The latest in my little Viet Nam season was this 2015 novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

I can see its merits. I can understand why it won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2016. But I didn't enjoy it that much.

Let me qualify that, as you don't really expect to "enjoy" books about war, defeat, flight, assassination, insurrection, and torture. I guess it's more accurate to say that I didn't warm to the book as much as I thought I would. Overall, I'd be going along with this 3/5 rating.

The premise is very interesting. The narrator (unnamed) has a foot in many camps. He is biracial (his father a European priest, his mother a young Vietnamese villager); he is bicultural and bilingual (raised in Viet Nam, he has studied in America, and returns there on one of the chaotic evacuation flights just before the fall/liberation of Saigon, but never totally feels at home there). And, most importantly for the storyline, he is politically bifurcated, too. He is a communist who has infiltrated the higher echelons of the secret police in the south, and he continues to spy for the communists from his vantage-point in America. Of his two closest friends -- the three having sworn to be blood brothers back in their youth -- one is his communist handler and the other an avowed anti-communist.

So it's an understatement to say that he has an interesting perspective. He really can see both sides of most questions -- by the end so effectively that he refers to himself as "we". He admires American values, but is bitingly critical of American shortcomings. He reveres communist values, but comes to feel that the revolution has "gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power".

A kind of riddle emerges at the end: "Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom." This, he finally realizes, is to be understood not in the sense that independence and freedom are the most precious things, more precious than anything else, but in the sense that "nothing" -- whether understood as absence and inaction, or as the big void, the big emptiness, the big nihilistic gulf that opens up after ideals have vanished -- carries more value than anything else, including independence and freedom...

How has it happened, he wonders, that "a revolution fought for independence and freedom could make those things worth less than nothing"? And the big question, so relevant to so many "improving" enterprises regardless of their ideological angle: "Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others? And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing?"


The photos in this post were taken in Ho Chi Minh City, 2003

All this makes it sound as though it's a heavy read. But it's not. It's a thriller, in its way. You want to know how this infiltrator will cope when his divided loyalties are tested, as they often are.

It's also a very moving portrayal of many historical and social situations -- that awful scramble to get out of Saigon before the northern forces arrived; the wrenching adjustment faced by the plucky but disoriented and traumatized refugees as they try their best to come to terms with a new life in a new country, while still grieving the loss of their old lives and their old country, and dealing with a less-than-sympathetic host citizenry ("the majority of Americans regarded us with ambivalence if not distaste, we being living reminders of their stinging defeat"); the desperate, hole-and-corner ways insurrection builds, as these ill-at-ease people aspire to wrest their country back by force ("the General's men, by preparing themselves to invade our now communist homeland, were in fact turning themselves into new Americans"); the apparently utter and complete tone-deafness of white people where it comes to Asia...

And it's a feisty exploration of representation: "Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory's laminated floor?" It's the narrator who says this, back in the 1970s-going-on-1980s. But not a lot has changed, it seems. The author, in 2016, points out: "The literary industry and the entire social and cultural system of the United States work to tempt writers of color into writing for white people... If I had written the book for a white audience, I would have sold it for a lot more money and many more publishers would have been bidding for it."

These are all important themes.



But there's something in the execution that doesn't sit well with me. Firstly, the frame. We're told right at the beginning that it's a "confession", written for a camp commandant by a prisoner in an isolation cell. I don't have any expertise in how such narrations would have sounded, but I'd be very surprised if they sounded like this... The tone is too arch, the turn of phrase too effortfully clever. There's a kind of nod to this when the commandant says: "Your language betrays you... It is the language of the elite." But the potential inauthenticity lingers as a doubt in the reader's mind.

Secondly, some of the stylistic elements grated on me. I hate epithets -- the "affectless lieutenant", the "crapulent major", and so on. People have names, for goodness' sake... And while Nguyen has a dramatic and colourful turn of phrase, it does sometimes teeter over the brink into the overblown.

Thirdly, I feel as though it's all written in capitals...

There's the outrageous professor, who requires the narrator to list his "Oriental and Occidental qualities", and advises him to "assiduously cultivate those reflexes that Americans have learned innately, in order to counterweigh your Oriental instincts". 

There's the equally outrageous author, spouting yet more cliches about "the Oriental".

And most egregiously, there's the outrageous film-maker, who is aiming to make a movie about Viet Nam, but has never met a Vietnamese before the narrator rolls up, and initially comes up with a script in which no Vietnamese has an intelligible word to say. For the narrator, the film-maker's "arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created". The narrator is eventually allowed some input, too modest to have any real imprint on the final product, but enough to leave him open to charges of cooption. As his friend comments: "You tried to play their game, okay? But they run the game. You don't run anything."

These things need to be said, of course. The professor and the author could, unfortunately, be 1970s/1980s real... (Dear God, may this stuff not still be tarnishing academia in 2021, but I wouldn't want to put money even on that...) And the movie scenario is based on a composite of actual movies that Nguyen watched...

Nevertheless, the message is so strong that I felt I was being beaten over the head and megaphoned all at the same time, and I couldn't help feeling it could all have been done a tad more subtly.



After my meditations on The Things They Carried, I guess I couldn't stop myself wondering how much was "true"...

Nguyen points out that "there really were spies in South Vietnam that rose to the very highest ranks of the South Vietnamese bureaucracy and military", and tells us about Pham Xuan An: "[He] was so important that during his time as a mole he was promoted to a major general by the North Vietnamese. And he was friends with people like David Halberstam and all the important American journalists. And they had no idea that he was a communist spy who had studied in the United States."

The author was himself a Vietnamese refugee, so is familiar with many of the situations described in The Sympathizer. His parents, originally from the north of Viet Nam, fled to the south in the mid-1950s when the country was divided. His mother's family came with them; his father's stayed in the north. When the family fled again to the US, his mother's family stayed in the south. It would be 40 years, therefore, before his father would see his relatives again, and 20 before his mother saw hers.

He remembers life in a refugee camp in America, and the arduous business of finding the "sponsor" who was your only ticket out. No-one would sponsor the whole family, so at that early age -- he was only four -- he was separated from his parents, and sent to live with a white family for a while. Eventually, his reunited family moved to California, where there was a sizeable community of Vietnamese.

This wasn't exactly an easy life either. His parents worked long hours in the grocery store they'd opened, and were even shot and injured during a hold-up (not an infrequent experience for immigrant shopkeepers, it seems). Violence was endemic in the refugee community as well: "There was a lot of domestic violence, a lot of domestic abuse. People were traumatized. They were hurt. They were scared. The men faced downward mobility and alienation. And of course, they took it out on their families -- their wives and their children. And these children, a lot of them joined gangs."

And all the time there was the challenge of coping with two identities. He remembers watching Apocalypse Now, and cheering for the Americans until the moment when they started killing Vietnamese: "And that was an impossible moment for me because I didn't know who I was supposed to identify with -- the Americans who were doing the killing or the Vietnamese who were dying and not being able to speak?"

What a stupid, divided world humans have created for themselves. Despite my misgivings, this book made me understand those divisions better.