And they had no idea that he was a communist spy who had studied in the United States. And he was friends with people like David Halberstam and all the important American journalists. And then the other inspiration for that was that there really were spies in South Vietnam that rose to the very highest ranks of the South Vietnamese bureaucracy and military.Īnd there was a very famous spy named Pham Xuan An who was so important that during his time as a mole he was promoted to a major general by the North Vietnamese. VIET THANH NGUYEN: Well, when my agent told me I should write a novel, the first thing that came to me was a spy novel and partly it was because it's a genre that I really enjoy and I wanted to write a novel that was actually entertaining, that people would actually want to read because I knew that I would also be dealing with a lot of very serious political and literary matters. Why did you want to write this novel from the point of view of a spy? He is now a professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. When the South fell to the North in 1975, the family fled to America. With the North under communist control, his parents fled to the South. Viet Thanh Nguyen's parents grew up in the north of Vietnam when the country was divided in the mid-1950s. My guest tells part of his own story in an essay at the back of the book. His father was a French colonialist in Vietnam.
The character's mother grew up in the north of Vietnam. That sympathy is in part a function of his own divided self.
It appears that part of his crime is sympathizing with the suffering on both sides. His novel, "The Sympathizer," is set during and just after the war in Vietnam and is told in the form of a forced confession written by a spy for the North Vietnamese who worked undercover as an aid to a South Vietnamese general. My guest is the winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Viet Thanh Nguyen.
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