Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their own soldiers. If those thousands still lived, they would not have believed how they had died, just as we could not believe that the Americans—our friends, our benefactors, our protectors—had spurned our request to send more money. And what would we have done with that money? Buy the ammunition, gas, and spare parts for the weapons, planes, and tanks the same Americans had bestowed on us for free.
The narrator consistently points out the hypocrisy of the American involvement in Vietnam. Although purporting to support Vietnam's efforts to fight back communism, the American military stops short of providing what is truly needed after leaving Vietnam dependent on its assistance. Comparably, the Vietnamese army kills many of the very citizens they are supposedly fighting to protect. The narrator, too, embodies this very hypocrisy—he works to sabotage the Vietnamese army for the communist forces, but often needs to exact violence on communist fighters to maintain his facade as an army captain. He recognizes and criticizes the absurdity of the Vietnam war, but also simultaneously embodies it.
You have asked me what I mean when I say “we” or “us,” as in those moments when I identify with the southern soldiers and evacuees on whom I was sent to spy. Should I not refer to those people, my enemies, as “them”? I confess that after having spent almost my whole life in their company I cannot help but sympathize with them, as I do with many others.
The narrator is defined by his ability to see the many complex sides of every situation. Because of this, he is able to amplify and dampen certain aspects of his identity to function effectively in different communities. He is part of the Vietnamese military while serving as a communist spy. Born to a poor Vietnamese mother and a French priest, he does not belong fully in Vietnam or the west but he integrates himself as an outsider in both. He loves his country and criticizes the American intervention in Vietnam, but is shaped heavily by his American education and familiarity with American culture. The perspective he provides as a universal “sympathizer” helps the reader to identify with the many perspectives and cultures explored in the novel.
I was a son and a husband and a father and a soldier, and now I’m none of that. I’m not a man, and when a man isn’t a man he’s nobody. And the only way not to be nobody is to do something. So I can either kill myself or kill someone else. Get it?
Bon loses his sense of purpose when he loses his family in the war and flees to the United States, leaving behind his life as a soldier. Despite Bon’s ready willingness to continue killing for the cause, the narrator’s love for Bon allows him to demonstrate the humanity, sorrow, and vulnerability driving these violent impulses. By describing Bon’s violent tendencies along with his pain, the narrator’s empathy allows him to communicate the hidden motivations behind many soldier’s involvement in the war, no matter which side they fight for.
The majority of Americans regarded us with ambivalence if not outright distaste, we being living reminders of their stinging defeat. We threatened the sanctity and symmetry of a white and black America whose yin and yang racial politics left no room for any other color, particularly that of pathetic little yellow-skinned people pickpocketing the American purse.
The narrator constantly points out the complex racial politics of being a Vietnamese refugee in America. In Vietnam, he is part of a complex web of social and racial hierarchies, economic inequalities, and political groups. In America, he is lumped in with Asian immigrants from other countries or relegated to a simplified symbol of American military defeat. His employer lectures him ignorantly about his racial identity, instructing him to list his “Oriental and Occidental qualities,” and he is treated as inferior in Hollywood. American racism leaves no room for a nuanced understanding of the political and social differences among the refugees, disrupting the hierarchies so rigid in Vietnam and leaving the highest military generals on an even plane with their subordinates. This is the same ignorance that colors the American intervention in Vietnam, as seen from the narrator’s perspective.
The flawlessness of my English did not matter. Even if she could hear me, she still saw right through me, or perhaps saw someone else instead of me, her retinas burned with the images of all the castrati dreamed up by Hollywood to steal the place of real Asian men.
The narrator criticizes the way in which American movies caricature the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people to serve their own interests in producing profitable entertainment. In doing so, Hollywood cheapens a conflict fought by people with deep conviction that caused tremendous pain, death, and trauma. The narrator’s perfect English and idiosyncrasies cannot defy the deeply ingrained stereotypes created by American media. When he provides notes on a film about Vietnam, which turns out to be an offensive “epic about white people saving good yellow people from bad yellow people,” he is laughed away and told that authenticity cannot beat imagination.
