off the leash

A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial

Viet Thanh Ngoyen

If you read “The Sympathizer” or “The Committed,” one about a Vietnamese refugee in America and the other a Vietnamese refugee in France, you may have wondered how much of those two novels reflected the story of their author Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a Vietnamese refugee. His memoir “A Man of Two Faces” promises some answers. But they aren’t easy.

Nguyen was four when his parents, whom he refers to collectively as Ba Ma, fled Vietnam after the war. They were model refugees, the embodiment of the so-called American Dream. They built a business, the SaiGon Moi, which I presume is a sort of Vietnamese bodega, worked tirelessly, bought a nice house and put their sons through college. None of that prevented a sign from appearing outside their store that said “Another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese.” Nor did it stop the city from forcing them to sell their property when they decided to build a new city hall across the street.

Most books about refugees focus on the hardships of their lives and challenges they face. Nguyen, while calling himself an ingrate, offers a commentary on the society into which he was placed. What he sees above all else is racism. “The cycle repeats throughout American history: big businesses rely on cheap Asian labor, which threatens the white working class, whose fears are stoked by race-baiting politicians and media, leading to catastrophe for Asians.” You can easily substitute Blacks, Latinos or any other non-white segment of American Society in place of Asians in that sentence.

Amidst the history and social commentary in Nguyen’s story is a lot of family. In particular he writes about his mother. After a lifetime of hard work she faced “13 years of slow erosion, a death inflicted cell by cell on her body and mind.” He describes his own struggles with writing her story.

Why the “Man of Two Faces?” Perhaps it is this:

“In America’s binary of colonizer and colonized, are you, a refugee, the colonized or the colonizer? Perhaps you are both.”

Or maybe this:

“JFK dispatched (the Green Berets) to Viet Nam to save the good, freedom-loving Vietnamese (this means you) from the bad, communist-loving Vietnamese (this also means you.)”

Likely it’s something more personal. He is not afraid to lay out his contradictions and enigmas. His story is at once both proud and self-deprecating. What comes across is a very honest memoir. A read both captivating and enlightening.

Ordinary Human Failings

Megan Nolan

The Greens are an Irish family living in London. There’s a brother and sister, their father, and the sister’s 10-year-old child Lucy. They have any number of ordinary human failings: alcoholism, an unwanted pregnancy, neglectful parenting and an assortment of antisocial behavior traits.

The story revolves around a moment in time when Lucy is suspected of causing the death of another child on a playground.

Throw into this mix a young reporter for one of London’s sleazy, sensationalist tabloids. He sees this opportunity to generate headlines of outrage about Irish immigrants. To that end he isolates and inebriates each family member.

It is within that context that the story of this moment in time is told backwards. The story of how each member of the family came to be what they are. Is the sum total a sensational story in a sleazy tabloid? Or just a mash up of ordinary human failings?

The plot does eventually move forward, and the characters grow. But their past never stops influencing their future. Altogether the author has produced a creative vehicle to tell a story, simple on the surface but with somewhat hidden layers of depth.

Amigoland

Oscar Casares

If you are of a certain age, of which I am, this book is bloodchilling. Amigoland is an assisted care facility. We follow the patient Don Fidencio who doesn’t want to be there, doesn’t want to admit he needs the care he needs, doesn’t want anything to do with the walker he needs to walk. He’s no longer proficient at remembering names so he refers to staffers with names like The One with the Flat Face, and his fellow residents have monikers like The Gringo with the Ugly Finger. An ingenious way to remember who’s who.

Fidencio’s younger brother helps him escape. He is no youngster himself and is well into retirement. He is accompanied by his Mexican house cleaner/lover who is 30 years his junior. She is the voice of common sense through this epic.

The three of them go on a bus/taxi road trip through Mexico in search of Fidencio’s childhood home. It is a journey full of angst, emotions and humor.

This is a tale of identity. The brothers, though living in Texas, are not quite American, not quite Mexican. It is maybe a fact of life living on the border. It’s also very much about being alone. About losing parents or spouses or family and losing a sense of your roots.

This is both an entertaining and insightful read. Casares reminds us of the human issues on the border, not the polarizing political ones. And one more thing, it reminds us that it sucks to get old and watch your body give out on you.

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy

James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

Business news stories have been circulating that Paramount/CBS may be on the market. If you read Unscripted you won’t shed any tears for the disappearance of what seems to have historically been a pit of corporate toxicity. If you haven’t had your fill of sleaze following the Trump trials, you could pick up here.

It all starts with the patriarch, Sumner Redstone. The book covers his later years when he is in his early nineties. Barely able to talk and fed through a tube, this obscenely wealthy geezer still surrounds himself with beautiful young women who he showers with dollars, cars and houses. There’s one woman who is brought in from time to time to attempt some sort of sexual acts with him, most likely without success.

Two of the women he courts end up moving in and taking control of his care, or, more importantly his bank account. These two end up feuding with his daughter Shari. It’s a feud they ultimately lose but nonetheless walk away with considerable wealth.

Did Sumner just become cranky, temperamental and vengeful because he’s so old. We can’t tell what a younger Sumner was like from reading this book but my guess would be pretty awful.

Then there’s Les Moonves, CBS’ superstar CEO. Moonves had a track record of successful programming that has boosted the stock. He has also left behind a trail of MeToo moments. Like when he went after a diabetes doctor who was treating him and masturbated in her office. Or when he hired an assistant whose duties included providing oral sex on demand.

Amidst this sea of men behaving badly, Shari Redstone is treated like something of a hero. She would become controlling shareholder of Viacom and CBS and while she runs up against the male dominated culture of the corporation she eventually prevails, largely due to Moonves being exposed. She also seems to manage to hold together the Redstone family.

However disgraceful the behavior of this cast of characters, they all walk away rich. As do scores of lawyers as these people are perpetually suing and countersuing each other.

Unscripted is written by two New York Times journalists. The style reflects that, full of facts and succinctly written. One suspects it would sail through a fact checking session pretty cleanly.

Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World

Yepoka Yeebo

A swindle of colossal proportions. The perpetrator a Ghanaian named Dr. John Ackah Blay-Miezah. Or at least that was the last name he used. And, of course, he wasn’t a doctor.

The con went something like this. It started with a tall tale told about Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister after it became an independent country. The story goes that Nkrumah hid enormous wealth in the form of gold bars in a Swiss bank. Blay-Miezah seized on that and worked up a scenario whereby he held the keys to recovering this fortune. But he needed some cash to free up the gold held in something called the Oman Ghana Trust Fund, so he offered investors a ten to one return for investments in the fund. Oh how people jump at a get rich quick scheme. Blah-Miezah, working with crooks in Philadelphia and London as well as Ghana, received investments to the tune of billions.

Yeebo paints a picture of 1970’s and 80’s Ghana as infested with corruption. It would be quite a find to come up with a government official whose primary focus wasn’t enriching himself. It seemed like a place where a guy in a bar with a grievance could plot a coup for the next day and have it succeed.

I was fascinated to find that Richard Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell was one of the crooks surrounding Blay-Miezah. This is a guy who was part of an administration that rode a law and order campaign into power. This is also a guy who went to jail because of his role in Watergate.

This book was exhaustively researched. Surely many of the folks mentioned would have wanted to hide this stuff. Yeebo brings it all out and in the epilogue offers this rather depressing conclusion: “…the story of Dr. John Ackah Blay-Miezah is not just a story about a con man. It is a story about how the world works: about how lies change history, and about how so much of today’s world is built on lies. Blay-Miezah matters because he was not the exception—he was the rule.”

No money ever shows up by the way. And the money investors gave to Blay-Miezah seems only to have enabled one man’s excessively lavish lifestyle.