War, Espionage, and the Construction of the Asian Transnational Subject in The　Sympathizer

• Published in: 영미연구, 54(0) pp. 281 - 304
• Main Author: 정혜연
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 영미연구소 01.02.2022
• Subjects: 학제간연구
• ISSN: 2508-4135; 2508-5417

This essay examines the trope of the spy in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, which weaves a complicated tale of espionage, wartime affairs, assassination, loyalty, and betrayal. Nguyen’s narrator (who remains nameless in the novel) follows a long line of Asian spies that have made their mark in the American popular and literary imagination; not only has the trope of the “inscrutable Asian spy” been recycled in the American mainstream culture but many Asian American writers have also deployed this self-same figure to critique the social invisibility and disempowerment of Asian Americans. Even as Nguyen’s spy protagonist alludes to the tradition of both conventional and ethnic spies, he is detachable from both. For one, the positioning of Nguyen’s narrator as the conventional spy hero is rendered problematic because his racial affiliation would hardly qualify him as “the protector of [America’s] established society.” Moreover, reading him as an extension of such ethnic spies as Changrae Lee’s Henry Park in Native Speaker also faces difficulty in that unlike other ethnic spies, the narrator is not necessarily conflicted by his purported invisibility in the US. In fact, Nguyen’s narrator (via his identity as a spy) rejects America’s national, ideological, and cultural binary, which enables him to take a stand against the gatekeepers of mainstream America. Framed by a tale of warfare and espionage which italicizes the primacy of nation-states,　I argue that The Sympathizer betrays the discourse of the nation in tracing the construction of an Asian transnational subjectivity. And the “double agency” (to borrow Tina Chen’s term) that the Asian transnational wields enables him not only to articulate his selfhood but also to critique the American institutions that designate the Asian body as alien. KCI Citation Count: 0