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 

