When it comes to satirical spy thrillers, it’s hard to do better than Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, winner of a 2016 Pulitzer. Opening in the last days of the Vietnam War, the novel is narrated by an unnamed South Vietnamese army captain who serves as a spy for the Communist North. His mission is to follow a crew of refugees to Southern California in the wake of the war and keep tabs on their political activities.
The narrative is certainly propulsive, featuring a nail-biting escape from Saigon and the clandestine assassination of an alleged traitor. It comes steeped in the perpetual tension generated by a protagonist whose true identity might at any moment be uncovered. Some of the most searing, memorable moments in The Sympathizer, however, are those that dwell in the mundane. Half a dozen chapters in, an exile known as the General opens a liquor store in a crummy corner of Los Angeles. This is not, on its own, remarkable—yet another immigrant establishing a small business in a new place to support his family. Still, in this scenario, Nguyen captures the dispossession and disorientation that inform such a life.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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In Vietnam, the General wielded power. He oversaw the brutal secret police and inhabited a spacious villa where he and his family were tended by a household staff. The narrator served as his aide and chauffeur. Now the General is another immigrant purveying cabernet and girlie mags on an unglamorous stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. In attendance at his grand opening are a former colonel who labors as a janitor, a major who works as a mechanic, and a “grizzled captain” who makes ends meet as a short-order cook.
“Many once commanded artillery batteries and infantry battalions,” the narrator reports, “but now they possessed nothing more dangerous than their pride, their halitosis, and their car keys, if they even owned cars.”
The story of the General broadly echoes that of a real South Vietnamese general: Nguyen Ngoc Loan, who became globally notorious after cameras captured him summarily executing a Vietcong fighter on the streets of Saigon in 1968. At the end of the war, Loan fled to the United States, where he ended up running a pizza joint in northern Virginia. He, like the general in The Sympathizer, is an exceptional figure: a powerful man with a grim backstory who somehow eluded the worst consequences of his behavior. All the same, their lives also embody the dizzying nature of the refugee experience, which involves leaving your homeland not in pursuit of abstract ideas about a better life but because one day you find yourself on the wrong end of a war and it’s time to run.
The Sympathizer takes us on that journey—one Nguyen himself made at age four when his family fled Vietnam. The novel leads us through refugee camps in Guam and the United States, the confounding bureaucratic struggle of finding a sponsor, and all the ways tenuous communities are atomized and dispersed. If, in part, The Sympathizer is about spy craft, it is also about the daily grind of getting to know a new country—while clinging to the hope that one day the old one might allow you back. In the United States, the General is no longer a general, but his compatriots continue to defer to him as if he still held the rank. This is a way of preserving the world as they knew it. As the narrator notes, displaced people live “in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers.”
In the popular imagination, California is a place of desire and reinvention. The Sympathizer’s protagonist, however, couldn’t be more unromantic about it, regarding it instead as a landscape of dismal apartments and menial labor. The parking lot, he acerbically states, is “an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world.” To the refugees in this novel, California is not a dreamed-of destination but a bewildering way station that somehow becomes permanent—a place to reassemble their lives within the nation that destroyed their country. It is a place where exiles become trapped in the amber of memory, of what once was but no longer exists. “We rinsed ourselves with hope,” the narrator tells us, “and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.” There is a piece, however, that remains very much alive; they carry it in their hearts.•
