The Sympathizer

Harry may have loved the temple the most, but for me the pièce de résistance was the cemetery. I saw it for the first time that night and returned to it several nights later, after a field trip to the refugee camp at Bataan, where I recruited a hundred Vietnamese extras. The trip had left me dispirited, encountering as I did thousands of ragged fellow countrymen who had fled from our homeland. I had seen refugees before, Commandant, the war having rendered millions of the southern people homeless within their own country, but this mess of humanity was a new kind of species. It was so unique the Western media had given it a new name, the boat people, an epithet one might think referred to a newly discovered tribe of the Amazon River or a mysterious, extinguished prehistoric population whose only surviving trace was their watercraft. Depending on one’s point of view, these boat people were either runaways from home or orphaned by their country. In either case, they looked bad and smelled a little worse: hair mangy, skin crusty, lips chapped, various glands swollen, collectively reeking like a fishing trawler manned by landlubbers with unsteady digestive tracts. They were too hungry to turn up their noses at the wages I was mandated to offer, a dollar a day, their desperation measured by the fact that not one—let me repeat, not one—haggled for a better wage. I had never imagined the day when one of my countrymen would not haggle, but these boat people clearly understood that the law of supply and demand was not on their side. What truly brought my spirits down, however, was when I asked one of the extras, a lawyer of aristocratic appearance, if the conditions in our homeland were as bad as rumored. Let’s put it this way, she said. Before the communists won, foreigners were victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. Now it’s our own people victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. I suppose that’s improvement.

I trembled at hearing her words. For a few days my conscience had been purring smoothly, the crapulent major’s death seemingly behind me in the rear view of my memory, a smear on the blacktop of my past, but now it was hiccuping again. What was happening at home, and what was I doing here? I had to remind myself of Ms. Mori’s parting words. When I told her I was taking the job, she had cooked me a farewell dinner where I almost gave in to the sneaky suspicion that perhaps I really did love her, even if I did have feelings for Lana, too. But as if anticipating such weakness on my part, Ms. Mori preemptively reminded me of our commitment to free love. Don’t feel obligated to me, she said over the orange sorbet. You can do whatever you want. Of course, I said, a little saddened. I could not have it both ways, free love and bourgeois love, no matter if I wanted to. Or could I? Society of any kind was well stocked with satin bilinguals who said and did one thing in public while saying and doing another in private. But Ms. Mori was not one of those people, and in the darkness of her bedroom, clinging to each other in the aftermath of our exercise in free love, she said, You have it in you to do something wonderful with this movie. I have confidence in you that you can make it better than it could be. You can help shape how Asians look in the movies. That’s no small thing.

Thank you, Ms. Mori.

Sofia, goddammit.