The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

And it struck us all then, the answer to humanity’s eternal question of Why? It was, and is, simply this: Why not?

Most of us had fled our motherland because the communists in charge had labeled us puppets, or pseudo-pacifists, or bourgeois nationalists, or decadent reactionaries, or intellectuals of the false conscience, or because we were related to one of these.

We wanted love, peace, and justice, except for our enemies, whom we wanted to burn in Hell, preferably for eternity. We wanted independence and freedom, except for the communists, who should all be sent to reeducation, preferably for life. 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!

Stepping out of the airplane, we were gripped by a sense of relief, for we had reached asylum, the fever dream of all refugees, especially those rendered refugees not just once or twice but three times: 1954, nine years after I was born; 1975, when I was young and reasonably handsome; and 1979, just two years ago. Was the third time the charm, as the Americans liked to say?

It was fitting, then, that the airport was named after Charles de Gaulle, the greatest of great Frenchmen in recent memory. The hero who had liberated France from the Nazis while continuing to enslave us Vietnamese. Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity!

He was my handler, and if eventually he became my torturer in that reeducation camp, didn’t that suit me, a man with two minds? And if my aunt was not really my aunt, wasn’t that perfect for a man with two faces?

The fact that none of this besides the beret was intrinsically charming indicates how the French had an enormously unfair advantage in their charm offensive, at least for those like me who had been, despite our best efforts, nearly completely colonized. I say nearly because even as I was charmed huffing up those stairs, some small, reptilian part of my brain—the savage native in me—resisted the charm long enough to recognize it for what it was: the seduction of subjugation.

There’s nothing sadder than exile, poor Bon said, fingers trembling on the tablecloth.

Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.

I could not help myself. These faces! The people around us reminded me of home.

Your father was a colonizer and a pedophile, which go hand in hand. Colonization is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all in the holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission!

From Descartes, for example, I learned that because I think, therefore I am!

Some of us ignored the insults, wanting only for our masters to love us. Some of us could not forget the insults and wanted to slay our masters. And some of us—me and myself most of all—loved and hated our masters at the same time.

How could I say that the so-called boat people had already helped themselves by getting on their boats in the first place? How could I say that I refused to be called a “boat person,” a term so overpowering that even the Anglophobic French had simply borrowed and worn it on a regular basis, like un jean and le week-end?

I was not a boat person unless the English Pilgrims who fled religious persecution to come to America on the Mayflower were also boat people. Those refugees just happened to be fortunate that the soon-to-be-hapless natives did not have a camera to record them as the foul-smelling, half-starved, unshaven, and lice-ridden lot that they were. In contrast, our misery was forever recorded in L’Humanité, where we were seen as anything but human. No, the boat people were not human, they did not get the benefit of some romantic painter casting them in oils, standing boldly on the prow of their sinking ships, facing the monstrous elements with the nobility of Greek heroes, enshrined in the Louvre to be admired by tourists and studied by art historians. No, boat people were victims, objects of pity fixed forever in newspaper photographs.

The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity.

Walking the next morning to the Maoist PhD’s apartment from the metro, I experienced déjà vu for the second time in less than twelve hours (strange that even my psychic tics or malfunctions were named in the master’s language).

But sometimes we were not just the Pearl of the Orient, and sometimes the Pearl of the Orient did not even refer to us. I had heard the Chinese of Hong Kong claim that their port was the Pearl of the Orient, and when I was in the Philippines, the Filipinos insisted that Manila was the Pearl of the Orient. Colonies were a pearl choker adorning the alabaster-white neck of the colonizer.

Perhaps something is wrong with the theory if it can’t be put into practice, I said. But it’s never been put into real practice. Unfortunately, conditions are not yet in place for genuine communism. Capitalism has to win globally and become the worst version of itself before communism can subvert it. The workers of the world have to see that capitalism is only interested in profit, not them, and that it will inevitably reduce them to slave labor as it maximizes profit. See Marx, Capital, volume one.

That baton made real what Benjamin—Walter Benjamin—argued in “Critique of Violence”—that what makes the state legitimate is not the law but violence. The state wants to monopolize violence, the monopoly of violence is named the law, and the law legitimates itself. The police are not there to protect us, the citizens, but to protect the state and its rule of law.

I could not tell whether I wanted to laugh, to cry, to shout, or to commit myself to an asylum. I, too, believed in everything he said, but unlike the Maoist PhD, I had lived through a revolution and its consequences.

Che Guevara and the Maoist PhD saw the Vietnamese revolution only from afar, with all its glamorous makeup, whereas I had seen it up close, denuded. Three million people dead for a revolution was, arguably, worth it, although that was always easier to say for the living! But three million people dead for this revolution? We had simply traded one Repressive State Apparatus for another one, and the only difference was that it was our own.

all aspects of our culture we performed much more frequently than a fan dance, or singing a snatch of opera or folk song, or wearing a silk gown, or reenacting a courtship ritual in the rice paddies, which only ever happened once in a lifetime, if at all, and if it did, likely involved scraping off the buffalo dung encrusted between our toes and swatting away the squadrons of dive-bombing mosquitoes.

But you think America betrayed us, I said as the credits rolled. That doesn’t mean everyone betrayed us. You think France raped our country. Why do you have to ruin everything? he cried. Just enjoy the damn song!

How did our so, so serious revolutionary leaders not understand that to own the means of entertainment was also revolutionary!

cast farming as a bucolic lifestyle and the backbone of our culture, whereas I am fairly sure that farming was a sweaty, hot mode of hellish, backbreaking survival that left little time for culture.

I always knew my mother was beautiful, but I also knew it was hard to be beautiful when one was exhausted, which was her normal condition.

I wanted to ask my ghosts if they had seen my mother, but I did not want them to see the child who still lived within me, the boy who screamed for his mama every morning.

And we are all Indochinese, aren’t we? Courtesy of our Franco-Frankenstein, who killed us, cut us up, and stitched us together, christening us with this bastard name that we now all shared, “Indochina.”

If we believed in collective guilt for the French, the Americans, the Japanese, and the Chinese, who had all in one way or another flagellated our country—if we believed so fervently that you committed violence on us—then we had to believe in our own collective guilt as well. Guilt, indeed, was a bitch.

Fanon wrote that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,” and so far, my personal experience bore out his analysis.

The Maoist PhD shook his head sadly over the picture. I saw that this morning, he said. Yes, of course, revolutions make mistakes and sometimes on the scale of the deaths of millions. Tragic? Yes. Wrong? Yes. But if you stop there, you’ve simply stepped into the trap of the capitalists. Ha! they’ll say. Got you! Now your only choice is capitalism and its pseudo-democracy, its trickery of false choices. For if communism is bad, then capitalism must be good, yes? No! Capitalists love to point out how tens of millions have died under Stalin and Mao, all while conveniently forgetting how hundreds of millions have died under capitalism. What were colonialism and slavery but forms of capitalism? What was the genocide of the natives of the Americas but capitalism? But let’s forget about those nasty contradictions of capitalism and focus on what the communists have done!

But another part of me, the recalcitrant Catholic, half fearful and half faithful, shaken and not stirred, believed that she had been airlifted to Heaven along with all the other refugees from that day, which is to say everyone who had died. What were any of us, once dead, but refugees fleeing the wretched earth for the refuge of eternal life?

heard the gunfire, then run out after the dwarfs

Whether one’s life has been worth living, however, is a question that can be answered only by oneself and God. And as He did not exist, that really left only oneself. 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!”

The Soviets are attempting to demonstrate that sad, ugly truth once more in Afghanistan. We must be committed to ensuring that Afghanistan is their Vietnam. “Their Vietnam”? What did that mean?

Vietnam,” in shorthand, was war, tragedy, and death, and so on and so on, and how, I begged to know, would it ever cease being that way?

people of color—and I counted myself as one—were doubly alienated because racism compounded their experiences under capitalism and its dancing partner, colonialism.

These people are our people, I wanted to say, but that was not entirely true. The protesters outside saw themselves as Vietnamese who happened to be in France, whereas the people inside saw themselves as French who happened to have a connection to Vietnam.

Do you know why they found him guilty? Because he was guilty? Because trials in absentia always end in a guilty verdict. The handsome and humorless lawyer, incapable of smiling at my naïveté, snorted. Has anyone ever been found innocent in absentia? Those trials aren’t about justice. They’re morality shows.

Nothing was sexier than sharing the same convictions in a world where few people did.

You! I shouted, as he was shouting, neither of us watching the road anymore. You—who are so upset that I called you and your fellow white people white—you are the one who calls me and my kind Asiatic! I call you Asiatic because you call yourself Asiatic! I have never called myself Asiatic!

since my people—the Vietnamese ones, not the French—did not celebrate birthdays except for the first and the eightieth. Turning one was significant, given high child mortality rates, and attaining eighty was also a landmark, given the many colorful ways of dying in a poor, rural, chaotic, and unjust (but still beautiful) land like mine.

If he beat me and my brothers, it was only because the French beat him first. Or maybe not only. Maybe he really is just an asshole and the French only made it worse. Who knows? One of my other uncles fought against the French in Algeria. The paratroopers took him away and my father—he was just a teenager then—had to go pick up what was left of his brother for burial. That will fuck you up. Then you fuck up your children and your children will fuck up their children and so on.

And I thought, I went to your schools, which are my schools. I learned your language, which is my language. I don’t feel Arab at all, except when people call me an Arab. And that’s not enough? Now I have to change my name, which my parents gave me?

As for France, if race did not exist, bastards could not also exist, could they?

Your love for these men, a love that might one day kill you, also let you know you were worthy of life.

We’re no more traitors than you are a traitor. The communists call you a traitor, but you are a patriot. So are we. You did what you believed was right for the country, just as we did what we believed was right—

But I can see every detail . . . And I can see beneath the details . . . I see not only his face now but the face he once wore, when we were fourteen, just boys. And on that young boy’s face, I see the future, although what I cannot see is his fate, and mine. What I see instead are hope, idealism, love, brotherhood, sincerity, and pain as he slices his palm and swears his oath. To us. I can still feel the stickiness and the slipperiness of his blood on my stinging palm, mingling with my blood as we grasp each other’s hands and become one. Oh, God! My God . . . forgive me. Those were the days when we were young, and innocent, and pure.

How can he be dead when you have written about him over so many pages, over two volumes of your confessions? You have read and reread your confessions, and in them Bon is alive, still alive, forever alive. He must live! This is how you have kept him away from the shade of death and in the light, until now.