Seven days without electricity
last
August
delivered
me
shaking
and
stimulus-starved
on the steps of Viet Thanh
Nguyen’s
“The
Sympathizer.”
Hurricane Isaias had taken out
most of Connecticut’s electrical
infrastructure, along with all
contact with the outside world.
Only when removed from 21st
century comforts could I approach
Nguyen’s award-encrusted novel.
Nguyen combines historical
fiction
with
spy
thriller,
following a nameless man with
divided
allegiances.
Initially,
his dense pages repelled me.
However, Nguyen’s cutting social
commentary drew me deeper.
After
being
educated
in
the United States, the book’s
protagonist returns to Vietnam
to fight in the Vietnam War. He
works as a communist sleeper
agent in the office of the American-
backed South Vietnamese. As
his moniker suggests, the man’s
identity and allegiances are not
clear cut. He muddles through life
and war, sympathetic to all sides
yet indecisive when it counts.
His uncertainty makes him a
questioning yet pliant cog in a
larger, destructive war machine.
While
traveling
between
California
college
campuses,
warscapes and movie sets, the man
makes cutting observations about
war, military, America, academia
and, perhaps most significantly,
his own confused identity. The
man is both Vietnamese and
American. He is innocent yet a
killer, unwilling yet complicit. He
is born of a poor Asian mother
and a proselytizing European
father. He fights for the South and
North simultaneously, for both
Capitalism and Communism.
In
many
ways,
his
circumstances
dramatize
the
hyphenated experiences of A/
PIA
(Asian-Pacific
Islander
American) individuals. A/PIA
individuals are routinely asked by
society or conscience to assert an
allegiance, to define themselves
and their ethnic identity within
pre-scripted denominations of
social
acceptability.
However,
as the protagonist finds, the
narrow range of Asian-American
expressions is stifling. In “The
Sympathizer,”
pre-scripted
roles of spy, communist and
killer hamstring the unnamed
protagonist. His mind ultimately
fractures under his two-minded
multinational duality.
Yet, what I gleaned from
“The
Sympathizer”
is
that
self-destruction is not the only
resolution to the hyphenated A/
PIA question.
Within the novel, another
character faces the allegiance
question.
It
is
through
the
protagonist’s co-worker and brief
lover, Ms. Sofia Mori, that we are
pampered with a fully realized
thesis of the Asian-American
experience. Reclining at the bar,
smoking a cig, Mori takes the
position that A/PIA individuals
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
On my belated encounter
with ‘Pride and Prejudice’
I’ve been having a hard
time keeping track of time, but
Goodreads indicates that it
took me just under two weeks
to read “Pride and Prejudice.”
For some reason it feels like
longer. Or maybe not? Time is
passing in strange ways now.
Maybe it’s that everything I do
now has a greater tendency to
completely fill my field of vision.
When I decided to read Austen’s
classic, it was all I really wanted
to do. Her long, intricate
sentences seemed to take
up my entire brain.
My housemate, who is
the kind of person who
read these novels in her
adolescence, lent me her
copy. It’s one of those
ugly-but-useful
Dover
Critical Editions that has
a bunch of essays and an
eye-wateringly extensive
bibliography in the back.
She told me she’s read it
six or seven times and you
can tell. Her marginalia
is that of someone with
a real affinity for the
material,
as
well
as
someone
who
knows
what’s going to happen
almost by heart. When
Wickham tells Elizabeth
his
(misrepresented)
life story, my housemate filled
the margins with skepticism.
“Consider how unusual at the
time it would be to just say all
of this directly to someone you
just met,” she wrote. Elizabeth
says something similar later
on:
“She
was
now
struck
with the impropriety of such
communication to a stranger,
and wondered it had escaped
her before.” My housemate’s
experience of this book reminds
me of Zadie Smith’s analogy for
rereading: like walking into a
house whose rooms you know
very well, and you can see clearly
the placement of the objects and
their relationships to each other.
Elsewhere, my housemate’s
annotations are enthusiastic.
“OMG he is so bad at this,” she
writes next to Darcy’s awkward
attempts to converse with Lizzy
Bennet. “Awful,” she writes
next to one of Mr. Collins’s
ponderously
misogynistic
speeches. Austen is a writer who
inspires this kind of immediate
affinity, fandom even, in a
way that a lot of other literary
writers don’t. I wanted to share
this affinity, but I couldn’t. Even
though I felt a sort of affinity
for her style and methods, I
never felt fully absorbed by it.
This is, of course, my fault and
I immediately felt bad about
it. I don’t really care about the
canon, not exactly, but it does
bother me a little bit that when
someone asks me what my
favorite novel is, I will answer
with something published in
the last 5-10 years. Uh, “My
Year of Rest and Relaxation”?
Maybe
“Conversations
With
Friends”? I could lie and say
“The Last Samurai.” That’s a
book that people who want to
be writers are allowed to have
as their favorite, I think. It’s
not that these are not good
books, but it’s that I feel a little
bit of shame at their topicality.
They feel like news items and
therefore whatever the opposite
of edifying is. Of course, it’s not
that I haven’t read “Jane Eyre”
or anything, it’s just that I am
not the kind of person who loves
that kind of thing.
What is “that kind of thing,”
anyway? Maybe it’s the ethos
Austen depicts. Her characters—
mostly the lower end of the
gentry who are, in their own
way,
precariously
situated—
spend a lot of their time visiting
each other. They are constantly
coming in and out of each other’s
houses, being entertained in
rooms
specifically
designed
for
the
purpose,
having
conversations
and
judging
each
other’s
conversational abilities.
Conversation is like a
game for these people:
they are always trying
to impress other people
and (sometimes) trying
to be fair and judicious in
their own assessments.
Darcy, who pretty early
on
refuses
to
dance
with anyone at a ball
and barely speaks to
anyone,
is
met
with
such universal disdain
by
the
Hertfordshire
set because he basically
confronts the concerns
that
animate
these
people’s lives and says
“no, thank you.” No one
seemingly dislikes him
more
than
Elizabeth
Bennet, who, as we know, ends
up with Darcy in the end.
Elizabeth’s
opinion
changes over the course of
an
uncountable
number
of
social gatherings and chance
encounters.
Elizabeth
visits
Netherfield to see her beloved
sister, who has fallen ill, and in
the process is in the same room
as Darcy in the evening. Later,
she visits her friend Charlotte
Lucas and her husband and
Darcy happens to be in their
social circle. It proceeds like
that — largely by accident, and
modestly. Austen’s characters
are constantly making guesses
and suppositions about their
friends and relations that have
to be confirmed by another visit,
another noticed gesture. Even
after it’s clear that Darcy and
Elizabeth finally have chemistry,
there are an intervening three
or four visits and encounters
before he proposes. It’s civilized
in the extreme.
Austen is not even-handed
or particularly realistic in her
depiction of human beings, and
veers into caricature more often
than I would like. Austen has
a particular disdain, it seems,
for people whose education
in manners has resulted in
incomplete, stunted or overly
self-possessed personalities. Mr.
Collins, the ridiculous parson
who proposes to Elizabeth in
the first section of the novel,
is an example of the kind of
character who receives the
most
scorn
from
Austen’s
narrator. Ditto for Mary Bennet,
Elizabeth’s younger sister, who,
by virtue of being “the only
plain one in the family” is the
most “accomplished,” meaning
that she spends all her time with
books and pretends not to care
about balls or social functions
where she would have little
success. Her manners are rigid
and solemn, and she sometimes
repeats the lazy, misogynistic
moralisms
that
Mr.
Collins
spouts. These two characters
lack the natural, unstudied
grace of Elizabeth and Jane.
Maybe this is an ethos of sorts
for the novel as a form — drawn,
as it is, as much from life as it is
from other books, all the while
disguising its source material.
Even so, I didn’t like that Austen
needed a character like Mary
to make this point. More than
once, I wrote in the margins
‘THIS IS A REALLY CYNICAL
BOOK’ and meant it. Of course,
a more fair assessment should
take into account the very real
social
pressures
placed
on
women in Austen’s world. She
insists on women’s subjectivity
in a world determined to deny it,
and even if the result is a narrow,
bourgeois kind of freedom, it’s
something. Elizabeth Bennet is
certainly an appealing character
— judicious, kind, capable of
changing her mind. Maybe my
favorite part of this book is
the close, intimate bond that
Lizzy has with her sister Jane.
The former almost seems to be
capable of predicting the latter’s
thoughts and has an intense
feeling for her happiness and
unhappiness. There’s a lot to
admire here, even if parts of it I
found off-putting.
One would think that a lush
Regency novel where the stakes
are ultimately rather low seems
like the perfect distraction right
now, but it was like my eyes
kept slipping past the text. As
much as I want to just shut out
everything
that’s
happening
and become an art monster, I
really can’t bring myself to. Like
a lot of people with too much
time on their hands, I’ve been
checking Twitter and news sites
compulsively. In the absence
of other stimuli, my inner life
starts to resemble a constantly
refreshing
timeline:
jittery,
fragmented, important-feeling,
ambiguous in composite. I’m
already pretty ADHD but this
has been making it worse.
To pull my brain back from
that flickering state to Austen’s
long,
intricate
sentences
frequently didn’t work. I found
myself rereading paragraphs
and losing the thread in the
process. She writes like the
second movement of Bach’s
Italian Concerto, just constantly
unspooling dripping elegance
that resides mostly in details.
Austen is resolutely against the
grand gesture. I’ve been feeling
the need, maybe, for something
dramatic now that there is very
little opportunity to make a
grand gesture without being
grossly irresponsible. Still, it
hurts a little bit that nothing in
my life really gets to the pitch
I want anymore. Maybe this
book is trying to convince me
to seek validation in repetition
and confirmation rather than
this persistent desire for drastic
change.
It’s not the fault of the work
that I happened to run into it
at a uniquely bad time. Like any
great work of art, “Pride And
Prejudice” makes the reader
adapt to it, and it could be that
I was just resisting what the
work is asking of me as a reader.
Ideally, you have to meet a work
on its own terms and not be
always imposing yourself on it,
as difficult as it might be.
EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer
C O M M E M O R AT I N G
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2020
4:10–5:30 P.M.
For more information: lawumi.ch/ConstitutionDay2020
Sponsored by U-M Office of the Provost
PRESIDENTIAL IMPEACHMENT,
FROM JOHNSON TO TRUMP:
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
COURTESY OF ELIZABETH YOON
This novel attests to the
hyphenated A/PIA life
do not need to defend themselves
or hold their identity accountable
to anyone but themselves. Her
theory of A/PIA identity requires
steadfast
stubbornness
and
self-reliance,
existing
beyond
governmental policy or national
status. Despite others’ opinions,
only oneself can arbitrate self-
worth and identity. As Mori’s
American
experience
implies,
neither state nor society can
resolve the allegiance question.
Relatedly, Mori’s boss, the
Department Chair of Oriental
Studies,
often
laments
her
inability to speak Japanese. He
wishes she would “honor her
culture”
and
Mori
responds
by venting after work hours,
questioning the double standard
applied to non-white Americans.
Why should Mori safeguard her
Japanese-ness if President John
F. Kennedy does not need to
hone his Gaelic? While lacking
the modern terminology, Mori
is alluding to the Perpetual
Foreigner stereotype.
During
World
War
II,
Japanese-Americans were forced
out of their homes and into
temporary concentration camps.
As a survivor of Executive Order
9066, Mori is intimately familiar
with the Perpetual Foreigner
Stereotype. The U.S. 1942 policy
was underpinned by the idea
that Asian-American individuals
are
incapable
of
successful
assimilation
into
mainstream
American society; the styeroptye
posits
that
regardless
of
circumstance,
any
non-white
individual will be regarded as a
dangerous, subversive “other.”
Some may take issue with
Mori’s “disregard for heritage”
in the novel, but her frustration
with her homeland resonates.
Despite America’s sins against
her family, she cannot relinquish
or erase her American birth
and upbringing. She has known
nothing other than her American
culture. And five years after
publication, the animosity and
identity-policing Mori describes
in “The Sympathizer” still rings
true. In 2020, Mori’s identity war
of attrition is still ongoing.
More than anything, “The
Sympathizer” provides a very
smart, very human treatise on the
Asian-American experience and
the ramifications of America’s
militarism. Chapter by chapter,
Nguyen juxtaposes the horrors
of war with American promises
and homely realities. Privy to
capitalist boons, propaganda and
the American Industrial Complex,
the characters make unrelenting,
uncomfortable and contradictory
social commentaries.
Through absurd circumstances
and vivid supporting characters,
Nguyen does the hard work of
articulating the strangled song
of
displacement
and
Asian-
American
identity,
scattered
in
the
meandering
cavities
interconnecting our brains, lungs
and tongues. And somehow, even
when the world feels careless and
chaotic, Nguyen provides a timely
insight into the American past
and present.
***
A
recommended
dish
to
devour alongside Nguyen’s novel
is a classic bowl of pho, tripe
optional.
And if you’re still hungering
for more, you can also view
the guest lecture Nguyen gave
at U-M in 2018 and his 2018
interview with The Michigan
Daily’s Michigan in Color.
Daily Arts Columnist Elizabeth
Yoon can be reached at elizyoon@
umich.edu.
ELIZABETH YOON
Daily Arts Columnist
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
It’s one of those ugly-
but-useful Dover
Critical Editions
that has a bunch of
essays and an eye-
wateringly extensive
bibliography in the
back.
10 — Wednesday, September 2, 2020