toastykitten

I am somehow sticking to the commitment this year of reading a book a month - I think The Sympathizer kicked me in the butt a bit. It was so good. Anyway, after the Committed I started The Refugees but then I got distracted, and then I ended up ordering A Man of Two Faces online and I realized how much I like reading an actual book as opposed to reading a screen. Maybe I might end up reading more than a book a month, who knows? 

I am really enjoying the series on HBO, and it is astonishing how much better the writing is when your source material is the work of a talented and thoughtful writer. (Yes, this is a bit of a dig at Warrior. I still can't bring myself to watch the rest. Maybe I'll skip to season 2.) The next episode is I think the one where Nguyen gets his vengeance on Hollywood and sends up the Apocalypse Now Vietnam War American movies. Highly looking forward to that one. 

Anyway, back to this book. I found this memoir, a bit hard to get into, because it is at once both very broad and very specific. At the end, you find out that the book is compiled out of a bunch of different lectures and works he's put out over the years, and then it makes more sense. The main thing is that Nguyen writes about growing up in San Jose, CA as a refugee and child of Vietnamese Catholics who really believed in the capitalist American Dream, and what happens with his memory when his mom gets sick and how he betrays her memory by writing about it, and how he experiences both America and the Vietnamese community he grows up in as a spy in both worlds. Which recalls the opening of The Sympathizer. And then he broadens out to an eagle eye view of how the legacy of war and American imperialism has affected the disconnect between him and his parents, and his community in general, and how it's affected other diaspora communities and writers.

He writes of being radicalized by Chicano and Asian American literature, and coming to an abiding belief in the power of change through writing. (Man I wish I had that kind of faith.) And sprinkled throughout is his commitment to both "Karl Marxism and Groucho Marxism" - in one chapter, he lists all the one-star reviews of The Sympathizer, in another, he notes that now that HBO is making a show out of The Sympathizer, you don't have to read it, you can just watch it. He mentions how he learned about tenure and was like "you can't get fired? sweet!" and just committed to being an academic so he could do whatever he wanted. 

And he recalls how he ended up in a class taught by Maxine Hong Kingston, only to fall asleep in every single class. He connects it later with his disconnect with his memory and the self-protective barriers he's constructed to avoid dealing with his mom's illness. 

Anyway, overall I enjoyed it and I feel like he's a bit of a kindred spirit in his voracious reading and he obviously has a lot of the same tastes I do - the book is peppered with different quotes from renown diaspora and minority writers such as Kingston, of course, but also Carlos Bulosan, Mahmoud Darwish, Jessica Hagedorn, etc. He names his son Ellison after Ralph Ellison and his daughter Simone after both Nina Simone and Simone de Beauvoir. But I didn't think this was as coherent or as well-written as The Sympathizer.