At a lycée in Saigon, he formed a bond with two fellow students, Bon and Man. In 1954, when he was nine, he and his mother had fled the communists in the North and encountered an American called Claude, nominally working in refugee relief but actually a CIA agent. Shunned by his aunts and cousins, her son was taught by the priest at a local mission school, though he didn’t know the man was his father until his eleventh birthday. His mother was a poor girl of thirteen living in North Vietnam when a French priest took her in as a maid and got her pregnant. Call him the Captain, call him the Crazy Bastard, call him by the name on his passport, ‘Vo Danh’. He’s an allegory, perhaps too many allegories at once. He’s angry – at the world, at history, at France, at America, at his fratricidal homeland. He’s good at getting banged up, consigned to the hospital bed, the bin, the re-education camp, a dank basement or an empty warehouse staring into the barrel of a gun. Part Vietnamese and part French, he speaks English with an American accent. He’s a serial betrayer but the most loyal of friends. He’s a liar by necessity and a thief at his pleasure.
THE COMMITTED VIET THANH NGUYEN ENDING MOVIE
He knows the movie business, which may be the most pitiless of them all. He’s a murderer (‘assassin’ might be the more generous term) and a double agent, a communist spy among the counter-revolutionaries. He’s a soldier schooled in CIA interrogation techniques. He reads Voltaire, Rousseau, Fanon, Gramsci he listens to jazz and disdains rock and roll, especially the hippy music of the Grateful Dead. He’s an intellectual with a graduate degree and he’s a bit of a snob.
He’s a lowlife, a drug dealer, a street fighter.
He’s a playboy who sometimes can’t get it up. T he narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s pair of novels, The Sympathiser (2015) and The Committed, is one of the more irresistible characters in recent American fiction.
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