The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

We wanted benevolent leaders who represented the people, by which we meant us and not them, whoever they were. We wanted to live in a society of equality, although if we had to settle for owning more than our neighbor, that would be fine. We wanted a revolution that would overturn the revolution we had just lived through. In sum, we wanted to want for nothing!

Ah, baguette! Symbol of how we Vietnamese have made French culture our own! For we were good bakers of the baguette, and the banh mi we created with baguettes were far tastier and more imaginative than the sandwiches the French fashioned from them.

American jazz, that black-and-blue music so beloved by the French partially because every sweet note reminded them of American racism, which conveniently let them forget their own racism.

If the French had not gone too far in exploiting the Cambodians, would the Khmer Rouge even exist? And wasn’t the student always supposed to go further than the teacher? Wasn’t the student supposed to do what the teacher did, not just follow what the teacher said?

In our Indochinese case, the teacher extolled liberté, égalité, fraternité, while the teacher’s people enslaved the student’s people.

What I’m saying is that all revolutions have excesses. It’s in their nature. People are too exuberant, too passionate. They get carried away. Feelings run high. And sometimes the wrong people are damaged. But you have to put yourself and what happened to you aside. You have to take the long view.

They were all looking at me as if I had said something deeply problematic like “I love America,” which one should never do among French intellectuals. One should confess to that only in private, as with a liking for pornography.

We took unknown words from Césaire, Fanon, and others, composed flash cards in French vocabulary, and turned learning into a drinking game, with Bon drilling us at night and us being forced to take a shot of cognac for every word we missed. “Forced,” of course, is a euphemism with the exact opposite meaning, like “pacification,” which usually involved a great degree of homicidal force on rambunctious natives.

One can get away with mass murder and wholesale looting of countries and continents if one handles oneself with a splash of élan, a dash of finesse, and gallons of hypocrisy and selective amnesia. Just ask the French (or the English or the Dutch or the Portuguese or the Belgians or the Spanish or the Germans or the Americans or the Chinese or the Japanese or even us Vietnamese, but not the Italians, who were not very good at colonization, having forgotten what their Roman ancestors had done so well).

I did not call on a god who did not exist before I went to sleep but instead repeated the last words of Black Skin, White Masks: “My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

Even in our criminality, we Asians were discreet and polite. We took our shoes off when entering homes and we disposed of body parts quietly and cleanly. If only it was possible to get rid of the image of those body parts in one’s conscience and one’s memory!

I could have been French if my father had only recognized me as his son, but instead he disavowed me, a disavowal that differed little from the forgetfulness that was the most important ingredient for enjoying foie gras, for if we could see how it was made, with a farmer force-feeding the poor goose with enormous amounts of grain through a funnel until its liver was about to burst, then perhaps we would not have such a taste for the delicacy, which, like many delicacies, was salted with misery.

I felt only the flat, dry wafer, and I wondered what part of Christ I had in my mouth—a slice of the intestine? a cross-section of an eyeball? a disk of bone?

American exceptionalism, which is how Americans delicately refer to “American imperialism,” a phrase that one must never say to Americans, who sincerely believe, as all imperialists do, that they have taken over the world for its own good, as if imperialism were a kind of penicillin (for the natives), with power, profit, and pleasure merely being surprising side effects (for the doctors).

Like me, they were refugees, in their case fleeing from the flabby belly of uncouth white American racism, straight into the bosom of self-satisfied, self-congratulatory Parisian racism.