![]() ![]() ![]() In doing so he masterfully reversed the gaze to show America through the eyes of a Vietnamese refugee: communist, double agent, man of two faces. In The Sympathizer Nguyen seized the narrative of the war in Vietnam from American hands, reminding the world of the millions of Vietnamese who lost their lives, livelihoods, country and futures as a result. He has talked often about the indelible early experience of being a refugee. On arrival he lived away from them for a period, with a white sponsor family. In 1975, aged four, Nguyen left Vietnam with his parents, bound ultimately for the United States. It is, as Nguyen himself has observed in the past, the first time history has ever been written by the loser. It is the story of the impact that fighting the war had on the bodies, minds and hearts of mainly white American males. There he is held in a re-education camp where he is interrogated and tortured by “the faceless man”, forced to write and rewrite his “confession” in an attempt to correct his ideological position: the result is the book itself.įor decades the master narrative of the Vietnam war has been created by American books and movies. His journey led him from a shack in Saigon to life among wealthy Vietnamese exiles in Los Angeles, finally to confront his own past years later back in Vietnam. In a distinctive voice, one that mixed erudition with the vernacular, quiet reflection with emotional outburst and came threaded with a biting wit, he recounted his life as a Viet Cong spy. In 2016 the unnamed protagonist of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first novel The Sympathizerwon his creator a Pulitzer prize for fiction. “W e were the unwanted, the unneeded and the unseen, invisible to all but ourselves.” And with those words he is back, the “man of two faces and two minds” as well as many guises: Vietnamese, French, American, soldier, academic, Japanese tourist, waiter, hoodlum, killer, communist, capitalist, spy.
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