The narrator is a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army who later becomes a refugee in the United States

Sympathetic to the bravery of his adversaries that he has infiltrated; neither fully comfortable as a Vietnamese or European through his father; committed to his communist ideologies but privately preferring the relative comforts of California... he struggles to understand where he fits in, and what he believes

Nguyen is quite open about the ugly undersides of everyone involved in the "American War", as it was called in Viet Nam. There is a lot of heavy sarcasm on these pages, but don't be misled that this is a "funny" book