The Sympathizer

A great deal of what I have confessed so far may seem foreign to you, dear Commandant, and to this mysterious, faceless commissar of yours whom I have heard so much about. The American Dream, the culture of Hollywood, the practices of American democracy, and so on can altogether make America a disorienting place for those like us who hail from the Orient. Presumably my half-Occidental status has helped me, perhaps innately, in understanding the American character, culture, and customs, including those concerning romance. The most important thing to understand is that while we courted, Americans dated, a pragmatic custom whereby a male and a female set a mutually agreeable time to meet, as if to negotiate a potentially profitable business venture. Americans understood dating to be about investments and gains, short or long term, but we saw romance and courtship as being about losses. After all, the only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.

Lana was clearly a woman in need of courting. I wrote her letters in which I pleaded my case, using the perfect cursive taught to me by pterodactyl nuns; I composed villanelles, sonnets, and couplets of doubtful prosody but resolute sincerity; I seized her guitar when she let me sit on a Moroccan cushion in her living room and sang her songs by Pham Duy, Trinh Cong Son, and the newest lyrical darling of our diaspora, Duc Huy. She rewarded me with the enigmatic smiles of an alluring apsara, a reserved seat at the front row of her performances, and the favor of continuing audiences, of which I was given no more than one a week. I was both grateful and tormented, as I recounted to Bon on listless afternoons at the liquor store. His response was as unenthusiastic as you might anticipate. Tell me this, lover boy, he said one day, back to his terse self. His attention was divided between me and a pair of teenage patrons creeping, possum-like, toward an aisle, a duo whose years and IQ were measurable in the low double digits. What happens when the General finds out? I was sitting with him behind the counter, awaiting the General’s afternoon arrival. Why would the General ever find out? I said. Nobody would tell him. Lana and I aren’t sentimental enough to think that one day we’ll get married and confess to him. Then what’s all this wooing and daring despair? he asked, quoting from my narration of our courtship. I said: Must wooing and daring despair end in marriage? Can’t it end in love? What does marriage have to do with love? He snorted. God made us to be married. Love has everything to do with marriage. I wondered if he was about to dissolve as he had that night at Fantasia, but discussing love, marriage, and death had no visible effect on him this afternoon, perhaps because he was focused on the convex mirror suspended over the rear corner. The mirror’s monocular eye revealed the teenagers gazing on the chilled beer with reverence, entranced by the reflection of fluorescent light on amber glass. Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human—if God exists—He didn’t intend for us to be slaves to each other.

You know what makes us human? In the mirror, the shorter of the duo slipped a bottle into his pocket. With a weary sigh, Bon reached for the baseball bat beneath the cash register. What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves.