Viet Thanh Nguyen, historical perspective and 1984

In times as tumultuous as our own, it can be soothing to accept how little one knows or understands. We face a torrent of information, reaction and conjecture – all of it available with a few twitches of the muscles in our fingers and thumbs. The data, the testimonies, the voices can be summoned instantaneously, but in a world that is at once connected and stratified, the difficulty lies in contextualising, absorbing and evaluating everything we’re presented with.

Of course, we must make our judgements amid an ever-changing landscape of understanding: even when you feel yourself approaching the boundaries of knowledge on a subject, you’ll discover new accounts, alternative recollections, divergent perspectives. Confidence, let alone expertise, in a particular topic is ephemeral and liable to be undermined, or even shattered, at short notice.

One such rude awakening occurred when I read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. Until working my way through this captivating 2015 novel, I considered myself well-informed about the Vietnam War(s), from the defeat of the French in 1954 to the evacuation of the American Embassy in 1975. I’d taken in the films, now ensconced in the Hollywood canon, and read the most notable memoirs and novels: O’Brien, Caputo, Marlantes and Johnson. I’d watched Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s masterful documentary series, and I’d visited the well-trodden battlefields of Hue and Cu Chi. Nguyen’s fictional account of a communist sleeper agent posing as an anti-communist veteran in post-war America, however, was a powerful corrective to my supposed understanding.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Literature

The story not only evokes the raw trauma of refugees fleeing a surrounded Saigon and setting out for a new home in the USA, but also subverts the American Dreams of opportunity and conformity, which the narrator names “the metastasizing cancer called assimilation”. The America the refugees settle in is one of cash-in-hand jobs cleaning evangelical churches, with “bargain-basement penny loafers and creased budget khakis”.

Nguyen, who himself came to America as a three-year-old in 1975, repeatedly contrasts the soaring rhetoric of the novel’s American congressmen and CIA advisors with the grubbiness of the Los Angeles underbelly, whether it is the narrator’s stinking apartment or messy political assassinations in apartment blocks and car parks. 

Iconic: but does Apocalypse Now misrepresent the war in Vietnam?

The novel also brilliantly satirises Hollywood’s representations of the Vietnam war, which have inevitably come to dominate the English-speaking world’s understanding of the conflict. The narrator finds himself working on the set of The Hamlet, a gleefully explicit, mega-budget war epic by a critically acclaimed Auteur, and quickly identifies some of the problems commonplace in the ‘Nam subgenre of cinema. Upon reviewing an early script for The Hamlet, the narrator summarises the film as “a movie about our country where not a single one of our countrymen had an intelligible word to say”. Even when The Auteur is persuaded to include a few Vietnamese characters in supporting roles, they are not represented by Vietnamese actors. Instead, the most substantial role is given to James Yoon, a “Korean American in his midthirties who could play a decade older or younger and assume the mask of any Asian ethnicity”.     

While Nguyen skewers films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon with acidic humour, The Sympathizer is at its most devastating when depicting the viciousness of asymmetrical warfare, of the type America continues to wage covertly in Asia today. A number of the novel’s key characters are involved in the infamous Phoenix Program, a CIA-organised initiative that sought to destroy the NLF / Viet Cong’s civilian infrastructure through assassinations, torture and imprisonment carried out by the South Vietnamese Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs). The cynicism and ruthlessness of the project is portrayed in affecting detail, which resonates particularly deeply considering the recent shifts in American policy in Afghanistan, where the CIA have appear to given local paramilitaries a free rein over the countryside.

The CIA-sponsored Phoenix Program targeted civilians for interrogation, torture and assassination

The torture depicted in The Sympathizer is suitably horrifying, with the narrator glibly noting that “our prison cells were time machines, the inmates aging much faster than they normally would”. Again, the novel echoes America’s contemporary misdeeds in Morocco, Jordan and Guantanamo Bay. Through the CIA’s tutelage, the novel’s narrator discovers that torture “can be creative and tailored to the individual or to the imagination of the interrogator. Disorientation. Sensory deprivation. Self-punishment.”

The details of interrogation that emerge later in The Sympathizer, including an all-white room blaring country music on a loop, also recall the later chapters of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four where narrator Winston Smith is interned in the Ministry of Love, “The place where there is no darkness”. Smith, tortured at the hands of the Thought Police, is physically shattered and psychologically degraded, to the point where he loves the dictator Big Brother with his “heart and soul”.

1984: Winston Smith in the Ministry of Love

The final chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four remain a harrowing read, even for modern audiences. Reading Orwell’s 1948 novel for the first time recently, I was shocked that such a visceral work, full of political and sexual complexities, has been misrepresented in popular culture as a one-dimensional screed against totalitarian government. I approached Nineteen Eighty-Four with some trepidation, put off by the blithe adjectival use of “Orwellian” and the ‘read some fucking Orwell’ rants of militant celebrity centrists, but found an affecting and nuanced story illuminated by a razor-sharp turn of phrase.

I expected reading the novel to be hard going, but the hardest part was swallowing my pride and giving it a chance. Exploring Nineteen Eighty-Four shattered my preconceptions about an iconic writer, while The Sympathizer upended my understanding of the wars in South East Asia. I look forward to the next chance to expose my own ignorance.