The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer #1)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

In this gloomiest of Aprils, faced with this question of what should be done, the general who always found something to do could no longer do so. A man who had faith in the mission civilisatrice and the American Way was at last bitten by the bug of disbelief.

My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy.

Now am I daring to accuse American strategic planners of deliberately eradicating peasant villages in order to smoke out the girls who would have little choice but to sexually service the same boys who bombed, shelled, strafed, torched, pillaged, or merely forcibly evacuated said villages?

But performers perform at least partially to forget their sadness, a trait I am well acquainted with. In these situations it is better to flirt and play, allowing everyone the opportunity to pretend to be happy for so long that they might actually feel such happiness.

was a smashingly successful cease-fire, for in the last two years only 150,000 soldiers had died, in addition to the requisite number of civilians. Imagine how many would have died without a truce!

Joining a line to turn in our trays to the dishwashers was the coup de grâce, pronouncing us no longer adult citizens of a sovereign country but stateless refugees, protected, for the moment, by the American military.

But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.

Before leaving camp, we exchanged the phone numbers and addresses of our new destinations, knowing we would need the refugee telegraph system to discover which city had the best jobs, which state had the lowest taxes, where the best welfare benefits were, where the least racism was, where the most people who looked like us and ate like us lived.

pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit.

At least in the Philippines I would be a tourist, and since the Philippines was east of our homeland, perhaps I would find it infinitely complex.

The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.

Man, not surprisingly, understood Hollywood’s function as the launcher of the intercontinental ballistic missile of Americanization.

What mattered was that the audience member, having paid for the ticket, was willing to let American ideas and values seep into the vulnerable tissue of his brain and the absorbent soil of his heart.

I had an encroaching sense of the meanness of my accomplishment, that I had been deluded in thinking I could effect change in how we were represented. I had altered the script here and there, and incited the creation of a few speaking parts, but to what end? I had not derailed this behemoth, or changed its direction, I had only made its path smoother as the technical consultant in charge of authenticity, the spirit haunting bad movies that aspired to be good ones.

was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world.

The Movie was just a sequel to our war and a prequel to the next one that America was destined to wage.

Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers.

I did not need to confess to a God I did not believe in, but I did need to appease the soul of a ghost whose face even now gazed at me from the altar on the side table.

The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think. Not thinking is more difficult than it sounds,

The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications.

This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall.

For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful.

Outside sprawled an expansive golfing green that demanded more water than a Third World city,

I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.

For someone to be happy, he must measure his happiness against someone else’s unhappiness, a process which most certainly works in reverse.

Refugees such as ourselves could never dare question the Disneyland ideology followed by most Americans, that theirs was the happiest place on earth.

But what would happen if one took off the mask and the other saw one not with love but with horror, disgust, and anger? What if the self that one exposes is as unpleasing to others as the mask, or even worse?

To live was to be haunted by the inevitability of one’s own decay, and to be dead was to be haunted by the memory of living.

While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored. To be anti-American only makes you a reactionary. In our case, having defeated the Americans, we no longer define ourselves as anti-American. We are simply one hundred percent Vietnamese.

Sympathy alone would never persuade the rich to share willingly and the powerful to give up power voluntarily.

just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides.

We can argue about the causes for these wars and the apportioning of blame, but the fact is that war begins, and ends, over here, with the support of citizens for the war machine, with the arrival of frightened refugees fleeing wars we have instigated.

Toni Morrison says in Beloved that to have to explain yourself to white people distorts you because you start from a position of assuming your inhumanity or lack of humanity in other people’s eyes. Rather than writing a book that tries to affirm humanity, which is typically the position that minority writers are put into, the book starts from the assumption that we are human, and then goes on to prove that we’re also inhuman at the same time.