Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first novel arises out of a vast archive of literature, including Asian American, African American, immigrant, and postcolonial writing.
Dustin Snipes
The Vietnam War is a long and devastating chapter in the soon-to-be-eight-decade sequence that began in spring and summer 1945 when Allied Forces liberated European Jews from German concentration camps and the United States detonated nuclear bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan (August 6–9, 1945). Waves of new geopolitical alignments, human rights and justice doctrines, cold and hot wars, civil rights movements, and decolonization campaigns roiled the planet. They were supposed to move humans ever closer (regardless of underlying political theory) to achieving universal freedom.
Born in 1971, Viet Thanh Nguyen is a member of the second generation to follow World War II. He grew up in 1980s San Jose, California, in a refugee Vietnamese household inundated with messages of an ever-rising democratic freedom that purportedly grew out of a free market. During the 1990s, he was an undergrad, then a burgeoning young writer-scholar on UC campuses in Los Angeles, Riverside, and Berkeley. Now the Aerol Arnold Chair and University Professor of English, American Studies, and Comparative Literature at USC, Nguyen has used his literary-critical training to sharpen his skepticism of official grand narratives vacantly promising liberty and justice for all.
Nguyen’s first novel, The Sympathizer, is a powerful artistic dividend of his refugee experience, his literary education, and his intellectual acuity. On April 30, Nguyen will celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Sympathizer’s publication. That date will also mark the half century since the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War’s denouement. The war’s wind-down was also the end of the U.S.’s 25-year (1950–1975) “intervention” in Vietnam.
Nguyen’s unnamed narrator-protagonist-titular-character was probably five years old when American military officials first arrived in South Vietnam, extending their cold war “containment” efforts against the Chinese and the Soviets from Seoul to Saigon. When readers meet the Sympathizer, it’s the late 1970s, he’s in his early 30s, and he’s already lived an intense life, warfare framing his whole adulthood.
He is a North Vietnamese Communist agent who doubles as a CIA-trained, American-educated body man for the General, the head of the South Vietnamese secret police. The protagonist comes by his dualities and contradictions honestly: He’s the bastard “love child” of a young Vietnamese woman and a French Catholic priest; his “blood brothers” are Bon, a fellow South Vietnamese secret police officer, and Man, a Saigon-based undercover Vietcong agent and his Communist mentor. He introduces himself this way:
I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess.
This self-description is the beginning of the narrator’s confession-cum-memoir. It’s also a gorgeous improvisation on the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s tome, the hilarious, political, tragicomic bildungsroman Invisible Man (1952).
Ellison’s protagonist also narrates a confessional memoir. It takes a fascinating early turn when the narrator, Invisible Man, says of his grandfather’s deathbed confession: “I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in Reconstruction.” That admission doubles as a mission statement: The grandfather implores the narrator to live with his head in the “lion’s mouth…overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you til they vomit or bust wide open.”
Nguyen, Ellison’s literary “grandson,” doubles down on the ancestral instruction to “agree ’em to death and destruction” by situating the Sympathizer in the mouths of several yoked diametrically opposed lion pairs: the Vietcong and the South; Man and Claude (his CIA handler); the Orient and the Occident.
The Sympathizer’s East-West conundrum first arises when he spends six “idyllic” years, beginning in the mid-1960s, living in “dreamy, sun-besotted” Southern California while earning degrees at Occidental College. Already “undercover, part scholarship student, part spy-in-training,” the protagonist learns Western ways of thinking while reading American history and literature, perfecting his grammar and absorbing slang, smoking pot and losing his virginity. He becomes an enthusiast for (that other Ralph Waldo) Emerson and jazz and an expert in all manner of American studies. After all, as the novel plays out, the narrator-protagonist is training for improvisational and psychological warfare.
Returning to Saigon at the turn of the 1970s, the Sympathizer invisibly supervises a Communist spy network while managing the secret police, who suss out the very same spies. He moves directives for and delivers information to the General, Claude, and Man. Even after they flee Vietnam and settle in Los Angeles, the Sympathizer must continue demonstrating his fidelities as both intelligence officer and Vietcong mole. He divines and executes traitors among the evacuees for the General. He sends coded letters to Man through his aunt in Paris. Writing in invisible ink, Nguyen’s narrator-protagonist reports on the reactionaries’ activities.
In mid-’70s L.A., the Sympathizer has love interests, works on the set of an Apocalypse Now–like film, and spends many hours musing existentially. He also returns to the Southeast Asian front, a secret retrenchment that seems to hold promise but may actually be a punishment. Here, in the novel’s denouement, we learn that the confession we’ve been reading is part of a reeducation and re-radicalization process, a redoubling, if you will, of the narrator-protagonist’s consciousness.
Nguyen’s early chapters are a blended pastiche of the spy thriller mode and Graham Greene’s “entertainments.” Nguyen ignites the novel’s action by relating scenes that detail the days before the Vietcong captured Saigon. Daring set pieces depict the evacuation of the protagonist’s secret police unit and their families out of Asia and into America.
When the Sympathizer wonders what it would feel like to “live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid,” we ought to imagine that question echoing across time and the globe. As Nguyen dramatizes throughout The Sympathizer and argues in his brilliant, precisely titled book of criticism, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016), we ought to consider the Vietnam War in the context of the United States’s century-long effort to “exert its dominion over the Pacific, Asia, and eventually the Middle East—the Orient, broadly defined.” From the late-19th-century seizure of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii to their exit from Afghanistan in August 2021, U.S. Armed Forces expanded and defended American interests overseas. The result is that “wartime has become normal time in America,” writes Nguyen, quoting legal scholar Mary L. Dudziak. His work illustrates that the historical sketch at the top of this piece is not the geopolitical past. We reckon daily with the manifold consequences of living in continuous wartime.
But in the face of ongoing neo-imperial violence, Nguyen, like Ellison, rejects the mantle of ethnic victim. He would rather dwell where Vietnam and the United States intersect and reflect each other’s complexities and complicities. Occidental College’s motto states: Occidens Proximus Orienti (the West is nearest the East).
In his soon-to-be-published Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, To Save and to Destroy: Writing As the Other (April 2025), Nguyen describes the literary and critical archive he relies on for shaping his fiction and informing his refugee-immigrant intellectual practice.
Under the influence of Ellison, Edward Said, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, Laila Lalami, Toni Morrison, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, among many others, Nguyen is the quintessential American thinker-tinker, which is to say that he writes in the traditions of Asian American, African American, refugee-immigrant, and postcolonial writing. This helps him mark the points where East Asia refreshes the California coastline. As a modernist novel, a thriller, a Vietnam War novel, an existentialist novel, a post-9/11 novel, and a tragicomic novel, The Sympathizer is related to Teju Cole’s Open City, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.
In the last of these, Danticat (whose beautiful stories and essays are haunted by French malfeasance, American violence, and Haitian self-destruction) may be describing Nguyen’s refugee ethic when she writes that the immigrant artist’s imperative is to “quantify the price of the American dream in flesh and bone” and to create dangerously from the point where “the language you were born speaking and the one you will probably die speaking” merge inside your brain. Those languages form extensive double histories that will “inevitably force [the refugee artist-intellectual] to rethink facile allegiances.” Danticat identifies both the experiential palette that Nguyen improvises from and the liminal, East-West intersection from where the Sympathizer resides.
