When writing his magnificent debut novel, The Sympathizer, the January California Book Club selection, and other books, author Viet Thanh Nguyen refused to capitulate to the fate colonial forces laid out for him.
By John Freeman

Dustin Snipes
Empires have roles for all of us to play, whether we want them or not. Soldier. Barbarian. Refugee. Grateful immigrant. Suffering victim. Innocent taxpayer. Savior. Revolutionary. Terrorist. Villain. Politics is not the only theater in which these roles get cast: Memory, and all the cultural forces that keep it alive, is the other. Watch the news closely enough and you can see figures change roles as time and fortune turn. A revolutionary becomes a terrorist; a grateful immigrant becomes an innocent taxpayer. A terrorist, a quaking country’s new savior.
Most people scripted into this loop have not opted for these changes: They are given to them. Throughout the late 1940s, Ho Chi Minh was supported by the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, as a revolutionary, a savior to his people, whom he led to independence. Later, he began to speak of Communism, and he became a villain. And subsequently, the United States war machine launched one of the most destructive wars in modern memory, more than three million Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Hmong, and Koreans dead, and many continued to perish from the effects of Agent Orange and thousands of land mines strewn across the region by U.S. forces. Some 58,220 American soldiers perished in the process, and countless others died after they came home as veterans.
This explosion is the rupture that decided the direction of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s life. But the way he uses narrative to refuse the roles given to him is what has made him a great artist. Model immigrant, grateful refugee. Perfect victim. Raised in San Jose, California, the child of refugees running a grocery store, growing in the blast radius of the dream machine that creates the afterlife of so many imperial wars, he watched as his birth country’s story was told back to him through the films made about the war his people called the American War and Americans called by his country’s name, Vietnam.
In the past 10 years, Nguyen has done more to rewrite the script he was offered than any artist alive. In essays and critical work, books of creative nonfiction and short fiction, he has traced the way war is fought first on the battlefront and then in memory. Studying films and literature, the patterns of political thought and aesthetic philosophy, he has torn up the tropes that reiterate American innocence in the face of terrible violence, replacing them even with subtler, more beautiful forms of entertainment. And he has cast people like him in new roles.
The Sympathizer, his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel, was the first salvo in this raid on memory, on the way novels and films about this war have so often been propaganda masquerading as art. It is one of the most important novels of the 21st century, and it does this in part by adopting a guise. At first glance, The Sympathizer looks simply like a clever reversal of the cold war spy novel. Told in the voice of an unnamed narrator, it chronicles the travails of a Communist double agent tasked with following into the afterlife a cadre of South Vietnamese officers, chief among them the General our hero once assisted, until Saigon fell.
The novel is told from the future backward—our hero has been captured, it’s not clear by whom, and he is confessing his story. This genre of talk comes preloaded with barbs for our narrator, the bastard child of a French priest and a Vietnamese woman. Whose forgiveness is he to seek? As a Communist sympathizer, God is out of the question for him. A man of two faces, at least, whose sins is he admitting to, and which ones are mortal? Late in the book, he remains full of questions: “What was I confessing to? I had done nothing wrong, except for being Westernized.” Surely, he is just doing his job.
Perhaps, he simply does it too well. As a narrator, Nguyen’s hero embodies to the point of mockery some of the spy genre’s hero characteristics. He drinks scotch, marks time with cigarettes, and has all but memorized the critical text that bewitches all the American officers he comes across, Richard Hedd’s Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction. This weighty tome is gripped in the large hand of Claude, the General’s CIA handler. The beefy American is an anomaly for Nguyen’s narrator: He’s a jock who reads. Claude is also the reason that he and the General and 90-some other handpicked South Vietnamese make it out of Saigon alive on the last American cargo plane in April 1975.
Nguyen has so many skills as a writer that it’s difficult to cover them all, but one of his best is key to a book like this: He writes violent action tremendously well. It comes in handy here. Fifty years on from that fateful day, Americans are still more apt to remember video footage of helicopters being pushed into the sea, as if the real victims of that war were machines. The Sympathizer takes its time setting up the long, chaotic rolling dolly shot of their departure from the air base. Sex workers, families, mistresses, American airmen, anyone who worked for South Vietnamese officers, thousands of people storm the runway desperate to leave, knowing that as bad as things have been, what’s coming could be worse. It is hot and muggy and everyone stinks. The plane everyone has boarded comes under fire, and then, as they try to escape its burning fuselage, the survivors are raked with machine gun fire.
Nguyen’s hero survives, as does his best friend, Bon—two of a trio who made a blood pact as teenagers to always watch out for one another. Bon’s wife and child are killed, however, the first in a series of violent deaths that punctuate The Sympathizer, each one getting close to the narrator. A bastard, he is marked by double vision from birth, preparing always in advance for how people see him. This learned defense came in handy when he went to America for university, and then wound up the key interlocutor between his boss, the General, and his American handlers. But this double vision fractures when he leaves Saigon. Bon, for example, is not a double agent: He is a true South Vietnamese believer. When his family is killed, surely Nguyen’s hero’s primary sympathy ought to be with him as a man, as a friend, who has suffered loss—not the cause?
Nguyen situates this flicker of a thought perfectly in the ethical peripheral vision of his hero. It could simply be a glitch of sentiment, of friendship. Besides, there is so much to come for him: Escape to Guam, then California, where he will nominally remain the General’s driver. Only, in California, the General and so many like him will also become like so many Americans. People who want to make money, experience some comfort. And now they live under drastically new circumstances. A man known as the “crapulent major” becomes a gas station attendant in Monterey. The General’s wife turns to her greatest talent—cooking—and opens a restaurant. Meanwhile, the General opens a liquor store, skimming blended scotch off the top. All the profits from the restaurant supposedly go to the movement back home, but Nguyen’s hero has his doubts.
Our hero has good reason to note all this with forensic clarity. Part of his mission is to report back to party leaders on the activities of the exiled South Vietnamese. While telling his offstage interlocutor his story, Nguyen’s narrator is also reliving the letters he sent to the Parisian aunt of his friend Man, the way he smuggles information out of America. Nguyen expertly milks this assignment for a potent mixture of comedy and pathos. For all the bribes he took in Saigon, the crapulent major is also simply an older man with a family, trying to move on with his life when the narrator has him killed. The General ordered it, and to disobey would call the narrator’s loyalty into question. Instantly, the man’s ghost begins to haunt Nguyen’s narrator—stirring up other ghosts. His mother, who died when he was a young man; surely, she imagined more for him than this.
All this might be easier to weather if straightforward revenge was possible, but The Sympathizer thwarts that easy rewriting. In the aftermath of the war, boondoggles shape-shift and take on new purposes: namely, to preserve the power structures that underwrote the war and laminate a false sense of its victims. On these fronts, the narrator also fails spectacularly. A U.S. congressman makes a deal with the General to turn his soldiers into footmen for votes, and there’s little the narrator can do to stop them. Separately, he gets himself installed as an adviser to a blockbuster “Vietnam War” film. Rather than stop the film’s grossest distortions, he nearly gets himself killed.
And thus The Sympathizer takes its ultimate form—a modernist American comedy about war and ethics. The deeper into the morass of his assignment Nguyen’s narrator sinks, the more American he becomes, the easier he finds it to seduce women. To his left and right are other Asian Americans who have made, without being spies, similar bargains. Philippine and Korean American actors, Chinese American waiters, Thai revolutionaries. Misrecognized at every step, they, too, ply a double life, even as back where they’ve come from—as in Marcos’s Philippines—terrible things are done to suppress life, in the form of torturing, detaining, even murdering their relatives.
In America, Nguyen’s narrator finds one man or woman after another who have made this bargain—to simply change disguises—which leads to ironies within ironies. For example, when the General begins to round up his former troops on American soil to perform exercises, they do this work on stolen Indian land—like so many other American reenactors. A trained observer, Nguyen’s narrator has the excuse to keep watch on all the people around him, one of the ways The Sympathizer constantly bursts forward in great gusts of hilarious description.
Nguyen is one of modern American literature’s great phrase-makers, especially when it comes to describing people. One man “had the habit of speaking with his teeth clenched, gnawing at his words like bones.” The longer the narrator’s friend Bon stays in America, the more cynical he becomes, and the more he talks. “Usually Bon used words like a sniper,” the narrator notes in one argument, “but this was a spray of machine-gun fire that silenced me for several moments.” Do any of their conversations about life and home have any point? he wonders. “Did we salivate for sadness,” he asks himself at an extravagant wedding where the General’s daughter appears like a mirage. “These questions required either Camus or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac.”
What a way for a scene to transition. In one phrase, as Percival Everett has done with the western or Charles Yu the Hollywood noir, The Sympathizer boots up and borrows a filmic genre’s entire lexicon, and also makes good fun of it. Chapter by chapter, this novel creates and marshals “the humming, crackling AM channel of hearsay” among a society of political exiles, but it also turns its gaze fundamentally, crucially, on the country and people who for years have been telling their story. At one point, Nguyen’s narrator goes with the General to meet with the U.S. congressman and his attaché. The meeting takes place upstairs in a restaurant, a room in which he enters and discovers that he “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.”
Just when you think this novel is overstuffed, it begins closing in on its extraordinary finale. After another piece of wet work for the General, Nguyen’s narrator gathers too much heat to stay in the U.S., and he flies to Thailand, where he plans to hump to the Laotian border and reunite with exiled South Vietnamese, still planning resistance from afar. He winds up in Bangkok for a day, where at last he sees the blockbuster action film he imagined to have influenced. Sitting in a darkened cinema, legs bumping up against his neighbors, moviegoers talking over the sound, he is bowled over by the scale and power of the finished story. Despite himself, he has to admire the director, a man who probably tried to kill him on set.
As the credits roll, Nguyen’s narrator starts looking for his name. After he passes “VC RAPIST #1” and “DESPERATE VILLAGER” and “CRAZY GUY IN WHORE HOUSE” and then all the animals and even the animal trainer, he realizes he will not appear in the credits either. That for all his effort to change the course of one slice of visible memory, he hasn’t just failed, but he hasn’t even been recorded as trying. One of the most difficult questions The Sympathizer addresses is what he is supposed to do with this rage. If a man such as this one, a man so close to power he can even be handed its cigar to smoke, on occasion, cannot change a system from the inside, what is he supposed to do?
Nguyen’s example as an artist has been to create his own means of production. The Sympathizer was an HBO series, and surely, he had something to do with its mostly Vietnamese American cast. His children’s books, like those of Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros and Junot DĂaz, have all rewritten the script of how kids like he was can see themselves. One of Nguyen’s most powerful books, his recent explosion of the memoir as a form, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial, essentially functions as a postmodern biography of his mother, whose story his own life was to occlude, were he to agree to the typical model-minority script: They sacrificed so I could become a storyteller for my people.
The question in this activity remains, To whom or where should one’s sympathy lie? Is it a betrayal to let it range widely, as Nguyen’s narrator does here, against—seemingly—his own will? Broken but not totally beaten by a variety of losses, improperly reeducated at least twice, he must confront the fact that this instinct of his is both imperiling and essential. Those who are truly doomed in this magnificent novel are the ones who cannot stomach this numinous risk or follow it to its conclusion. The ones who have accepted the power of empire to choose roles and have decided to honor these casting decisions. Book by book, Viet Thanh Nguyen has been showing us there’s another way.