"We were the unwanted, the unneeded, and the unseen, invisible to all but ourselves. Less than nothing, we also saw nothing as we crouched blindly in the unlit belly of our ark, 150 of us sweating in a space not meant for us mammals but for the fish of the sea."
This novel picks up the story from where its predecessor, The Sympathizer, leaves off. The unnamed narrator/protagonist of that novel is last seen setting off for unknown horizons as one of the “boat people” fleeing Vietnam amidst the chaos in the aftermath of U.S. forces departing after more than a decade of war. This novel commences with a Prologue and opens with this imagery of those refugees. The description of feeling unwanted, unneeded, and unseen is a common thread uniting all refugees no matter where they are fleeing from or why they are escaping. Refugees are people from countries who are afraid to return to their homeland while numerous problems keep them from being able to call somewhere their home. Although the bulk of the action in the novel takes place in the years following this escape, opening the story with an extensive description of the difficult journey over the sea where death was a constant companion is very effective at conveying the meaning of the title. The Prologue establishes both the vital importance of being committed to achieving a difficult goal and that the title characterization is very fitting for describing the narrator.
"I was no longer a communist who believed in a party, but I was still a descendant of Marx who believed in a theory, and that theory offered the best critique of capitalism available."
Though ostensibly a civil war between communists in the North and capitalists in the South, the Vietnam War actually an international operation funded if not actually fought by global superpowers. With the decision to withdraw U.S. troops, North Vietnam quickly defeated South Vietnam and the country unified into one single nation. With the communists now in complete control, the narrator no longer had capitalist enemies to revolt against. Not only did he become a man without a country on that boat filled with refugees, but he also became a revolutionary without a cause. This quote reveals the complexity of what it means to be a communist. To be a Marxist is not the same thing as belonging to a Party. The totalitarian nature of most communist regimes stems not from the political ideology, but from the fundamental nature of party politics (even as practiced in America) in which what is good for the Party takes precedence over what is good for the people. Capitalist democracies spent most the 20th century creating propaganda which conflated communist ideology with Party politics to successfully link the two as inextricably connected. And so, the idea that communism equals totalitarianism was born. The narrator is a self-avowed communist yet fled his homeland in the wake of it becoming fully a totalitarian communist regime. Much of the story is directed toward the question of why that decision made sense.
"But in seeking my revenge on the socialist, was I actually becoming that most horrid of criminals? No, not a drug dealer, which was a matter of bad taste. I mean was I becoming a capitalist, which was a matter of bad morals, especially as the capitalist, unlike the drug dealer, would never recognize his bad morality, or at least admit to it. A drug dealer was just a petty criminal who targeted individuals, and while he may or may not be ashamed of it, he usually recognized the illegality of his trade. But a capitalist was a legalized criminal who targeted thousands, if not millions, and felt no shame for his plunder."
On one level, this novel is the story of a communist who adopts capitalism. The twist is that the capitalist venture in which he begins to make money is organized crime, specifically drug trafficking. The link between organized crime and capitalism as a means to critique capitalism in practice as opposed to mere theory is historically rich. The connection is particularly palpable in American gangster movies in which the mobster has been compared to “legitimate business” going all the way back to 1931’s Little Caesar. This book is structured in a way that dramatic scenes showing the narrator’s involvement in crime are juxtaposed with sections that almost read more like a scholarly analysis of political and economic ideologies. Although the drug trafficking business is certainly organized along a hierarchical system similar to the structural rigidity of bureaucratic management within a large corporation, it is likely very few of those in either circumstance spend much time contemplating ideological theory like the narrator. That the narrator is capable of doing so reveals the power of fiction to illuminate real-world issues.
