BEDSIDE TABLE
“I read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison in college and was struck by its ambition in depicting African-American history through one person’s experience. When it came to be time to write my novel The Sympathizer, about an everyman who stands in for the Vietnamese, I used it as a guide.
Invisible Man was written in 1952; it’s about a young black man who doesn’t understand who he is in a white society. Though the novel is about what it means to be black, it’s also about how to find your identity and how to rise above various factions that want to determine your fate. It’s about feeling invisible—as if people do not see you for who you are—and not recognizing yourself as a result. The Sympathizer is about a similar kind of person, who is invisible in the sense that he’s a spy and always hiding, and therefore he can’t recognize himself. It was an exaggeration of my experience growing up as a refugee in America. I felt like a spy in my parents’ house because I was an American, but I felt like a spy in the U.S. because I was a refugee.