The Battle Between True and
Accurate Representation in Western Media
in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathiser

Asians have long been denied the opportunity to honestly represent their own reality in Western media. Nguyen emphasises the need for Vietnamese people to represent their own reality rather than simply to be represented by Western media by highlighting the subtle differences between accuracy and truth. An accurate representation is one that is technical and detail oriented, whereas a true or honest representation is one that is deeper, an emotional and raw experience that cannot be understood by anyone else but a Vietnamese person. Nguyen investigates the nuances of honest Vietnamese representation in the media by criticising Western glorification and superiority in the intention of stories, and exploring the blurry line between exploitation and representation that can be politicised.

Nguyen exposes the Western desire for authenticity that exists only to the extent that it is palatable for them. The Auteur tells the protagonist that “authenticity’s important” but “the story still comes first. The universality of the story has to be there” in their first meeting about the movie script (Nguyen 129). The intention for Western film makers to tell stories that represent the Vietnamese experience is to universalise it so that the Western audience can empathise and feel bad for the characters. Their need for certain authentic details is to show how much better Western life is in comparison. This perspective assumes a superiority and understanding that all non-white experiences are interchangeable with exception to certain details. This approach to accuracy, one that is just enough to make the movie seem real, but not enough to challenge the audience too much, is a descendant of colonization. European colonizers understood Asia as under one umbrella with exchangeable histories. When Violet explains the reasons for hiring non-Vietnamese Asian actors, the protagonist suggests that “we [the Vietnamese] can’t represent ourselves; we must be represented” (158). The usage of actors of other Asian descent, Korean and Chinese, instead of Vietnamese for the leading roles diminishes the agency and authority the Vietnamese have over their own reality. It forces the Vietnamese to see themselves represented by the Western gaze and intention, which is to distinguish the American reality as unique and glorious, and the Vietnamese or Asian reality as general and interchangeable.

In Western representation, the media wants to highlight the specks of Vietnamese reality that fall under the binary of pleasing or ugly, but nothing in between. The protagonist reflects that Westernised stories of Vietnamese experience “was strip-mining history, leaving the real history in the tunnels along with the dead, doling out tiny sparkling diamonds for audiences to gasp over” (133). The extreme pleasurable or unpleasurable are the only aspects that are showstopping and spectacular enough for cinema, not the messy middle ground that may become too real and honest for the cinematic audience. The Western media only want enough to get a reaction and be accurate to satisfy critics, but not enough to be honest and raw. The Auteur angrily tells the protagonist that “frankly, Vietnamese audiences aren’t going to watch this move, are they?” (132). This rhetorical question explicitly demonstrates the Western media agenda to commercialise a Vietnamese experience in a way that glorifies and satisfies a Western audience, rather than the Vietnamese. So, a Western appropriate version of Vietnamese reality is represented and sold to the global audience and not the whole rounded one when the Vietnamese people are denied opportunities to take the reign and represent themselves.

Nguyen spotlights how the Vietnamese may represent their own reality but complicates it by blurring the line between representation and exploitation. In the first meeting with the director, the protagonist goes into detail about how specific even a scream can be. His satirical differentiation of screams when he defines “that’s how we scream in my country” makes it sound mechanical, especially after just recollecting a memory of watching someone die to produce this distinction (131). This moment highlights how in the process of wanting to represent one’s experience accurately, one has to tap into the most private and emotional experiences. However, that experience is barely comprehensible to oneself and even more difficult to portray to a foreign person or in writing. To understand that experience, one needs someone like them that has lived through the same raw, unprocessed and unacknowledged experiences. When the leading actors are non-Vietnamese Asians who barely have speaking roles but need to showcase the Vietnamese experience, they are able to do so only in a way that is accurate but not true. It is this particular distinction that Nguyen is trying to emphasise in this novel, the subtle difference between accuracy and truth, where accuracy is mechanical, and truth is private, raw and emotional.

However, if that truth is commercialised and represented poorly, it can be exploitative. At the end of the day, the protagonist agrees to work as a consultant for the movie to get money. Money for the revolution and money to settle his guilt. He knows, or at least begins to understand that he is “helping to exploit my fellow countrymen and refugees” (153). Even the four refugee actors that played the Viet Cong rapists agreed to push aside their personal memories and beliefs for double the pay. Nguyen is highlighting how nuanced and complicated the process of representation can be. On the one hand, the protagonist helped give meaningful and speaking roles to the Vietnamese characters and people, and he gives working opportunities to Vietnamese refugees to act out their lived experiences. On the other hand, he witnesses the Vietnamese experience be manipulated and dramatized by Western writers and non-Vietnamese Asian actors for a spectacle and for commercial success. After watching the movie in a Vietnamese theatre, which as mentioned before, the Auteur did not regard as the primary target audience, the protagonist has a disagreement with Bon about the Vietnamese representation. The protagonist explains that he gave speaking roles to the actors but all Bon said was that “you were going to make sure we came off well… But we weren’t even human” (289). The non-Vietnamese Asian and the white people, everyone but the actual Vietnamese, were humanised. Nguyen demonstrates how warring intentions like money and honesty can blur the line between true representation and exploitation of the Vietnamese reality.

The reason Nguyen emphasises the need for the Vietnamese to represent themselves in the media is because art is a form of history and can be politicised. The protagonist reflects on Claude’s notion of American moves as “intercontinental ballistic missile of Americanization” and propaganda (172). Western representation of non-western experience tells a story from the American perspective, where the Americans are the heroes. And that is the point. The only reason the Westerners want the tiniest bits of accuracy of the Vietnamese reality is so that they can use it or manipulate it in a way that makes the American seem like the saviour. In the revised plot of the movie, the Vietnamese woman that falls in love with the American soldier is tortured by the Vietnamese and saved by the American soldier, a metaphor for America saving the nation, even though the Americans lost in reality. Even at loss, Americans want to tell a story of victory, rewrite and dominate the audience with their perspective so that no other reality prevails. It is a way to silence honest and true representations. As the protagonist later states, art is like an artefact, it remains in history, even if the actual details of the history are lost or diminished (178). This is why it is so important for Vietnamese people to tell their own stories in their own complicated, raw, honest, unprocessed, murky way, just as Nguyen himself has done in this novel to balance the Western dominant culture of American heroism and urge the appreciation of Vietnamese reality.

Disclaimer: This work is original and the property of Aroni Sarkar. It is not authorised for any use, copies or dissemination.

Works Cited

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathiser. Grove Press, New York, 2015.