Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Sympathizer is a satirical historical fiction novel set after the Fall of Saigon in the Vietnam War. Inspired by the author’s own experience as a refugee of the war, the novel tells the story of a North Vietnamese correspondent who also serves as the captain of the South Vietnamese army—“a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” The Sympathizer is written as a confession by a nameless narrator, who opens by stating that he is a prisoner of war. After narrowly escaping with his life on a U.S. military plane, the narrator and his South Vietnamese comrades flee to the United States, where the narrator encounters many instances of anti-Asian racism and instances of further trauma. Ultimately, despite the fact that the war in Vietnam is drawing to a close, the narrator decides to return to Vietnam with one of his comrades because the war continues to give his troubled life meaning. Upon crossing the border between Laos and Vietnam, the narrator and his comrade are captured by communist forces and relocated to a detention camp, wherein the narrator writes his confession. As a novel that stars a half-Vietnamese-half-French narrator with mixed allegiances who travels to the United States near the Vietnam War’s end, The Sympathizer is not only an intricate story about a complex time in history, but also a commentary on the mixed identities and experiences of racism that many Asian Americans have historically faced.
Everything about The Sympathizer’s narrator reveals the conflicts of his inner identity and conscience. The narrator is born out of wedlock to a French colonialist and Vietnamese woman in Vietnam: as the narrator recounts, “My mother was native, my father was foreign, and strangers and acquaintances had enjoyed reminding me of this ever since my childhood, spitting on me and calling me bastard, although sometimes, for variety, they called me bastard before they spit on me.” From his birth, the narrator is doomed to a destiny of otherness and troubled identity. The product of a European father and an Asian mother, he is regarded as ethnically inferior by paternalistic white colonialists as well as too tainted—a “bastard”—to be truly Vietnamese. It is no wonder that the narrator, an agent who risked everything for Vietnam’s future, became so desperate to escape to the United States, where he had previously studied as a college student. In a conversation with his revolutionary correspondent from North Vietnam, the narrator recalls that “When I reminded him that I did not belong here, he said, You don’t belong in America, either. Perhaps, I said. But I wasn’t born there. I was born here.” In the United States, at least, the narrator would be a true foreigner and be treated as such with traceable cause. In Vietnam, the narrator would have faced the much more humiliating destiny of being ostracized, despite being a “native.” This plight is symbolic of the internal conflict that many Asian Americans face—being perceived as not quite American enough to be fully accepted in the United States and yet not belonging to the countries from which their Asian ancestors migrated. The Asian American experience, like the narrator’s allegiances and heritage, is defined by inconsistencies and splits that serve as alienating symbols of an inferior status.
Alas, once the narrator arrives in the United States, he faces racism that has the same ostracizing quality as the prejudice he faced in Vietnam. Shortly after setting foot in the U.S., the narrator travels to Los Angeles, where he is able to find work as a secretary in a local university’s Department of Oriental Studies. There, he is frequently accosted by the Department Chair, a white man who fetishizes his Taiwanese wife and paternalistically reminds the narrator of his alienation. After the Department Chair becomes more intimate with the narrator, he comfortably proclaims, “Ah, the Amerasian, forever caught between worlds and never knowing where he belongs! Imagine if you did not suffer from the confusion you must constantly experience, feeling the constant tug-of-war inside you and over you, between Orient and Occident.” The Department Chair may have specialized in Oriental Studies (which lends itself a rather paternalistic name), but whether or not he could speak to the narrator’s personal experiences was questionable. His child-like fascination with “the Orient” and obvious disregard for the narrator’s humanity is representative of the view of Asian Americans as exotic creatures—nice to view but never to be intermingled with the viewer. Later on in his stay away from Vietnam, the narrator faces similar microaggression when he is recommended by an American Congressman to work as a script consultant for an Auteur producing a film in the Philippines. Upon being first introduced to this work, the narrator has a conversation with the Auteur’s personal assistant. However, instead of speaking normally to the narrator, the assistant “[trimmed] pronouns and periods, as if punctuation and grammar were wasted on [the narrator]. Then, without deigning to make eye contact, she inclined her head in a gesture of condescension and disdain, signaling [him] to enter.” At this, the narrator could only feign disaffection and submit to the assistant’s condescension if he wished to speak with the Auteur. However, when he speaks to the Auteur himself, the narrator’s advice is ridiculed, and he departs in indignation. Even with his perfect proficiency in English and sophistication of thought, the narrator could not be respected more than his foreign visage. As with Asian Americans in the United States, the narrator’s experience of being treated as other and therefore lesser is perpetual.
The narrator’s observations of all of his experiences lead him to lose faith in the ultimate end that so many of his comrades in the U.S. seek to attain: the American Dream. For people of the narrator’s background, the pursuit of wealth might have been possible, but integration into American society was not. The pursuit of the American Dream was a cruel irony. The narrator and his likes were “living reminders of [America’s] stinging defeat [in the Vietnam War]” who “threatened the sanctity and symmetry of a white and black America whose yin and yang racial politics left no room for any other color, particularly that of pathetic little yellow-skinned people pickpocketing the American purse.” Curiously, even though Asian Americans like the narrator contributed significantly to the United States’ history, Asian American faces somehow register as less American than those of other races. The great mystery of the Asian American experience, as the narrator suggests, will always be how American politicians and ordinary people have failed to see the U.S.’s Asian constituents as one of their own. And yet, so many Asian Americans like the narrator’s comrades remain steadfast in their pursuit of the American Dream, sold on the promise of happiness. However, as the narrator remarks, there exists a distinction between the promise of happiness and the opportunity to pursue happiness: “Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.” Even though many Asian Americans are involved in this game of jackpot, not all succeed. While some would be able to accrue wealth, others would be subjected to having their labor, culture, and identities capitalized in a society that views the Asian presence as an invasive problem which, if inextinguishable, should be simply ignored.
Through the narrator’s telling of his life’s events after the Fall of Saigon, The Sympathizer is a scathing account of the United States’ dubious role in Asian affairs and of the experiences of Asians in America. Nguyen expresses these themes through the narrator’s relationships with his Vietnamese compatriots and American acquaintances as well as his conscience-wrenching journey as a sympathizer to two enemies of war. The Sympathizer is important because it offers relatable reading experiences for Asian immigrants and their posterity as well as a unique perspective of American history. It deserves a respectable place on American bookshelves, as it tells the story of the United States and a horrific screeching in its past that still reverberates today.
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