The 1960s

The 1960s form a crucial period of double education for the unnamed narrator: at Occidental, he learns American habits and ideas as both a scholarship student and a covert operative. The decade’s shifting campus politics sharpen the divide between his public identity and his concealed history, while his later return to the college makes that divide visible in a changed America.

Covert Study in America

The unnamed narrator spends six years at Occidental, a small college in Southern California, during the 1960s. He is the lone Vietnamese student there, studying under a scholarship while serving as a spy-in-training. His revolutionary comrade Man assigns him a distinctive mission: to learn how Americans think. The narrator treats this as psychological warfare, not ordinary academic preparation.

His education ranges beyond formal coursework. He reads American history and literature, works on his grammar and slang, smokes marijuana, and loses his virginity. By the end, he has earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees and describes himself as an expert in American studies. The campus’s sunlit idyll is therefore double-edged: he experiences it as a student, but also as a person collecting knowledge for a political purpose.

Inconsistency and Political Formation

The narrator remembers reading Emerson on a lawn beneath jacaranda trees, with the words “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” standing out on the page. The maxim strikes him as apt not only for America but also for his homeland, which he regards as deeply inconsistent. His recollection makes the college years a period of intellectual recognition: the ideas he studies abroad offer a way to reflect on both societies, rather than simply to assimilate into one of them.

The General’s American experience provides a revealing contrast. He had trained at Fort Benning in 1958 as a junior officer, where the Green Berets permanently turned him against communism. The narrator’s own ideological “inoculation,” by contrast, did not take: he was already working undercover. The two men thus encounter American institutions from different positions and draw opposing political conclusions. The narrator’s American education broadens his knowledge without dislodging his revolutionary allegiance.

Campus Politics and Concealed Service

The narrator’s later return to Occidental as a refugee brings the political atmosphere of his student years into sharper relief. During his first time on campus, antiwar fervor had swept through collegiate life. At his college and others, students chanted “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” The narrator envies their open political passion, even as he must suppress his own beliefs and perform the role of a loyal citizen of the Republic of Vietnam.

By the time he returns, the campus has changed. The students are less interested in politics and world affairs than the previous generation, and the draft no longer places their lives at stake. The quiet, optimistic college he encounters contrasts with the earlier campus shaped by daily images of violence and by students’ sense of responsibility for a war their country was waging. His return makes the decade’s political intensity legible through its absence as much as through its remembered slogans.

At the college, the unnamed narrator’s public biography is carefully edited. A student newspaper presents him as an alumnus, honor-roll graduate, sole Vietnamese student in the college’s history, and rescued refugee. When asked about his military service, he claims he was a quartermaster whose work involved supplies and uniforms, and says he never killed anyone. The account is deliberately misleading: he had served as an infantry officer in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and later moved with the General into the National Police, including its Special Branch. He knows that acknowledging combat or intelligence work would be difficult on a campus marked by antiwar politics.

The Decade in Retrospect

The unnamed narrator’s later life shows how the education of the 1960s persists as a resource and a disguise. His knowledge of American language and custom helps him navigate the college where he works, but it cannot make his military history safe to disclose. His position as a refugee and campus employee therefore carries the unresolved contradiction of his student years: he can interpret American culture with expertise while withholding the political commitments and experiences that shaped his education.

His memories also place the decade against the dispersed life of Vietnamese exiles. He imagines that, had they been allowed to remain together, they might have formed a self-sufficient Little Saigon, with the full range of occupations, beliefs, and social differences of their former society. Instead, bureaucratic dispersal sends them across the country; they gather in basements, churches, backyards, and beaches, trying to recover familiar food and exchange stories about people scattered far from home. The 1960s thus matter not as a self-contained episode but as the narrator’s formative passage between revolutionary service and exile, between the American world he learned to read and the history he could not publicly tell.