By Kurt Johnson
There’s an irony in the small-screen adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer being a hit with viewers and critics alike, as Hollywood has long been one of his targets. “The Unofficial Ministry of Propaganda for the United States” as he calls Hollywood in the book is “a part of the mechanism of American military and political hegemony, and imperialism that produced someone like me”, Nguyen says, referring to his own experience as a refugee who fled Vietnam, yet who accepts that he is now American.
This stance does not mean that Nguyen, a professor of English at the University of Southern California, has rejected cinematic motifs or devices in his writing. His fiction adopts the cinematic, not only from Hollywood as his second novel, The Committed, set in Paris evokes French cinema too.
Viet Thanh Nguyen insisted on a 90 per cent Vietnamese cast in the small-screen adaptation of his prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer.Credit:
The Sympathizer’s recognisable locales are Vietnam as a steamy “exotic” noir, offset by the endless sun-bleached parking lots of Los Angeles. The tension of the narrative ratcheted up by the logic of a Cold War thriller but stretched beyond its elastic limit, so lampooning the original device.
“I grew up steeped in television and in movies, mostly out of Hollywood. And so, my imagination is also rather visual. And as much as I criticise Hollywood, I still also think that it produces great works of art.” Does this approach to writing amount to appropriating Hollywood to defeat it? “I think that might be a fair characterisation,” he says, “as long as we understand that it’s not just about movies, it’s about power.”
So a concept fed into the Hollywood machine can result in a misshapen product with perverse effects. It’s a pitfall that for Nguyen defines the entire Vietnam War genre: “Much of it is anti-war, but the spectacle is so overpowering that people can walk away excited and stimulated by all the explosions and weapons.”
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Nguyen is particularly critical of Hollywood’s cigar-chewing swagger, which usually demands reducing other people to props. “In a movie like Apocalypse Now, there are no Vietnamese people credited, even though they’re there as villagers and as Viet Cong.” When they have lines, their characters are two-dimensional, sacrificial backdrops for white saviours, he says. More often, though, they serve as uncredited hordes to be mown down in demonstrations of American glory.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, The Sympathizer, the unnamed protagonist (played in the HBO series by Australian Hoa Xuande) is a Vietnamese refugee who fled during the fall of Saigon, ostensibly the climax of the first televised war. Landing in LA as a refugee, he finds work as a film consultant for The Hamlet, a caricature of the Vietnam War genre, the director eerily similar to Apocalypse Now’s Francis Ford Coppola. The protagonist is keen to add depth to the Vietnamese characters, but the script is locked in. Here too he is to remain silent and invisible, retained as an exercise in cultural box-ticking.
“I think times have changed,” Nguyen says. “But that doesn’t mean that Hollywood’s structure will change. I think the machinery will still stay the same. And that’s where the satire of the novel is still relevant.”
How did Nguyen resist his novel being hammered into the genre mould when adapted to a miniseries? The first break was insisting on a 90 per cent Vietnamese cast. “There would never be an instance where someone would be speaking in English, but we knew they were actually speaking Vietnamese,” he says. His vision was also shared by cast and crew, aligned, he says, on the miniseries’ purpose, especially executive producer Niv Fichman, who first optioned the book.
Even 10 years ago, finding a publisher for The Sympathizer was difficult, as the manuscript was rejected by 13 publishers. In 2016, nobody in Hollywood was willing to option the novel.
Australian actor Hoa Xuande in a scene from The Sympathizer.Credit:
Nguyen’s autobiography, A Man of Two Faces, published last year, clarifies just how much of his family’s upheaval found its way into his novels. As a small child, Nguyen fled with his parents and brother, leaving his 16-year-old adopted sister behind. They walked more than 180 kilometres to Nha Trang to board a refugee boat. His memory is of an “ocean of amnesia”: the journey was rarely discussed with his parents, and his and his brother’s accounts differ on fundamental points such as whether he witnessed soldiers firing on another refugee boat.
Eventually, his family settled in San Jose, opening a Vietnamese grocery store. The business became the cornerstone of family life, which approached 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 both of the American dream and the expectation of gratefulness placed on them as refugees. “We are here because you were there,” he says in his autobiography.
During a comfortable but awkward childhood, Nguyen saw Apocalypse Now for the first time, and was hypnotised by the opening when The Doors’ This is the End is set to blossoming napalm. “This is cool,” he thought. It was a later scene that shaped his literary career. When a sampan of refugees is massacred by US soldiers he asked himself: “Are you the Americans killing? Or the Vietnamese being killed?”
“It’s easy to look at the United States and say, ‘Wow, this is a really screwed up country given 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 UC in Berkeley he tells a room full of Asian-American students how the scene affected him, and he started shaking “with rage and anger”. The adaptation of The Sympathizer now closes this “loop of influences”.
So, is he the Vietnamese or the Americans? “Nothing is a singular. Everything is multilayered,” he says today. This is a concept Nguyen returns to time and again.
The Sympathizer uses a double agent to evoke the contradictory self, one who must always be on guard, no matter the audience. I ask if this means belonging is an illusion. No, but Nguyen says he’s “very, very suspicious of the authenticity that goes with belonging. There’s always a horizon. Someone has to be on the outside.” He resolves this for himself with a linguistic sleight of hand: “The paradox of my own being is that I do believe in the authenticity of my inauthenticity.”
Even his family has histories that entwine the colonised and the coloniser. His parents moved from the North to a village in the South, occupying fertile lands and displacing the indigenous Montagnards to the rocky fringes. I ask him how he felt at this discovery. “It’s simply the logical outcome of everything that I’ve been concerned with since I became a politically conscious, artistically conscious person.”
So what complexities will he find on his first trip to Australia? Nguyen talks about the features shared between countries: allies, language and a colonial heritage. “It’s easy to look at the United States and say, ‘Wow, this is a really screwed up country given all these divisions and contradictions’, but Australia seems to have its fair share of these parallel structural problems.”
But “that doesn’t prevent me from being excited”, he says, adding, “You have one of the best accents in the anglophone world, especially for the overseas Vietnamese.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au) and Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au) The Age is a MWF partner. The Sympathizer, The Committed, and The Man of Two Faces are published by Little, Brown.
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