Cultural Duality Theme Analysis

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer uses duality as an overarching theme to explore the narrator’s personal racial ambivalence, as well as the social ambivalence of the Vietnamese refugee community in the United States. The story follows the nameless narrator to California after the fall of Saigon in 1975 (which marked the end of the Vietnam War), where he and other refugees must rebuild their lives. However, the narrator is also a sleeper agent for the Viet Cong, reporting on the activities of the refugees to his Communist superiors. When writing about the Vietnam War, the clearest dualities are the political ones between the Communist Viet Cong and the purported advocates of Western-style democracy in the South Vietnamese Army, as well as the geographical and cultural dualities between the North and the South, the East and the West. The narrator is the personification of these divides. He’s rejected by both the East and the West due to his failure, through no fault of his own, to be ethnically, culturally, and ideologically whole. Meanwhile, the refugee community learns to integrate into American culture without losing their native identity. This, too, requires the adoption of dual sensibilities. Nguyen examines how the narrator and other Vietnamese refugees establish identity, not by choosing sides, but by embracing dualism.

The narrator’s cultural ambivalence arises out of Vietnam’s colonial history. He must write his confession to the Commandant, a high-ranking Communist officer who imprisons the narrator in a detention center after his attempt to invade Vietnam with a handful of guerrillas, including his friend Bon. The narrator starts his confession by defining himself as “a man of two minds...able to see any issue from both sides.” This sense of twoness first comes from his biracial identity—he’s the son of a thirteen-year-old Vietnamese maid and a French priest. This makes him an embodiment of Vietnam’s exploitation in the context of benevolent Western paternalism.

The narrator’s father, the priest, never acknowledges him, while his mother refers to him as “her love child.” He is both wanted and unwanted. Legally, he is an “illegitimate son,” while the Oxford English Dictionary defines him as a “natural child.” Thus, he exists as a biological fact, but not as a legal one, due to being the product of an interracial affair between unmarried people. This, along with the priest’s ability to hide his crime behind his vow of celibacy, makes the narrator seem illegitimate among Westerners.

Meanwhile, Vietnamese people refer to the narrator and other biracial children in the Pacific—the products of colonial rule and American occupation—as “the dust of life.” The narrator is thus regarded as what is left over after an activity has ended—in this instance, colonial occupation and war. In other instances, he’s “a bastard” who “[doesn’t] look like anyone” in his home country. He’s an outsider due to his failure to meet a test of racial purity. In each of these examples, the narrator is constructed as a victim of colonial history. To escape from this construction of his identity, he defines himself as “a man of two faces” and “a man of two minds,” thereby embracing the duality that his people reject.

Self-definition under Western domination requires the colonized subject to compromise. The narrator describes how non-white people have to learn who they are while they also learn how to anticipate and satisfy the needs of white people in order to survive. Nguyen applies W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of “double-consciousness”—that is, the sense of having a divided identity, which makes it difficult, or altogether impossible, to define oneself as a fully-realized individual. Double-consciousness is necessary in helping the Vietnamese refugees both to remain connected to their own community and to assimilate into American culture.

During the Congressman’s lunch at the country club, for example, the General demonstrates how it’s possible to defend one’s own values without offending white people. He manages to disagree with Dr. Richard Hedd about the relative importance of Vietnam on the world stage by using language from the scholar’s own book, in which he validates the importance of fighting the Soviets and “their servants” in Vietnam. This tactic allows the General to assert his point while also validating the scholar’s ideas. The General feigns the attitude of self-effacing meekness that whites sometimes expect from Asians, while also defending the importance of his country.

In regard to their lives in the U.S., the narrator describes how the refugee community tries to blend in with other Americans, while still maintaining connections to their own community, particularly through food. The refugees learn American culture by eating the same food as Americans and watching popular films. They ingest the culture through their senses. They also spend hours chewing on dried squid, which becomes “the cud of remembrance.” Sensory experience helps the Vietnamese to integrate into American culture, while it also keeps them connected to their own culture. As a result, they develop dual sensibilities, both to survive and to remain connected to who they are.

In his depictions of the narrator’s identity as well as his illustrations of the various ways in which the refugee community assimilates without abandoning its connection to Vietnam, Nguyen asserts that the refugees’ cultural identity requires them to embrace the duality that they would have previously condemned in the narrator. The narrator’s biracial identity exemplifies what the Vietnamese have become as a result of both French colonialism and the Vietnam War—products of the East and West and survivors of a contentious history between the hemispheres.