Sonny

Sonny is a Vietnamese journalist in exile whose independent reporting unsettles the General’s plans and exposes the contradictions between revolutionary belief, political loyalty, and life in the United States. Once a persuasive student advocate of revolution, he has spent fourteen years abroad and built a newspaper that gives him both a public voice and a dangerous position among the exiles it covers.

Identity and Exile

Sonny’s life in the United States began as a temporary undertaking: he came to study, intending to return with an American education and use it to help liberate his country. By the time he explains this history to the unnamed narrator, fourteen years have passed. The duration itself marks a change he did not plan. Sonny says that living among a foreign people has changed him, leaving him feeling foreign even to himself; exile is not simply distance from home but a pressure that unsettles his sense of who he is and where he belongs.

His past as a revolutionary speaker remains part of how others judge him. During their college days, he delivered speeches about the people and the revolution, and the unnamed narrator remembers him as a convincing advocate. But Sonny does not return to fight. When challenged about that distance between belief and action, he admits fear, cowardice, hypocrisy, weakness, and shame, while also respecting the narrator for returning to fight for his own convictions. His admission does not erase their political disagreement; it makes the cost of exile and the uneven demands of commitment explicit.

In Westminster, Sonny is established as a newspaper publisher and reporter, with a biweekly paper that circulates among the Vietnamese exiles. At a wedding attended by the General and other community figures, he occupies a table closer to the center of influence than the unnamed narrator does, a position shaped in part by the host’s interest in favorable press coverage. Sonny takes notes, interviews a visiting congressman, and hires a photographer for the paper, demonstrating that his reporting has become an organized public enterprise rather than an occasional personal intervention.

Reporting and Political Pressure

Sonny’s journalism soon becomes a point of conflict with The General. In his coverage of the wedding, Sonny reports the speeches and asks whether it is time for talk of war to stop because the war is over. In an earlier article about the crapulent major’s funeral, he notes that police have called the death a robbery-homicide but questions whether an officer of the secret police might have had enemies. The General objects that Sonny should report facts rather than invent or interpret them, while recognizing that the articles are doing more than recording community events: they are putting political possibilities into circulation among people desperate for hope.

The General reads Sonny’s reporting as evidence of both a security breach and a political threat. When an article about the exiles’ Benevolent Fraternity raises questions about its aims, funding, and armed plans in Thailand, The General suspects that Sonny has obtained reliable information from people involved in the organization. The unnamed narrator explains that Sonny can gather fragments simply by moving among the men and collecting what each lets slip. The General acknowledges that the report sounds attractive to readers who want reconciliation, return, and rebuilding, but sees those promises as dangerous because returning veterans could face execution or reeducation. He calls independent reporters troublesome, while Sonny’s paper gives that independence a public platform.

The General also considers turning that platform to his own purposes. He proposes making Sonny’s newspaper a front for the revolutionary vanguard, alongside prospective youth, women’s, and intellectual groups, while organizing the movement in compartmentalized cells. Sonny’s paper is thus imagined as both an independent source of scrutiny and a possible instrument of covert organizing. The plan reveals the General’s willingness to absorb public institutions into clandestine work, even as Sonny’s reporting threatens to expose the movement’s operations.

At the wedding, Sonny’s reporting includes conversation as well as speeches. He asks Sofia Mori whether The General’s use of a familiar revolutionary slogan means anything, and she observes that a slogan can be worn by anyone. Sonny asks permission to use her formulation, showing how readily he turns an exchange into material for his paper. He also recognizes the unequal standards placed on Asian speakers: imperfect English invites ridicule, while a white speaker’s few words in an Asian language can win extravagant admiration. The unnamed narrator adds that fluent English may earn Asian immigrants trust by making it easier for Americans to imagine them as one of their own. Sonny listens and writes the observation down, making the encounter a small demonstration of his method: he gathers telling remarks from people positioned differently within the same community.

Friendship, Love, and Political Confession

When The unnamed narrator returns after seven months without calling, he finds Sonny at Sofia Mori’s apartment, sitting barefoot on the foldable futon with her black cat in his lap. Sonny rises to greet his old friend with an apology in his manner and says that he and Sofia talk about him often. The apartment’s spare furnishings reflect Sofia’s admiration for revolutionary figures who traveled light, while its shelves bow beneath books by women writers and activists. Sonny’s easy presence there makes the narrator confront how little he understands what Sofia wants—and how close she and Sonny have become in his absence.

The narrator turns their reunion into an interrogation about commitment. He recalls Sonny’s college speeches on the people and the revolution, then asks why Sonny did not return to fight, as the narrator did, or go back now. Sofia answers that Sonny’s home is where the people are, including the people among whom he lives in the United States. Sonny does not evade the challenge. He explains that he originally came to study, expecting to return with an American education and help liberate his country, but that fourteen years abroad have altered him. Living among a foreign people, he admits, has made him feel foreign to himself. He confesses fear, cowardice, hypocrisy, weakness, and shame, and acknowledges that he respects the narrator for returning to fight for what he believes.

That admission appears to give the narrator a victory in an argument he had never won against Sonny in college, but it does not win Sofia’s affection. She recognizes Sonny’s conflicted position in her own: she works as a secretary for a white man who addresses her as Miss Butterfly, and she does not openly challenge the condescension. Her sympathy joins them in a shared awareness of compromise rather than in a clean division between brave action and cowardly inaction. The narrator, unable to tell Sofia that he loves her, asks instead whether it is ever too late to fight. Sonny agrees. Sofia’s attention remains fixed on Sonny, and the narrator understands that their relationship is over. He has prevailed in the debate, yet Sonny has again won the audience.

The friendship’s unresolved political and personal tensions surface again when Sonny visits the narrator’s apartment. The narrator has come carrying a concealed pistol, but Sonny thinks the visit concerns Sofia and offers an apology for their earlier conversation. His genuine concern unsettles the narrator, who cannot bring himself to follow the plan and shoot Sonny while he is in the kitchen. Instead, the two sit among Sonny’s typewriter, scattered documents, cigarette smoke, and a clock set to Saigon time. The familiar clock links Sonny’s American life to the homeland he has not returned to, even as his journalism and relationships have taken root in exile.

When the narrator finally tells Sonny that he is a communist and has served as an agent for the revolution, Sonny reacts with disbelief and anger. He suspects that the declaration is a trap designed to make him confess a similar allegiance so that he can be killed or exposed. The narrator insists that he is trying to help, but Sonny interprets the disclosure through the narrator’s jealousy and their history with Sofia. Their old intimacy cannot make Sonny trust a revelation that arrives under the pressure of a concealed assassination plan; the friendship has become a contest in which personal grievance and political suspicion are difficult to separate.

Assassination and Afterlife in the Narrative

The narrator arrives at Sonny’s apartment carrying a concealed Walther P22 with a silencer, but Sonny’s apology about their last conversation and his concern for the narrator’s welfare disrupt the rehearsed plan. When Sonny goes to the kitchen to fetch a drink, the narrator cannot follow and shoot him. The delay makes the eventual killing less like the clean execution Bon had planned and more like a rupture in a friendship that still has the power to stop him—until it does not.

The narrator later fires first at the radio, then wounds Sonny’s raised hand as Sonny realizes the danger and tries to flee. A shot between the shoulder blade and spine staggers him; the narrator catches up and fires behind his ear and into his skull. Sonny falls face-first, his nose breaking against the floor. Even then, the narrator cannot be sure he is dead. He kneels beside Sonny and touches his eye; when it blinks and Sonny’s body shudders, he recoils and fires once more into the temple. The sequence lasts a little over three minutes. Its repeated pauses—to breathe, to approach, to test for life—make killing a struggle against the narrator’s own hesitation as much as a planned act.

Afterward, the narrator leaves with the confidence Bon prescribed, though he has failed to follow Bon’s warning not to look at the stranger in the lobby. Sonny’s death also leaves an absence beyond the apartment: the narrator imagines Sofia waiting for a call that will never come. Later, Sonny appears among the dead who haunt the narrator’s consciousness. In the reeducation camp, he joins the crapulent major in accusing the narrator of having brought himself to ruin through his plotting, while noting that Sofia still grieves for him. The dead Sonny is therefore not simply an image of guilt; he retains the sharpness of an old friend who can judge the narrator and expose the consequences of his actions.

Sonny’s murder completes the reversal in their relationship. The narrator had once challenged him for failing to return to fight, and Sonny had admitted his fear and respect for the narrator’s commitment. Now the narrator, who has presented himself as the committed revolutionary, kills the friend whose life in exile had become a rival form of political engagement. His act suppresses a reporter whose independent work threatens the General’s plans, but it also silences the person who might have understood the narrator’s divided loyalties. Sonny’s subsequent presence in the narrator’s confession keeps that silencing from becoming final: the account preserves him as a friend, journalist, political critic, and accusing witness, not merely as the victim of an operation.