The Sympathizer

The Sympathizer

by

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The Sympathizer makes teaching easy.

Mimi Character Analysis

One of a “triumvirate” of Saigon call girls, including Ti Ti and Phi Phi, who awaits a plane to escape from Vietnam, along with the narrator and other evacuees. She is tall with long, straight hair and pink nail polish on her fingernails and toenails. She has a “throaty voice” and speaks with a Hue dialect. Her voice causes the narrator to swoon.

Mimi Quotes in The Sympathizer

The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by Mimi or refer to Mimi . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Cultural Duality Theme Icon
).
Chapter 3 Quotes

By this degree, the three call girls were troupers, which could not be said of 70 or 80 percent of the prostitutes in the capital and outlying cities […] Most were poor, illiterate country girls with no means of making a living except to live as ticks on the fur of the nineteen-year-old American GI […] Now am I daring to accuse American strategic planners of deliberately eradicating peasant villages in order to smoke out the girls who would have little choice but to sexually service the same boys who bombed, shelled, strafed, torched, pillaged, or merely forcibly evacuated said villages? I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth […] ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Mimi , Ti Ti, Phi Phi, Sarge
Page Number: 37-38
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Sympathizer PDF

Mimi Quotes in The Sympathizer

The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by Mimi or refer to Mimi . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Cultural Duality Theme Icon
).
Chapter 3 Quotes

By this degree, the three call girls were troupers, which could not be said of 70 or 80 percent of the prostitutes in the capital and outlying cities […] Most were poor, illiterate country girls with no means of making a living except to live as ticks on the fur of the nineteen-year-old American GI […] Now am I daring to accuse American strategic planners of deliberately eradicating peasant villages in order to smoke out the girls who would have little choice but to sexually service the same boys who bombed, shelled, strafed, torched, pillaged, or merely forcibly evacuated said villages? I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth […] ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Mimi , Ti Ti, Phi Phi, Sarge
Page Number: 37-38
Explanation and Analysis: