The Sympathizer

The crapulent major’s death troubles the narrator greatly, but he consoles himself with the idea that “revolutionaries can never be innocent” (111). The narrator attends a Vietnamese-American wedding in a giant reception hall, having been invited by the father of the bride who was a marine colonel back in Saigon. Ms. Mori attends as the narrator’s date. The narrator tries to enjoy the festivities, but the evening is interrupted by a gory hallucination of the crapulent major’s severed head on one of the wedding tables—the narrator simply cannot get the crapulent major off of his mind.

A few drinks later, the narrator looks to the performers onstage and recognizes one of the wedding singers as Lana, the General’s eldest daughter. While Saigon fell, Lana had been away at University of California-Berkeley, so until this wedding, the narrator had not seen her in quite some time. “Her ultimate form of rebellion,” the narrator says “was to be a superb student who, like me, earned a scholarship to the States” (115). This womanly Lana onstage is much different from the innocent young girl the narrator knew in Saigon: “Even I was shocked by the black leather miniskirt that threatened to reveal a glimpse of the secret I had so often fantasized about” (116).