It turns out the protagonist’s tendency toward the dialectic is shared by his creator. The Vietnamese mafia’s goal is to prime privileged and empowered whites for blackmail-including a pretentious politician named BFD who Nguyen says was modeled, in part, on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or DSK. The protagonist’s “two minds” allow him to weigh theories of communism and revolution even while engaged in the rather bloody work of capitalism in his newly adopted role as a gangster, delivering drugs for a Vietnamese mafia that battles an Algerian one. A family-less name is also appropriate for the unacknowledged child of a French priest in Paris, the protagonist grapples with the memory of his missing father. It is a joke on gullible immigration authorities as well as a commentary on what it means to move through France as a person of Vietnamese descent, anonymized by a colonially inflected gaze. After encountering and enacting violence in Vietnam and the United States in The Sympathizer as a dual agent, the protagonist gets a fresh start as a refugee in France, where he tells authorities his name is Vo Danh-or vô danh, “anonymous” in Vietnamese.
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