The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer #1)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.

Who wants war? Do you? It’s the last thing I want. Or one of the last things. Honestly, I’d rather not die, or have my loved ones die, before not wanting any more war. But as a writer, I have to imagine that there are some people out there who want war. Or aren’t adverse to it. Or think it’s something necessary if unpleasant. These people are too often the ones that don’t have to go to war but stand to benefit from it. Or can cheer it piously from a distance. Or think war is an adventure, until they actually experience it. By then it’s too late. Even if they share their wisdom with a new generation, too many won’t listen. And too often, it’s the poor who bear the brunt of war, either because they’re the ones to be drafted, or they’re the ones that can’t get out of war’s way. That was what was going through my mind when I wrote this. Do you think literature can stop us from going to war? That’s the hope, perhaps, for some writers and readers. So far there’s no evidence to support that hope.

(Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.)

I heard this from a Japanese professor in Tokyo during a wonderful sashimi dinner where I was the guest as a visiting lecturer. The dinner was, for me, free. But the mild implication was that there was now a web of obligation in which I was caught. I haven’t yet had the chance to repay that hospitality. But what the professor said has always remained with me, as it’s probably true. At least in some cases.

Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.

Am I being cynical here? Have we, perhaps, seen a figure like this, a man who believes everything he says even if it’s a lie? And do we, sometimes, perhaps, maybe, believe our own lies to ourselves and others?

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.

It’s human nature to have divisions, to have us versus them, and to want to belong to the herd. In such a mindset, it’s easy to overlook our friends’ faults, or excuse them, and to point out the faults of our foes. Taken to the extreme, this leads to conflict, violence, war. In the aftermath, former soldiers often find that they have more in common with their former enemies than they do with the civilians of their own side. They’ve shared an experience that the noncombatants can never know. But that wisdom of shared experience is too late to prevent future wars. This was what led me to think that if we could only look beyond our need to protect ourselves in groups and look to see what we share with the people we are supposed to disagree with, even hate, we would be better off. Easier said than done. Have you been able to do it?

So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.

I just liked this sentence a lot when I wrote it. The rhythm, the metaphor of showering. I was obsessed in this novel with trying to find as many striking images as I could, partly because I was beholden to two novels: António Lobo Antunes’ THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD, in which almost every sentence has a remarkable image, and Vladimir Nabokov’s LOLITA, with its memorable line that “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” By the end of THE SYMPATHIZER, you know why this sentence matters.

So it was that I committed my first unnatural act at thirteen with a gutted squid purloined from my mother’s kitchen, where it awaited its proper fate along with its companions.

In one moment early in the book, our narrator has a flashback to the moment he lost his virginity…with a squid. Hmm. Judging from Goodreads reviews, about 1% of readers felt this was a cephalopod too far. As lowminded as this passage is (and what’s wrong with that?), there is a highminded conclusion, but I’m not sure if my distressed readers made it that far or noticed if they did, which is that in the larger scheme of things—murder, massacre, warfare—which we as a society can generally talk about, a sexual encounter of the squid kind is nothing! And, of course, I am only alluding to the hilarious episode in Philip Roth’s PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, which I read at far too young of an age, where Portnoy does the unmentionable with a slab of liver from the family fridge…which he then returns it to for the family dinner later that night. That, dear readers, is Literature.

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.

It’s also human nature to see the world and its conflicts as battles between right and wrong. Good and evil. If only things were so simple. Hegel is absolutely correct here. Any side in a conflict usually does see itself as right and the other side as wrong, but the other side feels exactly the same way. Hence, right versus right. How do you solve that? It’s very unfortunate in real life. In a novel, it’s exactly the type of dilemma that creates drama.

After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.

A lot of countries use guns to take away other countries’ freedom and independence, and often do this with high-minded rhetoric which no one believes except the country doing the violence. So the United States is not unique in this regard. HOWEVER, we seem to have a fetish for “freedom” and “independence.” They are a part of the American mythology. I wanted to poke fun at that mythology, as all mythologies deserve to be satirized once they become hypocritical. Rest assured, I get around to satirizing the Vietnamese communist hypocrisy around freedom and independence too.

What am I dying for? he cried back. I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.

Bon says this. A ruthless killer who loves his friends and his family. Kind of like God in being able to offer both punishment and love. A man of paradox and contradiction, as expressed in this quote. Bon might be kind of scary in person, but I really like him as a character on a page. I’m pretty sure I also read somewhere that this quote helped inspire a Green Day song, but now I can’t find any trace of that online. Help me out here. I did find out that Sleater-Kinney was inspired by The Sympathizer. https://pitchfork.com/features/moodboard/sleater-kinney-the-center-wont-hold-interview/

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

Am I wrong?

What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?

The war in Viet Nam posed all these questions, and the answers were tragic in the short term. My family fled from Viet Nam because of the answers to these questions. We were on the losing side, and the winners didn’t treat the losers very well. I do wonder if the suffering of the losers will matter in the long run. A hundred or two hundred years from now, will anyone care or remember what the losers went through when they lost power to the revolutionaries? The history of the American revolution would indicate that no one, or very few, will care. Who remembers the losers of the American revolution? It’s here that a novel might matter, by telling the story of the losers as much as the victors.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If you like THE SYMPATHIZER, you’ll probably love Charles Yu’s INTERIOR CHINATOWN, about a doomed actor known only as the Generic Asian Man. And Gina Apostol’s INSURRECTO, about movies, memory, and the American war in the Philippines. And the sequel to The Sympathizer, THE COMMITTED, which continues his misadventures in 1980s Paris. In The Sympathizer, I set out to offend everybody—Americans, communist Vietnamese, and anticommunist Vietnamese—and judging from my hate mail, I succeeded. Who else was left to offend? The French! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52260627-the-committed