The Sympathizer

  An hour passed but I was unable to return to sleep. I went to the kitchen and ate a salami sandwich while I reread the letter from my aunt that had arrived yesterday. Dear nephew, she wrote, thanks so much for your last letter. The weather has been terrible recently, very chilly and windy. The letter detailed her struggles with her roses, the customers at her shop, the positive outcome of her doctor’s visit, but nothing was as important as the signal about the weather, telling me that between the lines was a message from Man in an invisible ink concocted from rice starch. Tomorrow, when Bon was gone for his few hours to clean the reverend’s church, I would make a solution of iodine in water that I would brush onto the letter to reveal a series of numbers in purple ink. They referred to page, line, and word of Richard Hedd’s Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction, the cipher Man had so artfully chosen and now the most important book in my life. From Man’s invisible messages, I had learned that the spirits of the people were high, that the rebuilding of the country was progressing slowly but surely, and that his superiors were pleased with my reporting. Why would they not be? Nothing was happening among the exiles except tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth. I hardly needed to write that in the invisible ink I would make from cornstarch and water.

  Somewhat hungover and somewhat sentimental, this month being the first anniversary of Saigon’s fall, or liberation, or both, I wrote my aunt a letter to commemorate a year’s worth of tribulation. Although I left as much by choice as by circumstance, I confess that I could not help but feel pity for my sorry countrymen, their germs of loss passed back and forth until I, too, walked around light-headed in the fog bank of memory. My dear aunt, so much has happened. The letter was a rambling history of the exiles since their departure from camp, told from their teary-eyed point of view, the telling of which stirred tears in me as well. I wrote about how none of us was released without the helping hand of a sponsor, whose job it was to guarantee that we would not become dependent on the welfare state. Those among us without immediate benefactors wrote pleading letters to companies that once employed us, to soldiers who once advised us, to lovers who once slept with us, to churches that might take pity, even to the merest of acquaintances, hoping for sponsorship. Some of us left alone, some of us left as families, some of our families were divvied up and parceled out, some of us got to stay in warm western climes that reminded us of home, but most were dispatched far away to states whose names we could not wrap our tongues around: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and so on. We spoke of our new geography in our own version of English, each syllable stressed, Chicago becoming Chick-ah-go, New York pronounced closer to New-ark, Texas broken down to Tex-ass, California now Ca-li. Before leaving camp, we exchanged the phone numbers and addresses of our new destinations, knowing we would need the refugee telegraph system to discover which city had the best jobs, which state had the lowest taxes, where the best welfare benefits were, where the least racism was, where the most people who looked like us and ate like us lived.

  If allowed to stay together, I told my aunt, we could have incorporated ourselves into a respectably sized, self-sufficient colony, a pimple on the buttocks of the American body politic, with ready-made politicians, police officers, and soldiers, with our own bankers, salesmen, and engineers, with doctors, lawyers, and accountants, with cooks, cleaners, and maids, with factory owners, mechanics, and clerks, with thieves, prostitutes, and murderers, with writers, singers, and actors, with geniuses, teachers, and the insane, with priests, nuns, and monks, with Buddhists, Catholics, and the Cao Dai, with people from the north, the center, and the south, with the talented, the mediocre, and the stupid, with patriots, traitors, and neutralists, with the honest, the corrupt, and the indifferent, sufficiently collective to elect our own representative to the Congress and have a voice in our America, a Little Saigon as delightful, delirious, and dysfunctional as the original, which was exactly why we were not allowed to stay together but were instead dispersed by bureaucratic fiat to all the longitudes and latitudes of our new world. Wherever we found ourselves, we found each other, small clans gathering in basements, in churches, in backyards on the weekends, at beaches where we brought our own food and drink in grocery bags rather than buying from the more expensive concessions. We did our best to conjure up the culinary staples of our culture, but since we were dependent on Chinese markets our food had an unacceptably Chinese tinge, another blow in the gauntlet of our humiliation that left us with the sweet-and-sour taste of unreliable memories, just correct enough to evoke the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone, missing along with the proper variety, subtlety, and complexity of our universal solvent, fish sauce. Oh, fish sauce! How we missed it, dear Aunt, how nothing tasted right without it, how we longed for the grand cru of Phu Quoc Island and its vats brimming with the finest vintage of pressed anchovies! This pungent liquid condiment of the darkest sepia hue was much denigrated by foreigners for its supposedly horrendous reek, lending new meaning to the phrase “there’s something fishy around here,” for we were the fishy ones. We used fish sauce the way Transylvanian villagers wore cloves of garlic to ward off vampires, in our case to establish a perimeter with those Westerners who could never understand that what was truly fishy was the nauseating stench of cheese. What was fermented fish compared to curdled milk?

  But out of deference to our hosts we kept our feelings to ourselves, sitting close to one another on prickly sofas and scratchy carpets, our knees touching under crowded kitchen tables on which sat crenellated ashtrays measuring time’s passage with the accumulation of ashes, chewing on dried squid and the cud of remembrance until our jaws ached, trading stories heard second- and thirdhand about our scattered countrymen. This was the way we learned of the clan turned into slave labor by a farmer in Modesto, and the naive girl who flew to Spokane to marry her GI sweetheart and was sold to a brothel, and the widower with nine children who went out into a Minnesotan winter and lay down in the snow on his back with mouth open until he was buried and frozen, and the ex-Ranger who bought a gun and dispatched his wife and two children before killing himself in Cleveland, and the regretful refugees on Guam who petitioned to go back to our homeland, never to be heard from again, and the spoiled girl seduced by heroin who disappeared into the Baltimore streets, and the politician’s wife demoted to cleaning bedpans in a nursing home who one day snapped, attacked her husband with a kitchen knife, then was committed to a mental ward, and the quartet of teenagers who arrived without families and fell in together in Queens, robbing two liquor stores and killing a clerk before being imprisoned for twenty years to life, and the devout Buddhist who spanked his young son and was arrested for child abuse in Houston, and the proprietor who accepted food stamps for chopsticks and was fined for breaking the law in San Jose, and the husband who slapped his wife and was jailed for domestic violence in Raleigh, and the men who had escaped but left wives behind in the chaos, and the women who had escaped but left husbands behind, and the children who had escaped without parents and grandparents, and the families missing one, two, three, or more children, and the half dozen who went to sleep in a crowded, freezing room in Terre Haute with a charcoal brazier for heat and never woke up, borne to permanent darkness on an invisible cloud of carbon monoxide. Sifting through the dirt, we panned for gold, the story of the baby orphan adopted by a Kansas billionaire, or the mechanic who bought a lottery ticket in Arlington and became a multimillionaire, or the girl elected president of her high school class in Baton Rouge, or the boy accepted by Harvard from Fond du Lac, the soil of Camp Pendleton still in the tracks of his sneakers, or the movie star you love so much, dear Aunt, who circled the world from airport to airport, no country letting her in after the fall of Saigon, none of her American movie star friends returning her desperate phone calls until with her last dime she snagged Tippi Hedren, who flew her to Holly­wood. So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, a
nd for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.

  CHAPTER 5

  Having read many confessions myself, and bearing in mind your notes on what I have confessed thus far, I suspect, my dear Commandant, that this confession is not what you are most likely used to reading. I cannot blame you for the unusual qualities of my confession—only me. I am guilty of honesty, which was rarely the case in my adult life. Why begin now, in these circumstances, a solitary chamber of three by five meters? Perhaps because I do not understand why I am here. At least when I was a sleeper agent, I understood why I had to live my life in code. But not now. If I am to be condemned—if I am already condemned, as I suspect—then I will do no less than explain myself, in a style of my own choosing, regardless of how you might consider my actions.

  I should get credit, I think, for the real dangers and petty bothers that I endured. I lived like a bonded servant, a refugee whose only job perk was the opportunity to receive welfare. I barely even had the opportunity to sleep, since a sleeper agent is almost constantly afflicted with insomnia. Perhaps James Bond could slumber peacefully on the bed of nails that was a spy’s life, but I could not. Ironically, it was my most spy-like task to date that could always put me to sleep, the decoding of Man’s messages and the encoding of my own in invisible ink. As each dispatch was painstakingly coded word by word, it behooved sender and receiver to keep messages as brief as possible, and the one that I decoded the next evening from Man said simply: Good work, Deflect attention from yourself, and All subversives now detained.

  I saved encoding my response until after the grand opening of the General’s liquor store, which, the General said, Claude would be attending. We had spoken a few times by phone but I had not seen Claude since Saigon. There was another reason the General wanted to see me in person, however, or so Bon reported a few days later on returning from the store. He had just been hired as the store’s clerk, a job he could manage while also cleaning the reverend’s church part-time. I had urged the General to hire Bon, and was glad that he would now spend more hours on his feet than on his back. What does he want to see me for? I said. Bon opened the refrigerator’s arthritic jaw and extracted the most beautiful decorative object in our possession, a gleaming silver cylinder of Schlitz. There’s an informer in the ranks. Beer?

  I’ll take two.

  The grand opening would be at the end of April, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the fall, or liberation, or both, of Saigon. It fell on a Friday, and I had to ask Ms. Mori, she of the sensible shoes, if I could leave work early. Although I would not have asked for this favor in September, by April our relationship had taken an unexpected turn. In the months after I started working with her, we had gradually surveilled each other on smoking breaks, on the chats that naturally occur between office mates, and then after work at cocktail hours far from campus. Ms. Mori was not as hostile to me as I had supposed. In fact, we had become rather friendly, if that was the word to describe the sweaty, condomless intercourse we engaged in once or twice per week at her apartment in the Crenshaw neighborhood, the furtive fornication committed once or twice per week in the Department Chair’s office, and the nocturnal relations staged on the squeaky backseat of my Ford.

  As she explained after our first romantic interlude, it was my reasonable, kind, good-hearted manner that had eventually persuaded her to invite me for a drink “whenever.” I had taken up the invitation a few days later at a tiki bar in Silver Lake, frequented by heavyset men in Hawaiian shirts and women whose denim skirts barely harnessed their generous rumps. Flaming tiki torches flanked the entrance, while inside, ominous masks of some unknown Pacific Island origin were pinned to the planked wall, their lips seeming to say, Ooga booga. Table lamps in the shape of bare-breasted, brown-skinned hula girls in grass skirts cast an ambient glow. The waitress likewise wore a grass skirt whose faded straw color matched her hair, her bikini top fashioned from polished coconuts. Sometime after our third round, Ms. Mori cupped her chin with her right hand, elbow on the bar, and allowed me to light her cigarette, which, in my opinion, was one of the most erotic acts of foreplay a man can perform for a woman. She drank and smoked like a movie starlet from a screwball comedy, one of those dames with padded bras and shoulder pads who spoke in a second language of innuendo and double entendre. Looking me in the eye, she said, I have a confession. I smiled and hoped my dimples impressed her. I like confessions, I said. There’s something mysterious about you, she said. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that you’re tall, dark, and handsome. You’re just dark and sort of cute. At first, hearing about you and meeting you the first time, I thought, Great, here’s an Uncle Tom-a-san, a real sellout, a total whitewash. He’s not a cracker, but he’s close. He’s a rice cracker. The way you get along with the gaijin! White people love you, don’t they? They only like me. They think I’m a dainty little china doll with bound feet, a geisha who’s ready to please. But I don’t talk enough for them to love me, or at least I don’t talk the right way. I can’t put on the whole sukiyaki-and-sayonara show they love, the chopsticks in the hair kind of mumbo jumbo, all that Suzie Wong bullshit, like every white man who comes along is William Holden or Marlon Brando, even if he looks like Mickey Rooney. You, though. You can talk, and that counts for a lot. But it’s not just that. You’re a great listener. You’ve mastered the inscrutable Oriental smile, sitting there nodding and wrinkling your brow sympathetically and letting people go on, thinking you’re perfectly in agreement with everything they say, all without saying a word yourself. What do you say to that?

  Ms. Mori, I said, I am shocked by what I am hearing. I’ll bet, she said. Call me Sofia, for Chrissakes. I’m not your girlfriend’s over-the-hill mother. Get me another drink and light me another cigarette. I’m forty-six years old and I don’t care who knows it, but what I will tell you is that when a woman is forty-six and has lived her life the way she’s wanted to live it, she knows everything there is to know about what to do in the sack. It’s got nothing to do with the Kama Sutra or The Carnal Prayer Mat or any of that Oriental hocus-pocus of our beloved Department Chair. You’ve worked for him for six years, I said. And don’t I know it, she said. Is it just my imagination, or does every time he opens the door to his office a gong goes off somewhere? And does he smoke tobacco in his office, or is that incense in his bowl? I can’t help but feel he’s a little disappointed in me because I don’t bow whenever I see him. When he interviewed me, he wanted to know whether I spoke any Japanese. I explained that I was born in Gardena. He said, Oh, you nisei, as if knowing that one word means he knows something about me. You’ve forgotten your culture, Ms. Mori, even though you’re only second generation. Your issei parents, they hung on to their culture. Don’t you want to learn Japanese? Don’t you want to visit Nippon? For a long time I felt bad. I wondered why I didn’t want to learn Japanese, why I didn’t already speak Japanese, why I would rather go to Paris or Istanbul or Barcelona rather than Tokyo. But then I thought, Who cares? Did anyone ask John F. Kennedy if he spoke Gaelic and visited Dublin or if he ate potatoes every night or if he collected paintings of leprechauns? So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn’t my culture right here since I was born here? Of course I didn’t ask him those questions. I just smiled and said, You’re so right, sir. She sighed. It’s a job. But I’ll tell you something else. Ever since I got it straight in my head that I haven’t forgotten a damn thing, that I damn well know my culture, which is American, and my language, which is English, I’ve felt like a spy in that man’s office. On the surface, I’m just plain old Ms. Mori, poor little thing who’s lost her roots, but underneath, I’m Sofia and you better not fuck with me.

  I cleared my throat. Ms. Mori?

  Hmm?

  I think I’m falling in love with you.

  It’s Sofia, she said. And let’s get one thing straight, playboy. If we get involved, and that’s a big if, there are no strings att
ached. You do not fall in love with me and I do not fall in love with you. She exhaled twin plumes of smoke. Just so you know, I do not believe in marriage but I do believe in free love.

  What a coincidence, I said. So do I.

  According to Benjamin Franklin, as Professor Hammer taught me a decade ago, an older mistress was a wonderful thing, or so the Founding Father advised a younger man. I can’t recall the entire substance of the American Sage’s letter, only two points. The first: older mistresses were “so grateful!!” Perhaps true of many, but not of Ms. Mori. If anything, she expected me to be grateful, and I was. I had been resigned to the consolation of man’s best friend, i.e., self-pleasure, and certainly did not possess the wherewithal to consort with prostitutes. Now I had free love, its existence an affront not only to a capitalism corseted, or perhaps chastity-locked, by its ethnic Protestant justifications, but also alien to a communism with Confucian character. This is one of the drawbacks to communism that I hope will eventually pass, the belief that every comrade is supposed to behave like a noble peasant whose hard hoe is devoted only to farming. Under Asian communism, everything but sex is free, since the sexual revolution has not yet happened in the East. The reasoning is that if one has enough sex to produce six or eight or a dozen offspring, as is generally the case for families in Asian countries (according to Richard Hedd), one hardly needs a revolution for more sex. Meanwhile, Americans, vaccinated against one revolution and thus resistant to another, are interested only in free love’s tropical sizzle, not its political fuse. Under Ms. Mori’s patient tutelage, however, I began to realize that true revolution also involved sexual liberation.