The Sympathizer, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel from 2016, was recently adapted into an HBO miniseries directed by Park Chan-wook of Oldboy renown and features some high-profile stars including Sandra Oh, Robert Downey Jr., and former South Vietnamese vice president Nguyen Cao Ky’s daughter. It’s perhaps the first American production about the Vietnam War to approach it from a Vietnamese perspective and specifically to include the perspective of Vietnamese on the losing side of the conflict. The plot follows a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist spy who infiltrates the South Vietnamese secret police and follows his boss, an ARVN general, to the US after the war.
The narrative raises questions about what it means to be an American, American attitudes towards Asians, the struggles of adapting to a new society as refugees who must leave internecine struggles in the past, US feelings about the Vietnam experience, and the allure and false promises of revolution. The show is enjoyable, and its cast gives an excellent performance. Even though its exploration of social and political issues comes from a progressive angle, those of us outside the left can still appreciate its provision of food for thought as well as its ability to convey political themes. For example, the character of Congressman Ned Godwin, a California Republican and veteran of the war who seeks to make electoral inroads with the Vietnamese community, is a well-written and well-acted caricature of a seventies neoconservative.
Anyway, that should be sufficient praise to indicate that I was more than pleased with the book and show. However, I want to critique them on a particular point, namely their anachronistic depiction of American racism. The most egregious in my opinion is the presentation of American strategic thinking towards Asia in the mid-seventies. The Sympathizer depicts American officials and scholars alike as having 1950s attitudes in the mid-1970s. For a story about Asians and Americans set during the Cold War, it has trouble with accurately setting the context.
The Anachronisms
The novel uses anachronisms to subtly paint Americans and their country as racist from the outset. A throwaway example is when it’s revealed that Claude, the CIA operative who’s the first American character introduced, is said to have confided that he is “one sixteenth Negro.” In the miniseries adaptation his character mentions it unabashedly and uses it to explain his conformity to a list of racial stereotypes. Given that the story begins in 1975, it’s odd that it would inject the word “negro,” which had become outdated by then. The purpose in the novel seems to be to establish that the US is a racially biased society where a man of high standing would only reveal distant African heritage in confidence. In the show the aim seems to be to portray Claude, and by extension the country he works for, as flippantly racist.
A deeper and more subtle example of conflating the 1970s with the 1950s for the purpose of casting Americans as having unenlightened racial attitudes is a book Claude shares titled Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction: On Understanding and Defeating the Marxist Threat to Asia by the fictional author Richard Hedd (who’s later revealed to be a character introduced early on). The book sounds like a caricature of works on Asian geopolitics from America’s McCarthyite phase following the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. The title captures dual paranoias Americans had about Asia during the early stages of the Cold War, namely red scare and yellow peril.
The US was rather notoriously shocked into panic over the spread of international communism during the fifties, as anxieties about communist subversion at home and the tide of an apparently monolithic red menace abroad haunted the American psyche. The region where the socialist threat appeared to be advancing most rapidly was Asia since the most populous country on the planet had fallen under its sway and communist forces were on the march against pro-Western regimes in French Indochina and Korea.
It was in this context that books on the purported gratuitous cruelty and barbarism of communism’s Asian expressions abounded such as Tom Dooley’s Deliver Us from Evil: The Story of Vietnam’s Flight to Freedom, which presented atrocities against North Vietnam’s Roman Catholic population by the Viet Minh and the former’s desperation to be relocated to the French-backed State of Vietnam in the south. Western fears of “Orientals” and the “Far East” from earlier in the twentieth century were infused with the disquiet over communism. During the Second World War Americans cast the Japanese as unfeeling animals who valued the lives of neither themselves nor of their enemies and who thus had a natural propensity to commit inhuman acts. They were framed as possessing a mind that was, by its very essence, inscrutable to Westerners due to its alien nature. Americans had a history of painting Asians as duplicitous, which Pearl Harbor reinforced, and as obsessed with “saving face.” East Asia’s enormous population long frightened Westerners who feared they could be demographically overwhelmed, which resulted in exclusionary immigration policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the White Australia Policy.
These ingrained biases in the West easily fused with the disquiet over Soviet influence and produced an orientalist interpretation of Cold War geopolitics. The title of the book Claude gifts to the protagonist brilliantly captures the zeitgeist of the 1950s. The problem is that the story takes place in 1975. By the mid-seventies the US was extricating itself from the Asian mainland and the American public was eager to abandon and forget about the region even if it meant that communism would spread. Books like Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake, which portrayed the Vietnamese communists as harmless patriots first and Marxists second, had come to dominate thinking among the Western intelligentsia and media. America had reopened itself to Asian immigration with the Hart-Celler Act in 1965. President Nixon, who had developed a reputation as a staunch anti-communist earlier in his career, initiated rapprochement with Red China, which was becoming an American partner against the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet split had become public knowledge, and consequently the fear of a united communist bloc died. Nixon also considered withdrawing USFK in response to the newly emerging regional order, to the consternation of Park Chung-Hee. Following Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, several US allies normalized relations with the People’s Republic. Likewise, various US allies normalized relations with North Vietnam after Hanoi inked a peace deal with Washington and Saigon in 1973. In the runup to Saigon’s fall on 30 April 1975, President Ford had attempted to persuade Congress to continue funding South Vietnam’s defense but to no avail. When he announced at Tulane University that as far as Washington was concerned the war was over, he was met with thunderous applause. Kissinger tried to persuade the administration that South Vietnam’s survival was crucial for American credibility, but the administration came to a consensus to the contrary.
This is all to say that by the mid-seventies American and Western attitudes towards Asia and towards communism had evolved. No longer did most Americans see the communist world as a monolith with tentacles reaching across Asia ready to strike defenseless nations at any instant, and no longer did they unempathetically see Asians as belonging to a totally alien civilization equipped with unrecognizable morals and mental faculties. It’s true that popular Vietnam War films from the late seventies and the eighties depicted the Vietnamese as an Other in certain ways, but they also questioned the morality and conduct of the intervention. Furthermore, the US and other Western countries provided refuge for large numbers of Indochinese refugees fleeing in the aftermath of the war. There were instances of unwelcoming violence towards some in their new countries, but the fact that such resettlement occurred at a large scale indicates a general change in attitude from the fifties. Compare, for instance, Australian attitudes towards the White Australia Policy in 1962 and 1979.
Hence, the novel’s portrayal of the book as the talk of the town in 1975 is inappropriate. If the story were set at the conclusion of the First Indochina War in 1954 or even at the start of full-scale US intervention in 1965, it could’ve been fitting. But saying that “everyone was reading this how-to manual” and that it contained glowing blurbs from a senator, two secretaries of defense, and a news anchor is inconsistent with history. As the previous paragraphs have argued, Americans were uninterested in combatting communism in Asia by then, and it would’ve been reputationally disastrous for a senator or cable host to stand by the policies that the majority of the populace had come to reject. Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction appears, like the use of the word “negro,” to be a literary tool to depict Claude as vaguely racist regardless of whether it matches the phase in the evolution of American society and diplomacy. Since Claude’s a stand-in for the US, these anachronisms are intended to communicate that the US itself is a racist society with a government that treats its putative allies as expendable after they’ve served their purpose. The latter claim was certainly true in Vietnam, but the former was becoming less accurate.