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A Mixed-Race Asian Spy in The Sympathizer

Hyosun Lee 1

1연세대학교 언더우드국제대학

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ABSTRACT

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer (2015) features a mixedrace narrator born to a French father and Vietnamese mother while Vietnam was under French colonial rule. The first-person narrator and main protagonist in The Sympathizer is a Eurasian whose presence reflects Vietnam’s colonial history, and he has suffered discrimination because of his biracial background. Becoming a refugee after the Vietnam War, he is further pushed to the periphery of the world. However, owning the narrative authority and working as a spy, he challenges the US-centered narrative of the Vietnam War. This paper argues that the narrator positions his experience as a mixed-race person at the core of his identity so that he offers a revisionary historical narrative about the Vietnam War and its refugees. Thus, the paper looks at how he interestingly centers on the word “bastard,” which people used to call him to disdain and ignore his mixed-race identity. Next, the paper explores how he newly defines his identity as a mixed-race person and establishes the “bastard” as the subject of rewriting history. Therefore, the paper emphasizes that regarding the biracial “bastard” spy, the narrator attempts to re-historicize the Vietnam War and its refugees instead of presenting a mixed-race person who has been invisible to national history as a victim of discrimination.

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