The narrator is an unnamed double agent. He is a French-Vietnamese agent of North Vietnam, with a French father and a Vietnamese mother. Somehow, during the Fall of Saigon, he manages to escape Vietnam and settle in the United States, though he isn't the typical Vietnamese refugee. Rather, he is a North Vietnamese secret agent, regularly sending coded messages to Communists in Vietnam, giving details on life in the United States. He's essentially spying on the South Vietnamese refugees that settled in the USA.
Duality is a common theme here. The narrator goes back and forth between both sides of Vietnam. There's also a duality of perspective in many other aspects, such as for example when the narrator became the cultural adviser for a Vietnam War movie that Hollywood was producing, and this episode in the book was purely written from the perspective of the Asian characters. The narrator's very close friend also later turns out to be a very important enemy. There's definitely plenty of opportunities to flip the coin here.
Anyway, as much as I liked the story, I definitely think that there was just too many things going on. I didn't know whether this was a spy novel, a historical novel, a dark comedy, a novel about immigrants, or something else. I was hoping that the author just concentrated on a few of these threads, but because there were just so many threads going on, somehow the import got diluted more or less. At the end, I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry. And as I close the cover, I ask myself, what happened? Perhaps the best answer is what the author used as the key concluding issue: nothing!
I hear there's a sequel of this book, but given how this one is all over the place, I don't think I would be picking that one up. I give this book 3 out of 5 stars.
See my other book reviews here.
