The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

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I am so tired of being a dumbass american. Dumbass here is technical for "one who never wants to know what others feel, think or experience." Sometimes it is active, demanding silence and erasure of other parties. Much of the time the desire to know is so absent, the american dumbass doesn't even think to ask a question. He is so sure of his own problems or successes or puzzles he never thinks of the other at all. 

Take Vietnam as a country and a people, for example. What do we know about Vietnam? Only the war that we lost. Only what is called Vietnam Syndrome that set in after the war and new political division between hawks and doves. Or maybe you think of the peaceniks and hippies and draft cards being burned. Or maybe you think of the calls for raised-right men and grumbling old men who said the great generation never lost a war .... 

Sadly, even when I ask google "What happened in Vietnam after 1975," I get articles titled 40 years after the fall of Siagon, but they are all about us, americans and how we felt after the war and how we feel about it 40 years later. 

That is one huge reason I was impacted by reading this 2016 novel The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Playing with themes and allusions to american "others" like Ellison's Invisible Man and Du Bois' double consciousness, we follow protagonist who is at all the borders and so lets us see into other peoples and countries and to see ourselves. 

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