But we are not primitives, and we are not to be pitied. It smacks of anthropological condescension, evoking some forgotten branch of the human family, some lost tribe of amphibians emerging from ocean mist, crowned with sea weed. Now that we are to be counted among these boat people, their name disturbs us. There was always something derogatory about it, and his protagonist, the Captain, is aware of this: Collectively we will be called the boat people, a name we heard once more earlier tonight, when we surreptitiously listened to the Voice of America on the navigator’s radio. Nguyen uses this epithet in his novel, but he does not embrace it. Asian faces were a rare sight for me growing up in the western suburbs of Sydney, so I tended to think of anyone Asian as having likely escaped by boat from a situation of which I had little understanding. The Sympathizer is essentially a spy story, although it also eventually chronicles a class of people often derided in the late seventies: the boat-people. In the past I have remembered these images somewhat inaccurately, as though they showed an orderly movement of people, instead of what I see now when I return to them, of the ant-like ladder of humanity stretching precariously up to a helicopter on the embassy roof, and another image showing an overloaded helicopter virtually escaping as the panicked human ladder plunges under the force of its own gravity. It was years later that I saw images of the evacuation by helicopter off the top of the embassy building.

I was only nine years old when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese.

It chronicles events at the end of the Vietnam War, which I only vaguely remember from television news of the time. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen was a great read.

The sympathizer book review