Review: The Sympathizer

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Of the many motifs and themes running through this book, two stand out at the beginning: exclusion and friendship.

Exclusion quickly turns to friendship, as three Vietnamese boys pledge their loyalty in a blood pact. One boy, our narrator, is an outsider as he is the product of the Church, the French, and Vietnam. He is ‘Bui Do’ - the dust of the earth (a phrase later encapsulated in the heart-wrenching song in Cameron Mackintosh’s Miss Saigon.) The other two boys sympathize and rescue him from bullying at school, and they become fast and firm friends. However, the scars of adolescent unity never seem to heal in the humidity of 1970s Vietnam.

Sympathy is a title theme bleached throughout the book, yet it is unclear who the sympathizer is and with whom we should sympathize the most. The defeated French, sipping Ricard and sticking to the old names of Saigon’s streets? The defeated Americans, seeking to eliminate communism abroad and at home? The defeated South Vietnamese, trying to establish lives in whichever country would welcome them? The victorious North Vietnamese, who, despite being on the brink of starvation and bombed to near extinction by ‘Du Pont’, rallied behind the ideals of Ho Chi Minh against the Americans, as they did twenty years before against the French. Or the unlucky refugees, escaping from Troy, yet not headed to Ithaca or Italy - the collateral damage in the fog of war?

The book starts 49 years ago with Saigon's fall, or Saigon's liberation, depending on whose face looks at it. Vietnam was carved in three by the French, then in two, and is on the brink of being united by the forces of the North Vietnamese Army, carrying the torch and words of Ho Chi Minh, who, in the fiercest stage of the war, on 17 July 1966, gave out his call for national resistance against the U.S invaders affirming: “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom”.

The book reveals much of the surreality of Indochina in the period from 1975 to 1980, which was carefully researched by the author, who was only four years old when the events unfolded. Vietnamese women with ‘a mind like an abacus, the spine of a drill instructor, and the body of a virgin even after five children’. Narrow escapes from the closing jaws on 30th April 1975. Interim refugee camps. Formation of new migrant lives. Nationalism is fanned by memory. Wars and infiltration along borders. Settling of old scores. Ideologies manipulated by the CIA. Ghosts are exorcised through popular films such as Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, and Apocalypse Now. The book has it all, even the sad roulette of the boat people and the reminder that wars last several lifetimes, and their scars never heal.

The novel goes out on a Socratic limb: Is the examined life worth living? The Sympathizer has its doubts. Examination and interrogation can reveal truths that may themselves be empty or nothing. One of the characters he meets in the ‘free’ US is a nihilist. Nothing is the absence of anything or any meaning. Several characters encounter death, which liberates the soul from the tomb of the body (a view that Socrates and Jesus Christ both espoused).

Viet Thanh Nguyen has written a haunting tale set in a period instrumental to my involvement with Southeast Asia. I lived in Cambodia in the 1990s, a country still raw and sometimes numb, Nixon’s ‘sideshow’. I also lived in Vietnam, where the generational impact of the defoliant Agent Orange is a prominent reminder of the war. The Vietnamese don’t talk about the American War; they have made peace with America. Just last year, the Vietnamese government raised its trading status with America to a comprehensive strategic alliance, putting its former wartime foe on the same level as Russia and China. President Biden was given a state welcome, as was Obama several years before. There is even an ‘Obama Bun Cha’ restaurant in Hanoi, celebrating Obama’s famed humble lunch of beer and noodles with the late, great Anthony Bourdain. But there is still a North and a South. Hanoi still rules. And harsh messages are still sent down to re-educate those who have gone astray. Most recently, a southern entrepreneur who misappropriated billions of dollars, including some state money, was handed a death sentence.

I was determined to read The Sympathizer in April, the ‘cruellest of months’ and the period in which the book is set, and before the HBO version was streamed into my consciousness. Having lived in Cambodia and Vietnam, I have my realistic imagery that I wanted to revive and didn’t want to be visually or viscerally tainted by false memories. I know the streets, the cafes, the landmarks, and I have walked past its victims and shared many of their stories and tales over the years.

This novel was a satisfying meal. It is a kind of image soup, gathering several ingredients as one transforms translucent rice noodles into a bowl of steaming Pho—a rich aroma of beef broth and star anise. There were sweet elements of Greene, who wrote his Quiet American in room 214 of the Continental Hotel, on the corner of Lam Son Square, overlooking the narrator’s departure from Saigon (the narrator’s senior thesis had been on “Myth and Symbol in the Literature of Graham Greene.”) Sour tamarinds from shade-giving trees. An ‘appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat’. Piquant fish sauce from Phu Quoc.

The prose has brilliant touches, humour in dark places, and sadness throughout. The book will divide those who lived through the events described. As Vietnam continues to grow as an essential friendly shore for the US, the serialisation of the events comes at an exciting time. Next April, Vietnam will celebrate 50 years of reunification. Singaporeans play golf in Saigon, and Miss Saigon plays in Singapore. Although Mackintosh’s musical is a pastiche of the madness of the last days of one of America’s many disastrous wars, Nguyen’s Sympathizer is a more profound ‘meditation in green’ on how we form tribes, how we see and judge others, and how we reconcile man’s inhumanity to man.

I gave the book four stars.


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