The Sympathizer

Author:: Viet Thanh Nguyen Full Title:: The Sympathizer Tags:#media/book

• themes::
  • theme 1
• Summary::
  • summary 1

* highlights from 2021-02-08

* still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear. ([Location 141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=141))
* She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war. ([Location 175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=175))
* Having given us the needles, they now perversely no longer supplied the dope. (Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.) ([Location 179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=179))
* They were my enemies, and yet they were also brothers-in-arms. Their beloved city was about to fall, but mine was soon to be liberated. It was the end of their world, but only a shifting of worlds for me. ([Location 373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=373))
* Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most. ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=462))
* This was common enough when many a family was divided against itself, some fighting for the north and some for the south, some fighting for communism and some for nationalism. Still, no matter how divided, all saw themselves as patriots fighting for a country to which they belonged. ([Location 559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=559))
* Although he could have shot me or turned us back, he did what I gambled every honorable man forced to take a bribe would do. He let us all pass, holding up his end of the bargain as the last fig leaf of his dignity. ([Location 591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=591))
* It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends. ([Location 594](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=594))
* Aided (or was it invaded?) by Superman, our fecund little country no longer produced significant amounts of rice, rubber, and tin, cultivating instead an annual bumper crop of prostitutes, girls who had never so much as danced to a rock song before the pimps we called cowboys slapped pasties on their quivering country breasts and prodded them onto the catwalk of a Tu Do bar. ([Location 682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=682))
* ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness. ([Location 689](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=689))
* So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead. ([Location 1185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=1185))
* Unfortunately, undiluted truth was as affordable as eighteen-year-old single malt scotch. ([Location 1616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=1616))
* As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. ([Location 1624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=1624))
* He was a relatively innocent man, which was the best one could hope for in this world. ([Location 1749](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=1749))
* You didn’t even get the screams right, ([Location 2038](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2038))
* One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else’s pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual. ([Location 2046](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2046))
* for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). ([Location 2096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2096))
* But most actors spent more time with their masks off than on, whereas in my case it was the reverse. No surprise, then, that sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face. ([Location 2131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2131))
* Never in my life has there been a day when I learned so much about myself, the world, and its inhabitants. One must be grateful for one’s education no matter how it arrives. ([Location 2192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2192))
* the world began to make sense to me, how so many degrees of meaning existed in a single color, the tone so potent it must be applied sparingly. If one ever sees something written in red, one knows trouble and change lie ahead. ([Location 2208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2208))
* Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it. ([Location 2220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2220))
* Drenched in café au lait stucco, the mall was bordered by an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot. ([Location 2231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2231))
* canceling the side effects of the smoke by simultaneously inhaling good cheer, the healthy air of pleasantries concerning wives, children, and favorite sports teams. ([Location 2240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2240))
* Isn’t it funny that in a society that values freedom above all things, things that are free are not valued? ([Location 2270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2270))
* Of course he meant that we should engage in illegal activities, so long as he did not know about them. The unseen is almost always underlined with the unsaid. ([Location 2287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2287))
* Tombstone and tomb were cast from adobe rather than carved from marble, but I took comfort in knowing no one would be able to tell on film. At least in this cinematic life she would have a resting place fit for a mandarin’s wife, an ersatz but perhaps fitting grave for a woman who was never more than an extra to anyone but me. ([Location 2396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2396))
* technical consultant in charge of authenticity, the spirit haunting bad movies that aspired to be good ones. ([Location 2749](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2749))
* The swing of a dialect and the trim of a costume had to be real, but the truly important things in such a movie, like emotions or ideas, could be fake. I was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths. ([Location 2751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2751))
* Melancholy slipped her dry, papery hand into mine as she always did when I thought about my mother, whose life was so short, whose opportunities were so few, whose sacrifices were so great, and who was due to suffer one last indignity for the sake of entertainment. ([Location 2774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2774))
* feeling the sensation a coward always wants to feel and never wants to feel, that he was alive. It was a feeling possible only after surviving a round of Russian roulette with the gambler who never loses, Death. ([Location 2792](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2792))
* Wasn’t it much more plausible that what they saw was not what lay ahead of them but what lay behind? This was the universal memory of the first tunnel we all pass through, the light at its end penetrating our fetal darkness, disturbing our closed eyelids, beckoning us toward the chute that will deliver us to our inevitable appointment with death. ([Location 2803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2803))
* Every paranoid person is right at least once, said the tall sergeant. When he dies. ([Location 2840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2840))
* left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go. ([Location 2848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2848))
* Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. ([Location 2869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2869))
* struck me that I, the bastard, understood him, the philosopher, with perfect clarity. A person’s strength was always his weakness, and vice versa. The weakness was there to be seen if one could see it. In the Watchman’s case, he was the revolutionary willing to walk away from the most important thing to a Vietnamese and a Catholic, his family, for whom the only acceptable sacrifice was for God. His strength was in his sacrifice, and that had to be destroyed. ([Location 2916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2916))
* He would outsmart me by proving that it was possible to sabotage the means of production that you did not own, to destroy the representation that owned you. ([Location 2942](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2942))
* Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory’s laminated floor? Still smarting from my wounds even now, I cannot help but wonder, writing this confession, whether I own my own representation or whether you, my confessor, do. ([Location 2959](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2959))
* But amnesia was as American as apple pie, and it was much preferred by Americans over both humble pie and the fraught foods of foreign intruders. ([Location 2974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=2974))
* To know what one had forgotten was common, as was the case with dates of history, mathematical formulas, and people’s names. To forget without knowing one has forgotten must be even more common, or maybe less, but it is merciful: in this case one cannot realize what is lost. But to know that one has forgotten something without knowing what that something was made me shudder. ([Location 3082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3082))
* Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen. ([Location 3276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3276))
* After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence. ([Location 3313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3313))
* The lack of an answer mattered not; indeed, the lack of an answer was part of the power in the idea of the people that brought the men to their feet and the tears to their eyes ([Location 3346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3346))
* anyone ever wants is to be recognized and remembered. ([Location 3373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3373))
* If they fail, call them fools. But if they do not fail, they are heroes and visionaries, whether alive or dead. ([Location 3376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3376))
* What am I dying for? he cried back. I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live. ([Location 3406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3406))
* If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth? ([Location 3523](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3523))
* What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves. ([Location 3721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3721))
* For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful. ([Location 3725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3725))
* At least these cretins knew fear, one of the two great motives for belief. The question the baseball bat would not resolve was whether they knew the other motive, love, which, for some reason, was much harder to teach. ([Location 3739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3739))
* The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself. ([Location 3759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3759))
* I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit. ([Location 3782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3782))
* These categories existed as pages in a book exist, but most of us were composed of many pages, not just one. ([Location 3810](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3810))
* Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity. ([Location 3849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=3849))
* Slowly exhaling and inhaling, one cleared away life’s white noise, leaving one’s mind free and peaceful to be one with the object of its contemplation. ([Location 4079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=4079))
* perhaps most of all, that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious. ([Location 4220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=4220))
* But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air? ([Location 4244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=4244))
* As a species, we have never encountered a cave, a door, or an entrance of any kind that we did not want to enter. We are never satisfied with only one way in. We will always try every possibility, even the blackest and most forbidding passages, ([Location 4517](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=4517))
* The entire forest shimmered with the antics of death, the comedian, and life, the straight man, a duo that would never break up. To live was to be haunted by the inevitability of one’s own decay, and to be dead was to be haunted by the memory of living. ([Location 4597](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=4597))
* Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit. ([Location 4838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=4838))
* some strange creature that sees things from two sides. People like you must be purged because you bear the contamination that can destroy the revolution’s purity. ([Location 5043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5043))
* The military commandant and the political commissar are the living embodiment of dialectical materialism. We are the thesis and the antithesis from which comes the more powerful synthesis, the truly revolutionary consciousness. ([Location 5052](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5052))
* I was guilty of the crime of doing nothing. I was the man to whom things are done because he had done nothing! ([Location 5343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5343))
* valued the force of a sentence and the weight of the word; ([Location 5382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5382))
* While I chose to live two lives and be a man of two minds, it was hard not to, given how people had always called me a bastard. Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, ([Location 5420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5420))
* friend would release me from this small world with its small-minded people, those mobs who treated a man with two minds and two faces as a freak, who wanted only one answer for any question. ([Location 5427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5427))
* Now that we are the powerful, we don’t need the French or the Americans to fuck us over. We can fuck ourselves just fine. ([Location 5467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5467))
* time howled in my ear, screaming with laughter at the idea that we could control it with wrist watches, alarm clocks, revolutions, history. ([Location 5508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5508))
* How could I forget that every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea? The suits depended on how one wore them, and this suit was now worn out. I was mad but not insane, although I was not going to disabuse the commandant. He saw only one meaning in nothing—the negative, the absence, as in there’s nothing there. The positive meaning eluded him, the paradoxical fact that nothing is, indeed, something. ([Location 5555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5555))
* the intelligence operative of doubtful intelligence. Was he a fool or too smart for his own good? Had he chosen the right side or the wrong side of history? And were not these the questions we should all ask ourselves? Or was it only me and myself who should be so concerned? ([Location 5581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5581))
* We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same. ([Location 5603](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5603))
* Isn’t it remarkable that in a communist country money can still buy you anything you want? ([Location 5615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5615))
* for when he looked into the mirror and saw the void he understood the meaning of nothing. ([Location 5624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5624))
* nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom! ([Location 5625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5625))
* one really thought about it, with just a little bit of distance, with even the faintest sense of irony, one could laugh at this joke played on us, those who had so willingly sacrificed ourselves and others. So we laughed and laughed and laughed, and when Bon looked at us as if we were crazy and asked what was the matter with us, we wiped the tears from our eyes and said, Nothing. ([Location 5665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5665))
* They were exercises in fiction, for we had to find things to confess even though we had not done anything since our return to Saigon. Small things, like failing to display sufficient enthusiasm at a self-criticism session, were acceptable. But certainly nothing big, and we never failed to end a confession without writing that nothing was more precious than independence and freedom. ([Location 5688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5688))
* What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others? And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing? ([Location 5705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5705))
* Our life and our death have taught us always to sympathize with the undesirables among the undesirables. ([Location 5708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5708))
* Despite it all—yes, despite everything, in the face of nothing—we still consider ourselves revolutionary. We remain that most hopeful of creatures, a revolutionary in search of a revolution, although we will not dispute being called a dreamer doped by an illusion. ([Location 5722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PSSG4MM&location=5722))