier for them by telling a joke.
You're a very funny writer in ways that definitely offer atomic to some of those grief stricken moments.
Yeah, and of course, you know, telling the joke to alleviate the tragedy and so on goes back at least to Shakespeare probably, you know, maybe probably further back, so tried in true method.
I do love your account of your adopted sister, who you were separated from and who had to stay behind. One of the reasons your mother claimed to know that she was adopted was because she knew how to have a good time and you and your brother didn't.
Yeah, that's right. You know, we were a devout Catholic family and we do not know how to have fun. And so when I met my sister for the first time after we left, this was like twenty seven years later. You know, she was beautiful and she wore makeup and she was very fashionable, and I was like, wow, I wish all of our family was like this. But I will say that there's a PostScript to this story which doesn't appear in the book, because it happened after the book,
which is last month. This adopted sister who we had left behind at sixteen to guard the family property against the communists, and of course was not able to guard the property and then was sent to hard labor as a sixteen year old, if you can imagine, for several years. She came last month to the United States for the first time, just in time for the red carpet premiere of my TV series A Sympathizer. And we went to this fancy Hollywood party where we were the first to arrive,
and the second was Robert Downey Junior. And she got to have her picture taken, and I said, I told her, this is this happens all the time in Hollywood. I couldn't have scripted a better Hollywood ending for this particular story.
I suspect that your mother would have been delighted to say that perhaps you had learned how to have a good time, and it's just it took you a little while, I hope, so Viet Thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks so much.
Michael VI ten Wins memoir A Man of Two Faces is available at all Good bookstores now. The adaptation of his Pulitz Surprise winning novel The Sympathizer can be found in Australia on Binge. Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week, and it won't have escaped your attention that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. You're probably not looking for more depressing stuff to read, but the new quarterly essay Highway to Hell Climate Change in Australia's Future is an
essential read. Unfortunately, it's by climate scientist Joe L. Gergis, and she does an amazing job of summing up what the climate crisis means for Australia and what the cost of political and individual inertia is. Reading is a very small step towards doing something for the planet, but a worthwhile one. Nonetheless, you can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore next week.
I read this, I'm joined by Leslie Janison talking about her new memoir Splinters and the ways in which being raw on the page can be misunderstood.
So I think that there are all sorts of ways that women writing from life. Writing gets treated as somehow less shaped by craft, intentionality, artistry, when often I find that my artistry is most challenged, that I have to bring everything I have as an artist to that work that is about the closest and most personal experiences that I've had.
Read. This is produced and edited by Clare and mixing and original compositions by Zalten Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.