THE SYMPATHIZER part2

from Chapter 12 to Chapter 23 (the End)

THE SYMPATHIZER

Nguyên tác Anh ngữ by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove Press
New York
2015
an imprint of Grove Atlantic 154 West 14th Street New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West

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CHAPTER 12

By the time I emerged from the hospital, my services were no longer needed, and I was not invited back to the set for the mopping-up operation that took place after the shooting was completed. Instead, I found that an airplane ticket had been reserved for my instant departure from the Philippines, and I spent the entire trip brooding over the problem of representation. Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory’s laminated floor? Still smarting from my wounds even now, I cannot help but wonder, writing this confession, whether I own my own representation or whether you, my confessor, do.
The sight of Bon waiting for me at the Los Angeles airport made me feel a little better. He looked exactly the same, and when I opened our apartment door I was relieved to see that while it had not improved, neither had it worsened. The Frigidaire remained our decrepit diorama’s main attraction, thoughtfully stocked by Bon with enough beer to cure me of my jet lag, though not enough to cure me of the unexpected sadness massaged into my pores. I was still awake when he went to sleep, leaving me with the latest letter from my Parisian aunt. Before I retired, I dutifully composed my report to her. The Hamlet was complete, I wrote. But, more important, the Movement had established a revenue source.
A restaurant? I had said when Bon broke the news over our first round of beer. That’s what I said. Madame’s actually a good cook.
Hers was the last decent Vietnamese food I had eaten, reason enough for me to call the General the next day and congratulate him on Madame’s new enterprise. As expected, he urged me to come for a welcome back meal at the restaurant, which I found on Chinatown’s Broadway, bracketed by a tea shop and an herbalist. Once we had surrounded the Chinese in Cholon, the General said from behind his cash register. Now we’re surrounded by them. He sighed, his hands resting on the keys of the register, ready to bash out a harsh tune on that makeshift piano. Remember when I came here with nothing? Of course I remember, I said, even though the General had not actually come here with nothing. Madame had sewn a considerable number of gold ounces into the lining of her clothes and her children’s, and the General had strapped a money belt full of dollars around his waist. But amnesia was as American as apple pie, and it was much preferred by Americans over both humble pie and the fraught foods of foreign intruders. Like us, Americans were suspicious of unfamiliar food, which they identified with the strangers who brought them. We instinctively knew that in order for Americans to find refugees like us acceptable, they first had to find our food digestible (not to mention affordable and pronounceable). Because it was no easy thing to overcome this digestive skepticism or make a profit from it, a dimension of courage existed in General and Madame’s enterprise, as I told him.
Courageous? I find it degrading. Did you ever foresee the day when I would own a restaurant? The General gestured at the small confines of what had previously been a chop suey house, brown measles of grease still speckling the walls. No, sir, I said. Well, neither did I. It could at least have been a nice restaurant, instead of this. He spoke with such pathetic resignation I felt a renewed sympathy for him. Nothing had been done to renovate the restaurant, the linoleum floor battered, the yellow paint dull, the overhead lighting flat and harsh. The waiters were, he pointed out, veterans. That one’s Special Forces, and that one’s Airborne. In trucker caps and ill-fitting dress shirts that must have been rummaged from a thrift store, or bestowed on them by a strapping sponsor, the waiters did not look like killers. They looked like the anonymous men with bad haircuts who delivered Chinese takeout, the men who waited nervously in hospital emergency rooms without insurance, who fled the scenes of car accidents because they did not have licenses or registration. They wobbled as much as the table that the General led me to, its base uneven. Madame herself brought me a bowl of the pho special and joined us, both watching me eat one of the best examples I had ever indulged in of our national soup. It’s still delicious, I said after the first sip and bite. Madame remained unmoved, as glum as her husband. You should be proud of such . . . such soup.
We should be proud of selling soup? Madame said. Or owning a hole-in-the-wall? That’s what one of our customers called this place. We don’t even own it, said the General. We lease it. Their moroseness was matched by their appearance. Madame’s hair was pinned back in a librarian’s stale bun, when before it had almost always been worn in a glamorous bouffant or beehive that recalled the go-go days of the early sixties. She, like the General, wore off-the-rack clothing consisting of a mannish polo shirt, shapeless khakis, and the American footwear of choice, sneakers. They wore, in short, what almost every other middle-aged American couple I had encountered at the supermarket, the post office, or the gas station wore. The sartorial impression was to make them, like many American adults, look like overgrown children, the effect enhanced when these adults were spotted, as they often were, sucking on extra-large sodas. These petit bourgeois restaurateurs were not the aristocratic patriots I had lived with for five years and for whom I felt not only some fear but also a degree of affection. Their sadness was my sadness, too, so I turned the conversation toward a topic I knew might lift their spirits.
So, I said, what’s this about the restaurant funding the revolution?
A wonderful idea, isn’t it? said the General, brightening. Seeing Madame’s eyes turn to the ceiling, I suspected that it was, in fact, her idea. Hole-in-the-wall or not, this is the first such restaurant in this city, he said. Perhaps even in this country. As you can see, our countrymen are starving for a taste of home. Although it was only eleven thirty in the morning, every table and booth was occupied by people eating soup with chopsticks in one hand and spoon in the other. The restaurant was redolent with the fragrance of home and resonant with its sounds, the chatter of our native tongue competing with heartfelt slurping. This is a nonprofit enterprise, so to speak, said the General. All profits go to the Movement.
When I asked who knew about this, Madame said, Everyone and no one. It’s a secret, but an open secret. People come here and their soup is spiced with the idea they’re helping the revolution. As for the revolution, the General said, everything is almost in place, even the uniforms. Madame is in charge of those, as well as the women’s auxiliary and the making of flags. What a spectacle she can create! You missed the Tet celebration she organized in Orange County. You should have seen it! I have photos to show you. How the people cried and cheered when they saw our men in camouflage and uniform, carrying our flag. We’ve assembled the first companies of volunteers, all veterans. They train every weekend. From this group, we’re going to cull the best for the next step. He leaned over the table to whisper the rest. We’re sending a reconnaissance team to Thailand. They’ll link up with our forward field base and reconnoiter a path overland to Vietnam. Claude says the time is nearly right.
I poured myself a cup of tea. Is Bon a part of this team?
Of course. I hate to lose such a good worker, but he’s the best we have for this kind of work. What do you think?
I was thinking that the only route overland from Thailand involved trekking through Laos or Cambodia, avoiding established roads and choosing the treacherous terrain of disease-ridden jungles, forests, and mountains where the only inhabitants would be brooding monkeys, man-eating tigers, and hostile, frightened locals unlikely to give aid. These badlands were the perfect setting for a movie, and a horrible one for a mission that was almost certainly do or die. I would not have to tell Bon this. My crazy friend had volunteered not despite the fact that his chances of returning were slim, but because of them. I looked at my hand, at the red scar engraved there. I was suddenly aware of the outline of my body, of the sensation of the chair underneath my thighs, of the fragility of the force holding together my body and my life. It would not take much to destroy that force, which most of us took for granted until the moment when we could not. What I think, I said, not allowing myself to deliberate any further, is that if Bon is going I should go, too.
The General clapped his hands together in delight and turned to Madame. What did I tell you? I knew he would volunteer. Captain, I never had any doubt. But you know as well as I that you’ll do better staying here and working with me on the planning and logistics, not to mention the fund-raising and the diplomacy. I’ve told the Congressman the community is gathering funds to send an aid team to help the refugees in Thailand. That is, in a sense, what we’re doing, but we’ll need to continue persuading our supporters of that cause.
Or at least give them a reason to pretend to believe that is our cause, I said.
The General nodded with satisfaction. Exactly right! I know you’re disappointed, but it’s for the best. You’ll be more useful here than there, and Bon can take care of himself. Now look, it’s nearly noon. I think it’s the right time for a beer, don’t you?
Visible over Madame’s shoulder was a clock, hanging on the wall between a flag and a poster. The poster was for a new brand of beer, featuring three bikini-clad young women sprouting breasts the size and shape of children’s balloons; the flag was of the defeated Republic of Vietnam, three bold red horizontal stripes on a vivid field of yellow. This was the flag, as the General had noted more than once to me, of the free Vietnamese people. I had seen the flag countless times before, and posters like that one often, but I had never seen this type of clock, carved from hardwood into the shape of our homeland. For this clock that was a country, and this country that was a clock, the minute and hour hands pivoted in the south, the numbers of the dial a halo around Saigon. Some craftsman in exile had understood that this was exactly the timepiece his refugee countrymen desired. We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return?
Speaking of punctuality, I said to Madame, your clock is set to the wrong time. No, she said, rising to fetch the beer. It’s set to Saigon time.
Of course it was. How could I not have seen it? Saigon time was fourteen hours off, although if one judged time by this clock, it was we who were fourteen hours off. Refugee, exile, immigrant— whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.
After lunch, I debriefed the General and Madame on my Philippine adventures, which simultaneously lightened their gloominess and heightened their sense of resentment. Resentment was an antidote to gloominess, as it was for sadness, melancholy, despair, etc. One way to forget a certain kind of pain was to feel another kind of pain, as when the doctor examining you for mandatory military service (an exam that you never fail, unless you are afflicted by wealth) slaps you on one butt cheek while injecting you in the other cheek. The one thing I did not tell the General and Madame—besides myself nearly meeting the fate of one of those roasted ducks hung from its anus in the neighboring Chinese eatery’s window—was that I had been paid compensation for my near butchering. The morning after the extras had come bearing gifts, I had received two other visitors, Violet and a tall, thin white man in a powder-blue suit, his paisley tie as fat as Elvis Presley and his shirt the rich yellow color of urine after a meal of asparagus. How do you feel? she asked. All white, I whispered, although I could speak perfectly fine. She looked at me suspiciously and said, We’re all concerned about you. He wanted you to know he would have come himself but President Marcos is visiting the set today.
He who did not need to be named was, of course, the Auteur. I merely nodded, sagely and sadly, and said, I understand, though the mere mention of him infuriated me. This is the best hospital in Manila, the man in the suit said, flashing a searchlight of a smile onto my face. We all want the best possible care for you. How are you feeling? To tell you the truth, I said, proceeding to lie, I feel terrible. What a shame, he said. Let me introduce myself. He produced a pristine white business card with edges so sharp I feared a paper cut. I am a representative for the film studio. We want you to know we are paying all the bills for your hospital care.
What happened?
You don’t remember? Violet asked. An explosion. A lot of explosions.
It was an accident. I have the report here, said the representative, lifting a liver-colored briefcase high enough for me to see its gleaming gold buckles. Such efficiency! I skimmed the report. Its details were not as significant as what its existence proved, that fast work of this type, as in our homeland, was only possible by an application of grease to the palms.
Am I lucky to be alive?
Extremely lucky, he said. You have your life, your well-being, and a check in my briefcase for the sum of five thousand dollars. According to the medical reports I’ve seen, you suffered smoke inhalation, some scrapes and bruises, a few mild burns, a bump on your head, and a concussion. Nothing broken, nothing ruptured, nothing permanent. But the studio wants to ensure that all your needs are met. The representative opened the briefcase and produced a stapled document of white papers and a long slip of green paper, the check. Of course, you will have to sign a receipt, as well as this document releasing the studio from any future obligations.
Was five thousand dollars the worth of my miserable life? Admittedly it was a considerable amount, more than I had ever seen at any one time. That was what they were counting on, but even in my dazed state, I knew better than to settle for the first offer. Thank you for this generous pledge, I said. It is decent of the studio to worry on my behalf, to be so concerned with me. But as you may know, or maybe you do not, I am my extended family’s principal support. Five thousand dollars is wonderful if I thought only of myself, but an Asian—here I paused and allowed a faraway look to come into my eyes, the better to give them time to imagine the vast genealogical banyan tree extending above me, overshadowing me with the oppressive weight of generations come to root on the top of my head—an Asian cannot think just about himself.
So I’ve heard, said the representative. The family is everything. Like us Italians.
Yes, you Italians! The Asian must think of his mother, his father. His siblings, his grandparents. His cousins, his village. If word got out of my good luck . . . it would be endless. The favors. The requests for fifty dollars here, a hundred dollars there. Hands tugging at me from all directions. I could not decline. So you see the situation I find myself in. It would be better to take none of the money. I would spare myself these emotional hardships. Or the alternative. To have enough money to take care of all those favors as well as myself.
The representative waited for me to continue, but I waited for him to reply. At last he gave in and said, Not being aware of the complications of Asian families, I am also not aware of the appropriate sum that might satisfy all your familial obligations, which I understand are important to your culture, and which I respect greatly.

I waited for him to continue, but he waited for me to reply. I cannot be certain, I said. But although without certainty, I believe twenty thousand dollars would suffice. To satisfy any needs of my relatives. Anticipated and unanticipated.
Twenty thousand dollars? The representative’s eyebrows performed a graceful yoga pose, arching their backs in disturbingly steep concern. Oh, if you only knew the actuarial charts as I know them! For twenty thousand dollars you must lose at least a finger or, preferably, a larger appendage. If we are speaking of less visible matters, a vital organ or one of your five senses will do.
But in fact, ever since I had awoken from the explosion, something had been nagging at me that I could not name, an itch that was not physical. Now I knew what it was—I had forgotten something, but what that something was, I did not know. Of the three types of forgetting, this was the worst. To know what one had forgotten was common, as was the case with dates of history, mathematical formulas, and people’s names. To forget without knowing one has forgotten must be even more common, or maybe less, but it is merciful: in this case one cannot realize what is lost. But to know that one has forgotten something without knowing what that something was made me shudder. I have lost something, I said, pain getting the better of me and making itself audible in my voice. I’ve lost a piece of my mind.
Violet and the representative exchanged glances. I’m afraid I don’t understand, he said. A portion of my memory, I said, completely erased, from the explosion until now.
Unfortunately, you may find that hard to prove.
How to prove to someone else that one has forgotten something, or that one has known something and now no longer knows it? Nevertheless, I persisted with the representative. Even in my bedridden state, the old instincts remained. Like rolling one’s own cigarettes, or rolling one’s R’s, lying was a skill and a habit not easily forgotten. This was true also for the representative, whose kindred tricky spirit I recognized. In negotiations, as in interrogations, a lie was not only acceptable but also expected. All sorts of situations exist where one tells lies in order to reach an acceptable truth, and our conversation continued thus until we agreed on the mutually acceptable sum of ten thousand dollars, which, if being only half what I asked for, was twice their original offer. After the representative wrote a new check, I signed the documents and we traded farewell pleasantries that were worth as little as the trading cards of unknown baseball players. At the door, Violet paused with her hand on the knob, looked over her shoulder at me—was there ever a more romantic pose, even with a woman such as her?—and said, You know we couldn’t have done this movie without you.
To believe her was to believe in a femme fatale, in an elected official, in little green men from outer space, in the benevolence of the police, in holy men like my father, who not only had holes in his socks but also had a hole somewhere in his soul. But I wanted to believe, and what did it hurt to believe in her little white lie? Nothing. I was left with the beat of a trashy discotheque in my head and a green check that proved I was somebody, worth more dead than alive. All it cost me, unless they had lied, was a lump on my head and a portion of my memory, something of which I already had too much. Even so, why did I suspect that an operation had been performed on me while I was under the influence, leaving me with numbness more disturbing than pain? Why did I feel some phantom limb of memory, an absence on which I kept trying to rest my weight?
Returning to California with these questions unanswered, I cashed my check and left half in my heretofore barren bank account. The day I visited the General and Madame, the other half was in an envelope in my pocket. Later that afternoon I drove to Monterey Park, where, amid that city’s suburbs, soft and bland as tofu, I had an appointment with the crapulent major’s widow. I confess that my plan was to give her the money in my pocket, money that I admit could have been used for more revolutionary purposes. But what is more revolutionary than helping one’s enemy and his kin? What is more radical than forgiveness? Of course he was not the one asking for forgiveness; I was, for what I had done to him. There was no sign of what I had done to him in the carport, nor did the apartment building’s microclimate shimmer with the atmospheric disturbance of his ghost. Although I did not believe in God, I believed in ghosts. I knew this to be true because while I did not fear God, I feared ghosts. God would never appear to me whereas the crapulent major’s ghost had, and when his door opened, I held my breath, fearing that it might be his hand on the doorknob. But it was only his widow who was there to greet me, a poor woman whom bereavement had thickened rather than starved.
Captain! It’s so good to see you! She invited me to sit on her floral sofa, covered in transparent plastic that squeaked whenever I shifted my weight. Already waiting for me on the coffee table were a pot of Chinese tea and a plate of French ladyfingers. Have a ladyfinger, she urged, pressing the treats on me. I knew the brand, the exact company that manufactured the petit écolier biscuits of my childhood. No one could make a guilty pleasure like the French. Ladyfingers had been my mother’s favorite, given to her by my father as a lure, although she used the word “gift” when she mentioned it to me in my teenage years. I had enough consciousness to realize what a priest bearing ladyfingers to a child meant, for my mother was nothing but a child at thirteen when my father came wooing. In some cultures today or in the past, thirteen was good enough for mattress, marriage, and motherhood, or perhaps just two out of three on some occasions, but not in contemporary France or our homeland. Not that I did not understand my father, who at the time he fathered me was a few years older than I was now with a ladyfinger melting in my mouth. A girl at thirteen—I admit to having thoughts on occasion about particularly mature American girls, some of whom at thirteen were more developed than college girls in our homeland. But these were thoughts, not deeds. We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts.
Have another ladyfinger, the crapulent major’s widow urged, picking one up and leaning forward to thrust it in my face. She would have forced that sweet digit between my lips with maternal urgency but I intercepted her hand, taking the ladyfinger for myself. They’re delicious, absolutely delicious, I said. Let me just have a sip of tea first. At this, the good lady burst into tears. What’s the matter? I said. Those are the exact words he’d say, she said, which made me nervous, as if the crapulent major was even now manipulating me from behind the curtain separating the theater of life from the backstage of the afterlife.
I miss him so much! she cried. I squeaked my way across the plastic expanse between us and patted her on the shoulder as she wept. I could not help but see the crapulent major as I last encountered him in person if not in spirit, on his back with the third eye in his forehead, his other eyes open and blank. If God did not exist, then neither did divine punishment, but this meant nothing to ghosts who did not need God. I did not need to confess to a God I did not believe in, but I did need to appease the soul of a ghost whose face even now gazed at me from the altar on the side table. There in full cadet uniform was the young crapulent major, photographed at that phase before his first chin even dreamed of grandfathering a third chin, dark eyes staring at me as I comforted his widow. All he had to eat in the afterlife was a navel orange frosted with mold, a dusty can of Spam, and a roll of Lifesavers, arrayed in front of his photograph and illuminated by the incongruous, blinking Christmas lights she had hung on the altar ’s edge. Inequality ruled even in the afterlife, where the descendants of the rich feted them with heaping platters of fresh fruit, bottles of champagne, and cans of pâté. Genuinely devoted descendants burned paper offerings that included not only the usual cutouts of cars and homes, but also Playboy centerfolds. The hot body of a pliant woman was what a man wanted in the cold, long afterlife, and I swore to the crapulent major I would make him an offering of the fantastic, pneumatic Miss June.
To his widow, I said, I promised your husband that if the need ever arose I would do my utmost to take care of you and your children. Everything else I told her was the truth, my supposed accident in the Philippines and my reward, half of it in the envelope I pressed on her. She resisted gracefully but when I said, Think of the children, she gave in. There was nothing after that but to surrender to her demand that I see the children. They were in the bedroom, asleep as all children should be. They’re my joy, she whispered as we gazed down on the twins. They’re keeping me alive in these difficult days, Captain. Thinking about them I don’t think about myself so much, or my dear, beloved husband. I said, They’re beautiful, which may or may not have been a lie. They were not beautiful to me, but they were beautiful to her. I admit to not being an aficionado of children, having been one and having found my cohort and myself generally despicable. Unlike many, I was not intent on reproducing myself, deliberately or accidentally, since one of myself was more than enough for me to handle. But these children, just a year old, were still unconscious of their guilt. In their sleeping, alien faces I could see them as the naked and easily frightened new immigrants they were, so recently exiled into our world.
The only advantage I had over these twins was that I had had a father in my childhood to teach me about guilt, and they would not. My father taught classes for the children of the diocese, which my mother forced me to attend. In his schoolroom I learned my Bible and the history of my divine Father, the story of my Gallic forefathers, and the catechism of the Catholic Church. At that time, when my years could be counted on the fingers of two hands, I was naive and ignorant of the fact that this father in his black cassock, this holy man who sweated in his unnatural garb to save us from our tropical sins, was also my father. When I did know, it recast everything I learned from him, beginning with this most basic tenet of our faith, drilled into our young platoon of Catholics by the father as he walked before our class, reading our lips as we collectively droned the answer:
Q. What is the sin called that we inherit from our first parents?
A. The sin that we inherit from our first parents is called Original Sin.
For me, the truly important Question that had always preoccupied me was related to this Original Sin, for it concerned my father’s identity. I was eleven when I learned the Answer, my knowledge triggered by an incident on the dusty grounds of the church after Sunday school, a territory where we children reenacted on one another many a biblical atrocity. As we watched the father’s imported bulldog thrust away at a whining female companion in the shade of a eucalyptus tree, his tongue hanging, the pink balloon of his enormous scrotum swinging back and forth with hypnotic rhythm, one of my more knowledgeable classmates offered a supplement to this lesson in sex education. A dog and a bitch, that’s natural, he said. But him—and here he turned scornful eyes and finger on me— he’s like what happens when a cat and a dog do that. Everyone’s attention turned to me. I stood there as if on a boat drifting away from the shore where they all waited, seeing myself through the eyes of others as a creature neither dog nor cat, neither human nor animal.
A dog and a cat, this little comedian said to me. A dog and a cat—
When I punched him in the nose, the comedian bled but was silent, shocked, his eyes momentarily crossed as he tried to see the damage. When I punched him again in the nose, the blood gushed, and this time the comedian cried out loudly. I punched him again, working my way from ears to cheeks to solar plexus and then to the hunched shoulders that he drew up around his head to protect himself when he fell to the ground and I fell on top of him. Our peers gathered around us, yelling, screaming, and laughing as I continued to pummel him until my knuckles stung. Not a single one of these witnesses offered to intervene on behalf of the comedian, who finally stopped me when his sobs began sounding like the strangled laughter of someone hearing the best joke ever told. When I stood up, the yelling, screaming, and laughing subsided, and in the adorable faces of those little monsters I could see fear, if not respect. I walked home in confusion, wondering what, exactly, I had learned, unable to put it into words. My mind had no room for anything but the obscene picture of a dog mounting a cat, her animal face replaced by that of no one else but my mother, an image so upsetting that when I arrived home and saw her I burst into tears and confessed everything that had transpired that afternoon.
My child, my child, you are not unnatural, my mother said, clutching me to her as I sobbed against the cushion of her bosom, musky with her distinct fragrance. You are God’s gift to me. Nothing or no one could be more natural. Now listen to me, child. When I looked up into her eyes through the mist of my tears, I saw that she, too, was weeping. You have always wanted to know who your father is, and I told you that when you knew, you would be a man. You would have to say good-bye to your childhood. Are you sure you want to know?
When a mother asks her boy if he is ready to be a man, can he say anything else but yes? So I nodded and held her tight, my chin on her breast and my cheek on her collarbone.
You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you. Your father is . . .
She said his name. Seeing the confusion in my eyes, she said, I was very young when I was his maid. He was always very kind to me, and I was grateful. He taught me how to read and how to count in his language, when my parents couldn’t afford to send me to school. We spent a great deal of time together in the evenings, and he would tell me stories of France and his childhood. I could see he was very lonely. He was the only one of his kind in our village, and it seemed to me that I was the only one of my kind, too.
I broke away from my mother’s bosom, covering my ears. I no longer wanted to hear, but I was mute, and my mother continued talking. I no longer wanted to see, but images floated before me even though I closed my eyes. He taught me the Word of God, she said, and I learned to read and to count by studying the Bible and memorizing the Ten Commandments. We read sitting at each other’s side at his table, by lamplight. And one night . . . but you see, that is why you are not unnatural, child. God Himself sent you, because God would never have permitted what happened between your father and me unless He had some role for you in His Great Plan. That is what I believe and what you must, too. You have a Destiny. Remember that Jesus washed the feet of Mary Magdalene, and welcomed the lepers to his side, and stood against the Pharisees and the powerful. The meek shall inherit the earth, child, and you are one of the meek.
If my mother saw me now, standing over the crapulent major’s children, would she still think me one of the meek? And as for these sleeping children, how long would they stay unawake to the guilt they already bore, to the sins and crimes they were doomed to commit? Was it not possible that each of them in his little heart, as they tussled next to each other for their mother’s breasts, had already yearned, however briefly, for the disappearance of the other? But the widow was not waiting for an answer to these questions as she stood next to me, peering down at her womb’s wonders. She was waiting for me to sprinkle on them the holy water of meaningless compliments, a necessary baptism that I reluctantly gave and that so delighted the widow she insisted on cooking me dinner. I needed little encouragement, given my steady diet of frozen foods, and it soon became clear why the crapulent major had grown ever fatter under her love. Her shaking beef was beyond compare, her stir-fried morning glory evoked my mother’s, her winter melon soup soothed my guilty agitation. Even her white rice was fluffier than what I usually ate, the equivalent of goose down when I had slept for years on synthetic fiber. Eat! Eat! Eat! she cried, and in that command it was impossible not to hear my mother’s voice urging the same no matter how meager our spread. So I ate until I could eat no more, and when I was done, she insisted there was still the unfinished plate of ladyfingers.
Afterward I drove to a nearby liquor store, an immigrant outpost operated by an impassive Sikh with an impressive handlebar mustache I could never hope to replicate. I bought a copy of Playboy, a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, and an achingly lovely see-through bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. That name, with its echoes of Lenin, Stalin, and Kalashnikov, made me feel better about my capitalist indulgences. Vodka was one of the three things the Soviet Union made that were suitable for export, not counting political exiles; the other two were weapons and novels. Weapons I professionally admired, but vodka and novels I loved. A nineteenth-century Russian novel and vodka accompanied each other perfectly. Reading a novel while one sipped vodka legitimized the drink, while the drink made the novel seem much shorter than it truly was. I would have returned to the store to buy such a novel, but instead of The Brothers Karamazov it stocked Sgt. Rock comics.
It was then, hesitating in the parking lot with my arms wrapped protectively around my paper bag of treasures, that I spotted a pay phone. The urge to call Sofia Mori nagged at me. I had been delaying it for some perverse reason, playing hard to get even though she had no idea I was here to be gotten. Rather than waste a dime and call her, I jumped into my car and drove across the great expanse of Los Angeles. I felt somewhat at peace after having made my blood payment to the crapulent major’s widow, and as I sped down the freeway, sparse with traffic in the postprandial hours, I heard the crapulent major’s ghost chortling in my ear. I parked my car down the crowded street from Ms. Mori’s apartment and took my paper bag of treasures with me, except for the Playboy, which I left in the rear seat for the crapulent major’s ghost, opened to the centerfold of Miss June sprawled fetchingly on a stack of hay with nothing on except cowgirl boots and a neckerchief.
Ms. Mori’s neighborhood was as I remembered it, beige houses with fading toupees of lawn and gray apartment buildings with the institutional charm of army barracks. The lights glowed in her apartment, the scarlet curtains pulled shut. When she opened the door, the first thing I noticed was her hair, grown down to her shoulders and no longer permed but straight, rendering her younger than I remembered, an effect compounded by her simple clothes, a black T-shirt and blue jeans. It’s you! she cried, opening her arms to me. When we embraced, it all came back, her use of baby powder instead of perfume, her perfect body temperature, her small, plush breasts, usually encased in bras well padded enough to handle fragile objects, but tonight free of all such restraint. Why didn’t you call? Come in. She pulled me inside the familiar, minimally decorated apartment, furnished in the spirit of revolutionary self-denial she admired in the likes of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, men who traveled light. The largest piece of furniture she owned was a foldable futon in the living room on which her black cat usually sat. This cat had always kept her distance from me. This was not due to fear or respect, for whenever Ms. Mori and I made love, the cat perched on the nightstand and evaluated my performance with disdainful green eyes, occasionally spreading a paw and licking between her bared claws. The cat was present, but she was not lounging directly on the futon. Instead she lay on the lap of Sonny, who sat on the futon with legs crossed underneath himself, barefooted. He grinned apologetically, but nevertheless exuded an aura of ownership as he shooed the cat off his lap and rose. It’s good to see you again, old friend, he said, extending his hand. Sofia and I talk often about you.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 13

What did I expect? I had been missing for seven months and had never once phoned, the extent of my communication a few scribbled postcards. As for Ms. Mori, she was dedicated to neither monogamy nor man, much less to any one man in particular. She declared her allegiances through the most prominent furnishings in her living room, bookshelves bowed as the backs of coolies with the weight of Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, Angela Davis, and other women who had wrestled with the Woman Question. Western men from Adam to Freud had also asked that question, although they had phrased it as “What does woman want?” At least they had considered the subject. It occurred to me only then that we Vietnamese men never even bothered to ask what woman wanted. I had not even a germ of an idea about what Ms. Mori wanted. Perhaps I would have had a dim sense if I had read some of these books, but all I knew of them were the summaries found on their dust jackets. My intuition told me Sonny had actually read some of them in their entirety, and taking a seat next to him I could feel an anaphylactic reaction to his presence prickling on my skin, an eruption of hostility inflamed by his genial smile.
What do you have there? Sonny said, nodding at the paper bag on my lap. Ms. Mori had gone to fetch another wineglass. A pair already sat on the coffee table, along with an open bottle of red wine, a corkscrew with the wine-bloodied cork still skewered on it, and a photo album. Cigarettes, I said, taking out the carton. And vodka.
I had no choice but to offer Sonny the vodka, which he showed to Ms. Mori when she returned from the kitchen. You shouldn’t have, she said brightly, putting it next to the bottle of wine. The beautiful, transparent Stolichnaya maintained a stoic Russian demeanor as we regarded it in silence. Every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it. I had planned to read that bottle’s message with Ms. Mori, as was obvious to her and Sonny, and we might have all simply sat there soaking in the frigid waters of embarrassment if it had not been for Ms. Mori’s grace. It’s very thoughtful of you, she said. Especially as we’ve almost run out of cigarettes. I’ll have one, if you don’t mind.
So, Sonny said, how was your trip to the Philippines?
I want to hear all about it, Ms. Mori said, pouring me a glass of wine and refilling theirs. I’ve always wanted to go ever since my uncle talked about his time there in the war. I cracked open the carton and offered her a cigarette, took one myself, and began my well-rehearsed tale. The cat yawned in regal contempt, climbed back onto Sonny’s lap, stretched out, sneered at me, then fell asleep from boredom. I had the distinct impression that Sonny and Ms. Mori were only marginally more interested as they listened to me, smoked my cigarettes, and asked some polite questions. Dispirited, I did not even have the heart to tell them about my near-death experience, and my story tapered off without a climax. My gaze fell on the photo album, which was open to a page of black- and-white photos depicting middle-class scenes from a few decades earlier: a father and a mother at home in their lace-covered armchairs, their sons and daughters playing the piano, crocheting, gathered around a dining table for a meal, wearing the fashion and hairstyle of the thirties. Who are they? I said. My family, said Ms. Mori. Your family? The answer stupefied me. Of course I knew that Ms. Mori had a family, but she rarely talked about them, and certainly had never shown me photographs of them. All I knew was that they lived far north of here, in one of the dusty, hot San Joaquin valley towns. That’s Betsy and that’s Eleanor, Sonny said, leaning over to point at the relevant faces. Here’s George and Abe. Poor Abe.
I looked at Ms. Mori, sipping her wine. He died in the war?

No, she said. He refused to go to war. So he got sent to prison instead. He’s still bitter about it. Not that he shouldn’t be. God knows I’d probably be bitter if I were him. I’d just like for him to be happier than he is. The war’s thirty years past and it still lives with him, even though he didn’t go and fight.
He fought, Sonny said. He just fought at home. Who can blame him? The government puts his family in a camp and then asks him to go fight for the country? I’d be mad as hell, too.
A mist of smoke now separated the three of us. The faint eddies of our thoughts took fleeting, evanescent material shape, and for a brief moment a ghostly version of myself hovered over Sonny’s head. Where’s Abe now? I said.
Japan. Not that he’s any happier there than he was here. After the war ended and he was freed, he thought he’d go back to his people, the way that he’d been told to all his life by white people, even though he was born here. So he went and found out that the people in Japan didn’t think he was one of them, either. To them he’s one of us, and to us he’s one of them. Neither one thing nor another.
Maybe our Department Chair can help him, I said.
God, I hope you’re joking, said Ms. Mori. Of course I was joking, but as an unwilling partner in this complicated ménage à trois I was off my rhythm. I steadied myself by finishing my wine. When I looked at the wine bottle, I saw that it was empty. Would you like some of the vodka? Ms. Mori said. Her gaze was loaded with pity, which was ever only served lukewarm. Longing flooded the basement of my heart, and all I could do was nod mutely. She went to the kitchen and retrieved clean tumblers for the vodka while Sonny and I sat in awkward silence. The vodka, when served, was as pungent and wonderful as I had imagined it would be, the paint thinner I needed to strip down the stained, flaking walls of my interior.
Maybe we’ll go to Japan someday, Sonny said. I’d like to meet Abe.
I’d like you to meet him, too, said Ms. Mori. He’s a fighter just like you are.
Vodka was good for honesty, especially on ice, as mine was. Vodka on ice was so transparent, so clear, so powerful, it inspired its drinkers to be the same. I swallowed the rest of mine, preparing myself for the bruises sure to come. There’s something I’ve always wondered since our college days, Sonny. You always talked then about how much you believed in the people and the revolution so much. You should have heard him, Ms. Mori. He gave very good speeches.
I would have liked to hear them, Ms. Mori said. Very much.
But if you had heard them, you would have asked yourself why he didn’t go back and fight for the revolution he believed in. Or why he doesn’t go back now and be a part of the people and the revolution tomorrow? Even your brother Abe went to prison and went to Japan for what he believed in.
And look where that’s got him, said Ms. Mori.
I’d just like an answer to my question, Sonny. Are you still here because you’re in love with Ms.
Mori? Or are you still here because you’re afraid?
He winced. I had hit him where it hurt, in the solar plexus of his conscience, where everyone who was an idealist was vulnerable. Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen. The question was one of commitment, and I knew, even if he did not, that I was one of the committed. He looked at his bare feet, ashamed, but for some reason this had no effect on Ms. Mori. She only glanced at him with understanding, but when she turned her full gaze to me it remained marked by pity and something else —regret. It was time to stop and make a graceful exit, but the vodka that could not drain fast enough through the plugged-up sinkhole in the basement of my heart compelled me to swim on. You always talked with so much admiration of the people, I said. If you want to be with the people so much, go home.
His home is here, Ms. Mori said. I had never wanted her more than she was now, smoking a cigarette and fighting back. He stayed here because the people are here, too. There’s work to be done with them and for them. Can’t you see that? Isn’t this your home now, too?
Sonny laid his hand on her arm and said, Sofia. There was a lump in my throat but I could not swallow, watching her put her hand on his. Don’t defend me. He’s right. I was right? I had never heard him say this before. I should have been joyful, but it was more and more evident that there was little I could say that would persuade Ms. Mori to turn her heart, or her mind, away from Sonny. He swallowed the rest of his vodka and said, I’ve lived in this country for fourteen years now. In a few more years, I’ll have spent as much time here as I have in our homeland. That was never my intention. I came here, like you, just to study. I remember so clearly saying farewell to my parents at the airport and promising them that I would come back and help our country. I’d have an American degree, the best education the world could offer. I’d use that knowledge and help our people liberate themselves from the Americans. Or so I hoped.
He held out his glass to Ms. Mori, and she poured him a double. After taking a sip, he continued, looking somewhere between Ms. Mori and myself. What I learned, against my will, is that it’s impossible to live among a foreign people and not become changed by them. He swirled his vodka and knocked it back in one punishing swallow. Sometimes I feel a little foreign to myself as a result, he said. I admit that I am afraid. I admit my cowardice, my hypocrisy, my weakness, and my shame. I admit that you are a better man than me. I don’t agree with your politics—I despise them—but you went home when you had the choice and you fought the fight that you believed in. You stood up for the people as you see them. For that, I respect you.
I could not believe it. I had gotten him to confess to his failures and to surrender. I had won an argument with Sonny, something I had never done in our college days. So why was Ms. Mori clinging to his hand and murmuring something soothing? It’s all right, she said. I know exactly how you feel. It’s all right? I needed another drink. Look at me, Sonny, Ms. Mori went on. What am I? A secretary for a white man who thinks he’s complimenting me when he calls me Miss Butterfly. Do I protest and tell him to go to hell? No. I smile and say nothing and continue typing. I’m no better than you, Sonny. They stared into each other’s eyes as if I did not exist. I refilled all of our glasses but it was only me who took a slug. The part that was me said, I love you, Ms. Mori. No one heard that. What they heard was the part I was playing say, It’s never too late to fight, is it, Ms. Mori?
Their spell was broken. Sonny turned his gaze back to me. He had performed some kind of intellectual judo and turned my blow against myself. But he exhibited none of the triumph he would have in our college days. No, it’s never too late to fight, he said, sober despite the wine and vodka. You are quite right about that, my friend. Yeah, Ms. Mori said. In the way she slowly exhaled that syllable, in the way she focused on Sonny with a hungry intensity never shown toward me, in the way she chose that word over yes, I knew it was all over between us. I had won the argument, but somehow, as in our college days, he had won the audience.
The General also thought it was never too late to fight, as I reported in the next letter to my Parisian aunt. He had found an isolated stretch of terrain to carry out the training and maneuvers for his nascent army, in the sun-exposed hills far east of Los Angeles, near a remote Indian reservation. Some two hundred men had driven themselves across the freeways and past the suburbs and exurbs to this stretch of scrubby land where, in the past, the mob might have buried a few of its victims. Our gathering was not as strange a thing as it might have appeared. A xenophobe would see a company of foreigners in camouflage uniforms, carrying out military drills and calisthenics, and might imagine us to be the lead element of some nefarious Asian invasion of the American homeland, a Yellow Peril in the Golden State, a diabolical dream of Ming the Merciless sprung to life. Far from it. The General’s men, by preparing themselves to invade our now communist homeland, were in fact turning themselves into new Americans. After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.
Ten score of the best, the General had called these men in his restaurant, where he had sketched out for me the organization of his compact army on a napkin. I later pocketed that napkin and sent it to my Parisian aunt, the sketch depicting a headquarters platoon, three rifle platoons, and a heavy weapoons platoon, even though there were as yet no heavy weapons. No problem, said the General. Southeast Asia is awash in heavy weaponry. We’ll get them there. Here the goal is to build discipline, harden bodies, prepare minds, get these volunteers to think of themselves as an army again, get them to imagine the future. He wrote down the names of the platoon commanders and the officers of his staff, explaining to me their histories: this one formerly the executive officer from such-and-such division, this one formerly a battalion commander of such-and-such regiment, and so on. These details I transmitted to my Parisian aunt as well, this time in arduous code. I also paraphrased what the General told me, that these were all experienced men, down to the lowliest private. They’ve all seen action back home, he said. All volunteers. I didn’t put out a general call. I organized my officers first, had them contact men they trust who would be the noncommissioned officers, then had the NCOs find the enlisted men. It’s taken over a year to collect this nucleus. Now we’re ready for the next phase. Physical training, drilling, maneuvers, turning them into a fighting unit. Are you with me, Captain?
Always, sir. This was how I found myself in uniform again, although my task for the day was to be documentarian rather than foot soldier. The two hundred or so men sat Indian style on the earth, legs crossed, while the General stood before them and I stood behind them, camera in hand. Like his men, the General was uniformed in battle camouflage, purchased at an army surplus store and tailored by the Madame to fit. In his uniform, the General was no longer the morose proprietor of a liquor store and a restaurant, a petty bourgeois who counted his hopes as he did the change in his register. His uniform, his red beret, his polished field boots, the stars on his collar, and the Airborne patch on his sleeve had restored to him the nobility he had once possessed in our homeland. As for my uniform, it was a suit of armor cut from cloth. Though a bullet or knife would have sliced through the uniform with ease, I felt less vulnerable than in my everyday civilian clothes. If I was not bulletproof, I was at least charmed, as all the men were.
I photographed them from several different angles, these men who had been humbled by what they had been turned into here in exile. In their working outfits as busboys, waiters, gardeners, field hands, fishermen, manual laborers, custodians, or simply the un- and underemployed, these shabby examples of the lumpen blended into the background wherever they happened to be, always seen as a mass, never noticed as individuals. But now, in uniform and with their raggedy haircuts hidden by field caps and berets, they were impossible to miss. Their renewed manhood was manifest in the way their backs were stiff and straight, rather than slouched in the refugee slump, and in the way they marched proudly across the earth, rather than shuffling as they usually did in cheap shoes with worn-down soles. They were men again, and that was how the General addressed them. Men, he called out. Men! The people need us. Even from where I was, I heard him clearly, though he seemed to exert no effort in projecting his voice. They need hope and leaders, the General said. You are those leaders. You will show the people what can happen if they have the courage to rise up, to take arms, and to sacrifice themselves. I watched the men to see if they would flinch at the idea of sacrificing themselves, but they did not. This was the occult power of the uniform, of the mass, that men who would never dream of sacrificing themselves in the course of their everyday lives waiting on tables would agree to do so while waiting under a hot sun. Men, the General said. Men! The people cry out for freedom! The communists promise freedom and independence, but deliver only poverty and enslavement. They have betrayed the Vietnamese people, and revolutions don’t betray the people. Even here we remain with the people, and we will return to liberate the people who have been denied the freedom given to us. Revolutions are for the people, from the people, by the people. That is our revolution!
Nothing was so true, and yet nothing was so mysterious, for the questions of who the people were and what they might want remained unanswered. The lack of an answer mattered not; indeed, the lack of an answer was part of the power in the idea of the people that brought the men to their feet and the tears to their eyes as they shouted, Down with communism! Like salmon that instinctively knew when to swim upstream, we all knew who the people were and who were not the people. Anyone who had to be told who the people were probably was not part of the people, or so I soon wrote to my Parisian aunt. I also sent her photos of the cheering men in uniform, along with others showing them exercising and engaging in maneuvers the rest of that weekend. Perhaps these men looked silly or foolish, doing push-ups while the grizzled captain yelled at them, or crouching behind trees aiming vintage rifles under the command of the affectless lieutenant, or conducting a mock patrol with Bon amid the brush where Indians once hunted. But don’t be fooled, I warned Man in my coded notes. Revolutions begin this way, with men willing to fight no matter what the odds, volunteering to give up everything because they had nothing. This was an apt description of the grizzled captain, the former guerrilla hunter who was now a short-order cook, and the affectless lieutenant, sole survivor of an ambushed company who made his living as a deliveryman. Like Bon, they were certifiably insane men who had volunteered for the reconnaissance mission to Thailand. They had decided that death was just as good as life, which was fine for them but was worrisome for me if I was to go along with them.
What about your wives and kids? I said. The four of us sat under an oak tree, sleeves rolled up past our elbows, eating a midday meal of army surplus C rations, which looked almost exactly the same entering the human body as they did exiting it. The grizzled captain rattled his spoon in his can and said, We got separated during the whole mess at Da Nang. They didn’t make it out. Last I heard the VC sent them to clear swampland for the crime of being related to me. Guess I can either wait for them to get out or I can go get them myself. He had the habit of speaking with his teeth clenched, gnawing at his words like bones. As for the affectless lieutenant, his emotional strings had been cut. He had the semblance of a human being, but while his body moved, his face and voice moved not at all. Thus, when he said, They’re dead, the toneless announcement was more forbidding than if he had wailed or cursed. I was afraid to ask him what had happened. Instead I said, You guys don’t plan on coming back, do you? The affectless lieutenant rotated the turret of his head a few degrees and aimed his eyes at me. Come back to what? The grizzled captain chuckled. Don’t be shocked, kid. I’ve ordered more than a few men to certain death. Now maybe it’s my turn. Not that I want to sound all emotional. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m looking forward to it. War may be hell, but you know what? Hell’s better than this shithole. With that, the affectless lieutenant and the grizzled captain departed to take a piss.
I didn’t need to write in my letter to Paris that these men were not fools, at least not yet. The minutemen were not fools in believing they could defeat the British Redcoats, any more than the first armed propaganda platoon of our revolution was foolish as it drilled with a motley assembly of primitive weapons. From that militia eventually arose an army of a million men. Who was to say the same fate did not await this company? Dear Aunt, I wrote in visible ink, These men are not to be underestimated. Napoleon said men will die for bits of ribbon pinned to their chests, but the General understands that even more men will die for a man who remembered their names, as he does theirs. When he inspects them, he walks among them, eats with them, calls them by their names and asks about wives, children, girlfriends, hometowns. All anyone ever wants is to be recognized and remembered. Neither is possible without the other. This desire drives these busboys, waiters, janitors, gardeners, mechanics, night guards, and welfare beneficiaries to save enough money to buy themselves uniforms, boots, and guns, to want to be men again. They want their country back, dear Aunt, but they also yearn for recognition and remembrance from that country that no longer exists, from wives and children, from future descendants, from the men they used to be. If they fail, call them fools. But if they do not fail, they are heroes and visionaries, whether alive or dead. Perhaps I shall return with them to our country, regardless of what the General has to say.
Even as I was planning for the possibility of returning, I also did my best to dissuade Bon of doing the same. We were smoking a final cigarette under the oak tree, our last gesture before embarking on a ten-mile hike. We watched as the men commanded by the grizzled captain and the affectless lieutenant rose and stretched, scratching at various parts of their lumpy bodies. Those guys have death wishes, I said. Don’t you get it? They’ve got no intention of coming back. They know it’s a suicide mission.
Life’s a suicide mission.
That’s very philosophical of you, I said. It doesn’t change the fact that you’re crazy.
He laughed with genuine humor, such a rare occasion ever since Saigon I was taken aback. For only the second time since I had known him, he embarked on a speech that was, for him, an epic. What’s crazy is living when there’s no reason to live, he said. What am I living for? A life in our apartment? That’s not a home. It’s a jail cell without bars. All of us—we’re all in jail cells without bars. We’re not men anymore. Not after the Americans fucked us twice and made our wives and kids watch. First the Americans said we’ll save your yellow skins. Just do what we say. Fight our way, take our money, give us your women, then you’ll be free. Things didn’t work out that way, did they? Then, after fucking us, they rescued us. They just didn’t tell us they’d cut off our balls and cut out our tongues along the way. But you know what? If we were real men, we wouldn’t have let them do that.
Usually Bon used words like a sniper, but this was a spray of machine-gun fire that silenced me for several moments. Then I said, You don’t give these guys enough credit for what they did, for what they faced. Though they were my enemies, I understood their soldiers’ hearts, beating with the belief that they had fought bravely. You’re being too hard on them.
He laughed again, this time without humor. I’m hard on myself. Don’t call me a man or a soldier, either. Call the guys who stayed behind men and soldiers. The men in my company. Man. All dead or in prison, but at least they know they’re men. They’re so dangerous it takes other men with guns to keep them locked up. Here, no one’s frightened of us. The only people we scare are our wives and kids. And ourselves. I know these guys. I sell them liquor. I hear their stories. They come home from work, yell at their wives and kids, beat them once in a while just to show that they’re men. Only they’re not. A man protects his wife and children. A man isn’t afraid to die for them, his country, his buddies. He doesn’t live to see them all die before him. But that’s what I’ve done.
You retreated, that’s all, I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. I had never seen him speak about his pain so bluntly before. I wanted to comfort him and it hurt me that he would not let me. You had to save your family. That doesn’t make you less of a man or a soldier. You are a soldier, so think like one. Is it better to go on this suicide mission and not come back, or is it better to go with the next wave that’s actually got a chance?
He spat and ground out his cigarette against the heel of his boot, then buried it under a mound of dirt. That’s what most of these guys are saying. They’re losers and losers always have excuses. They dress up, talk tough, play soldier. But how many are really going back home to fight? The General asked for volunteers. He got three. The rest of them hide behind their wives and kids, the same wives and kids they beat because they can’t stand hiding behind them. Give a coward a second chance, he’ll just run again. So it is with most of these guys. They’re bluffing.
You cynical bastard, I cried. What are you dying for then?
What am I dying for? he cried back. I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.

And to this, I had nothing to say. It was true, even for this small detachment of heroes or perhaps fools. Whatever they were, they now had something to live for if not die for. They had eagerly shed the funereal clothes of their mediocre civilian lives, understanding the allure of tailored tiger stripe fatigues with dashing scarves of yellow, white, or red around their necks, a military splendor akin to the costumes of superheroes. But, like superheroes, they would not want to keep themselves a secret for long. How could you be a superhero if no one knew you existed?
Rumors had already spread about them. Even before the desert assembly, during that night when Sonny had admitted his failure and yet still won, he had asked me about these mysterious men. The wheels of our conversation had stopped spinning, the black cat was gloating over my defeat, and in the vodka-infused silence Sonny raised the reports of a secret army preparing for a secret invasion. I replied that I had not heard of any such thing, to which he said, Don’t play the innocent. You’re the General’s man.
If I were his man, I said, more reason not to tell a communist. Who said I’m a communist?
I pretended to be surprised. You’re not a communist? If I were, would I tell you?
That was the subversive’s dilemma. Rather than flaunt ourselves in the sexually dubious costumes of superheroes, we hid beneath cloaks of invisibility, here just as in Saigon. There, when I attended clandestine meetings with other subversives, conducted in the fusty cellars of safe houses, sitting on crates of black market hand grenades manufactured in the USA, I donned a clammy cotton hood that revealed only my eyes. Lit by candlelight or oil lamp, we knew one another only by the peculiarity of our aliases, by the shape of our bodies, by the sound of our voices, by the whites of our eyes. Now, watching Ms. Mori recline under Sonny’s arm, I was sure my ever-absorbent eyes were no longer white but bloodshot from the wine, vodka, and tobacco. Our lungs had achieved smoky equilibrium with the stale air, while on the coffee table the ashtray silently suffered its usual indignity, mouth crammed full of butts and bitter ash. I dropped what remained of my cigarette into the well of the wine bottle, where it drowned in the remaining liquid with a faint, reproachful hiss. The war’s over, Ms. Mori said. Don’t they know that? I wanted to say something profound as I stood up to say good night. I wanted to impress Ms. Mori with the intellect she could never have again. Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep.
Is that true for old soldiers, too? she asked, not looking impressed. Of course it’s true, Sonny said. If they didn’t go to sleep, how else would they dream? I almost answered before I realized it was a rhetorical question.
Ms. Mori offered me her cheek to kiss and Sonny offered me his hand to shake. He showed me the door and I slid home through the cool sheets of night and into my own bed, Bon asleep and hovering above me in his rack. I closed my eyes and, after a spell of darkness, floated on my mattress across a black river to the foreign country that needed no passport to visit. Of its many gnomic features and shady denizens I now recall only one, my mind wiped clean except for this fatal fingerprint, an ancient kapok tree that was my final resting place and on whose arthritic bark I laid my cheek. I was almost asleep within my sleep when I gradually understood that the knot of gnarled wood on which my ear rested was actually an ear itself, curled and stiff, the wax of its auditory history encrusted in the green moss of its twisted canal. Half of the kapok tree towered above me, half was invisible below me in the rooted earth, and when I looked up I saw not just one ear but many ears swelling from the bark of its thick trunk, hundreds of ears listening and having listened to things I could not hear, the sight of those ears so horrible it hurled me back into the black river. I woke drenched and gasping, clutching the sides of my head. Only after I kicked off the damp sheets and looked under the pillow could I lie down again, trembling. My heart still beat with the force of a savage drummer, but at least my bed was not littered with amputated ears.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 14

Sometimes the work of a subversive is purposeful, but sometimes, I confess, it is accidental. In retrospect, perhaps my questioning of Sonny’s courage pushed him to write the headline that I saw two weeks after the field maneuvers, “Move On, War Over.” I saw it on the General’s desk in his war room at the liquor store, fixed squarely on the writing pad and weighed down by a stapler. The sentiments of the headline might be hailed by some, but certainly not by the General. Beneath that headline was a photograph of a rally staged by the Fraternity at a Westminster park, with ranks and files of grim veterans in paramilitary uniforms of brown shirts and red berets. In another photo, civilians in the cast-off couture of refugees waved signs and clutched banners with the telegraphic messages of political protests. HO CHI MINH = HITLER! FREEDOM FOR OUR PEOPLE! THANK YOU, AMERICA! To the degree that the article might sow doubt in the hearts of exiles about continuing the war, and create divisions among exile factions, I knew that my provocation of Sonny had had an unintentional, but desirable, effect.
I photographed the article with the Minox mini-camera that was finally finding some use. For the last few weeks, I had been photographing the General’s files, all of which I had access to as his aide- de-camp. Ever since my return from the Philippines, I had been unemployed except for this considerable pro bono work done for the General, the Fraternity, and the Movement. Even secret armies and political fronts needed clerks. Memos must be written; documents filed; meetings called; flyers designed, printed, and distributed; photos taken; interviews scheduled; donors found; and, most important for my purposes, correspondence taken and mailed, then received and read before it was handed over to the General. I had photographed the General’s complete order of battle, from the company here to the battalion in Thailand, from the Fraternity’s public parades to the Movement’s private maneuvers, as well as the communiqués between the General and his officers in the Thai refugee camps, led by a landlocked admiral. Not least, I photographed the statements of the bank accounts where the General stashed the modest funds for the Movement, raised in small donations from the refugee community, the revenues of Madame’s restaurant, and a handful of respectable charitable organizations that had donated to the Fraternity for the relief of sad refugees and sadder veterans.
All this information had been packaged into a parcel dispatched to my Parisian aunt. The parcel’s contents were a letter and a chintzy souvenir, an automatically rotating snowball featuring the Hollywood sign. This gift required nine-volt batteries, which I included and which I had hollowed out. Into each I inserted a cartridge of Minox film, a more sophisticated method than how my courier in Saigon traded information with me. When Man first told me of my courier, I had immediately conjured up one of those supple beauty queens for which our country was deservedly famous, white as refined sugar on the outside, scarlet as sunrise on the inside, a Cochin-Chinese Mata Hari. What showed up at my door every morning was an aging auntie, the lines on her face promising more secrets than the lines on her palms, hawking gobs of betel juice as well as her specialty, sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves. I bought a packet for breakfast every morning, and in it there might or might not be a message, rolled and wrapped in plastic. Likewise, in the small wad of folded piastres I paid her with, there might or might not be a cartridge of film or a message of my own, written invisibly with rice water on cement paper. The only flaw in this method was that auntie was a terrible cook, her sticky rice a ball of glue that I had to swallow, lest the maid find it in my garbage and wonder why I was buying what I would not eat. I complained to auntie once, but she cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary. Even the cyclo drivers hanging around the General’s villa for fares were impressed. You better marry that one, Captain, a driver missing a left arm called out. She won’t be single for long!
I winced at the memory and poured myself a drink from the bottle of fifteen-year-old scotch the General kept in his drawer. Given that I was not being paid, the General kept me happy, and admittedly dependent, with generous gifts of fine and not-so-fine liquor from his ample supply. I needed it. Written invisibly in the letter were the dates and details of Bon’s itinerary and those of the grizzled captain and affectless lieutenant, from their airplane tickets to the location of the training camp. The information was no different in substance from what I had dispatched through auntie, the classified logistics of operations that would inevitably lead to devastating ambushes. Newspaper articles would report the number of American or republican soldiers dead or wounded, but they were as abstract as the faceless dead in history books. I could write these dispatches with ease, but the one about Bon had taken me all night, not because of the amount of words, but because he was my friend. I’m coming back, too, I wrote, even though I had not yet figured out how I would do that. The better to report on the movement of the enemy, I wrote, even though what I really intended was to save Bon’s life. This feat I also had no idea how to accomplish, but ignorance had never stopped me from taking action before.
With no idea how I would manage to betray Bon and save him at the same time, I searched for inspiration in the bottom of a bottle. I was sipping from my second tumbler of scotch when the General entered. It was a little past three, the routine time of his return from Madame’s restaurant after its midday rush. He was, as usual, irritated from his hours manning the cash register. Former soldiers would salute him, a sign of respect that nevertheless reminded him of the stars he was not wearing, while the occasional snide civilian, always a woman, would say, Weren’t you that general? If she was very snide, she would leave him the tip, the typically grand sum of one dollar, our nod to what we considered a ludicrous American practice. Thus the General would arrive in the afternoons at the liquor store, as he did today, throw a handful of crumpled dollar bills on his desk, and wait for me to pour him a double. Reclining in his chair, he would sip the scotch with closed eyes and sigh dramatically. But today, instead of reclining, he leaned forward at his desk, tapped the newspaper, and said, Did you read this?
Not wanting to deprive the General of the opportunity to fulminate, I said I had not. He nodded grimly and began to read excerpts out loud. “Rumors abound about this Fraternity and what its true purpose is,” the General said, face blank and voice even. “The overthrow of the communist regime is clearly its objective, but how far is it willing to go? While the Fraternity asks for donations to help refugees, these funds may possibly be going toward a Movement of armed refugees in Thailand. Rumors are that the Fraternity has invested in certain businesses whose profits it reaps. The most disappointing aspect of the Fraternity is the false hope it peddles to our countrymen that we can one day take our country back through force. We would be better off if we pursued reconciliation peacefully, in the hopes that one day we in exile can return to help rebuild our country.” The General folded the newspaper and laid it back on his desk in the exact same position it had occupied before. Someone’s been feeding this man some reliable information, Captain.
I sipped my scotch to disguise the fact that I was swallowing the saliva that had pooled in my mouth. We have leaks, sir, just like we did at home. Look at that picture. All those men know something about what’s going on. All Sonny had to do was walk around with a bucket catching one drop here and another drop there. Soon enough he’d have a glass or two of information.
You’re right, of course, the General said. We can keep mistresses but we can’t keep secrets. This— he tapped the newspaper—sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Reconcile, return, rebuild. Who wouldn’t want that? And who would benefit the most? The communists. But for us, the greater likelihood if we return is a bullet in the head or a long stay in reeducation. That’s what the communists mean by reconciliation and rebuilding, getting rid of people like us. And this newsman is peddling this leftist propaganda to poor people who are desperate for any kind of hope. He’s getting more troublesome, don’t you think?
Of course, I said, reaching for the bottle of scotch. Like me, it was half empty and half full.
Newsmen are always troublesome if they’re independent.
How do we know he’s just a newsman? Half of the newsmen in Saigon were communist sympathizers, and a good percentage of them were just communists. How do we know the communists didn’t send him here years ago with exactly this plan in mind, to spy on any of us who made it here and undermine us? You knew him in college. Did he display these sympathies back then? If I said no and the General later heard otherwise from someone else, I would be in trouble. The only answer was yes, to which the General said, As my intelligence officer, you’re not showing much intelligence, are you, Captain? Why didn’t you warn me of this when I met him? The General shook his head in disgust. Do you know what your problem is, Captain? I had a rather long list of my problems, but it was better to simply say I had no idea. You’re too sympathetic, the General said. You didn’t see the danger in the major because he was fat and you took pity on him for that. Now the evidence shows that you’ve been willfully blind to the fact that Sonny is not only a left-wing radical but potentially a communist sleeper agent. The General’s gaze was intense. My face started to itch but I did not dare scratch. Something may need to be done, Captain. Don’t you agree?
Yes, I said, throat dry. Something may need to be done.
I had plenty of time to contemplate the General’s vague demand in the ensuing days. How could one disagree with something needing to be done? Something always needed doing by somebody. An ad in Sonny’s newspaper announcing that Lana was singing as part of a revue called Fantasia provided me the opportunity for action, although not the kind the General likely had in mind. What I needed was a vacation, if only for a night, from the stressful, solitary work of being a subversive. For a mole used to darkness, a nightclub was an ideal place to emerge. Persuading Bon to go to Fantasia to hear the songs and sounds of our gone but not forgotten country was less of a struggle than I thought it would be, for Bon, having decided to die, was finally showing signs of life. He even allowed me to cut his hair, which he afterward slicked down with Brylcreem until it matched our glossy black shoes. The Brylcreem and our cologne lent my car an intoxicatingly masculine atmosphere as we listened to the Rolling Stones, the car transporting us not only west to Hollywood but back to the glory days of Saigon circa 1969, after my return from America. Then, before Bon and Man became fathers, the three of us had wasted the weekends of our youth in Saigon’s bars and nightclubs, exactly as one was supposed to do. If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?
Perhaps I could blame youth for my friendship with Bon. What drives a fourteen-year-old to swear a blood oath to a blood brother? And more important, what makes a grown man believe in that oath? Should not the things that count, like ideology and political belief, the ripe fruit of our adulthood, matter more than the unripe ideals and illusions of youth? Let me propose that truth, or some measure of it, can be found in these youthful follies that we forget, to our loss, as adults. Here was the scene of how our friendship first became established: a football pitch of the lycée, myself a new student surrounded by older, taller ones, the prancing steeds of the school. They were about to repeat a scene rehearsed by man from the dawn of time, the moment when the strong turn on the weak or the odd for sport. I was odd but I was not weak, as I had proven against the village comedian who called me unnatural. Although I had beaten him, I had also been beaten before, and I prepared myself for a losing fight. It was then that another new boy unexpectedly spoke out in my defense, stepping forward from the ring of voyeurs and saying, This isn’t right. Don’t single him out. He’s one of us. An older boy scoffed. Who are you to say who’s one of us? And why do you think you’re one of us? Now get out of the way. Man did not get out of the way, and for this he received the first blow, a slap on the ear that sent him reeling. I drove my head into the older boy’s ribs and knocked him down, landing astride his chest, from where I commenced to land two blows before his fellow oafs hurled themselves on me. The odds were five-to-one against me and my new friend Man, and even though I fought back with all my heart and rage, I knew we were doomed. All the other schoolboys surrounding us did, too. So why, then, did Bon jump forth from that crowd and take our side? He was a new boy who was as big as the older boys, true, but even so he could not beat them all. One he slugged, another he elbowed, a third he rammed, and then he, too, was brought down by the horde. So they kicked us, and hit us, and beat us, and left us bruised, bloody, and elated. Yes, elated! For we had passed some mysterious test, one that separated us from the bullies on the one side and the cowards on the other. That very night, we snuck out of our dormitory and made our way to a tamarind grove, and under its boughs we cut our palms. We mingled our blood once more with boys we recognized as more kin to us than any real kin, and then gave one another our word.
A pragmatist, a true materialist, would dismiss this story and my attachment to it as romanticism. But the story says everything about how we saw ourselves and one another at that age, as boys who knew instinctively that their cause was to stand up for the weaker. Bon and I had not talked about that incident in a long time, but I sensed that it was in his bloodstream as well as mine as we sang songs from our youth on the way to our destination at the Roosevelt Hotel. Once a swinging establishment on Hollywood Boulevard for celebrities in the black-and-white era, the Roosevelt was now as unfashionable as a silent film star. Worn rugs masked shabby tiles, and for some reason the lobby’s furniture comprised card tables and chairs with the spindly legs of cranes, ready for games of penny poker and solitaire. I had expected some residual splash of Hollywood glamour, with paunchy porn producers in butterfly collars and powder-blue blazers, leading demi-glazed women by their bejeweled hands. But the best-dressed people in the hotel appeared to be my fellow countrymen, bedecked in sequins, polyester, and attitude as we headed to the lounge where Fantasia waited. The other patrons, presumably the hotel guests, wore plaid shirts, pediatric shoes, and seven o’clock shadows, the only thing in tow an oxygen tank. We always arrived late for everything, including, apparently, Hollywood’s fashionable moment.
Nevertheless, the atmosphere inside the hotel’s cozy lounge was buoyant. Some entrepreneur had rented out the space to stage Fantasia, and the result was a refuge without any sign of refugees, the men sharp in tailored suits and the women delectable in ball gowns. Our aspiring bourgeoisie had found forty-hour-a-week jobs with overtime and, having padded their wallets enough to sit more comfortably, were now on the hunt for wine and song. As Bon and I settled into a table at the back, a winsome singer in a bolero jacket serenaded the lounge with a heartache-soaked version of Pham Duy’s “City of Sadness.” Was there any other way to sing about a city of sadness, the portable city carried by all of us in exile? After love, was sadness not the most common noun in our lyrical repertoire? Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat? These questions required either Camus or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac.
I paid for the snifters without a twinge from my dwindling settlement cash, being of the firm belief that money did not live until it was spent, particularly in the company of friends. When I spotted the grizzled captain and the affectless lieutenant standing at the bar nursing beers, I even sent them snifters of cognac. They came over to our table and toasted our comradeship, even though I had not yet brought up the matter of my return with the General again. That was my intent, though, and I was happy to buy us all another round. Cognac made everything better, the equivalent of a mother’s kiss for a grown man, and so it was that we indulged as the singers shimmied on the stage one by one. Men and women, they crooned, they wailed, they sighed, they belted, they moaned, they roared, and no matter what they sang or how, the crowd adored them. We were, all of us, even Bon, airlifted back in time by the lungs of the singers, across years and miles to nightclubs in Saigon where the taste of champagne, besides the usual flavors and hints, always carried a touch of tears. Too many tears, and one was overpowered; none, and one was not enslaved. But a drop of this elixir was all one’s tongue needed before it could utter only one name: Saigon.
That word was mentioned by nearly every one of the performers and by the emcee himself. This guide to Fantasia was a modestly built man modestly dressed in a gray flannel suit, the only shiny thing about him being his spectacles. I could not see his eyes but I recognized his name. The Poet was a writer whose works had appeared in the literary journals and newspapers, gentle and nostalgic verses about the textures of everyday life. I remembered one in particular about the epiphany to be found in the washing of rice, and while I could not remember the Poet’s epiphany, I remembered the urge in the poem to find meaning in even the meanest of chores. Sometimes, when I washed rice and sunk my hand into the wet grains, I thought of the Poet. I was proud to see that in our culture a Poet could be an emcee for a night of song and wine for the common people. We respected our poets and assumed they had something important to teach us, and this Poet did. He had written a few columns for Sonny’s newspaper, explaining the vagaries of American life or the cultural miscommunications between Americans and us, and in this vein he interspersed his introductions of the singers with brief lessons in our culture or the American culture. When it came time for Lana, he began by saying, Some of you may have heard that the Americans are a people who like to dream. It’s true, and although some say that America is a welfare state, in actuality it is a dream state. Here, we can dream of anything, can’t we, ladies and gentlemen? I will tell you what my American Dream is, he said, holding the microphone with the care one reserved for a stick of dynamite. My American Dream is to see once more, before I die, the land where I was born, to taste once more the ripe persimmons from the tree of my family’s garden in Tay Ninh. My American Dream is to return home so I can light incense at the tomb of my grandparents, to roam that beautiful country of ours when it is at last peaceful and the sound of guns cannot be heard over the shouts of joy. My American Dream is to walk from city to village to farm and to see boys and girls laughing and playing who have never heard of war, from Da Nang to Da Lat, from Ca Mau to Chau Doc, from Sa Dec to Song Cau, from Bien Hoa to Ban Me Thuot—
The train ride through our cities and towns great and small continued, but I had gotten off at Ban Me Thuot, my hometown, hill town, town of red earth, Highland country of the finest coffee beans, land of booming waterfalls, of exasperated elephants, of the half-starved Gia Rai in their loincloths, barefoot and bare breasted, land where my mother and father died, land where my umbilical cord was buried in my mother’s meager plot, land where the heroic People’s Army struck first in its liberation of the south during the great campaign of ’75, land that was my home.
That is my American Dream, said the Poet, that no matter the clothes I wear or the food I eat or the language I speak, my heart will be unchanged. This is why we gather here tonight, ladies and gentlemen. Though we cannot be home in reality, we can return in Fantasia.
The audience applauded sincerely and enthusiastically for our diasporic poet laureate, but he was a wise man who knew that we were gathered here for another purpose besides hearing him. Ladies and gentlemen, he said, raising his hand to still the crowd, may I present to you another American Dream, our very own Vietnamese fantasy . . .
Now known by just one name, like John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Mary, she stepped onstage clad in a red velvet bustier, a leopard-print miniskirt, black lace gloves, and thigh-high leather boots with stiletto heels. My heart would have paused at the boots, the heels, or the flat, smooth slice of her belly, naked in between miniskirt and bustier, but the combination of all three arrested my heart altogether and beat it with the vigor of a Los Angeles police squad. Pouring cognac over my heart freed it, but thus drenched it was easily flambéed by her torch song. She turned on the heat with her first number, the unexpected “I’d Love You to Want Me,” which I had heard before sung only by men. “I’d Love You to Want Me” was the theme song of the bachelors and unhappily married males of my generation, whether in the English original or the equally superb French and Vietnamese renditions. What the song expressed so perfectly from lyric to melody was unrequited love, and we men of the south loved nothing more than unrequited love, cracked hearts our primary weakness after cigarettes, coffee, and cognac.
Listening to her sing, all I wanted was to immolate myself in a night with her to remember forever and ever. Every man in the room shared my emotion as we watched her do no more than sway at the microphone, her voice enough to move the audience, or rather to still us. Nobody talked and nobody stirred except to raise a cigarette or a glass, an utter concentration not broken for her next, slightly more upbeat number, “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).” Nancy Sinatra sang it first, but she was merely a platinum princess whose only knowledge of violence and guns was derived secondhand from the mob friends of her father, Frank. Lana, in contrast, had grown up in a city where gangsters were once so powerful the army fought them in the streets. Saigon was a metropolis where grenade attacks were commonplace, terror bombings not unexpected, and wholesale invasion by the Viet Cong a communal experience. What did Nancy Sinatra know when she sang bang bang? To her, those were bubble-gum pop lyrics. Bang bang was the sound track of our lives.
Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.
When Lana was finished, the audience clapped, whistled, and stomped, but I sat silent and stunned as she bowed and gracefully withdrew, so disarmed I could not even applaud. As the Poet introduced the next performer, all I heard was bang bang, and when Lana returned to the table reserved for the performers, with the seat next to her left empty by the singer who had replaced her, I told Bon I would be back in ten minutes. I heard him say, Don’t do it, you stupid bastard, but without further thought I began my walk across the lounge. The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think. Not thinking is more difficult than it sounds, and yet, with women, one should never think. Never. It simply won’t do. The first few times in approaching girls, during my lycée years, I had thought too much, hesitated, and, as a result, flailed and failed. But even so, I discovered that all the childhood bullying directed at me had toughened me, making me believe that being rejected was better than not having the chance to be rejected at all. Thus it was that I approached girls, and now women, with such Zen negation of all doubt and fear the Buddha would approve. Sitting down next to Lana and thinking of nothing, I merely followed my instincts and my first three principles in talking to a woman: do not ask permission; do not say hello; and do not let her speak first.
I had no idea you could sing like you do when I first met you, I said. She looked at me with eyes that evoked those on ancient Grecian statues, empty and yet expressive. Why would you? I was only sixteen.
And I was only twenty-five. What did I know? I leaned close to be heard over the music and to offer her a cigarette. Fourth principle: give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me. If she declined the cigarette, as any of our proper young women should, I had an excuse to take one myself, which gave me a few seconds to say something while she focused on my cigarette. But Lana unexpectedly accepted, giving me the chance to fire up her cigarette with a suggestive flame, as I had once lit up Ms. Mori. What do your mother and father think of all this?
They think it’s a waste of time to sing and dance. I suppose you agree with them? I lit my own cigarette. If I agreed with them, would I be here?
You agree with everything my father says.
I agree with only some of the things your father says. But I don’t disagree with anything. So you agree with me when it comes to music?
Music and singing keep us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live.
And we know we can love. She blew smoke away from me, though I would have been delighted to have her blow smoke in my eyes or on any part of my body. My parents fear singing will ruin me for marriage, she said. What they want for me is to get married tomorrow to someone very respectable and very rich. You’re neither of those things, are you, Captain?
Would you rather I be respectable and rich? You’d be much less interesting if you were.
You might be the first woman in the history of the world who’s ever felt that way, I said. All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications. A man gazing on semi- exposed breasts was not only engaging in simple lasciviousness, he was also meditating, even if unawares, on the visual embodiment of the verb “to cleave,” which meant both to cut apart and to put together. A woman’s cleavage perfectly illustrated this double and contradictory meaning, the breasts two separate entities with one identity. The double meaning was also present in how cleavage separated a woman from a man and yet drew him to her with the irresistible force of sliding down a slippery slope. Men had no equivalent, except, perhaps, for the only kind of male cleavage most women truly cared for, the opening and closing of a well-stuffed billfold. But whereas women could look at us as much as they wanted, and we would appreciate it, we were damned if we looked and hardly less damned if we didn’t. A woman with extraordinary cleavage would reasonably be insulted by a man whose eyes could resist the plunge, so, just to be polite, I cast a tasteful glance while reaching for another cigarette. In between those marvelous breasts bumped a gold crucifix on a gold chain, and for once I wished I were a true Christian so I could be nailed to that cross.
Care for another cigarette? I said, our gazes meeting once more as I offered her my pack. Neither of us acknowledged my expert appraisal of her cleavage. Instead, she silently accepted my offer, reached forth her delicate hand, plucked out a cigarette, inserted it between her candied lips, waited for it to be ignited from a flame in my hand, and then, gradually, smoked the cigarette until it dwindled to a handful of ashes, easily blown away. If a man survived the time taken to smoke the first cigarette, he had a fighting chance on the beachhead of a woman’s body. That I had survived a second cigarette boosted my confidence immeasurably. Thus, when the permed chanteuse whose chair I occupied returned, it was with confidence that I stood up and said to Lana, Let’s go to the bar. Principle five: statements, not questions, were less likely to lead to no. She shrugged and offered me her hand.

Over the next hour, in between the times when Lana scorched the earth and the hair on my forearms with a few more songs, I learned the following. She loved vodka martinis, of which I ordered her three. Each one was shaken with top-shelf liquor in whose clear solution floated a pair of plump green olives, the suggestive nipples of pimentos protruding from them. Her employer was an art gallery in tony Brentwood. She had had boyfriends, plural, and when a woman discussed past boyfriends, she was informing you that she was evaluating you in comparison with defective and effective partners past. Although I was too tactful to ask about politics or religion, I learned that she was socially and economically progressive. She believed in birth control, gun control, and rent control; she believed in the liberation of homosexuals and civil rights for all; she believed in Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thich Nhat Hanh; she believed in nonviolence, world peace, and yoga; she believed in the revolutionary potential of disco and the United Nations of nightclubs; she believed in national self-determination for the Third World as well as liberal democracy and regulated capitalism, which was, she said, to believe that the invisible hand of the market should wear the kid glove of socialism. Her favorite singers were Billie Holiday, Dusty Springfield, Elvis Phuong, and Khanh Ly, and she believed Vietnamese people could also sing the blues. Of American cities, she believed New York was where she wanted to live if she could not live in Los Angeles. But of all the things I learned about her, the most important was this: whereas most Vietnamese women kept their opinions to themselves until they were married, whereon they never kept their opinions to themselves, she was not hesitant to say what she thought.
At the end of the hour I waved Bon over, desperate for another pair of ears to relieve the stress on mine. He, too, was punchy with cognac, its influence making him unusually voluble. Lana was not above socializing with a common man, and for the next hour they became partners on a walk down memory lane, reminiscing about Saigon and songs while I quietly quaffed my cognac, discreetly admiring Lana’s legs. Longer than the Bible and a hell of a lot more fun, they stretched forever, like an Indian yogi or an American highway shimmering through the Great Plains or the southwestern desert. Her legs demanded to be looked at and would not take no, non, nein, nyet, or even maybe for an answer. I was being held captive by the sight of them when I heard Lana say, And your wife and child? The tears trickling down Bon’s cheeks broke the spell she had cast on me, the sight rousing me from deafness. Somehow the conversation had taken a turn from Saigon and songs to the fall of Saigon, which was not surprising. Most of the songs the exiles listened to were soaked in melancholic, romantic loss, which could not help but remind them of the loss of their city. Every conversation among the exiles about Saigon eventually became a conversation about the fall of Saigon and the fate of those left behind. They’re dead, Bon now said. I was astonished, for Bon never talked about Linh and Duc with anyone but me, a function of the fact that Bon hardly talked to anyone. This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall. But perhaps this embarrassing collapse was worth it, for Lana, to my even greater astonishment, embraced him and pressed his stubborn, ugly head against her cheek. You poor man, Lana said. You poor, poor man. I was overwhelmed by a great, aching love for my best friend and this woman whose divine figure was the symbol of infinity turned upright onto its rounded bottom. I yearned to prove the hypothesis of my desire for her by empirically examining her naked curves with my eyes, her breasts with my hands, her skin with my tongue. I knew then, as she focused all her attention on the weeping Bon, who was so insensate with grief he seemed unaware of the enchanted valley exposed to his view, that I would possess her and that she would have me. $pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 15

A great deal of what I have confessed so far may seem foreign to you, dear Commandant, and to this mysterious, faceless commissar of yours whom I have heard so much about. The American Dream, the culture of Hollywood, the practices of American democracy, and so on can altogether make America a disorienting place for those like us who hail from the Orient. Presumably my half- Occidental status has helped me, perhaps innately, in understanding the American character, culture, and customs, including those concerning romance. The most important thing to understand is that while we courted, Americans dated, a pragmatic custom whereby a male and a female set a mutually agreeable time to meet, as if to negotiate a potentially profitable business venture. Americans understood dating to be about investments and gains, short or long term, but we saw romance and courtship as being about losses. After all, the only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.
Lana was clearly a woman in need of courting. I wrote her letters in which I pleaded my case, using the perfect cursive taught to me by pterodactyl nuns; I composed villanelles, sonnets, and couplets of doubtful prosody but resolute sincerity; I seized her guitar when she let me sit on a Moroccan cushion in her living room and sang her songs by Pham Duy, Trinh Cong Son, and the newest lyrical darling of our diaspora, Duc Huy. She rewarded me with the enigmatic smiles of an alluring apsara, a reserved seat at the front row of her performances, and the favor of continuing audiences, of which I was given no more than one a week. I was both grateful and tormented, as I recounted to Bon on listless afternoons at the liquor store. His response was as unenthusiastic as you might anticipate. Tell me this, lover boy, he said one day, back to his terse self. His attention was divided between me and a pair of teenage patrons creeping, possum-like, toward an aisle, a duo whose years and IQ were measurable in the low double digits. What happens when the General finds out? I was sitting with him behind the counter, awaiting the General’s afternoon arrival. Why would the General ever find out? I said. Nobody would tell him. Lana and I aren’t sentimental enough to think that one day we’ll get married and confess to him. Then what’s all this wooing and daring despair? he asked, quoting from my narration of our courtship. I said: Must wooing and daring despair end in marriage? Can’t it end in love? What does marriage have to do with love? He snorted. God made us to be married. Love has everything to do with marriage. I wondered if he was about to dissolve as he had that night at Fantasia, but discussing love, marriage, and death had no visible effect on him this afternoon, perhaps because he was focused on the convex mirror suspended over the rear corner. The mirror’s monocular eye revealed the teenagers gazing on the chilled beer with reverence, entranced by the reflection of fluorescent light on amber glass. Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human—if God exists—He didn’t intend for us to be slaves to each other.
You know what makes us human? In the mirror, the shorter of the duo slipped a bottle into his pocket. With a weary sigh, Bon reached for the baseball bat beneath the cash register. What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves.
Perhaps the point could have been made more delicately, but he was never one to be interested in delicacy. He was more interested in threatening the shoplifters with severe bodily harm until they fell to their knees, surrendered the items hidden in their jackets, and kowtowed for forgiveness. Bon was merely teaching them the way we had been taught. Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars. For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful. My father was no exception. He was simply more high-minded than most, working the xylophone of his students’ knuckles with his ruler until our poor joints were bruised purple, blue, and black. Sometimes we deserved to be whacked, sometimes not, but my father never showed any regret when evidence of our innocence surfaced. Since all were guilty of Original Sin, even punishment wrongly given was in some way just.
My mother was guilty, too, but hers was such an unoriginal sin. I was the kind bothered less by sinning than by unoriginality. Even in courting Lana, I suspected any sin I committed with her would never be enough because it would not be original. Yet I believed that sinning with her might be enough, since I would never know unless I tried. Perhaps I would glimpse infinity when I lit her up with the spasmodic spark that came from striking my soul against hers. Perhaps I would finally know eternity without resorting to this:
Q. Say the Apostles’ Creed.
A. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth . . .
Even these two thieves had likely heard of this prayer, Christian ideas being so important to the American people that they had granted them a place on the most precious document of all, the dollar bill. IN GOD WE TRUST must even now be printed on the money in their wallets. Bon tapped the shoplifters’ foreheads gently with the baseball bat as they cried, Please, forgive us! At least these cretins knew fear, one of the two great motives for belief. The question the baseball bat would not resolve was whether they knew the other motive, love, which, for some reason, was much harder to teach.
The General arrived at his usual time, and as soon as he did, we left, myself chauffeuring while he sat in the back. He was not verbose as usual, nor did he spend his time poring through papers in his briefcase. Instead, he gazed out the window, which he normally considered a waste of time, and the only command he issued was to turn off the music. In the ensuing silence I heard the muted cello of foreboding, announcing the theme I was sure preoccupied him: Sonny. The newspaper article Sonny had written on the alleged operations of the Fraternity and the Movement had circulated with the ease of the common cold through the exiled community, his microbial allegations becoming confirmed facts and his facts becoming infectious rumors. By the time the rumors reached me, the story was that the General was either broke in his efforts to fund the Movement or wallowing in ill-gotten lucre. This was either the payoff from the US government for keeping mum about its failure to help us at war’s end, or the profits from not just a chain of restaurants, but also drug dealing, prostitution, and extortion of small-time business owners. The Movement, some insisted, was simply a racket, and its men in Thailand a rabble of scurvy degenerates dependent on the community’s donations. Others said those men were actually a regiment of the finest Rangers, bloodthirsty and mad for revenge. According to this ever-proliferating gossip, the General was either going to send these fools to their deaths from his armchair or he was going to return, like MacArthur to the Philippines, to lead the heroic invasion himself. If I was hearing this gossip, then Madame certainly was, and therefore the General, too, all of us tuned in to the humming, crackling AM channel of hearsay. This included the crapulent major, his fat body spilling over the edges of the bucket seat next to me. I dared not turn my head to look, although from the corner of my eye I saw him facing me, all three of his eyes surely wide open. I had not drilled that hole into his head that had given him his third eye, but I had come up with the plot that led to his fate. Now it was this third eye that allowed him to continue watching me even though he was dead, a spectator and not just a specter. I can’t wait to see the end of this little story, he said. But I already know how it’s going to end. Don’t you?
Did you say something? the General said. No, sir.
I heard you say something.
I must have been talking to myself. Stop talking to yourself.
Yes, sir.
The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself. But if talking to oneself was the ideal conversation in the cocktail party of one’s imagination, the crapulent major was the annoying guest who kept butting in and ignoring the cues to scram. Plots take on a life of their own, don’t they? he said. You gave birth to this plot. Now you’re the only one who can kill it. So it went for the rest of the drive to the country club, the crapulent major whispering in my ear while I held my tongue for so long it hurt, swollen with the words I wanted to say to him. Mostly I wished for him what I had once desired for my father, a disappearance from my life. After I had received his letter to me in the States that conveyed the news of my mother’s death, I had written to Man that if God really did exist, my mother would be alive and my father would not. How I wish he were dead! In fact, he died not long after I returned, but his death had not brought me the satisfaction I thought it would.
This is a country club? the General said when we arrived at our destination. I checked the address; it was the same as on the Congressman’s invitation. The invitation did mention a country club, and I, too, had pictured that we would drive through winding roads bereft of vehicles and roll up a gravel driveway to a valet waiting in a black vest and bow tie, the pastel prelude to entering a hushed den carpeted with the hides of black bears. On the walls, among the picture windows, would hang the antler-crowned heads of deer, gazing with mordant wisdom through clouds of cigar smoke. Outside sprawled an expansive golfing green that demanded more water than a Third World city, where quartets of virile bankers practiced a sport whose swinging skills required both the brute, warlike force necessary to disembowel unions as well as the coup de grâce finesse of tax dodging. But instead of such a soothing haven where one could always count on an undiminished supply of dimpled golf balls and self-congratulatory bonhomie, the address we arrived at was a steak house in Anaheim with all the charm of a door-to-door vacuum salesman. It seemed an ignoble setting for a private dinner with none other than Richard Hedd, who was visiting on a lecture tour.
After parking the car myself in a lot populated only by American and Teutonic vehicles of recent vintage, I followed the General into the steak house. The maître d’ possessed the mannerisms of an ambassador from a very small country, a careful blend of superciliousness and servitude. Hearing the Congressman’s name, he softened enough to bow his head slightly and led us through a maze of small dining rooms where red-blooded Americans in argyle sweater vests and button-down oxford shirts feasted on inordinate amounts of porterhouse steak and rack of lamb. Our destination was a private room on the second floor, where the Congressman was holding court with several others at a round table large enough for a man to lie on. Each of the attendees already had a drink in his hand, and it dawned on me that our lateness was prearranged. As the Congressman rose, I calmed the tremor in my gut. I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.
Gentlemen, we are delighted you can join us, the Congressman said. Let me introduce you. There were six others—prominent businessmen, elected officials, and lawyers—as well as Dr. Hedd. While the Congressman and Dr. Hedd were Very Important Persons, the others, including the General, were Semi-Important Persons (as for me, I was a Non-Important Person). Dr. Hedd was the main attraction of our dinner party, and the General was the secondary attraction. The Congressman had arranged the dinner for the General’s benefit, an opportunity to expand his network of potential advocates, supporters, and investors, with the big prize being Dr. Hedd. A good word from Dr. Hedd, the Congressman had told the General, can open doors and pocketbooks for your cause. Not by accident, then, were the seats on either side of Dr. Hedd reserved for the General and myself, and I wasted no time in presenting my copy of his book for an autograph.
I see you’ve read this rather closely, the doctor said, riffling through pages dogeared so exhaustively that the book swelled as if waterlogged. The young man’s a student of the American character, said the Congressman. From what the General tells me, and from what I’ve seen, I’m afraid he might know us better than we know ourselves. The men at the table chuckled at such a thought, and I did, too. If you’re a student of the American character, said Dr. Hedd, signing the title page, why are you reading this book? It’s more about the Asian than it is the American. He handed the book back to me, and with the weight of it in my hand, I said, It seems to me that one way to understand a person’s character is to understand what he thinks of others, especially those like oneself. Dr. Hedd regarded me intently over the tops of his rimless glasses, a species of look that always bothered me, even more so coming from a man who had written this:
The average Viet Cong fighter does not have a dispute with the real America. He has a dispute with the paper tiger created by his overlords, for he is no more than an idealistic young man duped by communism. If he understood the true nature of America, he would realize that America was his friend, not his enemy. (p. 213)
Dr. Hedd was not speaking of me, exactly, as I was not the average Viet Cong fighter, and yet he was speaking of me, in the sense that he was dealing in types. Before this meeting I had reviewed his book one more time and found two instances where his categories addressed someone such as myself. On the verso side of me:
The Vietnamese radical intellectual is our most dangerous foe. Likely to have read Jefferson and Montaigne, Marx and Tolstoy, he rightly asks why the rights of man so praised by Western civilization have not been extended to his people. He is lost to us. Having committed his life to the radical cause, there is no going back for him. (p. 301)
In this assessment Dr. Hedd was correct. I was the worst kind of cause, the lost cause. But then there was this passage, written on the recto side of myself:
The young Vietnamese who are enamored of America hold the key to South Vietnam’s freedom. They have tasted the Coca-Cola, as it were, and discovered it to be sweet. Cognizant of our American imperfections, they are nevertheless hopeful about our sincerity and our goodwill in working on those flaws. It is these young people we must cultivate. They will eventually replace the dictatorial generals who were, after all, trained by the French. (p. 381)
These categories existed as pages in a book exist, but most of us were composed of many pages, not just one. Still, I suspected, as Dr. Hedd scrutinized me, that what he saw was not that I was a book but that I was a sheet, easily read and easily mastered. I was going to prove him wrong.
I wager you, gentlemen, said Dr. Hedd, returning his attention to the rest of the table, that this young man is the only one among you to have read the entirety of my book. The table rippled with unembarrassed laughter, and for some reason I felt that it was I who was the butt of the joke. The entirety? said the Congressman. Come on, Richard. I’d be amazed if anybody here even read more than the back cover and the blurbs. Another round of laughter, but instead of being insulted Dr. Hedd seemed amused. He was the king of this affair, but he wore his paper crown lightly. Doubtless he was used to being feted, given the popularity of his books, the frequency of his appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows, and the prestige of his position as a resident scholar at a Washington think tank. Air force generals in particular loved him, employing him as a strategic consultant and regularly dispatching him to brief the president and his advisers on the wonders of bombing. Senators and congressmen loved Richard Hedd, too, including our Congressman and those like him whose districts manufactured the planes used for this bombing. So far as my book is concerned, he said, a little less honesty and a little more politeness in terms of saving face would seem to be needed.
Only the middle-aged man next to me did not laugh or chuckle. His suit was neutral blue, and an inoffensive striped tie was leashed around his neck. He was a personal injury lawyer, a maestro of the class-action lawsuit. Picking at his Waldorf salad, he said, It’s funny you say saving face, Dr. Hedd. Things have changed, haven’t they? Twenty or thirty years ago, no American would have said “saving face” with a straight face.
There were many things Americans would not have said with a straight face twenty or thirty years ago that we say today, said Dr. Hedd. “Saving face” is a useful expression, and I say this as someone who fought the Japanese in Burma.
They were tough, said the Congressman, or so my father told me. There’s nothing wrong with respecting your enemies. In fact, it’s noble to respect them. Look at what they’ve done with some help from us. You can’t drive down the street today without seeing a Japanese car.
The Japanese invested big in my country, too, said the General. They sold motorbikes and tape recorders. I owned a Sanyo stereo myself.
And this was only a couple of decades after they occupied you, the Congressman said. Did you know that a million Vietnamese died of famine during the Japanese years? The comment was addressed to the other men in suits, who did not laugh or chuckle. No kidding, said the personal injury lawyer. “No kidding” was about the only thing one could say when a statistic such as this arrived after the salad and before the hanger steak and baked potato. For a moment everyone squinted at his plate or cocktail, earnest as a patient studying an eye chart. As for me, I was calculating how to repair the damage the Congressman had inadvertently inflicted. He had complicated our task of being pleasant dinner companions by mentioning famine, something that Americans had never known. The word could only conjure otherworldly landscapes of the skeletal dead, which was not the spectral image we wanted to present, for what one should never do was to require other people to imagine they were just like one of us. Spiritual teleportation unsettled most people, who, if they thought of others at all, preferred to think that others were just like them or could be just like them.
That tragedy was a long time ago, I said. To tell you the truth, most of our countrymen here are less focused on the past than they are on becoming Americans.
How are they doing that? Dr. Hedd asked, and as he stared over his lenses it seemed to me that I was being examined by four eyes, not two. They—we, that is—believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I said, the answer I had given to many Americans. This drew approving nods from everyone at the table except for Dr. Hedd, who I had forgotten was an English immigrant. He kept his quadriscopic vision turned on me, those dual eyes and dual lenses unsettling. So, he said, are you happy? It was an intimate question, nearly as personal as asking about my salary, acceptable in our homeland but not here. What was worse, however, was that I could not think of a satisfactory answer. If I was unhappy, it would reflect badly on me, for Americans saw unhappiness as a moral failure and thought crime. But if I was happy, it would be in bad taste to say so, or a sign of hubris, as if I was boasting or gloating.
The waiters arrived at that moment with the solemnity of Egyptian servants ready to be buried alive with their pharaoh, platters with the main courses propped on their shoulders. If I thought that having slabs of meat before us would spare me Dr. Hedd’s attention, I was wrong. He repeated his question after the waiters had departed, and I said I was not unhappy. The fat balloon of my double negative hung in the air for a moment, ambiguous and vulnerable. Presumably, Dr. Hedd said, you are not unhappy because you are pursuing happiness and have not yet captured it. As we all supposedly are, correct, gentlemen? The men murmured an assent through mouthfuls of steak and red wine. Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity. Not only did Dr. Hedd have a measure of both, he also possessed an English accent, which affected Americans the way a dog whistle stimulated canines. I was immune to the accent, not having been colonized by the English, and I was determined to hold my own in this impromptu seminar.
What about you, Dr. Hedd? I asked. Are you happy?

The doctor was unfazed by my question, parsing his peas with his knife before deciding on a sliver of steak. As you evidently realized, he said, there is no good answer to that question.
Isn’t yes the good answer? said the assistant district attorney.
No, because happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game, sir. Dr. Hedd slowly turned his head in an arc as he spoke, making sure that he saw every man in the room. For someone to be happy, he must measure his happiness against someone else’s unhappiness, a process which most certainly works in reverse. If I said I was happy, someone else must be unhappy, most likely one of you. But if I said I was unhappy, that might make some of you happier, but it would also make you uneasy, as no one is supposed to be unhappy in America. I believe our clever young man has intuited that while only the pursuit of happiness is promised to all Americans, unhappiness is guaranteed for many.
Gloom descended on the table. The unspeakable had been spoken, which people like the General and myself could never have uttered in polite white company without rendering ourselves beyond the pale. Refugees such as ourselves could never dare question the Disneyland ideology followed by most Americans, that theirs was the happiest place on earth. But Dr. Hedd was beyond reproach, for he was an English immigrant. His very existence as such validated the legitimacy of the former colonies, while his heritage and accent triggered the latent Anglophilia and inferiority complex found in many Americans. Dr. Hedd was clearly aware of his privilege and was amused at the discomfort he was causing his American hosts. It was in this climate that the General intervened. I’m sure the good doctor is right, he said. But if happiness is not guaranteed, freedom is, and that, gentlemen, is more important.
Hear, hear, General, said the Congressman, raising his glass. Isn’t that what the immigrant has always understood? The rest of the guests also raised their glasses, even Dr. Hedd, smiling enigmatically at the General’s redirection of the conversation. Such a move was typical on the General’s part. He knew how to read a crowd, a crucial skill for raising money. As I had reported to Man through my Parisian aunt, he had already achieved a degree of fund-raising success, drawing from a handful of organizations to which he had been introduced by Claude, as well as his own contacts among Americans who had visited our country or done tours of duty there. These were well- connected men of pedigree, as were those who served on the boards of trustees for these organizations. The amount of money they gifted to the Fraternity was moderate by their standards, hardly anything to draw the attention of auditors or journalists. But once the Dollar Bill was dispatched abroad to Thailand, some extraordinary hocus-pocus called the exchange rate happened. The Dollar Bill might buy a ham sandwich in America, but in a Thai refugee camp the modest green Dollar Bill transformed into colorful Baht, ready to feed a fighting man for days. For a little more Baht, our fighting man could be clothed with the latest in olive drab. Thus, in the name of helping refugees, these donations met the basic necessities of food and garb for the secret army, consisting, after all, of refugees. As for guns and ammunition, they were supplied by the Thai security forces, who in turn received their pocket money from Uncle Sam, carried out with complete transparency and full congressional approval.
It was up to the Congressman, of course, to signal the appropriate moment for us to talk about why we were really there. He did so over the baked Alaska and after several rounds of cocktails. Gentlemen, the Congressman said, there is a serious reason for our meeting today and renewing our friendship. The General has come to talk to us about the plight of our old ally the South Vietnamese soldier, without whom the world would look much worse than it does today. Indochina did fall to communism, but look what we saved: Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, and Japan. These countries are our bulwark against the communist tide.
Let us not forget your Philippines, said Dr. Hedd. Or Indonesia.
Absolutely. Marcos and Suharto had time to put their communists down because the South Vietnamese soldier was their firewall, said the Congressman. So I think we owe this soldier something besides simple gratitude, which is why I asked you to come here today. Now I turn it over to one of the finest guardians of freedom Indochina has ever known. General?
The General pushed away his empty snifter and leaned forward with his elbows on the table, his hands clasped. Thank you, Congressman. It is my humble honor to meet you all. Men like you have built the world’s greatest weapon, the arsenal of democracy. We could never have fought as long as we had against overwhelming forces without your boys and your guns. You must remember, gentlemen, how arrayed against us were not only our misguided brothers, but the entire communist world. The Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans—they were all there, just as on our side were the many Asians you had befriended. How could I ever forget the South Koreans, the Filipinos, and the Thai who fought with us, as well as the Australians and the New Zealanders? Gentlemen, we did not fight the Vietnam War. We did not fight alone. We only fought the Vietnam battle in the Cold War between liberty and tyranny—
No one is disputing that there is still trouble in Southeast Asia, said Dr. Hedd. I had ever only seen the president dare to interrupt the General, but if he was offended, which he surely was, he betrayed no sign, merely smiling just a touch to express his pleasure at Dr. Hedd’s contribution. But whatever the troubled past, Dr. Hedd went on, the region is quieter now, Cambodia aside. Meanwhile there are other, immediately urgent issues to worry us. The Palestinians, the Red Brigades, the Soviets. The threats have changed and metastasized. Terrorist commandos have struck in Germany, Italy, and Israel. Afghanistan is the new Vietnam. We should be worried about that, wouldn’t you say, General?
The General furrowed his brow just a bit to show his concern and understanding. As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere. The General was deeply familiar with the nature, nuances, and internal differences of white people, as was every nonwhite person who had lived here a good number of years. We ate their food, we watched their movies, we observed their lives and psyche via television and in everyday contact, we learned their language, we absorbed their subtle cues, we laughed at their jokes, even when made at our expense, we humbly accepted their condescension, we eavesdropped on their conversations in supermarkets and the dentist’s office, and we protected them by not speaking our own language in their presence, which unnerved them. We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never knew because our field notes were written in our own language in letters and postcards dispatched to our countries of origin, where our relatives read our reports with hilarity, confusion, and awe. Although the Congressman was joking, we probably did know white people better than they knew themselves, and we certainly knew white people better than they ever knew us. This sometimes led to us doubting ourselves, a state of constant self-guessing, of checking our images in the mirror and wondering if that was really who we were, if that was how white people saw us. But for all we thought we knew about them, there were some things we knew we did not know even after many years of forced and voluntary intimacy, including the art of making cranberry sauce, the proper way of throwing a football, and the secret customs of secret societies, like college fraternities, which seemed to recruit only those who would have been eligible for the Hitler Youth. Not least among the unknown to us was a sanctum such as this, or so I reported to my Parisian aunt, a hidden chamber where very few of our kind had appeared before, if any. As aware of this as I, the General was on mental tiptoes, careful not to offend.
It is funny you bring up the Soviets, the General said. As you have written, Dr. Hedd, Stalin and the peoples of the Soviet Union are closer in character to Oriental than Occidental. Your argument that the Cold War is a clash of civilizations, not just a clash of countries or even ideologies, is absolutely correct. The Cold War is really a conflict of Orient and Occident, and the Soviets are really Asiatics who have never learned Western ways, unlike us. Of course it was actually I, in preparation for this meeting, or audition, who had summarized for the General these claims in Hedd’s book. Now I observed Dr. Hedd closely for his reaction to my prescription, but his expression did not change. Still, I was confident that the General’s comments had affected him. No author was immune from having his own ideas and words quoted back to him favorably. Authors were, at heart, no matter how much they blustered or how suavely they carried themselves, insecure creatures with sensitive egos, as delicate in the constitution as movie stars, only much poorer and less glamorous. One only needed to dig deep enough to find that white, fleshy tuber of their secret self, and the sharpest tools with which to do so were always their own words. I added my own contribution to this effort and said, It is undisputed that we should confront the Soviets, Dr. Hedd. But the reason to fight them is related to the reason you advocated for fighting their servants in our country, and why we continue to fight them now.
What reason is that? said the ever Socratic Dr. Hedd.
I’ll tell you the reason, said the Congressman. And not in my words, but in the words of John Quincy Adams when he spoke of our great country. “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be .
. . She”—America—“is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.”
Dr. Hedd smiled again and said, Very good, sir. Even an Englishman cannot argue with John Quincy Adams.
What I still don’t get is how we lost, the assistant district attorney said, beckoning to the headwaiter for another cocktail. In my opinion, said the personal injury lawyer, and hopefully you gentlemen will understand, we lost because we were too cautious. We feared harming our reputation, but if we had simply accepted that any damage to it wouldn’t last, we could have exerted overwhelming force and showed your people which side deserved to win.
Perhaps Stalin and Mao had the right response, the General said. After a few million have died, what’s a few million more? Didn’t you write something to that effect, Dr. Hedd?
You have read my book more closely than I expected, General. You are a man who has undoubtedly seen the worst of war, as have I, so you will forgive me if I speak the unpalatable truth about why the Americans lost Vietnam. Dr. Hedd pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose until his eyes finally peered through the lenses. Your American generals fought in World War II and knew the value of your Japanese strategies, but they didn’t have a free hand to run the war. Instead of waging a war of obliteration, the only kind of war the Oriental understands and respects—nota bene Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—they had to, or chose to, fight a war of attrition. The Oriental interprets that, quite rightly, as weakness. Am I wrong, General?
If the Orient has one inexhaustible resource, said the General, it is people.
That is right, and I will tell you something else, General. It saddens me to come to this conclusion, but I have seen the evidence for myself, not only in books and archives, but in the battlefields of Burma. It must be said. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it—Dr. Hedd paused—life is not important. Perhaps it is insensitive to say, but the Oriental does not put the same high price on life as the Westerner.
I wrote to my Parisian aunt that a moment of silence fell on the table as we absorbed this idea and as the waiters returned with our cocktails. The Congressman stirred his drink and said, What do you think, General? The General sipped from his cognac and soda, smiled, and said, Of course Dr. Hedd is right, Congressman. The truth is so often uncomfortable. What do you think, Captain?
All the men turned their attention to me, my brimming martini glass halfway to my lips. I reluctantly eased it down. After three of these libations and two glasses of red wine, I felt full of insight, the air of truth having expanded my mind and needing to be let out. Well, I said, I beg to differ from Dr. Hedd. Life actually is valuable to the Oriental. The General frowned and I paused. No one else’s expression changed, but I could feel the static electricity of tension accumulating. So you’re saying that Dr. Hedd is wrong, said the Congressman, as affable as Dr. Mengele must have been in the right company. Oh, no, I hastened to say. I was sweating, my undershirt damp. But you see, gentlemen, while life is only valuable to us—I paused again, and my audience inclined toward me by a millimeter or two—life is invaluable to the Westerner.
The attention of the men turned to Dr. Hedd, who raised his cocktail to me and said, I could not have phrased it better myself, young man. With that, the conversation finally exhausted itself, leaving us to nuzzle our cocktails with the affection one reserved for puppies. I made eye contact with the General and he nodded approvingly. Now, our hosts satisfied with our parley, I could ask a question of my own. Perhaps this is naive, I said, but we thought we were coming to a country club.
Our hosts roared with laughter as if I had told a most excellent joke. Even Dr. Hedd seemed to be in on it, chuckling over his Manhattan. The General and I grinned, waiting for the explanation. The Congressman glanced at the headwaiter, who nodded, and said, Gentlemen, now’s a good a time as any to introduce you to the country club. Don’t forget your cocktails. Led by the headwaiter, we filed out of the dining room with cocktails in hand. Down the hallway was another door. Opening it, the headwaiter said, The gentlemen are here. Inside was the room I had been expecting, with wood- paneled walls on which was mounted the head of a buck, its rack of antlers sporting sufficient points for all of us to hang our jackets on. The air was smoky and the lighting was dim, the better to flatter the comely young women in slinky dresses arranged on the leather sofas.
Gentlemen, said the Congressman, welcome to the country club. I don’t get it, the General whispered.
I’ll tell you later, sir, I muttered. I finished my cocktail and handed the glass to the headwaiter as the Congressman beckoned to a pair of young ladies. General, Captain, let me introduce you. Our companions stood up. Elevated by high heels, they were taller than the General and myself by two or three inches. Mine was an enormous inflated blonde whose enameled white teeth were not quite as hard and shiny as her Nordic blue eyes. In one hand was a coupe of fizzy champagne, and in the other a long-stemmed cigarette holder with a half-smoked cigarette. She was a professional who had seen the likes of me a thousand times, which I could hardly complain about, given that I had seen the likes of her a fair number of times myself. Although I cranked my cheeks and lips into the facsimile of a smile, I could not muster inside myself the usual enthusiasm as the Congressman introduced us. Perhaps it was the way she casually flicked the head of ash from her cigarette onto the carpet, but instead of being magnetized by her iron beauty I was distracted by a striation below her jaw, the hemline between the unadorned skin of her neck and the white foundation coating her face. What’s your name again? she said, laughing for no good reason. I leaned forward to tell her and nearly fell into the well of her cleavage, my sudden vertigo induced by the chloroform of her thick perfume.
I like your accent, I said, pulling back. You must be from somewhere in the South. Georgia, honey, she said, laughing again. You speak real good English for an Oriental.
I laughed, she laughed, and when I looked to the General and his redheaded companion, they, too, were laughing. Everyone in the room was laughing, and when the waiters arrived with more champagne, it was clear we were all going to have a most excellent time, including Dr. Hedd. After handing a glass to his buxom companion and another to me, he said, I hope you do not mind, young man, if I use your memorable turn of phrase in my next book. Our female companions looked at me without interest, waiting for my reply. Nothing could make me happier, I said, even though I was, for reasons unspeakable in this company, quite unhappy.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 16

The General delivered a surprise to me as we parked outside his unlit residence later that evening, a little past midnight. I’ve been thinking about your request to return to our homeland, he said from the backseat, eyes visible in my rearview mirror. I need you here, but I respect your courage. Unlike Bon and the others, however, you’ve never been battlefield tested. He described the grizzled captain and the affectless lieutenant as war heroes, men whom he would trust with his life in combat. But you’ll need to prove you can do what they can. You’ll need to do what must be done. Can you do that? Of course, sir. I hesitated, then asked the obvious question: But what is to be done? You know what needs to be done, said the General. I sat with my hands still on the steering wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock, hoping I was wrong. I just want to make sure I do the right thing, sir, I said, looking at him in the rearview mirror. What exactly needs to be done?
The General rustled in the back, rummaging through his pockets. I brought out my lighter. Thanks, Captain. For a brief moment the flame lit the palimpsest of his face. Then the chiaroscuro died and his face was no longer legible. I never told you the story of how I came to spend two years in a communist prison camp, did I? Well, no need for graphic details. Suffice it to say the enemy had surrounded our men at Dien Bien Phu. Not just Frenchmen and Moroccans and Algerians and Germans, but ours, too, thousands of them. I volunteered to jump into Dien Bien Phu, though I knew I would also be doomed. But I could not let my fellow soldiers die while I did nothing. When Dien Bien Phu fell, I was captured along with everybody else. Even though I lost two years of my life in prison, I never regretted jumping. I became the man I am today by jumping and by surviving that camp. But no one asked me to volunteer. No one told me what needed to be done. No one discussed the consequences. All these things were understood. Do you understand, Captain?
Yes, sir, I said.
Very good, then. If what needs to be done is done, then you can return to our homeland. You are a very intelligent young man, Captain. I trust you with all the details. No need to consult me. I’ll arrange your ticket. You will get it when I receive news of what has been done. The General paused, door halfway open. Country club, huh? He chuckled. I’ll have to remember that. I watched him walk up the pathway to his darkened house, where Madame was likely reading in bed, staying awake for his return, as she had waited so often in the villa. She knew a general’s duties extended past midnight, but was she aware what some of these duties included? That we, too, had country clubs? Sometimes, after delivering him to the villa, I stood in my socked feet in the hallway and listened for any signs of distress from their room. I never heard any, but she was too smart not to know.
As for what I knew, it was this: my Parisian aunt had replied and the invisible words that gradually became visible were succinct. Don’t come back, Man had written. We need you in America, not here. These are your orders. I burned the letter in a wastebasket, as I had burned all the letters, which was until that moment only a way of getting rid of evidence. But in that moment, I confess that burning the letter was also sending it to Hell, or perhaps making an offering to a deity, not God, who could keep Bon and me safe. I did not tell Bon about the letter, of course, but I did tell him of the General’s offer and sought his counsel. He was characteristically blunt. You’re an idiot, he said. But I can’t stop you from going. As for Sonny, nothing to feel bad about. The man’s got a big mouth. This consolation was offered the only way he knew how, at a billiards hall where he bought me several drinks and several rounds of pool. Something about the fraternal atmosphere of a billiards hall reassured the soul. The isolated pool of light over a table of green felt was an indoor hydroponic zone where what grew was the prickly plant of masculine emotion, too sensitive for sunlight and fresh air. After a café, but before a nightclub or home, a billiards hall was where one was most likely to encounter the southern Vietnamese man. Here he discovered that in billiards, as in lovemaking, accurate and true aim was increasingly difficult in proportion to the amount of alchohol consumed. Thus, as the night progressed, our games gradually grew longer and longer. To Bon’s credit, however, the offer he made me was given in our first game, well before the nub of the night wore away to nothing and we numbly left the pool hall in the first minutes of dawn, exiting onto a lonely street whose only sign of life was a flour-dusted baker toiling in a doughnut shop’s window. I’ll do it, Bon said, watching me rack the balls. Tell the General you did it, but I’ll get him for you.
His offer did not surprise me at all. Even as I thanked him, I knew I could not accept it. I was venturing into a wilderness many had explored before me, crossing the threshold separating those who had killed from those who had not. The General was correct that only a man who had received this rite could be allowed to return home. What I needed was a sacrament but none existed for this matter. Why not? Who were we fooling with the belief that God, if He existed, would not want us to acknowledge the sacredness of killing? Let us return to another important question of my father’s catechism:
Q. What is man?
A. Man is a creature composed of a body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.
Q. Is this likeness in the body or in the soul?
A. This likeness is chiefly in the soul.
I need not look in the mirror or at the faces of my fellow men to find a likeness to God. I need only look at their selves and inside my own to realize we would not be killers if God Himself was not one, too.
But of course I am talking about not only killing but its subset murder. Bon shrugged at my hesitation and leaned over the table, cue stick resting on his splayed hand. You’re always wanting to learn things, he said. Well, there’s no greater knowledge than in killing a man. He put some english on the cue ball, and when it struck its target it rolled backward gently, aligning itself for the next shot. What about love and creation? I said. Getting married, having children? You, of all people, should believe in that kind of knowledge. He rested his hip on the table’s edge, both hands clutching the pool cue propped on his shoulder. You’re testing me, right? Okay. We have all kinds of ways to talk about life and creation. But when guys like me go and kill, everyone’s happy we do it and no one wants to talk about it. It would be better if every Sunday before the priest talks a warrior gets up and tells people who he’s killed on their behalf. Listening is the least they could do. He shrugged. That’s not ever happening. So here’s some practical advice. People like to play dead. You know how to tell if someone’s really dead? Press your finger on his eyeball. If he’s alive, he’ll move. If he’s dead, he won’t.
I could see myself shooting Sonny, having seen such an act so many times in the movies. But I could not see my finger wiggling the slippery fish ball of his eye. Why not just shoot him twice? I said. Because, smart guy, it makes noise. It goes bang. And who said anything about shooting him even once? Sometimes we killed VC with things other than guns. If it makes you feel any better, this isn’t murder. It’s not even killing. It’s assassination. Ask your man Claude if you haven’t already. He’d show up and say, Here’s the shopping list. Go and bag some. So we’d go into the villages at night with the shopping list. VC terrorist, VC sympathizer, VC collaborator, maybe VC, probable VC, this one’s got a VC in her belly. This one’s thinking of being a VC. This one everybody thinks is VC. This one’s father or mother is VC, therefore is VC in training. We ran out of time before we got them all. We should have wiped them out when we had the chance. Don’t make the same mistake. Take out this VC before he gets too big, before he turns others into VC. That’s all it is. Nothing to feel sorry about. Nothing to cry about.
If it were all so simple. The problem with killing all the Viet Cong was that there would always be more, teeming in the walls of our minds, breathing heavily under the floorboards of our souls, orgiastically reproducing out of our sight. The other problem was that Sonny was not VC, for a subversive would not, by definition, have a big mouth. But maybe I was wrong. An agent provocateur was a subversive, and his task was to shoot his mouth off, agitating others in the spin cycle of radicalization. In that case, however, the agent provocateur here would not be a communist, spurring the anticommunists to organize against him. He would be an anticommunist, encouraging like- minded people to go too far, dizzy with ideological fervor, rancid with resentment. By that definition, the most likely agent provocateur was the General. Or the Madame. Why not? Man assured me we had people in the highest ranks. You’ll be surprised who gets the medals after the liberation, he said. Would I now? The joke would be on me if the General and Madame were sympathizers, too. A joke we could all laugh at when we were commemorated as Heroes of the People.
With Bon’s counsel stashed away, I turned for solace to the only other person whom I could speak to, Lana. I came to her apartment the next week with a bottle of wine. At home she she looked like a college student in her UC Berkeley sweatshirt, faded blue jeans, and the lightest of makeup. She cooked like one, too, but no matter. We ate dinner in the living room while watching The Jeffersons, a TV comedy about the unacknowledged black descendants of Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence. Afterward we drank another bottle of wine, which helped to soften the heavy lumps of starch in our tummies. I pointed toward the illuminated architectural masterpieces on a hill in the distance, visible through her window, and told her that one of them belonged to the Auteur, whose opus was soon to be released. I had already recounted my misadventures in the Philippines and my suspicion, however paranoid, that the Auteur had tried to kill me. I’ll admit, I told her, that I’ve fantasized about killing him once or twice. She shrugged and stubbed out her cigarette. We all fantasize about killing people, she said. Just a passing thought, like, oh, what if I ran over that person with a car. Or at least we fantasize what it would be like if someone were dead. My mother, for example. Not really, of course, but just what if . . . right? Don’t leave me feeling like I’m crazy here. I had her guitar on my lap, and I strummed a dramatic Spanish chord. Since we’re confessing, I said, I’ve thought about killing my father. Not really, of course, but just what if . . . Did I ever tell you he was a priest? Her eyes opened wide. A priest? My God!
Her sincere shock endeared her to me. Underneath the nightclub makeup and artificial diva gloss she was still innocent, so unsullied that all I wanted was to rub the emollient, creamy pulp of my ecstatic self onto her soft white skin. I wanted to replicate the oldest dialectic of all with her, the thesis of Adam and the antithesis of Eve that led to the synthesis of us, the rotten apple of humanity, fallen so far from God’s tree. Not that we were even as pure as our first parents. If Adam and Eve had debased God’s knowledge, we had in turn debased Adam and Eve, so that what I really wanted was the steamy, hot, jungle dialectic of “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Were either of these couplings any better than a Vietnamese girl and a French priest? My mother used to tell me nothing was wrong with being the love child of such a pair, I told Lana. After all, Mama said, we are a people born from the mating of a dragon and a fairy. What could be stranger than that? But people looked down on me all the same, and I blamed my father. When I was growing up, I fantasized that one day he would stand before the congregation and say, Here is my son that you may know him. Let him come before you that you should recognize him and love him as I love him. Or some such thing. I’d have been happy if he would just visit and eat with us and call me son in secret. But he never did, so I fantasized about a lightning bolt, a mad elephant, a fatal disease, an angel descending behind him at the pulpit and blowing a trumpet in his ear to call him back to his Maker.
That’s not fantasizing about killing him.

Oh, but I did, with a gun. But have you forgiven him?
Sometimes I think I have. Sometimes I think I haven’t, especially when I think of my mother. That means, I suppose, that I haven’t really forgiven him.
Lana leaned forward then, resting her hand on my knee. Perhaps forgiveness is overrated, she said. Her face was closer to me than ever before, and all I need do was lean forward. It was then I committed the most perverse act of my life. I declined, or rather, I reclined, putting distance between me and that beautiful face, the tempting crevice of those slightly parted lips. I should go, I said.
You should go? From the expression on her face, it was clear she had never heard those words before from a man. She would not have looked so astonished if I had asked her to commit the most heinous acts of Sodom. I stood up before I changed my mind, handing her the guitar. There’s something I must do. Before I can do what needs to be done here. It was her turn to recline, amused, and strum a dramatic chord. Sounds serious, she said. But you know what? I like serious men.
If only she knew how serious I could be. I drove the hour between her apartment and Sonny’s with my hands at ten and two o’clock, breathing deeply and methodically to quell my regret at leaving Lana and my nervousness at meeting him. Breathing mindfully was a lesson Claude had taught me, learned from the practices of our Buddhist monks. Everything came down to focusing on the breath. Slowly exhaling and inhaling, one cleared away life’s white noise, leaving one’s mind free and peaceful to be one with the object of its contemplation. When subject and object are the same, Claude said, you don’t shake when you squeeze the trigger. By the time I parked my car around the corner from Sonny’s apartment, my mind was a gull gliding over a beach, carried not by its own will or movement but by the breeze. I took off my blue polo shirt and slipped on a white T-shirt. I kicked off my brown loafers and removed my khakis, then pulled on a pair of blue jeans and beige canvas shoes. Last to go on was a reversible windbreaker, the plaid side exposed, and a fedora. Leaving the car, I carried with me a free tote bag I had received for subscribing to Time magazine, inside of which was a small backpack, the clothes I had just shed, a baseball cap, a blond wig, a pair of tinted glasses, and a black Walther P22 with a silencer. The General had given Bon an envelope of cash, and with it Bon had bought the pistol and silencer from the same Chinese gang that had supplied him with the .38. Then he had made me rehearse the plan with him until I had memorized it.
The sidewalk was barren from car to apartment. Walking the streets was not an American custom, as I had confirmed after observing the neighborhood several times. It was a little past nine o’clock when I checked my watch at the entrance to his apartment building, a gray two-story factory for manufacturing hundreds of tired replicas of the American Dream. All the inmates imagined their dreams to be unique, but they were merely tin reproductions of a lost original. I rang the intercom. Allô? he said. When I announced my presence, there was a slight pause before he said, I’ll buzz you in. I took the stairs instead of the elevator to avoid meeting anyone. On the second floor, I peeked into the hallway to make sure no one was there. He opened the door a second after I knocked.
The apartment smelled like home, the scents of fried fish, steamed white rice, and cigarette smoke. I know why you’re here, he said as I sat down on his couch. I clutched the tote bag. Why am I here? I said. Sofia, he said, as serious as I was even though his feet were in fuzzy pink slippers. He wore sweatpants and a gray cardigan. On the dining table behind him hunkered a typewriter with a lip of paper dangling from its roller, the machine abutted by haphazard mounds of documents. Under the dining table’s chandelier, above an ashtray, floated a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, the exhaust from Sonny’s active brain. And on the wall above the table, through that scrim, hung the same clock as in the General and Madame’s restaurant, also set to Saigon time.
We never did have the talk we should have had about her, he said. Our last conversation was uncomfortable. I apologize for that. If we had been decent about it, we would have written you a letter in the Philippines. His unexpected and seemingly genuine concern for my welfare caught me off guard. It was my fault, I said. I never wrote her in the first place myself. We both looked at each other for a moment and then he smiled and said, I’m being a bad host. I haven’t even offered you a drink. How about it? Despite my protestations, he leaped up and went to the kitchen, exactly as Bon predicted. I put my hand on the Walther P22 in the tote bag but I could not find the will to stand up, follow him into the kitchen, and quickly put a bullet behind his ear as Bon had advised. It’s the merciful thing to do, he said. Yes, it was, but the lump of starch in my stomach glued me to the couch, upholstered in a scratchy, stain-resistant fabric designed for motel room trysts. Stacks of books on the industrial carpet sandbagged the walls, and on top of the antique television a silver stereo muttered. Above the armchair, a blotchy, amateurish painting in the style of a demented Monet illustrated an interesting principle, that beauty is not needed to make a milieu more attractive. A very ugly object can also make an ugly room less ugly by comparison. Another affordable way to add a drop of loveliness to the world was not to change it but to change how one saw it. This was one of the purposes for the bottle of bourbon that Sonny returned with, a third full.
You hear that? he said, nodding at the stereo. The two of us cuddled the glasses of bourbon in our laps. After all the Cambodian attacks on our border towns, we just raided Cambodia. You’d think we’d had enough of war that we wouldn’t want another one. I thought about how the border clash with the Khmer Rouge was an incredible stroke of good luck for the General, a distraction to keep everyone looking elsewhere than our Laotian border. The problem with winning, I said, is that everyone’s so riled up they’re ready to fight again. He nodded and sipped his bourbon. The good thing about losing is it keeps you from fighting another war, at least for a while. Although that’s not true for your General. I was about to protest when he raised his hand and said, Forgive me. I’m talking politics again. I swear not to talk about politics tonight, my brother. You know how hard that is for someone who believes everything is political.
Even bourbon? I said. He grinned. All right, so perhaps bourbon is not political. I don’t know what to talk about besides politics. It’s a weakness. Most people can’t tolerate it. But Sofia can. I talk to her like no one else. That’s love.
So you’re in love with her?
You weren’t in love with her, were you? She said you weren’t. If she said so, then I guess I wasn’t.
I understand. Losing her hurts even if you didn’t love her. That’s human nature. You want her back. You don’t want to lose her to someone like me. But please, see it from my point of view. We didn’t plan anything. It’s just that when we started talking at the wedding, we couldn’t stop. Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word. At least that’s one way I’ve figured out how to describe love. I’ve never been in love before. It leaves me with this strange need to find the right metaphor to describe being in love. Like I am a windmill, and she is the wind. Stupid, yes?
No, not at all, I mumbled, realizing we had broached a topic more problematic than politics. I looked down at the nearly empty glass cupped in my hand, and through the skim of bourbon at the bottom of the glass I saw the red scar. It’s not her fault, he said. I gave her my number at the wedding and asked for hers, because, I said, wouldn’t it be great if I could write an article about how a Japanese sees us Vietnamese? Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation. And then, if you have not claimed America, where will you go? We can go anywhere, I said. You think that way because you weren’t born here, she said. I was, and I have nowhere else to go. If I had children, they, too, would have nowhere else.

They will be citizens. This is their country. And at that moment, with those words of hers, a desire I had never experienced came over me. I wanted to have a child with her. Me, who had never wanted marriage! Who could never imagine being a father!
Can I have another drink?
Of course! He refilled my glass. You stupid bastard, Bon’s voice in my head said. You’re making this worse. Get it over with. Now, Sonny continued, I realize that so far as children and fatherhood goes, it’s more dream than possibility. Sofia is past her childbirthing years. But there’s adoption. I think it’s time to think of someone else besides me. Before I only wanted to change the world. I still want that, but it was ironic how I never wanted to change myself. Yet that’s where revolutions start! And it’s the only way revolutions can continue, if we keep looking inward, looking at how others might see us. That’s what happened when I met Sofia. I saw myself the way she saw me.
With that, he lapsed into silence. My resolve was so weakened I could not raise my right arm to reach into the bag for the gun. Listen, I said. I have something to confess to you.
So you do love Sofia. He looked genuinely sad. I’m sorry.
I’m not here because of Ms. Mori. Can we just talk about politics instead? As you wish.
I asked you before if you were a communist. You said you wouldn’t tell me if you were. But what if I told you I was a communist? He smiled, shaking his head. I don’t believe in the hypothetical, he said. What’s the point of playing a game of what or who you might be? It’s not a game, I said. I am a communist. I’m your ally. I have been an agent for the opposition and the revolution for years. What do you think about that?
What do I think? He hesitated in disbelief. Then his face turned bright red in fury. I don’t believe it at all is what I think. I think you’ve come here to trick me. You want me to say I’m a communist, too, so you can kill me or expose me, don’t you?
I’m trying to help you, I said.
How exactly are you trying to help me?
I had no answer to his question. I confess that I do not know what brought me to make my confession to him. Or, rather, I did not know then, but perhaps I do know now. I had worn my mask for so long, and here was my opportunity to take it off, safely. I had stumbled to this action instinctively, out of a feeling that was not unique to me. I cannot be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved. But what would happen if one took off the mask and the other saw one not with love but with horror, disgust, and anger? What if the self that one exposes is as unpleasing to others as the mask, or even worse?
Did the General put you up to this? he said. I can see the two of you plotting away. If I was gone, it would be good for him and for you, no doubt.
Listen to me—
You’re jealous because I have Sofia, even though you don’t even love her. I knew you’d be angry, but I didn’t think you’d stoop this low and come bait me. How stupid do you think I am? Did you think you’d suddenly be attractive to Sofia again if you said you were a communist? You don’t think she’d smell your desperation and laugh in your face? My God, I can’t even imagine what she’ll say when I tell her—
Although it seems impossible to miss from five feet away, it is very possible, especially after too much wine and a tumbler or two of bourbon suffused with the bitter peat of the past. The bullet punctured the radio, muffling but not silencing it. He looked at me in utter astonishment, his gaze fixed on the gun in my hand, the silencer adding a few more inches. I had stopped breathing, my heart had ceased beating. The gun jerked and he cried out, pierced in the hand that he had flung up. Suddenly awakened to his impending death, he leaped to his feet and turned to run. The third bullet struck between shoulder blade and spine, staggering but not stopping him as I jumped over the coffee table, catching up before he reached the door. Now I was in the ideal position, or so Bon told me, a foot behind my subject, in his blind spot, where one really could not miss. Click, clack went the gun, one bullet behind the ear, another in the skull, and Sonny fell face-first with enough graceless weight to break his nose.
I stood over his prone body, cheek down on the carpet, copious amounts of blood gushing from the holes drilled in his head. At the angle at which I stood, behind him, I could not see his eyes but I could see his upturned hand with the bloody hole in his palm, his arm bent awkwardly beside him. The lump of starch had dissolved, but now its liquid results sloshed in my guts and threatened to spill. I inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. I thought of Ms. Mori, most likely at home, cat on her lap, reading a radical feminist treatise, waiting for Sonny to call, the call that never would come, the call that defined our relationship to God, whom we forlorn lovers were always calling. Now Sonny had crossed the greatest divide, leaving behind only his cold, darkened shade, his lamp forever extinguished. On the back of his cardigan a crimson stain spread, while around his head a bloody halo swelled. A wave of nausea and chills shook me, and my mother said, You’ll be better than all of them, won’t you, my son?
I inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly, once, twice, and one more time, slowing my shaking to a trembling. Remember, Bon said inside my head, you’re doing what has to be done. The list of other things in need of doing returned. I took off my windbreaker and T-shirt and put my blue polo shirt back on. The jeans and canvas shoes came off, replaced by khakis and loafers. I reversed the windbreaker to expose the plain white side, swapped the fedora for the wig, its blond hair touching the base of my neck, and put on the baseball cap. Last came the tinted glasses, my change complete after the tote bag and the gun went into the backpack. The wig, cap, and glasses were Bon’s idea. He had made me try the look on in front of the bathroom mirror, foggy with a year’s worth of spattered toothpaste foam. See? he said. Now you’re a white man. To me I still looked like me, hidden by a disguise much too normal for a masked ball or a Halloween party. But that was the point. If someone did not know what I looked like, I did not look like I was in disguise.
I wiped the fingerprints off my glass with my handkerchief, and it was with the handkerchief wrapped around the doorknob that I thought I heard Sonny moan. I looked down at the back of his shattered head, but I could hear nothing more above the thrumming of blood in my ears. You know what you have to do, Bon said. I got on my knees, lowering my face to look Sonny in his one exposed eye. When the liquid contents of my dinner rose up against the back of my throat, I clapped my hand over my mouth. I swallowed hard and tasted vileness. Sonny’s eye was lusterless and blank. He must surely be dead, but as Bon had told me, sometimes the dead did not know they were dead yet. So it was that I reached forth my index finger, slowly, closer and closer to that eye, which moved not at all. My finger hovered an inch before the eye, then a few millimeters. No movement. Then my finger touched that soft, rubbery eye, the texture of a peeled quail egg, and he blinked. I jumped back as his body shuddered, just a little, and then I fired another bullet into his temple from a foot away. Now, Bon said, he’s dead.
I inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and almost threw up. A little more than three minutes had elapsed since the first shot. I inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and my liquid contents achieved precarious equilibrium. After all was still, I opened Sonny’s door and walked out with presidential confidence, as Bon recommended. Breathe, Claude said. So I breathed, running down the echoing stairway, and I breathed once more as I exited into the lobby, where the front door was opening.
He was a white man, the lawn mower of middle age having blazed a broad swatch of baldness through his hair. The well-tailored, cheap-looking suit bolted to his considerable body implied he worked in one of those low-paying professions where appearances counted, where one worked on commission. His wingtips glistened with the sheen of frozen fish. I knew all this because I looked at him, which Bon said not to do. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t give people a reason to give you a second look. But he did not even look at me. Eyes straight ahead, he walked by as if I were invisible, a ghost or, more likely, just another unremarkable white man. I passed through his vapor trail of artificial pheromone, the dime-store cologne of the macho male, and caught the front door before it closed. Then I was on the street, breathing in the Southern Californian air, fine-grained with the particulates of smog, heady with the realization that I could go wherever I wanted. I made it as far as my car. There, kneeling by the wheel well, I vomited, heaving until nothing was left, staining the gutter with the tea leaves of my insides.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 17

It’s normal, Bon said the next morning. He soothed the hematoma swelling from my mind with the aid of a fine bottle of scotch, granted by the General. It just had to be done, and we’re the ones who have to live with it. Now you understand. Drink up. We drank up. You know what the best cure is? I had thought the best cure was to return to Lana, which I had done after leaving Sonny’s apartment, but even an unforgettable evening with her had not helped me forget what I had done to Sonny. I shook my head slowly, careful not to rattle my bruised brain. Getting back to the battlefield. You’ll feel better in Thailand. If that was true, then fortunately I did not have to wait long. We were leaving tomorrow, the scheduling planned to help me avoid any possibility of entanglement with the law and to avoid my plot’s obvious weakness, Ms. Mori. On hearing of Sonny’s death, her first thoughts might be confused, but her subsequent thoughts would turn to me, her jilted lover. The General had trusted that I would get the deed done on the date I promised, and he had provided me with my ticket the previous week. We were in his office, the newspaper on his desk, and when I opened my mouth, he lifted his hand and said, It goes without saying, Captain. I closed my mouth. I inspected the ticket, and that evening I wrote my Parisian aunt. In code, I told Man that I accepted responsibility for disobeying his orders, but that I was returning with Bon to save his life. I did not inform Man of my plan for how to do that, because I still did not have one. But I had gotten Bon into this situation, and it was up to me to get him out of it if I could.
So, two days after the deed was done, with no one yet having noticed Sonny’s absence, except, perhaps, for Ms. Mori, we left with no fanfare aside from that provided by the General and Madame at the airport gate. There were four of us departing on this unlikely trip—Bon, myself, the grizzled captain, and the affectless lieutenant—slung across the Pacific in a tubular, subsonic Boeing airliner. Good-bye, America, the grizzled captain said during our ascent, looking out the window at a landscape I could not see from my aisle seat. I’ve had enough of you, he said. The affectless lieutenant, sitting in the middle, agreed. Why did we ever call it the beautiful country? he said. I had no answer. I was in a daze and terribly uncomfortable, sharing my seat as I was with the crapulent major on one side and Sonny on the other. It was only my seventh time on a jet airplane. I had flown to and from America for college, then flew with Bon from Saigon to Guam and Guam to California, followed by my round trip to the Philippines, and now this. My chances of returning to America were small, and I thought with regret about all the things I would miss about America: the TV dinner; air- conditioning; a well-regulated traffic system that people actually followed; a relatively low rate of death by gunfire, at least compared with our homeland; the modernist novel; freedom of speech, which, if not as absolute as Americans liked to believe, was still greater in degree than in our homeland; sexual liberation; and, perhaps most of all, that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious. There were also many things about America with which I was less enchanted, but why be negative? I would leave the anti-American negativity and pessimism to Bon, who had never assimilated and was relieved to go. It’s like I’ve been hiding in someone else’s house, he said somewhere over the Pacific. He was sitting across the aisle from me. The Japanese stewardesses were serving tempura and tonkatsu, which tasted better than the last word the General had forced into my mouth at the departure gate. In between the walls, Bon said, listening to other people live, coming out only at night. I can breathe now. We’re going back where everyone looks like us. Like you, I said. I don’t look like everyone there. Bon sighed. Stop bitching and moaning, he said, filling my teacup with the whiskey the General had given him at the gate. Your problem isn’t that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you’re thinking. So I’ll just shup up then, I said. Yes, just shut up, he said. All right, then, I’ll shut up, I said. Jesus Christ, he said.
After a sleepless twenty-hour trek that involved changing planes in Tokyo, we arrived in Bangkok. I was exhausted, not having been able to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw either the crapulent major’s face or Sonny’s, which I could not bear to look at for long. Thus it was not surprising that when I picked up my rucksack from the baggage carousel, I found it to be heavier than I remembered, loaded as it was now with guilt, dread, and anxiety. The overstuffed rucksack was my only piece of luggage, for before leaving our apartment, we had given the key to the Reverend R-r-r-r-amon and told him to sell our things and keep the money for his Church of Everlasting Prophets. All my belongings now fit in the rucksack, my copy of Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction in its false bottom, the book so well worn it had nearly split in two along its cracked spine. Everything else we needed would be provided in Thailand, the General said. Matters would be handled by the admiral in charge of the base camp and by Claude, who would be there in a guise familiar to him, working for a nongovernmental organization that assisted refugees. He greeted us at the international gate dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and linen pants, looking the same as I had seen him last at Professor Hammer’s house, except for being deeply tanned. It’s great to see you guys, he said, shaking my hand and those of the others. Welcome to Bangkok. You guys ever been here? Didn’t think so. We’ve got one night and we’re painting the town red. My treat. He threw his arm around my shoulders and squeezed with genuine affection, leading me through the throbbing crowd and toward the exit. Perhaps it was only my state of mind, its consistency close to porridge, but every one of the natives we passed seemed to be looking at the two of us. I wondered if among them was one of Man’s agents. You look good, Claude said. You ready to do this thing?
Of course, I said, all my dread and anxiety bubbling in a compartment somewhere behind my bowels. I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air? I could hardly ask that question of Claude, who always seemed to be the master of his own fate, at least until the fall of Saigon. He squeezed my shoulder again. I’m proud of you, buddy. I just wanted you to know that. We both walked in silence for a moment, allowing this sentiment to circulate, and then he squeezed my shoulder again and said, I’m going to show you the best time of your life. I grinned and he grinned, the thing unsaid being that this might be the last best time of my life. His enthusiasm and concern touched me, his way of saying he loved me, or possibly his way of providing me with the equivalent of a doomed man’s last meal. He led us outside the terminal and into the seasonable late December weather, the best time of the year to visit the region. We loaded ourselves into a van, and Claude said, You don’t get over jet lag by going to a hotel and getting some sleep. I’m going to keep you awake until nighttime, and then tomorrow we’re setting out for the camp.
The driver steered us onto a road jammed with vans, trucks, and motorbikes. We were surrounded by the honking, beeping, and roaring of an urban metropolis engorged with automotive metal, human flesh, and unspoken emotion. Remind you guys of home? said Claude. This is the closest you guys have been for years. Same-same like Saigon, the grizzled captain said. Same-same but different, said Claude. No war and no refugees. All that’s on the border, where you guys are going. Claude passed out cigarettes and we all lit up. First it was the Laotians running across the border. Now we have a lot of Hmong. All very sad, but helping refugees does get us access to the countryside. The affectless lieutenant shook his head and said, Laos. Very evil communists there. Claude said, Is there any other kind? But Laos itself is the closest thing to paradise Indochina’s got. I spent time there during the war and it was incredible. I love those people. They’re the gentlest, most hospitable people on earth except when they want to kill you. When he exhaled smoke, the tiny fan mounted on the dashboard blew it back toward us. At some point, had Claude and other foreigners considered us to be the gentlest, most hospitable people on earth? Or had we always been a warlike, aggressive people? I suspected the latter.
As the driver exited from the freeway, Claude nudged me and said, I heard about what you did. What I did? What did I do? When Claude said nothing and kept his steady gaze on me, I remembered the one thing that I had done that must be passed over in silence. Oh, yeah, I muttered. Don’t feel bad, said Claude. From what the General told me, that guy was asking for it. I can guarantee you he didn’t ask for it, I said. That’s not what I meant, said Claude. It’s just that I’ve seen plenty of his kind. Professional malcontents. Self-righteous masochists. They’re so unhappy with everything that they’re never going to be happy until they’re trussed for execution. And you know what his kind would say when he’s facing the firing squad? I told you so! The only thing different in your case is that the poor slob didn’t have time to think about it. If you say so, Claude, I said. I’m not saying so, he said. It’s in the book. He’s the guilt-ridden character.
I could see the pages of the book that Claude was referring to, the interrogation manual we had pored over in his course, the book that went under the name KUBARK. It had definitions of several character types the interrogator was likely to meet, and unbidden, the paragraph about the guilt-ridden character rippled before my eyes.
This kind of person has a strong, cruel, unrealistic conscience. His whole life seems devoted to reliving his feelings of guilt. Sometimes he seems determined to atone; at other times he insists that whatever went wrong is the fault of somebody else. In either event he seeks constantly some proof or external indication that the guilt of others is greater than his own. He is often caught up completely in efforts to prove that he has been treated unjustly. In fact, he may provoke unjust treatment in order to assuage his conscience through punishment. Persons with intense guilt feelings may cease resistance and cooperate if punished in some way, because of the gratification induced by punishment.
Perhaps this was, indeed, Sonny, but I would never know for sure, as I would have no more opportunities to interrogate him.
Here we are, said Claude. Our destination was an alley over which hung a rainbow of artificial neon light, the sidewalks thronged with pale-faced primates of all ages and sizes, some with military crew cuts and some with the long hair of the hippie tribe, all inebriated or about to be inebriated, many howling and hooting in considerable agitation. Bars and clubs lined the entire alley, and in the doorways stood girls with bare limbs and exquisitely painted features. The van stopped at an establishment above whose door rose a gigantic vertical sign in bright yellow that spelled GOLDEN COCK. The door was held open by two girls who appeared to be twenty or so, which meant that they were mostly likely anywhere from fifteen to eighteen. They stood on six-inch heels and wore what euphemistically could be called clothing—halter tops and bikini bottoms not even as substantial as their kind smiles, as loving and gentle as those of kindergarten teachers. Oh boy, said the grizzled captain, grinning so widely I could see his decaying molars. Even the affectless lieutenant said, Nice, though he did not smile. Glad you like it, said Claude. It’s all for you. The affectless lieutenant and the grizzled captain had already entered when Bon said, No. I walk. What? A walk? Claude said. You want private company? You’ll get it, trust me. These girls are veterans. They know how to take care of shy guys. Bon shook his head, the look in his eyes almost one of fear. It’s okay, I said. I’ll take a walk with you. Hell no! Claude said, grabbing Bon by the elbow. I get it. Not every guy is up for this kind of thing. But take a walk and you deny your good buddy here the night of his life. So just come on in and sit down and have some drinks. You don’t have to touch. You don’t even have to look if you don’t want. Just sit with your eyes closed. But you’re doing it for your pal, not yourself. How about it? I put my hand on Claude’s arm and said, It’s okay. Leave him alone. Not you, too, said Claude.
Yes, me too. Bon had apparently infected me with his morality, a disease likely to be fatal. I offered him a cigarette after Claude gave up attempting to persuade us and went inside, and together we stood there smoking, ignoring the touts tugging at our shirts but unable to ignore the passing troops of tourists who bumped and shoved us. Gawd, someone behind me said, didja see what she did with that Ping-Pong ball, mate? Ping-Pong ching-chong, someone else said. Long schlong duk dong. Bloody hell, I think the bitch pinched my wallet. Bon threw his cigarette away and said, Let’s get out of here before I kill somebody. I shrugged. Where to? He pointed over my shoulder, and when I turned I saw the movie poster that had caught his eye.
We watched The Hamlet in a movie theater full of locals who had not yet learned that cinema was a hallowed art form, that one did not, during the performance, blow one’s nose without a tissue; bring one’s own snack, beverage, or picnic; beat one’s child or, conversely, sing a crying baby a lullaby; call out affectionately to friends several rows away; discuss past, present, and future plot points with one’s seatmate; or sprawl so widely in one’s seat that one’s thigh rested against a neighbor’s for the entire duration. But who was to say they were wrong? How else could one tell whether a movie was faring well or badly if the audience did not respond to it? The audience seemed to enjoy themselves thoroughly, given the cheering and clapping, and God help me if I did not also find myself caught up in the story and the sheer spectacle. The scene the audience reacted to most strongly was the climactic battle, during which my own jet-lagged heart also beat faster. Perhaps it was the menacing, Beethoven-like score with its infernal repetitition of notes saturated in the devil’s deep pitch, dum- dum-DA-dum-DA-dum-DA-DA-DAAAA; perhaps it was the hissing helicopter blades, reduced to slow- motion sound; perhaps it was the crosscutting between the gazes of Bellamy and Shamus, riding their airborne steeds, with the gazes of the Viet Cong girls peering through the crosshairs of their antiaircraft cannons; perhaps it was the bombs bursting in air; perhaps it was the sight of the Viet Cong savages being given a bloodbath, the only kind of bath they were likely to take; perhaps it was all these things that made me wish for a gun in my hand so I, too, could participate in the Old Testament slaughter of the Viet Cong who looked, if not exactly like me, fairly close to me. They certainly looked exactly like my fellow spectators, who whooped and laughed as a variety of American-made weaponry vaporized, pulverized, lacerated, and splattered their not-so-distant neighbors. I twisted in my seat, fully awoken from my torpor. I wanted to close my eyes but could not, unable to do more than blink a few times rapidly since the preceding scene, the only one where the audience had fallen completely quiet.
This was also the only scene I had not seen filmed. The Auteur used no music, the agony unreeling with only Mai’s screams and protests, underscored by the VC quartet’s laughing, cursing, and jeering. The lack of music only made more audible the audience’s sudden silence, and mothers who had not bothered to turn away their children’s faces from the gutting, shooting, hacking, and decapitation now clapped their hands over the eyes of their babes. Long shots from the cave’s darkened corners depicted a human octopus writhing at the cave’s center, the naked Mai struggling under the backs and limbs of her half-naked rapists. While we saw glimpses of her naked body, most of it was obscured by the strategically placed legs, arms, and buttocks of the VC, with the flesh tones, the scarlet blood, and their tattered black-and-brown clothing rendered in a painterly Renaissance shading that recalled for me faint memories of an art history class. Alternating with these long shots were extreme close- ups of Mai’s battered face with its howling mouth and bloody nose, one eye so swollen it had closed completely. The most extended shot of the movie was devoted to this face filling the entire screen, her open eye wheeling in its socket, blood sputtering on her lips as she screamed
Mamamamamamamamamamamamamamamama!
I cringed, and when finally the movie cut to the reverse shot and we saw these red-skinned demons as seen from Mai’s eye, faces flushed from home-brewed rice wine, bared teeth crusty with lichen, squinty eyes squeezed shut in ecstasy, the only possible feeling burning in one’s gut was the desire for their utter extinction. This was what the Auteur provided next, in the gruesome finale of hand-to-hand combat, which could also double as a medical school training film in anatomical dissection.
By the movie’s last shot, of innocent Danny Boy sitting in the open doorway of a Huey helicopter ascending slowly into the clear blue heavens, weeping as he gazed over his war-ravaged homeland, destined for a country where women’s breasts produced not just milk but milkshakes—or so the GIs told him—I had to admit to the Auteur’s talent, the way one might admire the technical genius of a master gunsmith. He had hammered into existence a thing of beauty and horror, exhilirating for some and deadly for others, a creation whose purpose was destruction. As the credits began rolling, I felt touched by shame for having contributed to this dark work, but also pride in the contributions of my extras. Faced with ungraceful roles, they had comported themselves with as much grace as possible. There were the four veterans who played VC RAPIST #1, VC RAPIST #2, VC RAPIST #3, and VC RAPIST #4, as well as the others who had made their screen debuts as DESPERATE VILLAGER, DEAD GIRL, LAME BOY, CORRUPT OFFICER, PRETTY NURSE, BLIND BEGGAR, SAD REFUGEE, ANGRY CLERK, WEEPING WIDOW, IDEALISTIC STUDENT, GENTLE WHORE, and CRAZY GUY IN WHOREHOUSE. But I did not take pride in just my own. There were also all those colleagues who dedicated themselves behind the scenes, like Harry. This artist was sure to score an Oscar nomination for his fanatically detailed sets, his valuable work unmarred even by the minor incident involving his hiring of a local fixer to furnish actual corpses from a nearby graveyard for the finale. To the gendarmes who came to arrest him, he said, with genuine contriteness, I didn’t think it was illegal, officers. All was reconciled with the speedy return of the corpses to their graves and a substantial donation by the Auteur to the policemen’s benevolent association, otherwise known as the local brothel. I grimaced at seeing Violet’s name as assistant producer, but conceded that she had a right to come before me in the hierarchy of credits. I recalled fondly the unending sustenance supplied by the artisans of craft services, the dedicated care of the first aid team, and the efficient daily transportation provided by the drivers, although, to be frank, my services were more specialized than any of those. I do admit that perhaps my bicultural, bilingual skills were not as unique as those of the trainer who taught various tricks and commands to the adorable mutt playing the adopted native pet of the Green Berets, credited as SMITTY THE DOG, or the exotic animal handler who flew in on a DC-3 charter with a surly Bengal tiger in a cage—LILY—and who ensured the docility of the elephants, ABBOTT and COSTELLO. But while I admired the cheerful, prompt work of the laundresses—DELIA, MARYBELLE, CORAZON, and so on—did they merit appearing before me? The names of the laundresses continued their upward scroll, and it was only with the acknowledgments of the mayor, the councilmen, the head of the tourist bureau, the Philippine armed forces, and First Lady Imelda Marcos and President Ferdinand Marcos that I realized my name was never coming at all.
By the time the sound track and film stock credits had passed, my grudging acknowledgment of the Auteur had evaporated, replaced by boiling murderous rage. Failing to do away with me in real life, he had succeeded in murdering me in fiction, obliterating me utterly in a way that I was becoming more and more acquainted with. I was still steaming as we left the theater, my emotions hotter than the temperate night. What did you think? I asked Bon, silent as usual after a movie. He smoked his cigarette and waved for a taxi. Well, what did you think? He finally looked at me, his gaze a mix of pity and disappointment. You were going to make sure we came off well, he said. But we weren’t even human. A rattling taxi pulled to the curb. Now you’re a movie critic? I said. Just my opinion, college boy, he said, climbing inside. What do I know? If it wasn’t for me, I said, slamming the door shut, there wouldn’t even be any roles at all for our people. We would just be target practice. He sighed and rolled his window down. All you did was give them an excuse, he said. Now white people can say, Look, we got yellow people in here. We don’t hate them. We love them. He spat out the window. You tried to play their game, okay? But they run the game. You don’t run anything. That means you can’t change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.
We spoke no more for the duration of the ride, and when we got to our hotel, he fell asleep almost right away. I lay in our darkened room with an ashtray on my chest, smoking and contemplating how I had failed at the one task both Man and the General could agree on, the subversion of the Movie and all it represented, namely our misrepresentation. I tried to fall asleep but could not, kept awake by the blare of horns and the unnerving sight of Sonny and the crapulent major lying on the ceiling above me, behaving as if they always passed their time thus. The monotonous squeaking of bed springs next door did not help, the squeaking going on for such an absurdly long time that I felt sorry for what I assumed was the poor, silent woman enduring it all. When the male involved squawked his battle cry, I was relieved it was all over, although it wasn’t, for when that concluded, his partner uttered his own deep, protracted, appreciative masculine mating call. The surprises just would not end, not since the General and Madame came to see us off at the airport, he in a herringbone suit and she in a lilac ao dai. He had presented us four heroes with a bottle of whiskey each, taken a picture with us, and shook each of our hands before we passed through the ticket gate, myself coming last. With me, however, he held on and said, Just a word, Captain.
I stepped aside to let the other passengers board. Yes, sir? You know Madame and I look on you as our adopted son, said the General. I didn’t know that, sir. The look on his face and Madame’s was grim, but that was the same look my father usually gave me. How could you, then? said Madame. I was used to dissembling and I manufactured a look of surprise. How could I what? Try to seduce our daughter, the General said. Everyone’s talking about it, said Madame. Everyone? I said. The rumors, the General said. I should have seen it when you spoke with her at the wedding, but no. It never occurred to me that you would encourage my daughter in her nightclub pursuits. Not only this, Madame added, but the two of you made a spectacle out of yourselves at the nightclub. Everyone saw it. The General sighed. That you would attempt to defile her, he said, was something I could hardly believe. Not after you lived in my house and treated her as a child and a sister. A sister, Madame emphasized. I am sorely disappointed in you, said the General. I wanted you here by my side. I would never have let you go except for this.
Sir—
You should have known better, Captain. You are a soldier. Everything and everyone belongs in his proper place. How could you ever believe we would allow our daughter to be with someone of your kind?
My kind? I said. What do you mean by my kind?
Oh, Captain, said the General. You are a fine young man, but you are also, in case you have not noticed, a bastard. They waited for me to say something, but the General had stuffed the one word in my mouth that could silence me. Seeing that I had nothing to say, they shook their heads in anger, sorrow, and recrimination, leaving me at the gate with my bottle of whiskey. I wanted to crack it open then and there, for the whiskey might have helped me spit that word out. It was stuck in my throat and had the taste of a woolen sock sodden with our homeland’s rich mud, the kind of meal I had forgotten was reserved for those who ranked among the meanest.

We arose before the sun to a dark morning. After a breakfast where no one uttered more than a grunt, Claude drove from Bangkok to the camp, a day’s journey that ended near the border with Laos. By the time he swerved onto an unpaved side road and into a white-barked cajeput forest, dodging craters and dips, the sun was rolling on its downward slope behind us. A kilometer into the twilight forest we reached a military checkpoint consisting of a jeep and two young soldiers in olive-green battle dress, each with a protective amulet of the Buddha around his neck and an M16 in his lap. I smelled the unmistakable funk of marijuana. Without bothering either to rise from the jeep or to raise their half- lidded eyes, the soldiers waved us through. We continued on the rutted road, plunging even deeper into a forest where the skeletal hands of tall trees with their thin branches loomed over us, until we emerged into a clearing of small, square huts on stilts, the scene saved from total rusticity by the electric light illuminating the windows. Wigs of palm leaves thatched the roofs, and wooden planks led from elevated doors to the earth. Barking dogs had brought shadows to the mouths of the doorways, and by the time we clambered out a squad of those shadows was approaching. There they are, said Claude. The last men standing of the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam.
Perhaps the pictures of them that I had seen in the General’s office were taken in better times, but those stern freedom fighters bore little resemblance to these haggard irregulars. In the pictures, those clean-shaven men with red scarves cinched around their necks had been clad in jungle camouflage, combat boots, and berets, standing at attention under the forest’s filtered sunlight. But instead of boots and camouflage, these men wore rubber sandals with black blouses and pants. Instead of red scarves, the Rangers’ legendary emblem, they wore the checkered scarves of peasants. Instead of berets, they wore wide-brimmed bushwacker hats. Instead of clean cheeks, they were unshaven, their hair matted and untrimmed. Their eyes, once hot and bright, were dull as coal. Each carried an AK-47 with its distinctive banana clip, and the presence of this icon, combined with all the other features, led to an unusual visual effect.
Why do they look like Viet Cong? said the grizzled captain.
It was not only the guerrillas who resembled their old enemies, as we discovered when a dozen of them led us to the hut of their commander. On this hut’s thin lip of a porch stood a slim man backlit by a bare electric lightbulb. Isn’t that— said Bon, before stopping at asking the absurd. Everybody says so, said Claude. The admiral raised his hand in greeting and smiled a familiar, avuncular smile. His face was angular, gaunt, and almost handsome, the classic noble visage of a scholar or mandarin. The hair was gray but not white, thinning a little on top, and trimmed short. A goatee was his most distinctive feature, a neatly sculpted affair for the man of middle age, rather than the scraggle of youth or the long, flowing tuft of the elder. Welcome, men, the admiral said, and even in the gentle intonation of his voice I heard echoes of the newsreel on which Ho Chi Minh’s cultivated and calm voice was recorded. You have traveled a great distance, and you must be tired. Please, come in and join me.
Like Ho Chi Minh, the admiral referred to himself as uncle. Like Ho Chi Minh, he also dressed with simplicity, his black blouse and pants matching the garb of his guerrillas. And, like Ho Chi Minh, he furnished his quarters in a sparse and scholarly fashion. We sat barefoot on reed mats in the hut’s one plain room, us newcomers uneasy in the presence of this uncanny look-alike. Our apparition must have slept on the plank floor, for there was no sign of a bed. Bamboo bookshelves lined one wall, and a simple bamboo desk and chair occupied another. Over the course of dinner, as we drank the General’s whiskey, the admiral quizzed us on our years in America and we quizzed him in turn on how he had come to be shipwrecked in the forest. He smiled and tapped his ashes into an ashtray made of half a coconut shell. On the last day of the war, I was in command of a transport ship full of marines, soldiers, policemen, and civilians rescued from the piers. I could have sailed to the Seventh Fleet, like many of my fellow captains. But the Americans had betrayed us before, and there was no hope of fighting again if I fled to them. The Americans were finished. Now that their white race had failed, they were leaving Asia to the yellow race. So I sailed toward Thailand. I had Thai friends and I knew the Thai would give us asylum. They had nowhere to go, unlike the Americans. The Thai would fight communism because it was pressing up against their border with Cambodia. Laos, too, was going to fall soon. You see, I was not interested in being saved, unlike so many of our countrymen. He paused here and smiled once more, and none of us needed to be reminded that we were some of those countrymen. God had already saved me, the admiral went on. I did not need to be saved by Americans. I swore on my ship in front of my men that we would continue our fight for months, years, even decades if necessary. If we looked at our struggle from God’s eyes, this was no time at all. So, Bon said, you think we really have a chance, Uncle? The admiral stroked his goatee before answering. My child, he said, still stroking the goatee, remember Jesus and how Christianity began with just him, his apostles, their faith, and the Word of God. We are like those true believers. We have two hundred apostles in this camp, a radio station broadcasting the word of freedom into our enslaved homeland, and guns. We have things Jesus and his apostles never had, but we have their faith, too, and not least—furthest from least—God is on our side.
Bon lit another cigarette. Jesus died, he said. So did the apostles.
So we’re going to die, said the affectless lieutenant. Despite the meaning of his words, or perhaps because of them, his manner and pronouncement remained unemotional. Not that that’s a bad thing, he said.
I am not saying you will die on this mission, the admiral said. Just eventually. But if you do die on this mission, know that those you save will be grateful to you, as those the apostles saved were grateful to them.
A lot of the people they went to save didn’t want to be saved, Uncle, Bon said. That’s why they ended up dead.
My son, the admiral said, no longer smiling, it does not sound like you are a believer.
If by that you mean a believer in religion or anticommunism or freedom or anything with a big word like that, no, I’m not. I used to believe, but not anymore. I don’t give a damn about saving anybody, including myself. I just want to kill communists. That’s why I’m the man you want.
I can live with that, the admiral said.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 18

We spent two weeks acclimating to the weather and our new comrades, among whom were three characters I had never expected to see again. These marine lieutenants were bearded and longer- haired than on the night Bon, Man, and I had encountered them in that Saigon alley, singing, Beautiful Saigon! Oh, Saigon! Oh, Saigon!, but they were still recognizably dumb. They had made their way to the docks on the day Saigon fell, and there had jumped on board the admiral’s ship. We’ve been in Thailand ever since, said the marine who was the leader of the three. He had been steeped in the Mekong Delta his entire life, as his comrades had been, all of them branded by a life in the sun, although in different shades. He was dark, but one of the other marines was darker, and the third was the darkest of all, black as a cup of black tea. They, Bon, and I grudgingly shook hands. We’re going with you across the border, said the dark marine. So we better get on each other’s right sides. This was the marine on whom I had drawn my pistol, but since he chose not to mention this fact, neither did I.
Altogether there were a dozen of us on the reconnaissance team that set out early one night, led by a Lao farmer and a Hmong scout. The Lao farmer had no choice in the matter. He had been kidnapped by the admiral’s men on an earlier reconnaissance, and was now being used as a guide, given his knowledge of the terrain through which we were traveling. He could not speak Vietnamese but the Hmong scout could and served as his translator. Even from a distance, one could see that the scout’s eyes were a ruin, dark and shattered as the windows of an abandoned palace. He was clad in black, as we all were, but he was unique in wearing a faded green beret a size too large, the brim resting on his ears and eyebrows. Following him were two of the marines, the dark one armed with an AK-47 and the darker one with our M79 elephant gun, its stubby grenades resembling short, metallic dildos. After the marines came the affectless lieutenant and the grizzled captain, who could not bring themselves to carry the enemy’s AK-47 and instead toted the M16. Behind them was the skinny RTO, grease gun in hand and PRC-25 radio on his back. Next was the philosophical medic, M3 medical kit hanging from one shoulder and M14 from the other, as no man on this reconnaissance could go unarmed. He and I had hit it off right away during an evening perfumed with jasmine and marijuana. Besides sadness and sorrow, he had asked me, what’s really heavy but weighs nothing at all? When he saw that I was stumped, he said, Nihilism, which was, in fact, his philosophy. Then came the hefty machine gunner, M60 in his arms, with myself and Bon next, me with an Ak-47, Bon with the M16. Bringing up the rear was the darkest marine, his weapon the B-40 rocket launcher.
For defense, in place of bulletproof vests and helmets, each of us was given a laminated, wallet- sized picture of the Virgin Mary to wear over our hearts. The admiral had blessed us with these gifts on our departure from the camp, which was, for most of us, a relief. We had spent our days discussing tactics, preparing rations, and studying the map of our route through the southern end of Laos. This was terrain probed by the marines on earlier reconnaissance, home to the Lao farmer. Smugglers, he claimed, crossed the border all the time. Periodically we listened to Radio Free Vietnam, its crew working from a bamboo shack next to the admiral’s hut. From there they broadcast the admiral’s speeches, read items translated from newspapers, and aired pop songs with reactionary sentiments, James Taylor and Donna Summer being particular favorites of the season. The communists hate love songs, said the admiral. They don’t believe in love or romance or entertainment. They believe the people should only love the revolution and the country. But the people love love songs, and we serve the people. The airwaves bore those love songs, laden with emotion, across Laos and into our homeland. In my pocket was a transistor radio with an earpiece so I could listen to the broadcast, and I valued it more than my weapon and the Virgin Mary. Claude, who did not believe in her or any god, gave us his secular blessing in the form of high fives as we left. Good luck, he said. Just in and out. Quick and quiet. Easier said than done, I thought. I kept that idea to myself, but I suspected that many of the dozen of us might have been thinking the same thing. Claude intuited my worry when he squeezed my shoulder. Take care of yourself, buddy. If anybody starts shooting, just keep your head down. Let the pros do the fighting. His estimation of my abilities was moving and most likely accurate. He wanted to keep me safe, this man who, along with Man, had taught me everything I knew about the practices of intelligence, of secrecy as a way of life. We’ll be waiting for you guys to come back, said Claude. See you soon, I said. That was all.
We set off on our march under a sliver of moon, cheered by the optimism that one sometimes had at the beginning of strenuous exercise, a kind of helium that filled our lungs and carried us along. Then, after an hour, we trudged, or at least I trudged, my helium depleted and replaced with the first hints of fatigue, soaking into the body as the slow drip of water soaks into a towel. A few hours into our march we arrived at a pool of water, where the grizzled captain called for a rest. Sitting on the edge of the moonlit pool and resting my sore thighs, I could just make out the phosphorescent, disembodied hands on my wristwatch pointing to one in the morning. My hands felt as detached as the watch’s hands, for what they wanted was to hold and caress one of the cigarettes in my breast pocket, the urge electrifying my nervous system. Seemingly unaffected by any similar yearning, Bon sat down next to me and silently ate a rice ball. A fetid smell of mud and decaying vegetation emanated from the pool, and on its surface bobbed a dead bird the size of a finch, floating in a corona of molting feathers. Bomb crater, Bon muttered. The bomb crater was an American footprint, a sign that we had entered Laos. We came upon more of these craters as we journeyed east, sometimes singly, sometimes in clusters, and we had to pick our way carefully past the julienned remnants of unrooted cajeputs flung this way and that. Once we came close to a village, and on the banks of the craters nearby we saw nets on poles, ready to be dipped into these pools that the farmers had stocked with fish.
Near dawn the grizzled captain halted our trek, at a spot the Lao farmer said was isolated and rarely visited by the inhabitants of this borderland. Our resting place was on the peak of a hill, and under the indifferent cajeputs we spread our ponchos and covered ourselves with hooded capes of netting into which we had woven palm fronds. I lay down with my head on my rucksack, which, besides my rations, contained Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction, tucked away in my rucksack’s false bottom in case I ever needed it again. Two or three of us stayed awake for shifts of three hours, and it was my misfortune to be assigned to one of the middle shifts. It seemed that I had barely managed to fall asleep with the brim of my hat on my face when the hefty machine gunner shook my shoulder and exhaled his horrendous bacterial breath all over my face, informing me that it was my turn for sentry duty. The sun was high in the sky and my throat was parched. I could see the Mekong in the far distance through my binoculars, a brown belt dividing the earth’s green torso. I could see question marks and exclamation points of woodsmoke issuing from farmhouses and brick factories. I could see bare-shinned farmers wading after their water buffalos, fetlock deep in the muddy water of rice paddies. I could see countryside roads and paths trafficked by vehicles that, from a distance, moved with the tortured slowness of arthritic turtles. I could see the crumbling sandstone ruins of an ancient temple, erected long ago by some fallen race, overseen by the crowned head of some forgotten tyrant, blank eyes blinded by the waste of his empire. I could see the entire lay of the land, naked body exposed in sunlight and resembling not at all the mysterious creature of night, and suddenly a tremendous longing seized me with such force that the land itself lost focus and trembled, and I realized with equal parts amazement and dread that for all the essentials we had brought with us, none of us had brought a drop of liquor.

The second night did not proceed much as the first. It was not clear to me whether I walked that night or whether I simply hung on to a beast bucking and heaving under me. A tide of bile rose and fell in my throat, my ears swelled from my head, and I shivered as if it were wintertime. When I looked up I caught a glimpse of the stars through the branches, swirling snowflakes trapped within the glass of a snow globe. Sonny and the crapulent major laughed faintly as they watched me from outside that snow globe and shook it with their giant hands. The only solid thing anchoring me to the material world was the rifle in my hands, for my feet could not feel the ground. I gripped the AK-47 as I had Lana’s arms the night after I had left Sonny’s place. She had not looked surprised on opening the door, for she had always known I was coming back. I had not told the General what Lana and I had done but I should have. There was one thing he could never do and I had done it, for having just killed a man nothing was forbidden from me, not even what belonged to or issued from him. Even the scent of the forest was her scent, and when I shrugged off my rucksack and sat down between Bon and the affectless lieutenant in the midst of a bamboo grove, the dampness of the earth reminded me of her. Above us innumerable fireflies lit the branches, and I had the sense that the snouts and eyes of the forest were fixed upon us. Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors. As a species, we have never encountered a cave, a door, or an entrance of any kind that we did not want to enter. We are never satisfied with only one way in. We will always try every possibility, even the blackest and most forbidding passages, or so I was reminded in my night with Lana. I got to pee, said the affectless lieutenant, standing up again. He disappeared into the gloom of the forest, while above him the fireflies turned off and on in unison. You know why I like you? she had asked in the aftermath. You’re everything my mother would hate. I was not offended. I had been force-fed so much hate that a little more hardly mattered to my fattened liver. If my enemies ever cut out my liver and ate it, as the Cambodians were rumored to do, they would smack their lips in delight, for nothing was more delicious than the foie gras of hatred, once one had acquired the taste for it. I heard the crack of a branch in the direction taken by the lieutenant. Are you okay? Bon said. I nodded, concentrating on the fireflies, their collective signal outlining the shapes of the bamboo trees in a wilderness Christmas. The underbrush rustled and the dim shape of the lieutenant emerged from the bamboo.
Hey, he said. I—
A flash of light and sound blinded and deafened me. Earth and gravel pelted me and I flinched. My ears rang and somebody was screaming as I huddled on the ground, arms over my head. Somebody was screaming and it was not me. Somebody was cursing and it was not me. I shook off the earth that had fallen onto my face and overhead the trees had gone dark. The fireflies had stopped blinking and somebody was screaming. It was the affectless lieutenant, writhing in the ferns. The philosophical medic bumped against me as he sprinted to reach the lieutenant. Looming out of the darkness, the grizzled captain said, Take up your defensive positions, goddammit. Beside me, Bon turned his back to the mess, racked his slide—click-clack—and aimed his weapon into the darkness. I heard the click- clack all around me of weapons being primed for firing, and I did the same. Someone turned on a flashlight and even with my back turned to the scene I could see its luminescence. Leg’s gone, said the philosophical medic. The lieutentant kept on screaming. Hold the light while I tie him off. Everybody in the valley’s hearing this, said the dark marine. Is he going to make it? said the grizzled captain. He might make it if we get him to a hospital, said the medic. Hold him down. We have to shut him up, said the dark marine. It must have been a mine, said the grizzled captain. It’s not an attack. Either you do it or I do it, said the dark marine. Someone put his hand on the lieutenant’s mouth, muffling his screams. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the dark marine’s flashlight illuminating the philosophical medic as he pointlessly tied the tourniquet on the lieutenant’s stump, the molar of a bone protuding where the leg had been blown off above the knee. The grizzled captain had one hand clapped over the lieutenant’s mouth, his other hand squeezing shut the nostrils. The lieutenant heaved, clutching at the sleeves of the philosophical medic and the grizzled captain, and the dark marine switched off the flashlight. Gradually the thrashing and strangled noises ceased, and at last he was still, dead. But if he was really gone, why could I still hear him screaming?
We have to move, said the dark marine. No one’s coming now but they will when it’s light. The grizzled captain said nothing. Did you hear me? The grizzled captain said yes. Then do something, said the dark marine. We’ve got to be as far away from here as possible before morning. The grizzled captain said to bury him. When the dark marine said that was going to take too long, the grizzled captain gave the order to carry the body with us. We divvied up the lieutenant’s ammunition and gave his rucksack to the Lao farmer, with the dark marine carrying the lieutenant’s M16. The hefty machine gunner handed his M60 to the darker marine and picked up the lieutenant’s body. We were about to set off when the gunner said, Where’s his leg? The dark marine turned on his flashlight. There the leg lay, served on a bed of shredded ferns, meat tattered and strips of black cloth still clinging to it, mangled white bone jutting through a jagged rip in the flesh. Where’s the foot? said the dark marine. I think it was just blown away, said the philosophical medic. Bits of pink flesh and skin and tissue hung on the ferns, already crawling with ants. The dark marine grabbed the leg, and when he looked up I was the first one he saw. It’s all yours, he said, thrusting the leg at me. I thought about refusing it, but someone else would have to carry it. Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything. If someone else had to do this, I could, too. It was only a hunk of meat and bone, its flesh sticky with blood and gritty with embedded dirt. When I took it and brushed off the ants, I found it to be a little heavier than my AK-47, the leg having been detached from a smallish man. The grizzled captain ordered us to march and I followed the hefty gunner, the lieutenant’s body slung over his shoulder. The lieutenant’s shirt had ridden up his back, and the exposed plank of flesh was blue in the moonlight.
I carried his leg with one hand, my other hand on the strap of the AK-47 hanging from my shoulder, and the burden of carrying a man’s leg seemed far heavier than carrying a man’s body. I carried his leg as far away from me as possible, its weight growing more and more, like the Bible my father made me hold in front of the classroom as punishment for some transgression, my arm outstretched with the book on the scale of my hand. I carried that memory still, along with the memory of my father in his coffin, corpse as white as the affectless lieutenant’s protruding bone. The chanting of the congregation in the church hummed in my ears. I had learned of my father’s death when his deacon called me at police headquarters. How did you get this phone number? I said. It was in the father’s papers on his desk. I looked at the document on my own desk, a classified investigation about an unremarkable event last year, 1968, when an American platoon had pacified a mostly abandoned village near Quang Ngai. After executing the water buffalos, pigs, and dogs, and after gang-raping four girls, the soldiers had gathered them as well as fifteen elders, women, and children in the village square, where they fired on them until they were dead, according to a regretful private’s testimony. The platoon leader’s report certified that his men had killed nineteen Viet Cong, although they had recovered no weapons besides some spades, some hoes, a crossbow, and a musket. I don’t have time, I said. It would be important for you to go, said the deacon. Why would it be important? I said. After a long pause, the deacon said, You were important to him and he was important to you. It was then I knew, without any need for words, that the deacon was aware of who my father was.
We ended our forced march after two hours, the same amount of time devoted to my father’s funeral Mass. A creek gurgled in the arroyo where we stopped and where I scratched my face against a vine of bougainvillea. I set down the leg as the marines began digging a shallow grave. My hand was gummy with blood and I knelt by the creek to wash it in the cold water. By the time the marines finished, my hand was dry and a faint stroke of pink light was on the horizon. The grizzled captain unrolled the affectless lieutenant’s cape of palm leaves and the hefty machine gunner laid his body on it. I only realized then that I would have to bloody my hand again. I picked up the leg and put it in its place. In the pink light I saw his open eyes and slack mouth, and I could still hear him screaming. The grizzled captain closed the eyes and mouth and wrapped his body in the cape, but when he and the hefty machine gunner lifted the body, the leg slipped out of the cape. I was already wiping my sticky hand on my pants but there was nothing to do but pick up the leg once more. After his body was lowered into the grave, I leaned in and tucked his leg under the cape, below his knee. Glistening worms were already wriggling out of the earth as I helped scoop dirt back into the grave. It was just deep enough to cover our tracks for a day or two, until the animals dug up the corpse and ate it. What I want to know, said Sonny, squatting by me as I knelt by the grave, is whether the lieutenant will hang around here with one leg or two, or whether he’ll have worms crawling out of his eyes or not. Truly, said the crapulent major, head sticking out of the grave as he talked to me, it’s a mystery what shape a ghost will take. Why am I all here except for this hole in my head and not a disgusting mess of bones and meat? Tell me that, won’t you, Captain? You know everything about everything, don’t you? I would have answered if I could, but it was hard to do so when I felt that I, too, had a hole in my head.
The day passed with us undiscovered, and by late in the evening, after a short march, we reached the banks of the Mekong, gleaming under the moonlight. Somewhere on the other side you were waiting for me, Commandant, as well as the faceless man who is the commissar. While I was still innocent of this knowledge, it was impossible not to sense something foreboding as we plucked off the leeches adhering to us with the stubbornness of bad memories. We had been carrying them without knowing, until the Lao farmer pulled an animated black finger from his ankle. I could not help but wish, prying away a little monster sucking my leg, that it was Lana thus attached to me. The skinny RTO radioed the base camp, and while the grizzled captain reported to the admiral, the marines again showed they were good for something by constructing a raft of bamboo trunks strapped together with lianas. Four men could row themselves across the river with makeshift paddles fashioned of bamboo, with the first team trailing a rope carried by the darker marine. That rope, tied to a tree on either side of the river, would guide the darker marine on his return with the raft. It would take four trips to transport all of us, and the first group set off before midnight: the darker marine, the Hmong scout, the hefty machine gunner, and the dark marine. The rest of us were scattered on the exposed bank, huddled under our capes of leaves, backs to the river and weapons aimed at the vast forest crouched on its haunches.
A half hour later the darker marine returned with the raft. Three more went with him, the Lao farmer, the darkest marine, and the philosophical medic, who, at the affectless lieutenant’s grave, had said as a kind of benediction, All of us who are living are dying. The only ones not dying are the dead. What the hell does that mean? said the dark marine. I knew what it meant. My mother was not dying because she was dead. My father was also not dying because he was dead. But I was on this embankment, dying, because I was not yet dead. What are we, then? asked Sonny and the crapulent major. Dying or dead? I shivered, and gazing into the darkness of the forest, staring down the length of my weapon, I saw the shapes of other ghosts among the haunted trees. Human ghosts and beast ghosts, plant ghosts and insect ghosts, the spirits of dead tigers and bats and cycads and hobgoblins, vegetable world and animal world heaving with claims to the afterlife as well. The entire forest shimmered with the antics of death, the comedian, and life, the straight man, a duo that would never break up. To live was to be haunted by the inevitability of one’s own decay, and to be dead was to be haunted by the memory of living.
Hey, hissed the grizzled captain, it’s your turn. Another half hour must have passed. The raft was scraping onto the bank again, pulled along the rope by the darker marine. Bon and I rose along with Sonny and the crapulent major, ready to follow me across the river. I remember the river’s white noise, the soreness of my knees, and the weight of my weapon in my arms. I remember the injustice of how my mother never came to visit me after her death no matter how many times I cried out for her, unlike Sonny and the crapulent major, whom I would carry with me forever. I remember how none of us looked human on the riverbank, shrouded by our capes of leaves, our faces painted black, clutching weapons extracted from the mineral world. I remember the grizzled captain saying, Take the paddle, as he thrust it at me, right before a whip snapped by my ear and the grizzled captain’s head cracked open, spilling its yolk. A fleck of something wet and soft landed on my cheek and a thunderous racket rose on both sides of the river. Muzzle flashes rippled on the far side and the boom of grenades rent the air. The darker marine had taken one step off the raft when a rocket-propelled grenade whooshed by me and struck the raft, shattering it in a hail of fire and sparks and throwing him into the shallow water lapping against the riverbank, where he lay not quite dead, screaming.
Get down, dumbass! Bon pulled me to earth. The skinny RTO was already returning fire into our side of the forest, the sound of his submachine gun hammering my eardrums. I could feel the volume of the guns and the velocity of the bullets passing overhead. Fear inflated the balloon of my heart and I pressed my cheek into the earth. Being on the bank’s downward slope saved us from the ambuscade, keeping us below the eyeline sight of the forest’s vengeful ghosts. Shoot, goddammit, said Bon. Dozens of insane, murderous fireflies flickered on and off in the forest, only they were muzzle flashes. To shoot I would have to lift my head and take aim, but the guns were loud and I could feel their bullets striking the earth. Shoot, goddammit! I lifted my weapon and aimed it into the forest, and when I squeezed the trigger the gun kicked me in the shoulder. The muzzle flash was so bright in the darkness that everyone who was trying to kill us now knew exactly where I was, but the only thing to do was to keep squeezing the trigger. My shoulder was hurting from the gun kicking me, and when I paused to eject a magazine and load another, I could feel my ears aching as well, subjected to the stereophonic effects of our firefight on this side of the river and the clash of the ignorant squads on the other side. At any moment I feared that Bon would rise and order me to charge with him into the enemy’s fire, and I knew that I would not be able to do it. I feared death and I loved life. I yearned to live long enough to smoke one more cigarette, drink one more drink, experience seven more seconds of obscene bliss, and then, perhaps, but most likely not, I could die.
All of a sudden they stopped shooting at us and it was just Bon and me blasting at the darkness. Only then did I notice that the skinny RTO was no longer joining in. I paused once more in my shooting and saw, under the moonlight, his head bowed over his silent gun. Bon was the only one still firing, but after discharging the last of his magazine he, too, stopped. The firefight across the river had already ceased, and from the other side a few men were shouting in a foreign language. Then, from the recesses of the gloomy forest on our side, someone called out in our language. Give up! Don’t die for nothing! His accent was northern.
All was quiet on the riverbank except for the river’s throaty whisper. No one was screaming for his mother, and it was then I knew that the darker marine was also dead. I turned to Bon and in the lunar light I saw the whites of his eyes as he looked at me, wet with the sheen of tears. If it wasn’t for you, you stupid bastard, Bon said, I’d die here. He was crying for only the third time since I had known him, not in that apocalyptic rage as when his wife and son died, or in the sorrowful mood that he shared with Lana, but quietly, in defeat. The mission was over, he was alive, and my plot had worked, no matter how clumsily or inadvertently. I had succeeded in saving him, but only, as it turned out, from death.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 19

Only from death? The commandant appeared genuinely wounded, his finger resting on the last words of my confession. In his other hand was a blue pencil, the color chosen because Stalin had also used a blue pencil, or so he told me. Like Stalin, the commandant was a diligent editor, always ready to note my many errata and digressions and always urging me to delete, excise, reword, or add. Implying that life in my camp is worse than death is a little histrionic, don’t you think? The commandant seemed eminently reasonable as he sat in his bamboo chair, and for a moment, sitting in my bamboo chair, I, too, felt that he was eminently reasonable. But then I remembered that only an hour earlier I had been sitting in the windowless, redbrick isolation cell where I had spent the last year since the ambush, rewriting the many versions of my confession, the latest of which the commandant now possessed. Perhaps your perspective differs from mine, Comrade Commandant, I said, trying to get used to the sound of my own voice. I had not spoken to anyone in a week. I’m a prisoner, I went on, and you’re the one in charge. It may be hard for you to sympathize with me, and vice versa.
The commandant sighed and laid the final sheet of my confession on top of the 294 other pages that preceded it, stacked on a table by his chair. How many times must I tell you? You’re not a prisoner! Those men are prisoners, he said, pointing out the window to the barracks that housed a thousand inmates, including my fellow survivors, the Lao farmer, the Hmong scout, the philosophical medic, the darkest marine, the dark marine, and Bon. You are a special case. He lit a cigarette. You are a guest of myself and the commissar.
Guests can leave, Comrade Commandant. I paused to observe his reaction. I wanted one of his cigarettes, which I would not get if I angered him. Today, however, he was in a rare good mood and did not frown. He had the high cheekbones and delicate features of an opera singer, and even ten years of warfare fought from a cave in Laos had not ruined his classically good looks. What rendered him unattractive at times was his moroseness, a perpetual, damp affliction he shared with everyone else in the camp, including myself. This was the sadness felt by homesick soldiers and prisoners, a sweating that never ceased, absorbed into a perpetually damp clothing that could never be dried, just as I was not dry sitting in my bamboo chair. The commandant at least had the benefit of an electric fan blowing on him, one of only two in the camp. According to my baby-faced guard, the other fan was in the commissar’s quarters.
Perhaps a better term than “guest” is “patient,” the commandant said, editing once more. You have traveled to strange lands and been exposed to some dangerous ideas. It wouldn’t do to bring infectious ideas into a country unused to them. Think of the people, insulated for so long from foreign ideas. Exposure could lead to a real catastrophe for minds that aren’t ready for them. If you saw the situation from our point of view, you would see that it was necessary to quarantine you until we could cure you, even if it hurts us to see a revolutionary like yourself kept in such conditions.
I could see his point of view, albeit with some difficulty. There were reasons to be suspicious of someone like me, who had endured suspicion all his life. But still, it was hard for me not to feel that a year in an isolation cell from which I was allowed to emerge only an hour a day for exercise, blinking and white, was unwarranted, as I had informed him at each of these weekly sessions where he criticized my confession and I, in turn, criticized myself. These reminders I had given him must also have been on his mind, because when I opened my mouth to speak again, he said, I know what you’re going to say. As I told you all along, when your confession reaches a satisfactory state, based on our reading of it and on my reports of these self-criticism sessions to the commissar, you will move on to the next and, we hope, last stage of your reeducation. In short, the commissar believes you ready to be cured.
He does? I had yet to even meet the faceless man, otherwise known as the commissar. None of the prisoners had. They saw him only during his weekly lectures, sitting behind a table on the dais of the meeting hall where all the prisoners gathered for political lectures. I had not even seen him there, for these lectures, according to the commandant, amounted only to an elementary school education designed for pure reactionaries, puppets brainwashed by decades of ideological saturation. The faceless man had decreed me exempt from these simple lessons. Instead, I was privileged by having no burdens except to write and to reflect. My only glimpses of the commissar had come on those rare moments when I looked up from my exercise pen and saw him on the balcony of his bamboo quarters, atop the larger of the two hills overlooking the camp. At the base of the hills clustered the kitchen, mess hall, armory, latrines, and warehouses of the guards, along with the solitary rooms for special cases like me. Barbed-wire fencing separated this interior camp of the guards from the exterior camp where the inmates slowly eroded, the former soldiers, security officers, or bureaucrats of the defeated regime. Next to one of the gates in this fencing, on the interior side, was a pavilion for family visits. The prisoners had become emotional cacti in order to survive, but their wives and children inevitably wept at the sight of their husbands and fathers, whom they saw, at most, a couple of times a year, the trek from even the nearest city an arduous one involving train, bus, and motorbike. Beyond the pavilion, the exterior camp itself was fenced off from the wasteland of barren plains surrounding us, the fence demarcated with watchtowers where pith-helmeted guards with binoculars could observe female visitors and, according to the prisoners, entertain themselves. From the elevated height of the commandant’s patio, one could see not only these voyeurs but also the cratered plains and denuded trees surrounding the camp, a forest of toothpicks over which gusts of crows and torrents of bats soared in ominous black formations. I always paused on the patio before entering his quarters, savoring for a moment the view denied to me in my isolation cell, where, if I had not yet been cured, I had certainly been baked by the tropical sun.
You have complained often about the duration of your visit, the commandant said. But your confession is the necessary prelude to the cure. It is not my fault that it took you a year to write this confession, one that is not, in my opinion, even very good. Everyone except you has confessed to being a puppet soldier, an imperialist lackey, a brainwashed stooge, a colonized comprador, or a treacherous henchman. Regardless of what you think of my intellectual capacities, I know they’re just telling me what I want to hear. You, on the other hand, won’t tell me what I want to hear. Does that make you very smart or very stupid?
I was still somewhat dazed, the bamboo floor wobbling under my bamboo seat. It always took me at least an hour to become readjusted to light and space after my cell’s cramped darkness. Well, I said, gathering the tattered coat of my wits about me, I believe the unexamined life is not worth living. So thank you, Comrade Commandant, for giving me the opportunity to examine my life. He nodded approvingly. No one else has the luxury I have of simply writing and living the life of the mind, I said. My orphaned voice, which had detached itself in my cell and spoken to me from a cobwebbed corner, had returned. I am smart in some ways, stupid in others. For example, I am smart enough to take your criticism and editorial suggestions seriously, but I am too stupid to understand how my confession has not met your high standards, despite my many drafts.
The commandant regarded me through glasses that magnified his eyes to twice their size, his poor eyesight a condition of having lived in cavernous darkness for ten years. If your confession was even just satisfactory, the commissar would let you proceed with what he calls your oral examination, he said. But my opinion of what he calls your written examination is that it hardly seems like a genuine confession to me.
Haven’t I confessed to many things, Commandant?

In content, perhaps, but not in style. Confessions are as much about style as content, as the Red Guards have shown us. All we ask for is a certain way with words. Cigarette?
I hid my relief and merely nodded casually. The commandant inserted the dart of a cigarette between my cracked lips, then lit it for me with my own lighter, which he had appropriated. I inhaled the oxygen of smoke, its infusion into the folds of my lungs calming the trembling in my hands. Even in this latest revision, you quote Uncle Ho only once. This is but one symptom, among many in your confession, that you prefer foreign intellectuals and culture over our native traditions. Why is that?
I’m contaminated by the West?
Exactly. That wasn’t so hard to admit, was it? Funny, then, how you can’t put it into writing. Of course, I can understand why you didn’t quote How the Steel Was Tempered or Tracks in the Snowy Forest. You wouldn’t have had access to them, even though everyone of my generation from the north has read them. But not to mention To Huu, our greatest revolutionary poet? And to cite, instead, the yellow music of Pham Duy and the Beatles? The commissar actually has a collection of yellow music that he keeps for what he calls research purposes. He’s offered to let me listen to them, but no thanks. Why would I want to be contaminated by that decadence? Contrast the songs you discuss with To Huu’s “Since Then,” which I read in high school. He talks about how “The sun of truth shone on my heart,” which was exactly how I felt about the revolution’s effect on me. I carried a book of his with me to China for infantry training, and it helped sustain me. My hope is that the sun of truth will shine on you as well. But I also think of another poem of his about a rich child and a servant child. Closing his eyes, the commandant recited a stanza:
A child lives in a life of plenty
With abundant toys made in the West While the other child is an onlooker Watching silently from far away
He opened his eyes. Worth a mention, don’t you think?
If you would give me that book, I’d read it, I said, not having read anything for a year besides my own words. The commandant shook his head. You won’t have any time to read anything in the next phase. But implying you only needed a book in order to be better read is hardly a good defense. Not quoting Uncle Ho or revolutionary poetry is one thing, but not even a folk saying or a proverb? Now you may be from the south—
I was born in the north and lived nine years there, sir.
You chose the southern side. Regardless, you share a common culture with me, a northerner. Yet you will not quote from that culture, not even this:
The good deeds of Father are as great as Mount Thai Son
The virtue of Mother is as bountiful as springwater gushing from its source Wholeheartedly is Mother to be revered and Father respected
So that the child’s way may be accomplished.
Did you not learn something as basic as this in school?
My mother did teach it to me, I said. But my confession does show my reverence for my mother and why my father is not to be respected.
The relations between your mother and father are indeed unfortunate. You may think that I’m heartless, but I am not. I look at your situation and feel great sympathy for you, given your curse. How can a child be accomplished if his source is tainted? Yet I can’t help but feel that our own culture, and not Western culture, tells us something about your difficult situation. “Talent and destiny are apt to feud.” Don’t you think Nguyen Du’s words apply to you? Your destiny is being a bastard, while your talent, as you say, is seeing from two sides. You would be better off if you only saw things from one side. The only cure for being a bastard is to take a side.
You’re right, Comrade Commandant, I said, and perhaps he was. But the only thing harder than knowing the right thing to do, I went on, is to actually do the right thing.
I agree. What puzzles me is that you are perfectly reasonable in person, but on the page you are recalcitrant. The commandant poured himself a shot of unfiltered rice wine from a recycled soda bottle. Any urges? I shook my head, even though my priapic desire for a drink bumped against the back of my throat. Tea, please, I said, voice cracking. The commandant poured me a cup of lukewarm tinted water. It was quite sad watching you in those first few weeks. You were a raving lunatic. Isolation did you good. Now you’re purified, at least in body.
If spirits are so bad for me, then why do you drink, Commandant?
I don’t drink to excess, unlike you. I disciplined myself during the war. You rethink your entire life living in a cave. Even things like what to do with one’s waste. Ever thought of that?
Once in a while.
I sense sarcasm. Still not satisfied with the camp’s amenities and your chamber? This is nothing compared to what I went through in Laos. That’s why I’m also puzzled by the unhappiness of some of our guests. You think I’m feigning perplexity, but no, I’m genuinely surprised. We haven’t stuck them in a box underground. We haven’t shackled them until their legs waste away. We haven’t poured lime on their heads and beaten them bloody. Instead, we let them farm their own food, build their own homes, breathe fresh air, see sunlight, and work to transform this countryside. Compare that to how their American allies poisoned this place. No trees. Nothing grows. Unexploded mines and bombs killing and maiming innocents. This used to be beautiful countryside. Now it’s just a wasteland. I try to bring these comparisons up with our guests and I can see the disbelief in their eyes even as they agree with me. You, at least, are honest with me, even though, to be honest with you, that may not be the healthiest strategy.
I’ve lived my life underground for the revolution, Commandant. The least the revolution can grant me is the right to live above ground and be absolutely honest about what I have done, at least before you put me below ground again.
There you go again, defiant for no reason. Don’t you see we live in a sensitive time? It will take decades for the revolution to rebuild our country. Absolute honesty isn’t always appreciated at moments like this. But that’s why I keep this here. He pointed at the jar on the bamboo cabinet, covered with a jute cloth. He had already shown the jar to me more than once, though once was more than enough. Nevertheless, he leaned over and slipped the cloth off the jar, and there was nothing to do but turn my gaze onto the exhibit that should, if there were any justice in the world, be exhibited in the Louvre and other great museums devoted to Western accomplishments. Floating in formaldehyde was a greenish monstrosity that appeared to have originated from outer space or the deepest, weirdest depths of the ocean. A chemical defoliant invented by an American Frankenstein had led to this naked, pickled baby with one body but two heads, four eyes shut but two mouths agape in permanent, mongoloid yawns. Two faces pointed in different directions, two hands curled up against the chest, and two legs spread to reveal the boiled peanut of the masculine sex.
Imagine what the mother felt. The commandant tapped his finger on the glass. Or the father. Imagine the shrieks. What is that thing? He shook his head and drank his rice wine, its color that of thin milk. I licked my lips, and while the scratching of my dessicated tongue on my brittle lips was loud in my ears, the commandant did not notice. We could have just shot all these prisoners, he said. Your friend Bon, for example. A Phoenix Program assassin deserves the firing squad. Protecting him and excusing him as you do reflects poorly on your character and judgment. But the commissar is merciful and believes anyone can be rehabilitated, even when they and their American masters killed anyone they wanted. In contrast to the Americans and their puppets, our revolution has shown generosity by giving them this chance for redemption through labor. Many of these so-called leaders never worked a day on a farm. How do you lead an agricultural society into the future with no idea of the peasant’s life? Without bothering to drape the cloth over the jar again, he poured himself another drink. Lack of understanding is the only way to characterize how some prisoners think they’re being poorly fed. Of course I know they suffer. But we all suffered. We all must suffer still. The country is healing, and that takes longer than the war itself. But these prisoners focus only on their own suffering. They ignore what our side went through. I can’t get them to understand that they get more calories per day than the revolutionary soldier during the war, more than the peasants forced into refugee camps. They believe they are being victimized here, instead of being reeducated. This obstinacy shows how much reeducation they still need. As recalcitrant as you are, you are still far ahead of them. Here I agree with the commissar about the state of your reeducation. I was just talking about you with him the other day. He’s remarkably tolerant of you. He didn’t even object to being called the faceless man. No, I understand, you are not mocking him, merely describing the obvious, but he’s quite sensitive about his . . . condition. Wouldn’t you be? He wants to meet you this evening. That’s quite an honor. No prisoner has ever met him personally, not that you are a prisoner. He wants to clarify a few issues with you.
What issues? I said. We both looked at my manuscript, its leaves neatly stacked on his bamboo table and pinned down by a small rock, all 295 pages written by the light of a wick floating in a cup of oil. The commandant tapped my pages with a middle finger, its tip cut off. What issues? he said. Where to begin? Ah, dinner. A guard was at the door with a bamboo tray, a boy, his skin a sickly shade of yellow. Whether they were guards or prisoners, most men in the camp were this shade of yellow, or else a sickly, rotten shade of green, or a sickly, deathly shade of gray, a color palette resulting from tropical illnesses and a calamitous diet. What is it? said the commandant. Wood pigeon, manioc soup, stir-fried cabbage, and rice, sir. The wood pigeon’s roasted haunches and breast made me salivate, as my usual ration was boiled manioc. Even when starving, I had to force the manioc down my gullet, where it cemented itself against the walls of my stomach, laughing at my attempts to digest it. Subsisting on a diet of manioc not only was culinarily unpleasant, it was also no fun from a gastroenterological perspective, resulting in either a painfully solid brick or its highly explosive liquid opposite. As a consequence, the inflamed piranha of one’s anus was always gnawing at one’s posterior. I tried desperately to time my bowel movements, knowing a guard would fetch the ammo box reserved for that purpose at 0800 hours, but the snarled firehose of my bowels erupted at will, oftentimes right after the guard returned with the emptied can. Liquids and solids then fermented for most of the night and day, a vile mixture rusting through the ammo box. But I had no right to complain, as my baby-faced guard told me. No one’s picking up my shit every day, he said, peering at me through the slot in my iron door. But you’re being waited on hand and foot, short of someone wiping your ass. What do you say to that?
Thank you, sir. I could not call the guards “comrade,” the commandant demanding that I keep my history a secret, lest it be leaked. The commissar orders this for your own protection, the commandant had told me. The inmates will kill you if they know your secret. The only men who knew my secret were the commissar and the commandant, for whom I had developed feline feelings of both dependency and resentment. He was the one making me rewrite my confession with repeated strokes of his blue pencil. But what was I confessing to? I had done nothing wrong, except for being Westernized. Nevertheless, the commandant was right. I was recalcitrant, for I could have shortened my unwanted stay by writing what he wanted me to write. Long live the Party and the State. Follow Ho Chi Minh’s glorious example. Let’s build a beautiful and perfect society! I believed in these slogans, but I could not bring myself to write them. I could say that I was contaminated by the West, but I could not inscribe that on paper. It seemed as much of a crime to commit a cliché to paper as to kill a man, an act I had acknowledged rather than confessed, for killing Sonny and the crapulent major were not crimes in the commandant’s eyes. But having nevertheless acknowledged what some might see as crimes, I could not then compound those deeds through my description of them.
My resistance to the appropriate confessional style irritated the commandant, as he resumed telling me over dinner. You southerners had it too good for too long, he said. You took beefsteak for granted, while we northerners lived on starvation rations. We’ve been purged of fat and bourgeois inclinations, but you, no matter how many times you’ve rewritten your confession, cannot eradicate those inclinations. Your confession is full of moral weaknesses, individual selfishness, and Christian superstition. You exhibit no sense of collectivity, no belief in the science of history. You show no need to sacrifice yourself in the cause of rescuing the nation and serving the people. Another of To Huu’s verses is appropriate here:
I’m a son of tens of thousands of families
A younger brother of tens of thousands of withered lives
A big brother to tens of thousands of little children
Who are homeless and live in constant hunger
Compared to To Huu, you are a communist only in name. In practice, you are a bourgeois intellectual. I’m not blaming you. It’s difficult to escape one’s class and one’s birth, and you are corrupted in both respects. You must remake yourself, as Uncle Ho and Chairman Mao both said bourgeois intellectuals should do. The good news is that you show glimmers of collective revolutionary consciousness. The bad news is that your language betrays you. It is not clear, not succinct, not direct, not simple. It is the language of the elite. You must write for the people!
You speak truthfully, sir, I said. The wood pigeon and manioc soup had begun dissolving in my stomach, their nutrients energizing my brain. I just wonder what you would say about Karl Marx, Comrade Commandant. Das Kapital isn’t exactly written for the people.
Marx did not write for the people? Suddenly I could see the darkness of the commandant’s cave through his magnified irises. Get out! See how bourgeois you are? A revolutionary humbles himself before Marx. Only a bourgeois compares himself to Marx. But rest assured, he will treat you for your elitism and Western inclinations. He has built a state-of-the-art examination room where he will personally supervise the final phase of your reeducation, when you are transformed from an American into a Vietnamese once more.
I’m not an American, sir, I said. If my confession reveals anything, isn’t it that I’m an anti- American? I must have said something outrageously humorous, for he actually laughed. The anti- American already includes the American, he said. Don’t you see that the Americans need the anti- American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored. To be anti-American only makes you a reactionary. In our case, having defeated the Americans, we no longer define ourselves as anti-American. We are simply one hundred percent Vietnamese. You must try to be as well.
Respectfully speaking, sir, most of our countrymen do not think I am one of them.
All the more reason for you to work harder to prove that you are one of us. Obviously you think of yourself as one of us, at least sometimes, so you are making progress. I see you’ve finished eating. What did you think of the wood pigeon? I admitted that it was delicious. What if I told you that “wood pigeon” is only a euphemism? He watched me carefully as I looked again at the pile of little bones on my plate, sucked clean of every bit of meat and tendon. Regardless of what it was, I still longed for another serving. Some call this rat, but I prefer “field mouse,” he said. But it hardly matters, does it? Meat is meat, and we eat what we must. Do you know I once saw a dog eating the brains of our battalion doctor? Ugh. I don’t blame the dog. He was only eating the brains because the man’s intestines had already been eaten by his fellow dog. These are the kinds of things you see on the battlefield. But losing all those men was worth it. All the bombs dropped on us by those air pirates were not dropped on our homeland. Not to mention that we liberated the Laotians. That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others.
Yes, Comrade Commandant.
Enough serious talk. He threw the jute cover back over the pickled baby. I just wanted to give you my personal congratulations on having finished the written phase of your reeducation, no matter how barely, in my opinion. You should be pleased with how far you’ve come, even if you should be critical yourself for the limitations so evident in your confession. As good a student as you are, you may yet become the dialectical materialist that the revolution needs you to be. Now, let us go meet the commissar. The commandant checked the time on his wristwatch, which also happened to have been my wristwatch. He is expecting us.
We descended from the commandant’s quarters and walked past the guard barracks to the stretch of flatland separating the two hills. My isolation cell was located here, one of a dozen brick ovens where we basted in our own juices and where the prisoners tapped messages on the walls with tin cups. They had developed a simple code for communicating, and it was not long before they taught it to me. Part of what they conveyed to me was how they held me in high regard. Much of my heroic reputation came from Bon, who often greeted me through my neighbors. He and they believed I was singled out for extended isolation because of my ardent republicanism and my Special Branch credentials. They blamed the commissar for my fate, for he was really the one in charge of the camp, as everyone, including the commandant, knew. My neighbors had seen the commissar up close during his weekly political lectures, and the sight was truly horrific. Some cursed him, taking delight in his suffering. But the facelessness compelled respect among others, the mark of his dedication and sacrifice, even if for a cause that the prisoners despised. The guards, too, spoke of the faceless commissar with mixed tones of horror, fear, and respect, but never mockery. A commissar must never be mocked, even among one’s peers, for one never knew when one of those peers might report such antirevolutionary thinking.
I understood the need for my temporary detention and marginal conditions, for the revolution must be vigilant, but what I could not understand, and what I hoped the commissar would explain, was why the guards feared him, and, more generally, why revolutionaries feared one another. Aren’t we all comrades? I asked the commandant at an earlier session. Yes, he said, but not all comrades have the same level of ideological consciousness. Although I am not thrilled at having to seek the commissar’s approval on certain matters, I also admit that he knows Marxist-Leninist theory and Ho Chi Minh Thought much better than I ever will. I’m not a scholar, but he is. Men like him are guiding us toward a truly classless society. But we haven’t eradicated all elements of antirevolutionary thinking, and we must not forgive antirevolutionary faults. We must be vigilant, even of each other, but mostly of ourselves. What my time in the cave taught me is that the ultimate life-and-death struggle is with ourselves. Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit. This is the lesson you must absorb by heart, which is why we give you so much time to achieve it.
Ascending the hill toward the commissar’s quarters, it seemed to me that I had already spent too much time learning that lesson. We stopped at the stairs leading up to his balcony, where the baby- faced guard and three other guards awaited. The commissar’s in charge of you now, the commandant said, inspecting me from head to toe with a frown. I’ll be frank. He sees much more potential in you than I do. You are addicted to the social evils of alcohol, prostitution, and yellow music. You write in an unacceptable, counterrevolutionary manner. You are responsible for the deaths of the Bru comrade and the Watchman. You failed even in undermining this movie that misrepresents and insults us. If it were only up to me, I’d send you to the fields for your final cure. And if things do not work out with the commissar, I still can. Remember that.
I will, I said. And, knowing that I had not yet escaped his power, I also said, Thank you, Comrade

Commandant, for all you have done for me. I know I’ve seemed reactionary to you because of my confession, but please believe me when I say that I have learned much under your tutelage and criticism. (This, after all, was the truth.)
My show of gratitude mollified the commandant. Let me give you some advice, he said. The prisoners tell me what they think I want to hear, but they don’t understand that what I want to hear is sincerity. Isn’t that what education is all about? Getting the student to sincerely say what the teacher wants to hear? Keep that in mind. With that, the commandant turned and began his descent down the hill, a man of admirably erect posture.
The commissar’s waiting, the baby-faced guard said. Let’s go.
I gathered what remained of myself. I was three-quarters of the man I used to be, according to the commandant’s scale, manufactured in the USA and appropriated from a southern hospital. The commandant was obsessed with his weight and enamored with the scale’s statistical precision. Through a rigorous longitudinal study of bowel movements, sampled from both guards and prisoners, including myself, the commandant had calculated that the camp’s collective bowels issued about six hundred kilos of waste per day. The prisoners collected and hand-carried this waste to the fields, where it served as fertilizer. Fecal precision was thus necessary for the scientific management of agricultural production. Even now, climbing the stairs ahead of the guards and knocking on the commissar’s door, I felt the factory of my innards fashioning the wood pigeon into a solid brick that would be used tomorrow to help build the revolution.
Come in, said the commissar. That voice . . .
His quarters consisted entirely of one big, rectangular room as austere as the commandant’s, with bamboo walls, bamboo floors, bamboo furniture, and bamboo rafters holding up a thatched roof. I had entered the sitting area, furnished with some low-slung bamboo chairs, a bamboo coffee table, and an altar on which sat Ho Chi Minh’s gold-painted bust. Above his head hung a red banner imprinted with those golden words NOTHING IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM. In the middle of the room was a long table stacked with books and papers, surrounded by chairs. Leaning against one of the chairs was a guitar with familiar curvaceous hips, and at one end of the long table was a record player that looked like the one I had left behind at the General’s villa . . . At the far end of the room was a platform bed, draped in a cloud of mosquito netting behind which a shadow stirred. The bamboo floor was cool under my bare feet, and the breeze whispering through the open windows caused the netting to tremble. A hand parted the netting, its skin burned red, and he emerged from the bed’s recesses, a visage of fearful asymmetry. I looked away. Come now, the commissar said. Am I really so horrible that you do not recognize me, my friend? I looked back to see lips scorched away to reveal perfect teeth, eyes bulging from withered sockets, nostrils reduced to holes without a nose, the hairless, earless skull one massive keloid scar, leaving the head to resemble one of those dried, decapitated trophies swung on a string by an ebullient headhunter. He coughed, and a marble rattled in his throat.
Didn’t I tell you, Man said, not to return?$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 20

He was the commissar? Before I could say a word, or make any sound at all, the guards seized me, gagged me, and blindfolded me. You? I wanted to scream, to shout into the darkness, but I could do no more than grunt and moan as they dragged me outside and down the hill, the blindfold scratchy, my arms pinioned, to a destination less than a hundred paces away. Open the door, the baby-faced guard said. Hinges creaked, and I was pushed from the open air into a confined, echoing space. Arms up, the baby-faced guard said. I raised my arms. Someone unbuttoned my shirt and stripped it from me. Hands untied the string holding up my pants and they dropped around my ankles. Look at that, another guard said, whistling with admiration. The bastard’s big. Not as big as me, a third guard said. Let’s see it, then, the fourth guard said. You’ll see it when I fuck your mother with it.
Perhaps more was said, but after someone with rough fingers inserted foam plugs into my ears, and someone else placed muffs of some kind on top of them, I heard nothing more. Deaf, dumb, and blind, I was pushed down onto a mattress. A mattress! I had slept on planks the past year. The guards strapped me down with ropes around my chest, thighs, wrists, and ankles until I could do no more than wriggle my spread-eagled body. A foamy material was wrapped around my hands and feet and a silky hood was pulled over my head, the softest fabric I had felt since Lana’s lingerie. I stopped squirming, calming myself down so I could focus on my breathing through the hood. Then came vibrations of feet on the rough cement floor, followed by the faintest clank of the door being shut, and nothing more.
Was I alone, or was someone watching me? I began sweating from the accumulating heat, rage, and fear, my sweat pooling under my back faster than the mattress could absorb it. My hands and feet were hot and clammy as well. A sudden sense of panic, of drowning, surged through me. I thrashed against my constraints and tried to scream, but my body would hardly move and no sound emerged except a snuffle. Why was this being done to me? What did Man want from me? Surely he would not let me die here! No! This was my final examination. I must calm down. This was only a test. I aced tests. The Oriental is a perfect student, the Department Chair had remarked more than once. And according to Professor Hammer, I had studied the best of what had been thought and said in Western civilization, its torch passed on to me. I was my country’s finest representative, Claude had assured me, a natural at the intelligence game. Remember, you’re not half of anything, my mother said, you’re twice of everything! Yes, I could pass this test, whatever it was, devised by a commissar who had been studying me, and Bon, for the past year. He had been reading my confession, even though he, unlike the commandant, already knew most of what was in it. He could have let us go, set us free. He could have told me he was the commissar. Why subject me to a year in isolation? My calm vanished and I almost choked against my gag. Calm down! Breathe slowly! I managed to control myself once more. Now what? How would I pass the time? At least an hour must have elapsed since I was blindfolded, hadn’t it? I longed to lick my lips, but with the gag in my mouth I almost vomited. That would have been the death of me. When was he coming for me? How long would he leave me here? What had happened to his face? The guards would feed me, surely. On and on the thoughts came, the thousand cockroaches of time crawling over me until I shivered in agony and revulsion.
I wept for myself then, and the tears under my blindfold had the unexpected benefit of clearing the dust from my mind’s eye, enough for me to realize that I was not blind. My mind’s eye could see, and what I saw was the crapulent major and Sonny, circling around me as I lay on my mattress. How did you end up here, with your best friend and blood brother overseeing your demise? said the crapulent major. Don’t you think your life would have taken a different course if you hadn’t killed me? Not to mention mine, said Sonny. Do you know Sofia still weeps for me? I’ve tried to visit her and put her at peace but she can’t see me. Whereas you, who I would rather not see at all, can see me all the time. But I have to say that seeing you like this does give me some pleasure. Justice exists after all! I wanted to reply to these accusations and tell them to wait for my friend the commissar to explain everything, but even in my head I was mute. All I could do was moan in protest, which only made them laugh. The crapulent major nudged my thigh with his foot and said, See where your plotting has led you now? He nudged me even harder, and I shuddered in protest. He kept nudging me with that foot, and I kept shuddering, until I realized it was not the crapulent major but someone I could not see pushing his heel against my leg. I felt the door clang shut again. Someone had entered without me knowing, or someone had been here the entire time and just left. How much time had passed? I couldn’t be certain. Had I fallen asleep? If I had, then several hours must have gone by, perhaps an entire day. That must be why I was hungry. Finally a part of me, my stomach, could be heard, groaning. The loudest voice in the world is the voice of one’s own tortured stomach. Even so, this voice was still a quiet one compared to the angry beast it could be. I was not starving, not yet. I was just famished, my body having completely digested the wood pigeon that was actually a rat. Were they not going to feed me? Why was this being done to me? What had I ever done to him?
I remembered this kind of hunger. I had experienced it so often in my youth, even when my mother served me three-quarters of a meal and saved only a quarter for herself. I’m not hungry, she said. When I was old enough to see that she was denying herself, I said, I’m not hungry, either, Mama. Our staring contest over the meager helpings led us to push them back and forth until her love for me overpowered mine for her, as always. Eating her portion, I swallowed not just the food but the salt and pepper of love and anger, spices stronger and harsher than the sugar of sympathy. Why were we hungry? my stomach cried. Even then I understood that if the rich could only spare all the hungry a bowl of rice, they would be less rich but they would not starve. If the solution was so simple, why was anyone hungry? Was it only a lack of sympathy? No, Man said. As he taught me in our study group, both the Bible and Das Kapital provided answers. Sympathy alone would never persuade the rich to share willingly and the powerful to give up power voluntarily. Revolution made those impossible things happen. Revolution would free us all, rich and poor . . . but by that Man meant freedom for classes and collectivities. He did not necessarily mean that individuals would be freed. No, many revolutionaries had died in prison, and that seemed more and more as if it would be my fate. But despite my sense of doom, as well as my sweat, my hunger, my love, and my rage, sleep almost overcame me. I was fading when that foot nudged me again, this time in the ribs. I shook my head and tried to turn onto my side, but my restraints would not let me. The foot nudged me once more. That foot! The demon would not let me rest. How I came to hate its horned toes scraping against my bare skin and pushing against my thigh, my hip, my shoulder, my forehead. The foot knew whenever I was on the verge of sleep, returning at exactly that moment to deny me even the slightest taste of what I needed so much. The monotony of darkness was challenging, and hunger was painful, but this constant wakefulness was even worse. How long had I been awake? How long had I been in what must be the examination room? When was he coming to explain everything to me? I could not tell. The only interruptions to mark the passage of time were that foot and the occasional touch of hands lifting my hood, loosening my gag, squirting water down my throat. I never got more than a word or two out before the gag was tightened again and the hood pulled down to my neck. Oh, let me sleep! I could touch its dark waters . . . and then that damned foot would nudge at me again.
The foot would keep me awake until I died. The foot was slowly, ever so slowly, killing me. The foot was judge, guard, and executioner. Oh, foot, have sympathy for me. Foot, whose whole life is one of being stood upon, of being made to walk the dirty earth, neglected by all above, you of all living things should understand how I feel. Foot, where would we, humanity, be without you? You delivered us from Africa to the rest of the world, and yet so little is said about you. Clearly you got a raw deal as compared with, say, the hand. If you let me live, I will dedicate words to you and make my readers realize your importance. Oh, foot! I beg of you, nudge me no more. Stop rubbing your calluses on my skin. Don’t scratch me with your sharp, uncut nails. Not that your calluses and nails are your fault. They are your negligent master’s fault. I confess that I am just as heedless in the care of my feet, your kin. But I promise if you just let me go to sleep, I will be a new man in regards to my own feet, to all feet! I will worship you, foot, as Jesus Christ did when he washed the feet of sinners and kissed them.
Foot, you should be revolution’s symbol, not the hand holding hammer and sickle. Yet we keep you hidden under the table, or shod in a shoe. We abuse you, as the Chinese do, by binding you. Would we ever inflict such an injury on the hand? Stop prodding me, please, I beg of you. I recognize that humanity poorly represents you, except for when we spend copious amounts of money in dressing you, because you, of course, cannot represent yourself. Foot, I wonder why I never thought about you before, or hardly ever. The hand is free to do whatever it pleases. It even writes! No wonder more words have been written about the hand than the foot. We share something in common, foot. We are the downtrodden of the world. If you would only stop keeping me awake, if only—
This time the hand nudged me. Someone tugged at my hood, loosened it and raised it above my ears, but kept it on my head. Then the hand pulled the muffs away and yanked the plugs out and I heard the shuffling of sandals, the scraping of a chair or a stool on cement. You idiot! the voice said. I was still in darkness, hands and feet still bound and encased, body naked and damp. Water was poured down my parched throat until I gagged. Didn’t I tell you not to come? It came from far above me, somewhere in the ceiling, his voice, I was sure of it even in my agonized state. But how could I not come back? I blubbered. Mama told me the bird always returns to its nest. Am I not that bird? Is this not my nest? My origin, my place of birth, my country? My home? Are these not my people? Are you not my friend, my sworn brother, my true comrade? Tell me why you’re doing this to me. I wouldn’t do this to my worst enemy.
The voice sighed. Never underestimate what you can do to your worst enemy. But so far as this goes, what was it that priests like your father always said? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That sounds good, but things are never that simple. The problem, you see, is how to know what we want to have done to us.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, I said. Why are you torturing me?
Do you think I want to do this to you? I am doing my best to make sure worse things don’t happen to you. The commandant already believes that I am being too gentle with my pedagogical methods, with my desire to hear your confession. He is the kind of dentist who believes toothaches can be treated by removing all of one’s teeth with pliers. This is the situation you have gotten yourself into by doing exactly what I told you not to do. Now, if you have any wish of leaving this camp with your teeth intact, we must play out our roles until the commandant is satisfied.
Please don’t be angry with me, I sobbed. I couldn’t take it if you were angry at me, too! He sighed once more. Do you remember writing that you forgot something, but that you couldn’t remember what it was? I told him I didn’t remember. Of course, he said. Human memory is short, and time is long. The reason you are here in this examination room is for you to remember what you forgot, or at least forgotten to write. My friend, I am here to help you see what it is you cannot see on your own. His foot nudged the base of my skull. Here, at the back of your head.
But what does that have to do with not letting me sleep? I said. He laughed, not the laugh of the schoolboy who had enjoyed Tintin comics, but the laugh of someone perhaps just a bit mad. You know as well as I why I cannot let you sleep, he said. We must access that safe hiding the last of your secrets. The longer we keep you awake, the better chance we have of cracking that safe.

But I’ve confessed to everything.
No, you haven’t, the voice said. I am not accusing you of deliberately withholding, though I gave you many opportunities to write your confession in such a way as to satisfy the commandant. It is you who bring this on yourself, no one else.
But what am I supposed to confess to?
If I told you what to confess to, then it would not be much of a confession, the voice said. But take comfort in knowing that your situation is not as impossible as you think. Do you remember our exams, when you would always score perfectly and I would miss a few points? Even though I read and memorized as feverishly as you, you always outdid me. I just couldn’t get the answers to come out of my head. But they were there. The mind never forgets. When I looked at our textbooks again, I thought, Of course! I knew them all the time. In fact, I know you know the answer to the question you must pass in order to finish your reeducation. I will even ask you that question now. Answer it successfully and I will free you from your bonds. Are you ready?
Go ahead, I said, swelling with confidence. All I ever needed was a test to prove myself. I heard the rustle of paper, as if he was thumbing through a book, or perhaps my confession. What is more precious than independence and freedom?
A trick question? The answer was obvious. What was he looking for? My mind was swaddled in something soft and clammy. Through it I could feel the hard, solid answer, but what it was I could not tell. Perhaps the obvious was indeed the answer. At last I told him what I thought he wanted to hear: Nothing, I said, is more precious than independence and freedom.
The voice sighed. Almost, but not quite. Almost, but not right. Isn’t it frustrating when the answer is right there but one doesn’t know what it is?
Why, I cried, are you doing this to me? You are my friend, my brother, my comrade!
A long silence ensued. I heard only the shuffling of paper and the rasp of his tortured breathing. He was sucking hard to ensure the passage of even a small amount of air. Then he said, Yes, I am your friend, brother, comrade, all these things until I die. As your friend, brother, comrade, I warned you, didn’t I? I could not have been any clearer. I was not the only one reading your messages, nor could I send you a message without someone looking over my shoulder. Everyone has someone looking over his shoulder here. And yet you insisted on returning, you fool.
Bon was going to get himself killed, I had to come back to protect him.
And you were going to get yourself killed, too, the voice said. What kind of plan is that? Where would you two be if I was not here? We are the Three Musketeers, aren’t we? Or perhaps now we are the Three Stooges. No one volunteers for this camp, but when I realized you would be returning I demanded to be the commissar and to have the two of you sent here. Do you know who they put in this camp? The ones who chose to make a last stand, who continued to fight a guerrilla war, who will not recant or confess with proper contrition. Bon has already demanded twice to be shot by firing squad. The commandant would gladly have done it if not for me. As for you, your chances of survival would be doubtful without my protection.
You call this protection?
If it weren’t for me, you would likely be dead already. I am a commissar but above me are more commissars, reading your messages, following your progress. They dictate your reeducation. All I can do is take charge of it and persuade the commandant that my method will work. The commandant would have put you on a demining squad, and that would be the end of you. But I have gotten you the luxury of a year writing in an isolation cell. The other prisoners would kill for your privilege. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I’ve done you a big favor, getting the commandant to keep you locked up. In his eyes, you are the most dangerous of all subversives, but I’ve convinced him that the revolution is better off curing you than killing you.

Me? Haven’t I proven myself a true revolutionary? Haven’t I sacrificed decades of my life in the cause of liberating our country? You of all people should know that!
It is not me who needs convincing. It is the commandant. You do not write in any way a man like him can understand. You claim to be a revolutionary, but your story betrays you, or rather, you betray yourself. Why, you stubborn ass, do you insist on writing this way, when you must know that the likes of you threaten the commandants of the world . . . The foot nudged me awake. I had fallen asleep for one delicious instance, as if I had been crawling through a desert and tasted a tear. Stay awake, the voice said. Your life depends on it.
You’re going to kill me if you won’t let me sleep, I said.
I am going to keep you awake until you understand, the voice said. I understand nothing!
Then you have understood almost everything, the voice said. He chuckled and it sounded almost like my old schoolmate. Isn’t it funny how we find ourselves here, my friend? You came to save Bon’s life and I came to save both your lives. Let us hope my plot works out better than yours. But truth be told, it wasn’t purely out of friendship that I petitioned to be the commissar here. You have seen my face, or rather, my lack of one. Can you imagine my wife and children seeing this? The voice cracked. Can you imagine their horror? Can you imagine mine every time I look in the mirror? Although, to be honest, I have not looked at a mirror for years now.
I wept, thinking of him exiled from them. His wife was a revolutionary, too, a girl from our sister school of such integrity and simple beauty that I would have fallen in love with her if he hadn’t first. His boy and girl must be now at least seven and eight, little angels whose only fault was that they sometimes fought with each other. They would never look with fear on your . . . your condition, I said. You only imagine what they see through how you see yourself.
You know nothing! he shouted. Silence ensued again, interrupted only by the rasp of his breathing. I could imagine the scars of his lips, the scars in his throat, but all I wanted was to sleep . . . His foot nudged me. I apologize for losing my temper, the voice said, softly. My friend, you cannot know what I feel. You only think you can. But can you know what it is like to be so horrible that your own children cry when they see you, when your wife flinches at your touch, when your own friend does not recognize you? Bon has seen me this last year and not known who I am. True, he sits at the back of the meeting hall and only sees me from afar. I have not called him in to let him know who I am, because such knowledge would certainly do him no good and probably do him great harm. Nevertheless—nevertheless I dream that he will recognize me despite myself, even if, in recognizing me, he would only want to kill me. Can you imagine the pain of losing my friendship with him? Perhaps you can. But can you actually know the pain of napalm burning the skin off your face and your body? How can you?
Then tell me, I cried. I want to know what happened to you!
Silence ensued, for how long I do not know, until the foot nudged me again and I realized I had missed the first part of his story. I was still wearing my uniform, said the voice. The sense of doom was thick among my unit, panic in the eyes of the officers and the men. With the liberation only hours away, I hid my joy and excitement but not my worry for my family, even though they should be safe. My wife was at home with the children, one of our couriers close by to ensure their safety. When the tanks of the liberation army approached our bridge and my commanding officer ordered us to stand firm, I worried for myself as well. I didn’t want our liberators to shoot me on the last day of the war, and my mind was calculating how to avoid such a fate when someone said, Here’s the air force at last. One of our planes was overhead, flying high to avoid antiaircraft fire, but also flying far too high for a bombing run. Get closer, someone shouted. How’s he going to hit anything flying that high? The voice chuckled. How indeed? When the pilot dropped his bombs, the sense of dread possessing my fellow officers touched me, for I could see that the bombs, instead of falling toward the tanks, were falling toward us, in slow motion. The bombs fell faster than our eyesight told us, and though we ran, we did not get far. A cloud of napalm engulfed us, and I suppose I was lucky. I ran faster than the others and the napalm only licked me. It hurt. Oh, how much it hurt! But what can I tell you besides the fact that being on fire feels like being on fire? What can I tell you about the pain except that it was the most horrendous pain I have ever felt? The only way for me to show you how much it hurt, my friend, is for me to burn you myself, and that I will never do.
I, too, had come close to death on the tarmac of the Saigon airport, and again on the set of the Movie, but neither experience was the same as being burned. At worst I had been lightly scorched. I tried to imagine that multiplied by ten thousand, by a napalm that was the very light of Western civilization, having been invented at Harvard, or so I had learned in Claude’s class. But I could not. All I could feel was my desire for sleep as my self dissolved, leaving only my melting mind. But even in this buttery condition, my mind understood that this was not the time to talk about me. I can’t imagine, I said. Not at all.
It was a miracle that I lived. I am a living miracle! A human being turned inside out. I should be dead but for my dear wife, who searched for me when I did not come home. She found me dying in an army hospital, a low-priority case. When she notified the powers that be, they ordered the best surgeons remaining in Saigon to operate on me. I was saved! But for what? The pain of being burned was hardly less than the pain of having no skin and no face. I was on fire every day for months. When my medication wears off, I still burn. Excruciating is the right word, but it cannot convey the feeling it describes.
I think I know what excruciation feels like. You are only beginning to know.
You don’t have to do this!
Then you do not yet understand. Certain things can be learned only through the feeling of excruciation. I want you to know what it is that I knew and still know. I would have spared you that knowledge if you had not come back. But you have come back, and the commandant is watching. Left by yourself, you would not survive under his care. You frighten him. You are nothing but a shadow standing at the mouth of his cave, some strange creature that sees things from two sides. People like you must be purged because you bear the contamination that can destroy the revolution’s purity. My task is to prove that you do not need to be purged, that you can be released. I have constructed this examination room exactly for this purpose.
You don’t have to do this, I muttered.
But I do! What’s being done to you is for your own good. The commandant would break you the only way he knows how, through your body. The only way to save you was to promise the commandant that I would test new methods of examination that would not leave a mark. This is why we have not beat you even once.
I should be thankful?
Yes, you should. But now it is time for the final revision. The commandant will accept no less. You must give him more than what you have.
I have nothing left to confess!
There is always something. That is confession’s nature. We can never stop confessing because we are imperfect. Even the commandant and I must criticize ourselves to each other, as the Party has intended. The military commandant and the political commissar are the living embodiment of dialectical materialism. We are the thesis and the antithesis from which comes the more powerful synthesis, the truly revolutionary consciousness.
If you already know what I forgot to confess, then tell me!

The voice chuckled again. I heard the shuffling of papers. Let me quote from your manuscript, the voice said. “The communist agent with the papier-mâché evidence of her espionage crammed into her mouth, our sour names literally on the tip of her tongue.” You mention her four more times in your confession. We learn that you pulled this list from her mouth and that she looked at you with mortal hatred, but we don’t learn her fate. You must tell us what you did to her. We demand to know!
I saw her face again, her dark peasant skin and broad, flat nose, so similar to those broad, flat noses of the doctors surrounding her in the movie theater. But, I said, I did nothing to her.
Nothing! Do you think her fate is the thing you have forgotten that you have forgotten? But how is her tragedy possible to forget? Her fate is so clear. Was there ever any fate for her that could differ from what a reader might imagine, seeing her in your confession?
But I did nothing to her!
Exactly! Don’t you see how everything in need of confession is already known? You indeed did nothing. That is the crime that you must acknowledge and to which you must confess. Do you agree?
Perhaps. My voice was faint. His foot nudged me again. Would he let me sleep if I said yes?
It is time for me to rest, my friend. I can feel the pain again. The pain never goes away. Do you know how I tolerate it? Morphine. The voice chuckled. But that wonder drug only numbs the body and the brain. What about my mind? I’ve discovered that the only way to manage pain is to imagine someone else’s greater pain, a suffering that diminishes your own. So, remember what we learned in the lycée, the words of Phan Boi Chau? “For a human being, the greatest suffering comes from losing his country.” When this human being lost his face, his skin, and his family, this human being imagined you, my friend. You had lost your country and I was the one who exiled you. I felt deeply for you, the terrible loss only hinted at in your cryptic messages. But now you have returned, and I can no longer imagine your suffering to be greater than mine.
I’m suffering now, I said. Please, just let me go to sleep.
We’re revolutionaries, my friend. Suffering made us. Suffering for the people is what we chose because we sympathized so much with their suffering.
I know all this, I said.
Then listen to me. The chair scraped and his voice, already high above me, rose even higher. Please understand. I do this to you because I am your friend and your brother. Only without the comfort of sleep will you fully understand the horrors of history. I tell you this as someone who has slept very little since what has happened to me. Believe me when I say that I know how you feel, and that this has to be done.
I was already afraid, but his prescription of my treatment magnified my fear even more. Somebody must have something done to him! Was I that somebody? No! That cannot be true, or so I wanted to tell him, but my tongue refused to obey me. I was only mistaken to be that somebody, because I was, I told him, or thought I did, a nobody. I am a lie, a keeper, a book. No! I am a fly, a creeper, a gook. No! I am—I am—I am—
The chair scraped again and I smelled the distinct, gamy odor of the baby-faced guard. A foot nudged me and I trembled. Please, Comrade, I said. Just let me sleep. The baby-faced guard snorted, nudged me once more with his horny foot, and said, I’m not your comrade.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 21

The prisoner had never known that he needed a respite from history, he who had committed his adult life to its hot pursuit. His friend Man had introduced him to the science of history in the study group, its chosen books written in scarlet letters. If one understood history’s laws, then one could control history’s chronology, wresting it away from capitalism, already intent on monopolizing time. We wake, work, eat, and sleep according to what the landlord, the owner, the banker, the politician, and the schoolmaster command, Man had said. We accept that our time belongs to them, when in truth our time belongs to us. Awaken, peasants, workers, colonized! Awaken, invisible ones! Stir from your zones of occult instability and steal the gold watch of time from the paper tigers, running dogs, and fat cats of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism! If you know how to steal it, time is on your side, and numbers are, too. There are millions of you and only thousands of them, the colonizers, compradors, and capitalists who have persuaded the wretched of the earth that capitalist history is inevitable. We, the vanguard, must convince the dark peoples and subterranean classes that communist history is inevitable! The exhaustion of the exploited will inevitably lead them to revolt, but it is our vanguard that speeds up the time toward that uprising, resets the clock of history and rings the alarm clock of revolution. Ticktock—ticktock—ticktock—
Fixed on his mattress, the prisoner—no, the pupil—understood that this was the study group’s final session. To be a revolutionary subject he must be a historical subject who remembered all, which he could do so only by being fully awake, even if being fully awake would, eventually, kill him. And yet if he could but sleep, he would understand better! He writhed, he wriggled, he wrestled with himself in his failed bid for sleep, and this may have gone on for hours, or minutes, or seconds, when, all of a sudden, his hood was removed, followed by his gag, allowing him to gasp and suck in air. His captor’s rough hands plucked away his muffs and earplugs and, lastly, untied the blindfold chafing against his skin. Light! He could see, but just as quickly he had to shut his eyes. Suspended over him were dozens—no, hundreds of lightbulbs, planted in the ceiling and blinding him with their collective wattage, their glare radiating through the red filter of his eyelids. A foot pushed against his temple and the baby-faced guard said, No sleeping, you. He opened his eyes to the glowing hot mass of bulbs arranged in an orderly grid, their intense light revealing an examination room whose walls and ceiling were plastered in white. The floor was cement painted white, and even the iron door was painted white, all in a chamber roughly three meters by five. The baby-faced guard in his yellow uniform stood at attention in the corner, but the three others in the room stood at the edges of his mattress, one to either side and another at his feet. They were dressed in white lab coats and sea-green medical scrubs, hands behind their backs. Surgical masks and stainless steel goggles hid their faces, all six orbital lenses focused on him, who was now clearly not only prisoner and pupil but also patient.
Q. Who are you?
The man to his left asked the question. Didn’t they know who he was by now? He was the man with a plan, the spy with an eye, the mole in the hole, but his tongue had inflated itself to fill his entire mouth. Please, he wanted to say, let me close my eyes. Then I’ll tell you who I am. The answer is on the tip of my tongue—I am the gook being cooked. And if you say I am only half a gook? Well, in the words of that blond-haired major tasked with counting the communist dead after the battle for Ben Tre, confronted with the mathematical problem of a corpse whose remains included only his head, chest, and arms: half a gook is still a gook. And since the only good gook is a dead gook, as the American soldiers liked to say, it must be that this patient was one bad gook.
Q. What are you?
This came from the man to his right in the commandant’s voice. On hearing this voice, the patient lunged against his ropes until they burned his flesh, the question inciting a red flare of silent rage. I know what you’re thinking! You think I’m a traitor! A counterrevolutionary! A bastard who belongs nowhere, not to be trusted by anyone! The rage subsided just as suddenly into despair, and he wept. Would his sacrifices never be honored? Would no one ever understand him? Would he always be alone? Why must he be the man to whom things are done?
Q. What is your name?
It was the man at the end of the mattress, speaking in the commissar’s voice. An easy question, or so he thought. He opened his mouth, but when his tongue would not move, he shrank in fright. Had he forgotten his name? No, impossible! He had given himself his American name. As for his native name, his mother, the only one who understood him, had given it to him, his father no help, his father who never called him son or by his name, even in class simply calling him you. No, he could never forget his name, and when at last it came to him, he freed his tongue from its gummy bed and said it aloud.
The commissar said, He can’t even get his name right. Doctor, I think he needs the serum, to which the man on the patient’s left said, Very well, then. The doctor brought his hands from behind his back, gloved to the forearms in white rubber, one hand with an ampule the size of a rifle cartridge, the other with a needle. With a smooth stroke, the doctor drew a clear liquid from the ampule into the needle, then crouched by the patient’s side. When he shuddered and twitched, the doctor said, One way or another I’ll inject you, and if you move, it will be worse for you. The patient stopped thrashing and the prick in the crook of the elbow was almost a welcome relief, another kind of feeling than the hallucinatory urge for sleep. Almost, but not quite. Please, he said, turn off the lights.
The commissar said, That we cannot do. Don’t you see that you must see? The commandant snorted. He will never see, not with all the light in the world. He’s been underground too long. He’s fundamentally blind! Now, now, said the doctor, patting the patient’s arm. Men of science must never give up hope, least of all when operating on the mind. As we can neither see nor touch his mind, all we can do is help the patient see his own mind by keeping him awake, until he can observe himself as someone else. This is most crucial, for we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It’s as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can. This is the nature of our experiment, for which we need one more device. The doctor pointed to a brown leather satchel on the floor that the patient had not noticed but immediately recognized, a military field telephone, the sight of which made him tremble again. The Soviets provided the serum that will compel our patient to tell the truth, the doctor said. This other component is American. You see the look in our patient’s eyes? He remembers what he has seen in those interrogation rooms. But we will not be wiring him via nipple and scrotum to the battery terminals on the phone’s generator. Instead—the doctor reached into the satchel and extracted a black wire—we clip this to a toe. As for the hand crank, it generates too much electricity. We do not want pain. We do not torture. All we want is enough stimulus to keep him awake. Thus I have modified the electrical output and wired the phone to this. The doctor held up a wristwatch. Every time the second hand crosses twelve o’clock, a brief spark travels to the patient’s toe.
The doctor untied the burlap sack of wadding from around the patient’s foot, and although the patient craned his neck to see the doctor’s contraption he could not elevate himself enough to observe the details. All he could see was the black wire running from toe to satchel, inside of which the doctor had replaced the wristwatch. Sixty seconds, gentlemen, said the doctor. Ticktock . . . the patient trembled, waiting for the call. The patient had seen how a subject receiving such a call answered it by screaming and flinging about. By the tenth or twentieth such call, the subject’s eyes took on the glassy sheen of a taxidermically prepared specimen in a diorama, living and yet dead, or vice versa, as the subject anticipated the crank’s next turn. Claude, who had taken the class to see such an interrogation, said, Any of you jokers laugh or get a hard-on, I yank you. This is serious business. The patient remembered being relieved when he was not asked to turn the crank. Watching the subject spasm, he had winced and wondered what the call felt like. Now here he was, sweating and shivering as the seconds ticked away until a burst of static electricity made him jump, not pained but startled. See? Perfectly harmless, said the doctor. Just keep switching the wire to different toes so he doesn’t get a burn from the wire’s clip.
Thank you, Doctor, said the commissar. Now if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like some privacy with our patient. Take all the time you want, said the commandant, heading for the door. This patient’s mind is contaminated. It needs a thorough washing. After the exit of the commandant, the doctor, and the baby-faced guard—but not Sonny and the crapulent major, who observed the patient with great patience as they stood in one corner—the commissar sat down on a wooden chair, the only furnishing in the room besides the patient’s mattress. Please, the patient said, just let me rest. The commissar said nothing until the next burst of static electricity jarred the patient. Then he leaned forward and showed the patient a thin book heretofore hidden from him. We found this in your quarters at the General’s villa.
Q. What is the title?
A. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, 1963.
Q. What is KUBARK?
A. A cryptonym for the CIA.
Q. What is the CIA?
A. The Central Intelligence Agency of the USA.
Q. What is the USA?
A. The United States of America.
You see that I hide nothing from you, the commissar said, leaning back. I have read your marginal notes, taken account of your underlined passages. Everything being done to you comes from this book. In other words, yours is an open-book exam. There are no surprises.
Sleep . . .
No. I am observing you to see if this serum is working. A gift from the KGB, although we both know what the great powers expect for their gifts. They have tested their techniques, their weapons, and their ideas on our small country. We have been the subjects of that experiment they call, with a straight face, the Cold War. What a joke, given how hot the war has been for us! Funny but not so funny, for you and I are together the butt of this joke. (I thought we were the butt of the joke, said Sonny. Hush, said the crapulent major. I want to hear this. It’s going to be rich!) As always, the commissar continued, we have appropriated their techniques and technology. These lightbulbs? Manufactured in the USA, and the generator that powers them as well, although the gasoline is a Soviet import.
Please, turn off the lights, the patient said, sweating from the heat generated by the grid of bulbs. Hearing no response, he repeated himself, and when he still heard nothing, he realized that the commissar had left. He closed his eyes, and for a moment he thought he was asleep, until the electricity bit his toe. I’ve been subjected to these techniques myself at the Farm, Claude had told the class. They work even if you know what is being done to you. He was referring to the techniques in the mimeographed KUBARK manual now in the commissar’s hands, the required reading for the

interrogation course. The patient, before he was a patient and when he was only a pupil, had read this book several times. He had memorized its plot, characters, and devices, and he understood the importance of isolation, sensory deprivation, joint interrogators, and penetration agents. He had mastered the Ivan Is a Dope technique, the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing technique, the Alice in Wonderland technique, the All-Seeing Eye technique, the Nobody Loves You technique. In short, he knew this book inside and out, including its stress on an unpredictable routine. Thus it was no surprise when the baby-faced guard came in and reattached the wire to one of his fingers. While the baby- faced guard was rewrapping his foot, the patient mumbled something even he did not understand, to which the baby-faced guard said nothing at all. This baby-faced guard was the one who had shown the patient his tattoo, BORN IN THE NORTH TO DIE IN THE SOUTH, scripted in blue ink on his biceps. As he was in the last division to march on Saigon, however, the war was over by the time he arrived to liberate the city. But his tattoo might still be prophetic. He had nearly died already from the syphilis given to him by a prisoner’s visiting wife, who had paid her bribe with the only resource she had. Please, turn off the lights, the patient said. But the baby-faced guard was no longer tending to him. It was a teenage guard, delivering his food. Hadn’t he just eaten? He wasn’t hungry, but the teenage guard forced the rice gruel down his throat with a metal spoon. The schedule of his basic necessities must be disrupted, his feeding schedule irregular and unpredictable, exactly according to the book. Like a doctor studying a fatal disease that suddenly afflicts him, he knew everything that had happened and would happen to him, and yet it made no difference. He attempted to tell this to the teenage guard, who told him to shut up before kicking him in the ribs and leaving. The electric wire bit him again, only this time it was not clipped to his finger but to his ear. He shook his head but the wire would not release its jaws, nagging at him to stay awake. His mind was raw and chapped, as his mother’s nipples must have been after he fed on them. My hungry baby, she called him. Just a few hours old, you couldn’t even open your eyes and yet you knew exactly where to find my milk. And once you latched on, you wouldn’t let go! You demanded it every hour on the hour. That first soupçon of his mother’s milk must have been perfection, but he could not remember what it tasted like. All he knew was what it did not taste like: fear, the sharp, metallic tinge of a nine-volt battery rubbed on his tongue.
Q. How do you feel?
The commissar had returned, looming over the patient in his white lab coat, surgical mask, and stainless steel goggles, his hands in white rubber gloves, holding a notepad and a pen.
Q. I said, how are you feeling?
A. I can’t feel my body.
Q. But can you feel your mind?
A. My mind feels everything.
Q. Now do you remember?
A. What?
Q. Do you remember what you have forgotten?
And it occurred to the patient that he did remember what he had forgotten, and that if he could just articulate it, the wire would be removed from the tip of his nose, the taste of a battery in his mouth would go away, the lights would be turned off, and he could, at last, sleep. He wept, his tears falling into the vast waters of his forgetting, and that slight saline change to the liquid constitution of his amnesia provoked the obsidian past to rise. An obelisk slowly emerged from his ocean of disremembering, the resurrection of what he did not even know was dead since it had been buried at sea. Engraved on the obelisk were hieroglyphs—cryptic images of three mice, a series of rectangles, undulating curves, a scattering of kanji . . . and a movie projector, for what had been forgotten, he now remembered, had occurred in the room they called the movie theater.
Q. Who called it the movie theater?
A. The policemen.

Q. Why is it called the movie theater?
A. When foreigners visit, the room is a movie theater.
Q. And when foreigners are not visiting? A. . . .
Q. And when foreigners are not visiting?
A. Interrogations are done there.
Q. How are interrogations done?
A. There are so many ways.
Q. What is one example?
One example! There were so many to choose from. The telephone call, of course, and the plane ride, and the water drum, and the ingenious, scarless method involving pins, paper, and an electric fan, and the massage, and the lizards, and the spot burns, and the eel. None of them were written in the book. Even Claude did not know their origins, only that they had been practiced long before his entry into the guild. (This is going on for far too long, said the crapulent major. He’s had enough. No, said Sonny. He’s really sweating now. We’re starting to get somewhere!)
Q. Who was in the movie theater?
A. The three policemen. The major. Claude.
Q. Who else was in the movie theater?
A. Me.
Q. Who else was in the movie theater? A. . . .
Q. Who else—
A. The communist agent.
Q. What happened to her?
How could he have forgotten the agent with the papier-mâché evidence in her mouth? His own name was written on the list of policemen she had been trying to swallow when she was caught. Watching her in the movie theater, he was certain that she was unaware of his true identity, though he was the one who had passed the list to Man. But the agent, being Man’s courier, knew who Man was. She lay in the center of the capacious room, naked on a table covered with a black rubber sheet, hands and feet roped to the table’s four legs. The movie theater was lit only by overhead fluorescent lighting, its blackout curtains puckered shut. Pushed haphazardly against the walls were gray metal folding chairs, while in the back of the room stood a Sony movie projector. On the opposite wall the movie screen served as the backdrop, from where Claude watched by the projector, of the agent’s interrogation. The crapulent major was in charge, but having abdicated his role to the three policemen in the movie theater, he sat watching from a folding chair, his face unhappy and sweating.
Q. Where were you?
A. With Claude.
Q. What did you do?
A. I watched.
Q. What did you see?
Later, sometime in the bright future, the commissar would play the patient a tape recording of his answer, though he had no memory of the tape recorder’s presence. Many people who heard their voices on tape thought that they did not sound like themselves, which they found disturbing, and he was no exception. He heard this stranger’s voice say, I saw everything. Claude told me that this was nasty business, but that I had to see it. I said, Is this really necessary? Claude said, Talk to the major. He’s in charge. I’m just the adviser. So I went to the major, who said, There’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing! The General wants to know how she got the names and he wants to know now. But this is wrong, I said. Don’t you see? This doesn’t need to be done. The major sat there and said nothing, and Claude, standing by the movie projector, was also silent. Just give me some time alone with her, I said to the three policemen. Although the Americans called our policemen white mice because of their white dress uniforms and hats, none of these three were mouselike. They were average specimens of

national manhood, slim and gaunt with deeply tanned skin from riding in jeeps and on motorcycles. Instead of head-to-toe dress whites, they wore field uniforms of white shirts and light blue pants, their light blue caps doffed. Just give me a couple of hours with her, I said. The youngest policeman snorted. He just wants first dibs. I turned red with fury and shame, and the oldest policeman said, The American’s not worrying about this. Neither should you. Here, have a Coke. In the corner was a Frigidaire full of soda, and the oldest policeman, who already had an open bottle in his hand, pressed it into mine before ushering me to the chair next to the major. I sat down and the fingers of my hand, holding the ice-cold bottle, began to go numb.
Please, sirs! cried the agent. I’m innocent! I swear! That explains why you got a list with all those policemen’s names on it? said the youngest. You just found that lying around somewhere and then got so hungry you had to try to eat it? No, no, sobbed the agent. She needed a good story to cover herself but for some reason she could not come up with it, not that any story could divert the policemen. All right, said the middle-aged one, unbuckling his belt and unzipping his pants. He was already erect, his eleventh finger protruding from his boxers. The agent moaned and turned her eyes away to the other side of the table, only to find the youngest policeman standing there. Having already dropped his pants, he was pumping himself furiously with one hand. Sitting behind him, all I saw were the sunken cheeks of his naked buttocks, as well as the horror in the agent’s eyes. She saw that this was not an interrogation but a sentence, written by the policemen with the instruments in their hands. The oldest, who must have been a father, was fondling the stubby length of the ugliest part of most adult male bodies. This was fully evident to me now that the youngest policeman had turned in profile, bringing himself closer to the agent’s face. Come on, take a look, he said. He likes you! The three engorged members differed in length, one pointing up, another down, the third bent to the side. Please don’t do this! the agent cried, eyes shut and head shaking. I beg you! The oldest policeman laughed. Look at that flat nose and dark skin. She’s got some Cambodian in her, or maybe Cham. They’re hot-blooded.
Let’s start easy, the middle-aged policeman said, climbing up awkwardly onto the table between her legs. What’s your name? She said nothing, but when he repeated the question, something primitive awoke in her, and when she opened her eyes to look at the policeman, she said, My surname is Viet and my given name is Nam. For a moment, the three policemen were speechless. Then they burst into laughter. This bitch is asking for it, said the youngest. The middle-aged one, still laughing, ponderously lowered himself onto the agent as she screamed and screamed. Watching the policeman grunting and pounding, and the other two shuffling around the table with their pants around their ankles, ugly knees exposed, it seemed to me that they were, after all, mice, gathered around a block of cheese. My countrymen never understood the concept of a queue, no one wanting to be at the end of a line, and as these three mice jostled one another and obstructed my view, all I could see were their sweaty nether regions and the agent’s thrashing legs. She was no longer screaming becaus she no longer could, the youngest policeman having silenced her. Hurry up, he said. What’s taking so long? I’ll take as long as I please, said the middle-aged one. You’re enjoying yourself with her anyway, aren’t you? (Stop talking about this! cried the crapulent major, clapping his hands over his eyes. I can’t look!) But we were helpless except to watch as the middle-aged policeman at last convulsed with a tremendous spasm. Pleasure of this degree should always be kept private, unless everyone was participating, as in a carnival or an orgy. Here, the pleasure was hideous to those who only looked. My turn, said the youngest, detaching himself from the agent, who was able to scream once more until the oldest took the youngest policeman’s place, silencing her. What a mess, said the youngest, hiking up his shirt. He took his position on the table, undeterred by the mess, and even as the middle- aged policeman zipped up his pants over the frizzy toupee crowning his deflated self, the youngest began repeating his predecessor’s motions, reaching, in a few minutes, the same obscene conclusion. Then it was the oldest policeman’s turn, and when he climbed onto the table, he left me an unimpeded

view of the agent’s face. Although she was now free to scream, she no longer did, or no longer could. She was staring directly at me, but with the screws of pain tightened on her jaws and eyes, those screws that turned ever more, I had the feeling she did not see me at all.
After the oldest was finished, the room was quiet except for the agent’s sobbing and the hiss of the cigarettes being smoked by the other policemen. The oldest, catching me looking at him as he tucked his shirt in, shrugged. Somebody else would do it. So why not us? The youngest said, Don’t waste your time talking to him. He couldn’t get it up to give her the treatment anyway. Look, he hasn’t even touched his soda. It was true, I had forgotten the bottle in my hand. It was no longer even cold. If you’re not going to drink it, the middle-aged one said, give it to me. I did not move and the exasperated policeman walked three paces to me and seized the bottle. He took a sip and made a face. I hate warm soda. He said this with malevolence and offered me back the bottle, but I could only look blankly at it, my mind as numb as my fingers had been. Wait a minute, said the oldest. No need to make the man drink warm soda when this one here needs a good washing. He patted the agent’s knee, and at that touch, and at those words, she came back to life, rearing her head and glaring at us all with a hatred so intense that every man in the room should have turned to cinders and smoke. But nothing happened. We remained flesh and blood, and so did she as the middle-aged policeman laughed, putting his thumb over the bottle’s mouth and shaking it vigorously. Good idea, he said. But it’s going to be sticky!
Yes, memory was sticky. I must have stepped on some of that soda, even though afterward the policemen had splashed buckets of water on the agent and the table, then mopped the tile floor. (I ordered them to do that, said the crapulent major. They weren’t happy about cleaning up after themselves, I can tell you that.) As for the agent, left on the table still naked, she no longer screamed or even sobbed but was dead silent, eyes closed once more, head flung back, back arched. After the policemen had flushed themselves from her, they left the drained bottle inside, buried to the throat of its neck. I can see right into her, said the middle-aged policeman, bending down to peer through the bottom of the bottle with gynecological interest. Let me see, said the youngest, shouldering him aside. I don’t see a thing, he complained. It’s a joke, you idiot! shouted the oldest. A joke! Yes, a very bad joke, a slapstick travesty that one understands in any language, as Claude did. While the policemen played doctor with their makeshift speculum, he came up to me and said, Just so you know? I didn’t teach them how to do that. The bottle, I mean. They came up with it all on their own.
They were good students, just like me. They learned their lesson well, and so have I, so if you would please just turn off the lights, if you would please just turn off the telephone, if you would just stop calling me, if you would remember that the two of us were once and perhaps still are the best of friends, if you could see that I have nothing left to confess, if history’s ship had taken a different tack, if I had become an accountant, if I had fallen in love with the right woman, if I had been a more virtuous lover, if my mother had been less of a mother, if my father had gone to save souls in Algeria instead of here, if the commandant did not need to make me over, if my own people did not suspect me, if they saw me as one of them, if we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else’s play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn’t come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn’t taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said, Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand years, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if Adam and Eve still frolicked in the Garden of Eden, if the dragon lord and the fairy queen had not given birth to us, if the two of them had not parted ways, if fifty of their children had not followed their fairy mother to the mountains, if fifty more had not followed their dragon father to the sea, if legend’s phoenix had truly soared from its own ashes rather than simply crashed and burned in our countryside, if there were no Light and no Word, if Heaven and earth had never parted, if history had never happened, neither as farce nor as tragedy, if the serpent of language had not bitten me, if I had never been born, if my mother was never cleft, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 22

Of course you cannot sleep. Revolutionaries are insomniacs, too afraid of history’s nightmare to sleep, too troubled by the world’s ills to be less than awake, or so the commandant said. He spoke as I lay on my mattress, a specimen on a slide under a microscope, and with a shutter’s smooth snick, I realized that the doctor’s experiment had succeeded. I was divided, tormented body below, placid consciousness floating high above, beyond the illuminated ceiling, buffeted from my agony through an invisible gyroscopic mechanism. Seen from this altitude, the vivisection being done to me was actually very interesting, leaving my wobbly body’s yolk shimmering beneath my viscous white mind. Thus simultaneously subjugated and elevated, I was beyond the comprehension of even Sonny and the crapulent major, who remained on the plane of my chronic sleeplessness, peering over the shoulders of the doctor, the commandant, and the commissar as they stood around me, no longer in lab coats, scrubs, and stainless steel goggles but in yellow uniforms with red tabs of rank, pistols holstered on their hips. While those below were human and ghost, I was the supernatural Holy Spirit, clairvoyant and clairaudient. In this detached way, I saw the commandant kneel down and reach his hand toward my subhuman self, index finger slowly extending until it pressed lightly on my open eyeball, a touch at which my poor body flinched.
MYSELF
Please, let me sleep.
THE COMMANDANT
You can sleep when I’m satisfied with your confession.
MYSELF
But I’ve done nothing!
THE COMMANDANT
Exactly.
MYSELF
The lights are too bright. If you could—
THE COMMANDANT
The world watched what happened to our country and most of the world did nothing. Not only that—they also took great pleasure in it. You are no exception.
MYSELF
I spoke out, didn’t I? Is it my fault no one listened?
THE COMMANDANT
Don’t make excuses! We didn’t whine. We were all willing to be martyrs. It’s only pure luck that the doctor, the commissar, and myself are alive. You simply weren’t willing to sacrifice yourself to save the agent, though she was willing to sacrifice her life to save the commissar’s.
MYSELF
No, I—
THE COMMANDANT and
THE COMMISSAR and
THE DOCTOR (in unison)
Admit it!
I saw myself admit it then. I heard myself acknowledge that I was not being punished or reeducated for the things I had done, but for the thing I had not done. I wept and cried without shame for the shame I felt. I was guilty of the crime of doing nothing. I was the man to whom things are done because he had done nothing! And not only did I weep and cry; I howled, a tornado of feeling causing the windows of my soul to shudder and clack. The sight and sound of my abjection was so disturbing that everyone averted his eyes from the sorry mess I had made of myself, except for the commandant, the commissar, and I.
THE COMMISSAR
Satisfied?
THE COMMANDANT
So he’s admitted to doing nothing. But what about the Bru comrade and the Watchman?
THE COMMISSAR
He couldn’t have done anything to save the Bru comrade and the Watchman. As for the agent, she lived.
THE COMMANDANT
She couldn’t even walk when we liberated her.
THE COMMISSAR
Perhaps she was broken in body, but not in spirit.
THE DOCTOR
What happened to those policemen?
THE COMMISSAR
I found them.
THE COMMANDANT
They paid the price. Shouldn’t he?
THE COMMISSAR
Yes, but he should also receive credit for the lives he took.
THE COMMANDANT
Sonny and the major? Their pitiful lives aren’t even equal to the agent’s injuries.
THE COMMISSAR
But is his father’s life equal?
My father? What was this? Even Sonny and the crapulent major, appalled at the harsh evaluation of their lives and deaths, paused in their agitation to listen.
THE COMMANDANT
What did he do to his father?
THE COMMISSAR
Ask him yourself.
THE COMMANDANT
You! Look at me! What did you do to your father?
MYSELF
I didn’t do anything to my father!
THE COMMANDANT and
THE COMMISSAR and
THE DOCTOR (in unison)
Admit it!
And looking down on my weeping, yolked self, I did not know whether I should laugh or cry in sympathy. Did I not remember what I had written to Man about my father? I wish he were dead.
MYSELF
But I didn’t mean it!
THE COMMISSAR
Be honest with yourself.
MYSELF
I didn’t mean for you to do it!
THE COMMISSAR
Of course you did! Who did you think you were writing to?
I was writing to the revolutionary who was on a powerful committee and who knew, even then, that he might one day be a commissar; I was writing to a political cadre already learning the plastic art of making over the souls and minds of men; I was writing to a friend who would do whatever I asked; I was writing to a writer who valued the force of a sentence and the weight of the word; I was writing to a brother who knew what I wanted more than I knew it myself.
THE COMMANDANT and
THE COMMISSAR and
THE DOCTOR (in unison)
What did you do?
MYSELF
I wanted him dead!
The commandant rubbed his chin and looked doubtfully at the doctor, who shrugged. The doctor only cracked open bodies and minds; he was not responsible for what was found.
THE DOCTOR
How did his father die?
THE COMMISSAR
A bullet in the head, listening to his assassin’s confession.
THE COMMANDANT
I wouldn’t put it past you to make up this story to save him.
THE COMMISSAR
Ask my agent. She arranged the father’s death.
The commandant gazed down at me. If I could be guilty of doing nothing, shouldn’t I also be deserving of wanting something? In this case, my father’s death. This father, in the commandant’s atheistic mind, was a colonizer, a dealer in the opiate of the masses, a spokesman for a God for whom millions of dark-skinned people had been sacrificed, supposedly for their own salvation, a burning cross lighting their hard road to Heaven. His death was not murder but a just sentence, which was all that I had ever wanted to write.
THE COMMANDANT
I’ll think about it.
The commandant turned and departed, the doctor obediently following, leaving Sonny and the crapulent major to watch as the commissar slowly settled into the chair with a grimace.
THE COMMISSAR
What a pair we are.
MYSELF
Turn off the lights. I can’t see.
THE COMMISSAR
What is more precious than independence and freedom?
MYSELF
Happiness?
THE COMMISSAR
What is more precious than independence and freedom?
MYSELF
Love?
THE COMMISSAR
What is more precious than independence and freedom?
MYSELF
I don’t know!
THE COMMISSAR
What is more precious than independence and freedom?
MYSELF
I wish I was dead!
There, I had said it, sobbing and howling. Now, at last, I knew what it was that I wanted for myself, what so many people wanted for me. Sonny and the crapulent major applauded in approval, while the commissar drew his pistol. At last! Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt. The sound of the bullet loading into the chamber was as clear as the bell of my father’s church, which my mother and I heard from our hovel every Sunday morning. Looking down on my self, I could still see the child in the man and the man in the child. I was ever always divided, although it was only partially my fault. While I chose to live two lives and be a man of two minds, it was hard not to, given how people had always called me a bastard. Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies. No, just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides. This was not simply hard to do—no, it was truly impossible, for how could I choose me against myself? Now my friend would release me from this small world with its small-minded people, those mobs who treated a man with two minds and two faces as a freak, who wanted only one answer for any question.
But wait—what was he doing? He had put the gun on the floor and knelt by my side, untying the sack around my right hand, then untying the rope binding it. I saw myself holding my hand before my eyes, scored with the red mark of our brotherhood. Through those subhuman eyes and through my supernatural gaze above, I saw my friend place the pistol in my hand, a Tokarev. The Soviets had based their design on the American Colt, and while its weight was not unfamiliar, I could not hold the pistol upright on my own, forcing my friend to wrap my fingers around the grip.
THE COMMISSAR
You are the only one who can do this for me. Will you?
And here he leaned forward, pressing the muzzle between his eyes, his hands steadying my own.
MYSELF
Why are you doing this?
As I spoke, I cried. He, too, wept, tears rolling down the hideous absence of a face that I had not seen this close in years. Where was the brother of my youth, vanished from everywhere except my memory? There, and only there, his earnest face remained, serious and idealistic, with high, pronounced cheekbones; thin, narrow lips; an aristocratic, slim nose; and an expansive brow hinting at a powerful intelligence whose tidal force had worn away the hairline. All that was left to be recognized were the eyes, kept alive by tears, and the timbre of his voice.
THE COMMISSAR
I’m crying because I can hardly bear to see you so afflicted. But I cannot save you except to have you afflicted. The commandant would not have it otherwise.
At this I laughed, although the body on the mattress only trembled.
MYSELF
How is this saving me?
He smiled through his tears. I recognized the smile, too, the whitest I had ever seen among any of my people, befitting a dentist’s son. What had changed was not the smile but the face, or the lack of it, so that this white smile floated in a void, the horrible grin of a Cheshire cat.
THE COMMISSAR
We are in an impossible situation. The commandant will let you leave only when you redeem yourself. But what about Bon? And even if he can leave, what will you two do?
MYSELF
If Bon can’t leave... neither can I.
THE COMMISSAR
And so you will die here.
He pressed the barrel of the gun against his head even harder.
THE COMMISSAR
Shoot me first. Not because of my face. I would not die for its sake. I would only exile myself here so that my family need never see this thing again. But I would live.
I was no longer my body or myself, I was only the gun, and through its steel came the vibrations of his words, signaling the impending arrival of a locomotive that would crush us both.
THE COMMISSAR
I am the commissar, but what kind of school do I oversee? One in which you, of all people, are reeducated. It is not because you did nothing that you are here. It is because you are too educated that you are being reeducated. But what have you learned?
MYSELF
I watched and did nothing!
THE COMMISSAR
I will tell you what cannot be found in any book. In every town, village, and ward the cadres deliver the same lectures. They reassure those citizens not in reeducation of our good intentions. But the committees and the commissars do not care about remaking these prisoners. Everyone knows this and no one will say it aloud. All the jargon that the cadres spout only hides an awful truth—
MYSELF
I wanted my father dead!
THE COMMISSAR
Now that we are the powerful, we don’t need the French or the Americans to fuck us over. We can fuck ourselves just fine.
The glare above my body was blinding. I was no longer certain whether I could see everything or nothing, and under the heat of the lights my palm was slick with perspiration. My grip on the pistol was slippery, but the commissar’s hands held the barrel in place.
THE COMMISSAR
If anyone besides you knew that I had spoken the unspeakable, I would be reeducated. But it is not reeducation that I fear. It is the education I have that terrifies me. How can a teacher live teaching something he does not believe in? How do I live seeing you like this? I cannot. Now pull the trigger.
I think I said that I would rather shoot myself first, but I could not hear myself, and when I tried to pull the gun away from his head and turn it toward my own, I did not have the strength. Those relentless eyes stared down at me, now dry as bones, and from somewhere deep inside of him came a rumble. Then the rumble burst forth, and he was laughing. What was so funny? This black comedy? No, that was too heavy. This illuminated room allowed for only a light comedy, a white comedy where one could die from laughter, not that he laughed that long. He stopped laughing when he let go of my hand, my arm dropping to my side and the pistol clattering on the cement floor. Behind the commissar, Sonny and the crapulent major stared with longing at the Tokarev. Either one would have been happy to pick it up and shoot me if he could, but they no longer possessed their bodies. As for the commissar and I, we had bodies but could not shoot, and perhaps that made the commissar laugh. The void that had been his face still loomed above me, his hilarity having passed with such rapidity I was not sure I had heard correctly. I thought I saw sadness in that void, but I could not be certain. Only the eyes and teeth expressed any emotion, and he no longer cried or smiled.
THE COMMISSAR
I apologize. That was selfish and weak of me. If I died, you would die, and then Bon. The commandant can’t wait to drag him before the firing squad. At least now you can save yourself and our friend, if not me. That I can live with.
MYSELF
Please, can we talk of this after I sleep?
THE COMMISSAR
First answer my question.
MYSELF
But why?
The commissar holstered his pistol. Then he tied my free hand down once more and stood up. He gazed down on me from a great height, and perhaps it was because of the foreshortened angle, but I saw in his absence of a face something else besides horror... a faint shadow cast by madness, although perhaps it was merely an ocular effect created by the glare behind his head.
THE COMMISSAR
My friend, the commandant may let you go because you wanted your father dead, but I will let you go only when you can answer my question. Just remember, my brother, that I do this for your own good.
He raised his hand to me in farewell, and on his palm blazed the red mark of our oath. With that, he left. Those are the most dangerous words you can hear, Sonny said, sitting down on the vacated chair. The crapulent major joined him, pushing him aside for room. “For your own good” can only mean something bad, he said. As if on cue, the speakers mounted high in the corners clicked and hummed, the ones I had only noticed when the commissar played for me my own stranger’s voice. The question of what would be done to me was answered when somebody began screaming, and while Sonny and the crapulent major could clap their hands over their ears I could not. But even with ears protected, Sonny and the crapulent major could not endure this screaming for more than a minute, this shrieking of a baby in torment, and in the blink of an eye they, too, vanished.
Somewhere a baby was screaming, its suffering shared with me, who needed no more. I saw myself squeeze my eyes shut, as if that could also squeeze my ears shut. It was impossible to think with the screaming in this examination room, and for the first time in a very long time I wanted something more than sleep. I wanted silence. Oh, please—I heard myself crying this aloud—stop! Then another click, and the screaming ceased. A tape! I was listening to a tape. No baby was being tortured in some nearby chamber, its howls piped into mine. It was just a recording, and for a few more moments I only had to worry about the unceasing light and heat and the rubber band snap of the electric wire against my little toe. But then I heard the click again, and my body clenched in anticipation. Somebody began screaming once more. Somebody was screaming so loudly that I not only lost track of myself, I lost track of time. Time no longer ran straight as a railroad; time no longer rotated on a dial; time no longer crawled under my back; time was infinitely looping, a cassette tape repeating without end; time howled in my ear, screaming with laughter at the idea that we could control it with wristwaches, alarm clocks, revolutions, history. We were, all of us, running out of time, except for the malevolent baby. The baby who was screaming had all the time in the world, and the irony was that the baby did not even know it.
Please—I heard myself again—stop! I’ll do anything you want! How was it that the most vulnerable creature in the world could also be the most powerful? Did I scream like this at my mother? If so, forgive me, Mama! If I screamed, it was not because of you. I am one but I am also two, made from an egg and a sperm, and if I screamed, it must be because of those blue genes gleaned from my father. I saw it now, that moment of my origin, the Chinese acrobat of time bent impossibly back on itself so that I could see the invasion of my mother’s womb by my father’s dumb, masculine horde, a howling gang of helmeted, hell-bent nomads intent on piercing the great wall of my mother’s egg. From this invasion, the nothing that I was became the somebody that I am. Somebody was screaming and it was not the baby. My cell divided, and divided, and divided again, until I was a million cells and more, until I was multitudes and multitudes, my own country, my own nation, the emperor and dictator of the masses of myself, commanding my mother’s undivided attention. Somebody was screaming and it was the agent. I was packed tight into my mother’s aquarium, knowing nothing of independence and freedom, witness by all my senses except the sense of sight to the uncanniest experience of all, being inside another human being. I was a doll within a doll, hypnotized by a metronome ticking with perfect regularity, my mother’s strong and steady heartbeat. Somebody was screaming and it was my mother. Her voice was the first sound I heard when I emerged headfirst, thrust into a humid room as warm as the womb, seized by the gnarled hands of an unimpressed doula who would tell me, years later, how she had used her sharpened thumbnail to slice the tight frenulum holding down my tongue, the better for me to suckle and to talk. This was also the woman who told me, with glee, of how my mother pushed so hard she expelled not only me but also the waste from her bowels, washing me onto the shores of a strange new world in a maternal effluence of blood and excrement. Somebody was screaming and I did not know who it was. My leash was cut and my naked, smeared purple self was turned toward a throbbing light, revealing to me a world of shadows and dim shapes speaking my mother tongue, a foreign language. Somebody was screaming and I knew who it was. It was me, screaming the one word that had dangled before me since the question was first asked—nothing—the answer that I could neither see nor hear until now—nothing!—the answer I screamed again and again and again—nothing!—because I was, at last, enlightened.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 23

With that one word, I completed my reeducation. All that remains to be told is how I glued myself back together, and how I found myself where I am now, preparing for a watery departure from my country. Like everything else of consequence in my life, neither task was easy. Leaving, in particular, is not something that I want to do but is something I must do. What in life is left for me, or any of the other graduates of reeducation? No place exists for us in this revolutionary society, even for those who think of ourselves as revolutionaries. We cannot be represented here, and this knowledge hurts more than anything done to me in my examination. Pain ends but knowledge does not, at least until the mind rots away—and when would that ever happen for me, the man with two minds?
The end of pain, at least, began when I spoke that one word. In retrospect the answer was obvious. So why did it take me so long to understand? Why did I have to be educated and reeducated for so many years, and at such great expense to both the American taxpayer and Vietnamese society, not to mention considerable damage to myself, in order to see, at last, the word that was there at the very beginning? The answer was so absurd that now, months later and in the temporary safety of the navigator’s house, I laugh even as I reread this scene of my enlightenment, which itself devolved—or is it evolved?—from screams to laughter. Of course I was still screaming when the commissar came to turn off the light and sound. I was still screaming when he unbound me and embraced me, cradling my head against his breast until my screams subsided. There, there, he said in the dark examination room, silent at last except for my sobbing. Now you know what I know, don’t you? Yes, I said, sobbing still. I get it. I get it!
What was it that I got? The joke. Nothing was the punch line, and if part of me was rather hurt at being punched—by nothing, no less!—the other part of me thought it was hilarious. That was why, as I shook and shuddered in that dark examination room, my wailing and sobbing turned to howls of laughter. I laughed so hard that eventually the baby-faced guard and the commandant came to investigate the cause of the commotion. What’s so funny? the commandant demanded. Nothing! I cried. I was, at last, broken. I had, at last, spoken. Don’t you get it? I cried. The answer is nothing! Nothing, nothing, nothing!
Only the commissar understood what I meant. The commandant, flustered by my bizarre behavior, said, Look what you’ve done to him. He’s out of his mind. He was not so much concerned with me as he was about the camp’s health, for a madman who kept on saying nothing would be bad for morale. I was mad that it had taken me so long to understand nothing, even though my failure, in hindsight, was inevitable. A good student cannot understand nothing; only the class clown, the misunderstood idiot, the devious fool, and the perpetual joker can do that. Still, such a realization could not spare me from the pain of overlooking the obvious, the pain that drove me to push the commissar away, to beat my fists against my forehead.
Stop that! said the commandant. He turned to the baby-faced guard. Stop him!
The baby-faced guard struggled with me as I beat not only my fists against my forehead, but my head against the wall. Finally, the commissar and the commandant themselves had to help him tie me down again. Only the commissar understood that I had to beat myself. I was so stupid! How could I forget that every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea? The suits depended on how one wore them, and this suit was now worn out. I was mad but not insane, although I was not going to disabuse the commandant. He saw only one meaning in nothing— the negative, the absence, as in there’s nothing there. The positive meaning eluded him, the paradoxical fact that nothing is, indeed, something. Our commandant was a man who didn’t get the joke, and people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed. They are the ones who say nothing with great piousness, who ask everyone else to die for nothing, who revere nothing. Such a man could not tolerate someone who laughed at nothing. Satisfied? he asked the commissar, both of them looking down on me, sobbing, weeping, and laughing all at the same time. Now we have to call in the doctor again.
Call him in, then, said the commissar. The hard part’s done.
The doctor moved me back to my old isolation cell, although now the chamber was unlocked and I was not shackled. I was free to go as I pleased but was reluctant to do so, sometimes needing the baby- faced guard to coax me out of the corners. Even on those rare occasions when I emerged voluntarily, it was never into sunlight, but only the night, a conjunctivitis having rendered my eyes sensitive to the solarized world. The doctor prescribed an improved diet, sunlight, and exercise, but all I wanted was to sleep, and when I was not sleeping, I was somnambulent and silent, except for when the commandant came. Is he still not saying anything? the commandant asked whenever he dropped by, to which I said, Nothing, nothing, nothing, a grinning simpleton huddled in the corner. Poor fellow, said the doctor. He is a little, how shall we say, discombobulated after his experiences.
Well, do something about it! cried the commandant.
I’ll do my best, but it’s all in his mind, the doctor said, pointing at my bruised forehead. The doctor was only half right. It was certainly all in my mind, but which one? Eventually, however, the doctor did hit on the treatment that put me on the slow road to recovery, its end the reunification of me with myself. Perhaps, he said one day, sitting on a chair next to me as I huddled in the corner, arms folded and head resting on them, a familiar activity might help you. I peered at him with one eye. Before your examination began, your days were occupied by writing your confession. Your state of mind is such that I don’t think you can write anything now, but perhaps just going through the motions may help. I peered at him with both eyes. From his briefcase, he extracted a thick stack of paper. Does this look familiar? Cautiously, I unfolded my arms and took the stack. I looked at the first page, then the second, and the third, slowly thumbing my way through the numbered sheaf of 295 pages. What do you think that is? said the doctor. My confession, I muttered. Exactly, dear fellow! Very good! Now what I want you to do is to copy this confession. Out came another stack of paper from his briefcase, as well as a handful of pens. Word for word. Can you do that for me?
I nodded slowly. He left me alone with my two stacks of paper, and for a very long time—it must have been hours—I stared at the first blank page, pen in trembling hand. And then I began, my tongue between my lips. At first I could copy only a few words an hour, then a page an hour, and then a few pages an hour. My drool dotted the pages as I saw my entire life unfold over the months it took to copy the confession. Gradually, as my bruised forehead healed, and as I absorbed my own words, I developed a growing sympathy for the man in these pages, the intelligence operative of doubtful intelligence. Was he a fool or too smart for his own good? Had he chosen the right side or the wrong side of history? And were not these the questions we should all ask ourselves? Or was it only me and myself who should be so concerned?
By the time I finished copying my confession, enough of my senses had returned for me to understand that the answers were not to be found in those pages. When the doctor next came to examine me, I asked for a favor. What is it, dear fellow? More paper, Doctor. More paper! I explained that I wanted to write the story of those events that had happened after my confession, in the interminable time of my examination. So he brought me more paper, and I wrote new pages about what had been done to me in the examination room. I felt very sorry for the man with two minds, as would be expected. He had not realized that such a man best belonged in a low-budget movie, a Hollywood film or perhaps a Japanese one about a military-grade science experiment gone terribly awry. How dare a man with two minds think he could represent himself much less anyone else, including his own recalcitrant people? They would never, in the end, be representable at all, regardless of what their representatives claimed. But as the pages mounted, I felt something else that surprised me: sympathy for the man who did those things to me. Would he, my friend, not also be tortured by the things he had done to me? I was certain he would be by the time I finished writing, by the time I concluded with me screaming that one awful word into the bright, shining light. All that remained after the certainty was to ask the doctor to let me see the commissar once more.
That is a very good idea, the doctor said, patting the pages of my manuscript and nodding with satisfaction. You are nearly done, my boy. You are nearly done.
I had not seen the commissar since the examination’s conclusion. He had left me alone to begin my recovery, and I can only think that it was because he, too, was conflicted over what he had done to me, even though what was done to me had to be done, for I had to come to the answer myself. No one could tell me the solution to his riddle, not even him. All he could do was speed up my reeducation through the regrettable method of pain. Having used such a method, he was reluctant to see me again, reasonably expecting my hatred. Meeting him in his quarters for our next and last meeting, I could see that he was uneasy, offering me tea, tapping his fingers on his knees, studying the new pages I had written. What do a torturer and the tortured say to each other after their climax has passed? I did not know, but as I sat watching him from my bamboo chair, still bisected into myself and another, I detected a similar division in him, in the horrible void where a face had been. He was the commissar but he was also Man; he was my interrogator but also my only confidant; he was the fiend who had tortured me but also my friend. Some might say I was seeing things, but the true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus. We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same. Likewise, we often deceived overselves when we thought we saw ourselves most clearly. And how did I know that I was not deluding myself as I heard my friend speak? I do not. I could only try to understand whether he was fooling me as he skipped the pleasantries of inquiring about my dubious health, physical and mental, and announced that Bon and I were leaving both camp and country. I had assumed that I would die here, and the finality of what he was saying startled me. Leave? I said. How?
A truck is waiting for you and Bon at the gates. When I heard you were ready to see me, I wanted to waste no more time. You are going to Saigon. Bon has a cousin there, who I am sure he will contact. This man has already tried twice to flee from this country and been caught both times. This third time, with you and Bon, he will succeed.
His plan left me in a daze. How do you know that? I said at last.
How do I know? His void was without expression, but his voice was amused and, perhaps, bitter. Because I bought your escape. I’ve sent money to the right officials, who will make sure the right police officers look the other way when the time comes. Do you know where the money comes from? I had no idea. Desperate women will pay any price to see their husbands in this camp. The guards take their portion and leave the rest to the commandant and myself. I send some home to my wife, I pay my tithe to my superiors, and I used the remainder for your escape. Isn’t it remarkable that in a communist country money can still buy you anything you want?
It’s not remarkable, I muttered. It’s funny.
Is it? I can’t say I laughed in taking the money and gold of these poor women. But you see, while a confession may be enough to free you from this camp, given your revolutionary background, nothing less than money will free Bon. The commandant must be paid, after all—a considerable sum, too, given Bon’s crimes. And nothing less than a great deal of money will ensure that the two of you can leave our country, as you must. This, my friend, is what I have done to these women out of friendship for you. Am I still the friend you recognize and love?
He was the faceless man who had tortured me, for my own good, for the sake of nothing. But I could still recognize him, for who but a man with two minds could understand a man with no face? I embraced him then and wept, knowing that while he was setting me free, he himself could never be free, unable or unwilling to leave this camp except through death, which at least would be a relief from his living death. The only benefit from his condition was that he could see what others could not, or what they might have seen and disavowed, for when he looked into the mirror and saw the void he understood the meaning of nothing.
But what was this meaning? What had I intuited at last? Namely this: while nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom! These two slogans are almost the same, but not quite. The first inspiring slogan was Ho Chi Minh’s empty suit, which he no longer wore. How could he? He was dead. The second slogan was the tricky one, the joke. It was Uncle Ho’s empty suit turned inside out, a sartorial sensation that only a man of two minds, or a man with no face, dared to wear. This odd suit suited me, for it was of a cutting-edge cut. Wearing this inside-out suit, my seams exposed in an unseemly way, I understood, at last, how our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power. In this transformation, we were not unusual. Hadn’t the French and the Americans done exactly the same? Once revolutionaries themselves, they had become imperialists, colonizing and occupying our defiant little land, taking away our freedom in the name of saving us. Our revolution took considerably longer than theirs, and was consideraby bloodier, but we made up for lost time. When it came to learning the worst habits of our French masters and their American replacements, we quickly proved ourselves the best. We, too, could abuse grand ideals! Having liberated ourselves in the name of independence and freedom—I was so tired of saying these words!—we then deprived our defeated brethren of the same.
Besides a man with no face, only a man of two minds could get this joke, about how a revolution fought for independence and freedom could make those things worth less than nothing. I was that man of two minds, me and myself. We had been through so much, me and myself. Everyone we met had wanted to drive us apart from each other, wanted us to choose either one thing or another, except the commissar. He showed us his hand and we showed him ours, the red scars as indelible as they were in our youth. Even after all we had been through, this was the only mark on our body. We clasped hands and he said, Before you leave, I have something to give you. From beneath his desk he retrieved our battered rucksack and our copy of Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction. The last we had seen it, the book was nearly falling apart, creased deeply at the spine. The binding had finally torn apart, and a rubber band bound the book’s two halves. We tried to refuse it, but he slipped the book in the rucksack and pressed it on us. In case you ever need to send me a message, he said. Or vice versa. I still have my copy.
Reluctantly, we took the rucksack. Dear friend—
One more thing. He picked up our manuscript, the copy of our confession and everything after, and motioned for us to open the rucksack. What happened in that examination room is between us. So take this with you, too.
We just want you to know— Go! Bon is waiting.
So we went, rucksack over our shoulders, dismissed for the last time. No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks. Silly rhymes and childish wordplay, but if we had thought of anything more serious we would have fallen down under the weight of disbelief, of our sheer relief.

The baby-faced guard escorted us to the camp gates, where the commandant and Bon stood by an idling Molotova truck. We had not seen Bon in a year and many months, and the first words he said were, You look like hell. Us? What about him? Our disembodied minds laughed, but our embodied selves did not. How could we? Our poor friend stumbled before us in patchwork and rags, a puppet in an alcoholic’s hands, hair thinning and skin a sickly shade of decayed jungle vegetation. Over one eye he wore a black patch, and we knew better than to ask him what had been done to him. A few meters away, behind barbed wire, three other haggard men in shambolic clothing watched. It took us a moment to recognize our comrades, the Hmong scout, the philosophical medic, and the dark marine. You don’t look like hell, the Hmong scout said. You look worse. The philosophical medic managed a grin with half his teeth missing. Don’t pay him any attention, he said. He’s just jealous. As for the dark marine, he said, I knew you bastards would get out of here first. Good luck to you.
We couldn’t say anything, only smile and raise our hand in farewell before climbing into the truck with Bon. The baby-faced guard raised the hatch and locked it. What? the commandant said, looking up at us. You still have nothing to say? In fact, we had many things to say, but not wanting to provoke the commandant into revoking our release, we only shook our head. Have it your way. You’ve confessed your errors and there’s nothing more to say after that, is there?
Nothing indeed! Nothing was truly unspeakable. As the truck departed in a cloud of red dust that made the baby-faced guard cough, we watched the commandant walk away and the Hmong scout, the philosophical medic, and the dark marine cover their eyes. Then we turned a corner and the camp disappeared from view. When we asked Bon about our other comrades, he told us that the Lao farmer had vanished in the river, trying to escape, while the darkest marine bled to death after a landmine sheared off his legs. At first we were quiet on hearing this news. What cause had they died for? For what reason had millions more died in our great war to unify our country and liberate ourselves, often through no choice of their own? Like them, we had sacrificed everything, but at least we still had a sense of humor. If one really thought about it, with just a little bit of distance, with even the faintest sense of irony, one could laugh at this joke played on us, those who had so willingly sacrificed ourselves and others. So we laughed and laughed and laughed, and when Bon looked at us as if we were crazy and asked what was the matter with us, we wiped the tears from our eyes and said, Nothing.
After a numbing two-day journey over mountain passes and crumbling highways, the Molotova deposited us on Saigon’s outskirts. From there we shuffled along sullied streets populated by sullen people toward the navigator’s house, our pace slowed by Bon’s limp. The muffled city was eerily muted, perhaps because the country was once again at war, or so we were told by the Molotova’s driver. Tired of the Khmer Rouge attacks on our western border, we had invaded and seized Cambodia. China, to punish us, had raided our northern border earlier in the year, sometime during my examination. So much for peace. What bothered us more was that we had not heard even one romantic song or snatch of pop music by the time we arrived at the home of the navigator, Bon’s cousin. Sidewalk cafés and transistor radios had always played such tunes, but over a dinner only marginally better than the commandant’s meal, the navigator confirmed what the commandant had implied. Yellow music was now banned, and only red, revolutionary music was allowed.
No yellow music in a land of so-called yellow people? Not having fought for this, we could not help but laugh. The navigator looked at us curiously. I’ve seen worse, he said. Two stints in reeducation and I’ve seen much worse. He had been reeducated for the crime of trying to escape the country by boat. On those previous attempts, he had not taken his family with him, hoping to brave the dangers alone and reach a foreign country from where he could send money home to help his family survive or flee, once the route was proven safe. But he was certain that a third capture would lead to reeducation in a northern camp, from which no one had so far returned. For this attempt, then, he was taking his wife, three sons and their families, two daughters and their families, and the families of three in-laws, the clan living or dying together on the open sea.
What are the odds? Bon asked the navigator, an experienced sailor of the old regime whose expertise Bon trusted. Fifty-fifty, the navigator said. I’ve only heard from half of those who fled. It’s safe to assume the other half never made it. Bon shrugged. Sounds good enough, he said. What do you think? This was addressed to us. We looked to the ceiling, where Sonny and the crapulent major lay flat on their backs, scaring away the geckos. In unison, as they were now wont to speak, they said, Those are excellent odds, as the chances of one ultimately dying are one hundred percent. Thus reassured, we turned back to Bon and the navigator and, with no more laughter, nodded our agreement. This they interpreted as a sign of progress.
Over the next two months, as we waited for our departure, we continued working on our manuscript. Despite the chronic shortages of almost every good and commodity, there was no shortage of paper, since everyone in the neighborhood was required to write confessions on a periodic basis. Even we, who had confessed so extensively, had to write these and submit them to the local cadres. They were exercises in fiction, for we had to find things to confess even though we had not done anything since our return to Saigon. Small things, like failing to display sufficient enthusiasm at a self-criticism session, were acceptable. But certainly nothing big, and we never failed to end a confession without writing that nothing was more precious than independence and freedom.
Now it is the evening before our departure. We have paid for Bon’s fare and our own with the commissar’s gold, hidden in my rucksack’s false bottom. The cipher that we share with the commissar has taken the gold’s place, the heaviest thing we will carry after this manuscript, our testament if not our will. We have nothing to leave to anyone except these words, our best attempt to represent ourselves against all those who sought to represent us. Tomorrow we will join those tens of thousands who have taken to the sea, refugees from a revolution. According to the navigator’s plan, on the afternoon of our departure tomorrow, from houses all over Saigon, families will leave as if on a short trip lasting less than a day. We will travel by bus to a village three hours south, where a ferryman waits by a riverbank, a conical hat shading his features. Can you take us to our uncle’s funeral? To this coded question, the coded answer: Your uncle was a great man. We, along with the navigator, his wife, and Bon, clamber on board the skiff, we carrying in our rucksack our rubber- bound cipher and this unbound manuscript, wrapped in watertight plastic. We glide across the river to a hamlet where the rest of the navigator’s clan will join us. The mother ship awaits further down the river, a fishing trawler for 150, almost all of whom will hide in the hold. It will be hot, warned the navigator. It reeks. Once the crew battens down the hatches of the hold, we will struggle to breathe, no vents to alleviate the pressure from 150 bodies locked into a space for a third that number. Heavier than depleted air, however, is the knowledge that even astronauts have a better chance of survival than we do.
Around our shoulders and chest we will strap the rucksack, cipher and manuscript inside. Whether we live or die, the weight of those words will hang on us. Only a few more need to be written by the light of this oil lamp. Having answered the commissar’s question, we find ourselves facing more questions, universal and timeless ones that never get tired. What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others? And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing? We can only answer these questions for ourselves. Our life and our death have taught us always to sympathize with the undesirables among the undesirables. Thus magnetized by experience, our compass continually points toward those who suffer. Even now, we think of our suffering friend, our blood brother, the commissar, the faceless man, the one who spoke the unspeakable, sleeping his morphine dream, dreaming of an eternal sleep, or perhaps dreaming of nothing. As for us, how long it had taken us to stare at nothing until we saw something! Might this be what our mother felt? Did she look into herself and feel wonderstruck that where nothing had been something now existed, namely us? Where was the turning point when she began wanting us rather than not wanting us, seed of a father who should not have been a father? When did she stop thinking of herself and began to think of us?
Tomorrow we will find ourselves among strangers, reluctant mariners of whom a tentative manifest can be written. Among us will be infants and children, as well as adults and parents, but no elderly, for none dare the voyage. Among us will be men and women, as well as the thin and lean, but not one among us will be fat, the entire nation having undergone a forced diet. Among us will be the light skinned, dark skinned, and every shade in between, some speaking in refined accents and some in rough ones. Many will be Chinese, persecuted for being Chinese, with many others the recipients of degrees in reeducation. Collectively we will be called the boat people, a name we heard once more earlier this night, when we surreptitiously listened to the Voice of America on the navigator’s radio. Now that we are to be counted among these boat people, their name disturbs us. It smacks of anthropological condescension, evoking some forgotten branch of the human family, some lost tribe of amphibians emerging from ocean mist, crowned with seaweed. But we are not primitives, and we are not to be pitied. If and when we reach safe harbor, it will hardly be a surprise if we, in turn, turn our backs on the unwanted, human nature being what we know of it. Yet we are not cynical. Despite it all—yes, despite everything, in the face of nothing—we still consider ourselves revolutionary. We remain that most hopeful of creatures, a revolutionary in search of a revolution, although we will not dispute being called a dreamer doped by an illusion. Soon enough we will see the scarlet sunrise on that horizon where the East is always red, but for now our view through our window is of a dark alley, the pavement barren, the curtains closed. Surely we cannot be the only ones awake, even if we are the only ones with a single lamp lit. No, we cannot be alone! Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes, and forbidden plots. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live. And even as we write this final sentence, the sentence that will not be revised, we confess to being certain of one and only one thing—we swear to keep, on penalty of death, this one promise:
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many of the events in this novel did happen, although I confess to taking some liberties with details and chronology. For the fall of Saigon and the last days of the Republic of Vietnam, I consulted David Butler’s The Fall of Saigon, Larry Engelmann’s Tears Before the Rain, James Fenton’s “The Fall of Saigon,” Dirck Halstead’s “White Christmas,” Charles Henderson’s Goodnight Saigon, and Tiziano Terzani’s Giai Phong! The Fall and Liberation of Saigon. I am particularly indebted to Frank Snepp’s important book Decent Interval, which provided the inspiration for Claude’s flight from Saigon and the episode with the Watchman. For accounts of South Vietnamese prisons and police, as well as Viet Cong activities, I turned to Douglas Valentine’s The Phoenix Program, the pamphlet We Accuse by Jean-Pierre Debris and André Menras, Truong Nhu Tang’s A Vietcong Memoir, and an article in the January 1968 issue of Life. Alfred W. McCoy’s A Question of Torture was crucial for understanding the development of American interrogation techniques from the 1950s through the war in Vietnam, and their extension into the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the reeducation camps, I made use of Huynh Sanh Thong’s To Be Made Over, Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh’s South Wind Changing, and Tran Tri Vu’s Lost Years. As for the Vietnamese resistance fighters who attempted to invade Vietnam, a small exhibit in the Lao People’s Army History Museum in Vientiane displays their captured artifacts and weapons.
While those fighters have been largely forgotten, or simply never known, the inspiration for the Movie can hardly be a secret. Eleanor Coppola’s documentary Hearts of Darkness and her Notes: The Making of Apocalypse Now provided many insights, as did Francis Ford Coppola’s commentary on the Apocalypse Now DVD. These works were also helpful: Ronald Bergan’s Francis Ford Coppola: Close Up; Jean-Paul Chaillet and Elizabeth Vincent’s Francis Ford Coppola; Jeffrey Chown’s Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola; Peter Cowie’s The Apocalypse Now Book and Coppola: A Biography; Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise’s On the Edge: The Life and Times of Francis Coppola; Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill’s Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews; and Michael Schumacher’s Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life. I also drew on articles by Dirck Halstead, “Apocalypse Finally”; Christa Larwood, “Return to Apocalypse Now”; Deirdre McKay and Padmapani L. Perez, “Apocalypse Yesterday Already! Ifugao Extras and the Making of Apocalypse Now”; Tony Rennell, “The Maddest Movie Ever”; and Robert Sellers, “The Strained Making of Apocalypse Now.”
The exact words of others were occasionally important as well, in particular those of To Huu, whose poems appeared in the Viet Nam News article “To Huu: The People’s Poet”; Nguyên Van Ky, who translated the proverb “The good deeds of Father are as great as Mount Thai Son,” available in the book Viêt Nam Exposé; the 1975 edition of Fodor’s Southeast Asia; and General William Westmoreland, whose ideas concerning the Oriental’s view of life and its value were given in the documentary Hearts and Minds by director Peter Davis. Those ideas are attributed here to Richard Hedd.
Finally, I am grateful to a number of organizations and people without whom this novel would not be the book that it is. The Asian Cultural Council, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the University of Southern California gave me grants, residencies, or sabbaticals that facilitated my research or writing. My agents, Nat Sobel and Julie Stevenson, provided patient encouragement and wise editing, as did my editor, Peter Blackstock. Morgan Entrekin and Judy Hottensen were enthusiastic supporters, while Deb Seager, John Mark Boling, and all the staff of Grove Atlantic have worked hard on this book. My friend Chiori Miyagawa believed in this novel from its beginning and tirelessly read the early drafts. But the people to whom I owe the greatest debt are, as ever, my father, Joseph Thanh Nguyen, and my mother, Linda Kim Nguyen. Their indomitable will and sacrifice during the war years and after made possible my life and that of my brother, Tung Thanh Nguyen. He has been ever supportive, as has his wonderful partner, Huyen Le Cao, and their children, Minh, Luc, and Linh.
As for the last words of this book, I save them for the two who will always come first: Lan Duong, who read every word, and our son, Ellison, who arrived right on time.

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