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?

There was no need for the French to condemn us. So long as we spoke in their language, we condemned ourselves.

that no longer squatted but assumed the right to sit

And sometimes a Pearl of the Orient could be a Paris of the Orient as well. The Parisians and the French and just about everyone meant that as a compliment, but it was a backhanded compliment, the only kind a colonizer could give to the colonized.

while the northerners offered a utopia that could be found nowhere, the southerners had created a Fantasia that could be experienced everywhere

Thank you, Canada! Thank you, France! The geography lesson continued, and

WHAT IS TO BE DONE ABOUT WHAT NEEDS DOING?

human beings can make: an excuse. Whoever said the road to Hell was paved with good intentions had gotten it all wrong. If you looked more closely, you could see that the road to Hell was paved with excuses.

“In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists.”

“The colonized is a persecuted person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”

that

Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.

“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.

Nations, without exception, disposed of body parts all the time. How could we bear ourselves otherwise if not for the mass graves of our forgetting?

There was only one solution to this alienation that was created not by the Negro or the bastard, but by the real bastards, the racists and colonizers who blamed the victim for the conditions that the victimizer created. And that solution was “to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.”

Real talent was required to use so many words in two languages to say nothing.

I was a little person who spoke an immigrant version of his language, the language of a country that basked in the best of both worlds: to have once been an imperial power that had mugged weaker countries at gunpoint, while no longer being an imperial power and having to deal with pesky things like mosquitoes and malaria or resentment and revolutions.

To avoid talking, we both smoked incessantly and listened to a greatest hits tape of Johnny Hallyday, the sonic equivalent of Ricard Pastis, a taste the rest of the world could not acquire.

If I’m unreadable—if all these Asians you refer to are unreadable—perhaps we are only unreadable to those who do not know how to read. Semantics—

If Jesus Christ, child of refugees, born poor in a stable, a colonized person, a hick from the backwaters, despised by his society’s leaders and by the rulers of his leaders, a humble carpenter—if this Jesus Christ became universal—then so can I, motherfucker!

You know what you know. You know what you do not know. But what do you not know that you do not know? And what do you already know that you refuse to know?

He poured me two fingers of Jack Daniel’s and I was grateful that his fingers were substantially thicker than mine.

“Art is not a mirror held up to the world but a hammer with which to shape it.”