You’ve said this novel begs a sequel because, even after the speaker has been utterly destroyed, there’s a moment in which his reconstruction begins. In the same vein as the question I asked earlier about ghosts, you mentioned in an interview that in writing this novel, you were haunted by nightmares. Thinking about the ghostly nightmares that occurred both for you and the narrator at the end of the novel—where you write, “He struggled with many things he now understands.”—what do you understand about this narrator, or his adventures and misadventures, or about the Vietnam/Vietnamese narrative you’re writing into, and how might that begin your next project?
I think he is just barely beginning to understand himself and the person that he is. Throughout the novel, he’s very torn by things he’s witnessed and endured while he writes the confession. He thinks he knows who he is and how the world works because he’s a revolutionary. He comes into political consciousness, which has allowed him to make sense of himself and what he’s feeling. But that confidence is taken away from him throughout the course of the book. So he’s left unmoored at the end, and he needs to discover how to reconstruct himself after this re‐education. I have some ideas about what that might entail, but part of the pleasure of writing was not knowing exactly how he would change as a person. I might have to actually write the sequel to discover how his self‐education will unfold.
In your acknowledgements, you write that the last words of this book you save for Lan Duong and your son Ellison. I turned to the last words and they are “We will live.” As your son grows up in this world, where this novel exists, what kind of life do you hope for him?
Being a father is a revelatory experience. My son is a complete surprise in terms of how wonderful I find him to be, which is probably what every father, I hope, thinks of his children too. I don’t want to put any burden of expectation on him in terms of what we as Asian Americans are supposed to want from our children, which is an Ivy League education and professional success and all that. That to me is not important. I look at him and I see someone who is happy, and loving, and kind, and a joy, and I want him to retain all those qualities as he grows and lives. That to me is more important than any kind of external success that he might achieve. I think what I want for him is an outcome of my own experience and what happens to my narrator in the book. I certainly wouldn’t want my son to grow up like me or my narrator; and the last thing I would want him to do would be to become a writer!
What kind of political work do you hope this book does in the world, especially in the face of a dominant American culture that will relentlessly maintain its ideas about Vietnamese people and its involvement in Vietnam?
Another interviewer, when she finished reading the book, told me that she was rattled by the ending. I want readers to be rattled by the book. That might be the most I can hope for the book politically. I’ve really wondered if I, as a critic, have overestimated the political capacity of literature beyond the scope of people who read books. I hope it does, but I don’t dare to predict what impact the book will have except within the realm of literature and people who read books. I want this book to provoke people to rethink their assumptions about this history, and also about the literature they’ve encountered before—to make them uncomfortable in a good way.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
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