Both capitalism and communism invoke freedom as their ultimate goal, and they both fail. So how should we proceed? Is true freedom even attainable? These slippery questions lie at the heart of The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story of a communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army who spends time in Vietnam, California, and the Philippines—working as an extra wrangler on a thinly veiled satire of Apocalypse Now. The mock-epic novel gradually reveals itself to be a confession extracted under torture, undermining itself as coerced. The narrator is half-Vietnamese, half-French, his entire self a product of colonialism, his story one of never fully, comfortably belonging to any tribe.

What had I intuited at last? Namely this: while nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom! These two slogans are almost the same, but not quite. The first inspiring slogan is Ho Chi Minh’s empty suit, which he no longer wore. How could he? He was dead. The second slogan was the tricky one, the joke. It was Uncle Ho’s empty suit turned inside out, a sartorial sensation that a man of two minds, or a man with no face, dared to wear. This odd suit suited me, for it was of a cutting-edge cut. Wearing this inside-out suit, my seams exposed in an unseemly way, I understood, at last, how our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power. In this transformation, we were not unusual. Hadn’t the French and the Americans done exactly the same? Once revolutionaries themselves, they had become imperialists, colonizing and occupying our defiant little land, taking away our freedom in the name of saving us. Our revolution took considerably longer than theirs, and was considerably bloodier, but we made up for lost time. When it came to learning the worst habits of our French masters and their American replacements, we quickly proved ourselves the best. We, too, could abuse grand ideals! Having liberated ourselves in the name of independence and freedom—I was so tired of saying these words!—we then deprived our brethren of the same!

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Links:

• A Crime of Dispassion: ‘The Sympathizer’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen – Henri Lipton, ZYZZYVA, no date

  
  

• Belonging Is a Complicated Thing: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen – Jennifer Acker, The Common, September 12, 2022

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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