Viet Thanh Nguyen credits Park Chan-wook for ‘The Sympathizer’

“When I was writing The Sympathizer, I was greatly influenced by Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy,” said Viet Thanh Nguyen, 54, a Vietnamese-American author who won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In a virtual interview with Korean media on Nov. 4, Nguyen said Park’s film left a lasting impression on him. The Sympathizer tells the story of a North Vietnamese spy who flees to the United States. The novel was adapted into an HBO drama that aired last year, directed by Park and starring Robert Downey Jr. and Sandra Oh. Park, who inspired the novel, also directed the series adaptation.

“When the producers asked me who I wanted to direct the drama, I said without hesitation, Park Chan-wook,” Nguyen said. “The visual style, message, creativity and unusual violence of Oldboy all influenced how I wrote The Sympathizer.”

The interview coincided with the Korean release of Nguyen’s new book, A Man of Two Faces, published on Oct. 31. The autobiographical essay reflects on his life as someone who lived like a “double agent,” observing his Vietnamese immigrant parents’ struggles at home while navigating American society outside. Born in Vietnam, Nguyen moved to the United States with his family after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Nguyen’s family represents a success story of the American Dream. His older brother served as personal physician to former President Barack Obama, while Nguyen is a literature professor at the University of Southern California. Yet he said his youth was marked by a constant search for a sense of belonging.

In his new book, Nguyen recalls how his parents’ grocery store was often defaced with graffiti accusing Vietnamese immigrants of taking jobs from Americans. As a teenager, he also noticed that nearly all movie and television protagonists were white. “Creating literature that is both political and artistically refined is extremely difficult,” Nguyen said. “But one of my goals is to achieve that.”

“Recently, I’ve been reading George Orwell’s 1984 with my 12-year-old son,” he said. “It is political yet deeply artistic. The same is true of Toni Morrison’s novels. These works continue to inspire me.”


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