Authors: Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer (53 page)
Tomorrow we will find ourselves among strangers, reluctant mariners of whom a tentative manifest can be written. Among us will be infants and children, as well as adults and parents, but no elderly, for none dare the voyage. Among us will be men and women, as well as the thin and lean, but not one among us will be fat, the entire nation having undergone a forced diet. Among us will be the light skinned, dark skinned, and every shade in between, some speaking in refined accents and some in rough ones. Many will be Chinese, persecuted for being Chinese, with many others the recipients of degrees in reeducation. Collectively we will be called the boat people, a name we heard once more earlier this night, when we surreptitiously listened to the Voice of America on the navigator’s radio. Now that we are to be counted among these boat people, their name disturbs us. It smacks of anthropological condescension, evoking some forgotten branch of the human family, some lost tribe of amphibians emerging from ocean mist, crowned with seaweed. But we are not primitives, and we are not to be pitied. If and when we reach safe harbor, it will hardly be a surprise if we, in turn, turn our backs on the unwanted, human nature being what we know of it. Yet we are not cynical. 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. Soon enough we will see the scarlet sunrise on that horizon where the East is always red, but for now our view through our window is of a dark alley, the pavement barren, the curtains closed. Surely we cannot be the only ones awake, even if we are the only ones with a single lamp lit. No, we cannot be alone! Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes, and forbidden plots. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live. And even as we write this final sentence, the sentence that will not be revised, we confess to being certain of one and only one thing—we swear to keep, on penalty of death, this one promise:
We will live!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many of the events in this novel did happen, although I confess to taking some liberties with details and chronology. For the fall of Saigon and the last days of the Republic of Vietnam, I consulted David Butler’s
The Fall of Saigon
, Larry Engelmann’s
Tears Before the Rain
, James Fenton’s “The Fall of Saigon,” Dirck Halstead’s “White Christmas,” Charles Henderson’s
Goodnight Saigon
, and Tiziano Terzani’s
Giai Phong! The Fall and Liberation of Saigon
. I am particularly indebted to Frank Snepp’s important book
Decent Interval
, which provided the inspiration for Claude’s flight from Saigon and the episode with the Watchman. For accounts of South Vietnamese prisons and police, as well as Viet Cong activities, I turned to Douglas Valentine’s
The Phoenix Program,
the pamphlet
We Accuse
by Jean-Pierre Debris and André Menras, Truong Nhu Tang’s
A Vietcong Memoir,
and an article in the January 1968 issue of
Life
. Alfred W. McCoy’s
A Question of Torture
was crucial for understanding the development of American interrogation techniques from the 1950s through the war in Vietnam, and their extension into the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the reeducation camps, I made use of Huynh Sanh Thong’s
To Be Made Over
, Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh’s
South Wind Changing
, and Tran Tri Vu’s
Lost Years
. As for the Vietnamese resistance fighters who attempted to invade Vietnam, a small exhibit in the Lao People’s Army History Museum in Vientiane displays their captured artifacts and weapons.
While those fighters have been largely forgotten, or simply never known, the inspiration for the Movie can hardly be a secret. Eleanor Coppola’s documentary
Hearts of Darkness
and her
Notes: The Making of Apocalypse Now
provided many insights, as did Francis Ford Coppola’s commentary on the
Apocalypse Now
DVD. These works were also helpful: Ronald Bergan’s
Francis Ford Coppola: Close Up
; Jean-Paul Chaillet and Elizabeth Vincent’s
Francis Ford Coppola
; Jeffrey Chown’s
Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola
; Peter Cowie’s
The Apocalypse Now Book
and
Coppola: A Biography
; Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise’s
On the Edge: The Life and Times of Francis Coppola
; Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill’s
Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews
;
and Michael Schumacher’s
Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life
. I also drew on articles by Dirck Halstead, “Apocalypse Finally”; Christa Larwood, “Return to
Apocalypse Now
”; Deirdre McKay and Padmapani L. Perez, “Apocalypse Yesterday Already! Ifugao Extras and the Making of
Apocalypse Now
”; Tony Rennell, “The Maddest Movie Ever”; and Robert Sellers, “The Strained Making of
Apocalypse Now
.”
The exact words of others were occasionally important as well, in particular those of To Huu, whose poems appeared in the
Viet Nam News
article “To Huu: The People’s Poet”; Nguyên Van Ky, who translated the proverb “The good deeds of Father are as great as Mount Thai Son,” available in the book
Viêt Nam Exposé
; the 1975 edition of
Fodor’s Southeast Asia
; and General William Westmoreland, whose ideas concerning the Oriental’s view of life and its value were given in the documentary
Hearts and Minds
by director Peter Davis. Those ideas are attributed here to Richard Hedd.
Finally, I am grateful to a number of organizations and people without whom this novel would not be the book that it is. The Asian Cultural Council, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the University of Southern California gave me grants, residencies, or sabbaticals that facilitated my research or writing. My agents, Nat Sobel and Julie Stevenson, provided patient encouragement and wise editing, as did my editor, Peter Blackstock. Morgan Entrekin and Judy Hottensen were enthusiastic supporters, while Deb Seager, John Mark Boling, and all the staff of Grove Atlantic have worked hard on this book. My friend Chiori Miyagawa believed in this novel from its beginning and tirelessly read the early drafts. But the people to whom I owe the greatest debt are, as ever, my father, Joseph Thanh Nguyen, and my mother, Linda Kim Nguyen. Their indomitable will and sacrifice during the war years and after made possible my life and that of my brother, Tung Thanh Nguyen. He has been ever supportive, as has his wonderful partner, Huyen Le Cao, and their children, Minh, Luc, and Linh.
As for the last words of this book, I save them for the two who will always come first: Lan Duong, who read every word, and our son, Ellison, who arrived right on time.
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