The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The hero who had liberated France from the Nazis while continuing to enslave us Vietnamese.

The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.

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

the French were honorary Asians in their heroic determination to eat every kind and part of an animal.

He offered a smile, the kind that the Americans he admired so much called a “shit-eating grin,” a phrase whose meaning was the exact opposite of what one would suppose.

a crowd of intellectuals so leftist that I was always surprised to see that almost all of them ate with their right hands.

Although I did not say so out loud, I wondered if perhaps authentic Vietnamese culture should also include gambling, which we taught to our children during Tet celebrations and then wondered why we had a predilection for gambling as adults; or smoking and drinking coffee in cafés, for which, if there were an Olympic competition for such a sport, we Vietnamese men would be gold medal contenders,

Sometimes I preferred to sip my whiskey, to draw out the experience, because it was so good, and sometimes I needed to pour it down my throat as fast as possible, cranking up my liver to full throttle, because life was so bad.

one would keel over and die of ennui,

nothing brought peace more effectively than exterminating as many of one’s enemies as possible.

Paradise was the nicest place that I had ever lived, and all I had to do to live there was to die.

being very Vietnamese or simply very Parisian, as rudeness was second nature to both cultures.

dressed in a silken red ao dai with silken yellow trousers, which were either the colors of the anticommunist flag (if looked at in one way) or the colors of the communist flag (if looked at the other way).

Dead souls, after all, could weigh almost nothing.

the best situation for an anti-imperialist was to live in an imperial country where one could benefit from imperialism while righteously opposed to it, as happened quite often in the United States,

Perhaps that was what I needed, to need fewer things. To need less. To want . . . nothing?

I did that most un-Vietnamese of things and tipped her.

Your face is as imperturbable as . . . as the Mona Lisa’s.

To witness the interior of human beings was never, ever a pleasant experience.

My sponge of a professor had actually dripped some lukewarm wisdom on my brow, for what he had once proclaimed to our class was true, that books meant something different when we returned to them later, leavened by life.

his favorite food (doner kebabs),

wore colonial casual: white linen suit, white linen shirt, and brown oxfords.

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. When I tried my French on them, the quartet’s leader had shaken his head and whispered, No, man, we can’t speak French. I mean, we can speak French, but we don’t speak it here. Or when we do, we got to speak it badly, like Americans, get me? If we speak good French, they’ll think we’re Africans. They treat us great when they think we’re Americans, but when they think we’re Africans— They treat us like shit, the other three said.

Whitewashing the blood-soaked profits of colonization was the only kind of laundering white men did with their own hands.

The woman’s eyes were squeezed shut and her head was flung back as the octopus probed her with his tentacles. Or was it her tentacles? The gender-ambiguous octopus’s bulbous eyes peered from between the woman’s legs, its head in a pose I remembered all too well. Hokusai, the Ronin murmured, pausing in his social circuit.

Amazing stuff, my boy! I tried not to be disturbed by the necklace of human ears around his neck, which on closer inspection were dried peaches. Absolutely amazing! A man can live and die like this! Bunga bunga!

Congratulations, you bastard. You’re a father.

For a moment, you forgot reality, which was that the people who most hated Vietnamese people were other Vietnamese people.

your baptismal name, Joseph.

just as you shudder at being named after the most famous cuckold in Christian history. Your baptismal name is apt, for God, if He exists, has fucked you over many times.