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Man / The Commissar
The narrator describes her as a woman with “a mind like an abacus, the spine of a drill instructor, and the body of a virgin even after five children.” Despite her toughness, she is a delicate-looking woman, making her “the ideal Vietnamese woman.” The General is happily married to her. When she and the General settle in Los Angeles with their family, she is the one who finds schools for the children, ensures that the rent is paid, shops for groceries, cooks, does all the chores, and finds a church while her husband undergoes a personal crisis. Later, she opens a pho restaurant, using the profits to help her husband fund his guerrilla army in Vietnam.
Madame Quotes in The Sympathizer
The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by Madame or refer to Madame. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 8
Quotes
I had failed and the Auteur would make The Hamlet as he intended with my countrymen serving merely as raw material for an epic about white men saving good yellow people from bad yellow people. I pitied the French for their naiveté 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. I was maddened by my helplessness before the Auteur's imagination and machinations. 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.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
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Madame Quotes in The Sympathizer
The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by Madame or refer to Madame. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 8
Quotes
I had failed and the Auteur would make The Hamlet as he intended with my countrymen serving merely as raw material for an epic about white men saving good yellow people from bad yellow people. I pitied the French for their naiveté 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. I was maddened by my helplessness before the Auteur's imagination and machinations. 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.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
