Fiachra Gibbons, Agence France-Presse, Beirut, Aug 21, 2017<\/p>\n
PARIS: When Americans debate the Vietnam War, what the Vietnamese thought rarely gets a mention. Not anymore. \u201cThe Sympathizer,\u201d by Vietnamese-American academic Viet Thanh Nguyen, has ended that silence.<\/p>\n
An excoriating tragicomic novel, a best-seller in the U.S., it not only dismantles the Hollywood myth of the conflict but turns it inside out.<\/p>\n
Told from the perspective of an American-educated Viet Cong double agent, its sweeping arc \u2013 and bravura takedown of the legendary film \u201cApocalypse Now\u201d \u2013 won Nguyen the 2016 Pulitzer and a pile of other top prizes.<\/p>\n
The judges of the Dublin Literary Award \u2013 one of the few it didn\u2019t win \u2013 described it as \u201cthe masterpiece on Vietnam that the world has been waiting for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nguyen, who escaped his homeland in his mother\u2019s arms after the fall of Saigon in 1975, is not the type to have his head turned by critics comparing his debut novel to such classics as \u201cCatch 22\u201d and \u201cThe Invisible Man.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAll Vietnamese people are apparently proud of me now even if they haven\u2019t read the book, or whether they agree with it. The Pulitzer trumps everything,\u201d he told AFP in Paris, where he is working on a new book.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m happy that they\u2019re proud. I\u2019m glad I can give them something, yet I find it a little bit sad that they feel their experiences are so little-known that the validation of a literary prize matters so much.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having tried to \u201chumanize\u201d ordinary Vietnamese people in his acclaimed short stories, Nguyen chose to unleash their strangled anger toward the Americans, French colonialism and their own leaders in his novel.<\/p>\n
Just to live, \u201cI had turned my anger down to a pilot light,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cI turned it up for \u2018The Sympathizer,\u2019 and that was unnerving for many Americans.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe Asians are supposed to be the model minority.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are the nice people. We are not supposed to get upset.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have had some hate mail from veterans, which is OK.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m trying to force everybody to reconsider everything they know about the Vietnam War.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Nguyen, who grew up between a refugee camp and the shop that his parents slaved to set up in California, is an equal-opportunities satirist.<\/p>\n
While he eviscerates a barely disguised Francis Ford Coppola on the Philippine set of his iconic film, the Vietnamese do not emerge smelling of roses either.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I had only criticized the communists or the Americans I would have been fine,\u201d Nguyen said.<\/p>\n
For his Vietnamese characters are not only human.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are also inhuman, capable of doing terrible things. Some terrible things happen in the book, as they did in Vietnam. Nothing I wrote about did not happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nguyen said he was \u201canxious\u201d about how the Vietnamese translation would be received.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wonder even how my own family will react to this depiction of Vietnamese complexity and contradictions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
That it has taken this long for a Vietnamese writer to take on the war and its legacy is no surprise to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cVietnamese people do anything to avoid conflict. There is a very big temptation not to talk about the war. The Communist Party controls the narrative and if you try to get another perspective in there you are censored or exiled.\u201d<\/p>\n
In America, Vietnamese writers are up against Hollywood, he said, \u201cthe unofficial propaganda of the United States. These movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Are you going to go up in front of that with your puny little novel?\u201d<\/p>\n
Americans also \u201clike to think that they know something about Vietnam. But it is only ever their experiences we see,\u201d he insisted.<\/p>\n
Nguyen, a professor of English and ethnicity, decided to turn U.S. attitudes on race to his advantage.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a minority you are expected to write about your \u2018minority experience.\u2019 So I decided to give them that, but done my way, a way neither Americans nor Vietnamese people have seen before.\u201d<\/p>\n
His big challenge was to find a character that could cross the lines.<\/p>\n
And in coming up with an ambivalent Communist mole in the South Vietnamese army, the unwanted son of a French colonial Catholic priest and his maid, Nguyen found his man.<\/p>\n
Smart, sarcastic, yet desperate to be accepted and to please, the spy agrees to become an adviser on the set of \u201cApocalypse Now.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Movie,\u201d the character observes at one point in the book, \u201cwas just a sequel to our war and a prequel to the next one that America was destined to wage.<\/p>\n
\u201cKilling the extras was either a re-enactment of what had happened to us natives or a dress rehearsal for the next such episode, with the Movie the local anesthetic applied to the American mind.\u201d<\/p>\n