Jeff Lee

“Unlike Man and Ngo, I was never much of an organizer or agitator, which was one reason, Man would say later, that the committees above decided I would be a mole.

He used the English word, which we had learned not so long ago in our English course, taught by a professor whose greatest joy was diagramming sentences. A mole? I said. The animal that digs underground?

The other kind of mole.

There's another kind?

Of course. To think of a mole as that which digs underground misunderstands the meaning of the mole as a spy. A spy's task is not to hide himself where no one can see him, since he will not be able to see anything himself. A spy's task is to hide where everyone can see him and where he can see everything. Now ask yourself: What can everyone see about you but you yourself cannot?

Enough with the riddles, I said. I give up.

There—he pointed at the middle of my face-in plain sight.

I went to the mirror to see for myself, Man peering over my shoulder. There it indeed was, such a part of myselfI had long ago ceased to notice it. Keep in mind that you will be not just any mole, Man said, but the mole that is the beauty spot on the nose of power itself.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer