The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Given their gastronomic peculiarities for eating brains, guts, snails, and the like, the French were honorary Asians in their heroic determination to eat every kind and part of an animal.

The average person of any race was not good-looking, but while the ugliness of others only confirmed prejudices, the homeliness of one’s own people was always comforting.

The danger with worshipping human beings, of course, is that eventually they reveal their flawed humanity, at which point the believer has no choice but to kill the fallen idols or die trying.

Thank you, Jean-Jacques! By you I was inspired to be true to myself, for even if myself was a rotten bastard, I was like no other rotten bastard in history, before or since. I learned to love confessing and have never stopped acknowledging my crimes of violence, torture, and betrayal, all of which our French masters had taught us through the violence and torture they had inflicted on us as they betrayed their own ideals.

Perhaps my problem was that I thought we Vietnamese had hit bottom, under the French, and then saw there was another bottom beneath that with the Americans, when in reality, there was yet another bottom to discover—our own.

I was not just a mostly harmless domestic Asian; I was a completely harmless and well-disciplined Japanese tourist. In this disguise, as an innocent visitor intent on taking photographs rather than an invader who might be taking French jobs, I could go almost anywhere.

even if staging a culture show was really an acknowledgment of one’s cultural inferiority. The truly powerful rarely needed to put on a show, since their culture was always everywhere. Americans knew their culture was ubiquitous, whether burgers or bombs.

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