The Sympathizer

When the anthem finished, the Congressman was mobbed by well-wishers onstage while the rest of the audience members sunk into their seats with postcoital smugness. I turned to find Sonny, notepad and pen in hand, standing by Ms. Mori. Funny, he said, pink from a glass or two of cognac. It’s the same slogan the Communist Party uses. Ms. Mori shrugged. A slogan is just an empty suit, she said. Anyone can wear it. I like that, Sonny said. Mind if I use it? I introduced the two of them and asked him if he was going to get up close for a photograph. He grinned. The newspaper’s been doing well enough for me to hire a photographer. As for me, I already interviewed the good Congressman. I should have worn a flak jacket. He was practically shooting bullets at me.

Typical white man behavior, Ms. Mori said. Have you ever noticed how a white man can learn a few words of some Asian language and we just eat it up? He could ask for a glass of water and we’d treat him like Einstein. Sonny smiled and wrote that down, too. You’ve been here longer than we have, Ms. Mori, he said with some admiration. Have you noticed that when we Asians speak English, it better be nearly perfect or someone’s going to make fun of our accent? It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been here, Ms. Mori said. White people will always think we’re foreigners. But isn’t there another side to that? I said, my words a little slurred from the cognac in my bloodstream. If we speak perfect English, then Americans trust us. It makes it easier for them to think we’re one of them.

You’re that kind of person, right? Sonny’s eyes were as opaque as the tinted windows of a car. I was mistaken about him having changed that much. In the few times we had seen each other since our initial reunion, he had shown that he had merely turned down the volume on his personality. So what do you think of our Congressman?

Are you going to quote me?

You’ll be an anonymous source.

He’s the best thing that could have happened to us, I said. And that was no lie. It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.

The next weekend provided further opportunity to refine my understanding of the Congressman’s potential. On a bright Sunday morning, I chauffeured the General and Madame from Hollywood to Huntington Beach, where the Congressman lived and where he had invited them for lunch. My title of chauffeur was more impressive than the vehicle, a Chevrolet Nova whose best feature was its relative newness. But the fact remained that the General and the Madame, nestled in the backseat, had a chauffeur. My function was to be a trapping of their past and possibly future life. Their conversation for the hour-long drive revolved mostly around the Congressman until I asked about Lana, who, I said, struck me as having become all grown up. In the rearview mirror, I saw Madame’s face darken with barely repressed fury.

She’s completely insane, Madame declared. We’ve been trying to keep her insanity within the family, but now that she’s strutting in public as a singer—Madame said the word as if it were communist—there’s nothing we can do. Someone persuaded her that she had talent as a singer, and she took the compliment seriously. She is rather talented, I said. Don’t start! Don’t encourage her! Look at her. She looks like a slut. Is this what I raised her to be? What decent man would want to marry that? Would you, Captain? Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. No, Madame, I said, I wouldn’t want to marry that, also the two-faced truth, for marriage was not the first thing on my mind when I saw her onstage. Of course not, she fumed. The worst thing about living in America is the corruption. At home, we could contain it in the bars and nightclubs and bases. But here, we will not be able to protect our children from the lewdness and the shallowness and the tawdriness Americans love so much. They’re too permissive. No one even thinks twice of what they call dating. We all know that “date” is a euphemism. What parent not only allows their daughter to copulate in her teenage years, but willingly encourages it? It’s shocking! It’s an abnegation of moral responsibility. Ugh.