The Sympathizer

The director of The Hamlet,referred to as the Auteur, invites the narrator to his home in the Hollywood Hills to go over his comments on the screenplay. The narrator is not there to simply flatter the Auteur, and in fact has many criticisms on the Auteur’s script: “I was flummoxed by having read a screenplay whose greatest special effect was neither the blowing up of various things nor the evisceration of various bodies, but the achievement of narrating a movie about our country where not a single one of our countrymen had an intelligible word to say” (128). The narrator has made several suggestions to make the screenplay more realistic, and while the Auteur is polite, it is clear he does not take too kindly to the narrator’s edits. The Auteur defends the veracity of his screenplay by saying that he read up on the psychology and history of Vietnam, so “I think I know something about you people” (130). The narrator replies by saying that the Auteur did not even get the screams of the Vietnamese people right—clearly, unlike the narrator, the Auteur does not know the shades of difference in the “different kinds of terror,” which only first-hand experience can bring. The scene in the Auteur’s villa ends in a darkly comical moment, with the narrator demonstrating the different kinds of screams for the Auteur and his personal assistant.

The narrator then heads to the General’s house to update him on the meeting with the Auteur, discussed over a bowl of pho made by Madame. The General and Madame agree that the Auteur seems rude. The General then turns the conversation to the latest edition of Sonny’s newspaper, which reported on the death of the crapulent major, arousing the General’s suspicion. The General expresses his frustration with Sonny to the narrator: “He’s supposed to be a reporter. That means to report the facts, not to make things up or interpret them or put ideas in people’s heads” (136). The General asks the narrator to speak to Sonny about being more careful about the information he includes in his publication.

The General reports that the Congressman is making plans to help place soldiers in Thailand, where the General can begin his overthrow of the communist regime in South Vietnam. The General does not want Sonny—or anyone—to talk about war being over. “We must not allow our people to grow complacent,” the General says (138).

Much to the narrator’s surprise, the Auteur has a change of heart and invites the narrator to be a special consultant on Vietnamese matters in The Hamlet. Filming will take place in the Philippines, where the narrator is tasked with wrangling the most destitute of Vietnamese refugees—called “the boat people”—who will be used as extras in the movie. The narrator vows that half of the payment he receives from this work will go to the crapulent major’s widow and children, the “innocents to whom wrong had been done, as I had once been an innocent child to whom wrong was done” (140). Thinking about violated innocence, the narrator recalls a memory from his childhood, in which his Vietnamese aunts gave him only half the New Year’s gifts to match his half-blooded self. One of the narrator’s cousins explains that, because the narrator is “a bastard,” the narrator is only entitled to half the New Year’s gifts (141). 

Back to the present, the narrator tells his aunt in Paris—again, actually a cover for Man—he has accepted the consultant job offered by the Auteur. He also reports that the Congressman has agreed to help the General form a non-profit, the Benevolent Fraternity of Former Soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The General assures the Congressman that if he helps fund this veteran’s organization, the General can promise his people will cast their votes for him in the upcoming election. In essence, with the creation of this non-profit, the Congressman is buying the Vietnamese vote.

Three months later, the narrator lands in the Philippines for the filming of The Hamlet. Harry, the production designer, gives him a tour of the set: the Central Highland, the temple, and the cemetery. The narrator recalls when his mother died of tuberculosis at just thirty-four years old, when the narrator was a junior in college. There in Luzon, the narrator attaches his mother’s picture to a tombstone in the set’s cemetery, so that her image will be memorialized in the movie: “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” (154).