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An American Sin
By Frederick Su
Bytewrite, 2001. 337 pages.
It is 1990 and David Wong, a Chinese-American who was born and raised in the United States, is still haunted by his experiences as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam. In this novel, pain and guilt and healing and reconciliation are the forces through which author Frederick Su explores his overriding theme that “Even in war, there is Right and Wrong.”
Many sins are depicted in An American Sin. These sins are not uniquely American — prejudice, racial violence, atrocity in war, domestic neglect — but they have a uniquely American tone in the context of the 1960s and the Vietnam War and its aftermath. And though this ground has been trod often in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, the perspective of Su’s main character offers the opportunity for fresh insight.
Wong’s Asian-ness, a “sin” for which he suffered in youth and high school, plays a key role in his decision to enlist and go to Vietnam. There, that same unavoidable quality leads him to commit an atrocity which, combined with other traumatic wartime experiences and losses, will define his life from here on. Having survived Vietnam he returns to the States and, residing near Seattle, goes through the motions of life, never quite having a career, never quite committed to his marriage. More than twenty years after leaving Vietnam he is compelled to visit a psychiatrist, Erlandson, to begin the process of healing.
His marriage finished, Wong begins relationships with two women and eventually embarks on a cross-country pilgrimage to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In the midst of this simple trajectory, Su writes of Wong’s wartime experiences, especially of his atrocity and of lost comrades whose names he wishes to seek out on the granite wall in Washington, D.C.
Su is at his best when writing about the war. There is a raw honesty in these sections of the book; we sense that little or nothing is being held back, that the author is not sparing our sensibilities when it comes to these harsh realities. Wong’s friendships, especially with Deacon and Muley, epitomize the bonds forged by men at war in the context of incomprehensible violence and unavoidable loss.
In his quest to come to terms with his gut-knowledge that war does not negate the existence of right and wrong, Wong takes many wrong turns and is blessed by chance encounters — while on his pilgrimage to the Wall — that provide greater insight than he will find in his shrink’s office or in his lovers’ beds. A fellow American veteran offers room and board for several days in Montana, and slowly reveals that he played a small but pivotal role in an infamous event; and a Chinese warrior from the Second World War demonstrates the possibility of making right one’s terrible wrongs.
An American Sin is driven by David Wong’s desperate and compelling need to come to terms with the great wrong he has committed, a wrong that he cannot write off to “wartime expedience.” Despite some important flaws in structure and style, Wong’s quest had me turning the pages and wondering, Is he tilting at windmills, or will he slay a real dragon?
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