The Sympathizer

  During her returns home in the summers of ’73 and ’74, she reappeared as a foreigner in bell-bottomed jeans and feathered hair, blouses stretched tight as a trampoline over the swell of her bosom, clogs adding several inches to her modest height. Madame would sit her down in her salon and, according to the nannies, lecture her on the importance of maintaining her virginity and of cultivating the “Three Submissions and Four Virtues”—a phrase that calls to mind the title of a highbrow erotic novel. The mere mention of her endangered or putatively lost virginity provided ample wood for the cookstove of my imagination, a fire I stoked in the privacy of my room, down the hall from the one she shared with a little sister. Lan had visited the General and Madame a few times since our arrival in California, but I had not been invited to the home on such occasions. Nor had I been invited to go with the General and Madame to her graduation cum laude a few months before. The most I heard of Lan was when the General muttered something about his unfilial daughter, who was now going by the name of Lana and who had not returned home after graduation but instead chosen to live on her own. Although I tried to draw out the General on what Lana was doing postgraduation, he had been uncharacteristically incommunicative.

  Now I knew, and now I knew why. This Lana onstage bore no relationship to the Lan that I remembered. In the band’s arrangement, the other female singer was the angel of tradition, clad in a chartreuse ao dai, hair long and straight, makeup tasteful, her songs of choice estrogen-soaked ballads about lovelorn women hailing distant soldier lovers or lost Saigon itself. No such sadness or loss tinted Lana’s songs, no looking backward over the shoulder for this temptress of modernity. Even I was shocked by the black leather miniskirt that threatened to reveal a glimpse of that secret I had so often fantasized about. Above the miniskirt, her gold silk halter top shimmered with every gyration of her torso as she flexed her lungs, her specialty being the rock-’em, sock-’em numbers that the blues and rock bands of our homeland had mastered in order to entertain American troops and Americanized youth. I had heard her sing “Proud Mary” earlier in the evening without realizing it was she, and now I had to remind myself not to stare at her as she let loose a throaty version of “Twist and Shout” that called nearly everyone under the age of forty to the dance floor. Besides the simple yet elegant cha-cha, the twist was the favorite dance of the southern people, requiring as it did no coordination. Even Madame usually did the twist, innocent enough that she allowed her children to flock to the floor and dance, too. But glancing at the General’s table, which occupied a place of honor on the dance floor’s edge, I saw both the General and the Madame remaining seated, looking as if they were sucking on the sour fruit of the tamarind tree that had shaded their lost villa. And no wonder! For no one was twisting more than Lana herself, every rotation of her hips working an invisible ratchet that pulled the heads of the men on the dance floor forward and then pushed back. I might have participated if I was not so aware of Ms. Mori dancing with me, twisting with such childlike glee that I had to smile. She was looking remarkably feminine compared with her usual style. A lily nestled in her marcelled hair, and she wore a chiffon dress that actually exposed her knees. I had flattered her more than once on her appearance, and I took the occasion of seeing her knees during the twist to compliment her on her dancing as well. I haven’t danced like that in a long time, she said when the song was over. Neither have I, Ms. Mori, I said, kissing her on the cheek. Sofia, she said.

  Before I could respond, Clark Gable took to the stage and announced a surprise visitor, a congressman who served in our country as a Green Beret from ’62 to ’64 and who was the representative for this district we found ourselves in. The Congressman had achieved a significant degree of renown in Southern California as an up-and-coming young politician, his martial credentials serving him well in Orange County. Here, his nicknames of Napalm Ned or Knock-’em-Dead Ned or Nuke-’em-All Ned, used depending on one’s mood and the geopolitical crisis, were affectionate rather than derogatory. He was so anti-red in his politics he might as well have been green, one reason he was one of the few politicians in Southern California to greet the refugees with open arms. The majority of Americans regarded us with ambivalence if not outright distaste, we being living reminders of their stinging defeat. We threatened the sanctity and symmetry of a white and black America whose yin and yang racial politics left no room for any other color, particularly that of pathetic little yellow-skinned people pickpocketing the American purse. We were strange aliens rumored to have a predilection for Fido Americanus, the domestic canine on whom was lavished more per capita than the annual income of a starving Bangladeshi family. (The true horror of this situation was actually beyond the ken of the average American. While some of us indeed had been known to sup on the brethren of Rin Tin Tin and Lassie, we did not do so in the Neanderthalesque way imagined by the average American, with a club, a roast, and some salt, but with a gourmand’s depth of ingenuity and creativity, our chefs able to cook canids seven different virility-enhancing ways, from extracting the marrow to grilling and boiling, as well as sausage making, stewing, and a few varieties of frying and steaming—yum!) The Congressman, however, had written editorials defending us and welcoming the émigrés to his Orange County district.

  Good God, look at you, he said, with microphone in hand, Clark Gable by his side, flanked by angel and temptress. He was in his forties, a crossbreed between lawyer and politician, exhibiting the former’s aggressiveness and the latter’s smoothness, typified by his head. Shiny, polished, and pointed as the tip of a fountain pen, words flowed from it as easily as the finest India ink. This head was the difference in height between him and the shorter Clark Gable, and in every dimension was the Congressman so much more expansive that two Vietnamese men of average height and size could have squeezed themselves into the confines of his body. Look at yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, look at yourselves the way I wish my fellow Americans would look at you, which is as fellow Americans. I am truly thankful for the chance to be here tonight and to share in the joy of this occasion, this marriage of two lovely young Vietnamese people in a Chinese restaurant on California soil under an American moon and in a Christian universe. Let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, for two years I lived among your people in the Highlands and fought with your soldiers and shared your fears and faced your enemy, and I thought then and I think now how I could do nothing finer with my life than sacrifice it in the cause of your hopes, dreams, and aspirations for a better life. While I believed as surely as you that those hopes, dreams, and aspirations would be fulfilled in your homeland, we have been dealt another hand by history and the mysterious and unquestionable grace of God. I am here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that this is a hand of temporary bad luck, for your soldiers fought well and bravely, and would have prevailed if only Congress had remained as steadfast in their support of you as the president promised. This was a promise shared by many, many Americans. But not all. You know who I mean. The Democrats. The media. The antiwar movement. The hippies. The college students. The radicals. America was weakened by its own internal divisions, by the defeatists and communists and traitors infesting our universities, our newsrooms, and our Congress. You, sad to say, merely remind them of their cowardice and their treachery. I am here to tell you that what you remind me of is America’s great promise! The promise of the immigrant! The promise of the American Dream! The promise that the people of this country used to hold dear and will one day soon hold dear again, that America is a land of freedom and independence, a land of patriots who have always stood up for the little man no matter where he is in the world, a land of heroes who will never relent in the cause of helping our friends and smiting our enemies, a land that welcomes people like you, who have sacrificed so much in our common cause of democracy and liberty! One day, my friends, America will stand tall again, and it will be because of people like you. And one day, my friends, the land you have lost will be yours again! Because nothing can stop th
e inevitable movement of freedom and the will of the people! Now, affirm with me in your beautiful language what we all believe—

  The entire audience had been cheering and applauding wildly throughout the speech, and if he had rolled out a communist in a cage, the spectators would have gladly called for him to rip out the red’s beating heart with his massive fists. There was no way he could possibly get them even more excited, but he did. Raising his arms to form a V, presumably for Victory, or for Vietnam, or for Vote for me, or for something even more subliminally suggestive, he shouted into the microphone, in the most perfect Vietnamese, Vietnam Muon Nam! Vietnam Muon Nam! Vietnam Muon Nam! Everyone sitting leaped to his or her feet, and everyone standing stood a little taller, and everyone roared after the Congressman the refrain of Vietnam Forever! Then Clark Gable made a motion to the band, and it swung into the rhythms of our national anthem, which the angel and the temptress and Clark Gable and the Congressman all sang with zeal, as did everyone in the audience, myself included, except for the stoic Chinese waiters, who could finally take a rest.

  When the anthem finished, the Congressman was mobbed by well-wishers onstage while the rest of the audience members sunk into their seats with postcoital smugness. I turned to find Sonny, notepad and pen in hand, standing by Ms. Mori. Funny, he said, pink from a glass or two of cognac. 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? I introduced the two of them and asked him if he was going to get up close for a photograph. He grinned. The newspaper’s been doing well enough for me to hire a photographer. As for me, I already interviewed the good Congressman. I should have worn a flak jacket. He was practically shooting bullets at me.

  Typical white man behavior, Ms. Mori said. Have you ever noticed how a white man can learn a few words of some Asian language and we just eat it up? He could ask for a glass of water and we’d treat him like Einstein. Sonny smiled and wrote that down, too. You’ve been here longer than we have, Ms. Mori, he said with some admiration. Have you noticed that when we Asians speak English, it better be nearly perfect or someone’s going to make fun of our accent? It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been here, Ms. Mori said. White people will always think we’re foreigners. But isn’t there another side to that? I said, my words a little slurred from the cognac in my bloodstream. If we speak perfect English, then Americans trust us. It makes it easier for them to think we’re one of them.

  You’re that kind of person, right? Sonny’s eyes were as opaque as the tinted windows of a car. I was mistaken about him having changed that much. In the few times we had seen each other since our initial reunion, he had shown that he had merely turned down the volume on his personality. So what do you think of our Congressman?

  Are you going to quote me?

  You’ll be an anonymous source.

  He’s the best thing that could have happened to us, I said. And that was no lie. It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.

  The next weekend provided further opportunity to refine my understanding of the Congressman’s potential. On a bright Sunday morning, I chauffeured the General and Madame from Hollywood to Huntington Beach, where the Congressman lived and where he had invited them for lunch. My title of chauffeur was more impressive than the vehicle, a Chevrolet Nova whose best feature was its relative newness. But the fact remained that the General and the Madame, nestled in the backseat, had a chauffeur. My function was to be a trapping of their past and possibly future life. Their conversation for the hour-long drive revolved mostly around the Congressman until I asked about Lana, who, I said, struck me as having become all grown up. In the rearview mirror, I saw Madame’s face darken with barely repressed fury.

  She’s completely insane, Madame declared. We’ve been trying to keep her insanity within the family, but now that she’s strutting in public as a singer—Madame said the word as if it were ­communist—there’s nothing we can do. Someone persuaded her that she had talent as a singer, and she took the compliment seriously. She is rather talented, I said. Don’t start! Don’t encourage her! Look at her. She looks like a slut. Is this what I raised her to be? What decent man would want to marry that? Would you, Captain? Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. No, Madame, I said, I wouldn’t want to marry that, also the two-faced truth, for marriage was not the first thing on my mind when I saw her onstage. Of course not, she fumed. The worst thing about living in America is the corruption. At home, we could contain it in the bars and nightclubs and bases. But here, we will not be able to protect our children from the lewdness and the shallowness and the tawdriness Americans love so much. They’re too permissive. No one even thinks twice of what they call dating. We all know that “date” is a euphemism. What parent not only allows their daughter to copulate in her teenage years, but willingly encourages it? It’s shocking! It’s an abnegation of moral responsibility. Ugh.

  Somehow, at lunch, the conversation turned exactly in this direction, allowing Madame to repeat her points to the Congressman and his wife, Rita, a refugee from Castro’s revolution. She bore a passing resemblance to Rita Hayworth, with ten or fifteen years and pounds added to the movie star at her most glamorous period, circa Gilda. Castro, she said, in the way Madame said singer, is the devil. The only good thing about living with the devil, General and Madame, is that one knows evil and can recognize it. That is why I am happy you are here today, because we Cubans and Vietnamese are cousins in our shared cause against communism. These words sealed the bond between the Congressman and Rita and the General and Madame, who was comfortable enough that she eventually mentioned Lana to them while the mute housekeeper policed the empty dishes. Rita immediately sympathized. She was the domestic equivalent of her husband, an anticommunist warrior housewife to whom nothing was just an isolated incident but was almost always a symptom by which the disease of communism could be linked to poverty, depravity, atheism, and decay of many kinds. I won’t allow rock music in this house, she said, gripping Madame’s hand to console her for the loss of her daughter’s virtue. None of my children will be allowed to date until eighteen and, so long as they live in this house, will have a curfew by ten. It’s our weak spot, this freedom we allow people to behave any way they please, what with their drugs and their sex, as if those things aren’t infectious.

  Every system has its excesses that must be checked internally, the Congressman said. We let the hippies steal the meaning of the words “love” and “freedom,” and we’ve only just begun to fight back. That fight begins and ends in the home. Unlike his public persona, the Congressman in private was soft-spoken and measured in his tones, baronially assured as he sat at the head of the table, the General and Madame to either side. We control what our children read and listen to and watch, but it’s a tough fight when they can just turn on the television or radio any time they want. We need the government to make sure Hollywood and the record labels don’t go too far.

  Aren’t you the government? the General said.

  Exactly! Which is why one of my priorities is legislation that regulates movies and music. This is not censorship, only advice with teeth. But you can bet the Hollywood and music types don’t like me at all, until they meet me, that is, and see I’m not some kind of ogre out to feast on their creations. I’m just trying to help them refine their product. Now one thing that happened as a consequence of my work on the subcommittee is that I became friendly with some of the Hollywood people. I’ll admit I had my prejudices about them, but some of them are actually smart and passionate guys, too. Smart and passionate—that’s what I care about. The rest, we negotiate. Anyway, one of them is making a movie about the war and wanted my advice. I’m going to give him some notes on his script about what he got right and wrong. But the reason I mention it to you, General, is because the story’s about the Phoenix Program, and I know you’re an expert on that. Me, I left before that e
ven got started. Maybe you can give some feedback. Otherwise who knows what kind of Hollywood story they’re going to make.

  This is why I have my captain, the General said, nodding toward me. He is, in effect, my cultural attaché. He would be more than happy to read the screenplay and offer his insight. When I asked the Congressman for the title, I was taken aback. Hamlet?

  No, The Hamlet. The director’s also the writer. Never served a day in the armed forces, just got fed John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies as a kid. The main character’s a Green Beret who has to save a hamlet. I did serve two years on an A-Team in a number of hamlets, but nothing like this fantasyland he’s cooked up.

  I’ll see what I can do, I said. I had lived in a northern hamlet only a few years as a young boy, before our flight south in ’54, but lack of experience had never stopped me from trying anything. This was my mind-set when I approached Lana after her commanding performance, my intent to congratulate her on her new career. We stood in the restaurant’s foyer, by an imposing photograph of the newlyweds displayed on an easel, and it was here that she studied me with the objective, unsentimental eye of an art appraiser. She smiled and said, I was wondering why you were keeping your distance from me, Captain. When I protested that I simply had not recognized her, she asked me if I liked what I saw. I don’t look like the girl you knew, do I, Captain?

  Some men preferred those innocent schoolgirls in their white ao dai, but not me. They belonged to some pastoral, pure vision of our culture from which I was excluded, as distant to me as the snowcapped peaks of my father’s homeland. No, I was impure, and impurity was all I wanted and all I deserved. You don’t look like the girl I knew, I said. But you look exactly like the woman I imagined you would one day become. No one had ever said anything like this to her, and the unexpected nature of my remark made her falter for a moment before she recovered. I see I’m not the only person who’s changed since coming here, Captain. You’re so much more . . . direct than you were when you lived with us.