How did Nguyen resist having his novel fit into the genre mold when it was adapted into a miniseries? The first break was insisting on a 90% Vietnamese cast. “There would never be a case where someone was speaking in English, but we knew they were actually speaking Vietnamese,” he says. His vision was also shared by the cast and crew, aligned, he says, with the purpose of the miniseries, especially executive producer Niv Fichman, who first optioned the book.
Even 10 years ago, find a publisher for The sympathizer it was difficult, as the manuscript was rejected by 13 editors. In 2016, no one in Hollywood was willing to go for the novel.
Australian actor Hoa Xuande in a scene from The Sympathizer.Credit:
autobiography of Nguyen, A man of two faces, published last year, sheds light on the extent to which her family's upheaval found its way into her novels. As a young child, Nguyen ran away with his parents and brother, leaving his 16-year-old adopted sister behind. They walked more than 180 kilometers to Nha Trang to board a refugee boat. His memory is of an “ocean of amnesia”: the trip was rarely discussed with his parents, and his and his brother's accounts differ on key points, such as whether he witnessed soldiers shooting another refugee ship
Eventually, his family settled in San Jose and opened a Vietnamese grocery store. The business became the cornerstone of family life, approaching the American dream. His parents become model American refugees: grateful, hardworking and devoutly Catholic; they took citizenship and changed their names to Joseph and Linda.
Nguyen is critical of both the American dream and the expectation of gratitude placed upon them as refugees. “We are here because you were there,” he says in his autobiography.
During a comfortable but uncomfortable childhood, Nguyen saw Apocalypse Now for the first time, and was mesmerized by the opening when The Doors' This is the end is set up by blooming napalm. “This is great,” he thought. It was a later scene that shaped his literary career. When a sampan of refugees is massacred by American soldiers, he asked himself, “Are you killing Americans? Or killing Vietnamese?”
“It's easy to look at the United States and say, 'Wow, this is a really deserving country considering all these divisions and contradictions,' but Australia seems to have its fair share of these parallel structural problems.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Years later, while completing his studies at UCLA in Berkeley, he tells a room full of Asian-American students how the scene affected him, and he began to shake “with rage and rage.” The adaptation of The sympathizer now close this “cycle of influences”.
So is it the Vietnamese or the Americans? “Nothing is unique. Everything is multi-layered”, he says today. This is a concept Nguyen returns to again and again.
The sympathizer he uses a double agent to evoke the contradictory self, the one who must always be on guard, whatever the audience. I ask if this means that belonging is an illusion. No, but Nguyen says he's “very, very wary of the authenticity that comes with membership. There's always a horizon. Someone has to be out there.” He solves it for himself with a linguistic sleight of hand: “The paradox of my own being is that I believe in the authenticity of my inauthenticity.”
Even his family has stories that intertwine the colonized and the colonizer. His parents moved from the North to a town in the South, occupying fertile land and displacing the indigenous Montagnards in the rocky fringes. I ask him how he felt about this discovery. “It is simply the logical outcome of everything that has troubled me since I became a politically and artistically conscious person.”
So what intricacies will he encounter on his first trip to Australia? Nguyen talks about the shared traits between countries: allies, language and colonial heritage. “It's easy to look at the United States and say, 'Wow, this is a really deserving country considering all these divisions and contradictions,' but Australia seems to have its fair share of these parallel structural problems.”
But “that doesn't stop me from getting excited,” he says, adding: “You have one of the best accents in the English-speaking world, especially for overseas Vietnamese.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au) and the Sydney Writers' Festival (swf.org.au). The Age is a partner of MWF. The sympathizer, The Committedi The man of two faces are published by Little, Brown.
