The author on confronting the long shadow of colonialism, imperialism, and anti-Asian violence.

By April Yee
FROM: Electric Literature

The promise and problems of the protagonist of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s two novels—2015’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer and 2021’s sequel, The Committed—spring from his two faces. He is both a South Vietnamese communist spy and an American CIA operative, a nostalgic Vietnamese and a lover of Western culture, a loyal friend and a liar.

After encountering and enacting violence in Vietnam and the United States in The Sympathizer as a dual agent, the protagonist gets a fresh start as a refugee in France, where he tells authorities his name is Vo Danh—or vô danh, “anonymous” in Vietnamese. It is a joke on gullible immigration authorities as well as a commentary on what it means to move through France as a person of Vietnamese descent, anonymized by a colonially inflected gaze. A family-less name is also appropriate for the unacknowledged child of a French priest; in Paris, the protagonist grapples with the memory of his missing father.

The protagonist’s “two minds” allow him to weigh theories of communism and revolution even while engaged in the rather bloody work of capitalism in his newly adopted role as a gangster, delivering drugs for a Vietnamese mafia that battles an Algerian one. The Vietnamese mafia’s goal is to prime privileged and empowered whites for blackmail—including a pretentious politician named BFD who Nguyen says was modeled, in part, on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or DSK.

It turns out the protagonist’s tendency toward the dialectic is shared by his creator. Over Zoom, Nguyen gave a two-pronged take on subjects ranging from Frantz Fanon, whose theories fuel much of the novel, to the current uptick in violence against Asian Americans, a side effect of coronavirus discourse that continues a Western tradition of othering people of Asian descent. Read Rest of Interview Here