Nuanced Narratives: Reframing Vietnam Through Literature
Representation intrinsically shapes narratives, allowing a storyteller to dictate how a story is told, interpreted, and remembered. When people, nations, or cultures are represented by others–particularly by those with differing cultural backgrounds or conflicting interests–the narratives often skew toward the perspectives, biases, and agendas of the dominant or representing group. This dynamic can result in incomplete, distorted, or even detrimental portrayals of the represented group. The Vietnam War offers a clear example of this phenomenon. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Sympathizer dubbed the conflict the “first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors” (Nguyen 134). In its capacity to influence the cultural zeitgeist, the American entertainment industry is nearly as robust as the American military-industrial complex. Since the war’s cessation, Hollywood has churned out narratives about the Vietnam War centered around a dramatized American experience–a loss of innocence in a senseless, hostile landscape, devastation for American soldiers as they encounter Vietnamese, both friend and foe, who rarely deliver a speaking line but are often victims of brutal deaths. Films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon have become the dominant representations of not just the Vietnam War but, for many, Vietnam itself. Over time, collective memory aligns with the narratives of those in power rather than the reality of the people affected by these events. There are several pieces of literature that seek to rectify this discrepancy by recentering Vietnamese experiences. Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, in particular, utilize fiction to reassert control over Vietnamese narratives to provide a more nuanced view of Vietnam and its people, bringing the depth and complexity that both are owed. The Gangster We Are All Looking For and The Sympathizer, and analyses of those works, respectively, demonstrate how representation moved beyond binary frameworks of good and bad to provide for a more multifaceted narrative that challenges distorted portrayals of Vietnam.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For can be read as a subtle representation of a nation, providing nuance by challenging the typical immigration narrative and refusing to limit Vietnam to a place of war. Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s novel directs the reader in the novel's preface to contemplate the presence of water, drawing attention to the multiple meanings attached to the Vietnamese word “nước.” Nước can be “a nation, a country, and a homeland” simultaneously. Water returns in various forms throughout the story; its absence and presence uplift or rip apart the central family. Water first carried the narrator and her father from Vietnam, saving them but leaving the family divided, Ma left behind. Water in the red apartment's swimming pool comforts the family. To the narrator, its removal marks the beginning of a strained and uneasy time for the family. She remarks that without the pool, “there was nothing to keep [her parents] from fighting” (Thúy 66). When the final scene of the novel, set on the beach, is closely read, it becomes evident that Lê Thi Diem Thúy is using water to represent Vietnam itself, characterizing the nation as something round and fully fleshed out, capable of producing both positive and negative experiences, something more than a war. The final scene bends time, returning the reader to a moment from the narrator’s past. She describes being woken by her father, who drives the family to the beach late at night. The narrator notices “scattered sparks of light” across the sand, which, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be small silver fish pushed ashore by the waves (157). “They writhed in the wet sand, and it seemed that the more they writhed, the brighter they became” (158). In this context, the word “writhed” imparts the feeling that the fish are struggling. Possibly cruelly, the water has pushed them from their home and up on inhospitable land. But, the narrator describes how this struggle has made their shimmer more intensely beautiful. She describes how it appears that the fish simply “could not get enough of the cool salt night air” (158). In this way, the reader is left with the sense that the water has delivered the fish into something beautiful and desirable, though its methods were cruel. In this way, the fish seem to represent the central family. Ba seems to recognize this. “My father turned to my mother and me and, smiling broadly, pointed at the fish as if we knew them” (158). The water delivered the fish on American soil, as the little family once had been. Just as the girl views the fish in their struggles as more beautiful, many would see the family as better off in America, delivered from the hardships of their homeland. The audience understands that the family’s situation is more complex than that. America didn’t free the family from their burdens, and Vietnam was not something they needed to escape entirely. Ma, Ba, and the daughter frequently reflect on Vietnam with nostalgia. Ba and his friends reminisce on the smell of the first rain after a dry season (114). Ma reconnects with abandoned relations, revived in a photograph. The daughter remembers Vietnam as a land of glittering squid boats and youthful schoolchildren (149). Though it was the water of Vietnam that took their son and the war in Vietnam, which separated Ba in a reeducation camp for a time, there is not an overtly negative sentiment attached to the memory of Vietnam itself. Just like the water had imparted beauty and struggle onto the beached fish, Vietnam imparted both positive and negative experiences to the family. Vietnam, like the water present throughout the novel, is not only positive or negative; it doesn’t just give or take. Much like Gsoels-Lorensen argues Lê uses photographs to tell her audience what “Vietnam is,” and I argue that water represents how Vietnam feels (14). In her poem “shrapnel shards on blue water,” Lê, a Vietnamese immigrant herself, states that Vietnam is “a world, a love, a fear, to bury” (Gsoels-Lorensen 14). No association or feeling with any nation can be considered either completely good or bad. However, Vietnam as a country has long been stuck with a negative affiliation due to its association with war. By tying water to the feelings attached to Vietnam, Lê attempts to give her audience a multidimensional understanding of Vietnam that so many other nations are automatically awarded. I believe Lê is trying to pass this understanding of Vietnam to an audience that has reduced it to a negative moment in time, a period of war. We are encouraged to have the same grace as the daughter, viewing the fish on the beach. She does not critique the water for stranding the fish but instead sees how the push of the waves has made them more radiant. Gangster tells us that Vietnam is round, full of complexities and experiences, both positive and negative. Lê Thi Diem Thúy represents Vietnam and a Vietnamese family as rounded concepts and people in a narrative that never seeks to assign blame. Vietnam is not “bad” or a place of war. Vietnam is a place where families can live and love but also suffer and experience loss, just like any other nation. Vietnamese people can come to America to escape conflict, but this does not mean they have been “saved.” Vietnamese families in America are capable of experiencing difficulties just as they are capable of flourishing. Representation through Lê’s understated storytelling is particularly effective for delivering this repackaging of Vietnam, leaving the audience with a holistic impression of the country rooted in feeling and spread across time.
A close reading of the titular chapter of Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s novel reveals the importance of a narrator’s degree of context in creating a nuanced narrative of Vietnam within and beyond the novel. Gangster’s third chapter describes the arrival of a photograph of Ma’s parents at the family’s San Diego home in Linda Vista. For the family, this episode highlights how access to context can lead to diverging emotional responses. To the daughter, the photograph simply represents Vietnam. To Ma, the photo represents her parents in a moment in time, her disownment, and the primary actors in that occasion, her parents–these variations in meaning lead to two significantly different reactions from mother and daughter (Gsoels-Lorensen 8). Ma cries, yelling at Ba, blaming him for the pain suffered by the “child,” being herself at the time of her disownment (Thúy 92). The novel’s representation of the daughter’s reaction represents familial disconnect, as the daughter is displaced from her role as “child” and cannot access the feelings associated with the moment the photo represents (Gsoels-Lorensen 13). The daughter runs from the house like a “crazy lady,” unaware of why the photograph sends shockwaves through her mother (11). Taken out of the context of the novel, I believe this scene can be interpreted as a representation of how context changes how much a storyteller can impart to a narrative, distinguishing between insider and outsider. Ma, who is personally connected to the content of the photo and may, in this context, represent any individual intimately connected with the Vietnamese experience, can access an understanding of its content beyond the surface level. The mother can access the photograph in ekphrastic terms, bridging the gap between a traditional media photograph and the extended meaning this photograph can contain when described in the literature (7). On paper, this photograph takes on a new life–literally, as Ma begins to treat the photo as if it were her parents, asking her daughter to help move her grandparents in and setting them up in the attic space (8). The daughter, who serves as a stand-in for those who lack a personal understanding of Vietnamese experiences, still tries to ascribe meaning to the photo, stating that the photo simply represents “Vietnam” (Thúy 78). The two individuals are not equally equipped to narrate the photo's story, with Ma bringing a deeper, emotional story rooted in experience. The daughter’s response is indeed emotional, but that emotion is more in reaction to her surroundings. This is similar to the feelings evoked by traditional photography of the Vietnam War. Photos like Napalm Girl and famous depictions of American soldiers sharply contrasting against the background of a Vietnamese village seem intent on imparting a sense of chaos and confusion, providing limited context. Western narratives of the Vietnam War in photography can be reductive, telling the story of a highly reactive American soldier in unfamiliar surroundings. Representation of Vietnam without a contextual understanding of Vietnam limits what the Western narrative can portray, and a lack of context limits what the daughter can understand about the photo. Recentering Vietnamese people in the creation of media representing Vietnam may help ensure that the emotional responses born of these sources are rooted in contextual understanding rather than reactionary detachment.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, written as the confession of a North Vietnamese spy embedded with South Vietnamese and American troops after the communist victory, takes a multifaceted approach to representation, providing nuance through the use of contradiction. The novel presents its audience with almost countless binaries: orient and occident, Northern and Southern, representer and represented. The narrator’s embodiment of this final binary is most potent on the set of the quintessentially American war film “The Hamlet.” As he often does, the narrator exists in the gray space between two roles. The narrator has been paid to assist the “representer,” the Auteur, in depicting Vietnamese people represented in the limited roles of “victim” and “villain.” Upon their first introduction, the Auteur is taken aback by the Sympathizer’s criticism of his screenplay, responding aggressively and stating, “I think I know something about your people” (Nguyen 130). Having just finished his speech about the importance of both imagination and authenticity–describing how he had found an actual Green Beret to “vet the script”–the Auteur rejects the notion of providing authenticity for the Vietnamese he seeks to depict (129). As the Sympathizer later explains to Madam and the General, the Auteur was “looking for a yes man…a rubber stamp of approval” (133). Though the Sympathizer agrees to join the production team, in the end, a rubber stamp of approval is precisely what the Auteur gets from the narrator. The Sympathizer casts extras and coaches them, provides cultural insights to the Auteur that are regularly ignored, and is nearly killed in a highly suspect on-set explosion. The Sympathizer is appalled once able to view the finished film with Bon in Thailand. The Auteur had set out to create a movie that reinforced the traditional “Western savior” troupe and used all the tools at his disposal–both the powerful Hollywood machine and the Sympathizer himself–to do just that. As Bon put it, “All [the narrator] did was give them an excuse” (289). Bon states nothing can be changed “from the inside” (289). “When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside” (289). This could be interpreted as a nod to precisely what the Sympathizer does for the novel's audience. While Bon and the Sympathizer view the movie as a failure, for the audience on the outside, the multidimensional, multi-minded protagonist directly contradicts the flat depictions of Vietnamese in American films. Not only that, but the Sympathizer’s presence on set provides the reader with behind-the-scenes access to both the Auteur’s exertion of power over the narrative and the inaccuracies of his portrayal compared to the lived experiences of the Vietnamese. Through the narrator, the audience observes the Auteur’s not-so-hidden biases in moments where he tells Vietnamese actors to “act natural” during a rape scene (164). The audience is also able to reflect on the brutality of the torture taught by Claude to the South Vietnamese, contradicting the American heroism ideal fed by the Auteur. When watching James Yoon’s torture scene, the narrator recalls the “disorientation,” “sensory deprivation,” and “self-punishment” methods tested by American scientists for use in Vietnam (169). Representation as an extension of power in a narrative's direction is displayed at multiple points throughout the novel. “Clashing voices” seek to impress a “self-serving doctrine” upon the reader, a mission that fails because the Sympathizer never seems to fully buy into the narratives of those he sympathizes with (Gheytasi 14). The narrator, a third party removed from the different cultural, social, and political contexts around him, can highlight distinctions in historical narratives depending on who is attempting to represent history. It is not only the Americans but also the North and South Vietnamese that attempt to skew the historical narrative in their favor. Americans, with their heightened access to tools of influence like Hollywood, possess a disproportionate ability to rewrite history, representing Vietnamese as victims and themselves as tragic heroes. South Vietnamese displaced in America choose to remember Vietnam as “only free and democratic,” ignoring a national history of coups and corruption and even cheering for the Congressman when he uses a slogan typical of Vietnamese communists (11). The North Vietnamese advocate that nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, yet actively participate in the personal historical revision of the Sympathizer’s account of his time as a spy and employ the same punitive methods of torture used by the Americans against the Sympathizer to extract a vindictive confession. The Sympathizer, at various points throughout the novel, corrects these misrepresentations, highlighting the failure and cowardice of the American military, the rose-colored lenses of the South, and the “authoritative methodologies” of the North (12). The Sympathizer draws attention to the powerful parties that wield influence over a narrative to recognize the subjectivity and nuances of history.
Nuance in representation isn’t about determining a “correct” versus “incorrect” history. It’s about embracing the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions inherent in any story. Nuance provides a gray space, allowing audiences to explore a range of perspectives rather than being funneled into a single, definitive narrative shaped by a storyteller's biases or agenda. Neither The Sympathizer nor The Gangster We Are All Looking For attempt to impress upon the audience a definitive answer for what Vietnam “is” or “means.” Instead, they undo binary definitions of Vietnam, highlight the importance of a narrator’s degree of context, and provide a variety of historical perspectives, highlighting some biases and deficiencies of each. The Sympathizer and The Gangster We Are All Looking For provide an opportunity to examine personal, cultural, and historical complexities, encouraging readers to question dominant narratives and reflect on their own interpretations of Vietnam.
References
Gheytasi, Sajjad. “Voices in Conflict: Exploring Memory and Multiplicity in The Sympathizer.” Anuari de Filologia. Literatures Contemporànies, vol. 13, 2023, pp. 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1344/aflc2023.13.1.
Gsoels-Lorensen, Jutta. “Iê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For: The Ekphrastic Emigration of a Photograph.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 48, no. 1, 2006, pp. 3–18.
Lê, Thi Diem Thúy. The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Anchor Books, 2004.
Nguyen, V. T. The Sympathizer. Grove Press, 2015.