Dear Sympathizer
As I write this, I am watching the Netflix show Dear White People(F.Y.I). And it makes me wonder, what is genuine sympathy. In the episode I am watching, the white students are constantly telling a black student how they are sorry that he was held at gunpoint. On top of this, the white students are always hinting that they stand with the black students by liking rap and making cultural references and more importantly that they are not racist. So the question I find myself asking: does this ambiguous narrator have genuine sympathy or is he a cultural appropriator who sees the hardships and sees the culture but is not in it. He immediately tells us that he has two faces and two minds. But he never tells us who he identifies with more, he just tells us that both groups do not accept him. But since the narrator is constantly referencing American culture( supermarkets, Elvis, and Twain) and not telling us about any Vietnamese culture, is he just like the white students in this show that solely pities a culture from the outside? He sees the hardships that the South Vietnamese face, he is even experiencing a fraction of it with the death of Linh and Duc, but is this as far as his genuine sympathies go? 
2 responses so far
I agree with you that the genuine sympathy of the narrator is questionable. My feelings on the narrator’s genuineness are mixed. I do think the narrator sympathizes with both sides, but I find his emphasis on being rejected from both sides, and the dubious nature of a spy to be equally persuasive. I think the narrator claims to be sympathetic because he wants to elicit sympathy from us.
The analogy between the narrator and Dear White People, however, overlooks the deeper problem of racial idenity. Unlike the white characters in Dear White People, the narrator is of mixed race and that’s why he takes pity on both sides. So, I think it’s more complicated than one side taking pity on another. The narrator has one foot in each culture.
I agree with the previous response that the narrator is not being completely honest by revealing his sympathy to the both sides. Is he being this open because he has finally got caught or because he is trying to play another trick in order to escape his imprisonment?
I also think that the paradox of the narrator is that he actually is both accepted and rejected by the both sides – The Communists and the Capitalists – at the same time. Narrator’s mixed race gives him an opportunity to put-on a chameleon-like guise and act like a Vietnamese in Vietnam and American in America, but then also be seen as an Asian immigrant in America and Eurasian in Vietnam. Through no fault of his own he is not able to be 100% invested into just one culture. This is what, I think, is causing him his duality.