The Sympathizer

A child refugee, he moved to the United States with his family at the end of the Vietnam War.

He's best known for his 2015 debut novel, The Sympathizer, which has been translated into 30 languages, sold more than a million copies worldwide, and was adapted as an HBO television series in 2024.

Viet Thanh Nguyen has written widely about conflict, migration, and identity in his fiction, and more recently in his memoir, A Man of Two Faces.

A professor of English and American Studies, he teaches at the University of Southern California.

And at that moment, the trap door fell open beneath me.

And I fell through and I realized I had not processed at all in any way what had happened to my family and to myself and that I would need to confront those emotions.

Well, let's talk about your debut novel, The Sympathizer, which was published in 2015.

It's about a North Vietnamese spy who is embedded in a South Vietnamese community in exile in America.

Let's look at two drastically different but connected novels about the Asian American experience in California.

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club from 1989, and Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer from 2015.

The Joy Luck Club was a massive cultural moment.

You have four immigrant mothers, four American-born daughters, and San Francisco acting as the literal room where Chinese history and American girlhood completely failed to translate.

And for those characters, the Pacific Ocean isn't just a pretty view from the Golden Gate Bridge.

It is an open wound of separation, but also a bridge connecting two disparate worlds.

That dual nature, the wound and the bridge, is an excellent segue into Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer.

The protagonist here is a communist double agent living among the South Vietnamese refugees who are trying to rebuild their shattered lives in Los Angeles after the fall of Saigon.