I haven't been this jealous in a long time, though I'm watching a know-it-all auteur director torture yet another Hollywood Vietnam War movie. You know, the kind with the stereotypical peasants in straw conical hats getting yelled and shot at, and the hackneyed U.S. soldiers full of fear and drugs blowing up everything. At least this flick doesn't have an overused prostitute archetype selling the line "me love you long time."

What I'm actually watching is Episode 4 of the HBO miniseries "The Sympathizer," based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. True to the book, the show about a half-French, half-Vietnamese spy is biting commentary on America's Vietnam War literature and movies. Also true to the book, the miniseries doesn't spare us Vietnamese, either. There's plenty of hypocritical guilt on both sides.

Why am I jealous?

"The Sympathizer" stars Robert Downey Jr. and Sandra Oh, but its cast is majority Vietnamese who speak actual Vietnamese lines that appear in English subtitles – throughout the show's seven episodes, with the finale airing Sunday. That's quite a long way from what Hollywood box office numbers dictated when I was in a Vietnam War movie.

Three decades ago, I had 15 minutes' worth of lines in Oliver Stone's "Heaven and Earth," even a scene with Tommy Lee Jones. Then, the American public didn't have an appetite for movies with subtitles. When we Vietnamese actors spoke our lines with other Vietnamese characters, we spoke American English standing in for Vietnamese. When we talked to American characters, however, we had to speak pidgin English.

For me, who at the age of 8 came here with my family as the Vietnam War ended in 1975 and grew up in Phoenix before becoming a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, it was, to say the least, awkward.

It's a different story for "The Sympathizer" cast.

"We had a whole........

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