Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote two fantastic books about the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The Sympathizer and The Committed. They’ve been made into an HBO series, too.
The first book follows an unnamed character from his childhood in Vietnam as the son of a Vietnamese woman and a French priest. He gets a job working for the Americans in Saigon, which he uses to collect information for the North Vietnamese. After the war, he ends up in Los Angeles with other South Vietnamese refugees, where he continues playing both sides of the fence while helping the refugees organize an army to go back and fight.
The story continues in the second part, where the still unnamed narrator leaves Vietnam for France, where he experiences a more typical immigrant experience than he had in Los Angeles. He lives with a relative, works at a restaurant, and grapples with the twin legacies of colonialism and war. Our narrator is nameless, but he has two faces and two mouths, and those parts play through both books.
These are thrillers, psychological narratives, and political histories all at once. Both France and the United States were ultimately defeated by the Vietnamese people, who resisted the artificial division placed on them. Now, it’s a buffer between China and the United States in an emerging trade war, and my money is on Vietnam.
These books are fantastic. I think you could read one without the other, but why not read both?
