The Sympathizer

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

By this degree, the three call girls were troupers, which could not be said of 70 or 80 percent of the prostitutes in the capital and outlying cities, of whom sober studies, anecdotal evidence, and random sampling indicate the existence of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands. Most were poor, illiterate country girls with no means of making a living except to live as ticks on the fur of the nineteen-year-old American GI. His pants bulging with an inflationary roll of dollars and his adolescent brain swollen with the yellow fever that afflicts so many Western men who come to an Asian country, this American GI discovered to his surprise and delight that in this green-breasted world he was no longer Clark Kent but Superman, at least in regards to women. Aided (or was it invaded?) by Superman, our fecund little country no longer produced significant amounts of rice, rubber, and tin, cultivating instead an annual bumper crop of prostitutes, girls who had never so much as danced to a rock song before the pimps we called cowboys slapped pasties on their quivering country breasts and prodded them onto the catwalk of a Tu Do bar. Now am I daring to accuse American strategic planners of deliberately eradicating peasant villages in order to smoke out the girls who would have little choice but to sexually service the same boys who bombed, shelled, strafed, torched, pillaged, or merely forcibly evacuated said villages? I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to ser...