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The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Last accessed on Sunday May 13, 2018

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moment—if the southern army comprised only men like him, it would have won. I confess that I admired him, even though he was my enemy. It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends. Wouldn’t you agree, Commandant?

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A marine on the bullhorn mumbled at them to form into lines, but queuing was unnatural for our countrymen. Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development.

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Let me assure you, if there is one part of a prostitute that is made of gold, it is not her heart. That some believe otherwise is a tribute to the conscientious performer.

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So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.

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So it was that I committed my first unnatural act at thirteen with a gutted squid purloined from my mother’s kitchen, where it awaited its proper fate along with its companions. Oh, you poor, innocent, mute squid! You were the length of my hand, and when stripped of head, tentacles, and guts possessed the comely shape of a condom, not that I knew what that was then. Inside, you had the smooth, viscous consistency of what I imagined to be a vagina, not that I had ever seen such a marvelous thing besides those exhibited by the toddlers and infants wandering around totally naked or naked from the waist down in my town’s lanes and yards. This sight scandalized our French overlords, who saw this childhood nudity as evidence of our barbarism, which then justified their raping, pillaging, and looting, all sanctioned in the holy name of getting our children to wear some clothes so they would not be so tempting to decent Christians whose spirit and flesh were both in question. But I digress! Back to you, soon-to-be-ravished squid: when I poked my index and then middle finger inside your tight orifice, just out of curiosity, the suction was such that my restless imagination could not help but make the connection with the verboten female body part that had obsessed me for the past few months. Without bidding, and utterly beyond my control, my maniacal manhood leaped to attention, luring me forward to you, inviting, bewitching, come-hither squid! Although my mother would return soon from her errand, and while at any moment a neighbor might have walked by the lean-to of our kitchen and caught me with my cephalopodic bride, I nevertheless dropped my trousers. Hypnotized by my squid’s call and my erection’s response, I inserted the latter into the former, which was, unfortunately, a perfect fit. Unfortunate because from then onward no squid was safe from me, not to say that this diluted form of bestiality—after all, hapless squid, you were dead, though I now see how that raises other moral questions—not to say this transgression occurred often, since squid was a rare treat in our landlocked town. My father had given my mother the squid as a gift, as he himself ate well. Priests always had much attention lavished on them by their starstruck fans, those devout housewives and wealthy congregants who treated them as if they were guardians of the velvet rope blocking entrance into that ever so exclusive nightclub, Heaven. These fans invited them to dinner, cleaned their chambers, cooked their food, and bribed them with gifts of various kinds, including delectable, expensive seafood not meant for the likes of a poor woman like my mother. While I felt no shame at all for my shuddering ejaculation, an enormous burden of guilt fell on me as soon as my senses returned, not because of any moral violation, but because I could hardly bear depriving my mother of even a morsel of squid. We had only a half dozen, and she would notice one missing. What to do? What to do? A…
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As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.

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We’re all innocent on one level and guilty on another. Isn’t that what Original Sin is all about?

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So I paid for the major’s sin by donating the money to the revolution, handing it to Man at the basilica. See what we’re fighting against? he said. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, droned the dowagers. This is why we’ll win, Man said. Our enemies are corrupt. We are not. The point of writing this is that the crapulent major was as sinful as Claude estimated. Perhaps he had even done worse than simply extort money, although if he did it did not make him above average in corruption. It just made him average.

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While I had no desire to be married, weddings reminded me of what had been denied to me through no choice of my own.

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Even in my somnambulant state I knew that white was not only the color of purity and innocence. It was also the sign of mourning and death.

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Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves.

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naively believed that I could divert the Hollywood organism from its goal, the simultaneous lobotomization and pickpocketing of the world’s audiences. The ancillary benefit was strip-mining history, leaving the real history in the tunnels along with the dead, doling out tiny sparkling diamonds for audiences to gasp over. Hollywood did not just make horror movie monsters, it was its own horror movie monster, smashing me under its foot.

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I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit.

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most actors spent more time with their masks off than on, whereas in my case it was the reverse. No surprise, then, that sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face. Now, with the face of the captain readjusted for a proper fit, I said, The citizenry can’t sift out what is useful and good if there’s too much opinion circulating.

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Even two choices may be one too many. One choice is enough, and no choice may be even better. Less is more, isn’t it? You

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censoring just the part about my mother’s breasts.

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“money votes” was “open sesame” to the deep caverns of the American political system.

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Confucius say, Clean with Sheen! Not surprisingly, Yoon was an alcoholic.

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His face was an accurate thermometer of his condition, the mercurial redness an indicator that the liquor had worked its way up from his toes to his vision, tongue, and brain, for he was flirting with the actress playing his sister even though neither was heterosexual.

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a disgruntled Green Beret scrawling, I believe in God, but God believes in napalm, on his helmet;

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the interrogator must produce a steady stream of epithets, insults, grunts, demands, and provocations with all the concentration and creativity of a woman manning a dirty-talk sex line.

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It was at her headstone I knelt down to say good-bye. The desecration by weather over the past seven months had eroded much of her face in the photographic reproduction, while the red paint with which her name was written had faded to the hue of dried blood on a sidewalk.

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Where’s Abe now? I said. Japan. Not that he’s any happier there than he was here. After the war ended and he was freed, he thought he’d go back to his people, the way that he’d been told to all his life by white people, even though he was born here. So he went and found out that the people in Japan didn’t think he was one of them, either. To them he’s one of us, and to us he’s one of them. Neither one thing nor another.

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Life’s a suicide mission.

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That was the subversive’s dilemma. Rather than flaunt ourselves in the sexually dubious costumes of superheroes, we hid beneath cloaks of invisibility, here just as in Saigon.

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A man gazing on semi-exposed breasts was not only engaging in simple lasciviousness, he was also meditating, even if unawares, on the visual embodiment of the verb “to cleave,” which meant both to cut apart and to put together.

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for once I wished I were a true Christian so I could be nailed to that cross.

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she believed in the revolutionary potential of disco and the United Nations of nightclubs;

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Outside sprawled an expansive golfing green that demanded more water than a Third World city, where quartets of virile bankers practiced a sport whose swinging skills required both the brute, warlike force necessary to disembowel unions as well as the coup de grâce finesse of tax dodging.

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If I was unhappy, it would reflect badly on me, for Americans saw unhappiness as a moral failure and thought crime. But if I was happy, it would be in bad taste to say so, or a sign of hubris, as if I was boasting or gloating.

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Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

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We ate dinner in the living room while watching The Jeffersons, a TV comedy about the unacknowledged black descendants of Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence.

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What if the self that one exposes is as unpleasing to others as the mask, or even worse?

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that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious.

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We are never satisfied with only one way in. We will always try every possibility, even the blackest and most forbidding passages, or so I was reminded in my night with Lana.

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Bits of pink flesh and skin and tissue hung on the ferns, already crawling with ants.

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I feared death and I loved life. I yearned to live long enough to smoke one more cigarette, drink one more drink, experience seven more seconds of obscene bliss, and then, perhaps, but most likely not, I could die.

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As I told you all along, when your confession reaches a satisfactory state, based on our reading of it and on my reports of these self-criticism sessions to the commissar, you will move on to the next and, we hope, last stage of your reeducation. In short, the commissar believes you ready to be cured.

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Haven’t I confessed to many things, Commandant? In content, perhaps, but not in style. Confessions are as much about style as content, as the Red Guards have shown us. All we ask for is a certain way with words. Cigarette?

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You, at least, are honest with me, even though, to be honest with you, that may not be the healthiest strategy.

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There you go again, defiant for no reason. Don’t you see we live in a sensitive time? It will take decades for the revolution to rebuild our country.

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The only men who knew my secret were the commissar and the commandant, for whom I had developed feline feelings of both dependency and resentment.

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You are nothing but a shadow standing at the mouth of his cave, some strange creature that sees things from two sides.

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slogans were empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea?

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But I could still recognize him, for who but a man with two minds could understand a man with no face?

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But what was this meaning? What had I intuited at last? Namely this: while nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom!

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Our life and our death have taught us always to sympathize with the undesirables among the undesirables.

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Asian Invasion and the Yellow Peril.

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Americans tell and retell their “intervention” in the Vietnamese peoples’ struggle for freedom. It obscures a story about Vietnamese people, their triumphs and tragedies, by placing the United States, its imperial imperatives, its altruism and delusional exceptionalism, at the center of the narrative.

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