The Complexities of War and Identity - The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The younger generation, like myself, thought it was just some distant war. I grew up playing Viet Cong, a video game that basically sets in Vietnam featuring American soldiers fighting against the communist guerilla. That was all I knew and even when I was in Laos a year ago, the story of the bombing was something that was still hard to understand. Why was the war started? The ideological differences of it all were so hard to comprehend up until last week.

Perhaps, it’s me who hasn’t read so many war stories but to my eyes, the stories of wars these days are dominated by the tale and references to WWII, mostly about Nazi occupation. I am sure you have read or watched things like boys in striped pajamas, etc etc.

Today, let me introduce you to a historical fiction The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen that won a Pulitzer award. This story is written by a Vietnamese voice, the narration from the other side. You might have heard of a quote “ History is written by the victor” but in this case, there are complexities of it all. The writer isn’t necessarily on the winning side. He’s a south Vietnamese, born on the losing side of the war but he also has roots of the north as his family was from that side of Vietnam. This is why this book is fascinating. Despite fiction, in the end of his book he also writes references where he draws his ideas, like the Fall of Saigon that marked the downfall of the American during the Vietnam war.

The story uses quite an unreliable narrator called “ The Captain”. He is a spy for the north, the communist side of Vietnam. He is working as the aide-de-camp for the General’s of the Southern side. The Captain is Eurasian, a love child between his mother, a Vietnamese woman with a pastor. He lived his life being called a bastard and is having a hard time, living in dualities, as an Asian but also European. Now, even more when he works as a spy for the communist cause.

The captain is well-versed in American culture and could speak just like an American. He studied in the US and during his time, he was exposed more to the US ideologies and ways of living. This makes him easier to mingle with the southerners who were the US allies in this war. As the war draws closer and the southern side is almost losing the war they wanted America to send them more money to fund the war as they had first given it as an aid. The offer was rejected and it was the start of the fall of Saigon.

“ Having given us the needles, they no perversely no longer supplied the dope. Nothing is ever so expensive as what is offered for free”

There are parts that really question the complexities of American involvement in this war. There are also CIA agents somehow monitoring and orchestrating this war. It’s almost like Vietnam was just a puppet just so communism didn't invade all of southeast asia and became the prominent ideology in the region.

What was it 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?

The story also involves themes like the complexities of friendship and how the war affected it. The Captain has two best friends, Bon and Man. Bon is an anti-community soldier from the south who was motivated to avenge his father who was brutally murdered by the Viet cong. Meanwhile Man is committed to the commonest cause, he works as a dentist and he is also the captain’s handler as he has higher ranks within the communist party.

They never talk about their ideological differences and kept it on the low, Man and the Captain wanted to make sure that when Saigon is liberated, Bon would be out of the city. However, things take turns when eventually, the Captain still has to work for the communist cause, being the spy for the General who escaped to the US. He now navigates life as a war refugee and spy in the US and somehow, even there, he was still being watched and spied on by his comrades.

The harrowing experience he faced through the war and the things that he witnessed, somehow changed something in him. The captain was a complex character, he was a man that existed in both worlds witnessing the things from both sides. In the story, he did a mission back to Vietnam, only to be sent to re-education camp and that his comrade loses trust in him.

Man now rose to even more as commissar, he told the narrator that going back to Vietnam was a mistake. He should’ve just stayed in the US with Bon. But The Captain was extremely loyal to the cause that it was something he would be willing to do, a mission to aid the anti-communist that was merely a trap. There was no way at that point, the southern is going to resurrect, the northern was too powerful by now.

The mindblowing part was during the time in the re-education camp. In some of the last chapters, you begin to questions if anything the Captain wrote was true or it was something forced just so he was able to be freed of the torture. So, I’ll let you discover it.

The Sympathizer is a pretty complex yet compelling novel. It was a door to view the Vietnam war through other lenses. The lens that involves the vietnamese voices. Even more so, with the narrator that acts as a two-faced man. I do not know much about the writer but clearly, there was a balance of both, that there was criticism aimed towards the American but also showed us that communism can be an ideology that is far from what it was supposed to be by its theorizer.

Let this novel be some type of reminder that war is complex and it affects all lives differently. There’s really no black and white about it all & one very important quote that I really love is that “none asks poor people if they want war” as well as this one. This one though unrelated to the current war that the character went through, somehow captures the essences of this ideological war itself.

“He buried them by the thousands, brave young men enmeshed in the cobwebbed eulogies spun by spidery politicians”

This novel has an HBO adaptation too. I watched it and it was fantastic as well. Although it’s almost closely based on the novel, there were parts that I think we're missing yet if they captured the whole idea of it, it was 8 out of 10. It was known as a series where Robert Downey Jr played almost a few different characters that really gets you confused especially if you read the novels. It really makes you think that those characters are the same and part of the symbolism in the novel that the CIA is everywhere and can be anything but really, in the novel it was a different tone. I’ll let you read this one and see you next week!