The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

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, 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.

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

Sometimes he heard their mournful ghosts calling, occasionally pleading with him to join them, other times urging him to stay alive.