The Sympathizer

This, at any rate, was my interpretation of the screenplay mailed to me by the director’s personal assistant, the thickish manila envelope arriving with my name misspelled in a beautifully cursive hand. That was the first whiff of trouble, the second being how the personal assistant, Violet, did not even bother to say hello or good-bye when she called for my mailing information and to arrange a meeting with the director in his Hollywood Hills home. When Violet opened the door, she continued with her bewildering manner of discourse in person. Glad to see you could make it, heard a lot about you, loved your notes on The Hamlet. And that’s precisely how she spoke, trimming pronouns and periods, as if punctuation and grammar were wasted on me. Then, without deigning to make eye contact, she inclined her head in a gesture of condescension and disdain, signaling me to enter.

Perhaps her abruptness was merely part of her personality, for she had the appearance of the worst kind of bureaucrat, the aspiring one, from blunt, square haircut to blunt, clean fingernails to blunt, efficient pumps. But perhaps it was me, still morally disoriented from the crapulent major’s death, as well as the apparition of his severed head at the wedding banquet. The emotional residue of that night was like a drop of arsenic falling into the still waters of my soul, nothing having changed from the taste of it but everything now tainted. So perhaps that was why when I crossed over the threshold into the marble foyer, I instantly suspected that the cause of her behavior was my race. What she saw when she looked at me must have been my yellowness, my slightly smaller eyes, and the shadow cast by the ill fame of the Oriental’s genitals, those supposedly minuscule privates disparaged on many a public restroom wall by semiliterates. I might have been just half an Asian, but in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t. Funnily enough, I had never felt inferior because of my race during my foreign student days. I was foreign by definition and therefore was treated as a guest. But now, even though I was a card-carrying American with a driver’s license, Social Security card, and resident alien permit, Violet still considered me as foreign, and this misrecognition punctured the smooth skin of my self-confidence. Was I just being paranoid, that all-American characteristic? Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But as she advanced along the polished bamboo floors, steering clear of the dusky maid vacuuming a Turkish rug, I just knew it could not be so. The flawlessness of my English did not matter. Even if she could hear me, she still saw right through me, or perhaps saw someone else instead of me, her retinas burned with the images of all the castrati dreamed up by Hollywood to steal the place of real Asian men. Here I speak of those cartoons named Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Number One Son, Hop Sing—Hop Sing!—and the bucktoothed, bespectacled Jap not so much played as mocked by Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The performance was so insulting it even deflated my fetish for Audrey Hepburn, understanding as I did her implicit endorsement of such loathsomeness.

By the time I sat down opposite the director in his office, I was seething from the memory of all these previous wounds, although I did not show it. On the one hand, I was sitting for a meeting with the famed Auteur, when once I was just another lovelorn movie fan passing Saturday afternoons in the cinematic bliss of matinee screenings from which I emerged, blinking and slightly shocked, into sunlight as bright as the fluorescent bulbs of a hospital birthing room. On the other hand, I was flummoxed by having read a screenplay whose greatest special effect was neither the blowing up of various things nor the evisceration of various bodies, but the achievement of narrating a movie about our country where not a single one of our countrymen had an intelligible word to say. Violet had scraped my already chafed ethnic sensitivity even further, but since it would not do to make my irritation evident, I forced myself to smile and do what I did best, remaining as unreadable as a paper package wrapped up with string.