“Refugee, exile, immigrant—whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures... Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past...”
Stories of Vietnam and the Vietnam War have almost always been told from a Westerner’s perspective. The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s powerful debut novel, rectifies this imbalance and gives voice to a county and people long silenced by colonial powers.
Narrated by an unnamed character referred to only as Captain, the novel gives an intimate portrait of a man and his country, both of them forced to live a split life because of colonial interference.
We learn the Captain is half Vietnamese and half white, the result of a relationship between his mother and a French Catholic priest. Rejected for being a bastard by both sides, the Captain grew up navigating two cultures while never feeling accepted by either one.
His unique upbringing makes him an ideal candidate for his mission as a Communist spy in the South Vietnamese army. As the Captain’s story unfolds, so do issues of national and personal identity, immigration, assimilation, and acceptance, all explored through the lens of the Vietnam War.
The novel’s scope is impressively wide in order to accommodate both the Captain’s personal struggles and Vietnam’s complicated history. One can read the book as a spy thriller, a historical novel, an immigrant tale, a condemnation of war and colonialism, and an exploration of personal and national identity, with each of the interpretations being correct.
It is this multifaceted perspective that makes The Sympathizer such a rich and engrossing novel. And though there are many narrative threads, Nguyen nimbly weaves them together into a single story about a man and his country, both trying to reconcile their splintered pasts and coming to terms with their still uncertain futures. The Sympathizer is an essential read, both for its literary qualities and for its deeply personal depiction of the Vietnamese American experience.