Quotes About Identity

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps

We're all the same to them, Phuong understood with a mix of anger and shame—small, charming, and forgettable. She

We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies. No,

For we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It's as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can.

Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything

My task was to ensure that the people scuttling in the background of the film would be real Vietnamese things and dressed in real Vietnamese clothing, right before they died.

We did our best to conjure up the culinary staples of our culture, but since we were dependent on Chinese markets our food had an unacceptably Chinese tinge, another blow in the gauntlet of our humiliation that left us with the sweet-and-sour taste of unreliable memories, just correct enough to evoke the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone, missing along with the proper variety, subtlety, and complexity of our universal solvent, fish sauce.

We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return?

We instinctively knew that in order for Americans to find refugees like us acceptable, they first had to find our food digestible (not to mention affordable and pronounceable).

As some men were born to handle a paintbrush or a pen, he was born to wield a gun. It looked natural in his hand, a tool of which a man could be proud, like a wrench.

IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I returned again and again to what people call my homeland, where my parents were born, as was I. But for the Vietnamese, the homeland is not simply the country of origin. It is the village where one's father was born and where one's father was buried. My father's father died where he was supposed to, as my father will not and as I will not, in the province of his birth, his mausoleum thirty minutes from Ho Chi Minh's birthplace.

A slogan is just an empty suit, she said. Anyone can wear it. I

We were not a people who charged into war at the beck and call of bugle or trumpet. No, we fought to the tunes of love songs, for we were the Italians of Asia.

Becoming a refugee is a gradual process, a bleaching ou, a transition into a ghostly existence.

No wonder, then, that I was drawn to the General, who, like my friends Man and Bon, never sneered about my muddled heritage. Upon selecting me for his staff, the General said, The only thing I'm interested in is how good you are at what you do, even if the things I ask you to do may not be so good. I

I cannot be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved. But what would happen if one took off the mask and the other saw one not with love but with horror, disgust, anger? What if the self that one exposes is as unpleasing to others as the mask, or even worse?

part spy thriller, part cultural and political reclamation, The Sympathizer

Don't you see that the Americans need the anti-American?

I was not a bastard, I was not, I was not, I was not, unless, somehow, I was.

In the end, my father had it right. He called me nothing at all.

The immigrant is the one who wants to come, unlike the refugee, who is forced to come.

To understand our fate and theirs, we must do more than tell ghost stories. We must also tell the war stories that made ghosts and made us ghosts, the war stories that brought us here.

I came to understand that in the United States, land of the fabled American dream, it is un-American to be a refugee. The refugee embodies fear, failure, and flight. Americans of all kinds believe that it is impossible for an American to become a refugee, although it is possible for refugees to become Americans and in that way be elevated one step closer to heaven.

But, like superheroes, they would not want to keep themselves a secret for long. How could you be a superhero if no one knew you existed?