The Sympathizer

Around our shoulders and chest we will strap the rucksack, cipher and manuscript inside. Whether we live or die, the weight of those words will hang on us. Only a few more need to be written by the light of this oil lamp. Having answered the commissar’s question, we find ourselves facing more questions, universal and timeless ones that never get tired. What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others? And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing? We can only answer these questions for ourselves. Our life and our death have taught us always to sympathize with the undesirables among the undesirables. Thus magnetized by experience, our compass continually points toward those who suffer. Even now, we think of our suffering friend, our blood brother, the commissar, the faceless man, the one who spoke the unspeakable, sleeping his morphine dream, dreaming of an eternal sleep, or perhaps dreaming of nothing. As for us, how long it had taken us to stare at nothing until we saw something! Might this be what our mother felt? Did she look into herself and feel wonderstruck that where nothing had been something now existed, namely us? Where was the turning point when she began wanting us rather than not wanting us, seed of a father who should not have been a father? When did she stop thinking of herself and began to think of us?

Tomorrow we will find ourselves among strangers, reluctant mariners of whom a tentative manifest can be written. Among us will be infants and children, as well as adults and parents, but no elderly, for none dare the voyage. Among us will be men and women, as well as the thin and lean, but not one among us will be fat, the entire nation having undergone a forced diet. Among us will be the light skinned, dark skinned, and every shade in between, some speaking in refined accents and some in rough ones. Many will be Chinese, persecuted for being Chinese, with many others the recipients of degrees in reeducation. Collectively we will be called the boat people, a name we heard once more earlier this night, when we surreptitiously listened to the Voice of America on the navigator’s radio. Now that we are to be counted among these boat people, their name disturbs us. It smacks of anthropological condescension, evoking some forgotten branch of the human family, some lost tribe of amphibians emerging from ocean mist, crowned with seaweed. But we are not primitives, and we are not to be pitied. If and when we reach safe harbor, it will hardly be a surprise if we, in turn, turn our backs on the unwanted, human nature being what we know of it. Yet we are not cynical. Despite it all—yes, despite everything, in the face of nothing—we still consider ourselves revolutionary. We remain that most hopeful of creatures, a revolutionary in search of a revolution, although we will not dispute being called a dreamer doped by an illusion. Soon enough we will see the scarlet sunrise on that horizon where the East is always red, but for now our view through our window is of a dark alley, the pavement barren, the curtains closed. Surely we cannot be the only ones awake, even if we are the only ones with a single lamp lit. No, we cannot be alone! Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes, and forbidden plots. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live. And even as we write this final sentence, the sentence that will not be revised, we confess to being certain of one and only one thing—we swear to keep, on penalty of death, this one promise:

We will live!





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS



Many of the events in this novel did happen, although I confess to taking some liberties with details and chronology. For the fall of Saigon and the last days of the Republic of Vietnam, I consulted David Butler’s The Fall of Saigon, Larry Engelmann’s Tears Before the Rain, James Fenton’s “The Fall of Saigon,” Dirck Halstead’s “White Christmas,” Charles Henderson’s Goodnight Saigon, and Tiziano Terzani’s Giai Phong! The Fall and Liberation of Saigon. I am particularly indebted to Frank Snepp’s important book Decent Interval, which provided the inspiration for Claude’s flight from Saigon and the episode with the Watchman. For accounts of South Vietnamese prisons and police, as well as Viet Cong activities, I turned to Douglas Valentine’s The Phoenix Program, the pamphlet We Accuse by Jean-Pierre Debris and André Menras, Truong Nhu Tang’s A Vietcong Memoir, and an article in the January 1968 issue of Life. Alfred W. McCoy’s A Question of Torture was crucial for understanding the development of American interrogation techniques from the 1950s through the war in Vietnam, and their extension into the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the reeducation camps, I made use of Huynh Sanh Thong’s To Be Made Over, Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh’s South Wind Changing, and Tran Tri Vu’s Lost Years. As for the Vietnamese resistance fighters who attempted to invade Vietnam, a small exhibit in the Lao People’s Army History Museum in Vientiane displays their captured artifacts and weapons.