Bucheon City of Literature

A Novel That Cuts to the Heart of Diaspora

There is already much that we know about the Vietnam War—the tragic end of the war in 1975, the boat people, the Korean military’s role in the fighting, and Vietnam’s postwar economic growth. We have also heard something about the lives of Vietnamese refugees in the United States.

Nevertheless, all those facts are merely fragments of the whole, distorting the true story that remains shrouded in darkness. Who was the winner, and who the loser of this war? Who was the aggressor, and who the victim? How can we divvy up shares of responsibility and victimhood for the violence and destruction that was perpetrated in Vietnam? Could it be that the attitudes adopted toward Vietnam in the United States and elsewhere in the world—sometimes hostile, sometimes amicable—actually represent some kind of unconscious urge to justify ourselves?

In his novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen digs straight into the vein of such doubts and confusions. The book’s unnamed narrator is a biracial child of colonizer and colonized, as well as occupying the unique position of a double agent working for the two warring governments of Vietnam. Already, this hints at the polarity and inscrutability of the “Vietnam issue.” Moving beyond that, the narrator is both an objective observer of the events of the book and a participant in those events, a dual nature that advances the plot through his bifurcated gaze. By way of this distinctive structure, the author reveals how all people involved in Vietnam’s history are reduced to accomplices to evil because all their constructive efforts end up furthering the destruction of their country.

If that predicament were boiled down to a single sentence, it would probably be the following fact: “Nobody can represent the state, but the state functions as the basis for everyone’s existence.” Furthermore, even though the absence of the state turns everybody into a phantom, the traces they leave behind are nonetheless genuinely human. Therefore, this book serves as both record and judgment of everyone’s experience of the Vietnam War.

That is how this book transcends the experience of Vietnamese immigrants to cut to the heart of diaspora. All of us seek to find our true selves, but the self can only exist in our relationships with other people. The fundamental question of diaspora, be that positive or negative, lies in the paradox of the preceding sentence.

The author’s skill in delving into the heart of the matter is not only evident in the book’s plot. Considering that one of the primary reasons for reading literature is to savor the texture of language, his evocative figures of speech, careful arrangement of events, and clever use of word play succeed at transmuting readers’ feelings about the book’s theme into their own personal experience. This makes for something of an “out-of-body experience” for Korea-based readers, who are transported far above the earth to mull the significance of the book’s events. The author once remarked, “I want readers to be rattled by the book.” Readers soon find that he is being quite serious.