Reviewing Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (April 2024)

On the surface, Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, his first published fiction, may seem like just another Vietnam War story. What’s different is that, as a related from a Vietnamese point of view, the author intends to deliberately break with the Asian non-confrontational literature about the war and express his anger and rage at the U.S. for what it did to Vietnam and the Vietnamese people. In a telephone interview with Paul Tran, reprinted and included in this volume, Nguyen states that

I sensed a reluctance to be angry at American culture or at the United States for what it has done. That’s why, in the book, I adopt a much angrier tone towards American culture and the U.S..

Because he was only four years old when his family left Vietnam and arrived in the U.S., his views have been shaped by his family and his community as well as his research. Nguyen represents a, but not necessarily the, view from the country where the war was fought and the people who suffered the most from the war. (Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s 2021 novel, The Mountains Sing, provides a North Vietnamese woman’s perspective of a family being caught in between the communist land reform fervour and the American bombing of the North including the infamous Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972—this after having endured French colonialism and Japanese wartime occupation.) And he is quick to point out that his novel doesn’t do justice to the death and destruction in Laos and Cambodia, which were unwittingly sucked into and engulfed by the war. In his accompanying essay commemorating Black April, the anniversary of the fall of Saigon, he reminds the reader of the horrific Asian death toll—upwards of two million Laotians and Cambodians and three million Vietnamese consumed by the Vietnam War.

The Sympathizer is a first-person confession to the Commandant of a Vietnamese prison camp. The action takes place between the fall of Saigon in 1975 and 1979, the latter based on the author’s reference to China’s invasion of Vietnam in response to Vietnam’s war against Cambodia. The narrator, a former North Vietnamese spy who had infiltrated the staff of a South Vietnamese general, is captured along with a small group of insurgents on a hopeless mission to invade from Thailand and topple the communist government. As the narrator is discovered to be a communist agent, he is imprisoned separately from the others; however, since he has been with the insurgents his loyalty is suspect and so he is put through a re-education program—a euphemism for the use of torture to change the heart and mind. The details of the torture are sufficiently graphic to convey the horror of what humans can do to one another even in an age when TV, film, and the Internet eat away at our empathetic selves. For the first year of the narrator’s re-education he is tasked with preparing a confession that meets the critical standards of the prison Commandant, a military officer, and the political Commissar, a communist party enforcer. Nothing seems good enough for the narrator’s taskmasters.

The narrator’s confession is the novel. This explains why there are no quotes in the text and why the narrative jumps around. As a lengthy 300-page confession written under the harsh physical and psychological conditions of solitary confinement, the stream of consciousness narrative style is most appropriate and, realistically, the most that could reasonably be expected. The history of the narrator and his community and his country are related through the embedded stories of illicit love between a French priest and his 13-year-old Vietnamese maid, edge-of-the-seat action and suspense during the panicked evacuation of Saigon, the community’s ground-up re-settlement in Los Angeles, a quixotic coup attempt to overthrow the communist Vietnamese government, the torture regime of a communist Vietnamese re-education camp, and a childhood blood-brother pledge that leads to freedom from prison and escape from Vietnam on the overcrowded boats of 1979. (The phenomenon of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ lasted well beyond the fall of Saigon, and the label is pejorative in Nguyen’s opinion as “[i]t smacks of anthropological condescension, evoking some forgotten branch of the human family, some lost tribe of amphibians emerging from ocean mist, crowned with seaweed.”)

The following is an important clue to the book's title.

Thank you, dear Commandant, for the notes that you and the commissar have given me on my confession. You have asked me what I mean when I say “we” or “us,” as in those moments when I identify with the southern soldiers and evacuees on whom I was sent to spy. Should I not refer to those people, my enemies, as “them”? I confess that after having spent almost my whole life in their company I cannot help but sympathize with them, as I do with many others. 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. Many bastards behave like bastards, and I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. After all, if she had not blurred the lines between maid and priest, or allowed them to be blurred, I would not exist.

Among the notable themes in The Sympathizer are the complexity of war (its causes, effects, motivations, loyalties and responsibilities), self-deception and compromise with an enemy, the cruel irony of victims as victimizers, and perhaps most importantly nihilism, whereby “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” For the narrator, Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary slogan has become empty, in the sense that the revolutionary ends of independence and freedom have been achieved but only through the subjugation of an Other and the restarting of the cycle.

One of the most interesting techniques Nguyen uses to present the complexity of themes is the run-on sentence. These lengthy sentences heavy with details reflect a mind desperately attempting to weave a tapestry from the jarring collision of juxtaposed images, sensations, memories, longings and fears. For example, the following extended quote elicits what many Vietnamese emigrants (emigrant instead of immigrant, because they are departing home) could not forget about home.

We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

And finally, this next quote that comes near the end of the narrator’s psychological torture, which incidentally is conducted largely in accordance with the CIA manual though supplemented by equally gruesome local customs, posits a seemingly endless reel of ‘what-ifs’ and alternate possibilities that ultimately succumb to the most basic of human needs.

[I]f you would please just turn off the lights, if you would please just turn off the telephone, if you would just stop calling me, if you would remember that the two of us were once and perhaps still are the best of friends, if you could see that I have nothing left to confess, if history’s ship had taken a different tack, if I had become an accountant, if I had fallen in love with the right woman, if I had been a more virtuous lover, if my mother had been less of a mother, if my father had gone to save souls in Algeria instead of here, if the commandant did not need to make me over, if my own people did not suspect me, if they saw me as one of them, if we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else’s play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn’t come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn’t taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said, Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand years, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if Adam and Eve still frolicked in the Garden of Eden, if the dragon lord and the fairy queen had not given birth to us, if the two of them had not parted ways, if fifty of their children had not followed their fairy mother to the mountains, if fifty more had not followed their dragon father to the sea, if legend’s phoenix had truly soared from its own ashes rather than simply crashed and burned in our countryside, if there were no Light and no Word, if Heaven and earth had never parted, if history had never happened, neither as farce nor as tragedy, if the serpent of language had not bitten me, if I had never been born, if my mother was never cleft, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?

In some respects, the narrator’s special status as a prisoner is reminiscent of the communist party loyalist in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon who is imprisoned for treason and struggles with having been charged with betraying the party he had served. This leads to one final observation: the notion of a vanguard leading the masses—to independence and freedom or some such utopia—ties in importantly with the Nguyen’s theme of ‘nothingness.’ For the narrator who is sufficiently schooled in communist ideology, Lenin’s concept of the vanguard of the proletariat naturally comes to mind. But through his intellectual self-torture for his own misdeeds, he comes to realize that this leadership paradigm is filled with contradictions. Speaking as a communist agent—purged but not properly ‘re-educated’—he concludes that “our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power.” But,

Hadn’t the French and the Americans done exactly the same? Once revolutionaries themselves, they had become imperialists, colonizing and occupying our defiant little land, taking away our freedom in the name of saving us. Our revolution took considerably longer than theirs, and was considerably bloodier, but we made up for lost time. When it came to learning the worst habits of our French masters and their American replacements, we quickly proved ourselves the best.

Nguyen insists that he is not laying full blame on the French and the Americans. In his interview with Paul Tran, Nguyen admits that “we fucked ourselves,” and he emphasizes that he “didn’t want to let anybody off the hook” and that his book attempts to “hold everyone accountable.”

Perhaps then, the wartime slogan ‘independence and freedom’ is just another siren call sung by people who have power and don’t want to relinquish it, who have had power and lost it and want to have it back, who are next in line to assume power or who take pleasure in being near power, and those who want to critique power, to overcome power to . . . . and so on. Being American, French, Japanese or Vietnamese (South or communist) is incidental.