The Sympathizer

This blew the doors off my own cultural understanding of Vietnam. Raised in North America through the 80's and 90's Vietnam is invoked as more an idea than a country. Vietnam is the backdrop to American reckoning, set to the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The people of Vietnam are mere props in the ongoing narrative the West tells itself. Americans are the heroes or anti-heroes in the story, the main protagonists while the Vietnamese are relegated to the margins. The complete appropriation of the idea of Vietnam by the Hollywood machine is just jaw-dropping. Vietnam invokes Marlon Brando whispering “the horror”, R. Lee Ermey dressing down recruits and Tom Berenger with his arms raised as he's gunned down. Vietnam has been repeatedly sold to me as a white American story whether it's Rambo rescuing POWs or Trump dodging the draft. And Viet Thanh Nguyen gets me thinking about all that while skewering a thinly veiled representation of Apocalypse Now as the director in the book may or may not have tried to have our protagonist killed. Just wild.

This is a book by a Vietnamese writer writing to the Vietnamese people. From its harrowing first pages as we see the fall of Saigon from a perspective I'm only just realizing I've never considered, to the torture nearing the end that is the most visceral, mind altering passage I've read that doesn't need to rely on gore. (Also the most extreme writers workshop I've ever seen rendered on the page.) The Vietnamese here are refugees, not immigrants. Former soldiers, counter-revolutionaries and patriots finding themselves suddenly living tiny, mediocre lives tending liquor stores and working in restaurants. Like our protagonist in the opening lines of the book they are of two minds. Not always an easy read but perspective changing ...and a tip of the hat to the badly abused squid.