We will live!

"We will live!" these are the last words from Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut novel The Sympathizer. After starting this book on a third attempt in January or February, I finally finished the 360+ pages story of the nameless communist agent living two lives, being half-French and half-Vietnamese, a bastard, a communist and a sympathizer to the anti-communists that fled Vietnam. As a reader you follow his adventures from the fall of Saigon, to his pursuit in building a somewhat bearable life in California, advising a Hollywood movie about the Vietnam War to then actually returning "home" and being caught in a re-education camp by his own best friend (these are just few accounts happening since I am trying not to spoil too much). It's dense. And there's so much happening on every single page. Nguyen is writing with so much eloquence and sharp wit, combining many different sentiments, I found myself re-reading certain pages. It's also a political book with lots of plot twists. When I first started out reading this, I found the content of the book highly complicated, disturbing and traumatic all at once - the images of people dying, of ghosts and of prisoners, I couldn't take them lightly (partly because I am on this discovery journey of what it means to be a child of the Vietnamese struggle for freedom myself). Having received so many good reviews though and trying to learn more about my roots, I did want to pay due respect by at least finishing it (plus this book was indeed a thoughtful gift by dear friend Minh-Tam back in 2017/18). By the end of this past weekend, by the end of the last pages, I learned to appreciate the ways in which Nguyen used Vietnamese words, names, places and songs as if he was writing for us as the majority. Not only are we the main protagonists in his book, we are also the audience. With this novel, he gives us an opportunity to be disturbed and think critically of ourselves, to not only see ourselves as the heroes and romantic lovers, but also the strategic minds, thinkers and villains. We could... in his words... "fuck ourselves over just fine." For that, we didn't need the Americans nor the French to come into our country.

And yet, there's hope, the Sympathizer returns, leaving the re-education camp after a horrendous year-long stay and we readers are being left in the open. This story yearns for a sequel as Nguyen shares with us in the new Asian Enough Podcast (highly recommend the Lulu Wang episode as well).

"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 the 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!"