I was born in Vietnam and fled as a refugee in April of 1975 with my family to the United States. Viet Thanh Nguyen teaches English and American Studies at the University of Southern California.īeBe Jacobs/Courtesy of Grove Atlantic Publishing The novel is rife with insight and criticism - and importantly in America, Nguyen tells Rath, the perspective of a Vietnamese person during and after the war. He now studies ethnicity in America as a professor at the University of Southern California.

Nguyen is Vietnamese-American, and was just 4 years old when his family fled South Vietnam in 1975. That mission takes the Captain to Los Angeles, to the Philippines to participate in the filming of an extravagant Vietnam War movie (sound familiar?), and back to Vietnam itself. The book is written as a confession from the narrator's jail cell, recounting his post-war mission: to flee with the remnants of the South Vietnamese Army to the United States, and continue to spy on them. depending on your point of view,' Nguyen tells NPR's Arun Rath) in April 1975. Its publication comes 40 years to the month after the fall of Saigon ('or liberation. So begins Viet Thanh Nguyen's new novel, The Sympathizer.

I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.

Nguyen viet thanh the sympathizer