The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The navigator opened the hatch and called us onto the deck of our ark, which the uncaring world denigrated as merely a boat.

Since ghosts were weightless, we could carry an infinite number of them.

One might try marijuana in Asia, but in the Orient, one smoked hashish.

Man and I were spies, secretly working against the anticommunist cause that Bon held so dear, the subterfuge squeezing us into all manner of difficult situations, our method of escape usually involving someone’s death.

The danger with worshipping human beings, of course, is that eventually they reveal their flawed humanity,

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?

No, not a drug dealer, which was a matter of bad taste. I mean was I becoming a capitalist, which was a matter of bad morals,

But a capitalist was a legalized criminal who targeted thousands, if not millions, and felt no shame for his plunder.

To expect capitalists to critique themselves was like asking the police to police themselves—

but it was a backhanded compliment, the only kind a colonizer could give to the colonized.

I’m not going to kill her. I just don’t want to be in her apartment.

Fantasia might have been mere entertainment, but so what?

Sarcasm was even more irritating when it came from a ghost.

What a fate it was, to be interrogated and then tortured by my best friend,

I only have to feel guilty if it’s a crime.

Shit was the secret of every society, and how a society treated its shit told a stranger a great deal,

I didn’t create the absurdity in this world! I just see it!