The Sympathizer

The Sympathizer

by

Viet Thanh Nguyen

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Ti Ti Character Analysis

One of a “triumvirate” of Saigon call girls, including Mimi and Phi Phi, who awaits a plane to escape from Vietnam, along with the narrator and other evacuees. She is “fragile and petite,” with “a fabulous beehive hairdo” that makes her look taller. She has pale, eggshell-colored skin and dewy eyelashes. The narrator seems to be particularly attracted to Ti Ti.

Ti Ti Quotes in The Sympathizer

The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by Ti Ti or refer to Ti Ti. 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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Ti Ti Quotes in The Sympathizer

The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by Ti Ti or refer to Ti Ti. 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: