The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer #1)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

If allowed to stay together, I told my aunt, we could have incorporated ourselves into a respectably sized, self-sufficient colony, a pimple on the buttocks of the American body politic, with ready-made politicians, police officers, and soldiers, with our own bankers, salesmen, and engineers, with doctors, lawyers, and accountants, with cooks, cleaners, and maids, with factory owners, mechanics, and clerks, with thieves, prostitutes, and murderers, with writers, singers, and actors, with geniuses, teachers, and the insane, with priests, nuns, and monks, with Buddhists, Catholics, and the Cao Dai, with people from the north, the center, and the south, with the talented, the mediocre, and the stupid, with patriots, traitors, and neutralists, with the honest, the corrupt, and the indifferent, sufficiently collective to elect our own representative to the Congress and have a voice in our America, a Little Saigon as delightful, delirious, and dysfunctional as the original, which was exactly why we were not allowed to stay together but were instead dispersed by bureaucratic fiat to all the longitudes and latitudes of our new world.