## Metadata - Author: [[Viet Thanh Nguyen]] - Full Title: A Man of Two Faces - Category: #books ## Highlights - Memory begins with Ba Má, their images like photographs, their story like a movie, the kind found in the black box of a VHS tape, in an era when I have long ago gotten rid of my VCR. ([Location 75](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=75)) - What do you call a Vietnamese minivan? A motorbike. ([Location 112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=112)) - have everything I need but almost nothing I want. ([Location 187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=187)) - cupped hands extended to the priest for the sacred Styrofoam, ([Location 195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=195)) - The red wine fails to seduce. I turn out an atheist. ([Location 196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=196)) - love my parents and know no other way to repay them than to eat what they cook and to attempt to be what they say I must be at nearly every meal: good, obedient, respectful. I interpret these commands to mean: Do as I am told. Be quiet. Ask no questions. ([Location 235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=235)) - those who are not refugees see you refugees as the zombies of the world, the undead rising from dying states to march or swim toward the borders of the living in endless frightening waves. Those on the other side do not see you as human at all. ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=280)) - You’re a coward. You intend to stay that way. ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=360)) - If something is to stay20 in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory. A handful of bad memories can be more indelible than a lifetime of good memories or mediocre ones. We notice the scar, not the skin. Being taken away from your parents is burned in between your shoulder blades, a brand you do not usually see until you examine yourself with the mirrors of your own writing. ([Location 452](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=452)) - Tags: [[pink]] - reverse of Munch’s famous painting, so that instead of seeing the silent scream you can only hear it. ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=461)) - Tags: [[orange]] - The writer’s dilemma: be scarred enough to be a good writer, but not so scarred as to be truly fucked up. You have achieved the magic balance! Congratulations!!! ([Location 465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=465)) - Tags: [[orange]] - And don’t forget when Tippi Hedren visits fellow actor and friend Kiều Chinh (who could also play your mother in the movie of her life) at Camp Pendleton and takes such pity on the refugees that she asks her manicurist to train some of these women. ([Location 508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=508)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The gap between imagining an emotion and feeling it is the distance between empathy and experience. ([Location 619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C15HPGRF&location=619))