The Sympathizer

Not surprisingly, Yoon was an alcoholic. His face was an accurate thermometer of his condition, the mercurial redness an indicator that the liquor had worked its way up from his toes to his vision, tongue, and brain, for he was flirting with the actress playing his sister even though neither was heterosexual. Yoon had made his intentions known to me over a dozen raw oysters at the hotel bar, their moist, open ears cocked upward to eavesdrop on his attempted seduction. No offense, I said, his hand on my knee, but I’ve never been so inclined. Yoon shrugged and removed his hand. I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise. In any case, you can’t blame a gay for trying, he said, smiling a smile utterly unlike my own. Having studied my smile and its effect on people, I knew it had the value of a second-rate global currency like the franc or the mark. But Yoon’s smile was the gold standard, so bright it was the only thing you could see or look at, so utterly overpowering in person it was understandable how he had won the role of the Sheen actor. I was happy to buy him a drink to show that I was not bothered by his advances, and he in turn bought me another, and we bonded that night and almost every night that followed.

As Yoon had tried with me, I had tried with Asia Soo, the actress. Like me, she was of mixed-race descent, although of a much more refined pedigree, in her case a British fashion designer mother and a Chinese hotelier father. Her given name really was Asia, her parents foreseeing that any progeny of their unlikely union would surely be blessed with sufficient attributes to live up to the name of an entire ill-defined continent. She had three unfair advantages over any man on the set, with the exception of James Yoon: she was in her early twenties, was a high-end fashion model, and was a lesbian. Every man on the set, myself included, was convinced that he possessed the magic wand that could convert her back to heterosexuality. If that was not achievable, then he would settle for convincing her that he was the kind of liberated man so open to female homosexuality he would not be offended, not at all, in watching her have sex with another woman. Some of us confidently declared that all high-end fashion models did was have sex with each other. If we were high-end fashion models, so the reasoning went, with whom would we rather have sex, men like us or women like them? Such a question was a little deflating to the masculine ego, and it was with some trepidation that I had approached her at the hotel pool. Hi, I said. Perhaps it was my body language, or something in my eyes, for before I could go any further she laid down her copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and said, You’re lovely, but just not my type. It’s not your fault. You’re a man. Yet again flabbergasted, all I could say was, You can’t blame a guy for trying. She did not, so we, too, were friends.

These, then, were the major dramatis personae of The Hamlet, all recorded in the letter I sent to my aunt, along with glazed Polaroids of myself and the cast, even one with the reluctant Auteur. Also included were Polaroids of the refugee camp and its denizens, as well as newspaper clippings that the General had provided me before my departure. Drowning! Pillage! Rape! Cannibalism? So went the headlines. The General had read them to me with alternating and escalating notes of horror and triumph, about how refugees were reporting that only one in two boats was surviving the crossing from the beaches and inlets of our homeland to the nearest semifriendly shores in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, storms and pirates sinking the rest. Here it is, the General said, shaking a newspaper at me. The evidence that those communist bastards are purging the country! To Man’s aunt, I wrote visibly in my letter about how sad it was to see these stories. Invisibly, I wrote, Is this really happening? Or propaganda? As for you, Commandant, what dream do you think compelled these refugees to escape, taking to the sea in leaky little boats that would have terrified Christopher Columbus? If our revolution served the people, why were some of these people voting by fleeing? At the time, I had no answers to these questions. Only now am I beginning to understand.