"The Sympathizer"

The narrator's voice captured me from the start. Viet Thanh Nguyen's protagonist holds many many identities but it doesn't feel contrived but illuminating.

• * I AM A SPY, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides... I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess. But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.
• That was my job as his aide-de-camp and junior officer of intelligence, to provide him with cribbed notes on, say, The Communist Manifesto or Mao’s Little Red Book. It was up to him to find occasions to demonstrate his knowledge of the enemy’s thinking.. In this gloomiest of Aprils, faced with this question of what should be done, the general who always found something to do could no longer do so.
• We could not believe that our president, Thieu, whose name begged to be spit out of the mouth, had inexplicably ordered our forces defending the Highlands to retreat.
• Madame. She had a mind like an abacus, the spine of a drill instructor, and the body of a virgin even after five children. All of this was wrapped up in one of those exteriors that inspired our Beaux Arts–trained painters to use the most pastel of watercolors and the fuzziest of brushstrokes. She was, in short, the ideal Vietnamese woman.
• Claude: He could sneak up on you in the dark, but he could never be invisible in our country.
• Why is it that the only people who do not know the Americans are pulling out are the Americans? Claude had the decency to look embarrassed as he explained how the city would erupt in riots if an evacuation was declared, and perhaps then turn against the Americans who remained... most of the Saigonese citizenry behaving like people in a scuppered marriage, willing to cling gamely to each other and drown so long as nobody declared the adulterous truth.
• Our prison cells were time machines, the inmates aging much faster than they normally would. Looking at her faces, then and now, helped me with the task of selecting a few men for salvation and condemning many more, including some I liked.
• the dreamy, sun-besotted world of Southern California / holding up his end of the bargain as the last fig leaf of his dignity. / sat there soaking in the frigid waters of embarrassment
• Her voice rose above the chatter and rain. Remember to call me home . . . My heart trembled. We were not a people who charged into war at the beck and call of bugle or trumpet. No, we fought to the tunes of love songs, for we were the Italians of Asia.
• What was it like to live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?
• * Their beloved city was about to fall, but mine was soon to be liberated. It was the end of their world, but only a shifting of worlds for me. So it was that for two minutes we sang with all our hearts, feeling only for the past and turning our gaze from the future, swimmers doing the backstroke toward a waterfall.
• it was impossible to mistake them for Americans, the dented helmets being the giveaway, steel pots sized for American heads that were too big for any of us.
• How about métis, which is what the French called me when not calling me Eurasian? The latter word lent me a romantic varnish with Americans but got me nowhere with the French themselves... Our countrymen preferred euphemisms to acronyms, calling people like me the dust of life.
• Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell.
• From here our politicians managed the shabby comic operetta of our country, an off-key travesty starring plump divas in white suits and mustachioed prima donnas in custom-tailored military uniforms... Our air force had bombed the presidential palace, our army had shot and stabbed to death our first president and his brother, and our bickering generals had fomented more coups d’état than I could count.
• * This language, as well as the discourse of study groups, committees, and parties, came easily to Man. He had inherited the revolutionary gene from a great-uncle, dragooned by the French to serve in Europe during World War I. He was a gravedigger, and nothing will do more to bestir a colonized subject than seeing white men naked and dead, the great-uncle said
• I confess that I admired him, even though he was my enemy. It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.
• But these young marines had never seen combat and had been in this country only a few weeks. Bright-eyed and clean-shaven, with not a hint of a needle track in the crooks of their arms or a whiff of marijuana in their pressed, jungle-free fatigues
• * We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in ’54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation.
• Bon and I settled down to the waiting part of hurry up and wait, the tedious custom of militaries the world over.
• You know what else? Bon said. Despair may be thick, but friendship’s thicker. After that, nothing more needed to be said, our camaraderie enough as we heeded the call of the Katyusha rockets, hissing in the distance like librarians demanding silence.
• The proper way to approach a prostitute is to adapt the attitude of a theatergoer, sitting back and suspending disbelief for the duration of the show. The improper way is to doltishly insist that the play is just a bunch of people putting on charades because you have paid the price of the ticket, or, conversely, to believe utterly in what you are watching and hence succumb to a mirage.
• * Aided (or was it invaded?) by Superman, our fecund little country no longer produced significant amounts of rice, rubber, and tin, cultivating instead an annual bumper crop of prostitutes, ... Now am I daring to accuse American strategic planners of deliberately eradicating peasant villages in order to smoke out the girls who would have little choice but to sexually service the same boys who bombed, shelled, strafed, torched, pillaged, or merely forcibly evacuated said villages? I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation,
• the International Committee of Control and Supervision. Our country was overrun by acronyms, with the ICCS otherwise known as “I Can’t Control Shit,” its role to oversee the cease-fire between north and south after the American armed forces strategically relocated.
• The sun continued rising notch by notch on its rack, the light becoming harsher and brighter until it achieved the retina-numbing quality generated by an interrogator’s lamp, stripping away every vestige of shade.
• As the debacle unfolded, the calcium and lime deposits of memory from the last days of the damned republic encrusted themselves in the pipes of my brain. Just a little more would be added late that night, after a dinner of baked chicken and green beans many of the refugees found exotically inedible,
• Sometimes he choked on his emotions so badly I feared I would have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him... undertook all the menial tasks of household drudgery that, for her entire cocooned existence, someone else had managed. She attended to these tasks with a grim grace, in short order becoming the house’s resident dictator, the General merely a figurehead who occasionally bellowed at his children like one of those dusty lions in the zoo undergoing a midlife crisis.
• On many college campuses including my own, Ho Ho Ho was not the signature call of Santa Claus, but was instead the beginning of a popular chant that went Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!
• a lifetime career devoted to the study of the Orient. He had hung an elaborate Oriental rug on his wall, in lieu, I suppose, of an actual Oriental.
• I confess that I could not help but feel pity for my sorry countrymen, their germs of loss passed back and forth until I, too, walked around light-headed in the fog bank of memory.
• most were dispatched far away to states whose names we could not wrap our tongues around: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and so on. We spoke of our new geography in our own version of English, each syllable stressed, Chicago becoming Chick-ah-go, New York pronounced closer to New-ark, Texas broken down to Tex-ass, California now Ca-li.
• * we were dependent on Chinese markets our food had an unacceptably Chinese tinge, another blow in the gauntlet of our humiliation that left us with the sweet-and-sour taste of unreliable memories, just correct enough to evoke the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone, missing along with the proper variety, subtlety, and complexity of our universal solvent, fish sauce.
• barely even had the opportunity to sleep, since a sleeper agent is almost constantly afflicted with insomnia.
• Ms. Mori: She drank and smoked like a movie starlet from a screwball comedy, one of those dames with padded bras and shoulder pads who spoke in a second language of innuendo and double entendre... So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn’t my culture right here since I was born here? Of course I didn’t ask him those questions. I just smiled and said, You’re so right, sir. She sighed. It’s a job. But I’ll tell you something else. Ever since I got it straight in my head that I haven’t forgotten a damn thing, that I damn well know my culture, which is American, and my language, which is English, I’ve felt like a spy in that man’s office. On the surface, I’m just plain old Ms. Mori, poor little thing who’s lost her roots, but underneath, I’m Sofia and you better not fuck with me.
• Now I had free love, its existence an affront not only to a capitalism corseted, or perhaps chastity-locked, by its ethnic Protestant justifications, but also alien to a communism with Confucian character. This is one of the drawbacks to communism that I hope will eventually pass, the belief that every comrade is supposed to behave like a noble peasant whose hard hoe is devoted only to farming. Under Asian communism, everything but sex is free.. Meanwhile, Americans, vaccinated against one revolution and thus resistant to another, are interested only in free love’s tropical sizzle, not its political fuse.
• Mr. Franklin’s. That sly old sybarite was well aware of the importance of the erotic to the political, wooing the ladies as much as the politicians in his bid for French assistance to the American Revolution. Therefore the gist of the First American’s letter to his young friend was correct: we should all have older mistresses.
• * He was more embarrassed and discreet about sex than about things I thought more difficult, like killing people, which pretty much defined the history of Catholicism,.. This sight scandalized our French overlords, who saw this childhood nudity as evidence of our barbarism, which then justified their raping, pillaging, and looting, all sanctioned in the holy name of getting our children to wear some clothes so they would not be so tempting to decent Christians whose spirit and flesh were both in question.
• me with my cephalopodic bride, I nevertheless dropped my trousers. Hypnotized by my squid’s call and my erection’s response, I inserted the latter into the former, which was, unfortunately, a perfect fit. Unfortunate because from then onward no squid was safe from me, not to say that this diluted form of bestiality—after all, hapless squid, you were dead, though I now see how that raises other moral questions—not to say this transgression occurred often, since squid was a rare treat in our landlocked town.
• My innocent mother returned to our miserable hut, stuffed the squid with ground pork, bean thread noodle, diced mushroom, and chopped ginger, then fried and served them with a ginger-lime dipping sauce... Yes, Mama, I said. And, bravely smiling, this obedient son slowly chewed and savored the rest of his defiled squid, its salty flavor mixed with his mother’s sweet love.
• The cue for the evacuation’s final phase was “White Christmas,” played on American Radio Service, but even this did not go according to plan. First, since the song was top secret information, meant only for the Americans and their allies, everyone in the city also knew what to listen for. Then what do you think happens? Claude said. The deejay can’t find the song. The Bing Crosby one... So, I said, situation normal. Claude nodded. All fucked up... Or was I not giving the military mastermind enough credit for being a deadpan ironist, he having also possibly chosen “White Christmas” as a poke in the eye to all my countrymen who neither celebrated Christmas nor had ever seen a white one? Could not this unknown ironist foresee that all the bad air whipped up by American helicopters was the equivalent of a massive blast of gas in the faces of those left behind? Weighing stupidity and irony, I picked the latter, irony lending the Americans a last shred of dignity.
• * a fair percentage collecting both welfare and dust, moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments as their testes shriveled day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile. In this psychosomatic condition, normal social or familial ills were diagnosed as symptoms of something fatal, with their vulnerable women and children cast as the carriers of Western contamination.
• I attended these parties as well as the ones thrown by the equally compact pro-war gang, differing in political tone but otherwise totally interchangeable in terms of food eaten, songs sung, jokes traded, and topics discussed. Regardless of political clique, these students gulped from the same overflowing cup of loneliness,
• Bon sipped his beer. First, he said, the General knows stuff we don’t. Second, we’re not killing. This is an assassination. Your guys did this all the time. Third, this is war. Innocent people get killed. It’s only murder if you know they’re innocent. Even so, that’s a tragedy, not a crime.
• He smiled. I suppose you could call me a born-again American. An irony, but if the bloody history of the past few decades has taught me anything, it’s that the defense of freedom demands the muscularity only America can provide.
• * We Marxists believe that capitalism generates contradictions and will fall apart from them, but only if men take action. But it was not just capitalism that was contradictory. As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, but I was right to kill him. Wasn’t I?
• The airing of moral doubts was as tiresome as the airing of domestic squabbles, no one really interested except for the ones directly involved.
• I took the shoes into the kitchen and wiped them off with a wet paper towel before I dialed the General’s number from the phone hanging by the refrigerator, its door decorated with the twin columns of my divided self.
• Contrary to some perceptions, revolutionary ideology, even in a tropical country, is not hot. It is cold, man-made.
• its ribs lined as always with beer. Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.
• the nubile bodies whose every curve was revealed without displaying an inch of flesh except above the neck and below the cuffs. This the writers apparently took as an implicit metaphor for our country as a whole, wanton and yet withdrawn, hinting at everything and giving away nothing in a dazzling display of demureness, a paradoxical incitement to temptation, a breathtakingly lewd exhibition of modesty. Hardly any male travel writer, journalist, or casual observer of our country’s life could restrain himself from writing about the young girls who rode their bicycles to and from school in those fluttering white ao dai, butterflies that every Western man dreamed of pinning to his collection.
• 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?.. Have you noticed that when we Asians speak English, it better be nearly perfect or someone’s going to make fun of our accent?
• she had the appearance of the worst kind of bureaucrat, the aspiring one,
• 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.
• I researched your country, my friend. I read Joseph Buttinger and Frances FitzGerald. Have you read Joseph Buttinger and Frances FitzGerald. He’s the foremost historian on your little part of the world. And she won the Pulitzer Prize. She dissected your psychology. I think I know something about you people.
• * Their situations and their bodies produce a qualitatively different timbre to their voices. One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else’s pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual.
• * the Hollywood organism from its goal, the simultaneous lobotomization and pickpocketing of the world’s audiences. The ancillary benefit was strip-mining history, leaving the real history in the tunnels along with the dead, doling out tiny sparkling diamonds for audiences to gasp over... I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit... His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created
• In this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l’oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute; we were to be struck dumb.
• Madame’s pho harkened back to the warmth of my mother’s kitchen, which was probably not as warm as it was in my memories, but never mind—I had to stop periodically to savor not only my soup but the marrow of my memories.
• From far away floated the susurrus of my mother’s voice: Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything!
• * Its refugee members were hobbled by their structural function in the American Dream, which was to be so unhappy as to make other Americans grateful for their happiness.
• Our community appreciates your words, but in the process of becoming American it has learned the expression “money talks.” And if voting is our best way of participating in American politics, we must vote for those who deliver the money.
• Everything my guidebook said was true and also meaningless. Yes, the East was vast, teeming, and infinitely complex, but wasn’t the West also? Pointing out that the East was an inexhaustible source of riches and wonder only implied that it was peculiarly the case, and not so for the West. The Westerner, of course, took his riches and wonder for granted, just as I had never noticed the enchantment of the East or its mystery.
• In a puzzling situation such as this, all riddles lead to one riddler, the dictator. This state of martial law was underwritten once more by Uncle Sam, who was supporting the tyrant Marcos in his efforts to stamp out not only a communist insurgency but also a Muslim one.
• The sight of their sad, confused faces had undermined my confidence, reminding me of the ligaments of sentimentality and sympathy that twined my tougher, more revolutionary parts together.
• Nobody wanted to be the Viet Cong (i.e., the freedom fighters), even though it meant only playing one. The freedom fighters among the refugees despised these other freedom fighters with an unsettling, if not unsurprising, vehemence.
• I’m a loser for believing in all the promises your America made to people like me. You came and said we were friends, but what we didn’t know was that you could never trust us, much less respect us. Only losers like us couldn’t have seen what’s so obvious now, how you wouldn’t want anyone for your friend who actually wanted to be your friend. Deep down you suspect only fools and traitors would believe your promises.
• * This was what few people realize—it’s hard work to beat somebody. I have known many an interrogator who has strained a back, pulled a muscle, torn a tendon or a ligament, even broken fingers, toes, hands, and feet, not to mention going hoarse. For while the prisoner is screaming, crying, choking, and confessing, or attempting to confess, or simply lying, the interrogator must produce a steady stream of epithets, insults, grunts, demands, and provocations with all the concentration and creativity of a woman manning a dirty-talk sex line. It takes significant mental energy to be nonrepetitive in heaping verbal abuse,
• * When was the last time an American president found it worth his while to write a speech on the importance of art and literature? I cannot recall. And yet at Yan’an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination.
• I had no doubt that in the Auteur’s egomaniacal imagination he meant that his work of art, now, was more important than the three or four or six million dead who composed the real meaning of the war. They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Marx spoke of the oppressed class that was not politically conscious enough to see itself as a class, but was anything ever more true of the dead, as well as the extras?
• It was only a fake cemetery with its fake tomb for my mother, but the eradication of this creation, in its wantonness and its whimsy, hurt me with unexpected severity. I had to pay my last respects to my mother and the cemetery
• the world around me afire and stinking of the gasoline sweat emanating from the woolly beasts of black smoke lunging and lurching toward me with ever-mutating faces.
• What I would recommend is a nurse, but we’ve exported all the pretty ones to America. Any questions? I struggled to speak but nothing came out, so I only shook my head. Rest, then. Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism.
• I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go. Now that my room was dark, all I could see was the only other all-white room I had been in, at the National Interrogation Center back in Saigon, working my first assignment under Claude’s supervision.
• Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed.. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.
• At least if you talk to me this confession won’t be published. Your reputation will stay intact until the day the war is over. I stood up. Think about it. He said nothing and did nothing except stare at his confession. I paused at the door. Still think I’m a bastard? <> No, he said tonelessly. You’re just an asshole.
• * the problem of representation. Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory’s laminated floor?
• * For this clock that was a country, and this country that was a clock, the minute and hour hands pivoted in the south, the numbers of the dial a halo around Saigon. Some craftsman in exile had understood that this was exactly the timepiece his refugee countrymen desired. We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return?
• This is the best hospital in Manila, the man in the suit said, flashing a searchlight of a smile onto my face.
• In negotiations, as in interrogations, a lie was not only acceptable but also expected. All sorts of situations exist where one tells lies in order to reach an acceptable truth,
• Why did I feel some phantom limb of memory, an absence on which I kept trying to rest my weight?
• Although I did not believe in God, I believed in ghosts. I knew this to be true because while I did not fear God, I feared ghosts. God would never appear to me whereas the crapulent major’s ghost had,
• But the widow was not waiting for an answer to these questions as she stood next to me, peering down at her womb’s wonders. She was waiting for me to sprinkle on them the holy water of meaningless compliments, a necessary baptism
• After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.
• Bon: The rest of them hide behind their wives and kids, the same wives and kids they beat because they can’t stand hiding behind them... What am I dying for? he cried back. I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.
• * What did Nancy Sinatra know when she sang bang bang? To her, those were bubble-gum pop lyrics. Bang bang was the sound track of our lives. <> Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers.. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees;
• I discovered that all the childhood bullying directed at me had toughened me, making me believe that being rejected was better than not having the chance to be rejected at all. Thus it was that I approached girls, and now women, with such Zen negation of all doubt and fear the Buddha would approve. Sitting down next to Lana and thinking of nothing, I merely followed my instincts and my first three principles in talking to a woman: do not ask permission; do not say hello; and do not let her speak first.
• For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful. My father was no exception.
• The maître d’ possessed the mannerisms of an ambassador from a very small country, a careful blend of superciliousness and servitude.
• I said I was not unhappy. The fat balloon of my double negative hung in the air for a moment, ambiguous and vulnerable.
• No, because happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game, sir. Dr. Hedd slowly turned his head in an arc as he spoke, making sure that he saw every man in the room. For someone to be happy, he must measure his happiness against someone else’s unhappiness, a process which most certainly works in reverse... But if I said I was unhappy, that might make some of you happier, but it would also make you uneasy, as no one is supposed to be unhappy in America. I believe our clever young man has intuited that while only the pursuit of happiness is promised to all Americans, unhappiness is guaranteed for many.
• Dr Hedd was beyond reproach, for he was an English immigrant. His very existence as such validated the legitimacy of the former colonies, while his heritage and accent triggered the latent Anglophilia and inferiority complex found in many Americans.
• The General was deeply familiar with the nature, nuances, and internal differences of white people, as was every nonwhite person who had lived here a good number of years. We ate their food, we watched their movies, we observed their lives and psyche via television and in everyday contact, ... We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never knew
• Instead of waging a war of obliteration, the only kind of war the Oriental understands and respects—nota bene Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—they had to, or chose to, fight a war of attrition. The Oriental interprets that, quite rightly, as weakness.
• Something about the fraternal atmosphere of a billiards hall reassured the soul. The isolated pool of light over a table of green felt was an indoor hydroponic zone where what grew was the prickly plant of masculine emotion, too sensitive for sunlight and fresh air.
• And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.
• Sonny: Before I only wanted to change the world. I still want that, but it was ironic how I never wanted to change myself. Yet that’s where revolutions start! And it’s the only way revolutions can continue, if we keep looking inward, looking at how others might see us. That’s what happened when I met Sofia. I saw myself the way she saw me.
• Then my finger touched that soft, rubbery eye, the texture of a peeled quail egg, and he blinked.
• * that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious.
• By the time the sound track and film stock credits had passed, my grudging acknowledgment of the Auteur had evaporated, replaced by boiling murderous rage. Failing to do away with me in real life, he had succeeded in murdering me in fiction, obliterating me utterly in a way that I was becoming more and more acquainted with.
• You tried to play their game, okay? But they run the game. You don’t run anything. That means you can’t change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.
• Each carried an AK-47 with its distinctive banana clip, and the presence of this icon, combined with all the other features, led to an unusual visual effect. <> Why do they look like Viet Cong? said the grizzled captain.
• The entire forest shimmered with the antics of death, the comedian, and life, the straight man, a duo that would never break up. To live was to be haunted by the inevitability of one’s own decay, and to be dead was to be haunted by the memory of living.
• But my opinion of what he calls your written examination is that it hardly seems like a genuine confession to me.
  Haven’t I confessed to many things, Commandant?
  In content, perhaps, but not in style. Confessions are as much about style as content, as the Red Guards have shown us. All we ask for is a certain way with words... Of course, I can understand why you didn’t quote How the Steel Was Tempered or Tracks in the Snowy Forest. 
• You would be better off if you only saw things from one side. The only cure for being a bastard is to take a side.
• I’m not an American, sir, I said. If my confession reveals anything, isn’t it that I’m an anti-American? I must have said something outrageously humorous, for he actually laughed. The anti-American already includes the American, he said. Don’t you see that the Americans need the anti-American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored. To be anti-American only makes you a reactionary.
• I longed to lick my lips, but with the gag in my mouth I almost vomited. That would have been the death of me. When was he coming for me? How long would he leave me here? What had happened to his face? The guards would feed me, surely. On and on the thoughts came, the thousand cockroaches of time crawling over me until I shivered in agony and revulsion.
• He chuckled and it sounded almost like my old schoolmate. Isn’t it funny how we find ourselves here, my friend? You came to save Bon’s life and I came to save both your lives. Let us hope my plot works out better than yours. But truth be told, it wasn’t purely out of friendship that I petitioned to be the commissar here. You have seen my face, or rather, my lack of one.
• When this human being lost his face, his skin, and his family, this human being imagined you, my friend. You had lost your country and I was the one who exiled you. I felt deeply for you, the terrible loss only hinted at in your cryptic messages. But now you have returned, and I can no longer imagine your suffering to be greater than mine.
• The oldest, who must have been a father, was fondling the stubby length of the ugliest part of most adult male bodies. This was fully evident to me now that the youngest policeman had turned in profile, bringing himself closer to the agent’s face. Come on, take a look, he said. He likes you!
• if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else’s play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn’t come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn’t taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said, Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand years, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks,
• Revolutionaries are insomniacs, too afraid of history’s nightmare to sleep, too troubled by the world’s ills to be less than awake, or so the commandant said.
• I was writing to the revolutionary who was on a powerful committee and who knew, even then, that he might one day be a commissar; I was writing to a political cadre already learning the plastic art of making over the souls and minds of men; I was writing to a friend who would do whatever I asked; I was writing to a writer who valued the force of a sentence and the weight of the word; I was writing to a brother who knew what I wanted more than I knew it myself.
  THE COMMANDANT and THE COMMISSAR and THE DOCTOR (in unison)
  What did you do?
  MYSELF
  I wanted him dead!
• The commandant gazed down at me. If I could be guilty of doing nothing, shouldn’t I also be deserving of wanting something? In this case, my father’s death.
• I was so stupid! How could I forget that every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea? The suits depended on how one wore them, and this suit was now worn out. I was mad but not insane, although I was not going to disabuse the commandant. He saw only one meaning in nothing—the negative, the absence, as in there’s nothing there. The positive meaning eluded him, the paradoxical fact that nothing is, indeed, something. Our commandant was a man who didn’t get the joke, and people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed. They are the ones who say nothing with great piousness, who ask everyone else to die for nothing, who revere nothing.
• He was the commissar but he was also Man; he was my interrogator but also my only confidant; he was the fiend who had tortured me but also my friend. Some might say I was seeing things, but the true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus. We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same.
• I understood, at last, how our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power. In this transformation, we were not unusual. Hadn’t the French and the Americans done exactly the same? Once revolutionaries themselves, they had become imperialists, colonizing and occupying our defiant little land, taking away our freedom in the name of saving us... When it came to learning the worst habits of our French masters and their American replacements, we quickly proved ourselves the best. We, too, could abuse grand ideals! Having liberated ourselves in the name of independence and freedom—I was so tired of saying these words!—we then deprived our defeated brethren of the same. <> Besides a man with no face, only a man of two minds could get this joke, about how a revolution fought for independence and freedom could make those things worth less than nothing. I was that man of two minds, me and myself.
• Yellow music was now banned, and only red, revolutionary music was allowed. <> No yellow music in a land of so-called yellow people?
• Now that we are to be counted among these boat people, their name disturbs us. It smacks of anthropological condescension, evoking some forgotten branch of the human family, some lost tribe of amphibians emerging from ocean mist, crowned with seaweed.