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A Bastard’s Confession: National Forgetting, Remasculinization, and the Ethics of Just Memory in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 64; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00111619.2023.2243822

1939-9138

Joohee Seo,

Race, History, and American Society

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the representation and critique of Asian masculinity and patriarchy in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. In his written confession, the narrator retraces the events after the Fall/Liberation of Saigon during his espionage on the defected South Vietnamese veterans who try to reclaim their country while relocated to the U.S. as refugees. The metatextual, confessional form of the novel embodies the act of remembering and forgetting, writing and rewriting. This paper argues that the narrator, ostracized as a “bastard” due to his biracial parentage, observes the interlocking of patriarchy and nationhood from the perspective of a marginalized outsider of Vietnamese society. The paper first examines the marginalization of the narrator as a bastard within the patriarchal Vietnamese society. Then, the paper analyzes how the process of remasculinization is incorporated into the General’s mission of rebuilding nationhood and how it inevitably fails. Finally, the paper assesses the narrator’s masculinist tendencies which inform his written confession. While the bastard narrator is a minoritarian subject that problematizes the ideology of nationhood that is based on heteronormative patrilineage, he himself is also a problematic figure whose masculinism lead him to purposely forget and erase his own involvements in acts of violence afflicted upon women. The narrator’s final act of remembrance enacts Nguyen’s notion of just memory. Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. The “emasculation” of Chinese American men also has a legal, historical context in which anti-immigration laws, in effect, created “bachelor communities” of Chinese American men who would work “in ‘feminized’ form of work – such as laundry, restaurants, and other service-sector jobs” (Lowe 11).2. In discussing the “fantasy-work of national identity,” Lauren Berlant uses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House” as a starting point to illuminate the imbricated workings of the private and the national. According to Berlant, Hawthorne’s own personal account reveals “diverse kinds of memory, knowledge, and experience” that “intermingle in his patrilineal and national legacies” (3). However, rather than enrichening a sense of self-understanding, “the more defamiliarized [Hawthorne] becomes, both with respect to himself and to his geopolitical surroundings” (3).3. Other similarities include that both novels are narrated in a confessional mode. The Sympathizer is written as an actual confession while The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a fictional autobiography in which the narrator “[divulges] the great secret of [his] life, the secret which for some years [he has] guarded far more carefully than any of [his] earthly possessions” (5).4. Eva Saks notes that in the jurisprudence of U.S. miscegenation laws, “genealogy was made the determinant of race,” and “blood” became the symbol of race: “By choosing the internal, biological res of blood, miscegenation jurisprudence transformed race into an intrinsic, natural, and changeless entity: blood essentialized race” (67) The Confucian idea of kinship in Vietnamese society in the novel also uses this same logic of blood and race.5. The sequel The Committed explores further into colonialism and racism as the novel finds the narrator in Paris in the 1980s. As Nguyen explains, “In the sequel, the narrator goes to Paris, because that is the land of his father, and he confronts the history of French colonialism and the rhetoric of French civilizing discourse there” (“A Novel Intervention” 71).6. Although the aunt does not physically appear in The Sympathizer, she appears as a character in the sequel, The Committed.7. The phrase “real Asian men” can be read as another nod to Frank Chin and Aiiieeeee! (Racial Castration 21; Race and Resistance 88).8. In one of the correspondences, the narrator writes to Man: “After I had received his letter to me in the States that conveyed the news of my mother’s death, I had written to Man that if God really did exist, my mother would be alive and my father would not. How I wish he were dead!” (248–49).9. In this statement, Nguyen via Sofia is also criticizing the Hollywood casting practice of white-washing that hires white actors to play nonwhite roles. In Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, Jennifer Jones was cast to play the role of Doctor Han Suyin, the biracial heroine of Chinese and European descent. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) is infamously known for the stereotypically racist portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi, played by the yellow-faced Mickey Rooney.10. Under Sofia’s “patient tutelage,” the narrator soon realizes that “true revolution also involved sexual liberation” (77). More specifically, he learns that free love existed as “an affront not only to a capitalism corseted, or perhaps chastity-locked, by its ethnic Protestant justifications, but also alien to a communism with Confucian character” (76). In the narrator’s summary of the lesson, he identifies that free love threatens the patriarchal order that exists in both the Western and Eastern world, the Protestant/Catholic and the Confucianism world, the capitalist and the communist world. He then further reflects upon his own Confucian and Catholic influences which religiously shame premarital, extramarital sexual acts.11. As Amanda R. Gradisek points out, the narrator mentions the communist agent several times over the course of his confession (18). This is another indication that the narrator has intentionally left out his witnessing the rape in his confession.12. The recollection of the rape scene is indeed very graphic and hard to read. While I limit my discussion of the rape scene in terms of how it is forgotten and remembered by the narrator, the issue of the representation of violence is an issue that should not be overlooked. For instance, Chong argues that the linking of war and rape is “a trope that underlies the entire Vietnam War genre (both filmic and literary) and one that Nguyen also turns to” (376), and asks “Is it possible to write (or film) the war without traveling through this abject trope?” (377). Gradisek argues that the novel grapples with this issue in a more nuanced way than other representations of the Vietnam War in that it purposely juxtaposes the filmic practice of linking rape and war through the fictional movie Hamlet and the narrator’s own textual representation (21).Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoohee SeoJoohee Seo is a lecturer of the Department of English Language and Literature at Seoul National University, and her scholarly interests include American novels, studies of the novel form, and the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality.