Jan 20

Jan 20 Tell Me What You're Reading No. 36: Trinh Q. Truong - The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

My guest for this episode is Trinh Q. Truong. Trinh came to the U.S. from Vietnam with her mother about 20 years ago. During what we in the U.S. refer to as the Vietnam War, Trinh’s grandfather worked for the governments of the Republic of Vietnam and the United States doing intelligence work, mainly mapping the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Most of the rest of her family was engaged during the war years in democratic activism in the country. After Saigon fell in 1975, Trinh’s grandparents and eight of their children—with the exception of Trinh’s mother, who was one year old—were sent to reeducation labor camps for nine years to atone for their wartime allegiances. Trinh herself is a longtime refugee activist in the U.S. and a recent graduate of Oxford in England with a masters degree in refugee and forced migration studies.

When I met Trinh last summer, we had, what to me, is an inevitable discussion of books. As I was intrigued by her background, I asked Trinh if there was a book she might like to discuss with me on the podcast. Trinh said that she had started reading The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen several times, and that she would get through it this fall and then talk with me.

The Sympathizer is a beautifully written, dark and tragic novel set during and after the war in Vietnam. The unnamed narrator is a Western-educated Vietnamese. While he is working for the CIA in Saigon and serving as aide-de-camp to a South Vietnamese general, he is also a spy for the North, secretly sending intelligence to the insurgents, and his spying continues as he joins Vietnamese refugees in America after the war. Adding to the difficulties for our narrator, his boyhood friends are soldiers fighting for the South. The narrator is torn apart by his conflicting sympathies. Now, sometime in the late 1970s, the narrator is in a communist prison, addressing an interrogator who demands that he explain his activities among the enemy. The book is ultimately an indictment of the French, the Americans and the Vietnamese themselves. As I got into the book, I thought I could begin to understand how difficult it might have been for Trinh to get through it.