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The Sympathizer Recap: American Nightmare


In case we forgot, America was (even more) racist in the 1970s.

Overt racism and microaggressions were all too common in the 1970s, and American race relations, even in a university setting, had yet to adopt the palatable veneer of today’s DEI-approved language, wherein racial contemptuousness is simply better concealed. He tells Ms. Mori that, as a young boy, he’d once stolen a piece of raw squid from the kitchen to masturbate with — a detail that recalls a spectacularly tentacular scene in Park’s 2003 movie Oldboy, where an actor slurps down several live octopi. They attended college together, although they had a disagreement over a Ho Chi Minh quote: Sonny is more aligned with the Communists while the Captain was “a CIA scholarship student.” At the grand opening, the General takes the opportunity to “reestablish [his] leadership,” delivering a speech that implies the graffiti on his new storefront is the work of a mole.

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