【盖茨书评】一个看待越战的新视角

第一次去越南的时候，我并不知道可以期待些什么。

虽然我当时还很小，用不着为我的征兵编码而担忧（美国在越战时期实行征兵制，译者注），但越南战争还是给我的青春留下了长长的阴影。同我这一代的很多人一样，我对这场战争的看法深受包括《猎鹿人》（The Deer Hunter）在内的充满暴力、以美国为中心的电影影响。2006年，我坐在前往河内的飞机上，心里却特别没底。在我计划会面的人中，很多都经历过越战。他们会不会因为我是美国人而怨恨我呢？

答案是响亮的“不”，这使我感到宽慰。和我交谈过的每个人都是那么热情友好，你根本不会感受到双方国家就在几十年前还曾交战的事实。不过这次越南之行也让我认识到，关于越南人对这场战争的看法，我实在知之甚少。

从越南回来后的这些年里，我开始试图去了解越南人的经历。最近我读到了阮越清（Viet Thanh Nguyen）的《同情者》（The Sympathizer，中文名暂译）。我平常不会主动看历史题材的小说，但当一个好朋友推荐这本书时，我还是抱起了一本——现在我很庆幸自己当初这么做了。

《同情者》的故事叙述者——我们一直不知道他的名字——是一名潜伏在南越军队及其美国盟军中的共产党双重间谍。西贡沦陷后，他乘飞机逃出了越南，最后来到加利福尼亚暗中监视他的难民同胞，并用隐形墨水写成报告，寄给越南的负责人。

我们读到的故事是这位叙述者的告白书，是他被关押在北越“再教育营”时被迫写下的。让再教育营司令官感到非常恼火的是，告白书中清楚地表明，这位叙述者并不是他们崇高事业的真正信徒，而是对冲突的双方都表现出“同情”。

作为一本既取得了巨大的商业成功，又在评论界大受好评的小说（本书获得了去年的普利策小说奖，阮越清最近还获得了麦克阿瑟天才奖），这个故事却出乎意料地令人感到沮丧。阮越清并没有回避越战给每个卷入其中的人所造成的创伤，同时也没有对书中的叙述者应该忠诚于哪一方做出评判。大部分战争小说都会明确表示出你应该支持哪一方，但《同情者》却不会让读者这么容易就得到答案。

在四十多年后的今天，很多美国人仍然对有关越战的几个重要问题争论不休：我们应不应该参战？当时的政治和军事领导人知不知道自己在做什么？他们是否明白这场战争的人力成本有多少？（如果你想了解更多有关这场争论的内容，我推荐 H.R. 麦克马斯特的精彩著作《玩忽职守》[Dereliction of Duty，中文名暂译]。）

阮越清在很大程度上忽略了这些问题，相反他探讨的是战争时期个人道德所发挥的作用。那位叙述者犯下了可怕的罪行，他代表了他所服务的北越政府和他所监视的难民群体。为了生存，他在两边周旋。最后，由于缺乏坚定的信仰，他成了所有人中最不道德的那一个。

尽管故事阴郁，《同情者》仍是一本快节奏、可读性很强的小说。我很喜欢其中一个格外让人难忘的章节：主人公认识了一位好莱坞著名导演，然后当上了这位导演正在执导的越战电影《哈姆雷特》的顾问。他每次试图在电影中加入一些越南人的视角都会被导演拒绝。最后导演对他越来越不耐烦，甚至想要利用一场特技爆炸事故杀掉他（书中并没有写明导演有没有这么做）。如果你是个电影爱好者，你会发现这部《哈姆雷特》和电影《现代启示录》有诸多相似之处。

去年接受美国国家公共电台（NPR）采访的时候，阮越清讲述了自己第一次观看弗朗西斯·福特·科波拉（Francis Ford Coppola）这部经典电影时的感受。他说看到影片中美国士兵屠杀越南人的镜头时，感觉就像是“一个象征性的时刻，让我明白了这就是我们在一个美国战争中的处境，越战从美国人的视角来看就是美国战争，而我自己，一定要为此做些什么。”对于越战，《同情者》展现了一个十分必要的越南人视角。我很高兴这本书在主流社会大获成功，也希望今后还能读到更多像这本书一样的作品。

A fresh take on the Vietnam War

I didn't know what to expect the first time I visited Vietnam. 

Although I’m a bit too young to have worried about my draft number, the Vietnam War cast a long shadow over my youth. Like many people of my generation, my view of the conflict was influenced by violent, American-centric movies like The Deer Hunter. So I was unsure when I found myself on a plane to Hanoi in 2006. Many of the people I was scheduled to meet with lived through the war. Would they resent me for being American? 

The answer was, to my relief, a resounding no. Everyone I talked to was warm and welcoming. You would have never known our countries were at war just decades earlier. But the visit made me realize how little I had seen or read about the Vietnamese perspective on the war. 

In the years since that trip, I’ve tried to learn more about the Vietnamese experience. Most recently, I picked up The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I don’t usually reach for historical fiction, but when a good friend recommended it, I picked up a copy – and I’m glad I did. 

The Sympathizer’s narrator – we never learn his name – is a communist double agent embedded with the South Vietnamese Army and their American allies. After he’s air-lifted out of the country during the fall of Saigon, he ends up in California spying on his fellow refugees and sending reports written in invisible ink to his handler back in Vietnam. 

The story we’re reading is the narrator’s confession, which he is forced to write while held in a North Vietnamese reeducation camp. Much to the chagrin of the camp’s commandant, this confession makes it clear that the narrator is not a true believer in their cause. Instead, he “sympathizes” with people on both sides of the conflict. 

For a novel that’s been met with such commercial success and critical acclaim (it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year, and Nguyen recently received a MacArthur genius grant), it is surprisingly bleak. Nguyen doesn’t shy away from how traumatic the Vietnam War was for everyone involved. Nor does he pass judgment about where his narrator’s loyalties should lie. Most war stories are clear about which side you should root for – The Sympathizer doesn’t let the reader off the hook so easily. 

More than 40 years later, many Americans still grapple with the big questions surrounding the Vietnam War: should we have gotten involved? Did our political and military leaders know what they were doing? Did they understand what the human cost of the war would be? (If you’re interested in reading more about this debate, I recommend H.R. McMaster’s excellent book Dereliction of Duty.) 

Nguyen largely ignores these questions and instead tackles the role of individual morality in a time of war. The narrator commits horrible acts on behalf of the North Vietnamese government he serves and the refugee community he’s spying on. He plays both sides to survive. In the end, his lack of conviction makes him the most immoral character of all. 

Despite how dark it is, The Sympathizer is still a fast-paced, entertaining read. I liked one particularly memorable section where the protagonist meets a famous Hollywood director and becomes a consultant for the Vietnam War epic he’s working on called The Hamlet. His attempts to bring the Vietnamese perspective into the film are thwarted at every turn by the director, who eventually grows so sick of the narrator that he may have tried to kill him with a stunt explosion gone wrong (the book doesn’t make it clear whether he did or not). If you’re a movie buff, you’ll notice that The Hamlet bears more than a passing resemblance to Apocalypse Now. 

In an interview with NPR last year, Nguyen shared the story of the first time he saw Francis Ford Coppola’s classic film. He described watching a scene where American soldiers kill Vietnamese people as “the symbolic moment of my understanding that this was our place in an American war, that the Vietnam War was an American war from the American perspective and that, eventually, I would have to do something about that.” The Sympathizer offers a much-needed Vietnamese perspective on the war. I’m glad that it’s experienced such mainstream success, and I hope to read more books like it in the future.

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