The Sympathizer

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-18

Chapters 19-21

Chapters 22-23

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 10 Summary

When the Auteur arrives on the set of The Hamlet, he throws a welcome party for himself and, though the narrator is technically part of the crew, he feels more welcome sitting at the tables with the Asian extras.

The basic premise of the movie is that the American Green Berets, part of the Phoenix Program, are heroes who have arrived in the hamlet to rescue the Vietnamese civilians from the villains, the Communist Viet Cong. The casting for the American roles in the movie includes the Thespian, an older, serious actor, in the leading role of Captain; and the Idol, a pop star turned actor, in the other leading role of Sergeant. The Vietnamese roles are assigned to a series of non-Vietnamese Asian actors: There is a Filipino child, a half-Chinese and half-British lesbian actress, and then a Korean actor named James Yoon who is known for playing the “Asian Everyman” (158). As the narrator explains, as the Asian Everyman, Yoon is a “television actor whose face most people would know but whose name they could not recall. They would say, Oh, that’s the Chinese guy on that cop show, or That’s the Japanese gardener in that comedy, or That’s the Oriental guy, what’s his name” (158).

The narrator and the Auteur butt heads on set over a brutal rape scene in the movie in which the main female character, a Vietnamese civilian, is raped by a Viet Cong troop. The Auteur gruffly says, “a little shock treatment never hurt an audience,” when the narrator suggests removing the scene from the movie. The fight escalates into larger matters, spiraling so that the narrator tells the Auteur outright that the Americans broke all their promises during the war.

Meanwhile, shooting on the film continues. Yoon’s character is a Vietnamese translator who aids the Green Berets in ridding Vietnam of the Viet Cong. He is captured, however, and in his death scene, he is mercilessly tortured by the Viet Cong. Yoon senses that performance—a suffering Vietnamese torture scene—is his chance for the Oscar in a supporting role, so he is eager to do the best job he can. The lines between reality and Hollywood fiction are blurred when Yoon insists on truly enduring some of the torture that his character experiences, and the Auteur allows it: “By the final take two hours later, James Yoon really was lachrymose with pain, his face bathed in sweat, mucus, vomit, and tears” (170). Yoon’s character ultimately dies a grisly death by suicide, biting off his tongue and drowning in the blood to evade further torture from the Viet Cong.

Chapter 11 Summary

The longer the narrator works on The Hamlet,the more he becomes convinced that he is not only “a technical consultant on an artistic project, but an infiltrator into a work of propaganda” (172). The narrator recalls his and Man’s discussions about how art and literature were crucial to revolution, and that art could not be separated from politics: “Politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them” (173).

Having worked on the movie for months, the production crew begins the process of filming the final scenes, which include a great deal of carnage: “Of course it was not merely enough to destroy the hamlet and the cave where King Cong hid; to satisfy the Auteur’s need for realistic bloodshed, all the extras had to be killed off” (175). The Thespian, for his death scene, “to ensure that no one could claim that Asia Soo or James Yoon had out-acted him,” demands that his death be filmed eighteen times (177). As the narrator watches this play-act of violence, he realizes the absurdity and futility of it all. He failed in representing the Vietnamese people properly because, “they [the Americans] owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths” (179).

The narrator is told that the Auteur has made the last-minute decision to include a sequence in which the Viet Cong destroys the hamlet’s cemetery, so he decides to visit his mother’s mock grave one last time before it is destroyed in the next hour. However, as the narrator is sitting before his mother’s grave, a bomb goes off directly underneath the narrator, sending him flying through space. He tries to make a run for it, but flashes of light and explosions surround him—soon his consciousness fades to black, and he sees his life flashing before his eyes, in reverse. “I gradually shrank in size,” he says, “until I was a teenager, then a child, and at last, a baby” (183). He soon wakes up in the hospital suffering from first-degree burns, smoke inhalation, and a concussion. The narrator suspects that the Auteur intentionally detonated the bomb in the cemetery while he was still there.

Left in his hospital bed with nothing to do but stare at the bright white walls, the narrator thinks back on his time in the Special Branch, particularly his involvement in the torture of a well-regarded Communist known as the Watchman. After a particularly cruel noise torture involving the song “Hey Good Lookin’” by Hank Williams, the Watchman committed suicide by choking himself on a boiled egg (193).

Chapter 12 Summary

The narrator returns from the Philippines to discover that the General’s wife is going to open a Vietnamese restaurant. Revenue from the restaurant will go directly to the General’s anti-Communist movement, particularly to help fund the reconnaissance team to make its way to Thailand as the first step in overthrowing the new South Vietnamese Communist regime. Bon, the General reports, has volunteered to be part of this team: “My crazy friend had volunteered not despite the fact that his chances of returning were slim, but because of them” (198).

The narrator debriefs the General and his wife on his time in the Philippines filming The Hamlet, but he does mention the explosion in the cemetery or his hospitalization afterward. The narrator remembers his time in the hospital, and we learn that he was paid off by the movie studio so that he would not sue for his injuries. The narrator claims that, outside of his physical injuries, he also may have lost a portion of his memory. The narrator, knowing how to manipulate this executive with his own racist stereotypes, assumes the role of “bereftAsian,” and haggles the studio executive from a $5,000 settlement to a $10,000 one.

As penance, half of the $10,000 will go to the crapulent major’s widow, which the narrator delivers to her in person at her home. When the widow offers the narrator a plate of ladyfingers, the narrator is transported in time to a memory of his mother. His mother loved ladyfingers, and his father the Catholic priest courted his mother—who was just thirteen years old at the time—by offering her ladyfingers as a gift. The age discrepancy and power differential between his mother and father greatly disturbs the narrator in retrospect. His father, the narrator says, taught him about guilt in the form of Original Sin—“the truly important Question that had always preoccupied me was related to this Original Sin, for it concerned my father’s identity” (208). We learn that, in early childhood, the narrator did not know who his father was; his mother reveals it to him after his classmates bully him, saying he is “unnatural.” “My child, my child, you are not unnatural…You are God’s gift to me. Nothing or no one could be more natural,” is what his mother says before revealing the identity of his father (209).

After departing the home of the crapulent major’s widow, the narrator makes a quick stop at the liquor store and then proceeds to Ms. Mori’s apartment for an unannounced visit. To his surprise, Sonny is already there, sitting with Ms. Mori’s cat on his lap.

Chapters 10-12 Analysis

In the filming of The Hamlet, the line between fiction and reality is blurred in disturbing ways. James Yoon’s death, particularly, is disturbing since his torture scene uncannily resembles—and, to an extent, actually feels like—torture. When the narrator pastes his mother’s photo to a tombstone in the mock cemetery, in a sense it is a true commemoration of her memory. Referring to the destruction of her mock tombstone, the narrator remarks that his mother, who had suffered throughout her entire life, was “due to suffer one last indignity for the sake of entertainment” (181). The “boat people,” the most pitiable sect of Vietnamese refugees, are cast as extras in the movie—a role they were born to play, in a way. The function of Hollywood is not merely frivolous entertainment; perhaps the most troubling way the film muddies the line between fiction and reality is around the question of exploitation. In the creation of this movie, the mistreatment, misrepresentation, and final disregard of Asians—in a Vietnamese story—mimics the way Americans exploit Asians and Asian culture in the world at large.

Another function of cinema, as illuminated in this section, is American propaganda, brainwashing the public at large about the narrative of the Vietnam War. “Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death,” the narrator says, “but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths of memory’s laminated floor?” (194). Even in his consultant role, the narrator has the uneasy sense that the Auteur will misrepresent the Vietnamese people, in favor of an American war hero story that glosses over the true pain and suffering of the Vietnamese. Adding to the richness of this theme, the story of The Hamletis a story within a confession, and the narrator (as confessor) wonders if he will be represented properly: “Still smarting from my wounds even now, I cannot help but wonder, writing this confession, whether I own my own representation or whether you, my confessor, do” (194).

The theme of the subjective, elusive meaning of “truth,” is further explored in these chapters, particularly in Man and the narrator’s discussion of the triplicate meaning of the word “mole.” In a flashback to when the narrator was first assigned his task as spy for the Communists, Man tells the narrator that he will be a mole. The narrator, not quite comprehending the word in English, asks Man to define “mole”—does he mean the mole, as in the animal that digs underground? Man says it is the other kind of mole, and the narrator then understands he means a spy. But Man corrects him, reminding the narrator of a third type of mole, one that perhaps even better symbolizes a spy: The beauty mark that one forgets is there, so in essence it is hidden in plain sight (174). A major theme in The Sympathizer is the shifting, sometimes counterintuitive, and often contradictory nature of truth. Meaning, the more indirect and riddle-like the answer—as in the case with “what is a mole”—the more likely it is to be the actual truth.