Author Viet Thanh Nguyen discussed about adapting his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer, for the screen. Through clips from the series and readings from the novel, Nguyen talked about the difficulties and rewards of adapting his work for the screen, among other topics for the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art
Tom Vick:
Good evening, everyone. Welcome to tonight’s very special event with Viet Thanh Nguyen. I’m Tom Vick, curator of film here at the National Museum of Asian Art, where we do all kinds of wonderful events throughout the year. I’d like to thank our co-presenters for tonight’s program, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and the Vietnam Society. Please give them a round of applause. Of course, I’d also like to thank HBO Max for making this event possible. In case if anyone in here doesn’t know, The Sympathizer is, new episodes premiere every Sunday night, and then they stream on Max the next day. There have been three episodes so far, and if you haven’t seen them already, I encourage you strongly to start checking them out. They’re really great. Tonight we welcome back to our stage Viet Thanh Nguyen to discuss, of course, his adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel for the series.
Among his other books, they include The Committed, another novel, the short story collection, The Refugees and the nonfiction books, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, and most recently, The Man With Two Faces. Of course, you probably all know this. But you may not know that we are selling his books in the lobby, and he will be glad to sign your copy after the show. So please join us after the show for a book signing. Our moderator tonight is Dr. Sylvia Chong, associate professor of American Studies and English at the University of Virginia, and author of The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era, so a perfect moderator for tonight’s program. So with no further ado, please welcome Viet Thanh Nguyen and Sylvia Chong.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thank you so much. Thank you, Tom.
Sylvia Chong:
Hello. Okay, just checking our mic. Thank you all for coming today. This is such an exciting event. A little backstory, back before the Pulitzer, back before the HBO series, we had Viet down at UVA, University of Virginia, to talk about the novel. Little did I know that we’d be watching it on HBO in such a very high production value adaptation. So I’m really looking forward to talking with Viet today about some of the processes of doing an literary adaptation. We’ve got some clips, so hopefully, it’s not too much of a spoiler for those of you. We won’t go past Episode 3. Obviously, those of you who have read the book probably know the spoilers that are coming up, but we won’t talk about them in too much detail, although you should know.
I think I just want to first acknowledge that it’s always hard, I’m a film scholar, Viet’s a scholar as well, every time we watch a work adapted for the screen, it’s hard not to feel possessive about the original work. The written work has a quality to it, a pace of narration, a style, and invariably, something happens in the adaptation. So we’re not going to spend our time cataloging on the ways things deviate, but I think we want to get into some of the interesting aspects of choices; choices that have significance, especially given the original novel’s emphasis on means of representation. So Viet, I’m just going to start with a super general question. How involved were you in this production? This is given in Episode 4, which is coming up, the context here is this question of the means of representation. How does one seize it? How does one get involved in it? How did you get involved with this means of representation?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thanks for that. Thanks all of you for being here. Thanks to the museum and to Vietnam Society and the Smithsonian Asian American Museum for having us. I can’t imagine a better partner to talk about this than with Sylvia who wrote an entire book exactly on the topic that the TV series is concerned with. So I’ve asked Sylvia to be brutally honest as a scholar and a critic about what we’ve seen so far, and I’ve been trying to be brutally honest. But in all honesty, I’m just way too close to this TV series to really be objective about it. I’ve been very involved in setting up the TV series because we started having conversations with producers as early as 2016 to try to adapt the TV series, and it’s been a long road. The longest part of making this TV series was all the talking that was involved in meeting various producers and people with money who tried to make this thing happen.
I think, in 2016, it wasn’t actually possible to make this TV series because at that time, I was working with a different producer, a person whose work I really respect, an Asian American producer, had been around in Hollywood for a long time. She came on, and she really wanted to adapt this. At the time, our model for the TV series was Narcos, which cost about $50 million, I think, to make Narcos. So she went off for several months to try to sell this idea. She came back after several months and she said, “Well, basically, what I’m hearing from people in Hollywood is that if you want a $50 million TV series, you’re going to have to get someone like Keanu Reeves to be a part of it.” I thought, “Wait a minute, that’s racist.” Not her, but the reaction. Because you have to remember, you look back at Narcos now, there were no movie stars in Narcos.
Now we know Pedro Pascal was in it, but at the time, there was nobody, and they could get 50 million to do that. But for an Asian or Asian American production, we would need Keanu Reeves to justify that much of money. I love Keanu Reeves, but he’s not Vietnamese. He was just the closest person to a mixed race person that Hollywood could imagine. So it really took, I think, a shift in the political climate is my guess, because obviously what happened after 2016, it was all the unrest in the country, political unrest, this recognition on the part of liberals that the country had deep-seated racial problems that had barely started to investigate. We benefited from that, I think. We had an opening. So she couldn’t get it done. Then another producer approached me, Niv Fichman, and Niv is Canadian. Niv had adapted the novels of José Saramago to the screen, Blindness, and The Double, which he turned into a film called The Enemy.
Saramago novels are complicated, and I thought, “If he can do that, then he might have the capacity to do this.” So then he asked me, “Who do you think would be the ideal director for this?” I said immediately Park Chan-wook. So if you know anything about Park Chan-wook’s movies, then you know he is the ideal director for this. His movie Old Boy was a big stylistic influence on The Sympathizer. So when Park Chan-wook read the novel and agreed to do it, I thought, “This is serendipitous.” So that was the kind of work that I think was most important for me was assembling with Niv the right team of collaborators, because I knew as a collaborative project, I would have to hand over the novel to a variety of different people, and I would’ve to trust their vision. We would have to have some agreement on the politics and the art that were in the novel, and I knew that there would be changes made. But as long as the creative team was able to retain the political and artistic visions, then I would be content.
Sylvia Chong:
Thank you. I want to talk a little bit about the casting. A lot of the cast is largely unknown to the American public, although I wanted to call out… and again, I know they’re Vietnamese in the audience, please forgive me, I’m Chinese and I make Vietnamese sound Chinese, so forgive me. It’s very imperialist. So the cast, I know you insisted that the Vietnamese characters be played by Vietnamese actors, but I know that you have invited a lot of very well-known people to be part of the cast as well as some… There’s also some relative unknowns, including Hoa Xuande, who, I think, carries the main role beautifully.
I’m going to ask you a question about his casting in a second, but I think as a scholar of Vietnam War and the Vietnam era, the ’70s, I was really taken especially by the casting of Nguyễn Cao Kỳ Duyên, who is the daughter of Premier Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, who is in many ways, a model for the General. In some ways, there’s a lot of things. Then we were just talking previously about the conclusion of Phanxinê, the person who plays The Crapulent Major, who was a director in Vietnam, and this is his first acting role. So maybe can you talk a little in general about how much of the casting did they find with your help? How much did they go out into open calls and find, or did they cultivate networks through people who were already in Vietnamese language things?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So I knew when I was getting into it that I would have to hand over the novel to a whole lot of different people, but there were certain red lines I felt if they crossed these red lines, I would take my name off the project. So one was we had to have Vietnamese actors playing Vietnamese roles. Number two is, when they were speaking Vietnamese, they really had to be speaking Vietnamese. It could not be that they would be speaking English with a Vietnamese accent, which is exactly what is satirized in The Sympathizer. So those were the red lines, two of the red lines. Thankfully, we did not get any pushback, I think, on that from HBO. So the casting process, I wasn’t really that involved with it because it was a global search. They had obviously a very well-known casting agent do this search all over the world and in Vietnam. Part of the constraint was that The Sympathizer was already a politically controversial novel.
I’ve said many times, I wrote it to offend everybody and I succeeded, and I especially succeeded with the Vietnamese of all backgrounds. So in fact, I think a lot of Vietnamese actors, that is citizens, nationals, working in the Vietnamese film industry so far as I know, we had a whole list of people. I had their headshots, I had their resumes and so on that we were hoping would audition. Some did and some didn’t. The pool was already limited in some ways despite the search because of the politics, because I think some actors probably felt that if they were in this TV series that was politically complicated their careers might be impacted in the Vietnamese film industry.
In fact, it was so controversial that we could not actually shoot in Vietnam. We had to shoot in Thailand instead. So there was a global search, and the criteria was oftentimes very, very difficult because for Hoa Xuande’s role of the Captain that is the narrator, the spy of this novel, he had to be mixed race. He had to be fluent in two languages. He had to be of a certain age, he had to be good-looking. He had to act, he had to be able to act, and he had to carry the entire TV series ’cause Hoa is in almost every single scene of a seven-hour production. So in many ways, it was such a difficult search to find all these kinds of actors.
In some cases, we really lucked out. So Linh, whose pseudonym is Phanxinê, he was interviewed in Vanity Fair a few days ago saying, “Well, I didn’t even really think that I was going to get the role. I was going to show up and just strip naked in the audition,” ’cause the call said it requires some nudity. All right? So lo and behold, he’s not even a professional actor, he’s a director and he got the role. Kỳ Duyên, who is famous for being the emcee of Paris by Night, and as you said, her father was a very important general and political leader in Vietnam who was part of the inspiration for our general, she decided she wanted to become an actor. So this is the second role that she tried out for, and she got it.
Sylvia Chong:
What was the first?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, she didn’t tell me that, so I don’t know, but Kỳ Duyên in this. That was really fascinating because I had met Kỳ Duyên and she realized that she was in The Sympathizer, the novel, although she’s never named as this famous South Vietnamese actress who is caught in the air when Saigon falls. So she literally is just going from airport to airport trying to find a country that would take her in. So when she met me, she was like, “Is there a role for me in any kind of adaptation?” I said, “Yes, of course, there will be a role for you. Then I realized, “No, there isn’t, because there’s nobody of the right age.” But when the writers adapted the novel, they created a role for The Crapulent Major’s mother, and we can get into why they did that, but I realized she’s going to be 80 years old.
That’s a perfect role for Kỳ Duyên. So I told the producers, “You have to get Kỳ Duyên to be in this ’cause this would be such an ideal casting.” They agreed, and so she got it. But the search for someone like the Captain’s character, that was so important. Hoa had said he auditioned for nine months for that role. It was really protracted because everybody knew what was at stake. So we were just really lucky that we found Hoa, who’s an incredible actor, but he’s not an mixed race. So that was just one box that we couldn’t quite check, but it raises other issues that were really interesting for me to think about as in what does a mixed race person look like? A mixed race person could actually look like anybody.
So I give credit to HBO for just being really aware of some of the complications that they might run into with audience reception and sensitivities over the casting. So for example, with Sandra Oh, when this was going to become a TV series, I thought, “Sandra Oh has to play Ms. Mori. She’s my first choice.” Then as it turns out, Don McKellar, the head writer and co-showrunner knows Sandra Oh. So we organized a dinner, and this was the first time I met Sandra Oh. Then Park Chan-wook came as well. This was March 2020, literally like a week before everything shut down, and Sandra Oh shows up. She looks fabulous.
We were having dinner at a place called Kato, which is at the time, just like in a small strip mall restaurant. She sits next to me and the first thing she says is, “So what’s your process?” I was like, “Oh, my God, Sandra Oh’s asking me about my process.” So she was brought on board, but HBO was like, “Can we have a Korean-Canadian play a Japanese-American?” I thought, “Wow, that’s interesting.” It never occurred to me that that might be an issue. So I did write a memo saying, “Absolutely, we can, and here’s all the reasons why.” So there was all that. It was such an interesting, complicated, nuanced process that involved a lot of the producers, but also the casting people as well to try to find these people.
Sylvia Chong:
My friends are very distracted by Hoa Xuande’s contacts, but you mentioned to me anecdotally that the makeup or the styling that they were going to use to indicate that he was mixed race could have been worse. So I don’t know, do you want to comment on that at all?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think you should think about how, of course, Hollywood has a long tradition of using various kinds of prosthetics and things like that to alter people’s faces to make them look one way or another. So that was something that we never wanted to do. So for me, it was, again, really crucial that we think about this TV series in many different ways. It’s certainly an entertainment first and foremost, but also it’s a commentary, I think, about our notions of race, representation, casting, all these things are going to be a part of that.
So wherever we could, we tried to do it as, I don’t think authentic is the right word, but we tried to do it in as good faith of a manner as possible. So yes, we were not going to rely on prosthetics and try to alter anybody’s appearance. So with the question of the contact lenses, I think that was the only gesture, and I don’t remember who made that decision, but Park Chan-wook is so detail-oriented. I’ve seen him at work. It’s really, really incredible. We can talk more about that process too, but so detail-oriented. So I’m sure he had some input onto this alteration of Hoa’s eyes.
Sylvia Chong:
Right. Well, maybe now it’s time to break up our conversation with a little clip that will get us into these themes and also some of the adaptation choices made. So the first clip I have queued up is from Episode 1, and it’s the torture of the Communist Agent. So maybe we can show it first and then we’ll talk about it. Just wanted to point out a few things before we talked. The novel is, I don’t know if it’s obvious, but it’s written in English and a literary scholar named Ben Tran, Vanderbilt has called this literary dubbing. So even when novels are set in other languages in other countries, just the translation process is invisible.
So you get the thoughts of these characters that are ostensibly in another language just filtered into English naturally. So one of the first things we notice in a scene like this is how much Vietnamese is used, and thus when the Captain and the general switch into English, I guess for the benefit of Claude, it’s a more noticeable shift so that the language of communication, whether it be Vietnamese English or French later, it really sonically grounds you.
But the other thing is that this torture sequence was not necessarily described in the book as being in a cinema, and the poster on the front of the cinema is Death Wish. That’s also the title of the episode. So the HBO show is really foregrounding something. Well, your book is meta narrative in a written way with the confession being written down here. We got a lot of meta cinematic cues, grounding, the film projector turning on, the camera movement being very explicit, and the rewinding, which we see throughout the series. So Viet, maybe you could tell us a little bit about what it felt like to have those adaptation choices made. I don’t know if you weighed in on that or whether Park Chan-wook or the screenwriters suggested those and how you feel that shifted the emphasis of this narrative.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So it was interesting because when we did the red carpet premiere, Park Chan-wook gave a speech at the beginning where he apologized to me saying, “Look, the novel is a novel, and the TV series is a TV series, and we can’t do certain things that you can do in a novel. But we can do certain things visually that you can’t do in a novel too.” He’s absolutely right. So in the novel, the not is meant to be in Vietnamese, but I can’t write Vietnamese, so the novel is in English, obviously. But the fiction of the novel is that it’s actually you are reading a Vietnamese text, and I’m okay with that because I’ve thought a lot about what would it mean for me to be an American writer versus a Vietnamese writer? The fact of the matter is that this is an impossible dilemma. The reason for the impossibility is because people like me, that is a Vietnamese refugee, a part of the Vietnamese diaspora, the very nature of our existence is that we are bastards of history.
We’ve been produced by war and colonialism and the refugee experience. So this notion of you have to be American, you have to be Vietnamese, you have to write in Vietnamese, you have to write in English, and there’s no in-between, these are notions of authenticity that have no meaning, I think, for someone who’s been produced as a refugee. So for me, I have to be an American writer writing in English, this is how I was raised, but I want to write about this other subject. How do I do it? I’m going to write as if I was a Vietnamese writer. If you’re a Vietnamese writer writing in Vietnamese, you know are speaking to a Vietnamese audience, therefore, you do not translate. If you are an American writer writing in English, you know you’re writing to an American audience. You do not translate.
If you are a Vietnamese American writer writing in English, what are you? So many Vietnamese Americans and many other people like that are tempted to translate. They’re tempted to explain. It’s not just a literary problem, it’s a life problem. Many of you who are of that situation have probably felt yourself forced to translate yourself constantly, and that is something I refused to do. So what that meant is that in writing the novel, I wanted to create a situation in which we could feel in English what these characters are thinking and feeling in Vietnamese. When you have someone who’s a Vietnamese person, an adult, they’re a general, they’re a full-grown person and then you have them speaking in English and they’re forced to speak that language and they speak broken English or they speak English with an accent, and then you render that on the page, what’s going to happen?
In fact, I didn’t witness this growing up. The perception is that by Americans is that these people are lesser because they can’t speak fluent English. So I knew that if I wrote the novel in a realistic way, I would reproduce the very problem that I wanted to rebut. So the novel had to be written in a certain way in which there were no quotation marks and everything’s being filtered through the consciousness of our narrator so that these Vietnamese people would come off as they themselves experienced themselves, as people who were fully functional in their language. So how do you translate that into a TV series? You can’t really do that. They have to speak certain words, certain languages, and so on. So there had to be a change where you can see that they have to transition between Vietnamese and English, and there was just no way of getting around that dimension of the realism.
But Park Chan-wook is a very, very smart director. So when in the adaptation process, he and Don McKellar were trying to figure out ways to retain some of the novel’s consciousness about the layers of representation that are taking place. So they took an idea in the novel, which is that the Communist Agent is being tortured in a room of the security headquarters that the security agents have called the cinema room or the movie theater. I forget what it is, it’s been a long time since I wrote my own novel. This is just based on reality. I think I really found out this detail. There was a movie projector in there. They would show movies in this room, but then they would also convert it into a torture chamber when needed.
So Park Chan-wook took that idea and turned it into a literal movie theater, and then in the timeline of the interrogation, it happens in the beginning of the story, but we don’t get to see it until the end of the novel. But then he decided to foreground it and put it into a movie theater in order to draw our attention to these meta cinematic layers that are taking place, both in terms of the adaptation of the book into a TV series. But the fact that the very nature of violence and interrogation is spectacular. It’s very visual, so I think he’s just playing with all of these concepts at the same time. Last thing I’ll say is that if you watch that clip for a few seconds longer, Kayli Tran who plays the Communist Agent finally gives up a name. The name that she says, she says, “His surname is Viet and his given name is Nam.” Do you know the reference?
Sylvia Chong:
Yes, Trinh Minh-ha. Also, when you were talking about accents, Trinh Minh-ha, a brilliant filmmaker, when she made Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, she precisely did what you were talking about, had her Vietnamese interview subjects, write down what they wanted to say. She had it translated into English, then she had them read the English. It was that distance so they were speaking their words, but it didn’t feel like their words. It’s very halting. It didn’t feel like it belonged in her mouth. That was part of the experiment that she was trying to engage in.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, there’s a whole genealogy because that idea, that Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, that goes back to a Phan Boi Chau story about Vietnamese nationalist resistance, and then Trinh Minh-ha reworking that through a feminist experimental documentary lens in Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, and she was my professor at Berkeley.
Sylvia Chong:
Mine too.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, and I watched that documentary, and I’ve read her work and so on. This TV series is so far afield from what it is that she’s interested in, and it’s working in this spectacular dimension that her work is very critical of, I think. But Nevertheless, I wanted to give a shout-out to that other tradition of Vietnamese artists working deliberately from the margins of corporate mainstream dominant cinema. Even though this TV series is very antithetical to that avant-gardeist project, my training is also, I was educated partly through her theorization, and I wanted to make a gesture at that.
Sylvia Chong:
Maybe we can look at another scene from Episode 1. I feel like this scene that I chose, which is from the bar where a bond man and the Captain are hanging out, feels very Park Chan-wook. The scene is long, so I think I’ll play a little bit of it and maybe stop the projectionist when we’re halfway through. But one of the things I wanted to foreground is when your novel came out, there was this question of genre, like what are you writing? I remember one of the first literary prizes you won was for Edgar Allen Poe Society for a detective novel. Then a lot of people have thought of this as a spy novel like Ian Fleming or John le Carré. Yet, it’s also in this Asian Americanist tradition of realist critique.
So genre comes through in an interesting way in this fight scene, whereas I think a lot of The Sympathizer, the adaptation does not feel like a typical war movie. It’s not Rambo. It’s not even Platoon. It in a different space, even though it is very much about war. But this scene has a little bit of that call out to those other genres. So let’s cue up the second scene, please. That scene has a lot of interesting mixed genres. So I don’t know if the audience is aware of Park Chan-wook’s previous work. The choreographed violence has a little bit of the feel of there’s this long tracking sequence, an old boy, but the melodrama of this sequence reminds me a lot of his earlier film joint security area.
So you have this very emotionally-laden conversation between the Captain and Man where it’s like they’re talking about love, but it’s love for a nation or love for a national ideal. Actually, it almost brought tears to my eyes, but at the same time, there’s this tragic comic fight happening in the background, which puts it into this space of choreographed fights, action movies, things like that. So it’s a very interesting play of masculinities, interesting play of national identities and investments in roles, embodiment, things like that. So maybe I can have you talk a little bit about those… I don’t know that I felt the melodramatic mode as strongly in your novel, so I don’t know if that was something that you enjoyed seeing brought out in this adaptation. Did you have any say in the filming of some of these sequences?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Not in anything that detailed. This is my opinion, the Vietnamese people can correct me, but I think we’re pretty melodramatic people, and I could just feel that growing up in a Vietnamese refugee community. All the stuff that you mentioned, even as a little boy and as an adolescent, I could look around at our community celebrations or the interactions of Vietnamese men or go look at what Vietnamese men were doing in cafes and all these notions of masculinity, of brotherhood, of sacrifice and love for the nation, the cause, but also for each other. I remember coming to San Jose and arriving in the second grade and going to a public high school that had a lot of Vietnamese kids in it.
Almost immediately I was pulled into the fact that on the playground there was one group of Vietnamese boys here and another group of Vietnamese boys here, and we fought each other. You had to pick a side. I don’t know what was going on. But from a very young age, it was impressed on me that this is what it meant to be a Vietnamese boy and a Vietnamese man, that you had to have your brothers, you had to pick a side. You had to fight for each other, you had to sacrifice for each other. Of course, it was also, I don’t know how much of that is Vietnamese culture and how much of that is a microcosm of the effects of the war and everything that that symbolizes.
So to me, it was always melodramatic. Masculinity is melodramatic. Vietnamese masculinity seems to me to be very melodramatic. You talk about the various genres that the novel was engaged in and all the things that you mentioned are true. But one of the other elements of the novel that I think was very important from the outset was the issue of masculinity, ’cause it was clearly going to be a novel about blood brothers. But the complexities of that masculinity, it would take the entire novel to unfold, so I can’t give away either the end of the novel or the end of the TV series. But everything that you see laid out there in combination with what you saw on the scene before with the interrogation and so on, all of that will explode by the end.
Sylvia Chong:
It’s almost like there’s a reverse Bechdel test here where can you have two men in a dialogue talking about love without mentioning sex, chicks, all that kind of stuff. Not that there isn’t heterosexuality in the novel and in the work, but this scene was a very tender scene between Man and the Captain.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So Vietnamese men, I think they’re pretty macho. They can be very aggressive, very violent and all this, but there’s also that tenderness at the same time. So it’s not uncommon for Vietnamese men to hold hands and to sit touching each other in a bar or a cafe, and it’s a homo-social environment. What the subtexts are, who knows? But that public expression of tenderness is actually not unusual at all.
Sylvia Chong:
But unusual for American representations of Asian Americans. Let’s move on to Episode 2, which has a lot more outward references to famous images of the Vietnam War. So one thing I did notice is that in the refugee camp sequence, we had it relocated from Guam to Arkansas, otherwise, the scene is very similar to how it unfolded. But this choice of moving from Guam to Arkansas is interesting. I wanted to point out before we watch this is now as we get to America, it is no longer just the Vietnamese refugees’ own experiences. We have the interplay of the televisual memory. So in this first scene, the Captain and the General are getting ready, getting dressed while the television is playing images of the Fall of Saigon, which they just managed to escape.
So you’ll recognize the very famous… well, it’s a televisual version of a very famous photograph by Hubert van Es of the Gall of Saigon. So let’s play the scene first. So I’d be interested to know what was the thinking about making the refugee camp be in Arkansas rather than Camp Pendleton or the novel’s Guam, but also the interesting… Well, I’m reminded of how a former president called certain countries shithole countries, and here it’s the implication that the U.S. is the shithole country. The filming here, again, showing that the loss of ideals in the refugee passage and how this tragedy of loss seems to be born by the memory of women rather than, at least here, the men who hoped to regain some level of their former glory and their authority. So yeah, say a little bit about the choice of moving the camp to the heart of America and some of the filming things.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That was actually shot in Pomona, California. I think the reason why Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar moved the location to Fort Chaffee is because I think Park Chan-wook wanted to have a scene where Bon and the Captain would have to drive from Fort Chaffee to LA. He wanted that whole sweep of the mythical American Western landscape. So you see that, and when they’re driving this convertible out there in the desert. That evokes cowboy movies, and so Park Chan-wook wanted to make these kinds of illusions. The incident where the women are throwing food at the General is based on a real incident, although that happened in Guam rather than in the United States. The reason for that was because you have to remember that the figure who helped inspire the General, not the only figure, but one of the figures who helped inspire the General was Nguyễn Cao Kỳ who was an Air Force general, and at the time was I think the Vice Premier of South Vietnam.
He got on the radio as Saigon was collapsing, and he got on the radio and he said, “Everybody fight to the last man.” Then he got on a helicopter and flew out to an American helicopter. So I don’t think this happened to him, but obviously people felt betrayed. Some people felt betrayed. Not surprisingly, a significant number of South Vietnamese soldiers were not able to escape or didn’t want to leave. So these women represent the women who had to leave their husbands behind. Their husbands or their sons or their brothers are missing. So yes, a lot of the cost of the war was obviously born by the men who fought in it, but a lot of the cost of the war was born by the civilians and the women as well. You raised a point earlier when we were talking about the bar scene, about how this is a war series, a war show that doesn’t feel like a conventional war movie or war show, because as we think war is supposed to involve men fighting battles.
But I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee community where war was still going on even though the war was actually over. The lesson I took away from that is that wars are actually not only about men and guns and battles and all that, it’s about the entire societies that are involved with them. The United States has the luxury of fighting most of its wars overseas, and the people here are insulated from what that means. Whereas for the Vietnamese, this was a war fought in their country. There was no escape from it. Likewise, there was no escape from the post-war consequences, whether for the people who stayed in Vietnam or whether for these refugees who are just now beginning to deal with what it means to have lost their country, and in some instances, to have lost their husbands brothers and sons and so on.
Sylvia Chong:
So maybe we can go straight into, I just want to make sure we can get to a lot of these lovely clips. The second scene from the second episode is another one of the General and another one that really invokes the historical circumstances of Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, which is the liquor store. Now, I believe the liquor store in your book was not named this, but it’s a brilliant invention to call it the Yellow Stripes. But here, again, is an invocation of the American representation of the war that American media would’ve seen coming into conflict or with the General’s understanding of the war and of himself. So let’s play the fourth scene, please. This scene for some of you who might recognize that is a quotation of Eddie Adams’ photograph of the Saigon Execution.
As the General mentioned, he did not do these things, but this was one of the well-publicized representations of the Tet Offensive. The General involved was General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, who incidentally has a Nova connection. He was one of the Vietnamese refugees that was resettled in the first wave to the D.C. area. For a long time, he didn’t run a liquor store, but he ran a pizza restaurant just outside of D.C. in Northern Virginia. This is not in the book. Also, just the absurdity of someone drawing that on his store, for me personally, I would’ve thought that would be something that someone would’ve done at the height of the anti-war movement. I could have seen an American do that. General Loan was in fact haunted by accusations that he was a butcher and did not deserve asylum and to be brought to the U.S. So tell me a little bit of history of that choice to add that graffiti into that scene.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, the other thing about Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, after he came to the United States in Southern California, he opened a liquor store.
Sylvia Chong:
Yeah.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Okay, so that’s a real historical reference. But I think what’s interesting about that scene, and I think it’s all Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar. But the reason why I think that that reference to the Eddie Adams photograph is in there is because these images from the Vietnam War, whether it’s Thích Nguyên Đức immolating himself in 1963, year or Nguyên Đức Loan executing this Viet Cong suspect in 1968, these were the spectacular images that occupied the mental space of people all over the world, so that when you said the word Vietnam, people who are not Vietnamese would think the Vietnam War, and they would start thinking about these kinds of images. They would not be thinking about Vietnamese subjectivities or Vietnamese complexities. They would be thinking about the horrors of the Vietnam War. So I think it is obviously a nod to the actual history and the representations, but also a nod to the overpowering quality of these images that overpowered the Vietnamese on the global stage. So the TV series, it’s a rebuttal or a response to that, but with the Vietnamese at the center with all our complexities.
Sylvia Chong:
I remember when you were writing your novel, even before you wrote your novel, one of the things you wanted to show was that there was complexity in the Vietnamese American experience, not just showing the other side were also victims, we have the subjectivity, but also that they were so soldiers, they fought a war. The dirty just was on both sides, and that both sides had done things in the course of fighting the war that on the outside are very easily condemned. But when you’re on the inside and you’re thinking about what it means to fight for nation survival, things happen.
So I think the inclusion of this is interesting because many people think of that image as all Vietnamese. The Vietnamese are monsters. They execute people on the street. One of the things Eddie Adams tried to emphasize, but also Nguyên Đức Loan mentioned, is that he did this because this was an act of war. He was fighting someone who had just massacred his own men. You don’t see the other side. You see this execution, which was a serendipitous act by a novelist. So can you maybe tell a little bit about this way of de-romanticizing both what the North did and what the South did in the act of fighting this war between themselves?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Okay, so the reason why Vietnamese people of all backgrounds dislike me or hate me, this is not my language, people have said, “My parents hate you,” the reason why is because precisely, I don’t choose to participate in the one-sided representation, which you will hear from the communists have their version of the history, and the anti-communists have their version of the history, and they want their versions of the history told. If you deviate from that version of the history where they are the victims fighting against victimizers, then you’re branded as the enemy or a sympathizer and so on. Those narratives are obviously very powerful for mobilizing nationalism and fighting war and everything like that. They’re not very interesting for making art or writing novels, I don’t think. So I wanted to write a novel. The novel’s ambitions were not simply to say there are two sides to this story.
That’s one aspect of it, but even that’s not really that interesting to me. The novel is using art to assert my version of Vietnamese subjectivity. By that I mean I don’t want to be portrayed as a victim or a victimizer. I want to be portrayed in all of my complexity, all of our complexity. What that means is a recognition that we are human and inhuman at the same time, and we shouldn’t be afraid of that. If we are afraid of that complexity, that fear actually represents our weakness. Because if all we want to do is to show stories where we’re the victims or the angels and we want to depict our enemies as the evil ones, that’s weak from the perspective of art. Because part of what this TV series is responding to is all of these American Vietnam War movies where the Americans actually portray themselves negatively.
You watch these American war movies, they’re depicting Americans committing atrocities. Yet, we walk away from these movies not thinking that Americans necessarily are terrible villainous people, but that they’re complex human beings under difficult circumstances, and that makes for compelling art. So for me, the novel was always about that level of response. All the other stuff about historical details and accuracy and all that kind of stuff is interesting, but really it’s an assertion of our complex subjectivity and our right to be at center stage doing beautiful and terrible things all at the same time. That’s what the TV series, to me, represents. We’re following the adventures of our Captain, the Communist spy, who’s hopefully charming and seductive and also doing terrible things. That portrayal of his character hopefully will compel us to watch the series, and in that way, also think a little bit about why we would want to be satisfied with reducing ourselves to only being victims or victimizers.
Sylvia Chong:
I’m going to wrap up now. We had some scenes from Episode 3, but I’ll just say go and watch it. One final thought I had before we turn to the audience for questions is that there’s an eeriness to this series being released right now as we’re witnessing a bombardment… well, the attack of Hamas on Israel, and then the subsequent bombardment of Gaza. I’ve been asked by a lot of people, because I myself studied this there as well about the resonances between not only the war going on in Israel and Palestine, but also the protests. I feel like what you just said about the complexity, the inhumanity within humanity reminds me of also anti-war protests during Vietnam, which I think now if we watch movies like Forrest Gump or Born on the 4th of July, we really romanticize what it means to be anti-war as if it’s simple to simply say yes to peace and no to war.
Certainly, there were glorifications of the North among the American left during anti-war protests that they basically did have egg on their face afterwards when they realized how brutal the takeover was. But at the same time, the glorification of the South on whose side we fought was also oversimplified. I don’t know if you feel the resonances too. I know a lot of things are going on on your campus. You didn’t pick this to be released now, you wouldn’t have known, but history is repeating itself. I don’t know if you have any thoughts about lessons from the war on representation from before and the war now?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I don’t think history is repeating itself. I think history is a continuous stream. When I wrote this novel, I knew exactly the problem I was walking into, which is that I was going to write a novel that people were going to call a Vietnam War novel, and it is a Vietnam War novel, but it is more than that. The Vietnam War is more than the Vietnam War. For me, I always felt like my function as an American writer thinking about the United States, not even talking about Vietnam yet, but I felt my function was to think about the country as a whole, which we as Vietnamese refugees and immigrants are not supposed to do. Our space, as with any minority or so-called minority in this country is we’re supposed to talk about our minority experiences. But our minority experiences would not exist if we weren’t also Americans or if the United States hadn’t interfered in our countries of origin in some way. So I felt my subject through the Vietnam War was all of the United States.
When I look at it that way, the Vietnam War is important to me, not simply because it produced me, but because it’s an episode in a very long history of American warfare that goes back to the very origins of the country. So in writing The Sympathizer, I was certainly writing about Vietnam and the Vietnam War. I was also writing about America from its very origins. If you’ve read the novel, you’ll know that. If you haven’t read the novel, just follow my Instagram because I’m posting a quotation from The Sympathizer every single day of the 49 days of this TV series. When I was writing the novel, I felt a lot of what I was saying was true, not just about the war in Vietnam, but about American history and about the American present. So ironically, a lot of the quotations that are being posted could be as if they were being written about what’s happening now.
So that’s why I don’t think there’s a repetition of history in so much as this has always been a part of American history. So the Vietnam War was foreshadowed by all the wars that came in advance, and then the Vietnam War, foreshadows, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine. If we’re seeing repetitions now, it’s because in fact, the structural conditions that produced the Vietnam War and the opposition to the Vietnam War are very similar to the structural conditions we have today. If there was, in fact, a romanticization on the part of the American left of the National Liberation front and the North Vietnamese, which is true, I think, that the American left didn’t have a very sophisticated understanding necessarily of the internal complexities of what was going on.
Nevertheless, the violence that was a part of the Revolution, whether it was from the North or from the South, killed a lot of innocent people, but it was also arguably very necessary for the reunification of the country. All these things are true all at the same time. So when we look at what’s happening in Israel’s war on Gaza, it’s not black and white, good and evil. You can’t reduce the politics in that way, and you can’t draw a direct analogy between the war in Vietnam and Israel’s war in Gaza. But there are some similarities, and there are some precautionary things to note, which is, that if you’re going to have occupation and revolution, it’s not just going to be all about heroism and celebration, but there will be a lot of innocent people being killed. No side is going to be, I think, morally clear from some of these complexities.
But when I look at what’s happening on our campuses, if we’re just going to be talking about students and political protest, what I would say is that what was very, very right about the American anti-war movement was that the judgment of the students that this was an immoral and racist war was absolutely correct. That’s my judgment. They made, I’m sure, mistakes in their organizing and activism and so on and so forth, but their convictions were right. History has borne out that judgment. Likewise, with what’s happening now, I’m sure students are making mistakes ’cause they’re 20 years old or 21 years old. But you know what? They’re right. They convictions are absolutely right. So if the TV series has any applicability to the present environment, I’m very delighted if people can make those connections. Because when I was writing the novel, I was writing the novel during the period of America’s war in Iraq. When I was writing the torture sequences, I was thinking about what all sides were doing in torture during the period of French colonization and the American War.
I was thinking about how the American techniques that were developed in terms of torture and interrogation during the Cold War that were applied in Vietnam, were then applied in Central America through American-trained forces, and were being applied by American forces in Abu Ghraib, which was happening when I was writing the novel. So for me, even though the novel is set during a very particular time period, and so is the TV series, the resonances are because the history that led up to it and that has come out of it still exists. I think Park Chan-wook understands that. We did a premier event together, and he was asked, “Why were you attracted to this material?” He said, “Well, because Korea and Vietnam have a lot of similarities and a lot of parallels,” and he said the word, “imperialism.” Okay? So what we’re watching, what we’re reading are hopefully very entertaining spectacles. But underneath, there is this whirlpool of history that I think he is attracted to and I’m attracted to, and we’re caught up in it.
Sylvia Chong:
Thank you, Viet.
Like the novel, the HBO series is an espionage thriller and cross-culture satire about the struggles of a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist spy during the final days of the Vietnam War and his new life as a refugee in Los Angeles, where he learns that his spying days aren’t over. Its showrunner is the acclaimed Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave), and the cast includes Robert Downey Jr. and Sandra Oh. The conversation was moderated by Dr. Sylvia Chong, associate professor of American Studies and English at the University of Virginia, and author of The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era. This event was copresented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and the Vietnam Society.
