The Sympathizer (2015)
is set in April 1975 in Saigon – the fall of Saigon – and in America.
The narrator begins by
announcing to readers that he is ‘a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two
faces.’ He is a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain, arranging to migrate
to America after the fall of Saigon.
While he is in Los
Angeles with Vietnamese refugees, he is secretly reporting to the communists in
Vietnam. So this is a spy story, an espionage story first, but it is also a
refugee story, a Vietnamese-American story, an identity-crisis story, and a
story of trust, love, and betrayal.
I’ve read a few
American-Vietnamese stories before, but this is widely different. The narrator tells,
in all honesty, and very comically, what it was like to settle into American
life as a Vietnamese refugee in the 1970s, with ‘one foot in America and one
foot in Vietnam.’
The title comes from
the lines: ‘Should I not refer to those people [on whom I was sent to spy], my
enemies, as ‘’them’’? I confess that after having spent almost my whole life in
their company I cannot help but sympathize with them … I credit my gentle
mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can
be a worthy behaviour. After all, if she had not blurred the lines between maid
and priest, or allowed them to be blurred, I would not exist.’ Yes, he is an
illegitimate child, and this too has a bearing on his identity-crisis.
The narrator’s story
is told in terms of films, music, and icons of the times, in angry-satirical-cynical-comical
statements of American attitudes toward Vietnamese refugees.
The narrator works as
a technical consultant on artistic projects, generally movies, which he says is
the same as being ‘an infiltrator into a work of [American] propaganda.’
For example, he
mentions ‘Asian’ actor James Yoon. ‘Yoon was the Asian Everyman, a
television actor whose face most people would know but whose name they could
not recall … Yoon was, in fact, a Korean American in his mid-thirties who could
play a decade older or a decade younger and assume the mask of any Asian
ethnicity.’ In one of Yoon’s last movies, in which his character was tortured
for being a communist agent … ‘despite all the punishment inscribed on him, he
never uttered a word, or at least an intelligible one.’
The dark humour of
this novel is extraordinarily insightful, provocative, funny, sad, absurd, courageous,
and intelligent. If you love good satire, and are interested in the aftermath
of the Vietnam War, this is the novel for you.
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international
aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different
in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament
(2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a
Knife-Edge (2010), and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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