On reading Viet Thanh Nguyen’s THE SYMPATHIZER
In the commentary included at the end of the Kindle version of The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen refers to a interviewer who was “rattled” by the novel’s ending, claiming that this is his intended effect: “I want this book to provoke people to rethink their assumptions about this history, and also about the literature they’ve encountered before–to make them uncomfortable in a good way.” My reaction to this book is quite different. The book, in fact, does nothing but reinforce for me a whole series of assumptions that take me back many years in the trajectory of my thinking: about identity in an immigrant community, about the role of Hollywood and the media in constructing erroneous and often heinous attitudes toward others, and about the Vietnam war specifically, assumptions that, as a college freshman, I was beginning to consider the uncomfortable truths about America in the postwar era, assumptions that at the time were hard to embrace but that nonetheless seemed vaguely right.
It was my lot to come of age against the backdrop of horrendous images of children being burned by napalm and corrupt military shooting suspected enemies in the head in the middle of city streets, in some far off, tropical Asian country. It was a era dominated by fear. The fear of my brother being sent off to the war and the fear of my eventually being drafted was mitigated, on the one hand, by Dale’s decision to join the reserves, get married and have children. I, on the other hand, was playing the waiting game (a 2S deferral for attending college) and trying to figure out what I would do if and when my number was called. The time bomb that was ticking over my head slowly died out, alas, thanks to the 1969 lottery and to the decision to wind the war down.
The dilemmas of that time continue to perplex me to this day.
Meanwhile, apocalyptic images of death and destruction played out on the television screens and in the media, while the ticker tape of names of hometown casualties continued to scroll across the monitors of our minds. The horror of it all was relentless and it was exacerbated by the unending haranguing of a political class bent on indoctrinating us all with their lame domino theories, and by the scornful disapproval of our elders who were conditioned by their memories of America’s of victorious heroic triumph over Fascism to accept the words of the false prophets at face value.
It took me time to realize that that political class was even more putrid than I could even imagine, and that our elders were even more naive.
Learning to un-train the mind is central to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel and was a core principle to my “coming of age” experience in the 1960s. I vividly remember my sensation at being challenged by the best of my college friends to rethink everything I had been trained to assume, by the world I grew up in: to consider, for instance, that the Vietnamese might actually be better off under a communist government lead by Ho Chi Minh (God forbid!) and that, in any case, there was no justification for the degree of destruction and suffering that American B52 bombers were unleashing on a civilian population. (How could that be? I knew people whose friends and lovers flew those planes?) I remember activists denouncing the moral and political corruption of the regimes that the American government was propping up in the lame name of some home-baked sense of “democracy.” For an 18-year-old child of immigrants from Lomita, California, to believe in all that was being unleashed upon him upon his arrival in Berkeley, in 1968, required a leap of faith and it required long struggles with the tensions rooted in a sense of respect and gratitude toward the past, our elders, society at large. These struggles were more painful than anyone who hasn’t lived them can imagine, but they were struggles that I confronted and resolved and that helped to make me a, well, if not better, at least a different person.
Seeing the PBS series last year on Vietnam was many things for me, including somewhat bittersweet. How long it has taken the official discourses in this country to align with what the activists were trying to tell us in 1968!
So, yes, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel for me is comforting: for the way it reinforces all of the assumptions that I struggled so hard to assimilate 50 years ago.
It is also comforting for the way it tells the story of a person living on the edge, of “two minds”: but that is another chapter.
