The Sympathizer and the hidden layers of Asian American spy stories

On the first page of Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee’s celebrated debut novel from 1995, Korean American protagonist Henry Park is handed a note by his wife as she leaves him. “You are surreptitious,” it begins, pinning him with descriptives, “[a] follower, traitor, spy.”

It turns out that Park is something of a spy. He befriends influential people and gathers compromising information to destabilize their leadership at the request of an organization which only hires black people. His white wife was unaware of this, resulting in suspicion and conflict. They eventually separated. The novel vacillates between Park’s lives and identities, focusing on how his life of disguise leaves him unseen in both his personal and professional lives, and even by himself.

In Lee’s novel and in other Asian American literature, spies appear as a narrative prism that illuminates the experience of the Asian diaspora. These spies, who are placed between nations, worlds and communities, begin to question the loyalty that Asian Americans have to their countries and to each other. They also start to break down binary ideas of belonging and alienness.

Spies had concrete roots before they became a literary concept in Asian American History. The book 2021 Asian American Spies Brian Masaru Hayashi reveals the lives of three Asian American spys during World War II.

These spies worked for the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA) and used their cultural background, language skills, and appearance to offer intelligence to the U.S. during the entire war. Hayashi built the book around three main spies, the Korean American KunsungRie and the Chinese American Lincolnkan. These spies were responsible for everything from propaganda to destabilizing the foreign war effort to reporting on crimes against foreign troops or slowing their progress.

The book is centered around the suspicion of Asian American spies and the mole in the OSS during the 1940s. A double agent was leaking secrets, and because the office’s recruitment centered around personal connections, essentially an “old boy network” according to Hayashi, suspicion lay upon those on the fringes, like the Asian Americans brought in for their expertise in Asian territories. Hayashi reveals that the mole in the OSS is one of those old boys, a well-educated and highly connected white American.

Image: Riverhead Books

The questioning of these spies’ Asian American loyalty, even as they risked their lives behind enemy lines, points to something elusive within the conflicted relationship between the U.S. and the Asian diaspora living within it. In the long history of immigration laws, there is a perceived danger of Asians living in America. This threat affects both family structures as well as a built-in nationalist loyalty. The contested loyalties of Asian American authors who place spies into their novels rarely lead them to try to prove loyalty, but rather to leaning in to the suspicion. Asian Americans who were pushed out of America’s definition from its inception have all lived in disguise, and may even work against it.

A novel that has been acclaimed The Sympathizer Viet Nguyen’s confession is framed as a story of tortured double agents who confessed to their crimes after they were captured. Unnamed protagonist is a man of many identities, all of which claim his loyalty. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” the protagonist writes. “Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.”

Rather than portraying a tension between being American or foreign, Nguyen’s protagonist is caught between many powers and identities, all claiming his attention and loyalty. The 1970s are the setting for the story, in which the protagonist is both a North Vietnamese spy and an agent of the North Vietnamese government. He also spies in California on South Vietnamese refugees. His parents were Vietnamese but he was born in America. He is witness to both the declining of South Vietnamese society and the flattening of his life in the U.S., along with many other Asian Americans. He consults on American films about the war but ends up grating against the director’s desire to produce a triumphal portrayal of the war and America.

For Lee’s protagonist in Native Speaker, the contested loyalties are less historical but focus on Park’s target, John Kwang, a Korean American politician on the rise in New York. Park becomes more affectionate towards Kwang when he works on finding dirt on him. He sees his struggle and identifies with it and even idolizes Kwang’s authoritative and powerful persona.

Park feels conflicted about destabilizing Kwang’s political campaign for mayor for an unknown power, but as Kwang’s campaign unravels and reveals a gang’s support network and Kwang’s own personal failings and abuse of women, Park betrays him and reveals his connections to underground crime as his last job before quitting.

Park refuses to accept the false dilemma of supporting a Korean American who is abusive or working with the shadowy power structures. He leaves his spy job after the election.

In Fine Company

The theme of Asian American writers revealing their identities and betraying their profession is not uncommon. In American playwright David Henry Hwang’s M. ButterflyThe opera singer Song Liling, who is now a spy and a French diplomatic officer mistakenly believes that Song Liling is female, develops a close relationship with the diplomat. Based on real events and Shi Pei Pu’s relationship with Bernard Boursicot, the play was inspired by true stories.

The play shows a diplomat serving a treason sentence and regretting the relationship he shared with Song for 20 years. The diplomat is rejected by Song after he reveals to him his true identity and takes off his disguise. He claims that the only thing he loved about Song was Butterfly, his female persona. Song is in love with the diplomat but only when disguised.

Each of the spies in both novels and Hwang’s play rejects the profession of hiding as they see it impacting their ability to be loved and understood, to be seen. After years of living multiple lives, Nguyen’s protagonist unburdens himself through his confession and disappears into a crowded boat of refugees in the closing scenes.

You can also find out more about the following: Native Speaker, Park’s long life in disguise has slowly caused him to lose touch with both his wife and himself, but in his act of defiance to both betray the supposedly Asian American civic ideal in Kwang and quit his job, he regains authenticity to himself and blends into New York in the end of the novel.

The Asian American writers explore their protagonists’ arcs as spies in order to show how they live in constant disguise. Instead of relying on the necessity to show loyalty or do work for someone, these spies refuse the job.