The Sympathizer

Violet calls the narrator a week after their meeting, though he doesn’t wish to speak to her. She says that the Auteur has reconsidered his advice and respects the narrator for standing up to him. She says that they need a consultant who’ll get things right “when it comes to Vietnamese matters.” Though they’ve researched the history, weapons, customs, and costumes, the narrator will provide the human touch. She mentions that there are refugees from Vietnam in the Philippines who’ll be working as extras and that they’ll need someone to work with them.

The Auteur offers the narrator four months of paid work in the Philippines and six months of pay if the shoot goes over schedule or if the local rebels become “too overconfident.” The narrator tells the Parisian aunt about his decision to accept the Auteur’s offer, a job that will be a chance to “[undermine] the enemy’s propaganda.” He maintains an upbeat tone about Los Angeles in his letters, afraid of censors reading refugee mail and “looking for dejected, angry refugees who could not or would not dream the American Dream.”

The narrator also tells the Parisian aunt about his agreement to help the General create a nonprofit charitable organization called the Benevolent Fraternity of Former Soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. In one reality, the organization exists to serve the needs of the thousands of South Vietnamese veterans without resources. In another reality, it’s a front that allows the General to receive funds for the movement to fight the Communists.

The narrator and the General visit the Congressman’s district office at a strip mall in Huntington Beach to talk about the new organization. The General hopes to get Congressional support, but the Congressman assures him that that won’t happen. The narrator suggests support in the form of “unofficial money” that goes to the organization. In return, the Congressman will get votes from their community. The General says that no one would argue against support for South Vietnamese veterans who fought alongside American soldiers during the war. The narrator thinks of how many organizations have been set up as fronts for the CIA. The Congressman unofficially pledges his support, hoping that the organization doesn’t engage in anything illegal “when it comes to its patriotic activities.”

Three months later, the narrator goes to the Philippines. For his flight, he has a copy of Fodor’s Southeast Asia. He’s not surprised to read that Vietnam is described as “the most devastated land.” He’s insulted to read the description of his neighbors, Cambodians, as “easy-going, sensuous, friendly, and emotional.” One could also say that about the Vietnamese, or people in most lands with “spa-like atmospheric conditions.”

The narrator takes a day trip to a refugee camp at Bataan, where he recruits a hundred Vietnamese extras. They’re too hungry to turn away the wages that the narrator offers: a dollar per day. It brings the narrator’s spirits down when no one haggles for a better wage and when one of the extras, “a lawyer of aristocratic appearance,” tells him that before the Communists won, it was foreigners who victimized, terrorized, and humiliated them. Now, it’s their own people. She supposes that’s an improvement. The narrator trembles at hearing her words.

For the past few days, the narrator has been feeling better about his past sins. He believes that he has put the crapulent major’s death behind him. Before he left Los Angeles, Sofia cooked him a farewell dinner, and he began to think that he loves her. However, he also has feelings for Lana. During dinner, Ms. Mori reminds him of their commitment to free love. After they have sex, she tells him that he can do something wonderful with The Hamlet. He can “help shape how Asians look in the movies.” The narrator, though, feels like nothing more than a collaborator, helping to exploit his fellow countrymen and refugees.

The narrator visits the cemetery that Harry built in Luzon as an additional film set and thinks of his mother’s grave. He remembers having seen her for the last time before departing for Occidental College. He then received a letter from his father in his junior year, telling him that she was dead at thirty-four from tuberculosis. The narrator asks to have the biggest tomb in the cemetery for his own use. He pastes a reproduction of his mother’s black-and-white picture, which he carries in his wallet, onto the tombstone. On the face of the tombstone, he paints her name and dates in red. The tombstone and the tomb are made from adobe, not marble, but no one will be able to tell on film. The narrator figures that, in cinema at least, his mother will have a resting place fit for an aristocrat—a “fitting grave for a woman who was never more than an extra to anyone but me.”