THE SYMPATHIZER part1

from Chapter 01 to Chapter 11

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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For Lan and Ellison

Let us not become gloomy as soon as we hear the word “torture”: in this particular case there is plenty to offset and mitigate that word—even something to laugh at.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

CHAPTER 1

I AM A SPY, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess. But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.

The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its limbs, as is the way of wars. It was a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world. It was a month that was both an end of a war and the beginning of . . . well, “peace” is not the right word, is it, my dear Commandant? It was a month when I awaited the end behind the walls of a villa where I had lived for the previous five years, the villa’s walls glittering with broken brown glass and crowned with rusted barbed wire. I had my own room at the villa, much like I have my own room in your camp, Commandant. Of course, the proper term for my room is an “isolation cell,” and instead of a housekeeper who comes to clean every day, you have provided me with a baby-faced guard who does not clean at all. But I am not complaining. Privacy, not cleanliness, is my only prerequisite for writing this confession.
While I had sufficient privacy in the General’s villa at night, I had little during the day. I was the only one of the General’s officers to live in his home, the sole bachelor on his staff and his most reliable aide. In the mornings, before I chauffeured him the short distance to his office, we would breakfast together, parsing dispatches at one end of the teak dining table while his wife oversaw a well-disciplined quartet of children at the other, ages eighteen, sixteen, fourteen, and twelve, with one seat empty for the daughter studying in America. Not everyone may have feared the end, but the General sensibly did. A thin man of excellent posture, he was a veteran campaigner whose many medals had been, in his case, genuinely earned. Although he possessed but nine fingers and eight toes, having lost three digits to bullets and shrapnel, only his family and confidants knew about the condition of his left foot. His ambitions had hardly ever been thwarted, except in his desire to procure an excellent bottle of Bourgogne and to drink it with companions who knew better than to put ice cubes in their wine. He was an epicurean and a Christian, in that order, a man of faith who believed in gastronomy and God; his wife and his children; and the French and the Americans. In his view, they offered us far better tutelage than those other foreign Svengalis who had hypnotized our northern brethren and some of our southern ones: Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, and Chairman Mao. Not that he ever read any of those sages! That was my job as his aide-de-camp and junior officer of intelligence, to provide him with cribbed notes on, say, The Communist Manifesto or Mao’s Little Red Book. It was up to him to find occasions to demonstrate his knowledge of the enemy’s thinking, his favorite being Lenin’s question, plagiarized whenever the need arose: Gentlemen, he would say, rapping the relevant table with adamantine knuckles, what is to be done? To tell the General that Nikolay Chernyshevsky actually came up with the question in his novel of the same title seemed irrelevant. How many remember Chernyshevsky now? It was Lenin who counted, the man of action who took the question and made it his own.

In this gloomiest of Aprils, faced with this question of what should be done, the general who always found something to do could no longer do so. A man who had faith in the mission civilisatrice and the American Way was at last bitten by the bug of disbelief. Suddenly insomniac, he took to wandering his villa with the greenish pallor of a malarial patient. Ever since our northern front had collapsed a few weeks before in March, he would materialize at my office door or at my room in the villa to hand off a snatch of news, always gloomy. Can you believe it? he would demand, to which I said one of two things: No, sir! or Unbelievable! We could not believe that the pleasant, scenic coffee town of Ban Me Thuot, my Highlands hometown, had been sacked in early March. We could not believe that our president, Thieu, whose name begged to be spit out of the mouth, had inexplicably ordered our forces defending the Highlands to retreat. We could not believe that Da Nang and Nha Trang had fallen, or that our troops had shot civilians in the back as they all fought madly to escape on barges and boats, the death toll running to the thousands. In the secret privacy of my office, I dutifully snapped pictures of these reports, which would please Man, my handler. While they pleased me, too, as signs of the regime’s inevitable erosion, I could not help but feel moved by the plight of these poor people. Perhaps it was not correct, politically speaking, for me to feel sympathy for them, but my mother would have been one of them if she were alive. She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their own soldiers. If those thousands still lived, they would not have believed how they had died, just as we could not believe that the Americans—our friends, our benefactors, our protectors—had spurned our request to send more money. And what would we have done with that money? Buy the ammunition, gas, and spare parts for the weapons, planes, and tanks the same Americans had bestowed on us for free. Having given us the needles, they now perversely no longer supplied the dope. (Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.)
At the end of our discussions and meals, I lit the General’s cigarette and he stared into space, forgetting to smoke the Lucky Strike as it slowly consumed itself in his fingers. In the middle of April, when the ash stung him awake from his reverie and he uttered a word he should not have, Madame silenced the tittering children and said, If you wait much longer, we won’t be able to get out. You should ask Claude for a plane now. The General pretended not to hear Madame. She had a mind like an abacus, the spine of a drill instructor, and the body of a virgin even after five children. All of this was wrapped up in one of those exteriors that inspired our Beaux Arts–trained painters to use the most pastel of watercolors and the fuzziest of brushstrokes. She was, in short, the ideal Vietnamese woman. For this good fortune, the General was eternally grateful and terrified. Kneading the tip of his scorched finger, he looked at me and said, I think it’s time to ask Claude for a plane. Only when he resumed studying his damaged finger did I glance at Madame, who merely raised an eyebrow. Good idea, sir, I said.
Claude was our most trusted American friend, our relationship so intimate he once confided in me to being one-sixteenth Negro. Ah, I had said, equally smashed on Tennessee bourbon, that explains why your hair is black, and why you tan well, and why you can dance the cha-cha like one of us. Beethoven, he said, was likewise of hexadecimal descent. Then, I said, that explains why you can carry the tune of “Happy Birthday” like no one’s business. We had known each other for more than two decades, ever since he had spotted me on a refugee barge in ’54 and recognized my talents. I was a precocious nine-year-old who had already learned a decent amount of English, taught to me by a pioneering American missionary. Claude supposedly worked in refugee relief. Now his desk was in the American embassy, his assignment ostensibly to promote the development of tourism in our war- stricken country. This, as you might imagine, required every drop he could squeeze from a handkerchief soaked with the sweat of the can-do American spirit. In reality, Claude was a CIA man whose time in this country dated back to the days when the French still ruled an empire. In those days, when the CIA was the OSS, Ho Chi Minh looked to them for help in fighting the French. He even quoted America’s Founding Fathers in his declaration of our country’s independence. Uncle Ho’s enemies say he spoke out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, but Claude believed he saw both sides at once. I rang Claude from my office, down the hall from the General’s study, and informed him in English that the General had lost all hope. Claude’s Vietnamese was bad and his French worse, but his English was excellent. I point this out only because the same thing could not be said of all his countrymen.
It’s over, I said, and when I said it to Claude it finally seemed real. I thought Claude might protest and argue that American bombers might yet fill our skies, or that American air cavalry might soon ride on gunships to our rescue, but Claude did not disappoint. I’ll see what I can arrange, he said, a murmur of voices audible in the background. I imagined the embassy in disarray, teletypes overheating, urgent cables crisscrossing between Saigon and Washington, the staff working without respite, and the funk of defeat so pungent it overwhelmed the air conditioners. Amid short tempers, Claude stayed cool, having lived here so long he barely perspired in the tropical humidity. He could sneak up on you in the dark, but he could never be invisible in our country. Although an intellectual, he was of a peculiarly American breed, the muscular kind who rowed crew and who flexed substantial biceps. Whereas our scholarly types tended to be pale, myopic, and stunted, Claude was six-two, had perfect vision, and kept himself in shape by performing two hundred push-ups each morning, his Nung houseboy squatting on his back. During his free time, he read, and whenever he visited the villa, a book was tucked under his arm. When he arrived a few days later, Richard Hedd’s Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction was the paperback he carried.
The book was for me, while the General received a bottle of Jack Daniel’s—a gift I would have preferred if given the choice. Nevertheless, I took care to peruse the book’s cover, crowded with blurbs so breathless they might have been lifted from the transcript of a teenage girls’ fan club, except that the excited giggling came from a pair of secretaries of defense, a senator who had visited our country for two weeks to find facts, and a renowned television anchor who modeled his enunciation on Moses, as played by Charlton Heston. The reason for their excitement was found in the significant type of the subtitle, On Understanding and Defeating the Marxist Threat to Asia. When Claude said everyone was reading this how-to manual, I said I would read it as well. The General, who had cracked open the bottle, was in no mood to discuss books or chitchat, not with eighteen enemy divisions encircling the capital. He wanted to discuss the plane, and Claude, rolling his glass of whiskey between his palms, said the best he could do was a black flight, off the books, on a C-130. It could hold ninety-two paratroopers and their gear, as the General well knew, having served in the Airborne before being called on by the president himself to lead the National Police. The problem, as he explained to Claude, was that his extended family alone amounted to fifty-eight. While he did not like some of them, and in fact despised a few, Madame would never forgive him if he did not rescue all of her relations.
And my staff, Claude? The General spoke in his precise, formal English. What of them? Both the General and Claude glanced at me. I tried to look brave. I was not the senior officer on the staff, but as the aide-de-camp and the officer most fluent in American culture, I attended all the General’s meetings with Americans. Some of my countrymen spoke English as well as I, although most had a tinge of an accent. But almost none could discuss, like I, baseball standings, the awfulness of Jane Fonda, or the merits of the Rolling Stones versus the Beatles. If an American closed his eyes to hear me speak, he would think I was one of his kind. Indeed, on the phone, I was easily mistaken for an American. On meeting in person, my interlocutor was invariably astonished at my appearance and would almost always inquire as to how I had learned to speak English so well. In this jackfruit republic that served as a franchise of the United States, Americans expected me to be like those millions who spoke no English, pidgin English, or accented English. I resented their expectation. That was why I was always eager to demonstrate, in both spoken and written word, my mastery of their language. My vocabulary was broader, my grammar more precise than the average educated American. I could hit the high notes as well as the low, and thus had no difficulty in understanding Claude’s characterization of the ambassador as a “putz,” a “jerkoff” with “his head up his ass” who was in denial about the city’s imminent fall. Officially, there’s no evacuation, said Claude, because we’re not pulling out any time soon.
The General, who hardly ever raised his voice, now did. Unofficially, you are abandoning us, he shouted. All day and night planes depart from the airport. Everyone who works with Americans wants an exit visa. They go to your embassy for these visas. You have evacuated your own women. You have evacuated babies and orphans. Why is it that the only people who do not know the Americans are pulling out are the Americans? Claude had the decency to look embarrassed as he explained how the city would erupt in riots if an evacuation was declared, and perhaps then turn against the Americans who remained. This had happened in Da Nang and Nha Trang, where the Americans had fled for their lives and left the residents to turn on one another. But despite this precedent, the atmosphere was strangely quiet in Saigon, most of the Saigonese citizenry behaving like people in a scuppered marriage, willing to cling gamely to each other and drown so long as nobody declared the adulterous truth. The truth, in this case, was that at least a million people were working or had worked for the Americans in one capacity or another, from shining their shoes to running the army designed by the Americans in their own image to performing fellatio on them for the price, in Peoria or Poughkeepsie, of a hamburger. A good portion of these people believed that if the communists won— which they refused to believe would happen—what awaited them was prison or a garrote, and, for the virgins, forced marriage with the barbarians. Why wouldn’t they? These were the rumors the CIA was propagating.
So— the General began, only to have Claude interrupt him. You have one plane and you should consider yourself lucky, sir. The General was not one to beg. He finished his whiskey, as did Claude, then shook Claude’s hand and bid him good-bye, never once letting his gaze fall away from Claude’s own. Americans liked seeing people eye to eye, the General had once told me, especially as they screwed them from behind. This was not how Claude saw the situation. Other generals were only getting seats for their immediate families, Claude said to us in parting. Even God and Noah couldn’t save everyone. Or wouldn’t, anyway.
Could they not? What would my father say? He had been a Catholic priest, but I could not remember this poor man of the cloth ever sermonizing about Noah, although admittedly I went to Mass only to daydream. But regardless of what God or Noah could do, there was little doubt that every man on the General’s staff, if given the chance, would rescue a hundred blood relatives as well as any paper ones who could afford the bribe. Vietnamese families were complicated, delicate affairs, and while sometimes I longed for one, being the only son of an ostracized mother, now was not one of those times.
Later that day, the president resigned. I had expected the president to abandon the country weeks ago in the manner befitting a dictator, and I spared him barely a thought as I worked on the list of evacuees. The General was fastidious and detail-oriented, habituated to making quick, hard decisions, but this was one task that he deferred to me. He was preoccupied with the matters of his office: reading the morning’s interrogation reports, attending meetings at the Joint General Staff compound, phoning his confidants as they discussed how to hold the city and yet be ready to abandon it at the same time, a maneuver as tricky as playing musical chairs to the tune of one’s most beloved song.

Music was on my mind, for as I worked on the list in the nocturnal hours, I listened to American Radio Service on a Sony in my room at the villa. The songs of the Temptations and Janis Joplin and Marvin Gaye usually always made bad things bearable and good things wonderful, but not in times like these. Every stroke of my pen through a name felt like a death sentence. All of our names, from the lowest officer to the General, had been found on a list being crammed into its owner’s mouth as we broke down her door three years ago. The warning I had sent to Man had not gotten to her in time. As the policemen wrestled her to the ground, I had no choice but to reach into this communist agent’s mouth and pull from it that saliva-soaked list. Its papier-mâché existence proved that members of the Special Branch, accustomed to watching, were ourselves watched. Even had I a moment alone with her, I could not have risked my cover by telling her that I was on her side. I knew what fate awaited her. Everyone talked in the Special Branch’s interrogation cells, and she would have told my secret despite herself. She was younger than me, but she was wise enough to know what awaited her, too. For just a moment I saw the truth in her eyes, and the truth was that she hated me for what she thought I was, the agent of an oppressive regime. Then, like me, she remembered the role she had to play. Please, sirs! she cried. I’m innocent! I swear!
Three years later, this communist agent was still in a cell. I kept her folder on my desk, a reminder of my failure to save her. It was my fault, too, Man had said. When the day of liberation comes, I’ll be the one unlocking her cell. She was twenty-two when arrested, and in the folder was a picture of her at her capture, and another one of her from a few months ago, her eyes faded and her hair thinning. Our prison cells were time machines, the inmates aging much faster than they normally would. Looking at her faces, then and now, helped me with the task of selecting a few men for salvation and condemning many more, including some I liked. For several days I worked and reworked the list while the defenders of Xuan Loc were annihilated and, across our border, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. A few nights later, our ex-president secretly fled for Taiwan. Claude, who drove him to the airport, noticed how the president’s inordinately heavy suitcases clanked with something metallic, presumably a hefty share of our nation’s gold. He told me this the next morning, when he called to say that our plane was leaving in two days. I finished my list early that evening, telling the General that I had decided to be democratic and representative, choosing the highest-ranking officer, the officer everyone thought the most honest, the one whose company I liked the most, and so on. He accepted my reasoning and its inevitable consequence, that a good number of the senior officers with the most knowledge and culpability in the work of the Special Branch would be left behind. I wound up with a colonel, a major, another captain, and two lieutenants. As for myself, I reserved one seat and three more for Bon, his wife, and his child, my godson.
When the General visited me that night to commiserate, bearing the now half-empty bottle of whiskey, I asked for the favor of taking Bon with us. Although not my real brother, he was one of my two blood brothers since our school days. Man was the other, the three of us having sworn undying loyalty to one another by slicing our adolescent palms and mingling our blood in ritual handshakes. In my wallet was a black-and-white photograph of Bon and his family. Bon had the appearance of a good-looking man beaten to a pulp, except that was simply his God-given face. Not even his paratrooper’s beret and crisply ironed tiger stripe fatigues could distract from his parachute-like ears, his chin perpetually tucked into the folds of his neck, and his flat nose bent hard right, the same as his politics. As for his wife, Linh, a poet might compare her face to the harvest moon, insinuating not only its fullness and roundness but also how it was mottled and cratered, dappled with acne scars. How those two concocted a child as cute as Duc was a mystery, or perhaps simply as logical as how two negatives when multiplied together yield a positive. The General handed me the photo and said, It’s the least I could do. He’s Airborne. If our army was just Airborne men, we’d have won this war.
If . . . but there was no if, only the incontrovertible fact of the General sitting on the edge of my chair while I stood by the window, sipping my whiskey. In the courtyard, the General’s orderly fed fistfuls of secrets into a fire blazing in a fifty-five-gallon drum, making the hot night hotter. The General got up and paced my small chamber, glass in hand, clad only in his boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, a midnight shadow of stubble across his chin. Only his housekeepers, his family, and myself ever saw him like this. At any hour of the day when visitors came to the villa, he would pomade his hair and don his starched khakis, the breast festooned with more ribbons than could be found in a beauty queen’s hair. But this evening, with the villa’s hush punctuated only by occasional shouts of gunfire, he allowed himself to be querulous about how the Americans had promised us salvation from communism if we only did as we were told. They started this war, and now that they’re tired of it, they’ve sold us out, he said, pouring me another drink. But who is there to blame but ourselves? We were foolish enough to think they would keep their word. Now there’s nowhere to go but America. There are worse places, I said. Perhaps, he said. At least we’ll live to fight again. But for now, we are well and truly fucked. What kind of toast is right for that?
The words came to me after a moment. Here’s blood in your eye, I said.
Damn right.
I forget from whom I learned this toast, or even what it meant, except that I had acquired it sometime during my years in America. The General had been to America, too, if only for a few months as a junior officer, training with a platoon of his fellows at Fort Benning in ’58, where the Green Berets inoculated him permanently against communism. In my case, the inoculation did not take. I was already undercover, part scholarship student, part spy-in-training, the lone representative of our people at a sylvan little college called Occidental, its motto Occidens Proximus Orienti. There I passed six idyllic years in the dreamy, sun-besotted world of Southern California during the sixties. Not for me the study of highways, sewage systems, or other such useful enterprises. Instead, the mission assigned to me by Man, my fellow conspirator, was to learn American ways of thinking. My war was psychological. To that end, I read American history and literature, perfected my grammar and absorbed the slang, smoked pot and lost my virginity. In short, I earned not only my bachelor’s but my master’s degree, becoming expert in all manner of American studies. Even now I can see quite clearly where I first read the words of that greatest of American philosophers, Emerson, on a lawn by an iridescent grove of jacaranda trees. My attention was divided between the exotic, tawny co-eds in halter tops and shorts, sunning themselves on beds of June grass, and the words so stark and black on a bare white page—“consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Nothing Emerson wrote was ever truer of America, but that was not the only reason I underlined his words once, twice, thrice. What had smitten me then, and strikes me now, was that the same thing could be said of our motherland, where we are nothing if not inconsistent.
On our last morning, I drove the General to his office at the National Police compound. My office was down the hallway from the General’s, and from there I summoned the five chosen officers for a private meeting, one by one. We leave tonight? asked the very nervous colonel, his eyes big and wet. Yes. My parents? The parents of my wife? asked the major, a crapulent devotee of the Chinese restaurants in Cholon. No. Brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews? No. Housekeepers and nannies? No. Suitcases, wardrobes, collections of china? No. The captain, who hobbled a bit because of venereal disease, threatened to commit suicide unless I found more seats. I offered him my revolver and he skulked off. In contrast, the young lieutenants were grateful. Having earned their precious positions via parental connections, they bore themselves with the herky-jerky nervousness of marionettes.
I closed the door on the last of them. When distant booms rattled the windows, I saw fire and smoke boiling from the east. Enemy artillery had ignited the Long Binh ammunition depot. Feeling a need both to mourn and to celebrate, I turned to my drawer, where I kept a fifth of Jim Beam with several ounces remaining. If my poor mother were alive, she would say, Don’t drink so much, son. It can’t be good for you. But can’t it, Mama? When one finds oneself in as difficult a situation as I did, a mole in the General’s staff, one looked for comfort wherever one could find it. I finished the whiskey, then drove the General home through a storm, the amniotic water bursting over the city a hint of the forthcoming season. Some hoped the monsoon might slow down the advancing northern divisions, but I thought that unlikely. I skipped dinner and packed my rucksack with my toiletries, a pair of chinos and a madras shirt bought at a J. C. Penney in Los Angeles, loafers, three changes of underwear, an electric toothbrush from the thieves’ market, a framed photograph of my mother, envelopes of photographs from here and America, my Kodak camera, and Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction.
The rucksack was a gift from Claude, given in honor of my college graduation. It was the handsomest thing I owned, capable of being worn on my back or, with a tuck of a strap here and there, converted to a hand-carried valise. Fabricated of supple brown leather by an esteemed New England manufacturer, the rucksack smelled richly, mysteriously of autumn leaves, grilled lobster, and the sweat and sperm of boys’ boarding schools. A monogram of my initials was branded on the side, but the most special feature was the false bottom. Every man should have a false bottom in his luggage, Claude had said. You never know when you’ll need it. Unbeknownst to him, I used it to hide my Minox mini-camera. The cost of the Minox, a present from Man, was a few times my annual salary. It was this I had used to photograph certain classified documents to which I had access, and I thought perhaps it would be useful again. Lastly, I sorted through the rest of my books and my records, most purchased in the States and all bearing the fingerprints of memory. I had no room for Elvis or Dylan, Faulkner or Twain, and while I could replace them, my spirit was still heavy when I wrote Man’s name on the box of books and records. They were too much to bear, as was my guitar, displaying its full, reproachful hips on my bed as I left.
I finished packing and borrowed the Citroën to retrieve Bon. The military police at the checkpoints waved me by when they saw the General’s stars on the automobile. My destination was across the river, a wretched waterway lined with the shanties of refugees from the countryside, their homes and farms obliterated by pyromaniacal soldiers and clean-cut arsonists who had found their true calling as bombardiers. Past this haphazard expanse of hovels, deep in District Four, Bon and Man waited at a beer garden where the three of us had passed more drunken hours than I could recall. Soldiers and marines crowded the tables, rifles under their stools, hair cropped close by sadistic military barbers intent on revealing the contours of their skulls for some nefarious phrenological purpose. Bon poured me a glass of beer as soon as I sat down, but would not allow me to drink until he offered a toast. Here’s to reunion, he said, lifting his own glass. We’ll meet again in the Philippines! I said it was actually Guam, for the dictator Marcos was fed up with refugees and no longer accepting any more. Groaning, Bon rubbed his glass against his forehead. I didn’t think it could get any worse, he said. But now we’ve got Filipinos looking down on us? Forget the Philippines, Man said. Let’s drink to Guam instead. They say it’s where America’s day begins. And our day ends, Bon muttered.
Unlike Man and I, Bon was a genuine patriot, a republican who had volunteered to fight, having hated the communists ever since the local cadre encouraged his father, the village chief, to kneel in the village square and make his confession before forcefully inserting a bullet behind his ear. Left to his own devices, Bon was sure to go Japanese and fight to the end or even put a gun to his own head, so Man and I had persuaded him to think of his wife and child. Leaving for America was not desertion, we claimed. This was strategic retreat. We had told Bon that Man would also flee with his family tomorrow, whereas the truth was that Man would stay to witness the liberation of the south by the northern communists Bon so despised. Now Man squeezed him on the shoulder with fingers long and delicate and said, We’re blood brothers, us three. We’ll be blood brothers even if we lose this war, even if we lose our country. He looked at me and his eyes were damp. For us there is no end.
You’re right, Bon said, shaking his head vigorously to disguise the tears in his eyes. So enough sadness and gloom. Let’s drink to hope. We’ll return to take our country back. Right? He, too, looked at me. I was not ashamed of the tears in my own eyes. These men were better than any real brothers I could have had, for we had chosen each other. I raised my beer glass. Here’s to coming back, I said. And to a brotherhood that never ends. We drained our glasses, shouted for another round, threw our arms around one another’s shoulders, and settled into an hour of brotherly love and song, the music provided by a duo at the other end of the garden. The guitarist was a long-haired draft dodger, sickly pale from having lived for the last ten years in between the walls of the bar owner’s house during the day, emerging only at night. His singing partner was an equally long-haired woman of dulcet voice, her slim figure outlined by a silk ao dai the same shade as a virgin’s blush. She was singing the lyrics of Trinh Cong Son, the folk singer beloved even by the paratroopers. Tomorrow I’m going, dear . . . Her voice rose above the chatter and rain. Remember to call me home . . . My heart trembled. We were not a people who charged into war at the beck and call of bugle or trumpet. No, we fought to the tunes of love songs, for we were the Italians of Asia.
Tomorrow I’m going, dear. The city’s nights are no longer beautiful . . . If Bon knew this was the last time he would see Man for years, perhaps ever, he would never step on the airplane. Ever since our lycée days, we had fancied ourselves the Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all. Man had introduced us to Dumas: first, because he was a great novelist, and second, because he was a quadroon. Hence he was a model for us, colonized by the same French who despised him for his ancestry. An avid reader and storyteller, Man would have likely become a teacher of literature at our lycée if we had lived in a time of peace. Besides translating three of the Perry Mason mysteries of Erle Stanley Gardner into our native tongue, he had also written a forgettable Zolaesque novel under a pen name. He had studied America but never been there himself, as was the case with Bon, who called for another round and asked if America had beer gardens. They have bars and supermarkets where you can always get a beer, I said. But are there beautiful women who sing songs like these? he asked. I refilled his glass and said, They have beautiful women but they do not sing songs like these.
Then the guitarist began strumming the chords of another song. They do sing songs like this, Man said. It was Yesterday by the Beatles. As the three of us joined in singing, my eyes grew moist. What was it like to live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid? I knew none of these young soldiers around me except for my blood brothers and yet I confess that I felt for them all, lost in their sense that within days they would be dead, or wounded, or imprisoned, or humiliated, or abandoned, or forgotten. They were my enemies, and yet they were also brothers-in-arms. Their beloved city was about to fall, but mine was soon to be liberated. It was the end of their world, but only a shifting of worlds for me. So it was that for two minutes we sang with all our hearts, feeling only for the past and turning our gaze from the future, swimmers doing the backstroke toward a waterfall.
The rain finally ceased by the time we left. We were smoking a final cigarette at the mouth of the dank, dripping alley that was the beer garden’s exit when a trio of hydrocephalic marines stumbled out of the vaginal darkness. Beautiful Saigon! they sang. Oh, Saigon! Oh, Saigon! Although it was only six, they were inebriated, fatigues stained with beer. Each had an M16 hanging from a shoulder strap, and each showed off a spare pair of testicles. These, on closer inspection, turned out to be two grenades clamped to either side of their belt buckles. Although their uniforms, weapons, and helmets were all of American manufacture, as were ours, it was impossible to mistake them for Americans, the dented helmets being the giveaway, steel pots sized for American heads that were too big for any of us. The first marine’s head swung this way and that before he bumped into me and cursed, the brim of his helmet falling all the way to his nose. When he pushed up the brim, I saw bleary eyes trying to focus. Hello! he said, breath reeking, his southern accent so thick I had some trouble understanding him. What’s this? A policeman? What’re you doing with the real soldiers?
Man flicked ashes at him. This policeman’s a captain. Salute your superior, Lieutenant.
The second marine, also a lieutenant, said, If you say so, Major, to which the third marine, a lieutenant as well, said, The hell with majors and colonels and generals. The president’s run off. The generals—poof! Like smoke. Gone. Saving their own asses like they always do. Guess what? That leaves us to cover the retreat. Like we always do. What retreat? the second marine said. There’s nowhere to go. The third agreed: We’re dead. As good as dead, the first said. Our job is to be dead.
I tossed away my cigarette. You’re not dead yet. You should get back to your posts.
The first marine focused once more on my face, taking a step closer until his nose nearly touched mine. What are you?
You are out of line, Lieutenant! Bon shouted.
I’ll tell you what you are. The marine poked his finger in my chest. Don’t say it, I said.
A bastard! he cried. The two other marines laughed and chimed in. A bastard!
I drew my revolver and placed the muzzle between the marine’s eyes. Behind him, his friends fingered their rifles nervously but did no more. They were impaired, but not enough to think they could be faster on the draw than my more sober friends.
You’re drunk, aren’t you, Lieutenant? Despite myself, my voice trembled. Yes, the marine said. Sir.
Then I won’t shoot you.
It was then, to my great relief, that we heard the first of the bombs. Everybody’s head swiveled in the direction of the explosion, which was followed by another and another, to the northwest. It’s the airport, Bon said. Five-hundred-pound bombs. He would turn out to be correct in both cases. From our vantage point, we could see nothing except, after a few moments, billowing plumes of black smoke. Then it seemed as if every gun in the city went off from downtown to the airport, light weaponry going clack-clack-clack and heavy weaponry going chug-chug-chug, flurries of orange tracers swirling into the sky. The racket drew all the residents of the pitiful street to their windows and into the doorways, and I holstered my revolver. Likewise sobered by the presence of witnesses, the marine lieutenants clambered into their jeep without another word and drove off, weaving through the handful of motorbikes on the street until they reached the intersection. Then the jeep braked to a halt and the marines stumbled out with M16s in hand, even as the explosions continued and civilians thronged the sidewalks. My pulse quickened when the marines glared at us from under the jaundiced light of a streetlamp, but all they did was aim skyward, howling and screaming as they fired their weapons until the magazines were empty. My heart was beating fast and the sweat was trickling down my back, but I smiled for the sake of my friends and lit another cigarette.
Idiots! Bon shouted as the civilians crouched in doorways. The marines called us a few choice names before they got back into the jeep, turned the corner, and vanished. Bon and I said good-bye to Man, and after he left in his own jeep I tossed Bon the keys. The bombing and the gunfire had ceased, and as he drove the Citroën to his apartment he swore bloody murder at the Marine Corps the entire way. I kept my silence. One did not depend on marines for good table manners. One depended on them to have the right instincts when it came to matters of life and death. As for the name they had called me, it upset me less than my reaction to it. I should have been used to that misbegotten name by now, but somehow I was not. My mother was native, my father was foreign, and strangers and acquaintances had enjoyed reminding me of this ever since my childhood, spitting on me and calling me bastard, although sometimes, for variety, they called me bastard before they spit on me.$pageOut
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CHAPTER 2

EVEN NOW, the baby-faced guard who comes to check on me every day calls me a bastard when he feels like it. This hardly surprises me, although I had hoped for better from your men, my dear Commandant. I confess that the name still hurts. Perhaps, for variety, he could call me mongrel or half-breed, as some have in the past? How about métis, which is what the French called me when not calling me Eurasian? The latter word lent me a romantic varnish with Americans but got me nowhere with the French themselves. I still encountered them periodically in Saigon, nostalgic colonizers who stubbornly insisted on staying in this country even after their empire’s foreclosure. Le Cercle Sportif was where they congregated, sipping Pernod while chewing on the steak tartare of memories that had happened on Saigonese streets they called by their old French names: Boulevard Norodom, Rue Chasseloup-Laubat, Quai de l’Argonne. They bossed the native help with nouveau riche arrogance and, when I came around, regarded me with the suspicious eyes of border guards checking passports.
It was not they who invented the Eurasian, however. That claim belongs to the English in India, who also found it impossible not to nibble on dark chocolate. Like those pith-helmeted Anglos, the American Expeditionary Forces in the Pacific could not resist the temptations of the locals. They, too, fabricated a portmanteau word to describe my kind, the Amerasian. Although a misnomer when applied to me, I could hardly blame Americans for mistaking me as one of their own, since a small nation could be founded from the tropical offspring of the American GI. This stood for Government Issue, which is also what the Amerasians are. Our countrymen preferred euphemisms to acronyms, calling people like me the dust of life. More technically, the Oxford English Dictionary I consulted at Occidental revealed that I could be called a “natural child,” while the law in all countries I know of hails me as its illegitimate son. My mother called me her love child, but I do not like to dwell on that. In the end, my father had it right. He called me nothing at all.
No wonder, then, that I was drawn to the General, who, like my friends Man and Bon, never sneered about my muddled heritage. Upon selecting me for his staff, the General said, The only thing I’m interested in is how good you are at what you do, even if the things I ask you to do may not be so good. I proved my competence more than once; the evacuation was merely the latest demonstration of my ability to finesse the fine line between the legal and the illegal. The men had been picked, the buses arranged, and, most important, the bribes for safe passage bestowed. I had paid the bribes from a satchel of $10,000 requisitioned from the General, who had submitted the request to Madame. It’s an extraordinary sum, she said to me over a cup of oolong in her salon. It’s an extraordinary time, I said. But it’s a wholesale bargain for ninety-two evacuees. She could not disagree, as anyone who placed their ears to the railroad tracks of gossip in the city could report. The rumble was that the price of visas, passports, and seats on evacuation airplanes ran to many thousands of dollars, depending on the package one chose and the level of one’s hysteria. But before one could even pay a bribe, one needed to have access to willing conspirators. In our case, my solution was a louche major whom I had befriended at the Pink Nightclub on Nguyen Hue. Shouting to be heard over the psychedelic thunder of CBC or the pop beats of the Uptight, I learned that he was the airport’s duty officer. For a relatively modest fee of a thousand dollars, he informed me who the guards at the airport would be for our departure, and where I might find their lieutenant.
All this arranged, and myself and Bon having retrieved his wife and child, we assembled for our departure at seven o’clock. Two blue buses waited outside the villa’s gates, windows encased in wire grilles off which terrorist grenades would theoretically bounce, unless they were rocket-propelled, in which case one relied on the armor of prayers. The anxious families waited in the villa’s courtyard while Madame stood on the villa’s steps with the household staff. Her somber children sat in the Citroën’s backseat, a blank, diplomatic mien on their faces as they observed Claude and the General smoking in front of the car’s headlights. Passenger manifest in hand, I called the men and their families forward, checking off their names and directing them to their buses. As instructed, each adult and teenager carried no more than a small suitcase or valise, with some of the children clutching thin blankets or alabaster dolls, their Western faces plastered with fanatical grins. Bon was last, steering Linh by her elbow, she in turn holding Duc’s hand. He was just old enough to walk confidently, his other hand balled around a yellow yo-yo I had given him as a souvenir from the States. I saluted the boy, and he, frowning in concentration, stopped to detach his hand from his mother’s and saluted me in return. Everyone’s here, I said to the General. Then it’s time to go, he said, grinding his cigarette under his heel.
The General’s last duty was bidding farewell to the butler, the cook, the housekeeper, and a trio of pubescent nannies. Some of them had made entreaties to be taken along, but Madame was firm in saying no, already convinced of her excessive generosity in paying for the General’s officers. She was correct, of course. I knew of at least one general who, having been offered seats for his staff, sold them to the highest bidder. Now Madame and all the help were weeping, except for the geriatric butler, a purple ascot tied around his goitered neck. He had begun his days with the General as an orderly when the General was only a lieutenant, both of them serving under the French during their season of hell at Dien Bien Phu. Standing at the bottom of the steps, the General could not meet the old man’s eyes. I’m sorry, he said, head bowed and bared, cap in hand. It was the only time I had heard him apologize to anyone besides Madame. You’ve served us well, and we’re not serving you well. But none of you will come to harm. Take what you want from the villa and then leave. If anyone asks, deny that you know me or that you ever worked for me. But as for me, I swear to you now, I will not give up fighting for our country! When the General began weeping, I handed him my handkerchief. In the ensuing silence, the butler said, I ask for one thing, sir. What is that, my friend? Your pistol, so I can shoot myself! The General shook his head and wiped his eyes with my handkerchief. You will do no such thing. Go home and wait for me to return. Then I will give you a pistol. When the butler tried to salute, the General offered him his hand instead. Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.
Madame distributed to each of the staff an envelope of dollars, its thickness appropriate to his or her rank. The General returned my handkerchief and escorted Madame to the Citroën. For this last drive, the General would take the leather-wrapped steering wheel himself and lead the two buses to the airport. I’ve got the second bus, Claude said. You take the first one and make sure that driver doesn’t get lost. Before boarding, I paused at the gates for one last look at the villa, conjured into being for the Corsican owners of a rubber plantation. An epic tamarind tree towered over the eaves, the long, knuckled pods of its sour fruit dangling like the fingers of dead men. The constant staff still stood at the proscenium atop the stairs. When I waved good-bye to them, they dutifully waved back, holding in their other hands those white envelopes that had become, in the moonlight, tickets to nowhere.
The route from villa to airport was as uncomplicated as anything could be in Saigon, which is to say not uncomplicated at all. One made a right out of the gates down Thi Xuan, left on Le Van Quyet, right on Hong Thap Tu in the direction of the embassies, left on Pasteur, another left on Nguyen Dinh Chieu, right on Cong Ly, then straight to the airport. But instead of taking a left on Le Van Quyet, the General turned right. He’s going in the wrong direction, my driver said. He had fingers stained yellow with nicotine and dangerously sharp toenails. Just follow, I said. I stood in the entry well, doors swung open to let in the cool night air. On the first bench behind me were Bon and Linh, Duc leaning forward on his mother’s lap to peer over my shoulder. The streets were empty; according to the radio, a twenty-four-hour curfew had been declared because of the strike on the airport. Nearly as vacant were the sidewalks, haunted only by the occasional set of uniforms shed by deserters. In some cases, the gear was in such a neat little heap, with helmet on top of blouse and boots beneath trousers, that a ray gun appeared to have vaporized the owner. In a city where nothing went to waste, no one touched these uniforms.
My bus carried at least a few soldiers in civilian disguise, although the rest of the General’s in-laws and cousins were mostly women and children. These passengers murmured among themselves, complaining of this or that, which I ignored. Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell. Why’s he taking this route? the driver said. The curfew! We’re all going to get shot, or at least arrested. Bon sighed and shook his head. He’s the General, he said, as if that explained everything, which it did. Nevertheless, the driver continued to complain as we passed the central market and turned onto Le Loi, not ceasing until the General finally stopped at Lam Son Square. Before us was the Grecian facade of the National Assembly, formerly the city’s opera house. From here our politicians managed the shabby comic operetta of our country, an off-key travesty starring plump divas in white suits and mustachioed prima donnas in custom-tailored military uniforms. Leaning out and looking up, I saw the glowing windows of the Caravelle Hotel’s rooftop bar, where I had often escorted the General for aperitifs and interviews with journalists. The balconies provided an unparalleled view of Saigon and its environs, and from them a faint laughter drifted. It must have been the foreign newsmen, ready to take the city’s temperature in its death rattle, as well as the attachés of nonaligned nations, watching the Long Binh ammunition dump glow over the horizon while tracers sputtered in the night.
An urge seized me to fire a round in the direction of the laughter, just to enliven their evening. When the General got out of the car, I thought he was following the same impulse, but he turned in the other direction, away from the National Assembly and toward the hideous monument on Le Loi’s grassy median. I regretted keeping my Kodak in my rucksack rather than my pocket, for I would have liked a photograph of the General saluting the two massive marines charging forward, the hero in the rear taking a rather close interest in his comrade’s posterior. As Bon saluted the memorial, along with the other men on the bus, all I could ponder was whether these marines were protecting the people who strolled beneath their gaze on a sunny day, or, just as likely, were attacking the National Assembly at which their machine guns aimed. But as one of the men on the bus sobbed, and as I, too, saluted, it struck me that the meaning was not so ambiguous. Our air force had bombed the presidential palace, our army had shot and stabbed to death our first president and his brother, and our bickering generals had fomented more coups d’état than I could count. After the tenth putsch, I accepted the absurd state of our state with a mix of despair and anger, along with a dash of humor, a cocktail under whose influence I renewed my revolutionary vows.
Satisfied, the General climbed back into the Citroën and the convoy proceeded once more, crossing the intersection of one-way Tu Do as it entered and exited the square. I had a last glimpse of the Givral Café, where I had enjoyed French vanilla ice cream on my dates with proper Saigonese girls and their mummified chaperone aunts. Past the Givral was Brodard Café, where I cultivated my taste for savory crepes while doing my best to ignore the parade of paupers hopping and hobbling by. Those with hands cupped them for alms, those lacking in hands clenched the bill of a baseball cap in their teeth. Military amputees flapped empty sleeves like flightless birds, mute elderly beggars fixed cobra eyes on you, street urchins told tales taller than themselves about their pitiable conditions, young widows rocked colicky babies whom they might have rented, and assorted cripples displayed every imaginable, unappetizing illness known to man. Farther north on Tu Do was the nightclub where I had spent many evenings doing the cha-cha with young ladies in miniskirts and the latest in arch-breaking heels. This was the street where the imperious French once stabled their gilded mistresses, followed by the more déclassé Americans whooping it up in lurid bars like the San Francisco, the New York, and the Tennessee, their names inscribed in neon, their jukeboxes loaded with country music. Those who felt guilty at a debauched evening’s end could totter north to the brick basilica at the end of Tu Do, which was where the General led us by way of Hai Ba Trung. In front of the basilica stood the white statue of Our Lady, her hands open in peace and forgiveness, her gaze downcast. While she and her son Jesus Christ were ready to welcome all the sinners of Tu Do, their prim penitents and priests—my father among them—spurned me more often than not. So it was always at the basilica that I asked Man to meet me for our clandestine business, both of us savoring the farce of being counted among the faithful. We genuflected, but in actuality we were atheists who had chosen communism over God.
We met on Wednesday afternoons, the basilica empty except for a handful of austere dowagers, heads shrouded in lace mantillas or black scarves as they chanted, Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . . I no longer prayed, but my tongue could not help wagging along with these old women. They were as tough as foot soldiers, sitting impassively through crowded weekend Masses where the infirm and the elderly sometimes swooned from the heat. We were too poor for air- conditioning, but heat stroke was simply another way of expressing religious fortitude. It would be hard to find more pious Catholics than those in Saigon, most of whom, like my mother and myself, had already run once from the communists in ’54 (my nine-year-old self having no say in the matter). To rendezvous in the church amused Man, a former Catholic like me. While we pretended to be devout officers for whom Mass once a week did not suffice, I would confess my political and personal failures to him. He, in turn, would play my confessor, whispering to me absolutions in the shape of assignments rather than prayers.
America? I said. America, he confirmed.
I had told him of the General’s evacuation plan as soon as I learned of it, and that past Wednesday in the basilica I was informed of my new task. This mission was given to me by his superiors, but who they were, I did not know. It was safer that way. This had been our system since our lycée days, when we secretly pursued one road via a study group while Bon openly continued on a more conventional path. The study group had been Man’s idea, a three-man cell consisting of himself, me, and another classmate. Man was the leader, guiding us in the reading of revolutionary classics and teaching us the tenets of Party ideology. At the time, I knew that Man was part of another cell where he was the junior member, although the identities of the others were a mystery to me. Both secrecy and hierarchy were key to revolution, Man told me. That was why there was another committee above him for the more committed, and above that another committee for the even more committed, and on and on until we presumably reached Uncle Ho himself, at least when he was alive, the most committed man ever, the one who had asserted that “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” These were words we were willing to die for. This language, as well as the discourse of study groups, committees, and parties, came easily to Man. He had inherited the revolutionary gene from a great- uncle, dragooned by the French to serve in Europe during World War I. He was a gravedigger, and nothing will do more to bestir a colonized subject than seeing white men naked and dead, the great- uncle said, or so Man told me. This great-uncle had stuck his hands in their slimy pink viscera, examined at leisure their funny, flaccid willies, and retched on seeing the putrefying scrambled eggs of their brains. He buried them by the thousands, brave young men enmeshed in the cobwebbed eulogies spun by spidery politicians, and the understanding that France had kept its best for its own soil slowly seeped into the capillaries of his consciousness. The mediocrities had been dispatched to Indochina, allowing France to staff its colonial bureaucracies with the schoolyard bully, the chess club misfit, the natural-born accountant, and the diffident wallflower, whom the great-uncle now spotted in their original habitat as the outcasts and losers they were. And these castoffs, he fumed, were the people who taught us to think of them as white demigods? His radical anticolonialism was enhanced when he fell in love with a French nurse, a Trotskyist who persuaded him to enlist with the French communists, the only ones offering a suitable answer to the Indochina Question. For her, he swallowed the black tea of exile. Eventually he and the nurse had a daughter, and handing me a slip of paper, Man whispered that she was still there, his aunt. On the slip of paper was her name and address in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, this fellow traveler who had never joined the Communist Party, and thus was unlikely to be surveilled. I doubt you’ll be able to send letters home, so she’ll be the go-between. She’s a seamstress with three Siamese cats, no children, and no suspicious credentials. That’s where you’ll send the letters.
Fingering that slip of paper, I recalled the cinematic scenario I had prepared, the one where I refused to board Claude’s plane while the General pleaded hopelessly with me to leave with him. I want to stay, I said. It’s almost over. Behind clasped hands, Man sighed. Is it almost over? Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. Your general isn’t the only one planning to keep on fighting. Old soldiers don’t fade away. The war’s been going on too long for them to simply stop. We need someone to keep an eye on them and make sure they’re not going to get into too much trouble. What happens if I don’t go? I asked. Man raised his eyes to the bruised, greenish Christ with his European features, suspended on a crucifix high above the altar, the lie of a loincloth draped around his groin when in all likelihood he died naked. The grin on Man’s face revealed startlingly white teeth. You’ll do more good there than you will here, this dentist’s son said. And if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for Bon. He won’t go if he thinks we’re staying. But in any case, you want to go. Admit it!
Dare I admit it? Dare I confess? America, land of supermarkets and superhighways, of supersonic jets and Superman, of supercarriers and the Super Bowl! America, a country not content simply to give itself a name on its bloody birth, but one that insisted for the first time in history on a mysterious acronym, USA, a trifecta of letters outdone later only by the quartet of the USSR. Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?
All right, I admit it! I said. I confess.
He chuckled and said, Consider yourself lucky. I’ve never left our wonderful homeland. Lucky, am I? At least you feel at home here.
Home is overrated, he said.
Easy for him to say when his father and mother got along reasonably well, while his siblings looked the other way when it came to his revolutionary sympathies. This was common enough when many a family was divided against itself, some fighting for the north and some for the south, some fighting for communism and some for nationalism. Still, no matter how divided, all saw themselves as patriots fighting for a country to which they belonged. When I reminded him that I did not belong here, he said, You don’t belong in America, either. Perhaps, I said. But I wasn’t born there. I was born here.
Outside the basilica, we said good-bye, our real farewell, not the one staged later for Bon. I’m leaving you my records and my books, I said. I know you’ve always wanted them. Thanks, he said, squeezing my hand hard. And good luck. When do I get to come home? I asked. Giving me a look of great sympathy, he said, My friend, I’m a subversive, not a seer. The timetable for your return will depend on what your General plans. And as the General drove by the basilica, I could not say what his plans were besides escaping the country. I only assumed that he had more in mind than the futile words emblazoned on the banners flanking the boulevard leading to the presidential palace, which a dissident pilot had strafed earlier in the month. NO LAND TO THE COMMUNISTS! NO COMMUNISTS IN THE SOUTH! NO COALITION GOVERNMENT! NO NEGOTIATION! I could see an impassive guardsman standing impaled at attention under his roofed post, but before we reached the palace the General finally, mercifully set a course for the airport by turning right on Pasteur. Somewhere far away, a heavy machine gun fired in uneven, staccato bursts. When a dull mortar grunted, Duc whimpered in his mother’s arms. Hush, darling, she said. We’re only going on a trip. Bon stroked his son’s wispy hair and said, Will we ever see these streets again? I said, We have to believe we’ll see them again, don’t we?
Bon draped his arm over my shoulders and we squeezed together in the stairwell, hanging our heads out the door and holding hands as the glum apartments rolled by, lights and eyes peeking from behind curtains and shutters. Noses to the wind, we inhaled a farrago of scents: charcoal and jasmine, rotting fruit and eucalyptus, gasoline and ammonia, a swirling belch from the city’s poorly irrigated gut. As we approached the airport, the shadowy cross of an airplane roared overhead, all lights extinguished. At the gates, prickly rolls of barbed wire sagged with middle-aged disappointment. Behind the wire waited a squad of sullen military policemen and their young lieutenant, rifles in hand and truncheons swinging from belts. My chest thumped as the lieutenant approached the General’s Citroën, leaned down by the driver’s window to exchange a few words, then glanced in my direction where I stood leaning out the door of the bus. I had tracked him down on the louche major’s information, to the canal-side slum he lived in with his wife, three children, parents, and in-laws, all of whom were dependent on a salary that was not enough to feed half of them. This was the typical lot of the young officer, but my task on the afternoon I visited last week was to discover what kind of man had been molded from this poor clay. In his skivvies, sitting on the edge of the wooden bed he shared with his wife and children, the half-naked lieutenant had the cornered look of a political prisoner freshly dropped into a tiger cage, wary and a bit frightened but not yet physically broken. You want me to stab my country in the back, he said tonelessly, the unlit cigarette I had given him in his hand. You want to pay me to let cowards and traitors escape. You want me to encourage my men to do the same.
I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise, I said. I spoke mostly for the benefit of the jury—his wife, parents, and in-laws, who sat, squatted, or stood in the tight confines of the sweltering, tin-roofed shack. Hunger had lent them emaciated cheekbones, the kind I knew from my own mother, who had suffered so much for me. I admire you, Lieutenant, I said, and I did. You’re an honest man, and it’s hard to find honest men when men have families to feed. The least I can do to reward you is to offer you three thousand dollars. This was a month’s salary for his entire platoon. His wife did her duty and demanded ten. Eventually we agreed on five, half paid then, half due at the airport. As my bus rolled by, he snatched from my hand the envelope with the cash, and in his eyes I saw the same look the communist agent had given me when I had pulled that list of names from her mouth. Although he could have shot me or turned us back, he did what I gambled every honorable man forced to take a bribe would do. He let us all pass, holding up his end of the bargain as the last fig leaf of his dignity. I averted my eyes from his humiliation. If—let me indulge in the conditional for a moment—if the southern army comprised only men like him, it would have won. I confess that I admired him, even though he was my enemy. It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends. Wouldn’t you agree, Commandant?
It was nearly nine as we drove through the metropolis that was the airport complex, on well-paved streets past Quonset huts, gabled barracks, nondescript offices, and tubular warehouses, deep into a miniature city in Saigon yet outside of it. This semiautonomous territory was once one of the world’s busiest airports, a hub for all kinds of lethal and nonlethal sorties and missions, including those flown by Air America, the CIA’s airline. Our generals stashed their families here, while American generals crafted their stratagems in offices stocked with imported steel furniture. Our destination was the compound of the Defense Attaché Office. With typical cheekiness, the Americans had nicknamed it Dodge City, the town where six-shooters ruled and where saloon girls danced the cancan, as was much the case here in Saigon. But while sheriffs kept the peace in the real Dodge City, American marines guarded this evacuation center. I had not seen so many since ’73, when they were a ragged, defeated lot departing from this airfield. But these young marines had never seen combat and had been in this country only a few weeks. Bright-eyed and clean-shaven, with not a hint of a needle track in the crooks of their arms or a whiff of marijuana in their pressed, jungle-free fatigues, they watched impassively as our passengers disembarked into a parking lot already crowded with hundreds of other nervous evacuees. I joined the General and Claude by the Citroën, where the General was handing over his keys. I’ll return them in the States, sir, Claude said. No, leave them in the ignition, the General said. I would not want anyone to damage the car while they steal it, since it will be stolen anyway. Enjoy her while you can, Claude.
When the General wandered off to find Madame and the children, I said, What’s going on here? It’s a mess. Claude sighed. Situation normal, all fucked up. Everybody’s trying to get their relatives and cooks and girlfriends out of here. Just consider yourself lucky. I know, I said. See you in the States? He clapped me on the shoulder with affection. Just like when the communists took over in ’54, he said. Who would have thought we’d be here again? But I got you out of the north then, and I’m getting you out of the south now. You’ll be all right.
After Claude left, I returned to the evacuees. A marine on the bullhorn mumbled at them to form into lines, but queuing was unnatural for our countrymen. Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development. We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in ’54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation. The marines, however, cared not a whit for such excuses, and their intimidating presence eventually coerced the refugees into lines. When the marines checked us for weapons, we officers dutifully, sadly turned over our guns. Mine was just a snub-nosed .38 revolver, good for covert activities, Russian roulette, and suicide, whereas Bon wielded the manly .45 Colt semiautomatic. The gun was designed to knock down Moro warriors in the Philippines with a single shot, I said to Duc. I had learned this from Claude; it was the kind of arcana he knew.
Papers! said the embassy bureaucrat at the desk after the weapons check, a young man with nineteenth-century sideburns, decked out in a beige safari suit and rose-tinted glasses. Each of the family heads had the laissez-passer documents from the Ministry of the Interior I had bought at a hefty discount, as well as the presidential parole delivered by Claude, stamped by the relevant embassy clerk. The parole assured us, even as we stood obediently in line, of the important thing: that we had cut to the head of the immigration queue in front of the huddled, hopeful millions from all over the world yearning to breathe free. We carried that small solace with us to the staging ground of the tennis courts, where earlier evacuees already occupied all the bleacher seats. We joined the tardier souls attempting a numb slumber on the green concrete of the courts. Red blackout lamps cast an eerie glow over the crowds, among which was a scattering of Americans. All of them appeared to be husbands of Vietnamese women, given how a Vietnamese family besieged each of them, or how a Vietnamese woman had practically handcuffed herself to his arm. I settled down with Bon, Linh, and Duc on an unoccupied plot. On one side was a covey of call girls, vacuum-packed into micro- miniskirts and fishnet stockings. On the other was an American, his wife, and their children, a boy and a girl of perhaps five and six. The husband sprawled on his back with his beefy forearm over his eyes, the only parts of his face visible the two furry limbs of his walrus mustache, his pink lips, and his slightly crooked teeth. His wife sat with her children’s heads in her lap, stroking their brown hair. How long have you been here? Linh asked, cradling a drowsy Duc in her arms. The whole day, the woman said. It’s been awful, so hot. There’s nothing to eat or drink. They keep calling out the numbers of planes but not ours. Linh made sympathetic noises while Bon and I settled down to the waiting part of hurry up and wait, the tedious custom of militaries the world over.
We lit cigarettes and turned our attention to the dark sky, every now and again illuminated by a parachute flare sputtering into spermatic existence, its bright head of light trailing a long, wiggling tail of smoke as it drifted downward. Ready for a confession? Bon said. He used words the way he used bullets, in short, controlled bursts. I knew today was coming. Just never said so aloud. That’s denial, right? I nodded and said, You’re only guilty of the same thing that everyone else in Saigon is. We all knew and we couldn’t do a thing about it, or so we thought, anyway. But anything can always happen. That’s what hope is all about. He shrugged, contemplating the end of his burning cigarette. Hope’s thin, he said. Despair’s thick. Like blood. He pointed to the scar in the palm of the hand holding the cigarette, carved to follow the lifeline’s arc. Remember?
I held up the palm of my right hand with its matching scar, the same one carried by Man. We saw this mark whenever we opened our hands for a bottle, a cigarette, a gun, or a woman. Like warriors of legend, we had sworn to die for one another, snared by the romance of schoolboy friendship, united by the eternal things we saw in each other: fidelity, honesty, conviction, the willingness to stand by friends and uphold beliefs. But what did we believe in at fourteen? Our friendship and our brotherhood, our country and our independence. We believed we could, if called upon, sacrifice ourselves for our blood brothers and our nation, but we did not know exactly how we would be called upon and what we would become. I could not predict that Bon would one day join the Phoenix Program to avenge his murdered father, his task to assassinate the people whom Man and I considered comrades. And good-hearted, sincere Bon did not know that Man and I would secretly come to believe that the only way to rescue our country was to become revolutionaries. All three of us followed our political beliefs, but only because of the reasons that led us to swear blood brotherhood in the first place. If ever circumstances forced us into a situation where death was the price of our brotherhood, I had no doubt that Man and I would pay. Our commitment was written on our hands, and under the wavering light cast by a distant magnesium flare, I held up my palm with its scar and traced the line with my finger. Your blood is mine and mine is yours, I said, which was the adolescent oath we had sworn to one another. You know what else? Bon said. Despair may be thick, but friendship’s thicker. After that, nothing more needed to be said, our camaraderie enough as we heeded the call of the Katyusha rockets, hissing in the distance like librarians demanding silence.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 3

THANK YOU, DEAR COMMANDANT, for the notes that you and the commissar have given me on my confession. You have asked me what I mean when I say “we” or “us,” as in those moments when I identify with the southern soldiers and evacuees on whom I was sent to spy. Should I not refer to those people, my enemies, as “them”? I confess that after having spent almost my whole life in their company I cannot help but sympathize with them, as I do with many others. My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy. Many bastards behave like bastards, and I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. After all, if she had not blurred the lines between maid and priest, or allowed them to be blurred, I would not exist.
Having been thus produced outside of marriage, I confess to feeling very uncomfortable at the thought of being married myself. Bachelorhood is one of the unexpected benefits of being a bastard, as I was not considered much of a catch to most families. Not even families with a daughter of mixed ancestry welcomed me, for the daughter was herself usually frantic to squeeze into the elevator of social mobility through marriage to someone of a pure pedigree. While friends and strangers sigh over my bachelorhood as part of the tragedy of being a bastard, I find that bachelorhood not only means freedom but also suits my subterranean life as a mole, who burrows better alone. Being a bachelor also meant I could chat without consequence with the call girls, brazenly displaying their shapely shanks among the evacuees while using yesterday’s tabloid paper to fan the sweaty ravines of their cleavage, artificially enhanced by atomic age bras. The girls called themselves Mimi, Phi Phi, and Ti Ti, common enough names in the demimonde, but as a triumvirate powerful enough to inject joy into my heart. Perhaps they invented those names on the spot, names changed as easily as customers. If so, their playacting was simply a professional reflex acquired through years of diligent study and dedicated practice. I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour. But to speak only of the financial side misses the point. The proper way to approach a prostitute is to adapt the attitude of a theatergoer, sitting back and suspending disbelief for the duration of the show. The improper way is to doltishly insist that the play is just a bunch of people putting on charades because you have paid the price of the ticket, or, conversely, to believe utterly in what you are watching and hence succumb to a mirage. For example, grown men who sneer at the idea of unicorns will tearfully testify to the existence of an even rarer, more mythical species. Found only in remote ports of call and the darkest, deepest reaches of the most insalubrious taverns, this is the prostitute in whose chest beats the proverbial heart of gold. Let me assure you, if there is one part of a prostitute that is made of gold, it is not her heart. That some believe otherwise is a tribute to the conscientious performer.
By this degree, the three call girls were troupers, which could not be said of 70 or 80 percent of the prostitutes in the capital and outlying cities, of whom sober studies, anecdotal evidence, and random sampling indicate the existence of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands. Most were poor, illiterate country girls with no means of making a living except to live as ticks on the fur of the nineteen-year- old American GI. His pants bulging with an inflationary roll of dollars and his adolescent brain swollen with the yellow fever that afflicts so many Western men who come to an Asian country, this American GI discovered to his surprise and delight that in this green-breasted world he was no longer Clark Kent but Superman, at least in regards to women. Aided (or was it invaded?) by Superman, our fecund little country no longer produced significant amounts of rice, rubber, and tin, cultivating instead an annual bumper crop of prostitutes, girls who had never so much as danced to a rock song before the pimps we called cowboys slapped pasties on their quivering country breasts and prodded them onto the catwalk of a Tu Do bar. Now am I daring to accuse American strategic planners of deliberately eradicating peasant villages in order to smoke out the girls who would have little choice but to sexually service the same boys who bombed, shelled, strafed, torched, pillaged, or merely forcibly evacuated said villages? I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness. This trio of talented stars promised another kind of goodness altogether, the bad kind. They flirted shamelessly with me and teased Bon and the American husband with the walrus mustache, now awake. Both merely grimaced and made themselves as still and small as they could, quite aware of the grim silence of their wives. I, on the other hand, flirted happily in return, perfectly mindful that each of these demimondaines had a backstory capable of breaking my heart and, most likely, my bank account. Did I not have one of these same backstories? But performers perform at least partially to forget their sadness, a trait I am well acquainted with. In these situations it is better to flirt and play, allowing everyone the opportunity to pretend to be happy for so long that they might actually feel such happiness. And it was a pleasure just to look at them! Mimi was tall, with long straight hair and pink nail polish on all twenty digits, their tips as glossy as jelly beans. Her throaty voice with its mysterious Hue dialect compelled all my blood vessels to constrict, making me a touch light-headed. Ti Ti was fragile and petite, a fabulous beehive hairdo adding height. Her pale skin evoked eggshells, her eyelashes trembled with a hint of dew. I wanted to wrap her in my arms and brush my eyelashes against hers in butterfly kisses. Phi Phi was the leader, her body’s curves reminding me of the dunes of Phan Thiet, where my mother had taken me for the one vacation of her life. While Mama covered herself from head to toe so she would not get any darker, I grubbed in the sunbaked sand ecstatically. That blissful memory of a ten-year-old’s warmth and happiness was aroused by Phi Phi’s fragrance, the same, nearly, or so I imagined, as from the one tiny vial of honey-colored perfume my mother owned, a present from my father with which she anointed herself once a year. So I fell in love with Phi Phi, a harmless enough emotion. I was wont to fall in love two or three times a year and was now
well past due.
As to how they had managed to infiltrate this airbase, when evacuations were meant for the rich, the powerful, and/or the connected, it was all because of Sarge. I imagined a slab of beefcake on two legs with a white marine’s cap perched on top. Sarge guards the embassy and just loves us girls, Phi Phi said. He’s a sweetheart, a doll, he didn’t forget us at all, just like he said he would never forget us. The other two nodded vigorously, Mimi cracking her gum and Ti Ti cracking her knuckles. Sarge got a bus and drove up and down Tu Do, rescuing as many of us girls as were around who wanted to leave. Then he got us on the airbase by telling the cops he was bringing us for a party with the poor boys here. The hard peach of my heart ripened and softened as I thought of their Sarge, this swell American who actually kept his promises, first name Ed and last name something none of the girls could pronounce. I asked them why they wanted to leave, and Mimi said because the communists were sure to imprison them as collaborators. They call us whores, she said. And they call Saigon the whore city, don’t they? Honey, I can connect the dots. Plus, Ti Ti said, even if we’re not tossed in jail, we couldn’t do our work. You can’t buy or sell anything in a communist country, right? Not for a profit, anyway, and darling, I’m not letting anyone eat this mango for free, communism or no communism. At this all three hooted and clapped. They were as ribald as Russian sailors on shore leave, but they also had a firm grasp of the theory of exchange value. What indeed would happen to girls like them once the revolution was victorious? To this matter I confess that I had not devoted much thought.
Their spirited élan made the time fly by as quickly as the C-130s flashing overhead, but even they and I got tired as the hours progressed and our numbers were not called. The marine with the bullhorn would mumble like a throat cancer victim with a mechanical larynx, and an exhausted company of evacuees would gather their pitiful belongings and stumble for the buses that would deliver them to the tarmac. Ten o’clock passed, then eleven. I lay down and could not sleep, even though I was in what soldiers, with their usual wit, called a thousand-star hotel. All I need do was look up to the galaxy to remind myself of my good luck. I squatted and smoked another cigarette with Bon. I lay down and again could not sleep, bothered by the heat. At midnight, I took a walk around the compound and poked my head in the toilets. This was a bad idea. They had been meant to handle only the normal flow of a few dozen office workers and rear-echelon military types, not the hot waste of thousands of evacuees. The scene at the swimming pool was no better. For all the years of its existence, the swimming pool was an American-only area, with passes for the whites of other countries and for the Indonesians, Iranians, Hungarians, and Poles of the International Committee of Control and Supervision. Our country was overrun by acronyms, with the ICCS otherwise known as “I Can’t Control Shit,” its role to oversee the cease-fire between north and south after the American armed forces strategically relocated. It was a smashingly successful cease-fire, for in the last two years only 150,000 soldiers had died, in addition to the requisite number of civilians. Imagine how many would have died without a truce! Perhaps the evacuees resented the exclusion of locals from this pool, but more likely they were just desperate when they turned it into a urinal. I joined the tinkling line standing at the pool’s edge, then returned to the tennis courts. Bon and Linh dozed with their hands cupping their chins, Duc the only one getting any sleep at all in his mother’s lap. I squatted, I lay down, I smoked a cigarette, and so on until, at nearly four in the morning, our number was at last called and I bid farewell to the girls, who pouted and promised we would see each other again on Guam.
We marched forth from the tennis court toward the parking lot, where a pair of buses waited to take on more than our group of ninety-two evacuees. The crowd was around two hundred, and when the General asked me who these other people were, I asked the nearest marine. He shrugged. Y’all ain’t too big, so we puttin’ two of you on for every one of us. Part of me was irritated as I boarded the bus after my unhappy General, while part of me reasoned that we were used to such treatment. After all, we treated each other in the same way, cramming our motorbikes, buses, trucks, elevators, and helicopters with suicidal loads of human cargo, disregarding all regulations and manufacturer recommendations. Was it any surprise that other people thought we were happy with conditions to which we were merely resigned? They wouldn’t treat an American general this way, the General complained, pressed against me in the tight confines. No, sir, they wouldn’t, I said, and it was most likely true. Our bus was immediately fetid and hot from the passengers who had been simmering outdoors all day and night, but it was only a short way to our parked C-130 Hercules. The plane was a garbage truck with wings attached, and like a garbage truck deposits were made from the rear, where its big flat cargo ramp dropped down to receive us. This maw led into a generous alimentary canal, its membrane illuminated by a ghostly green blackout light. Disembarked from the bus, the General stood to one side of the ramp and I joined him to watch as his family, his staff, their dependents, and a hundred people we did not know climbed aboard, waved on by a loadmaster standing on the ramp. Come on, don’t be shy, he said to Madame, his head encased in a helmet the size and shape of a basketball. Nut to butt, lady. Nut to butt.
Madame was too puzzled to be shocked. Her forehead wrinkled as she passed with her children, attempting to translate the loadmaster’s mindless refrain. Then I spotted a man coming to the ramp doing his best to avoid eye contact, a blue Pan Am travel bag clutched to his incurvate chest. I had seen him a few days prior, at his house in District Three. A mid-ranking apparatchik in the Ministry of the Interior, he was neither too tall nor too short, too thin nor too wide, too pale nor too dark, too smart nor too dumb. Some species of sub-undersecretary, he probably had neither dreams nor nightmares, his own interior as hollow as his office. I had thought of the sub-undersecretary a few times in the days since our meeting and could not recall his elusive face, but I recognized him now as he ascended the ramp. When I clapped my hand on his shoulder, he twitched and finally turned his Chihuahua eyes toward me, pretending not to have seen me. What a coincidence! I said. I didn’t expect to see you on this flight. General, our seats would not have been possible without the help of this kind gentleman. The General nodded stiffly, baring his teeth just enough to indicate that he should never be expected to reciprocate. My pleasure, the sub-undersecretary whispered, slight frame quivering and wife tugging at his arm. If looks could emasculate, she would have walked off with my sac in her purse. After the crowd pushed them by, the General glanced at me and said, Was it a pleasure? Of a sort, I said.
When all the passengers had boarded, the General motioned for me to go before him. He was the last to walk up the ramp into a cargo hold with no seats. Adults squatted on the floor or sat on bags, children perched on their knees. Lucky passengers had a bulkhead berth where they could cling to a cargo strap. The contours of skin and flesh separating one individual from another merged, everyone forced into the mandatory intimacy required of those less human than the ones leaving the country in reserved seating. Bon, Linh, and Duc were somewhere in the middle, as were Madame and her children. The ramp slowly rose and clamped shut, sealing us worms into our can. Along with the loadmaster, the General and I leaned against the ramp, our knees in the noses of the passengers before us. The quartet of turboprop engines turned over with a deafening racket, the vibrations rattling the ramp. As the plane grumbled its way along the tarmac, the whole population rocked back and forth with every motion, a congregation swaying to inaudible prayers. The acceleration pressed me backward while the woman in front of me braced her arm against my knees, her jaw pressed to the rucksack on my lap. As the heat in the plane climbed over forty degrees Celcius, so did the intensity of our odor. We exuded the stink of sweat, of unwashed clothing, and of anxiety, with the only succor being the breeze through the open door where a crewman stood in a rock guitarist’s wide-legged pose. Instead of a six-string electric guitar slung low across his hips, he carried an M16 with a twenty- round magazine. As we taxied along the runway, I caught glimpses of concrete revetments, giant cans sliced in half lengthwise, and a desolate row of incinerated warbirds, demolished jets blown up in a strafing run earlier this evening, wings plucked and scattered like those of abused flies. A hush blanketed the passengers, hypnotized by trepidation and anticipation. They were, no doubt, thinking what I was. Good-bye, Vietnam. Au revoir, Saigon—
The explosion was deafening, the force of it launching the crewman onto the passengers, the last thing I saw for several moments as the flash of light through the open door washed the sight from my eyes. The General tumbled into me and I fell onto the bulkhead, then onto screaming bodies, hysterical civilians spraying my face with sour saliva. The tires of the plane squealed on the runway as it spun to the right, and when my sight returned a blaze of fire shone through the door. I feared nothing more than burning to death, nothing more than being pureed by a propeller, nothing more than being quartered by a Katyusha, which even sounded like the name of a demented Siberian scientist who had lost a few toes and a nose to frostbite. I had seen roasted remains before, in a desolate field outside of Hue, carbonized corpses fused into the metal of a downed Chinook, the fuel tanks having incinerated the three dozen occupants, their teeth exposed in a permanent, simian rictus; the flesh of their lips and faces burned off; the skin a finely charred obsidian, smooth and alien, all the hair converted to ash, no longer recognizable as my countrymen or as human beings. I did not want to die that way; I did not want to die in any way, least of all in a long-range bombardment from the artillery of my communist comrades, launched from the suburbs they had captured outside Saigon. A hand squeezed my chest and reminded me I was still alive. Another clawed my ear as the howling people beneath me struggled to heave me off. Pushing back to try to right myself, I found my hand on someone’s oily head and myself pressed against the General. Another explosion somewhere on the runway heightened the frenzy. Men, women, and children caterwauled at an even higher pitch. All of a sudden the plane halted its gyrations at such an angle where the eye of the door did not look out onto fire but only onto the darkness, and a man screamed, We’re all going to die! The loadmaster, cursing inventively, began the lowering of the ramp, and when the refugees surged forward against the opening, they bore me backward with them. The only way to survive being trampled to death was to cover my head with my rucksack and roll down the ramp, knocking people down as I did so. Another rocket exploded on the runway a few hundred meters behind us, lighting up an acre of tarmac and revealing the nearest shelter to be a battered concrete divider fifty meters from the runway. Even after the explosion faded, the disturbed night was no longer dark. The plane’s starboard engines were aflame, two blazing torches spewing gusts of spark and smoke.
I was on my hands and knees when Bon seized me by the elbow, dragging me with one hand and Linh with the other. She in turn carried a wailing Duc, her arm wrapped around his chest. A meteorite shower of rockets and artillery shells was falling on the runways, an apocalyptic light show that revealed the evacuees dashing for the concrete divider, stumbling and tripping along the way, suitcases forgotten, the thundering prop wash from the two remaining engines blowing little children off their feet and staggering adults. Those who had reached the divider kept their whimpering heads below the concrete, and when something whizzed overhead—a fragment or a bullet—I fell to the earth and began crawling. Bon did likewise with Linh, her face tense but determined. By the time we fumbled our way to an unoccupied space at the divider, the crew had turned off the engines. The relief from the noise only made audible that someone was shooting at us. Bullets zipped overhead or ricocheted off the concrete, the gunners zeroing in on the bonfire of the burning plane. Our guys, Bon said, knees drawn up to his chest and one arm thrown around Duc, huddled between him and Linh. They’re pissed. They want a seat out of here. No way, I said, that’s NVA, they’ve taken the perimeter, even though I thought there was a fairly good chance it was our own men venting their frustrations. Then the plane’s gas tanks blew, the fireball illuminating a vast stretch of the airfield, and when I turned my face away from the bonfire I found that I was next to the sub-undersecretary, civil servant unextraordinaire, his face nearly pressed against my back and the message in his Chihuahua eyes as clear as the title on a cinema marquee. Like the communist agent and the lieutenant at the gate, he would have been happy to see me dead.
I deserved his hatred. After all, I had denied him a considerable fortune as a result of my unannounced visit to his house, the address procured for me by the louche major. It is true I have some visas, the sub-undersecretary had said as we sat in his living room. I and some colleagues are making them available in the interests of justice. Isn’t it unjust that only the most privileged or fortunate have the opportunity to escape? I made some sympathetic noises. If there was true justice, he went on, everyone would leave who needed to. That is clearly not the case. But this puts someone like me in rather difficult circumstances. Why should I be the judge of who gets to leave and who does not? I am, after all, merely a glorified secretary. If you were in my situation, Captain, what would you do?
I can appreciate the situation you find yourself in, sir. My dimples hurt from smiling, and I was impatient to arrive at the inevitable end game, but the middle had to be played, to provide me with the same moth-eaten moral covers he had already pulled up to his chin. You are clearly a respectable man of taste and values. Here I nodded to the left and right, gesturing at the tidy house that had to be paid for. Plastered walls were dotted with a few geckos and some decorative objects: clock, calendar, Chinese scroll, and colorized photograph of Ngo Dinh Diem in better days, when he had not yet been assassinated for believing he was a president and not an American puppet. Now the little man in a white suit was a saint to his fellow Vietnamese Catholics, having suffered an appropriately martyred death with hands hogtied, face masked in blood, a Rorschach blot of his cerebral tissue decorating the interior of an American armored personnel carrier, his humiliation captured in a photograph circulated worldwide. Its subtext was as subtle as Al Capone: Do not fuck with the United States of America.
The real injustice, I said, beginning to get heated, is that an honest man must live a penurious life in our country. Therefore, please allow me to extend to you a small token of the appreciation of my patron for the favor that he is requesting. You do have enough visas on hand for ninety-two people, do you not? I was not certain he would, in which case my plan was to put down a deposit and promise to return with the remainder. But when the sub-undersecretary replied affirmatively, I produced the envelope of remaining cash, $4,000, enough for two visas if he was feeling generous. The sub- undersecretary unsealed the envelope and ran his thumb, callused by experience, over the sheaf of bills. He knew immediately how much money was in the envelope—not enough! He slapped the cheek of the coffee table with the white glove of the envelope, and as if that were an insufficient expression of his outrage he slapped the cheek again. How dare you attempt to bribe me, sir!
I motioned to him to sit down. Like him, I, too, was a man trapped by difficult circumstances, forced to do what I must do. Is it just for you to sell these visas when they cost you nothing and were not yours to begin with? I asked him. And would it not be just for me to call the local police commander and have him arrest us both? And would it not be just for him to appropriate your visas and engage in some just redistribution of his own? So the most just solution is simply for us to return to the situation where I offer you four thousand dollars for ninety-two visas, since you should not even have ninety-two visas or four thousand dollars to begin with. After all, you can return to your desk tomorrow and procure another ninety-two visas easily enough. They’re only paper, aren’t they?
But to a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life! He hated me then for taking his paper and he hated me now, but I was bothered not in the least. What bothered me as I huddled at the concrete divider was yet another miserable wait, only this time one with no clear resolution. The glimmer of a rising sun brought a measure of comfort, but the soothing bluish light showed the tarmac to be in an awful state, chipped and pitted by rocket and artillery explosions. In the middle of it all was the smoldering slag heap of the C-130, exuding the pungent stink of burning fuel. Between us and the embers of the plane were little dark heaps that gradually took shape, becoming suitcases and valises abandoned in the mad rush, some of them burst open and spilling their entrails hither and thither. The sun continued rising notch by notch on its rack, the light becoming harsher and brighter until it achieved the retina-numbing quality generated by an interrogator’s lamp, stripping away every vestige of shade. Pinned down on the east side of the divider, people began to wilt and shrivel, beginning with the elderly and the children. Water, Mama, Duc said. All Linh could say was, No, darling, we don’t have any water, but we’ll get some soon.
On cue, another Hercules appeared in the sky, approaching so fast and steep a kamikaze pilot might have been at the controls. The C-130 landed with a screech of tires on a distant runway and a murmur rose from the evacuees. Only when the Hercules turned in our direction to approach haphazardly across intervening runways did that murmur turn into a cheer. Then I heard something else. When I poked my head over the divider cautiously, I saw them, darting out of the shadows of hangars and between revetments where they must have been hiding, dozens, maybe hundreds of marines and soldiers and military cops and air force pilots and crewmen and mechanics, the air base’s staff and rear guard, refusing to be heroes or sacrificial goats. Spotting this competition, the evacuees stampeded toward the C-130, which had pivoted on the runway fifty meters away and lowered its ramp in a not-so-coy gesture of invitation. The General and his family ran ahead of me, Bon and his family ran behind me, and together we brought up the rear of the fleeing masses.
The first of the evacuees was running up the ramp when I heard the hiss of the Katyushas, followed a second later by an explosion as the first of the rockets detonated on a far runway. Bullets whizzed overhead, and this time we heard the distinct bark of the AK-47 along with the M16. They’re at the perimeter! Bon shouted. It was clear to the evacuees that this Hercules would be the last plane out of the airport, if it could even take off with communist units closing in, and they once more began screaming with fear. As they rushed up the ramp as fast as they could, a slick little airplane on the far side of the divider shrieked into the air, a needle-nosed Tiger fighter, followed by a Huey helicopter thumping by with its doors flung wide open, revealing more than a dozen soldiers squeezed inside. What remained of the armed forces at the airport was evacuating itself with whatever air mobile vehicle was at hand. As the General pushed on the backs of the evacuees in front of him to propel them toward the ramp, and as I pushed the General, a dual-hulled Shadow gunship soared from the tarmac to my left. I watched it out of the corner of my eye. The Shadow was a funny-looking plane, the fat fuselage suspended between two hulls, but there was nothing funny about the smoke trail of the heat-seeking missile scribbling its way across the sky until its flaming tip kissed the Shadow at less than a thousand feet. When the two halves of the airplane and the bits and pieces of its crew fell to the earth like the shattered fragments of a clay pigeon, the evacuees groaned and shoved even harder to make the final climb up the ramp.
As the General set foot on the ramp, I paused to let Linh and Duc pass by. When they did not appear, I turned and saw that they were no longer behind me. Get on the plane, our loadmaster shouted beside me, his mouth open so wide I swear I saw his tonsils vibrating. Your friends are gone, man! Twenty meters away, Bon was kneeling on the tarmac, clutching Linh to his breast. A red heart slowly expanded on her white blouse. A puff of concrete dust rose when a bullet pinged off the runway between us, and every last drop of moisture in my mouth evaporated. I tossed my rucksack at the loadmaster and ran straight and fast toward them, hurdling abandoned suitcases. I slid the last two meters, feet first and shaving the skin off my left hand and elbow. Bon was making sounds I had never heard from him before, deep guttural bellows of pain. Between him and Linh was Duc, his eyes rolled back in his head, and when I pried husband and wife apart I saw the wet bloody mess of Duc’s chest where something had torn through it and through his mother. The General and the loadmaster were yelling something I could not understand over the increasing whine of the propellers. Let’s go, I shouted. They’re leaving! I pulled at his sleeve but Bon would not move, rooted by grief. I had no choice but to punch him in the jaw, just hard enough to shut him up and loosen his grip. Then with one tug I pried Linh from his arms, and when I did so Duc tumbled onto the tarmac, his head limp. Bon screamed something inarticulate as I ran for the airplane, Linh thrown over my shoulder and making no noise as her body bumped against me, her blood hot and wet on my shoulder and neck.
The General and the loadmaster stood on the ramp beckoning me as the plane taxied away, aiming for any clear stretch of runway as the Katyushas kept arriving, singly and in salvos. I was running as fast as I could, my lungs in a knot, and when I reached the ramp I threw Linh at the General, who caught her by the arms. Then Bon was at my side running with me, extending Duc with both hands to the loadmaster, who took him as gently as he could even though it did not matter, not with the way Duc’s head flopped from side to side. With his son handed off, Bon began to slow down, head bowed in agony and still sobbing. I grabbed him by the crook of his elbow and with one last push I shoved him face forward onto the ramp, where the loadmaster seized him by the collar and pulled him up the rest of the way. I leaped for the ramp, arms extended, landing on it with the side of my face and all of my rib cage, the grit of dirt and dust against my cheek while my legs flailed in open air. With the plane barreling down the runway, the General pulled me to my knees and dragged me into the hold, the ramp rising behind me. I was squeezed against the General on one side and the prostrate bodies of Duc and Linh on the other, a wall of evacuees pushing against us from the front. As the airplane ascended steeply, a terrible noise rose with it, audible not only through the straining metal but through the clamor from the open side door, where the crewman stood with his M16, firing three-round bursts from the hip. Through that open door, the patchy landscape of fields and tenements tilted and wheeled as the pilot took us into a corkscrew, and I realized that the terrible noise was not only coming from the engines but from Bon, too, pounding his head against the ramp and howling, not as if the world had ended, but as if someone had gouged out his eyes.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 4

Shortly after we landed on Guam, a green ambulance arrived to take the bodies. I lowered Duc onto a stretcher. His little body had grown heavier in my arms with each passing minute, but I could not lay him down on the grubby tarmac. After the medics draped him with a white sheet, they eased Linh from Bon’s arms and likewise covered her before loading mother and son into the ambulance. I wept, but I was no match for Bon, who had a lifetime’s worth of unused tears to spend. We continued to weep as we were trucked to Camp Asan, where, thanks to the General, we were given barracks that were luxurious compared to the tents waiting for the other late arrivals. Catatonic on his bunk, Bon would remember nothing of the evacuation playing on television that afternoon and through the next day. Nor would he remember how, in the barracks and tents of our temporary city, thousands of refugees wailed as if attending a funeral, the burial of their nation, dead too soon, as so many were, at a tender twenty-one years of age.
Along with the General’s family and a hundred others in the barracks, I watched inglorious images of helicopters landing on Saigon’s roofs, evacuating refugees to the decks of airplane carriers. The next day, after communist tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace, communist troops raised the flag of the National Liberation Front from the palace roof. As the debacle unfolded, the calcium and lime deposits of memory from the last days of the damned republic encrusted themselves in the pipes of my brain. Just a little more would be added late that night, after a dinner of baked chicken and green beans many of the refugees found exotically inedible, the children the only ones in the cafeteria with any appetite. Joining a line to turn in our trays to the dishwashers was the coup de grâce, pronouncing us no longer adult citizens of a sovereign country but stateless refugees, protected, for the moment, by the American military. After scraping his untouched green beans into the garbage, the General looked at me and said, Captain, our people need me. I’m going to walk among them and boost their morale. Let’s go. Yes, sir, I said, not optimistic about his chances but also not thinking of possible complications. While it was easy enough to spread the manure of encouragement among soldiers drilled into accepting all kinds of abuse, we had forgotten that most of the refugees were civilians.
In retrospect, I was fortunate not to be wearing my uniform, stained with Linh’s blood. I had shed it in favor of the madras shirt and chinos in my rucksack, but the General, having lost his luggage at the airport, still wore his stars on his collar. Outside our barracks and in the tent city, few knew who he was by face. What they saw was his uniform and rank, and when he said hello to the civilians and asked how they were faring, they met him with sullen silence. The slight crinkle between his eyes and his hesitant chuckling told me he was confused. My sense of unease increased with every step down the dirt lane between the tents, civilian eyes on us and the silence unbroken. We had barely walked a hundred meters into the tent city when the first assault came, a dainty slipper sailing from our flank and striking the General on his temple. He froze. I froze. An old woman’s voice croaked out, Look at the hero! We swiveled to the left and saw the one thing charging us that could not be defended against, an enraged elderly citizen we could neither beat down nor back away from. Where’s my husband? she screamed, barefoot, her other slipper in her hand. Why are you here when he’s not? Aren’t you supposed to be defending our country with your life like he is?
She smacked the General across the chin with her slipper, and from behind her, from the other side, from behind us, the women, young and old, firm and infirm, came with their shoes and slippers, their umbrellas and canes, their sun hats and conical hats. Where’s my son? Where’s my father? Where’s my brother? The General ducked and flung his arms over his head as the furies beat him, tearing at his uniform and his flesh. I was hardly unscathed, suffering several blows from flying footwear and intercepting several strokes from canes and umbrellas. The ladies pressed around me to get at the General, who had sunk to his knees under their onslaught. They could hardly be blamed for their ill temper, since our vaunted premier had gone on the radio the day before to ask all soldiers and citizens to fight to the last man. It was pointless to point out that the premier, who was also the air marshal and who should not be confused with the president except in his venality and vanity, had himself left on a helicopter shortly after broadcasting his heroic message. Nor would it have helped to explain that this general was not in charge of soldiers but the secret police, which would hardly have endeared him to civilians. In any case, the ladies were not listening, preferring to scream and curse. I pushed my way through the women who had come between the General and myself, shielding him with my body and absorbing many more whacks and globs of spit until I could drag him free. Go! I shouted in his ear, propelling him in the correct direction. For the second straight day we ran for our lives, but at least the rest of the people in the tent city left us alone, touching us with nothing except contemptuous gazes and catcalls. Good for nothings! Villains! Cowards! Bastards!
While I was used to such slings and arrows, the General was not. When we finally stopped outside our barracks, the expression on his face was one of horror. He was disheveled, the stars torn from his collar, his sleeves ripped, half his buttons gone, and bleeding from scratches on his cheek and neck. I can’t go in there like this, he whispered. Wait in the showers, sir, I said. I’ll find you some new clothes. I requisitioned a spare shirt and pants from officers in the barracks, explaining my own bruised and tattered condition as being the result of a run-in with our ill-humored competitors in the Military Security Service. When I went to the showers, the General was standing at a sink, his face rinsed clean of everything except the shame.
General—
Shut up! The only person he was looking at was himself in the mirror. We will never speak of this again.
And we never did.

The next day we buried Linh and Duc. Their cold bodies had lain in a naval morgue overnight, cause of death now official: a single slug, type unknown. The bullet would forever spin in Bon’s mind on a perpetual axis, taunting and haunting him with the even chance of coming from friend or foe. He wore a white scarf of mourning around his head, ripped from his bedsheet. After we had lowered Duc’s small coffin on top of his mother’s, both to share the one home for eternity, Bon threw himself into their open grave. Why? he howled, cheek against the wooden crate. Why them? Why not me? Why, God? Weeping myself, I climbed in the grave to calm him down. After I helped him out, we heaped the earth onto the coffins while the General, the Madame, and the exhausted priest watched silently. They were innocents, these two, especially my godson, who was probably the closest I would get to having a real son. With every strike of the iron shovel against the small mound of loamy earth, waiting to be poured back into the cavity from which it had been extracted, I tried believing that those two bodies were not truly dead but simply rags, shed by emigrants journeying to a land beyond human cartography where angels dwelled. Thus my sacerdotal father believed; but thus I could not.
Over the next few days, we wept and we waited. Sometimes, for variety, we waited and we wept. Just when the self-flagellation was beginning to wear me down, we were picked up and shuttled on to Camp Pendleton in San Diego, California, this time via an airliner where I sat in a real seat with a real window. Awaiting us was another refugee camp, its higher grade of amenities evidence that we were already profiting from the upward mobility of the American Dream. Whereas on Guam most of the refugees had lived under tents hastily erected by the marines, in Camp Pendleton we all had barracks, a boot camp to gird us for the rigors of learning Americana. It was here, during the summer of ’75, that I wrote the first of my letters to Man’s aunt in Paris. Of course, as I composed my letters, I was writing to Man. If I started a letter with a few tropes we had agreed on—the weather, my health, the aunt’s health, French politics—then he would know that written in between the lines was another message in invisible ink. If such a trope was absent, then what he saw was all there was to see. But that first year in America, there was not much need for steganography, the exiled soldiers hardly in any condition to foment a counterstrike. This was useful intelligence, but not one needing secrecy.
Dear Aunt, I wrote, pretending she was mine, I regret having to tell you something horrible as my first words to you in so long. Bon was not in a good state. At night, as I lay sleepless in my bunk, he tossed and turned in the rack above, his memories grilling him alive. I could see what flickered on the interior of his skull, the face of Man, our blood brother whom he was convinced we had abandoned, and the faces of Linh and Duc, their blood on his hands and mine, literally. Bon would have starved to death if I had not dragged him from his bunk to the mess hall, where we ate tasteless chow at communal tables. Along with thousands of others that summer, we also bathed in showers that lacked stalls and lived with strangers in barracks. The General was not exempted from these experiences, and I passed a great deal of time with him in the quarters he shared with Madame and their four children, along with three other families. Junior officers and brats, he muttered to me on one visit. This is what I’ve been reduced to! Sheets strung up on clotheslines divided the barracks into family quarters, but they did little to shield the delicate ears of Madame and the children. These animals are having sex day and night, he growled as he sat with me on the cement stoop. Each of us was smoking a cigarette and sipping from a mug of tea, which was what we had instead of even the cheapest liquor. They have no shame! In front of their own children and mine. You know what my eldest asked me the other day? Daddy, what’s a prostitute? She saw some woman selling herself down by the latrines!
Across the lane from us, in another barracks, a spat between a husband and wife that had started with the usual name-calling suddenly erupted into a full-blown fight. We saw none of it but heard the unmistakable sound of flesh being slapped, followed by the woman screaming. A small crowd of people soon gathered outside the doorway of the barracks. The General sighed. Animals! But among all this, some good news. He extracted a newspaper clipping from his pocket and handed it to me. Remember him? Shot himself. That’s good news? I asked, fingering the article. He was a hero, the General said, or so I wrote my aunt. It was an old article, published a few days after the fall of Saigon and mailed to the General by a friend in another refugee holding pen in Arkansas. The centerpiece was a photograph of the dead man, flat on his back at the base of the memorial the General had saluted. He could have been resting on a hot day, looking up at a sky as blue as a jazz singer, except the caption said he had committed suicide. While we were flying to Guam, with tanks entering the city, the lieutenant colonel had come to the memorial, drawn his service pistol, and drilled a hole in his balding head.
A real hero, I said. He had a wife and a number of children, how many I could not recall. I had neither liked him nor disliked him, and while I had considered his name for evacuation, I had passed him over. A feather of guilt tickled the back of my neck. I didn’t know he was capable of doing that, I said. If I had known . . .
If any one of us could have known. But who could have? Don’t blame yourself. I’ve had many men die under my watch. I’ve felt bad for each one, but death is a part of our business. It may very well be our turn one day. Let’s just remember him as the martyr he is.
We toasted with tea to the lieutenant colonel’s memory. Except for this one act, he was not a hero, so far as I knew. Perhaps the General also sensed this, for the next thing he said was, We could certainly have used him alive.
For what?
Keeping an eye on what the communists are doing. Just as they’re probably keeping an eye on what we’re doing. Have you done any thinking about that?
About how they’re keeping an eye on us?
Exactly. Sympathizers. Spies in our ranks. Sleeper agents.
It’s possible, I said, palms damp. They’re devious and smart enough to do it.
So who’s a likely candidate? The General looked at me intently, or perhaps he was staring at me in suspicion. He had his mug in hand and I kept it in my peripheral vision as I met his gaze. If he tried to crack me over the head with it, I’d have half a second to react. The Viet Cong had agents everywhere, he continued. It just makes sense there would be one of them with us.
You really think one of our own men could be a spy? By now the only part of me not sweating were my eyeballs. What about military intelligence? Or the general staff?
You can’t think of anybody? His eyes never left my own cool ones, while his hand still gripped the mug. I had a sip of cold tea left in mine and I took it now. An X-ray of my skull would have shown a hamster running furiously in an exercise wheel, trying to generate ideas. If I said I did not suspect anyone, when he clearly did, it would look bad for me. In a paranoid imagination, only spies denied the existence of spies. So I had to name a suspect, someone who would sidetrack him but who would not be an actual spy. The first person who came to mind was the crapulent major, whose name had the desired effect.
Him? The General frowned and at last stopped looking at me. He studied his knuckles instead, distracted by my unlikely suggestion. He’s so fat he needs a mirror to see his own belly button. I think your instincts are off for once, Captain.
Perhaps they are, I said, pretending to be embarrassed. I gave him my pack of cigarettes to divert him and returned to my barracks to report the gist of our conversation to my aunt, minus the uninteresting parts about my fear, trembling, sweating, etc. Fortunately, we were not much longer for the camp, where little existed to alleviate the General’s rage. Shortly after arriving in San Diego, I had written to my former professor, Avery Wright Hammer, seeking his help in leaving the camp. He was Claude’s college roommate and the person Claude had told about a promising young Vietnamese student who needed a scholarship to come study in America. Not only did Professor Hammer find that scholarship for me, he also became my most important teacher after Claude and Man. It was the professor who had guided my American studies and who had agreed to venture out of his field to supervise my senior thesis, “Myth and Symbol in the Literature of Graham Greene.” Now that good man leaped to action once again on my behalf, volunteering to be my sponsor and, by the middle of the summer, arranging a clerical position for me in the Department of Oriental Studies. He even took up a collection on my behalf among my former teachers, a grand gesture that moved me deeply. That sum, I wrote to my aunt at summer’s end, paid for my bus ticket to Los Angeles, a few nights in a motel, the deposit on an apartment near Chinatown, and a used ’64 Ford. Once situated, I canvassed my neighborhood churches for anyone who would sponsor Bon, religious and charitable organizations having proven sympathetic to the refugee plight. I came across the Everlasting Church of Prophets, which, despite its impressive name, plied its spiritual wares out of a humble storefront flanked by a bottom-feeding auto body shop and a vacant blacktop lot inhabited by heroin zealots. With minimal persuasion and a modest cash donation, the rotund Reverend Ramon, or R-r-r-r-amon as he introduced himself, agreed to be Bon’s sponsor and nominal employer. By September and just in time for the academic year, Bon and I were reunited in genteel poverty in our apartment. Then, with what remained of my sponsor’s money, I went to a downtown pawnshop and bought the last of life’s necessities, a radio and a television.
As for the General and Madame, they, too, ended up in Los Angeles, sponsored by the sister-in-law of an American colonel who had once been the General’s adviser. Instead of a villa, they rented a bungalow in a slightly less tony part of Los Angeles, the city’s flabby midriff, Hollywood adjacent.

Every time I dropped by for the next several months, as I wrote to my aunt, I found him still mired in a profound funk. He was unemployed and no longer a general, although his former officers all hailed him as such. During our visits, he consumed an embarrassingly varied assortment of cheap beer and wine, vacillating between fury and melancholy as one might imagine Richard Nixon to be doing not far away. Sometimes he choked on his emotions so badly I feared I would have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him. It was not that there was nothing for him to do with his time. It was that Madame was the one who found schools for the children, wrote the rent check, shopped for groceries, cooked the meals, washed the dishes, cleaned the bathrooms, found a church—in short, undertook all the menial tasks of household drudgery that, for her entire cocooned existence, someone else had managed. She attended to these tasks with a grim grace, in short order becoming the house’s resident dictator, the General merely a figurehead who occasionally bellowed at his children like one of those dusty lions in the zoo undergoing a midlife crisis. They lived in this fashion for most of the year before the credit line of her patience finally reached its limit. I was not privy to the conversations they must have had, but one day at the beginning of April I received an invitation to the grand opening of his new business on Hollywood Boulevard, a liquor store whose existence in the Cyclopean eye of the IRS meant that the General had finally conceded to a basic tenet of the American Dream. Not only must he make a living, he must also pay for it, as I myself was already doing as the dour face of the Department of Oriental Studies.
My job was to serve as the first line of defense against students who sought audiences with the secretary or the Department Chair, some addressing me by name though we had never met. I was a moderate celebrity on campus because of the feature the student newspaper had run on me, a graduate of the college, member of the dean’s list and honor roll, sole Vietnamese student in the history of my alma mater, and now rescued refugee. The article also mentioned my soldiering experience, although it was not quite accurate. What did you do? the budding journalist had asked. He was a skittish sophomore with braces on his teeth and teeth marks on his yellow no. 2 pencil. I was a quartermaster, I said. A boring job. Tracking supplies and rations, making sure the troops had uniforms and boots. So you never killed anyone? Never. And that, indeed, was the truth, even if the rest of my interview was not. A college campus was a bad place to acknowledge my service record. First, I was an infantry officer in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, where I had begun serving the General when he was a colonel. Then, when he became a general and took charge of the National Police, which was in need of some military discipline, I, too, moved with him. To say that one saw combat, much less was involved with the Special Branch, was a delicate topic on most college campuses even now. The campus had not been exempt from the antiwar fervor that had blazed like a religious revival through collegiate life when I was a student. On many college campuses including my own, Ho Ho Ho was not the signature call of Santa Claus, but was instead the beginning of a popular chant that went Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win! I envied the students their naked political passion, for I had to submerge my own in order to play the role of a good citizen from the Republic of Vietnam. By the time I returned to campus, however, the students were of a new breed, not interested in politics or the world like the previous generation. Their tender eyes were no longer exposed daily to stories and pictures of atrocity and terror for which they might have felt responsible, given that they were citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it. Most important, their lives were no longer at stake because of the draft. The campus had, as a result, returned to its peaceful and quiet nature, its optimistic disposition marred only by the occasional spring shower thrumming on my office window. My hodgepodge of tasks, for which I was paid minimum wage, involved answering the phone, typing professorial manuscripts, filing documents, and fetching books, as well as helping the secretary, Ms. Sofia Mori of the rhinestoned, horn-rimmed glasses. These things, perfectly suitable for a student, amounted to death by a thousand paper cuts for me. To compound matters, Ms. Mori did not seem to like me.
It’s nice to know you never killed anybody, she said not long after we met. Her sympathies were obvious, a peace symbol dangling from her key chain. Not for the first time, I longed to tell someone that I was one of them, a sympathizer with the Left, a revolutionary fighting for peace, equality, democracy, freedom, and independence, all the noble things my people had died for and I had hid for. But if you had killed someone, she said, you wouldn’t tell anybody, would you?
Would you, Ms. Mori?
I don’t know. She swiveled her chair with a twist of her womanly hips, turning her back to me. My small desk was tucked into a corner, and from here I shuffled papers and notes in a pretense of labor, the tasks not enough to fill my eight-hour days. As expected, I had smiled dutifully at my desk when the student journalist photographed me, aware I would be on the front page, yellow teeth appearing white in the black-and-white photograph. I was doing my best imitation of a Third World child on one of those milk cartons passed around elementary schools for American children to deposit their pennies and dimes in order to help poor Alejandro, Abdullah, or Ah Sing have a hot lunch and an immunization. And I was thankful, truly! But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid. Fearful of being seen as an ingrate, I focused on making enough subtle noise to please but not distract Ms. Mori of the avocado-green polyester slacks, my pseudo-work interrupted periodically by the need to run errands or to come to the adjoining office of the Department Chair.
As no one on the faculty possessed any knowledge of our country, the Chair enjoyed engaging me in long discussions of our culture and language. Hovering somewhere between seventy and eighty years old, the Chair nestled in an office feathered with the books, papers, notes, and tchotchkes accumulated over a lifetime career devoted to the study of the Orient. He had hung an elaborate Oriental rug on his wall, in lieu, I suppose, of an actual Oriental. On his desk facing anyone who entered was a gilt-framed picture of his family, a brown-haired cherub and an Asian wife somewhere between one-half and two-thirds his age. She was not exactly beautiful but could hardly help but look beautiful next to the bow-tied Chair, the tight neck of her scarlet cheongsam squeezing the bubble of a smile to her frosted lips.
Her name is Ling Ling, he said, seeing my gaze rest on the picture. Decades of hunching over a desk had bent the great Orientalist’s back into the shape of a horseshoe, thrusting his head forward in the inquisitorial fashion of a dragon. I met my wife in Taiwan where her family had fled from Mao. Our son is considerably bigger now than in that picture. As you can see, his mother’s genes are more resilient, which is not to be unexpected. Blond hair fades when mixed with black. He said all this during our fifth or sixth conversation, when we had achieved a certain degree of intimacy. As usual, he reclined in an overstuffed leather club chair that enfolded him like the generous lap of a black mammy. I was equally enveloped in the chair’s twin, sucked backward by the slope and softness of the leather, my arms on the rests like Lincoln on his memorial throne. A metaphor to explain the situation is available in our own Californian landscape, he continued, where foreign weeds choke to death much of our native foliage. Mixing native flora with a foreign plant oftentimes has tragic consequences, as your own experience may have taught you.
Yes, it has, I said, reminding myself that I needed my minimum wage.
Ah, the Amerasian, forever caught between worlds and never knowing where he belongs! Imagine if you did not suffer from the confusion you must constantly experience, feeling the constant tug-of- war inside you and over you, between Orient and Occident. “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” as Kipling so accurately diagnosed. This was one of his favorite themes, and he had even concluded one of our meetings by giving me a homework assignment to test Kipling’s point. I was to take a sheet of paper and fold it in half vertically. On the top, I was to write Orient on the left and Occident on the right. Then I was to write down my Oriental and Occidental qualities. Imagine this exercise as an indexing of yourself, the Chair had said. My students of Oriental ancestry inevitably find this beneficial.
At first I thought he was playing a joke on me, since the day he gave me the task was the first of April, the occasion for that funny Western custom called April Fools’ Day. But he was looking at me quite seriously and I remembered that he did not have a sense of humor. So I went home and after some thought came up with this:
ORIENT OCCIDENT
self-effacing occasionally opinionated respectful of authority sometimes independent worried about others’ opinions now and then carefree usually quiet talkative (with a drink or two)
always trying to please once or twice have not given a damn teacup is half empty glass is half full
say yes when I mean no say what I mean, do what I say almost always look to the past once in a while look to the future prefer to follow yet yearn to lead
comfortable in a crowd but ready to take the stage deferential to elders value my youth
self-sacrificial live to fight another day
follow my ancestors forget my ancestors!
straight black hair limpid brown eyes short (for an Occidental) tall (for an Oriental) somewhat yellowish white somewhat palish yellow
When I shared this exercise with him the next day, he said, Splendid! A fine beginning. You are a good student, as all Orientals are. Despite myself, I felt a small surge of pride. Like all good students, I yearned for nothing but approval, even from fools. But there is a drawback, he continued. See how so many of the Oriental qualities diametrically oppose the Occidental? In the West, many Oriental qualities unfortunately take on a negative cast. This leads to the severe problems of identity suffered by Americans of Oriental ancestry, at least those born or raised here. They feel themselves out of place. They are not so different from yourself, also split down the middle. What, then, is the cure? Is the Oriental in the West to feel forever homeless, a stranger, a foreigner, no matter how many generations lived on the soil of Judeo-Christian culture, never able to do away with the Confucian residue of his ancient, noble heritage? This is where you, as the Amerasian, offer hope.
I knew he meant to be kind, so I did my best to keep a straight face. Me?
Yes, you! You embody the symbiosis of Orient and Occident, the possibility that out of two can come one. We can no more separate the physical Oriental from you than we can separate the physical Occidental. Likewise with your psychic components. But while you are out of place today, in the future you will be the average! Look at my Amerasian child. A hundred years ago, he would have been seen as a monstrosity, whether in China or in America. Today, the Chinese would still see him as anomalous, but here we have made steady progress forward, not as fast as you or I would like, yet enough to hope that when he reaches your age no opportunity will be denied him. Born on this soil, he could even be president! There are more of you and he than you can probably imagine, but most are ashamed and seek to disappear in the foliage of American life. But your numbers are growing, and democracy gives you the best chance of finding your voice. Here you can learn how not to be torn apart by your opposing sides, but rather to balance them and benefit from both. Reconcile your divided allegiances and you will be the ideal translator between two sides, a goodwill ambassador to bring opposing nations to peace!
Me?
Yes, you! You must assiduously cultivate those reflexes that Americans have learned innately, in order to counterweigh your Oriental instincts.
I couldn’t help myself any longer. Like yin and yang? Exactly!
I cleared my throat of a sour taste, the gastric reflux of my confused Oriental and Occidental insides. Professor?
Hmm?
Would it make any difference if I told you I was actually Eurasian, not Amerasian? The Chair regarded me kindly and took out his pipe.
No, dear boy, absolutely not.
On the way home, I stopped off at the grocery store and bought white bread, salami, a plastic liter of vodka, cornstarch, and iodine. I would have preferred rice starch for sentiment’s sake, but cornstarch was easier to obtain. Once home, I put away the groceries and stuck the paper with my divided self to the refrigerator. Even poor people in America had refrigerators, not to mention running water, flush toilets, and twenty-four-hour electricity, amenities that even some of the middle class did not have back home. Why, then, did I feel poor? Perhaps it had something to do with my living situation. Home was a dismal one-bedroom, first-floor apartment whose most characteristic feature was the pervasive odor of belly lint, or so I wrote to my aunt. On that day as on every day previously, I found Bon listless with grief on the long tongue of our red velour sofa. The only time he left was to tend to his part-time night job as janitor for the Reverend R-r-r-r-amon’s church, which aimed to save money while saving souls. To that end, and proving that one could serve God and Mammon at the same time, the church paid Bon his wages in untaxable cash. With no reportable income, Bon was eligible for welfare, which he received with only a marginal degree of shame and a considerable sense of entitlement. Having served his country for a pittance, fighting an American-determined war, he sensibly concluded that welfare was a better reward than a medal. He had no choice but to accept his lot, for no one had a need for a man who could jump out of airplanes, hump thirty miles with eighty pounds of kit, nail a bull’s-eye with pistol and rifle, and absorb more punishment than one of those masked and oiled professional wrestlers on television.
On days when Bon collected the government handout, days like today, he spent the cash on a case of beer and the food stamps on a week’s supply of frozen meals. I opened the refrigerator to collect my beer ration and joined Bon in the living room, where he had already machine-gunned himself with a half-dozen cans, the empty shells scattered on the carpet. He was on his back on the couch, holding another cold can to his forehead. I dropped into the nicest piece of furniture we had, a patched but serviceable La-Z-Boy recliner, and switched on the television. The beer had the color and taste of baby’s pee, but we followed our usual routine and drank with joyless discipline until we both passed out. I woke up in the perineum of time between the very late hours of the evening and the very early hours of the morning, grotty sponge in my mouth, frightened by the severed head of a gigantic insect gaping its jaws at me until I realized it was only the wood-paneled television, its twin antennae drooping. The national anthem blared as the Stars and Stripes waved and blended with sweeping shots of majestic purple mountains and soaring fighter jets. When the curtain of static and snow finally fell on the screen, I dragged myself to the mossy, toothless mouth of the toilet, then to the lower rack of the bunk beds in the narrow bedroom. Bon had already found his way to the upper rack. I lay down and imagined we slumbered like soldiers even though the only place near Chinatown where one could buy bunk beds was the children’s section of gaudy furniture stores, overseen by Mexicans or people who looked like Mexicans. I could not tell anyone from the Southern Hemisphere apart but assumed they would take no offense, given that they themselves called me Chino to my face.
An hour passed but I was unable to return to sleep. I went to the kitchen and ate a salami sandwich while I reread the letter from my aunt that had arrived yesterday. Dear nephew, she wrote, thanks so much for your last letter. The weather has been terrible recently, very chilly and windy. The letter detailed her struggles with her roses, the customers at her shop, the positive outcome of her doctor’s visit, but nothing was as important as the signal about the weather, telling me that between the lines was a message from Man in an invisible ink concocted from rice starch. Tomorrow, when Bon was gone for his few hours to clean the reverend’s church, I would make a solution of iodine in water that I would brush onto the letter to reveal a series of numbers in purple ink. They referred to page, line, and word of Richard Hedd’s Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction, the cipher Man had so artfully chosen and now the most important book in my life. From Man’s invisible messages, I had learned that the spirits of the people were high, that the rebuilding of the country was progressing slowly but surely, and that his superiors were pleased with my reporting. Why would they not be? Nothing was happening among the exiles except tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth. I hardly needed to write that in the invisible ink I would make from cornstarch and water.
Somewhat hungover and somewhat sentimental, this month being the first anniversary of Saigon’s fall, or liberation, or both, I wrote my aunt a letter to commemorate a year’s worth of tribulation. Although I left as much by choice as by circumstance, I confess that I could not help but feel pity for my sorry countrymen, their germs of loss passed back and forth until I, too, walked around light- headed in the fog bank of memory. My dear aunt, so much has happened. The letter was a rambling history of the exiles since their departure from camp, told from their teary-eyed point of view, the telling of which stirred tears in me as well. I wrote about how none of us was released without the helping hand of a sponsor, whose job it was to guarantee that we would not become dependent on the welfare state. Those among us without immediate benefactors wrote pleading letters to companies that once employed us, to soldiers who once advised us, to lovers who once slept with us, to churches that might take pity, even to the merest of acquaintances, hoping for sponsorship. Some of us left alone, some of us left as families, some of our families were divvied up and parceled out, some of us got to stay in warm western climes that reminded us of home, but most were dispatched far away to states whose names we could not wrap our tongues around: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and so on. We spoke of our new geography in our own version of English, each syllable stressed, Chicago becoming Chick-ah-go, New York pronounced closer to New-ark, Texas broken down to Tex-ass, California now Ca-li. Before leaving camp, we exchanged the phone numbers and addresses of our new destinations, knowing we would need the refugee telegraph system to discover which city had the best jobs, which state had the lowest taxes, where the best welfare benefits were, where the least racism was, where the most people who looked like us and ate like us lived.
If allowed to stay together, I told my aunt, we could have incorporated ourselves into a respectably sized, self-sufficient colony, a pimple on the buttocks of the American body politic, with ready-made politicians, police officers, and soldiers, with our own bankers, salesmen, and engineers, with doctors, lawyers, and accountants, with cooks, cleaners, and maids, with factory owners, mechanics, and clerks, with thieves, prostitutes, and murderers, with writers, singers, and actors, with geniuses, teachers, and the insane, with priests, nuns, and monks, with Buddhists, Catholics, and the Cao Dai, with people from the north, the center, and the south, with the talented, the mediocre, and the stupid, with patriots, traitors, and neutralists, with the honest, the corrupt, and the indifferent, sufficiently collective to elect our own representative to the Congress and have a voice in our America, a Little Saigon as delightful, delirious, and dysfunctional as the original, which was exactly why we were not allowed to stay together but were instead dispersed by bureaucratic fiat to all the longitudes and latitudes of our new world. Wherever we found ourselves, we found each other, small clans gathering in basements, in churches, in backyards on the weekends, at beaches where we brought our own food and drink in grocery bags rather than buying from the more expensive concessions. We did our best to conjure up the culinary staples of our culture, but since we were dependent on Chinese markets our food had an unacceptably Chinese tinge, another blow in the gauntlet of our humiliation that left us with the sweet-and-sour taste of unreliable memories, just correct enough to evoke the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone, missing along with the proper variety, subtlety, and complexity of our universal solvent, fish sauce. Oh, fish sauce! How we missed it, dear Aunt, how nothing tasted right without it, how we longed for the grand cru of Phu Quoc Island and its vats brimming with the finest vintage of pressed anchovies! This pungent liquid condiment of the darkest sepia hue was much denigrated by foreigners for its supposedly horrendous reek, lending new meaning to the phrase “there’s something fishy around here,” for we were the fishy ones. We used fish sauce the way Transylvanian villagers wore cloves of garlic to ward off vampires, in our case to establish a perimeter with those Westerners who could never understand that what was truly fishy was the nauseating stench of cheese. What was fermented fish compared to curdled milk?
But out of deference to our hosts we kept our feelings to ourselves, sitting close to one another on prickly sofas and scratchy carpets, our knees touching under crowded kitchen tables on which sat crenellated ashtrays measuring time’s passage with the accumulation of ashes, chewing on dried squid and the cud of remembrance until our jaws ached, trading stories heard second- and thirdhand about our scattered countrymen. This was the way we learned of the clan turned into slave labor by a farmer in Modesto, and the naive girl who flew to Spokane to marry her GI sweetheart and was sold to a brothel, and the widower with nine children who went out into a Minnesotan winter and lay down in the snow on his back with mouth open until he was buried and frozen, and the ex-Ranger who bought a gun and dispatched his wife and two children before killing himself in Cleveland, and the regretful refugees on Guam who petitioned to go back to our homeland, never to be heard from again, and the spoiled girl seduced by heroin who disappeared into the Baltimore streets, and the politician’s wife demoted to cleaning bedpans in a nursing home who one day snapped, attacked her husband with a kitchen knife, then was committed to a mental ward, and the quartet of teenagers who arrived without families and fell in together in Queens, robbing two liquor stores and killing a clerk before being imprisoned for twenty years to life, and the devout Buddhist who spanked his young son and was arrested for child abuse in Houston, and the proprietor who accepted food stamps for chopsticks and was fined for breaking the law in San Jose, and the husband who slapped his wife and was jailed for domestic violence in Raleigh, and the men who had escaped but left wives behind in the chaos, and the women who had escaped but left husbands behind, and the children who had escaped without parents and grandparents, and the families missing one, two, three, or more children, and the half dozen who went to sleep in a crowded, freezing room in Terre Haute with a charcoal brazier for heat and never woke up, borne to permanent darkness on an invisible cloud of carbon monoxide. Sifting through the dirt, we panned for gold, the story of the baby orphan adopted by a Kansas billionaire, or the mechanic who bought a lottery ticket in Arlington and became a multimillionaire, or the girl elected president of her high school class in Baton Rouge, or the boy accepted by Harvard from Fond du Lac, the soil of Camp Pendleton still in the tracks of his sneakers, or the movie star you love so much, dear Aunt, who circled the world from airport to airport, no country letting her in after the fall of Saigon, none of her American movie star friends returning her desperate phone calls until with her last dime she snagged Tippi Hedren, who flew her to Hollywood. So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 5

Having read many confessions myself, and bearing in mind your notes on what I have confessed thus far, I suspect, my dear Commandant, that this confession is not what you are most likely used to reading. I cannot blame you for the unusual qualities of my confession—only me. I am guilty of honesty, which was rarely the case in my adult life. Why begin now, in these circumstances, a solitary chamber of three by five meters? Perhaps because I do not understand why I am here. At least when I was a sleeper agent, I understood why I had to live my life in code. But not now. If I am to be condemned—if I am already condemned, as I suspect—then I will do no less than explain myself, in a style of my own choosing, regardless of how you might consider my actions.
I should get credit, I think, for the real dangers and petty bothers that I endured. I lived like a bonded servant, a refugee whose only job perk was the opportunity to receive welfare. I barely even had the opportunity to sleep, since a sleeper agent is almost constantly afflicted with insomnia. Perhaps James Bond could slumber peacefully on the bed of nails that was a spy’s life, but I could not. Ironically, it was my most spy-like task to date that could always put me to sleep, the decoding of Man’s messages and the encoding of my own in invisible ink. As each dispatch was painstakingly coded word by word, it behooved sender and receiver to keep messages as brief as possible, and the one that I decoded the next evening from Man said simply: Good work, Deflect attention from yourself, and All subversives now detained.
I saved encoding my response until after the grand opening of the General’s liquor store, which, the General said, Claude would be attending. We had spoken a few times by phone but I had not seen Claude since Saigon. There was another reason the General wanted to see me in person, however, or so Bon reported a few days later on returning from the store. He had just been hired as the store’s clerk, a job he could manage while also cleaning the reverend’s church part-time. I had urged the General to hire Bon, and was glad that he would now spend more hours on his feet than on his back. What does he want to see me for? I said. Bon opened the refrigerator’s arthritic jaw and extracted the most beautiful decorative object in our possession, a gleaming silver cylinder of Schlitz. There’s an informer in the ranks. Beer?
I’ll take two.
The grand opening would be at the end of April, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the fall, or liberation, or both, of Saigon. It fell on a Friday, and I had to ask Ms. Mori, she of the sensible shoes, if I could leave work early. Although I would not have asked for this favor in September, by April our relationship had taken an unexpected turn. In the months after I started working with her, we had gradually surveilled each other on smoking breaks, on the chats that naturally occur between office mates, and then after work at cocktail hours far from campus. Ms. Mori was not as hostile to me as I had supposed. In fact, we had become rather friendly, if that was the word to describe the sweaty, condomless intercourse we engaged in once or twice per week at her apartment in the Crenshaw neighborhood, the furtive fornication committed once or twice per week in the Department Chair’s office, and the nocturnal relations staged on the squeaky backseat of my Ford.
As she explained after our first romantic interlude, it was my reasonable, kind, good-hearted manner that had eventually persuaded her to invite me for a drink “whenever.” I had taken up the invitation a few days later at a tiki bar in Silver Lake, frequented by heavyset men in Hawaiian shirts and women whose denim skirts barely harnessed their generous rumps. Flaming tiki torches flanked the entrance, while inside, ominous masks of some unknown Pacific Island origin were pinned to the planked wall, their lips seeming to say, Ooga booga. Table lamps in the shape of bare-breasted, brown-skinned hula girls in grass skirts cast an ambient glow. The waitress likewise wore a grass skirt whose faded straw color matched her hair, her bikini top fashioned from polished coconuts. Sometime after our third round, Ms. Mori cupped her chin with her right hand, elbow on the bar, and allowed me to light her cigarette, which, in my opinion, was one of the most erotic acts of foreplay a man can perform for a woman. She drank and smoked like a movie starlet from a screwball comedy, one of those dames with padded bras and shoulder pads who spoke in a second language of innuendo and double entendre. Looking me in the eye, she said, I have a confession. I smiled and hoped my dimples impressed her. I like confessions, I said. There’s something mysterious about you, she said. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that you’re tall, dark, and handsome. You’re just dark and sort of cute. At first, hearing about you and meeting you the first time, I thought, Great, here’s an Uncle Tom-a-san, a real sellout, a total whitewash. He’s not a cracker, but he’s close. He’s a rice cracker. The way you get along with the gaijin! White people love you, don’t they? They only like me. They think I’m a dainty little china doll with bound feet, a geisha who’s ready to please. But I don’t talk enough for them to love me, or at least I don’t talk the right way. I can’t put on the whole sukiyaki-and-sayonara show they love, the chopsticks in the hair kind of mumbo jumbo, all that Suzie Wong bullshit, like every white man who comes along is William Holden or Marlon Brando, even if he looks like Mickey Rooney. You, though. You can talk, and that counts for a lot. But it’s not just that. You’re a great listener. You’ve mastered the inscrutable Oriental smile, sitting there nodding and wrinkling your brow sympathetically and letting people go on, thinking you’re perfectly in agreement with everything they say, all without saying a word yourself. What do you say to that?
Ms. Mori, I said, I am shocked by what I am hearing. I’ll bet, she said. Call me Sofia, for Chrissakes. I’m not your girlfriend’s over-the-hill mother. Get me another drink and light me another cigarette. I’m forty-six years old and I don’t care who knows it, but what I will tell you is that when a woman is forty-six and has lived her life the way she’s wanted to live it, she knows everything there is to know about what to do in the sack. It’s got nothing to do with the Kama Sutra or The Carnal Prayer Mat or any of that Oriental hocus-pocus of our beloved Department Chair. You’ve worked for him for six years, I said. And don’t I know it, she said. Is it just my imagination, or does every time he opens the door to his office a gong goes off somewhere? And does he smoke tobacco in his office, or is that incense in his bowl? I can’t help but feel he’s a little disappointed in me because I don’t bow whenever I see him. When he interviewed me, he wanted to know whether I spoke any Japanese. I explained that I was born in Gardena. He said, Oh, you nisei, as if knowing that one word means he knows something about me. You’ve forgotten your culture, Ms. Mori, even though you’re only second generation. Your issei parents, they hung on to their culture. Don’t you want to learn Japanese? Don’t you want to visit Nippon? For a long time I felt bad. I wondered why I didn’t want to learn Japanese, why I didn’t already speak Japanese, why I would rather go to Paris or Istanbul or Barcelona rather than Tokyo. But then I thought, Who cares? Did anyone ask John F. Kennedy if he spoke Gaelic and visited Dublin or if he ate potatoes every night or if he collected paintings of leprechauns? So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn’t my culture right here since I was born here? Of course I didn’t ask him those questions. I just smiled and said, You’re so right, sir. She sighed. It’s a job. But I’ll tell you something else. Ever since I got it straight in my head that I haven’t forgotten a damn thing, that I damn well know my culture, which is American, and my language, which is English, I’ve felt like a spy in that man’s office. On the surface, I’m just plain old Ms. Mori, poor little thing who’s lost her roots, but underneath, I’m Sofia and you better not fuck with me.
I cleared my throat. Ms. Mori? Hmm?
I think I’m falling in love with you.

It’s Sofia, she said. And let’s get one thing straight, playboy. If we get involved, and that’s a big if, there are no strings attached. You do not fall in love with me and I do not fall in love with you. She exhaled twin plumes of smoke. Just so you know, I do not believe in marriage but I do believe in free love.
What a coincidence, I said. So do I.
According to Benjamin Franklin, as Professor Hammer taught me a decade ago, an older mistress was a wonderful thing, or so the Founding Father advised a younger man. I can’t recall the entire substance of the American Sage’s letter, only two points. The first: older mistresses were “so grateful!!” Perhaps true of many, but not of Ms. Mori. If anything, she expected me to be grateful, and I was. I had been resigned to the consolation of man’s best friend, i.e., self-pleasure, and certainly did not possess the wherewithal to consort with prostitutes. Now I had free love, its existence an affront not only to a capitalism corseted, or perhaps chastity-locked, by its ethnic Protestant justifications, but also alien to a communism with Confucian character. This is one of the drawbacks to communism that I hope will eventually pass, the belief that every comrade is supposed to behave like a noble peasant whose hard hoe is devoted only to farming. Under Asian communism, everything but sex is free, since the sexual revolution has not yet happened in the East. The reasoning is that if one has enough sex to produce six or eight or a dozen offspring, as is generally the case for families in Asian countries (according to Richard Hedd), one hardly needs a revolution for more sex. Meanwhile, Americans, vaccinated against one revolution and thus resistant to another, are interested only in free love’s tropical sizzle, not its political fuse. Under Ms. Mori’s patient tutelage, however, I began to realize that true revolution also involved sexual liberation.
This insight was not so far off from Mr. Franklin’s. That sly old sybarite was well aware of the importance of the erotic to the political, wooing the ladies as much as the politicians in his bid for French assistance to the American Revolution. Therefore the gist of the First American’s letter to his young friend was correct: we should all have older mistresses. This is not as sexist as it sounds, for the implication was that older women should also bed younger studs. And if subtlety was not always present in the Old Goat’s missive, the randy truth was. Thus our fine man’s second point, namely that the gravity of age worked its way from the top downward with the years. This commenced with the facial features, then crept south to the neck, the breasts, the tummy, etc., so that an older mistress was plump and juicy where it counted long after her visage was dry and haggard, in which case one could simply put a basket on her head.
But there was no such need in Ms. Mori’s case, as her features were pleasantly ageless. The only thing that could have made me happier was a companion for Bon, who, so far as I knew, was also practicing his solo stroke. Always a shy one, he swallowed his pill of Catholicism seriously. He was more embarrassed and discreet about sex than about things I thought more difficult, like killing people, which pretty much defined the history of Catholicism, where sex of the homo, hetero, or pederastic variety supposedly never happened, hidden underneath the Vatican’s cassocks. Popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, and monks carrying on with women, girls, boys, and each other? Hardly ever discussed! Not that there was anything wrong with carrying on—it’s hypocrisy that stinks, not sex. But the Church torturing, murdering, crusading against, or infecting with disease millions of people in the name of our Lord the Savior, from Arabia to the Americas? Acknowledged with useless, pious regret, if even that.
As for me, it was the reverse. Ever since my fevered adolescence I had enjoyed myself with athletic diligence, using the same hand with which I crossed myself in mock prayer. This seed of sexual rebellion one day matured into my political revolution, disregarding all my father’s sermons about how onanism inevitably led to blindness, hairy palms, and impotence (he forgot to mention subversion). If I was going to Hell, so be it! Having made my peace with sinning against myself, sometimes on an hourly basis, it was only due time before I sinned with others. So it was that I committed my first unnatural act at thirteen with a gutted squid purloined from my mother’s kitchen, where it awaited its proper fate along with its companions. Oh, you poor, innocent, mute squid! You were the length of my hand, and when stripped of head, tentacles, and guts possessed the comely shape of a condom, not that I knew what that was then. Inside, you had the smooth, viscous consistency of what I imagined to be a vagina, not that I had ever seen such a marvelous thing besides those exhibited by the toddlers and infants wandering around totally naked or naked from the waist down in my town’s lanes and yards. This sight scandalized our French overlords, who saw this childhood nudity as evidence of our barbarism, which then justified their raping, pillaging, and looting, all sanctioned in the holy name of getting our children to wear some clothes so they would not be so tempting to decent Christians whose spirit and flesh were both in question. But I digress! Back to you, soon-to-be-ravished squid: when I poked my index and then middle finger inside your tight orifice, just out of curiosity, the suction was such that my restless imagination could not help but make the connection with the verboten female body part that had obsessed me for the past few months. Without bidding, and utterly beyond my control, my maniacal manhood leaped to attention, luring me forward to you, inviting, bewitching, come-hither squid! Although my mother would return soon from her errand, and while at any moment a neighbor might have walked by the lean-to of our kitchen and caught me with my cephalopodic bride, I nevertheless dropped my trousers. Hypnotized by my squid’s call and my erection’s response, I inserted the latter into the former, which was, unfortunately, a perfect fit. Unfortunate because from then onward no squid was safe from me, not to say that this diluted form of bestiality—after all, hapless squid, you were dead, though I now see how that raises other moral questions—not to say this transgression occurred often, since squid was a rare treat in our landlocked town. My father had given my mother the squid as a gift, as he himself ate well. Priests always had much attention lavished on them by their starstruck fans, those devout housewives and wealthy congregants who treated them as if they were guardians of the velvet rope blocking entrance into that ever so exclusive nightclub, Heaven. These fans invited them to dinner, cleaned their chambers, cooked their food, and bribed them with gifts of various kinds, including delectable, expensive seafood not meant for the likes of a poor woman like my mother. While I felt no shame at all for my shuddering ejaculation, an enormous burden of guilt fell on me as soon as my senses returned, not because of any moral violation, but because I could hardly bear depriving my mother of even a morsel of squid. We had only a half dozen, and she would notice one missing. What to do? What to do? A plan instantly came to my devious mind as I stood with the befuddled, deflowered squid in hand, my blasphemy leaking from its molested vulva. First, rinse the evidence of crime from the inert, abused squid. Second, cut shallow scars onto the skin to identify the victim squid. Then wait for dinner. My innocent mother returned to our miserable hut, stuffed the squid with ground pork, bean thread noodle, diced mushroom, and chopped ginger, then fried and served them with a ginger- lime dipping sauce. There on the plate reclined my beloved, forlorn odalisque, marked by my hand, and when my mother said to help myself I seized it instantly with my chopsticks to forestall any chance of my mother doing so. I paused, my mother’s expectant, loving eyes upon me, and then I dipped the squid into the ginger-lime sauce and took the first bite. Well? she said. De-de-delicious, I stammered. Good, but you should chew it rather than swallow it whole, son. Take your time. It will taste better that way. Yes, Mama, I said. And, bravely smiling, this obedient son slowly chewed and savored the rest of his defiled squid, its salty flavor mixed with his mother’s sweet love.
Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.” Still, while I was more lover than fighter, my political choices and police service eventually did force me to cultivate a side of myself I had used only once in my childhood, the violent side. Even as a secret policeman, however, I never used violence insomuch as I allowed others to use it in front of me. Only when unfavorable conditions squeezed me into situations from which my cleverness could not extract me did I permit this violence to happen. These situations were so unpleasant that the memories of those whom I had seen interrogated continued to hijack me with fanatic persistence: the wiry Montagnard with a wire twisted around his neck and a twisted grimace on his face; the stubborn terrorist in his white room and with his purple face, impervious to everything except the one thing; 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. These captured subversives had only one destination, but there were many unpleasant side roads to get there. When I arrived at the liquor store for the grand opening, I shared with these prisoners the dread certainty that snickered beneath the card tables of retirement homes. Someone was going to die. Perhaps me.
The liquor store was on the eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard, far from the camera-popping glamour of the Egyptian and Chinese theaters where the latest movies premiered. This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees, and Bon’s other function, besides clerking, was to intimidate any would-be robbers and shoplifters. He nodded at me impassively from the cash register, standing before a wall with shelves displaying primo brands, theft-worthy pint bottles, and, in a discreet corner, men’s magazines with airbrushed Lolitas on their covers. Claude’s in the storeroom with the General, Bon said. The storeroom was in the back, abuzz with overhead fluorescent lights, smelling of disinfectant and old cardboard. Claude rose from his vinyl chair and we embraced. He was heavier by a few pounds but otherwise unchanged, even wearing a rumpled sport jacket he used on occasion in Saigon.
Have a seat, the General said from behind his desk. The vinyl chairs squeaked obscenely when we moved. Cartons and crates hemmed us in on three sides. The General’s desk was cluttered with a rotary-dial phone heavy enough for self-defense, a stamp pad bleeding red ink, a receipt book with a blue sheet of carbon paper tucked between the pages, and a desk lamp with a broken neck, its head refusing to stay raised. When the General opened his desk drawer, my heart choked. Here it was! The moment when the rat would get a hammer to the head, a knife to the neck, a bullet in the temple, or possibly all of the above just for the fun of it. At least it would be quick, relatively speaking. Back in the European Dark Ages, according to the interrogation course that Claude had taught to the secret policemen in Saigon, I would have been drawn and quartered by horses, my head stuck on a pole for all to see. One royal humorist flayed his enemy alive and then stuffed the skin with straw, mounted it on a horse, and paraded it around town. What a laugh! I stopped breathing and waited for the General to pull out the pistol with which he was going to remove my brains in an unsurgical fashion, but all he extracted was a bottle of scotch and a pack of cigarettes.
Well, said Claude, I wish we were reuniting in better circumstances, gentlemen. I heard you had a hell of a time getting out of Dodge. That, the General said, is putting it mildly. And yourself? I said. I bet you got out on the last helicopter.
Let’s not be too dramatic, Claude said. He accepted the General’s offer of a cigarette and a tumbler of scotch. I got out a few hours earlier on the ambassador’s helicopter. He sighed. I’m never going to forget that day. We waited too damn long to get our act together. You were the last ones out on airplanes. The marines flew in on helicopters to get the rest of the people from the airport and the embassy. Air America was flying rescue choppers, too, but the problem was that everyone in town knew about our supposedly secret helipads. Turns out that we’d enlisted little Vietnamese ladies to paint those helipad numbers on the roofs. Smart, huh? Come the moment of truth, all those buildings were surrounded. The ones who were supposed to get to the helicopters couldn’t get to them. Same story at the airport, no way in. The docks, totally impassable. Even the buses going to the embassy couldn’t get in, since the embassy was mobbed by thousands. They were waving all kinds of paper. Marriage certificates, employment contracts, letters, even US passports. They were screaming. I know So-and-So, So-and-So can vouch for me, I’m married to a US citizen. None of that counted. The marines were on the wall and pounding anybody who tried to come up. You had to get close enough to give a marine a thousand dollars before he’d haul you up. We’d go up to the wall or to the gate every now and then and look for the people who worked for us and we’d point them out. If they got close, the marines yanked them up or opened the gates a bit to let just that person in. But sometimes we’d see people we knew in the middle of the crowd or on the fringes, and we’d wave at them to get to the wall, but they couldn’t. All those Vietnamese in front weren’t letting any Vietnamese in back get ahead. So we’d look and wave, and they’d look and wave, and then after a while we just looked away and left. Thank God I couldn’t hear them screaming, not over all that ruckus. I’d go back inside and have a drink, but it wasn’t any better. You should have heard the radio chatter. Help me, I’m a translator, we have seventy translators at this address, get us out. Help me, we have five hundred people at this compound, get us out. Help me, we have two hundred at logistics, get us out. Help me, we have a hundred at the CIA hotel, get us out. Guess what? None of those people got out. We’d told them to go to those places and wait for us. We had guys at those places and we called them and said, No one’s coming. Get yourselves out now and get to the embassy. Leave those people behind. Then there were the people outside the city. Agents all over the countryside were calling in. Help, I’m in Can Tho, the VC are closing in. Help, you left me in the U Minh Forest, what am I going to do, what about my family? Help me, get me out of here. They had no chance in hell. Even some of those in the embassy had no chance. We evacuated thousands, but when the last helicopter took off, there were still four hundred people waiting in the courtyard, all neatly arranged and waiting for helicopters we told them were still coming. None of them got out.
Christ, I need another drink even to talk about this. Thank you, General. He rubbed his eyes. All I can say is, it was personal. After I left you at the airport, I went back to my villa to get some sleep. I’d told Kim to meet me at dawn. She was going to get her family. Six comes along, six fifteen, six thirty, seven. The chief calls me up and wants to know where I am. I put him off. Seven fifteen, seven thirty, eight. The chief calls me back and says, Get your ass down to the embassy now, every man on deck. The hell with the chief, that Hungarian bastard. I grab my guns and drive across town to find Kim. Forget the daytime curfew, everyone was out and running around, trying to find a way out. The suburbs were quieter, though. Life was normal. I even saw Kim’s neighbors breaking out the commie flag. The previous week those same people were flying your flag. I asked them where she was. They said they didn’t know where the Yankee whore was. I wanted to shoot them then and there, but everybody on the street had turned out to look at me. I sure couldn’t wait for the local Viet Cong to come kidnap me. I drove back to the villa. Ten o’clock. She wasn’t there. I couldn’t wait any longer. I sat in the car and I cried. I haven’t cried over a girl in thirty years, but hell, there you have it. Then I drove to the embassy and saw there was no way in. Like I said, thousands of people. I left the keys in the ignition just like you did, General, and I hope some communist son of a bitch is enjoying himself with my Bel Air. Then I fought my way through the crowd. Those Vietnamese who wouldn’t let their own fellow Vietnamese through, they made way for me. Sure, I pushed and shoved and screamed, and plenty of them pushed and shoved and screamed right back, but I got closer, even though the closer I got, the tougher it was. I had made eye contact with the marines on the wall, and I knew if I could just get close enough I’d be saved. I was sweating like a pig, my shirt was torn, and all those bodies were packed against me. The people in front of me couldn’t see I was an American and no one was turning around just because I was tapping them on the shoulder, so I yanked them by the hair, or pulled them by the ear, or grabbed them by the shirt collar to haul them out of my way. I’ve never done anything like that in my life. I was too proud to scream at first, but it didn’t take long before I was screaming, too. Let me through, I’m an American, goddammit. I finally got myself to that wall, and when those marines reached down and grabbed my hand and pulled me up, I damn near cried again. Claude finished the last of his drink and banged the glass on the desk. I was never so ashamed in my life, but I was also never so goddamn glad to be an American, either.
We sat in silence while the General poured us each another double. Here’s to you, Claude, I said, raising my glass to him. Congratulations. For what? he said, raising his own.
Now you know what it feels like to be one of us. His laugh was short and bitter.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
The cue for the evacuation’s final phase was “White Christmas,” played on American Radio Service, but even this did not go according to plan. First, since the song was top secret information, meant only for the Americans and their allies, everyone in the city also knew what to listen for. Then what do you think happens? Claude said. The deejay can’t find the song. The Bing Crosby one. He’s tossing his booth looking for that tape, and of course it’s not there. Then what? said the General. He finds a version by Tennessee Ernie Ford and plays that. Who’s he? I said. How do I know? At least the melody and lyrics were the same. So, I said, situation normal. Claude nodded. All fucked up. Let’s just hope history forgets the snafus.
This was the prayer many a general and politician said before they went to bed, but some snafus were more justifiable than others. Take the operation’s name, Frequent Wind, a snafu foreshadowing a snafu. I had brooded on it for a year, wondering if I could sue the US government for malpractice, or at least a criminal failure of the literary imagination. Who was the military mastermind who squeezed out Frequent Wind from between his tightly clenched buttocks? Didn’t it occur to anyone that Frequent Wind might bring to mind the Divine Wind that inspired the kamikaze, or, more likely for the ahistorical, juvenile set, the phenomenon of passing gas, which, as is well known, can lead to a chain reaction, hence the frequency? Or was I not giving the military mastermind enough credit for being a deadpan ironist, he having also possibly chosen “White Christmas” as a poke in the eye to all my countrymen who neither celebrated Christmas nor had ever seen a white one? Could not this unknown ironist foresee that all the bad air whipped up by American helicopters was the equivalent of a massive blast of gas in the faces of those left behind? Weighing stupidity and irony, I picked the latter, irony lending the Americans a last shred of dignity. It was the only thing salvageable from the tragedy that had befallen us, or that we had brought on ourselves, depending on one’s point of view. The problem with this tragedy is that it had not ended neatly, unlike a comedy. It still preoccupied us, the General most of all, who now turned to business.
I am glad you are here, Claude. Your timing could not be more perfect. Claude shrugged. Timing’s one thing I’ve always been good at, General. We have a problem, as you warned me before we left.
Which problem? There was more than one, as I recall. We have an informer. A spy.
Both looked at me, as if for confirmation. I kept my face impassive even as my stomach began to rotate counterclockwise. When the General named a name, it was the crapulent major’s. My stomach began to rotate in the opposite direction. I don’t know that guy, Claude said.
He is not a man to be known. He is not a remarkable officer. It is our young friend here who chose to bring the major with us.

If you remember, sir, the major—
It hardly matters. What matters is that I was tired and I made a mistake by giving you that job. I do not blame you. I blame myself. Now it is time to correct a mistake.
Why do you think it’s this guy?
Number one, he is Chinese. Number two, my contacts in Saigon say his family is doing very, very well. Number three, he is fat. I do not like fat men.
Just because he’s Chinese doesn’t mean he’s a spy, General.
I am not a racist, Claude. I treat all my men the same, no matter their origins, like our young friend here. But this major, the fact that his family is doing well in Saigon is suspicious. Why are they doing well? Who allows them to prosper? The communists know all our officers and their families. No officer’s family is doing well at home. Why his?
Circumstantial evidence, General.
That never stopped you before, Claude.
Things are different here. You have to play by new rules. But I can bend the rules, can I not?
You can even break them, if you know how.
I tabulated things learned. First, I had scored a coup, much to my chagrin and purely by accident, throwing the blame onto a blameless man. Second, the General had contacts in Saigon, meaning some kind of resistance existed. Third, the General could contact his people, though no direct communication was available. Fourth, the General was fully his old self again, a perennial plotter with at least one scheme in each pocket and another in his sock. Waving his arms to indicate our surroundings, he said, Do I look like a small-business owner to you gentlemen? Do I look like I enjoy selling liquor to drunks and blacks and Mexicans and the homeless and addicts? Let me tell you something. I am just biding my time. This war is not over. Those communist bastards . . . all right, they hurt us badly, we must admit that. But I know my people. I know my soldiers, my men. They haven’t given up. They’re willing to fight and die, if they get the chance. That’s all we need, Claude. A chance.
Bravo, General, said Claude. I knew you wouldn’t stay down for long. I am with you, sir, I said. To the end.
Good. Because you picked the major. Do you agree that you must correct your mistake? I thought you would. You do not have to do it alone. I have already discussed the problem of the major with Bon. You two will take care of this problem together. I leave it up to your endless imagination and skill to figure out the solution. You have never disappointed me before, except in picking the major. Now you can redeem yourself. Understood? Good. Now leave us. Claude and I have business to discuss.
The store was empty except for Bon, watching the phosphorescent, hypnotic signal of a baseball game on a tiny black-and-white television by the cash register. I cashed the check in my pocket, my tax refund from the IRS. It was not a large sum and yet symbolically significant, for never in my country would the midget-minded government give back to its frustrated citizens anything it had seized in the first place. The whole idea was absurd. Our society had been a kleptocracy of the highest order, the government doing its best to steal from the Americans, the average man doing his best to steal from the government, the worst of us doing our best to steal from each other. Now, despite my sense of fellow feeling for my exiled countrymen, I could not also help but feel that our country was being born again, the accretions of foreign corruption cleansed by revolutionary flames. Instead of tax refunds, the revolution would redistribute ill-gotten wealth, following the philosophy of more to the poor. What the poor did with their socialist succor was up to them. As for me, I used my capitalist refund to buy enough booze to keep Bon and me uneasily steeped in amnesia until next week, which if not foresightful was nevertheless my choice, choice being my sacred American right.
The major? I said as Bon bagged the bottles. You really think he’s a spy? What do I know about it? I’m just a grunt.
You do as you’re told.
So do you, smart guy. Since you’re so smart, you plan this. You know your way around here better than me. But the dirty stuff you leave to me. Now come and take a look. Behind the counter was a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun on a rack beneath the cash register. Like it?
How did you get that?
Easier to get a gun here than to vote or drive. You don’t even need to know any English. Funny thing is, the major got us the connection. He speaks Chinese. The Chinese gangs are all over Chinatown.
It’s going to be messy with a shotgun.
We’re not using a shotgun, genius. He opened a cigar box resting on a shelf beneath the counter. Inside was a .38 Special, a revolver with a snub nose, identical to the one that I carried as my service pistol. Delicate enough for you?
Once again I was trapped by circumstances, and once again I would soon see another man trapped by circumstances. The only compensation for my sadness was the expression on Bon’s face. It was the first time he had looked happy in a year.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 6

The grand opening began later that afternoon, the General shaking hands with well-wishers while chatting easily and smiling incessantly. Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician— which was what the General had become—had to keep his lips constantly moving. The constituents, in this case, were old colleagues, followers, soldiers, and friends, a platoon of thirty or so middle-aged men whom I had rarely encountered without their uniforms until our time in the refugee camps on Guam. Seeing them again in mufti, a year later, confirmed the verdict of defeat and showed these men now to be guilty of numerous sartorial misdemeanors. They squeaked around the store in bargain- basement penny loafers and creased budget khakis, or in ill-fitting suits advertised by wholesalers for the price of buy-one-get-one-free. Ties, handkerchiefs, and socks were thrown in, though what was really needed was cologne, even of the gigolo kind, anything to mask the olfactory evidence of their having been gleefully skunked by history. As for me, even though I was of lesser rank than most of these men, I was better dressed, thanks to Professor Hammer’s hand-me-downs. With just a bit of tailoring, his blue blazer with gold buttons and his gray flannel slacks fit me perfectly.
Thus smartly dressed, I made my way through the men, all of whom I knew in my capacity as the General’s aide. Many once commanded artillery batteries and infantry battalions, but now they possessed nothing more dangerous than their pride, their halitosis, and their car keys, if they even owned cars. I had reported all the gossip about these vanquished soldiers to Paris, and knew what they did (or, in many cases, did not do) for a living. Most successful was a general infamous for using his crack troops to harvest cinnamon, whose circulation he monopolized; now this spice merchant lorded over a pizza parlor. One colonel, an asthmatic quartermaster who became unreasonably excited discussing dehydrated rations, was a janitor. A dashing major who flew gunships, now a mechanic. A grizzled captain with a talent for hunting guerrillas: short-order cook. An affectless lieutenant, sole survivor of an ambushed company: deliveryman. So the list went, a fair percentage collecting both welfare and dust, moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments as their testes shriveled day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile. In this psychosomatic condition, normal social or familial ills were diagnosed as symptoms of something fatal, with their vulnerable women and children cast as the carriers of Western contamination. Their afflicted kids were talking back, not in their native language but in a foreign tongue they were mastering faster than their fathers. As for the wives, most had been forced to find jobs, and in doing so had been transformed from the winsome lotuses the men remembered them to be. As the crapulent major said, A man doesn’t need balls in this country, Captain. The women all have their own.
True, I concurred, though I suspected nostalgia had brainwashed the major and the others. Their memories had been laundered so thoroughly as to be colored differently from mine, for never had they talked so fondly about their wives in Vietnam. Have you ever thought about moving, Major? Maybe you and your wife could get a fresh start and rekindle your romance. Get away from all reminders of your past.
But what would I do for food? he said in all seriousness. The Chinese food is best where we live. I reached forth to straighten his crooked tie, which matched his crooked teeth. All right, Major. Then let me take you out. You can show me where the good Chinese food is.
My pleasure! The crapulent major beamed. He was a bon vivant who loved food and friendship, someone without an enemy in this new world, except for the General. Why had I mentioned the crapulent major’s name to him? Why hadn’t I given the name of someone whose sins outweighed his flesh, rather than this man whose flesh outweighed his sins? Leaving the major behind, I made my way through the crowd to the General. I was ready for some political boosterism, even of the most calculated kind. He was standing by Madame next to the chardonnay and cabernet, being interviewed by a man waving a microphone between the two of them as if it were a Geiger counter. I caught her eye, and when she amplified the wattage of her smile, the man turned around, a camera hanging around his neck and a retractable pen with four colors of ink peeking from his shirt pocket.
It took a moment for the recognition to register. I had last seen Son Do, or Sonny as he was nicknamed, in 1969, my final year in America. He was likewise a scholarship student at a college in Orange County, an hour away by car. It was the birthplace of the war criminal Richard Nixon, as well as the home of John Wayne, a place so ferociously patriotic I thought Agent Orange might have been manufactured there or at least named in its honor. Sonny’s subject of study was journalism, which would have been useful for our country if Sonny’s particular brand were not so subversive. He carried a baseball bat of integrity on his shoulder, ready to clobber the fat softballs of his opponents’ inconsistencies. Back then, he had been self-confident, or arrogant, depending on your point of view, a legacy of his aristocratic heritage. His grandfather was a mandarin, as he never ceased reminding you. This grandfather inveighed against the French with such volume and acidity that they shipped him on a one-way berth to Tahiti, where, after supposedly befriending a syphilitic Gauguin, he succumbed to either dengue fever or an incurable strain of virulent homesickness. Sonny inherited the utter sense of conviction that motivated his honorable grandfather, who I am sure was insufferable, as most men of utter conviction are. Like a hard-core conservative, Sonny was right about everything, or thought himself so, the key difference being that he was a naked leftist. He led the antiwar faction of Vietnamese foreign students, a handful of whom assembled monthly at a sterile room in the student union or in someone’s apartment, passions running hot and food getting cold. I attended these parties as well as the ones thrown by the equally compact pro-war gang, differing in political tone but otherwise totally interchangeable in terms of food eaten, songs sung, jokes traded, and topics discussed. Regardless of political clique, these students gulped from the same overflowing cup of loneliness, drawing together for comfort like these ex-officers in the liquor store, hoping for the body heat of fellow sufferers in an exile so chilly even the California sun could not warm their cold feet.
I heard you were here, too, Sonny said, gripping my hand and unwrapping a genuine smile. The confidence I remembered so well radiated from his eyes, rendering his ascetic face with its antiseptic lips attractive. It’s great to see you again, old friend. Old friend? That was not how I recalled it. Son, Madame interjected, was interviewing us for his newspaper. I’m the editor, he said, offering me his business card. The interview will be in our first issue. The General, flush with good cheer, plucked a chardonnay from the shelf. Here’s a token of appreciation for all your efforts in reviving the fine art of the fourth estate in our new land, my young friend. This could not help but prompt my memory of the journalists to whom we had given the gift of free room and board, albeit in a jail, for speaking a little too much truth to power. Perhaps Sonny was thinking the same thing, for he tried to decline the bottle, conceding only after much insistence from the General. I commemorated the occasion with Sonny’s hulking Nikon, General and Madame flanking him while he cupped the bottle that the General grasped by the neck. Slap that on your front page, the General said by way of farewell.
Left alone, Sonny and I traded brief synopses of our recent lives. He had decided to stay after graduation, knowing if he returned he would likely receive a complimentary airplane ticket to the tranquil beaches and exclusive, invitation-only prisons of Poulo Condore, built by the French with characteristic gusto. Before we refugees had arrived last year, Sonny had been reporting for an Orange County newspaper, making his home in a town I had never visited, Westminster, or, as our countrymen pronounced it, Wet-min-ter. Moved by our refugee plight, he started up the first newspaper in our native tongue, an effort to tie us together with the news that binds. But more later, my friend, he said, grasping me by the shoulder. I have another appointment. Shall we meet for coffee? It does my heart good to see you again. Bemused, I agreed, giving him my number before he departed through the thinning crowd. I looked for the crapulent major but he had disappeared. Except for him, most of our fellow exiles had been shrunken by their experience, either absolutely through the aforementioned maladies of migration, or relatively, surrounded by Americans so tall they neither looked through nor looked down on these newcomers. They simply looked over them. For Sonny, it was the opposite. He could not be ignored, but for different reasons from those in the past, in our college days. I could not remember him being as gentle or generous then, when he pounded on tables and ranted the way the Vietnamese foreign students in Paris in the twenties and thirties must have done, the original crop of communists to lead our revolution. I, too, differed in behavior now, although how so was subject to the vagaries of my memory. The historical record had been expunged, for while I kept journals as a student, I had burned them all before returning, fearing to bring with me any incriminating traces of what I really thought.
I breakfasted with the crapulent major a week later. It was an earthy, quotidian scene, the kind Walt Whitman would have loved to write about, a sketch of the new America featuring hot rice porridge and fried crullers at a Monterey Park noodle shop crammed full of unrepentantly unassimilated Chinese and a few other assorted Asians. Grease glazed the orange Formica tabletop, while chrysanthemum tea stood ready to be poured from a tin pot into chipped teacups the color and texture of the enamel on human teeth. I supped in a measured fashion while the major gorged with the undisciplined enthusiasm of a man enamored with food, mouth open and talking simultaneously, the occasional fleck of spit or rice landing on my cheek, my eyelash, or my own bowl, eating with such relish I could not help but love and pity the man in his innocence.
This, an informant? Hard to believe, but then he might be such a sly character as to be the perfect plant. The more logical conclusion was that the General had bolstered the Vietnamese tendency for conspiracy with the American trait of paranoia, admittedly with my help. Never had the crapulent major exhibited any particular skill at deceit, covert maneuvering, or politicking. Back in Saigon, his function in the Special Branch had been to analyze Chinese-language communication and to keep track of the subterranean subterfuges of Cholon, where the National Liberation Front had constructed an underground network for political agitation, terrorist organizing, and black market smuggling. More important, he was my source for the best Chinese food in Cholon, from majestic palaces with spectacular wedding banquets, to rattling carts roaming the unpaved streets, to elusive ladies who carried their bouncing wares on a yoke across their shoulders and set up shop on the sidewalks. Likewise in California, he had promised me the best rice porridge in Greater Los Angeles, and it was over a silky smooth white pottage that I commiserated with the crapulent major. He was now a gas station attendant in Monterey Park, paid in cash so he could qualify for welfare benefits. His wife, sewing in a sweatshop, was already reduced to nearsightedness from staring so intently at the puzzle of cheap stitching. My God, she can talk, he moaned, hunched over his empty bowl with the reproachful countenance of an unfed dog, eyeing my uneaten cruller. She blames me for everything. Why didn’t we stay at home? What are we doing here where we’re poorer than before? Why did we have kids we can’t afford to feed? I forgot to tell you, Captain, my wife got pregnant in camp. Twins! Can you believe it?
Heart overcast but voice bright, I congratulated him. He appreciated the offer of my untouched cruller. At least they’re American citizens, he said, chewing on his doughy treat. Spinach and Broccoli. Those are their American names. To tell you the truth, we hadn’t even thought about giving them American names until the nurse asked. I panicked. Of course they needed American names. The first thing that comes to mind is Spinach. I used to laugh at those cartoons where Popeye ate his spinach and became superpowerful all at once. No one will mess with a kid named Spinach. As for Broccoli, it just came logically. A lady on television said, Always eat your broccoli, and I remembered that. A healthy food, not like what I eat. Strong and healthy, that’s what these twins will be. They’ll need to be. This country isn’t for the weak or the fat. I need to go on a diet. No, I do! You’re too kind. I am quite aware I’m fat. The only good thing about being fat, besides the eating, is that everyone loves a fat man. Yes? Yes! People love to laugh at fat men and pity them, too. When I applied at that gas station, I was sweating even though I had walked just a couple of blocks. People look at a fat man sweating and they feel sorry for him, even if they feel a little contempt, too. Then I smiled and shook my belly and laughed as I told my story about how I needed a job, and the owner gave it to me on the spot. All he needed was a reason to hire me. Making people laugh and feel sorry always does the trick. See? You’re smiling right now and feeling sorry for me. Don’t feel too sorry, I have a good shift, in at ten in the morning and out by eight, seven days a week, and I can walk to work from home. I don’t do a thing except punch buttons on the cash register. It’s great. Come by and I’ll give you some free gallons. I insist! It’s the least I can do for you helping us escape. I never did properly thank you. Besides, this is a tough country. We Vietnamese have to stick together.
Oh, poor crapulent major! That night, at home, I watched Bon clean and oil the .38 Special on the coffee table, then load it with six copper bullets and lay it on a little throw pillow that came with our sofa, a tawdry, stained red velour cushion on which the pistol rested like a gift to deposed royalty. I’ll shoot him through the pillow, Bon said, cracking open a beer. Reduced noise. Great, I said. Richard Hedd was being interviewed on television about the situation in Cambodia, his English accent a stark contrast to the interviewer’s Bostonian one. After a minute of watching this, I said, What if he’s not a spy? We’ll be killing the wrong man. Then it would be murder. Bon sipped his beer. First, he said, the General knows stuff we don’t. Second, we’re not killing. This is an assassination. Your guys did this all the time. Third, this is war. Innocent people get killed. It’s only murder if you know they’re innocent. Even so, that’s a tragedy, not a crime.
You were happy when the General asked you to do this, weren’t you?
Is that bad? he said. He put the beer down and picked up the .38. As some men were born to handle a paintbrush or a pen, he was born to wield a gun. It looked natural in his hand, a tool of which a man could be proud, like a wrench. A man needs a purpose, he said, contemplating the gun. Before I met Linh, I had purpose. I wanted revenge for my father. Then I fell in love, and Linh became more important than my father or revenge. I hadn’t cried since he died, but after my marriage I cried at his grave because I had betrayed him where it mattered the most, in my heart. I didn’t get over that until Duc was born. At first he was just this strange, ugly little thing. I wondered what was wrong with me, why I didn’t love my own son. But slowly he grew and grew, and one night I noticed how his fingers and toes, his hands and feet, were perfectly made, miniature versions of mine. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be struck by wonder. Even falling in love was not like that feeling, and I knew that this was how my father must have looked at me. He had created me, and I had created Duc. It was nature, the universe, God, flowing through us. That was when I fell in love with my son, when I understood how insignificant I was, and how marvelous he was, and how one day he’d feel the exact same thing. And it was then I knew I hadn’t betrayed my father. I cried again, holding my boy, because I’d finally become a man. What I’m saying, why I’m telling you all this, is that my life once had meaning. It had a purpose. Now it has none. I was a son and a husband and a father and a soldier, and now I’m none of that. I’m not a man, and when a man isn’t a man he’s nobody. And the only way not to be nobody is to do something. So I can either kill myself or kill someone else. Get it?
I not only got it, I was astonished. It was the longest speech I had ever heard from him, his sorrow and rage and despair not only cracking open his heart but loosening his vocal cords. Those words even succeeded in making him less ugly than he objectively was, if not handsome, emotion softening the harsh features of his face. He was the only man I had ever met who seemed moved, deeply, not only by love but also by the prospect of killing. While he was an expert by necessity, I was a novice by choice, despite having had my opportunities. In our country, killing a man—or a woman, or a child—was as easy as turning a page of the morning paper. One only needed an excuse and an instrument, and too many on all sides possessed both. What I did not have was the desire or the various uniforms of justification a man dons as camouflage—the need to defend God, country, honor, ideology, or comrades—even if, in the last instance, all he really is protecting is that most tender part of himself, the hidden, wrinkled purse carried by every man. These off-the-rack excuses fit some people well, but not me.
I wanted to persuade the General that the crapulent major was no spy, but it would hardly do to disinfect him of the idea with which I had infected him in the first place. More than this, I knew I had to prove to the General that I could correct my ostensible mistake, and that I could be a man of action. Not doing something was not an option, as the General’s demeanor made clear to me at our next meeting the following week. He deserves it, the General said, disagreeably obsessed with the indelible stain of guilt he saw stamped on the major’s forehead, that tiny handprint of the major’s doomed mortality left there by me. But take your time. I’m in no rush. Operations should be performed patiently and painstakingly. He affirmed this in a storeroom that channeled the dispassionate atmosphere of a war room, the walls newly decorated with maps showing our sinuous, narrow- waisted homeland in all its splendor or its parts, each suffocating behind plastic sheeting, red markers dangling on strings next to them. Better to do it well and slowly than quickly and poorly, he said. Yes, sir, I said. What I had in mind was—
No need to bore me with details. Just let me know when it’s done.
So the major’s demise was written. Nothing was left me but to create a believable story where his death was neither my fault nor the General’s. I did not have to think very hard before the most obvious story came to me. What we had here was your usual American tragedy, only this time starring a hapless refugee.
Professor Hammer invited me to dinner the next Saturday night at his house, the occasion being Claude’s imminent return to Washington. The only other guest was the professor’s boyfriend, Stan, a doctoral student my own age at UCLA, writing his dissertation on the American literary expatriates of Paris. He had the white teeth and blond hair of a model in a toothpaste ad, where his role would be the young father of toothsome cherubs. The professor’s homosexuality had been mentioned to me by Claude before I matriculated at the college in ’63, because, Claude said, I just didn’t want you to be surprised. Never having known a homosexual, I had been curious to see how one behaved in his natural environment, which is to say the West, as the East apparently had no homosexuals. Much to my disappointment, Professor Hammer seemed no different from anyone else, aside from his acute intelligence and impeccable taste in all things, extending to Stan and the culinary arts.
The three-course meal was prepared by the professor himself, a salad of mixed greens, duck confit with rosemary potatoes, and a flaky tarte Tatin, preceded by martinis, accompanied by pinot noir, and finished off with single malt scotch. All was served in the meticulously restored dining room of the professor’s Craftsman bungalow in Pasadena, everything from the double-hung windows, to the art deco chandelier, to the brass hardware of the built-in cabinetry either an original from the early twentieth century or a faithful reproduction. Every now and then the professor rose from the dining table and replaced the record on the turntable, choosing a new selection from his extensive jazz collection. Over dinner, we talked about bebop, the nineteenth-century novel, the Dodgers, and America’s upcoming bicentennial. Then we repaired with our scotch to the living room with its massive fireplace of river rock and its stately Mission furniture of angular wooden frames and leather cushions. Books of all heights, widths, and colors lined the walls in a democratic parade of individualism, arranged as haphazardly as they were on the walls of the professor’s campus office. Ensconced thus by letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, and tomes, the evening was a pleasant one, memorable for the exchange that took place after we assumed our seats. His nostalgia stimulated, perhaps, by the literature around him, the professor said, I still remember your thesis on The Quiet American. That was one of the best undergraduate theses I’ve ever read. I smiled demurely and said thanks while Claude, sitting beside me on the sofa, snorted. I didn’t care too much for that book. The Vietnamese girl, all she does is prepare opium, read picture books, and twitter like a bird. Have you ever met a Vietnamese girl like her? If so, please introduce me. All the ones I meet can’t keep their mouths shut in or out of bed.
Oh, Claude, the professor said.
Oh, Claude, nothing. No offense, Avery, but our American friend in that book also happens to look suspiciously like a latent homosexual.
It takes one to smell one, Stan said.
Who wrote that one for you? Noël Coward? His name is Pyle, for God’s sake. How many jokes can you make with that name? It’s also a pro-communist book. Or at least anti-American. Same thing, anyway. Claude waved his hand at the books, the furniture, the living room, presumably the whole well-appointed home. Hard to believe he was once a communist, isn’t it?
Stan? I said.
No, not Stan. Were you, Stan? I thought not.
That left the professor, who shrugged his shoulders when I looked at him. I was your age, he said, putting his arm around Stan’s shoulders. I was impressionable, I was passionate, I wanted to change the world. Communism seduced me like so many others.
Now he’s the one doing the seducing, Stan said, squeezing the professor’s hand, a sight that made me squirm just a little. For me, the professor was a walking mind, and to see him as a body, or having a body, was still discomfiting.
Do you ever regret being a communist, Professor?
No, I do not. Only by making that mistake could I be what I am today. What is that, sir?
He smiled. I suppose you could call me a born-again American. An irony, but if the bloody history of the past few decades has taught me anything, it’s that the defense of freedom demands the muscularity only America can provide. Even what we do at the college has its purpose. We teach you the best of what was thought and said not only to explain America to the world, as I have always encouraged you to do, but to defend it.
I sipped my scotch. It was smoky and smooth, tasting of peat and aged oak, underscored by licorice and the intangible essence of Scottish masculinity. I liked my scotch undiluted, like I liked my truth. Unfortunately, undiluted truth was as affordable as eighteen-year-old single malt scotch. What about those who have not learned the best of what was thought and said? I asked the professor. If we can’t teach them, or if they won’t be taught?
The professor contemplated the copper depths of his drink. I suppose you and Claude have seen more than your fair share of those types in your line of work. There’s no easy answer, except to say it has always been thus. Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it’s been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians.
Nothing was more clear-cut than civilization versus barbarism, but what was the killing of the crapulent major? A simple act of barbarism or a complex one that advanced revolutionary civilization? It had to be the latter, a contradictory act that suited our age. We Marxists believe that capitalism generates contradictions and will fall apart from them, but only if men take action. But it was not just capitalism that was contradictory. As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, but I was right to kill him. Wasn’t I? When Claude and I left near midnight, I came as close as I could to broaching the subject of my conscience with him. As we smoked farewell cigarettes on the sidewalk, I asked the question that I imagined my mother asking of me: What if he’s innocent?
He blew a smoke ring, just to show he could. No one’s innocent. Especially in this business. You don’t think he might have some blood on his hands? He identified Viet Cong sympathizers. He might have gotten the wrong man. It’s happened before. Or if he himself is a sympathizer, then he definitely identified the wrong people. On purpose.
I don’t know any of that for sure.
Innocence and guilt. These are cosmic issues. We’re all innocent on one level and guilty on another.
Isn’t that what Original Sin is all about?
True enough, I said. I let him go with a handshake. The airing of moral doubts was as tiresome as the airing of domestic squabbles, no one really interested except for the ones directly involved. In this situation, I was clearly the only one involved, except for the crapulent major, and no one cared to hear his opinion. Claude, meanwhile, had offered me absolution, or at least an excuse, but I did not have the heart to tell him I could not use it. Original Sin was simply too unoriginal for someone like me, born from a father who spoke of it at every Mass.
The next evening I began reconnoitering the major. On that Sunday and the following five, from May until the end of June, I parked my car half a block from the gas station, waiting for eight o’clock when the crapulent major would leave, walking slowly home, lunch box in hand. When I saw him turn the corner, I started the car and drove it to the corner, where I waited and watched him walk down the first block. He lived three blocks away, a distance a thin, healthy man could walk briskly in five minutes. It took the crapulent major approximately eleven, with myself always at least a block behind. During six Sundays, he never varied his routine, faithful as a migratory mallard, his route taking him through a neighborhood of apartments that all seemed to be dying of boredom. The major’s own diminutive quadriplex was fronted by a carport with four slots, one vacant and three occupied by cars with the dented, drooping posteriors of elderly bus drivers. An overhanging second floor, its two sets of windows looking onto the street, shaded the cars. At 8:11 in the evening or so, the morose eyes of those bedroom windows were open but curtained, only one of them lit. On the first two Sundays, I parked at the corner and watched as he turned into the carport and vanished. On the third and fourth Sundays, I did not follow him from the gas station but waited for him half a block past his apartment. From there, I watched in my mirror as he entered the carport’s shadowed margin, a lane leading to the bottom apartments. As soon as he disappeared those first four Sundays, I went home, but on the fifth and sixth Sundays I waited. Not until ten o’clock did the car that parked in the vacant spot appear, as aged and dinged as the others, the driver a tired-looking Chinese man wearing a smeared chef’s smock and carrying a greasy paper bag.
On the Saturday before our appointment with the crapulent major, Bon and I drove to Chinatown. In an alley off Broadway lined with vendors selling wares from folding tables, we bought UCLA sweatshirts and baseball caps at prices that guaranteed they were not official merchandise. After a lunch of barbecued pork and noodles, we browsed one of the curio shops where all manner of Orientalia was sold, primarily to the non-Oriental. Chinese chess sets, wooden chopsticks, paper lanterns, soapstone Buddhas, miniature water fountains, elephant tusks with elaborate carvings of pastoral scenes, reproductions of Ming vases, coasters with images of the Forbidden City, rubber nunchaku bundled with posters of Bruce Lee, scrolls with watercolor paintings of cloud-draped mountain forests, tins of tea and ginseng, and, neither last nor least, red firecrackers. I bought two packets and, before we returned home, a mesh sack of oranges from a local market, their navels protruding indecently.
Later that evening, after dark, Bon and I ventured out one more time, each of us with a screwdriver. We toured the neighborhood until we reached an apartment with a carport like the crapulent major’s, the cars not visible from any neighboring windows. It took less than thirty seconds for Bon to remove the front license plate from one car, and myself the plate from the rear. Then we went home and watched television until bedtime. Bon fell asleep immediately, but I could not. Our visit to Chinatown reminded me of an incident that had taken place in Cholon years before with the crapulent major and myself. The occasion was the arrest of a Viet Cong suspect who had graduated from the top of our gray list to the bottom of our blacklist. Enough people had fingered this person as a Viet Cong for us to neutralize him, or so the major said, showing me the thick dossier he had compiled. Official occupation: rice wine merchant. Black market occupation: casino operator. Hobby: Viet Cong tax collector. We cordoned off the ward with roadblocks on all streets and foot patrols in the alleys. While the secondary units did ID checks in the neighborhood, fishing for draft dodgers, the major’s men entered the rice wine merchant’s shop, pushed past his wife to reach the storeroom, and found the lever that opened a secret door. Gamblers were shooting craps and playing cards, their rice wine and hot soup served for free by waitresses in outrageous outfits. On seeing our policemen charging through the door, all the players and employees promptly dashed for the rear exit, only to find another squad of heavies waiting outside. The usual high jinks and hilarity ensued, involving much screaming, shrieking, billy clubs, and handcuffs, until, at last, it was only the crapulent major, myself, and our suspect, whom I was surprised to see. I had tipped off Man about the raid and fully expected the tax collector to be absent.
VC? the man cried, waving his hands in the air. No way! I’m a businessman!
A very good one, too, the major said, hefting a garbage bag filled with the casino’s cash.
So you got me there, the man said, miserable. He had an overbite and three long, lucky hairs sprouting from a mole the size of a marble on his cheek. Okay, take the money, it’s yours. I’m happy to contribute to the cause of the police.
That’s offensive, the major said, poking the man’s gut with his billy club. This is going to the government to pay your fines and back taxes, not to us. Right, Captain?
Right, I said, the straight man in this routine.
But as to future taxes, that’s a different matter. Right, Captain?
Right. There was nothing I could do for the tax collector. He spent a week in the interrogation center being beaten black and blue, as well as red and yellow. By the end, our men were convinced that he was not a VC operative. The proof was incontrovertible, arriving in the form of a sizable bribe the man’s wife brought to the crapulent major. I guess I was mistaken, he said cheerfully, handing me an envelope with my share. It was equivalent to a year’s salary, which, to put it into perspective, was actually not enough to live on for a year. Refusing the money would have aroused suspicion, so I took it. I was tempted to use it for charitable activity, namely the support of beautiful young women hampered by poverty, but I remembered what my father said, rather than what he did, as well as Ho Chi Minh’s adages. Both Jesus and Uncle Ho were clear that money was corrupting, from the moneylenders desecrating the temple to the capitalists exploiting the colony, not to mention Judas and his thirty pieces of silver. So I paid for the major’s sin by donating the money to the revolution, handing it to Man at the basilica. See what we’re fighting against? he said. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, droned the dowagers. This is why we’ll win, Man said. Our enemies are corrupt. We are not. The point of writing this is that the crapulent major was as sinful as Claude estimated. Perhaps he had even done worse than simply extort money, although if he did it did not make him above average in corruption. It just made him average.
The next evening we were parked down the street from the gas station by seven thirty, wearing the UCLA sweatshirts and caps. If anyone noticed us, they would see, hopefully, UCLA students. My car had the stolen license plates affixed to it, my legitimate ones in the glove compartment. Every little bit of distraction helped, but most important of all were the distractions we did not control but which I had anticipated. With my window rolled down, we could hear distant explosions from the city’s fireworks show, as well as the pop-pop of occasional small arms fire as an individual celebrated independence. Smaller fireworks exploded closer, illegally detonated somewhere in this neighborhood as people lit cherry bombs, launched the occasional streaker into the low sky, or burned through ammo belts of Chinese firecrackers. Bon was tense as we waited for the major, his jaw clenched tight and shoulders hunched, refusing to let me turn on the radio. Bad memories? I said. Yeah. For a while he said nothing more, both of us watching the gas station. Two cars pulled in and gassed up, then left. This one time outside Sa Dec, the point man stepped on a Bouncing Betty. A little pop when it bounces. Then a big bang. I was two guys behind him, didn’t get a scratch. But it blew his balls off. Worst part of all, the poor son of a bitch lived.
I mumbled regretfully and shook my head, but otherwise had nothing more to offer, castration being something that was unspeakable. We watched two more cars gas up. There was only one favor I could perform for the crapulent major. I don’t want him to feel anything, I said.
He’s not even going to see it coming.
At eight, the crapulent major left the station. I waited until he turned the corner, then started the car. We drove to his apartment using a different route so he would not see us passing him. The fourth parking slot was open, and I parked the car there. I checked my watch. Three minutes, eight more until the major came. Bon took out the gun from the glove compartment and popped the cylinder open one more time to inspect the bullets. Then he clicked the cylinder into place and laid the gun on the red velour pillow in his lap. I looked at the gun and the pillow and said, What if some of the stuffing gets blown onto him? And pieces of the cover? The police will see it and wonder what it is.
He shrugged. So no pillow. That means there’ll be noise.
Somewhere down the street, someone set off another string of Chinese firecrackers, the same kind I had enjoyed so much as a little boy during New Year ’s. My mother would light up the long red string, and I would plug my ears and screech along with my mother in the patch of garden next to our hut while the serpent leaped this way and that, consuming itself from tail to head, or perhaps it was head to tail, ecstatically ablaze.
It’s just one shot, I said after the firecrackers ceased. No one’s coming out to see what happened, not with all this noise.
He looked at his watch. All right, then.
He slipped on a pair of latex gloves and kicked off his sneakers. I opened my door, got out, closed it softly, and took my position at the other end of the carport, next to the path leading from the sidewalk to the apartment’s mailboxes. The path continued past the mailboxes to the two ground-floor apartments, the entrance to the first one ten feet down. Poking my head around the corner, I could see the lights of the apartment through the curtains of the living room window, pulled shut. A tall wooden fence lined the other side of the path, and above it rose the wall of an identical apartment complex. Half of its windows were bathroom windows, and the other half were bedroom windows. Anyone at the windows on the second floor could see the path leading to the apartment but would not be able to see into the carport.

Bon walked on socked feet to his position, in between the two cars nearest to the path, where he knelt down and kept his head below the windows. I looked at my watch: 8:07. I held a plastic bag with a yellow happy face and the words THANK YOU! on it. Inside were the firecrackers and the oranges. Are you sure you want to do this, son? my mother said. It’s too late, Mama. I can’t figure a way out.
I was halfway finished with a cigarette when the major appeared at the carport for the last time. Hey. His face broke into a puzzled smile. He carried his lunch box in his hand. What are you doing here? I forced myself to smile in return. Lifting the plastic bag, I said, I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop this off.
What is it? He was halfway to me.
A gift for the Fourth of July. Bon emerged from behind the car by which the major was walking, but I kept my gaze on the major. He was within three feet when he said, Do they give gifts on the Fourth of July?
The expression on his face was still puzzled. When I offered him the bag with both hands, he leaned forward to peer at its contents. Behind him Bon walked up, noiseless on his socked feet and gun in hand. You didn’t have to, said the major. When he put his hands on the bag, it was the moment for Bon to shoot. But instead of pulling the trigger, Bon said, Hey, Major.
The major turned around, gift in one hand, lunch box in the other. I stepped to one side and heard him start to say a word when he saw Bon, and then Bon shot him. The report echoed in the carport, hurting my ears. The major’s skull cracked when his head hit the pavement, and if the bullet had not already killed him, perhaps the fall did. He lay flat on his back, the bullet hole in his forehead a third eye, weeping blood. Move, Bon hissed, tucking the gun into the waistband of his pants. As he knelt down and rolled the major onto his side, I leaned over the body and picked up the plastic bag, its yellow happy face freckled with blood. The major’s open mouth was wrapped around the shape of his last word. Bon tugged the wallet out of the major’s hip pocket, stood up, and pushed me toward the car. I looked at my watch: 8:13.
I pulled out of the carport. A numbness descended on me, beginning from my brain and my eyeballs and extending to my toes and fingers. I thought he wasn’t going to see it coming, I said. I just couldn’t shoot him in the back, he said. Don’t worry. He didn’t feel a thing. I was not worried about whether the crapulent major felt a thing. I was worried about whether I felt a thing. We said nothing more, and before we reached our apartment, I pulled into an alley where we replaced the license plates. Then we went home, and when I took my sneakers off I saw spots of blood on the white toes. I took the shoes into the kitchen and wiped them off with a wet paper towel before I dialed the General’s number from the phone hanging by the refrigerator, its door decorated with the twin columns of my divided self. He answered on the second ring. Hello? he said. It’s done. There was a pause. Good. I hung up the phone, and when I returned to the living room with two glasses and a bottle of rye, I found that Bon had emptied the contents of the major’s wallet onto the coffee table. What do we do with this? Bon asked. There was his Social Security card, his state ID (but no driver’s license, as he did not have a car), a wad of receipts, twenty-two dollars, a handful of change, and some photos. A black-and-white one showed him and his wife on their wedding day, very young and dressed in Western garb. He had been fat back then, too. There was also a color photo of his twins at a few weeks of age, genderless and wrinkled. Burn them, I said. The wallet I would dispose of tomorrow, along with the license plates, the plastic bag, and the ashes.
When I handed him a glass of rye, I saw the red scar on his hand. Here’s to the major, Bon said. The medicinal taste of the rye was so awful we had a second drink to wash it away, then a third, and so forth, all while watching television specials celebrating the nation’s birthday. It was not just any birthday, but the bicentennial of a great, brawny nation, a little punch-drunk from recent foreign excursions but now on its feet again and ready to swing, or so proclaimed the chatterati. Then we ate three of the oranges and went to bed. I lay down on my bunk, closed my eyes, knocked my knees against the rearranged furniture of my thoughts, and shuddered at what I saw. I opened my eyes but it made no difference. No matter whether my eyes were open or shut, I could still see it, the crapulent major’s third eye, weeping because of what it could see about me.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 7

I confess that the major’s death troubled me greatly, Commandant, even if it does not trouble you. He was a relatively innocent man, which was the best one could hope for in this world. In Saigon, I could have depended on my weekly visits to the basilica with Man to discuss my misgivings, but here I was alone with myself, my deeds, and my beliefs. I knew what Man would say to me, but I just needed him to say it to me again, as he had on other occasions, such as the time I passed to him a cartridge of film recording the heliborne assault plans of a Ranger battalion. Innocent men would die as a result of my actions, wouldn’t they? Of course men will die, Man said, masking his words behind his folded hands as we knelt in a pew. But they aren’t innocent. Neither are we, my friend. We’re revolutionaries, and revolutionaries can never be innocent. We know too much and have done too much.
I shivered in the humid climate of the basilica while the dowagers droned. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Contrary to some perceptions, revolutionary ideology, even in a tropical country, is not hot. It is cold, man-made. Little surprise, then, that revolutionaries needed natural heat sometimes. Thus, when I received an invitation to a wedding not long after the crapulent major’s demise, I accepted with enthusiasm. Sofia Mori was my curious guest to this reception for a couple whose names I had to check on the invitation before greeting them. The bride’s father was a legendary marine colonel whose battalion fought off an NVA regiment during the Battle of Hue with no American assistance, while the groom’s father was the vice president of the Saigon branch of Bank of America. His family had fled Saigon on a jet chartered by Bank of America, thus avoiding the indignity of the refugee camps. The most distinctive thing about the vice president, besides his air of effortless distinction, was the Clark Gable mustache playing dead on his upper lip, an adornment favored by southern men who fancied themselves debonair playboys. I had received an invitation since I had met the man several times in Saigon as the General’s aide. My status was indicated by how far I sat from the stage, which is to say very far. We were positioned near the restrooms, buffered from the scent of disinfectant only by the tables for the children and the band. Our companions were a couple of former junior officers, two mid-tier bank executives who had found lower-tier jobs with Bank of America branches, an in-law who looked inbred, and their wives. In dire times I would not merit a seat, but now we were more than a year into our American exile, and flush times had returned for some. The Chinese restaurant was in Westminster, where the man with the Clark Gable mustache had settled his family in a ranch-style suburban home, a demotion from his villa in Saigon but many rungs above almost all the evening’s attendees. Westminster was Sonny’s town, and I spotted him at a table several rings closer to the center of power, Clark Gable’s attempt to ensure positive press coverage.
Despite the noise and activity in the restaurant, where Chinese waiters tucked into red jackets scurried through the maze of banquet tables, a touch of melancholy pervaded the huge dining room. The bride’s father was notably absent, captured along with the remnants of his battalion as they defended the western approach to Saigon on the last day. The General praised him at the beginning of the banquet in a speech that stirred emotions, tears, and drinks. All the veterans toasted the hero with voluble bursts of bravado that helped to obscure their own uncomfortable lack of heroism. One simply must grin and drink unless one wants to sink to one’s neck in the quicksands of contradiction, or so said the sad crapulent major, his severed head serving as the table’s centerpiece. So I grinned and poured cognac down my throat. Then I mixed a libation of Rémy Martin and soda for Ms. Mori while explaining the exotic customs, habits, hairstyles, and fashion of our fun-loving people. I yelled my explanations, struggling to be heard over the loud cover band that was fronted by a petite dude in a sequined blazer. He sported a glam rocker’s perm modeled on a Louis XIV wig, minus the powder, and strutted on gold platform shoes while fondling his mike, pressing the ball of it to his lips suggestively as he sang. The heterosexually certified bankers and military men absolutely loved him, roaring approval at every flagrant pelvic gesture of flirtation from the singer’s extraordinarily tight satin pants. When the singer invited manly men to the stage for a dance, it was the General who immediately offered himself. He grinned as he sashayed with the singer to “Black Is Black,” the theme song of riotous Saigonese decadence, the audience cheering and clapping in appreciation, the singer winking over his shoulder à la Mae West. This was the General’s element, among men and women who appreciated him or who knew better than to voice any disagreements or discomfort with him. The execution—no, the neutralization—of the poor crapulent major had pumped life back into him, enough so that he had masterfully eulogized at the funeral. There he praised the major as a quietly self-sacrificial and humble man who always performed his duties to country and family without complaint, only to be tragically cut down in a senseless robbery. I had taken photographs of the funeral with my Kodak, the images later dispatched to my aunt in Paris, while Sonny sat in the front row of mourners, taking notes for an obituary. After the funeral, the General slipped the widow an envelope of cash from the operational funds provided by Claude, then stooped to peer into the bassinet where Spinach and Broccoli slept. As for myself, I could only mumble something generically appropriate to the widow, whose veil cloaked a waterfall of tears. How was it? Bon asked when I came home. How do you think? I said, heading for the refrigerator, its ribs lined as always with beer. Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.
Weddings often exacerbated the abuse, aggravated by the sight of a happy, innocent bride and groom. Their marriage might lead to alienation, adultery, misery, and divorce, but it might also lead to affection, loyalty, children, and contentment. While I had no desire to be married, weddings reminded me of what had been denied to me through no choice of my own. Thus, if I began every wedding as a pulp movie tough guy, mixing laughs with the occasional cynical comment, I ended each wedding as a watered-down cocktail, one-third singing, one-third sentimental, and one-third sorrowful. It was in this state that I took Ms. Mori to the dance floor after the wedding cake was cut, and it was then, near the stage, that I recognized one of the two female singers taking turns at the microphone with our gay blade. She was the General’s oldest daughter, safely ensconced in the Bay Area as a student while the country collapsed. Lana was nearly unrecognizable from the schoolgirl I had seen at the General’s villa during her lycée years and on summer vacations. In those days, her name was still Lan and she wore the most modest of clothing, the schoolgirl’s white ao dai that had sent many a Western writer into near-pederastic fantasies about the nubile bodies whose every curve was revealed without displaying an inch of flesh except above the neck and below the cuffs. This the writers apparently took as an implicit metaphor for our country as a whole, wanton and yet withdrawn, hinting at everything and giving away nothing in a dazzling display of demureness, a paradoxical incitement to temptation, a breathtakingly lewd exhibition of modesty. Hardly any male travel writer, journalist, or casual observer of our country’s life could restrain himself from writing about the young girls who rode their bicycles to and from school in those fluttering white ao dai, butterflies that every Western man dreamed of pinning to his collection.
In reality, Lan was a tomboy who had to be straitjacketed into her ao dai every morning by Madame or a nanny. Her ultimate form of rebellion was to be a superb student who, like me, earned a scholarship to the States. In her case, the scholarship was from the University of California at Berkeley, which the General and Madame regarded as a communist colony of radical professors and revolutionary students out to beguile and bed innocents. They wanted to send her to a girls’ college where the only danger was lesbian seduction, but Lan had applied to none of them, insisting on Berkeley. When they forbade her from going, Lan threatened suicide. Neither the General nor Madame took her seriously until Lan swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills. Thankfully she had a small fist. After nursing her back to health, the General was willing to concede, but Madame was not. Lan then threw herself into the Saigon River one afternoon, albeit at a time when the quay was well stocked with pedestrians, two of whom jumped in to save her as she floated in her white ao dai. At last Madame, too, conceded, and Lan flew off to Berkeley to study art history in the fall of ’72, a major her parents felt would enhance her feminine sensibilities and keep her suitable for marriage.
During her returns home in the summers of ’73 and ’74, she reappeared as a foreigner in bell- bottomed jeans and feathered hair, blouses stretched tight as a trampoline over the swell of her bosom, clogs adding several inches to her modest height. Madame would sit her down in her salon and, according to the nannies, lecture her on the importance of maintaining her virginity and of cultivating the “Three Submissions and Four Virtues”—a phrase that calls to mind the title of a highbrow erotic novel. The mere mention of her endangered or putatively lost virginity provided ample wood for the cookstove of my imagination, a fire I stoked in the privacy of my room, down the hall from the one she shared with a little sister. Lan had visited the General and Madame a few times since our arrival in California, but I had not been invited to the home on such occasions. Nor had I been invited to go with the General and Madame to her graduation cum laude a few months before. The most I heard of Lan was when the General muttered something about his unfilial daughter, who was now going by the name of Lana and who had not returned home after graduation but instead chosen to live on her own. Although I tried to draw out the General on what Lana was doing postgraduation, he had been uncharacteristically incommunicative.
Now I knew, and now I knew why. This Lana onstage bore no relationship to the Lan that I remembered. In the band’s arrangement, the other female singer was the angel of tradition, clad in a chartreuse ao dai, hair long and straight, makeup tasteful, her songs of choice estrogen-soaked ballads about lovelorn women hailing distant soldier lovers or lost Saigon itself. No such sadness or loss tinted Lana’s songs, no looking backward over the shoulder for this temptress of modernity. Even I was shocked by the black leather miniskirt that threatened to reveal a glimpse of that secret I had so often fantasized about. Above the miniskirt, her gold silk halter top shimmered with every gyration of her torso as she flexed her lungs, her specialty being the rock-’em, sock-’em numbers that the blues and rock bands of our homeland had mastered in order to entertain American troops and Americanized youth. I had heard her sing “Proud Mary” earlier in the evening without realizing it was she, and now I had to remind myself not to stare at her as she let loose a throaty version of “Twist and Shout” that called nearly everyone under the age of forty to the dance floor. Besides the simple yet elegant cha-cha, the twist was the favorite dance of the southern people, requiring as it did no coordination. Even Madame usually did the twist, innocent enough that she allowed her children to flock to the floor and dance, too. But glancing at the General’s table, which occupied a place of honor on the dance floor’s edge, I saw both the General and the Madame remaining seated, looking as if they were sucking on the sour fruit of the tamarind tree that had shaded their lost villa. And no wonder! For no one was twisting more than Lana herself, every rotation of her hips working an invisible ratchet that pulled the heads of the men on the dance floor forward and then pushed back. I might have participated if I was not so aware of Ms. Mori dancing with me, twisting with such childlike glee that I had to smile. She was looking remarkably feminine compared with her usual style. A lily nestled in her marcelled hair, and she wore a chiffon dress that actually exposed her knees. I had flattered her more than once on her appearance, and I took the occasion of seeing her knees during the twist to compliment her on her dancing as well. I haven’t danced like that in a long time, she said when the song was over. Neither have I, Ms. Mori, I said, kissing her on the cheek. Sofia, she said.

Before I could respond, Clark Gable took to the stage and announced a surprise visitor, a congressman who served in our country as a Green Beret from ’62 to ’64 and who was the representative for this district we found ourselves in. The Congressman had achieved a significant degree of renown in Southern California as an up-and-coming young politician, his martial credentials serving him well in Orange County. Here, his nicknames of Napalm Ned or Knock-’em- Dead Ned or Nuke-’em-All Ned, used depending on one’s mood and the geopolitical crisis, were affectionate rather than derogatory. He was so anti-red in his politics he might as well have been green, one reason he was one of the few politicians in Southern California to greet the refugees with open arms. The majority of Americans regarded us with ambivalence if not outright distaste, we being living reminders of their stinging defeat. We threatened the sanctity and symmetry of a white and black America whose yin and yang racial politics left no room for any other color, particularly that of pathetic little yellow-skinned people pickpocketing the American purse. We were strange aliens rumored to have a predilection for Fido Americanus, the domestic canine on whom was lavished more per capita than the annual income of a starving Bangladeshi family. (The true horror of this situation was actually beyond the ken of the average American. While some of us indeed had been known to sup on the brethren of Rin Tin Tin and Lassie, we did not do so in the Neanderthalesque way imagined by the average American, with a club, a roast, and some salt, but with a gourmand’s depth of ingenuity and creativity, our chefs able to cook canids seven different virility- enhancing ways, from extracting the marrow to grilling and boiling, as well as sausage making, stewing, and a few varieties of frying and steaming—yum!) The Congressman, however, had written editorials defending us and welcoming the émigrés to his Orange County district.
Good God, look at you, he said, with microphone in hand, Clark Gable by his side, flanked by angel and temptress. He was in his forties, a crossbreed between lawyer and politician, exhibiting the former’s aggressiveness and the latter ’s smoothness, typified by his head. Shiny, polished, and pointed as the tip of a fountain pen, words flowed from it as easily as the finest India ink. This head was the difference in height between him and the shorter Clark Gable, and in every dimension was the Congressman so much more expansive that two Vietnamese men of average height and size could have squeezed themselves into the confines of his body. Look at yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, look at yourselves the way I wish my fellow Americans would look at you, which is as fellow Americans. I am truly thankful for the chance to be here tonight and to share in the joy of this occasion, this marriage of two lovely young Vietnamese people in a Chinese restaurant on California soil under an American moon and in a Christian universe. Let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, for two years I lived among your people in the Highlands and fought with your soldiers and shared your fears and faced your enemy, and I thought then and I think now how I could do nothing finer with my life than sacrifice it in the cause of your hopes, dreams, and aspirations for a better life. While I believed as surely as you that those hopes, dreams, and aspirations would be fulfilled in your homeland, we have been dealt another hand by history and the mysterious and unquestionable grace of God. I am here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that this is a hand of temporary bad luck, for your soldiers fought well and bravely, and would have prevailed if only Congress had remained as steadfast in their support of you as the president promised. This was a promise shared by many, many Americans. But not all. You know who I mean. The Democrats. The media. The antiwar movement. The hippies. The college students. The radicals. America was weakened by its own internal divisions, by the defeatists and communists and traitors infesting our universities, our newsrooms, and our Congress. You, sad to say, merely remind them of their cowardice and their treachery. I am here to tell you that what you remind me of is America’s great promise! The promise of the immigrant! The promise of the American Dream! The promise that the people of this country used to hold dear and will one day soon hold dear again, that America is a land of freedom and independence, a land of patriots who have always stood up for the little man no matter where he is in the world, a land of heroes who will never relent in the cause of helping our friends and smiting our enemies, a land that welcomes people like you, who have sacrificed so much in our common cause of democracy and liberty! One day, my friends, America will stand tall again, and it will be because of people like you. And one day, my friends, the land you have lost will be yours again! Because nothing can stop the inevitable movement of freedom and the will of the people! Now, affirm with me in your beautiful language what we all believe—
The entire audience had been cheering and applauding wildly throughout the speech, and if he had rolled out a communist in a cage, the spectators would have gladly called for him to rip out the red’s beating heart with his massive fists. There was no way he could possibly get them even more excited, but he did. Raising his arms to form a V, presumably for Victory, or for Vietnam, or for Vote for me, or for something even more subliminally suggestive, he shouted into the microphone, in the most perfect Vietnamese, Vietnam Muon Nam! Vietnam Muon Nam! Vietnam Muon Nam! Everyone sitting leaped to his or her feet, and everyone standing stood a little taller, and everyone roared after the Congressman the refrain of Vietnam Forever! Then Clark Gable made a motion to the band, and it swung into the rhythms of our national anthem, which the angel and the temptress and Clark Gable and the Congressman all sang with zeal, as did everyone in the audience, myself included, except for the stoic Chinese waiters, who could finally take a rest.
When the anthem finished, the Congressman was mobbed by well-wishers onstage while the rest of the audience members sunk into their seats with postcoital smugness. I turned to find Sonny, notepad and pen in hand, standing by Ms. Mori. Funny, he said, pink from a glass or two of cognac. It’s the same slogan the Communist Party uses. Ms. Mori shrugged. A slogan is just an empty suit, she said. Anyone can wear it. I like that, Sonny said. Mind if I use it? I introduced the two of them and asked him if he was going to get up close for a photograph. He grinned. The newspaper’s been doing well enough for me to hire a photographer. As for me, I already interviewed the good Congressman. I should have worn a flak jacket. He was practically shooting bullets at me.
Typical white man behavior, Ms. Mori said. Have you ever noticed how a white man can learn a few words of some Asian language and we just eat it up? He could ask for a glass of water and we’d treat him like Einstein. Sonny smiled and wrote that down, too. You’ve been here longer than we have, Ms. Mori, he said with some admiration. Have you noticed that when we Asians speak English, it better be nearly perfect or someone’s going to make fun of our accent? It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been here, Ms. Mori said. White people will always think we’re foreigners. But isn’t there another side to that? I said, my words a little slurred from the cognac in my bloodstream. If we speak perfect English, then Americans trust us. It makes it easier for them to think we’re one of them.
You’re that kind of person, right? Sonny’s eyes were as opaque as the tinted windows of a car. I was mistaken about him having changed that much. In the few times we had seen each other since our initial reunion, he had shown that he had merely turned down the volume on his personality. So what do you think of our Congressman?
Are you going to quote me? You’ll be an anonymous source.
He’s the best thing that could have happened to us, I said. And that was no lie. It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.
The next weekend provided further opportunity to refine my understanding of the Congressman’s potential. On a bright Sunday morning, I chauffeured the General and Madame from Hollywood to Huntington Beach, where the Congressman lived and where he had invited them for lunch. My title of chauffeur was more impressive than the vehicle, a Chevrolet Nova whose best feature was its relative newness. But the fact remained that the General and the Madame, nestled in the backseat, had a chauffeur. My function was to be a trapping of their past and possibly future life. Their conversation for the hour-long drive revolved mostly around the Congressman until I asked about Lana, who, I said, struck me as having become all grown up. In the rearview mirror, I saw Madame’s face darken with barely repressed fury.
She’s completely insane, Madame declared. We’ve been trying to keep her insanity within the family, but now that she’s strutting in public as a singer—Madame said the word as if it were communist—there’s nothing we can do. Someone persuaded her that she had talent as a singer, and she took the compliment seriously. She is rather talented, I said. Don’t start! Don’t encourage her! Look at her. She looks like a slut. Is this what I raised her to be? What decent man would want to marry that? Would you, Captain? Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. No, Madame, I said, I wouldn’t want to marry that, also the two-faced truth, for marriage was not the first thing on my mind when I saw her onstage. Of course not, she fumed. The worst thing about living in America is the corruption. At home, we could contain it in the bars and nightclubs and bases. But here, we will not be able to protect our children from the lewdness and the shallowness and the tawdriness Americans love so much. They’re too permissive. No one even thinks twice of what they call dating. We all know that “date” is a euphemism. What parent not only allows their daughter to copulate in her teenage years, but willingly encourages it? It’s shocking! It’s an abnegation of moral responsibility. Ugh.
Somehow, at lunch, the conversation turned exactly in this direction, allowing Madame to repeat her points to the Congressman and his wife, Rita, a refugee from Castro’s revolution. She bore a passing resemblance to Rita Hayworth, with ten or fifteen years and pounds added to the movie star at her most glamorous period, circa Gilda. Castro, she said, in the way Madame said singer, is the devil. The only good thing about living with the devil, General and Madame, is that one knows evil and can recognize it. That is why I am happy you are here today, because we Cubans and Vietnamese are cousins in our shared cause against communism. These words sealed the bond between the Congressman and Rita and the General and Madame, who was comfortable enough that she eventually mentioned Lana to them while the mute housekeeper policed the empty dishes. Rita immediately sympathized. She was the domestic equivalent of her husband, an anticommunist warrior housewife to whom nothing was just an isolated incident but was almost always a symptom by which the disease of communism could be linked to poverty, depravity, atheism, and decay of many kinds. I won’t allow rock music in this house, she said, gripping Madame’s hand to console her for the loss of her daughter’s virtue. None of my children will be allowed to date until eighteen and, so long as they live in this house, will have a curfew by ten. It’s our weak spot, this freedom we allow people to behave any way they please, what with their drugs and their sex, as if those things aren’t infectious.
Every system has its excesses that must be checked internally, the Congressman said. We let the hippies steal the meaning of the words “love” and “freedom,” and we’ve only just begun to fight back. That fight begins and ends in the home. Unlike his public persona, the Congressman in private was soft-spoken and measured in his tones, baronially assured as he sat at the head of the table, the General and Madame to either side. We control what our children read and listen to and watch, but it’s a tough fight when they can just turn on the television or radio any time they want. We need the government to make sure Hollywood and the record labels don’t go too far.
Aren’t you the government? the General said.
Exactly! Which is why one of my priorities is legislation that regulates movies and music. This is not censorship, only advice with teeth. But you can bet the Hollywood and music types don’t like me at all, until they meet me, that is, and see I’m not some kind of ogre out to feast on their creations. I’m just trying to help them refine their product. Now one thing that happened as a consequence of my work on the subcommittee is that I became friendly with some of the Hollywood people. I’ll admit I had my prejudices about them, but some of them are actually smart and passionate guys, too. Smart and passionate—that’s what I care about. The rest, we negotiate. Anyway, one of them is making a movie about the war and wanted my advice. I’m going to give him some notes on his script about what he got right and wrong. But the reason I mention it to you, General, is because the story’s about the Phoenix Program, and I know you’re an expert on that. Me, I left before that even got started. Maybe you can give some feedback. Otherwise who knows what kind of Hollywood story they’re going to make.
This is why I have my captain, the General said, nodding toward me. He is, in effect, my cultural attaché. He would be more than happy to read the screenplay and offer his insight. When I asked the Congressman for the title, I was taken aback. Hamlet?
No, The Hamlet. The director’s also the writer. Never served a day in the armed forces, just got fed John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies as a kid. The main character’s a Green Beret who has to save a hamlet. I did serve two years on an A-Team in a number of hamlets, but nothing like this fantasyland he’s cooked up.
I’ll see what I can do, I said. I had lived in a northern hamlet only a few years as a young boy, before our flight south in ’54, but lack of experience had never stopped me from trying anything. This was my mind-set when I approached Lana after her commanding performance, my intent to congratulate her on her new career. We stood in the restaurant’s foyer, by an imposing photograph of the newlyweds displayed on an easel, and it was here that she studied me with the objective, unsentimental eye of an art appraiser. She smiled and said, I was wondering why you were keeping your distance from me, Captain. When I protested that I simply had not recognized her, she asked me if I liked what I saw. I don’t look like the girl you knew, do I, Captain?
Some men preferred those innocent schoolgirls in their white ao dai, but not me. They belonged to some pastoral, pure vision of our culture from which I was excluded, as distant to me as the snowcapped peaks of my father’s homeland. No, I was impure, and impurity was all I wanted and all I deserved. You don’t look like the girl I knew, I said. But you look exactly like the woman I imagined you would one day become. No one had ever said anything like this to her, and the unexpected nature of my remark made her falter for a moment before she recovered. I see I’m not the only person who’s changed since coming here, Captain. You’re so much more . . . direct than you were when you lived with us.
I don’t live with you any longer, I said. If Madame had not appeared at that moment, who knew where the conversation would have taken us then? Without a word to me, she seized Lana by the elbow and pulled her toward the ladies’ room with a force that would not be denied. Although that was the last I saw of her for quite a while, she returned in my fantasies many times over the subsequent weeks. Regardless of what I wanted or deserved, she inevitably appeared in a white ao dai, her long black hair sometimes framing her face and sometimes obscuring it. In the nameless dream city where I encountered her, my shadow self wavered. Even in my somnambulent state I knew that white was not only the color of purity and innocence. It was also the sign of mourning and death.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 8

We own the day, but CHARLIE owns the night. Never forget that. These are the words that blond twenty- one-year-old Sergeant JAY BELLAMY hears on his first day in the torrid tropics of ’Nam from his new commanding officer, Captain WILL SHAMUS. Shamus was baptized in the blood of his own comrades on the beaches of Normandy, survived another near-death experience under a Chinese human-wave attack in Korea, then hauled himself up the ranks on a pulley oiled with Jack Daniel’s. He knows he will not ascend any higher, not with his Bronx manners and his big, knobby knuckles over which no velvet gloves fit. This is a political war, he informs his acolyte, the words emanating from behind the smoke screen produced by a Cuban cigar. But all I know is a killing war. His task: save the prelapsarian Montagnards of a bucolic hamlet perched on the border of wild Laos. What’s threatening them is the Viet Cong, and not just any Viet Cong. This is the baddest of the bad—King Cong. King Cong will die for his country, which is more than can be said for most Americans. More important, King Cong will kill for his country, and nothing makes King Cong lick his lips like the ferric scent of the white man’s blood. King Cong has stocked the dense jungle around the hamlet with veteran guerrillas, battle-wizened men (and women) who have slaughtered Frenchmen from the Highlands to the Street Without Joy. What’s more, King Cong has infiltrated the hamlet with subversives and sympathizers, friendly faces only masks for calculating wills. Standing against them are the hamlet’s Popular Forces, a ragtag bunch of farmers and teenagers, Vietnam’s own minutemen trained by the dozen Green Berets of the US Army Special Forces A-Team. This is enough, Sergeant Bellamy thinks, alone in his watchtower at midnight. He’s dropped out of Harvard and run far from his St. Louis home, his millionaire daddy, and his fur-cloaked mother. This is enough, this stunningly beautiful jungle and these humble, simple people. This is where I, Jay Bellamy, make my first and maybe my last stand—at THE HAMLET.
This, at any rate, was my interpretation of the screenplay mailed to me by the director’s personal assistant, the thickish manila envelope arriving with my name misspelled in a beautifully cursive hand. That was the first whiff of trouble, the second being how the personal assistant, Violet, did not even bother to say hello or good-bye when she called for my mailing information and to arrange a meeting with the director in his Hollywood Hills home. When Violet opened the door, she continued with her bewildering manner of discourse in person. Glad to see you could make it, heard a lot about you, loved your notes on The Hamlet. And that’s precisely how she spoke, trimming pronouns and periods, as if punctuation and grammar were wasted on me. Then, without deigning to make eye contact, she inclined her head in a gesture of condescension and disdain, signaling me to enter.
Perhaps her abruptness was merely part of her personality, for she had the appearance of the worst kind of bureaucrat, the aspiring one, from blunt, square haircut to blunt, clean fingernails to blunt, efficient pumps. But perhaps it was me, still morally disoriented from the crapulent major’s death, as well as the apparition of his severed head at the wedding banquet. The emotional residue of that night was like a drop of arsenic falling into the still waters of my soul, nothing having changed from the taste of it but everything now tainted. So perhaps that was why when I crossed over the threshold into the marble foyer, I instantly suspected that the cause of her behavior was my race. What she saw when she looked at me must have been my yellowness, my slightly smaller eyes, and the shadow cast by the ill fame of the Oriental’s genitals, those supposedly minuscule privates disparaged on many a public restroom wall by semiliterates. I might have been just half an Asian, but in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t. Funnily enough, I had never felt inferior because of my race during my foreign student days. I was foreign by definition and therefore was treated as a guest. But now, even though I was a card-carrying American with a driver’s license, Social Security card, and resident alien permit, Violet still considered me as foreign, and this misrecognition punctured the smooth skin of my self-confidence. Was I just being paranoid, that all- American characteristic? Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But as she advanced along the polished bamboo floors, steering clear of the dusky maid vacuuming a Turkish rug, I just knew it could not be so. The flawlessness of my English did not matter. Even if she could hear me, she still saw right through me, or perhaps saw someone else instead of me, her retinas burned with the images of all the castrati dreamed up by Hollywood to steal the place of real Asian men. Here I speak of those cartoons named Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Number One Son, Hop Sing
—Hop Sing!—and the bucktoothed, bespectacled Jap not so much played as mocked by Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The performance was so insulting it even deflated my fetish for Audrey Hepburn, understanding as I did her implicit endorsement of such loathsomeness.
By the time I sat down opposite the director in his office, I was seething from the memory of all these previous wounds, although I did not show it. On the one hand, I was sitting for a meeting with the famed Auteur, when once I was just another lovelorn movie fan passing Saturday afternoons in the cinematic bliss of matinee screenings from which I emerged, blinking and slightly shocked, into sunlight as bright as the fluorescent bulbs of a hospital birthing room. On the other hand, I was flummoxed by having read a screenplay whose greatest special effect was neither the blowing up of various things nor the evisceration of various bodies, but the achievement of narrating a movie about our country where not a single one of our countrymen had an intelligible word to say. Violet had scraped my already chafed ethnic sensitivity even further, but since it would not do to make my irritation evident, I forced myself to smile and do what I did best, remaining as unreadable as a paper package wrapped up with string.
The Auteur studied me, this extra who had crept into the middle of his perfect mise-en-scène. A golden Oscar statuette exhibited itself to the side of his telephone, serving as either a kingly scepter or a mace for braining impertinent screenwriters. A hirsute show of manliness ruffled along his forearms and from the collar of his shirt, reminding me of my own relative hairlessness, my chest (and stomach and buttocks) as streamlined and glabrous as a Ken doll. He was the hottest writer- director in town after the triumph of his last two films, beginning with Hard Knock, a critically lauded movie about the travails of Greek American youth in the inflamed streets of Detroit. It was loosely autobiographical, the Auteur having been born with an olive-tinged Greek surname he had bleached in typical Hollywood fashion. His most recent film declared that he had had enough with off-white ethnicity, exploring cocaine-white ethnicity instead. Venice Beach was about the failure of the American Dream, featuring a dipsomaniac reporter and his depressive wife writing competing versions of the Great American Novel. As the foolscap mounted endlessly, their money and their lives slowly drained away, leaving the audience with a last image of the couple’s dilapidated cottage strangled by bougainvillea while beautifully lit by the sun setting beyond the Pacific. It was Didion crossed with Chandler as prophesied by Faulkner and shot by Welles. It was very good. He had talent, no matter how much it might have pained me to say so.
Great to meet you, the Auteur began. Loved your notes. How about something to drink. Coffee, tea, water, soda, scotch. Never too early for scotch. Violet, some scotch. Ice. I said ice. No ice, then. Me too. Always neat for me. Look at my view. No, not at the gardener. José! José! Got to pound on the glass to get his attention. He’s half deaf. José! Move! You’re blocking the view. Good. See the view. I’m talking about the Hollywood sign right there. Never get tired of it. Like the Word of God just dropped down, plunked on the hills, and the Word was Hollywood. Didn’t God say let there be light first. What’s a movie but light. Can’t have a movie without light. And then words. Seeing that sign reminds me to write every morning. What. All right, so it doesn’t say Hollywood. You got me. Good eye. Thing’s falling to pieces. One O’s half fallen and the other O’s fallen altogether. The word’s gone to shit. So what. You still get the meaning. Thanks, Violet. Cheers. How do they say it in your country. I said how do they say it. Yo, yo, yo, is it. I like that. Easy to remember. Yo, yo, yo, then. And here’s to the Congressman for sending you my way. You’re the first Vietnamese I’ve ever met. Not too many of you in Hollywood. Hell, none of you in Hollywood. And authenticity’s important. Not that authenticity beats imagination. The story still comes first. The universality of the story has to be there. But it doesn’t hurt to get the details right. I had a Green Beret who actually fought with the Montagnards vet the script. He found me. He had a screenplay. Everyone has a screenplay. Can’t write but he’s a real American hero. Two tours of duty, killed VC with his bare hands. A Silver Star and a Purple Heart with oak leaf clusters. You should have seen the Polaroids he showed me. Made my stomach turn. Gave me some ideas, though, for how to shoot the movie. Hardly had any corrections to make. What do you think of that.
It took me a moment to realize he was asking me a question. I was disoriented, as if I were an English as a second language speaker listening to an equally foreign speaker from another country. That’s great, I said.
You bet it’s great. You, on the other hand. You wrote me another screenplay in the margins. You ever even read a screenplay before.
It took me another moment to realize there was another question. Like Violet, he had a problem with conventional punctuation. No—
I didn’t think so. So why do you think— But you didn’t get the details right.
I didn’t get the details right. Violet, hear that. I researched your country, my friend. I read Joseph Buttinger and Frances FitzGerald. Have you read Joseph Buttinger and Frances FitzGerald. He’s the foremost historian on your little part of the world. And she won the Pulitzer Prize. She dissected your psychology. I think I know something about you people.
His aggressiveness flustered me, and my flustering, which I was not accustomed to, only flustered me further, which was my only explanation for my forthcoming behavior. You didn’t even get the screams right, I said.
Excuse me.
I waited for an interjection until I realized he was just interrupting me with a question. All right, I said, my string starting to unravel. If I remember correctly, pages 26, 42, 58, 77, 91, 103, and 118, basically all the places in the script where one of my people has a speaking part, he or she screams. No words, just screams. So you should at least get the screams right.
Screams are universal. Am I right, Violet.
You’re right, she said from where she sat next to me. Screams are not universal, I said. If I took this telephone cord and wrapped it around your neck and pulled it tight until your eyes bugged out and your tongue turned black, Violet’s scream would sound very different from the scream you would be trying to make. Those are two very different kinds of terror coming from a man and a woman. The man knows he is dying. The woman fears she is likely to die soon. Their situations and their bodies produce a qualitatively different timbre to their voices. One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else’s pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual. In this country, for example, someone fleeing for his life will think he should call for the police. This is a reasonable way to cope with the threat of pain. But in my country, no one calls for the police, since it is often the police who inflict the pain. Am I right, Violet?
Violet mutely nodded her head.

So let me just point out that in your script, you have my people scream the following way: AIIIEEEEE!!! For example, when VILLAGER #3 is impaled by a Viet Cong punji trap, this is how he screams. Or when the LITTLE GIRL sacrifices her life to alert the Green Berets to the Viet Cong sneaking into the village, this is how she screams before her throat is cut. But having heard many of my countrymen screaming in pain, I can assure you this is not how they scream. Would you like to hear how they scream?
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. Okay.
I stood up and leaned on the desk to look right into his eyes. But I didn’t see him. What I saw was the face of the wiry Montagnard, an elder of the Bru minority who lived in an actual hamlet not far from the setting of this fiction. Rumor had it he served as a liaison agent for the Viet Cong. I was on my first assignment as a lieutenant and could not figure out a way to save the man from my captain wrapping a strand of rusted barbed wire around his throat, the necklace tight enough so that each time he swallowed, the wire tickled his Adam’s apple. That was not what made the old man scream, however. It was just the appetizer. In my mind, though, as I watched the scene, I screamed for him.
Here’s what it sounds like, I said, reaching across the desk to pick up the Auteur’s Montblanc fountain pen. I wrote onomatopoeically across the cover page of the screenplay in big black letters: AIEYAAHHH!!! Then I capped his pen, put it back on his leather writing pad, and said, That’s how we scream in my country.
After I descended from the Auteur’s home to the General’s, thirty blocks distant and down the hills to the Hollywood flatlands, I reported my first experience with the motion picture industry to the General and Madame, both of whom were infuriated on my behalf. My meeting with the Auteur and Violet had gone on for a while longer, mostly in a more subdued fashion, with me pointing out that the lack of speaking parts for Vietnamese people in a movie set in Vietnam might be interpreted as cultural insensitivity. True, Violet interjected, but what it boils down to is who pays for the tickets and goes to the movies. Frankly, Vietnamese audiences aren’t going to watch this movie, are they? I contained my outrage. Even so, I said, do you not think it would be a little more believable, a little more realistic, a little more authentic, for a movie set in a certain country for the people in that country to have something to say, instead of having your screenplay direct, as it does now, Cut to villagers speaking in their own language? Do you think it might not be decent to let them actually say something instead of simply acknowledging that there is some kind of sound coming from their mouths? Could you not even just have them speak a heavily accented English—you know what I mean, ching-chong English—just to pretend they are speaking in an Asian language that somehow American audiences can strangely understand? And don’t you think it would be more compelling if your Green Beret had a love interest? Do these men only love and die for each other? That is the implication without a woman in the midst.
The Auteur grimaced and said, Very interesting. Great stuff. Loved it, but I had a question. What was it. Oh, yes. How many movies have you made. None. Isn’t that right. None, zero, zilch, nada, nothing, and however you say it in your language. So thank you for telling me how to do my job. Now get the hell out of my house and come back after you’ve made a movie or two. Maybe then I’ll listen to one or two of your cheap ideas.
Why was he so rude? Madame said. Didn’t he ask you to give him some comments? He was looking for a yes man. He thought I’d give him a rubber stamp of approval. He thought you were going to fawn over him.
When I didn’t do it, he was hurt. He’s an artist, he’s got thin skin. So much for your career in Hollywood, the General said.
I don’t want a career in Hollywood, I said, which was true only to the extent that Hollywood did not want me. I confess to being angry with the Auteur, but was I wrong in being angry? This was especially the case when he acknowledged he did not even know that Montagnard was simply a French catchall term for the dozens of Highland minorities. What if, I said to him, I wrote a screenplay about the American West and simply called all the natives Indians? You’d want to know whether the cavalry was fighting the Navajo or Apache or Comanche, right? Likewise, I would want to know, when you say these people are Montagnards, whether we speak of the Bru or the Nung or the Tay.
Let me tell you a secret, the Auteur said. You ready. Here it is. No one gives a shit.
He was amused by my wordlessness. To see me without words is like seeing one of those Egyptian felines without hair, a rare and not necessarily desirable occasion. Only later, driving away from his house, could I laugh bitterly about how he had bludgeoned me into silence with my own weapon of choice. How could I be so dense? How could I be so deluded? Ever the industrious student, I had read the screenplay in a few hours and then reread and written notes for several more hours, all under the misguided idea my work mattered. I naively believed that I could divert the Hollywood organism from its goal, the simultaneous lobotomization and pickpocketing of the world’s audiences. The ancillary benefit was strip-mining history, leaving the real history in the tunnels along with the dead, doling out tiny sparkling diamonds for audiences to gasp over. Hollywood did not just make horror movie monsters, it was its own horror movie monster, smashing me under its foot. I had failed and the Auteur would make The Hamlet as he intended, with my countrymen serving merely as raw material for an epic about white men saving good yellow people from bad yellow people. I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit. I was maddened by my helplessness before the Auteur’s imagination and machinations. His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). Hollywood’s high priests understood innately the observation of Milton’s Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or antihero than virtuous extra, so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage. In this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l’oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute; we were to be struck dumb.
Have some pho, Madame said. It will make you feel better.
She had been cooking and the house smelled of sentiment, a rich aroma of beef broth and star anise I can only describe as the bouquet of love and tenderness, all the more striking because Madame had never cooked before coming to this country. For women of Madame’s rarefied class, cooking was one of those functions contracted out to other women, along with cleaning, nursing, teaching, sewing, and so on, everything except for the bare biological necessities, which I could not imagine Madame performing, except, perhaps, for breathing. But the exigencies of exile had made it necessary for Madame to cook, as no one else in the household was capable of anything more than boiling water. In the General’s case, even that was beyond him. He could fieldstrip and reassemble an M16 blindfolded, but a gas stove was as perplexing as a calculus equation, or at least he pretended so. Like most of us Vietnamese men, he simply did not want to be even brushed with domesticity. The only domestic things he did were sleep and eat, both of which he was better at than me. He finished his pho a good five minutes before I did, although my slow speed of consumption was not due to lack of will but because Madame’s pho had dissolved me and transported me back in time to my mother’s household, where she concocted the broth from the gray beef bones given by my father from his leftovers. Usually we ate the pho without the thin slices of beef that were its protein, we being too poor to afford the meat itself, except for those rare occasions when my suffering mother scraped together enough wherewithal. But poor as she was, my mother brewed the most wonderfully aromatic soup, and I helped her by charring the ginger and onion that would be plunked into the iron pot for flavor. It was also my task to skim the scum that boiled to the top of the broth as the bones simmered, leaving the broth clear and rich. As the bones continued to simmer for hours, I tortured myself by doing my homework by the pot, the aroma taunting and tantalizing. Madame’s pho harkened back to the warmth of my mother’s kitchen, which was probably not as warm as it was in my memories, but never mind
—I had to stop periodically to savor not only my soup but the marrow of my memories.
Delicious, I said. I haven’t had this in years.
Isn’t it amazing? I never suspected she had this talent. You should open a restaurant, I said.
The way you talk! She was clearly pleased.
Have you seen this? The General pulled a newspaper from the stack on the kitchen countertop, the latest edition of Sonny’s biweekly paper. I had not seen it yet. What disturbed the General was Sonny’s article on the major’s funeral, now a few weeks past, and the coverage of the wedding. On the major’s demise, Sonny wrote that “the police call this a robbery-homicide, but are we sure an officer of the secret police was without enemies who might want him dead?” And in regards to the wedding, Sonny summarized the speeches and concluded by observing that “perhaps it is time for the talk of war to cease. Isn’t the war over?”
He’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing, I said, even though I knew that he had gone too far. But I agree he may be a little naive.
Is it naïveté? That’s a generous reading. He’s supposed to be a reporter. That means to report the facts, not to make things up or interpret them or put ideas in people’s heads.
He isn’t wrong about the major, is he?
Whose side are you on? Madame said, completely shedding the role of cook. Reporters need editors and editors need beatings. That’s the best newspaper policy. The problem with Son is that he is his own editor and he goes unchecked.
You’re absolutely right, Madame. The Auteur’s punch had unnerved me, knocked me out of character. Too much freedom of the press is unhealthy for a democracy, I declared. While I did not believe this, my character, the good captain, did, and as the actor playing this role I had to sympathize with this man. But most actors spent more time with their masks off than on, whereas in my case it was the reverse. No surprise, then, that sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face. Now, with the face of the captain readjusted for a proper fit, I said, The citizenry can’t sift out what is useful and good if there’s too much opinion circulating.
No more than two opinions or ideas on any one issue should be out there, the General said. Look at the voting system. Same concept. We had multiple parties and candidates and look at the mess we had. Here you choose the left hand or the right and that’s more than enough. Two choices and look at all the drama with every presidential election. Even two choices may be one too many. One choice is enough, and no choice may be even better. Less is more, isn’t it? You know the man, Captain. He’ll listen to you. Remind him of how we did things back home. Even though we’re here, we still need to remember the ways we did things.
In the good old days, Sonny would already be sweating in a holding cell. Out loud, I said, Speaking of the old days, sir, are we making any progress on winning them back again?
Progress is being made, the General said, leaning back in his chair. We have friends and allies in Claude and the Congressman, and they tell me they are not alone. But it’s a difficult time for getting support publicly, since the American people don’t want to fight another war. So we have to assemble ourselves slowly.

We need a network here and there, I suggested.
I have a list of the officers for our first meeting. I’ve talked to all of them in person and they are dying for the chance to fight. There’s nothing for them here. The only chance for them to regain their honor and be men again is to reclaim our country.
We’ll need more than a vanguard.
Vanguard? Madame said. That’s communist talk.
Maybe so. But the communists won, Madame. They weren’t just lucky. Perhaps we should learn from some of their strategies. A vanguard can lead the rest of the people toward where it is they don’t even know they want to go but should go.
He’s right, the General said.
The vanguard works clandestinely but sometimes shows the public a different face. Voluntary organizations and the like become the fronts for the vanguard.
Exactly, the General said. Look at Son. We need to make his newspaper one of those front organizations. And we need a youth group, a women’s group, even an intellectuals’ group.
We also need cells. Parts of the organization need to be secluded from one another so that if one cell is lost, others can survive. This is one cell right here. Then there are the cells Claude and the Congressman are involved in, which I know nothing about.
In due time, Captain. One step at a time. The Congressman is working on certain contacts to clear the way for us to send men to Thailand.
That will be the staging area.
Exactly. A return by sea is too difficult. We have to go overland back into the country. Meanwhile, Claude is finding us money. Money can get us the rest of what we need. We can get the men, but they will need weapons, training, a place to train. They’ll need transport to Thailand. We must think like communists, as you say. We must plan far ahead for decades. We must live and work underground, as they did.
At least we’re already acquainted with darkness.
We are, aren’t we? We had no choice. We have never had a choice, not really, not when it matters. Communism forced us to do everything we have done to oppose it. History has moved us. We have no choice but to fight, to resist evil and to resist being forgotten. This is why—and here the General picked up Sonny’s newspaper—even talking about the war being over is dangerous. We must not allow our people to grow complacent.
And neither must we let them forget their resentment, I added. That’s where newspapers can play a role, on the culture front.
But only if the journalists do their work as they should. The General tossed the newspaper back on the table. “Resentment.” That’s a good word. Always resent, never relent. Perhaps that should be our motto.
There’s a ring to it, I said.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 9

Much to my surprise, Violet called me the next week. I don’t believe we have anything to talk about, I said. He reconsidered your advice, she said. I noticed that she actually used complete sentences with me this time. He’s tempestuous and doesn’t take criticism well, as he’s the first to admit. But after he cooled down, he thought there were some usable ideas in your notes. More than that, he respects you for standing up to him. Not too many people are willing to do that, which makes you an ideal candidate for what I’m proposing. We need a consultant who can get things right when it comes to Vietnamese matters. We’ve already researched the history, the costumes, the weapons, the customs, anything we could find in a book. But we’ll need that human touch you can provide. There are refugees from Vietnam in the Philippines who we’ll be using as extras, and we need someone to work with them.
From far away floated the susurrus of my mother’s voice: Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything! Despite all the disadvantages of my poor, muddled heritage, my mother’s endless encouragement and fierce belief in me meant that I never backed down from challenge or opportunity. Their offer was four months of paid vacation in a tropical paradise, six months if the shoot went over schedule, and perhaps not so much a paradise if the local rebels got a little too overconfident, and perhaps not so much of a vacation as a working jaunt, and perhaps not so much paid as underpaid, but the upshot was that I needed a respite from my American refuge. Remorse over the crapulent major’s death was ringing me up a few times a day, tenacious as a debt collector. Also always there at the crowded back of my mind, front and center in the Catholic chorus of my guilt, stood the major’s widow. I had given her only fifty dollars at the funeral, which was all I could afford. Even underpaid, I would be able to save money, given how my room and board would be included, and from this provide some support for the major’s wife and children.
They were innocents to whom wrong had been done, as I had once been an innocent child to whom wrong was done. And not by strangers, but by my own family, my aunts who had not wanted me to play with my cousins at family gatherings and who shooed me away from the kitchen when there were treats. I associated my blood aunts with the scars they inflicted on me during the New Year, the time all other children remember with such fondness. What was the first New Year I could remember? Perhaps the one when I was five or six. I huddled with the other children, solemn and nervous, facing the prospect of approaching each adult and making a little speech wishing him or her health and happiness. But although I forgot not a word, and did not stumble like most of my cousins, and radiated sincerity and charm, Aunt Two did not grace me with a red envelope. The entire maternal family tree was watching me, on its gnarled branches my mother’s parents, her nine siblings, my three dozen cousins. I do not have enough, this wicked witch said, towering above me. I am one short. I stood immobilized, my arms still folded respectfully across my chest, waiting for a magical envelope or an apology to appear, but nothing more was forthcoming until, after what seemed to be several minutes, my mother laid her hand on my shoulder and said, Thank your aunt for her kindness in teaching you a lesson.
Only later, at home, on the wooden bed we shared, did Mama weep. It did not matter that my other aunts and uncles gave me red envelopes, although when I compared mine with my cousins’, I discovered that my sums of lucky money were but half theirs. That’s because you’re half-blooded, said one calculating cousin. You’re a bastard. When I asked Mama what a bastard was, her face inflamed. If I could, she said, I’d strangle him with my bare hands. Never in my life has there been a day when I learned so much about myself, the world, and its inhabitants. One must be grateful for one’s education no matter how it arrives. So I was grateful, in a way, for my aunt and my cousin, whose lessons I remember much more than many nobler things that passed before me in school. Oh, they’ll see! my mother wept, squeezing me with such force I was nearly breathless, my face pressed against one comforting breast while my hand squeezed its plush other. Radiating through thin cotton fabric was the hot, rich muskiness of a young woman’s body after a humid day spent mostly on feet or haunches, preparing food and serving. They’ll see! You’ll work harder than all of them, you’ll study more than all of them, you’ll know more than all of them, you’ll be better than all of them. Promise your mother you will! And I promised.
I have shared this story with only two people, Man and Bon, censoring just the part about my mother’s breasts. This was at the lycée, at separate moments of intimacy in our early adolescence. When Bon heard it, we were fishing in the river, and he flung down his rod in fury. If I ever meet this cousin, he said, I’ll beat him until half his blood is coming out of his head. Man was more measured. Even at that age, he was calm, analytical, and precociously dialectical-materialist in his attitude. He had treated me to sugarcane juice after school, and we were sitting on a curb, little plastic sacks in hand, sipping through straws. The red envelope is a symbol, he said, of all that’s wrong. It’s the color of blood, and they singled you out for your blood. It’s the color of fortune and luck. Those are primitive beliefs. We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do. They take advantage of things, like your cousins, and they don’t question things. As long as things work for them, then they support those things. But you see the lie beneath those things because you never got to take part. You see a different shade of red than them. Red is not good luck. Red is not fortune. Red is revolution. All of a sudden I, too, saw red, and in that throbbing vision the world began to make sense to me, how so many degrees of meaning existed in a single color, the tone so potent it must be applied sparingly. If one ever sees something written in red, one knows trouble and change lie ahead.
My letters to my aunt, then, were not written in such an alarming shade, even if the cipher I used to code my sub rosa reports disturbed me. Here was one representative example of Richard Hedd’s highly esteemed Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction:
The Vietnamese peasant will not object to the use of airpower, for he is apolitical, interested only in feeding himself and his family. Bombing his village will of course upset him, but the cost is outweighed ultimately by how airpower will persuade him that he is on the wrong side if he chooses communism, which cannot protect him. (p. 126)
From these kinds of insights, I reported on my decision to take the Auteur’s offer, a job I characterized as undermining the enemy’s propaganda. I also coded the names of the officers in the General’s vanguard. Just in case my letter would be read by any eyes other than those of Man’s aunt, I kept my tone upbeat about life in Los Angeles. Perhaps unknown censors were reading refugee mail, looking for dejected, angry refugees who could not or would not dream the American Dream. I was careful, then, to present myself as just another immigrant, glad to be in the land where the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed in writing, which, when one comes to think about it, is not such a great deal. Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.
It was in the name of happiness, I told my aunt, that I helped the General toward the next step in his plan, the creation of a nonprofit charitable organization that could receive tax-deductible donations, the Benevolent Fraternity of Former Soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. In one reality, the Fraternity served the needs of thousands of veterans who were now men without an army, a country, and an identity. It existed, in short, to increase their meager measure of happiness. In another reality, this Fraternity was a front that allowed the General to receive funds for the Movement from whoever wished to donate, which was not primarily the Vietnamese community. Its refugee members were hobbled by their structural function in the American Dream, which was to be so unhappy as to make other Americans grateful for their happiness. Instead of these refugees, broke and broken, the main donors were to be magnanimous individuals and charitable foundations interested in boosting America’s old friends. The Congressman had mentioned his charitable foundation to the General and me at a meeting at his district office, where we presented him the idea for the Fraternity and asked if Congress might help our organization in some way. His district office was a modest outpost in a Huntington Beach strip mall, a two-story arrangement of shops on a major intersection. Drenched in café au lait stucco, the mall was bordered by an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot. Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness. As a sign of his humility and closeness to the people, the Congressman had chosen such a strip mall for his headquarters, and in the windows were plastered white campaign signs with CONGRESSMAN in red and his name in blue, as well as his last campaign slogan: ALWAYS TRUE.
An American flag decorated one wall of the Congressman’s office. On another wall hung photos of him posing with various tuxedoed luminaries of his Republican Party: Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, John Wayne, Bob Hope, and even Richard Hedd, whom I recognized immediately from his author photograph. The Congressman offered us cigarettes and we partook for a while, canceling the side effects of the smoke by simultaneously inhaling good cheer, the healthy air of pleasantries concerning wives, children, and favorite sports teams. We also spent some time discussing my forthcoming adventure in the Philippines, which the Madame and General had both approved. What was that line from Marx? the General said, stroking his chin thoughtfully as he prepared to quote my notes about Marx. Oh, yes. “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” Isn’t that what’s happening here? Marx refers to peasants but he may as well refer to us. We cannot represent ourselves. Hollywood represents us. So we must do what we can to ensure that we are represented well.
I see where this is going, the Congressman said with a grin. He rubbed out his cigarette, leaned his elbows on his desk, and said: So what can this representative do for you? After the General explained the Fraternity and its functions, the Congressman said, Great idea, but Congress isn’t touching that. No one even wants to say the name of your country right now.
Understood, Congressman, the General said. We do not need the official support of the American people, and we understand why they would not be enthused.
But their unofficial support is another matter altogether, I said. Go on.
Even if Congress will not send money our way, there’s no preventing civically minded people or organizations, for example charitable foundations, from helping the cause of our traumatized and needy veterans. They’ve defended freedom and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the American soldier, sometimes giving blood and sometimes giving limbs.
You’ve been talking to Claude.
It’s true Claude planted certain ideas in my head. During our Saigon days, he mentioned that it was routine for the CIA to fund various activities. Not in its name, as that might be illegal or at least quite questionable, but through front organizations controlled by its agents and sympathizers, oftentimes respectable people of varied careers.
And the lucky recipients of such money were themselves often front organizations.

Indeed, with all these front organizations professing to help the poor, or feed the hungry, or spread democracy, or aid downtrodden women, or train artists, it can sometimes be difficult to know who does what and for whom.
Let me play devil’s advocate. There are many good causes to which I, for example, might donate. But to be frank, there is only so much money that I, for example, might have. Inevitably, self-interest comes into play.
Self-interest is good. It’s an instinct that keeps us alive. It’s also very patriotic. Absolutely. So: What is my self-interest in this organization of yours?
I looked at the General. It was on his lips, one of two magical words. If we possessed the things these words named, we would propel ourselves to the front rank of American citizens, able to access all the glittering treasures of American society. Unfortunately, we had only a tentative grasp on one. The word that identified what we did not possess was “money,” of which the General might have enough for his own use, but certainly not for a counterrevolution. The other word was “votes,” so that together “money votes” was “open sesame” to the deep caverns of the American political system. But even when just one-half of that magical combination floated from my aspiring Ali Baba’s lips, the Congressman’s eyebrows rippled ever so faintly. Think of our community as an investment, Congressman. A long-term investment. Think of us as a small, sleeping child who has not yet awaken and grown. It is true this child cannot vote. This child is not a citizen. But one day this child will be a citizen. One day this child’s children will be born as citizens, and they must vote for somebody. That somebody might as well be you.
As you can see when I attended the wedding, General, I already value your community.
With words, I said. With all due respect, Congressman, words are free. Money is not. Isn’t it funny that in a society that values freedom above all things, things that are free are not valued? So please permit me to be blunt. Our community appreciates your words, but in the process of becoming American it has learned the expression “money talks.” And if voting is our best way of participating in American politics, we must vote for those who deliver the money. This would hopefully be you, but of course the beauty of American politics is that we have a choice, do we not?
But even if I, for example, give your organization money, the irony is that I myself need money in order to run for election and to pay my staff. In other words, money talks both ways.
That is indeed a tricky situation. But what you are speaking of is official money that must be accounted for to the government. What we are speaking of is unofficial money that circulates to us, which returns to you in all officialness as votes delivered by the General.
That is correct, the General said. If my country has prepared me for one thing, it’s dealing with what my young friend describes so imaginatively as unofficial money.
Our performance entertained the Congressman, we the two little ingenious monkeys and he the organ-grinder, watching us hop and beg to a score not our own. We were well trained in this show from our previous exposure to Americans in our homeland, where the plays were all about unofficial money, i.e., corruption. Corruption was like the elephant in Indian lore, myself one of the blind wise men who could feel and describe only one part of it. It is not what one sees or feels that is confusing, it is what one does not see and does not feel, such as that part of the scheme we had just laid before the Congressman that was out of our control. This was the part where he found ways to funnel unofficial money to us via official channels, that is to say, foundations that had on their boards of trustees the Congressman, or his friends, or the friends of Claude. These foundations were, in short, fronts themselves for the CIA and perhaps even other, more enigmatic governmental or nongovernmental organizations I did not know of, just as the Fraternity was a front for the Movement. This the Congressman knew full well when he said, I just hope this organization of yours doesn’t engage in anything illegal when it comes to its patriotic activities. Of course he meant that we should engage in illegal activities, so long as he did not know about them. The unseen is almost always underlined with the unsaid.
Three months later I was en route to the Philippines, my rucksack in the overhead luggage bin, in my lap a copy of Fodor’s Southeast Asia, a tome as thick as War and Peace. It said this about traveling to Asia:
Why go east? The East has always woven a spell to enchant the West. Asia is vast and teeming and infinitely complex, an inexhaustible source of riches and wonder . . . Asia still holds, for the mind of the West, the lure, the challenge, the spell, and the rewards that have drawn generation after generation of Westerners from their snug, familiar lives into a world utterly different from everything they have known, thought, and believed. For Asia is half the world, the other half . . . The East may well be strange, but it doesn’t have to be frustrating. Once you have actually been there you may still find it mysterious, but that’s what will make it really interesting.
Everything my guidebook said was true and also meaningless. Yes, the East was vast, teeming, and infinitely complex, but wasn’t the West also? Pointing out that the East was an inexhaustible source of riches and wonder only implied that it was peculiarly the case, and not so for the West. The Westerner, of course, took his riches and wonder for granted, just as I had never noticed the enchantment of the East or its mystery. If anything, it was the West that was often mysterious, frustrating, and really interesting, a world utterly different from everything I had known before I began my education. As with the Westerner, the Easterner was never so bored as he was when on his own shores.
Flipping the pages to the countries that concerned me, I was not surprised to see our country described as “the most devastated land.” I, too, would not recommend going there for the casual tourist, as the book proscribed, but I was rather insulted to read the description of our neighboring Cambodians as “easy-going, sensuous, friendly, and emotional . . . Cambodia is not only one of the most charming countries in Asia, it is one of the most fascinating.” Surely that could also be said about my homeland, or most homelands with spa-like atmospheric conditions. But what did I know? I had only lived there, and people who live in a given place may have difficulty seeing its charms as well as its faults, both of which are easily available to the tourist’s freshly peeled eyes. One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both. At least in the Philippines I would be a tourist, and since the Philippines was east of our homeland, perhaps I would find it infinitely complex. The book’s description of the archipelago only made my mind salivate further, for it was “old and new, East and West. It’s changing by the day, but traditions persist,” a description that might have been written to describe me.
Indeed, I felt at home the instant I stepped from the air-conditioned chamber of the airplane into the humidity-clogged Jetway. The spectacle of the constabulary in the terminal with automatic weapons slung on their shoulders also made me homesick, confirming I was again in a country with its malnourished neck under a dictator’s loafer. Further evidence was found in the local newspaper, which had a few inches buried in the middle about the recent unsolved murders of political dissidents, their bullet-riddled bodies dumped in the streets. In a puzzling situation such as this, all riddles lead to one riddler, the dictator. This state of martial law was underwritten once more by Uncle Sam, who was supporting the tyrant Marcos in his efforts to stamp out not only a communist insurgency but also a Muslim one. That support included genuine made-in-the-USA planes, tanks, helicopters, artillery, armored personnel carriers, guns, ammunition, and kit, just as was the case for our homeland, although on a much smaller scale. Toss in a heap of jungle flora and fauna and some teeming masses and all in all the Philippines made a nice substitute for Vietnam itself, which is why the Auteur had chosen it.
The base camp was in a provincial city of the northern Luzon Cordillera, which played the role of the mountainous Annamese Cordillera that separated Vietnam and Laos. My hotel room’s amenities included a stream of water that did not so much run as jog, a flush toilet that gave a depressive sigh every time I pulled its chain, a wheezy air conditioner, and an on-call prostitute, or so said the bellboy on first showing me my room. I declined, conscious of myself as a privileged semi-Westerner in an impoverished country. After tipping him, I laid down on the slightly damp sheets, which also reminded me of home, where the humidity soaked into everything. The workmates I met later that night in the hotel bar were less thrilled about the weather, none of them having ever been mugged by the full-force humidity of a tropical climate. It’s like getting licked from throat to balls by my dog every time I go outside, the unhappy production designer groaned. He was from Minnesota. His name was Harry. He was hairy.
While the Auteur and Violet would not yet arrive for another week, Harry and his all-male production crew had already been sweating in the Philippines for months, building the sets, preparing the wardrobe, sampling the massage parlors, and being waylaid by various illnesses of gut and crotch. Harry showed me the main set the next morning, a complete reproduction of a Central Highlands hamlet down to the outhouse mounted on a platform above a fishpond. A stack of banana leaves and some old newsprint constituted the toilet paper. Peering through the round porthole of the toilet seat, we could see directly into the deceptively calm waters of the fishpond, which, Harry proudly pointed out, was stocked with a variety of whiskered catfish closely related to the ones of the Mekong Delta. Really ingenious, he said. He had a Minnesotan’s admiration for resourcefulness in the face of hardship, bred by generations of people one very bad winter away from starvation and cannibalism. I hear there’s a real feeding frenzy when someone’s taking a poop.
I had sat on exactly such a splintery toilet seat throughout my childhood, and remembered very well the catfish jockeying for the best seat at the dining table when I assumed the position. The sight of an authentic outhouse stirred neither any sentimental feelings in me nor any admiration for my people’s environmental consciousness. I preferred a flush toilet with a smooth porcelain seat and a newspaper on my lap as reading matter, not between my legs. The paper with which the West wiped itself was softer than the paper with which the rest of the world blew its nose, although this was only a metaphorical comparison. The rest of the world would have been stunned at the luxurious idea of even using paper to blow one’s nose. Paper was for writing things like this confession, not for mopping up excretions. But those strange, mysterious Westerners had exotic ways and wonders, symbolized in Kleenex and double-ply toilet paper. If longing for these riches made me an Occidentalist, I confess to it. I had no desire for the authenticity of my village life with my spiteful cousins and my ungracious aunts, or the rustic realities of being bit on one’s behind by a malarial mosquito when visiting the loo, which might be the case for some of the Vietnamese extras. Harry was planning to make them use this toilet in order to nourish the catfish, while the crew would bask in a battery of chemical toilets on dry land. So far as I was concerned, I was one of the crew, and when Harry invited me to be the first to bless the latrine, I regretfully declined, softening my rejection with a joke.
You know how we can tell that catfish sold in the markets come from ponds like this? How so? said Harry, ready to take mental notes.
They’re cross-eyed from looking up at assholes all the time.
Good one! Harry laughed and slapped my arm. Come on, let me show you the temple. It’s really beautiful. I’m going to hate it when the special effects guys blow it up.
Harry may have loved the temple the most, but for me the pièce de résistance was the cemetery. I saw it for the first time that night and returned to it several nights later, after a field trip to the refugee camp at Bataan, where I recruited a hundred Vietnamese extras. The trip had left me dispirited, encountering as I did thousands of ragged fellow countrymen who had fled from our homeland. I had seen refugees before, Commandant, the war having rendered millions of the southern people homeless within their own country, but this mess of humanity was a new kind of species. It was so unique the Western media had given it a new name, the boat people, an epithet one might think referred to a newly discovered tribe of the Amazon River or a mysterious, extinguished prehistoric population whose only surviving trace was their watercraft. Depending on one’s point of view, these boat people were either runaways from home or orphaned by their country. In either case, they looked bad and smelled a little worse: hair mangy, skin crusty, lips chapped, various glands swollen, collectively reeking like a fishing trawler manned by landlubbers with unsteady digestive tracts. They were too hungry to turn up their noses at the wages I was mandated to offer, a dollar a day, their desperation measured by the fact that not one—let me repeat, not one—haggled for a better wage. I had never imagined the day when one of my countrymen would not haggle, but these boat people clearly understood that the law of supply and demand was not on their side. What truly brought my spirits down, however, was when I asked one of the extras, a lawyer of aristocratic appearance, if the conditions in our homeland were as bad as rumored. Let’s put it this way, she said. Before the communists won, foreigners were victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. Now it’s our own people victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. I suppose that’s improvement.
I trembled at hearing her words. For a few days my conscience had been purring smoothly, the crapulent major’s death seemingly behind me in the rear view of my memory, a smear on the blacktop of my past, but now it was hiccuping again. What was happening at home, and what was I doing here? I had to remind myself of Ms. Mori’s parting words. When I told her I was taking the job, she had cooked me a farewell dinner where I almost gave in to the sneaky suspicion that perhaps I really did love her, even if I did have feelings for Lana, too. But as if anticipating such weakness on my part, Ms. Mori preemptively reminded me of our commitment to free love. Don’t feel obligated to me, she said over the orange sorbet. You can do whatever you want. Of course, I said, a little saddened. I could not have it both ways, free love and bourgeois love, no matter if I wanted to. Or could I? Society of any kind was well stocked with satin bilinguals who said and did one thing in public while saying and doing another in private. But Ms. Mori was not one of those people, and in the darkness of her bedroom, clinging to each other in the aftermath of our exercise in free love, she said, You have it in you to do something wonderful with this movie. I have confidence in you that you can make it better than it could be. You can help shape how Asians look in the movies. That’s no small thing.
Thank you, Ms. Mori. Sofia, goddammit.
Could I really make any difference? What would Man or Ms. Mori think, knowing that I was little more, perhaps, than a collaborator, helping to exploit my fellow countrymen and refugees? The sight of their sad, confused faces had undermined my confidence, reminding me of the ligaments of sentimentality and sympathy that twined my tougher, more revolutionary parts together. I even came down with the hot fever of homesickness, and so it was that when I returned to the base camp, I sought comfort in the hamlet that Harry had created. The dusty lanes, the thatched roofs, the earthen floors of the cottages and their simple bamboo furniture, the piggeries with real pigs already snorting softly in the night, the warble of the innocent chickens, the soupy air, the bite of the mosquitoes, the plop of my unsuspecting foot into a mushy cake of buffalo dung—all of it left me dizzy with the vertigo of sadness and longing. Only one thing was missing from the hamlet and that was the people, the most important of which was my mother. She had died during my junior year in college, when she was just thirty-four. For the first and only time, my father wrote me a letter, brief and to the point: Your mother has passed away of tuberculosis, poor thing. She is buried in the cemetery under a real headstone. A real headstone! He had noted it to say in his own way that he had paid for it, since my mother did not have the savings to afford any such thing. I read his letter twice in numb disbelief before the pain struck, the hot lead of sorrow pouring into the mold of my body. She had been sick, but not this sick, unless she had been hiding the real state of her condition from me. We had seen so little of each other over the past few years, what with me hundreds of miles away at the lycée in Saigon and then thousands of miles abroad. The last time I saw her was the month before I left for the States, when I returned to say good-bye for four years. I would have no money to return for Tet, or for the summer, or at all until I finished my degree, my scholarship paying for only one round-trip ticket. She smiled bravely and called me her petit écolier, after the chocolate-covered biscuits I loved so much as a child and which my father blessed me with once per year on Christmas. Her parting gifts to me were a box of those imported biscuits—a fortune for a woman who had only nibbled on the corner of one once and saved the rest for me each Christmas—as well as a notebook and a pen. She was barely literate and read out loud, and she wrote with a cramped, shy hand. By the time I was ten, I wrote everything for her. To my mother, a notebook and a pen symbolized everything she could not achieve and everything I, through the grace of God or the accidental combination of my genes, seemed destined for. I ate the biscuits on the airplane and wrote all over the notebook as a college diary. Now it was nothing but ashes. As for the pen, it had run out of ink and I had lost it at some point.
What I would give to have those useless things with me now, kneeling by my mother’s tomb and resting my forehead against its rough surface. Not the tomb in the hamlet where she had died, but here, in Luzon, in the cemetery built by Harry just for authenticity’s sake. When I had seen his field of stones, I had asked to have the biggest tomb for my own use. On the tombstone I had pasted a reproduction of my mother’s black-and-white picture that I carried in my wallet, the only extant image of her besides the rapidly fading ones in my mind, which had taken on the quality of a poorly preserved silent movie, its frames cracked by hairline fractures. On the gray face of the tombstone I painted her name and her dates in red, the mathematics of her life absurdly short for anyone but a grade-schooler to whom thirty-four years seemed an eternity. Tombstone and tomb were cast from adobe rather than carved from marble, but I took comfort in knowing no one would be able to tell on film. At least in this cinematic life she would have a resting place fit for a mandarin’s wife, an ersatz but perhaps fitting grave for a woman who was never more than an extra to anyone but me.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 10

When the Auteur arrived the next week, he threw himself a welcome party replete with barbecue, beer, burgers, Heinz ketchup, and a sheet cake big enough to sleep on. The prop department fashioned a fake cauldron from plywood and papier-mâché, stocked it with dry ice, and plopped in a couple of strippers with bleached blond hair from one of the bars around Subic Bay, their job to play white women boiled alive by natives. A handful of obliging young local men played the natives, wearing loincloths and shaking nasty-looking spears also concocted by the prop department. With the Vietnamese extras not due for another day, I was the lone representative of my people wandering among the more than a hundred actors and crew members, with an additional hundred or so Filipino laborers and cooks. These locals thought it was a gas to go up to the cauldron and slice carrots into the stripper soup. I could see the film shoot was going to generate tales of the movie people from Hollywood that would be passed on for decades, stretched ever taller for each succeeding generation. As for the extras, the boat people, they would be forgotten. No one remembered the extras.
Although I was neither one of the extras nor one of the boat people, the tide of sympathy pulled me toward them. The current of alienation simultaneously pushed me away from the movie people, even though I was one of them. In short, I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar, which I responded to in my usual fashion by arming myself with a gin and tonic, my first of the evening. I was sure to be defenseless after my fourth or fifth such drink at this party, which took place under the stars as well as under a huge thatched pavilion that served as the canteen. After trading jokes with Harry, I watched the men of the crew crowd around the few white girls on the set. Meanwhile, a blond-wigged band from Manila pounded out a perfect cover of Diana Ross’s “Do You Know Where You’re Going To,” and I wondered if it had perhaps been one of the same Filipino bands that had played in Saigon’s hotels. On the edge of the dance floor sat the Auteur, chatting with the Thespian, while Violet flirted with the Idol at the same table. The Thespian was playing Captain Will Shamus; the Idol was Sergeant Jay Bellamy. While the Thespian had started his long career off Broadway, the Idol was a singer who had flashed to fame with a bubble-gum pop hit so sweet my teeth hurt just on hearing it. The Hamlet was the first movie role for the young man, who had shown his commitment by shaving off the evanescent hairdo much imitated by teenage boys into a GI haircut, then submitting himself to the military drilling required for his role with the enthusiasm of a sexually repressed fraternity initiate. Leaning back on his rattan chair, sporting a white T-shirt and khakis, his perfect ankles exposed because he wore no socks with his boat shoes, he was cool as ice cream even in the tropical weather. That was why he was an Idol, fame his natural aura. Rumor had it that he and the Thespian did not get along, the Thespian being an actor’s actor’s actor who not only stayed in character the entire time but kept his uniform on as well. The GI fatigues and combat boots he wore were the same set he’d donned three days before, when he arrived and became possibly the first actor in history to demand a pup tent instead of his air-conditioned trailer. Since frontline soldiers did not shower and shave, neither had he, and as a result he had begun to give off the aroma of slightly less than fresh ricotta. On his web belt was a holstered .45, and while all the other guns on the set were empty of ammunition or had blanks, his packed real bullets, or so went another rumor that I am fairly certain originated with the Thespian. He and the Auteur discussed Fellini while Violet and the Idol reminisced about a Sunset Strip nightclub. No one paid any attention to me at all, so I sidled over to the next table, where the Vietnamese actors sat.
Or, to put it more accurately, the actors playing the Vietnamese. My notes to the Auteur had actually effected some change in how we were represented, and more than simply how the screams were now all rendered as AIEYAAHHH!!! The most crucial change was the addition of three Vietnamese characters with actual speaking parts, an older brother, a younger sister, and a little brother whose parents had been slaughtered by King Cong. Older brother Binh, nicknamed Benny by the Green Berets, was filled with hatred of King Cong. He loved his American rescuers and served as their translator. Along with the one black Green Beret, he would meet the grisliest of deaths at the hands of King Cong. As for the sister, Mai, she would fall in love with the young, handsome, idealistic Sergeant Jay Bellamy. She would then be kidnapped and raped by King Cong, which served as the justification for the Green Berets utterly annihilating every last trace of King Cong. As for the little boy, he would be crowned with a Yankees cap in the final scene and airlifted into the heavens, his ultimate destination being Jay Bellamy’s family in St. Louis, where he would be given a golden retriever and the nickname Danny Boy.
This was better than nothing, right?
In my naïveté, I had simply assumed that once roles were created for Vietnamese people, Vietnamese actors would be found. But no. We looked, Violet told me yesterday, when we had found time to sip iced tea together on the hotel veranda. Frankly, there just weren’t any qualified Vietnamese actors. Most of them were amateurs and the handful of professionals all overacted. It must be the way they were trained. You’ll see. Just withhold judgment until you see these actors act. Unfortunately, withholding judgment was not one of my strong suits. What Violet was telling me was that we could not represent ourselves; we must be represented, in this case by other Asians. The little one playing Danny Boy was the scion of a venerable Filipino acting family, but if he looked Vietnamese, then I could pass for the pope. He was simply too round and well fed to be a boy living in a hamlet, the typical such stripling having been raised without the benefit of any milk except his mother’s. No doubt the young actor was talented. He had won the hearts of everyone on set when, on first being introduced, he had rendered a high-pitched version of “Feelings” at the bidding of his mother, who was sitting with him now and fanning him as he nursed a soda. During his performance, the maternal affection of this Venus was so strong I was pulled into her orbit, convinced by her that one day, mark her words, he would be on Broadway. You hear how he says feelings and not peelings? she whispered. Lessons in elocution! He does not speak like a Filipino at all. Modeling himself on the Thespian, Danny Boy insisted on inhabiting his role and demanded to be called Danny Boy instead of his name, which I could not remember anyway.
The actor playing his older brother could not stand the child, mostly because Danny Boy stole the show with malicious ease whenever the two appeared next to each other. This was especially galling for James Yoon, the best-known performer on the set after the Thespian and the Idol. Yoon was the Asian Everyman, a television actor whose face most people would know but whose name they could not recall. They would say, Oh, that’s the Chinese guy on that cop show, or That’s the Japanese gardener in that comedy, or That’s the Oriental guy, what’s his name. Yoon was, in fact, a Korean American in his midthirties who could play a decade older or a decade younger and assume the mask of any Asian ethnicity, so malleable were his generically handsome features. Despite his many television roles, however, he would most likely go down in history for a highly popular recurring television commercial selling Sheen, a brand of dishwashing soap. In each commercial, a different housewife would be confronted by a different kind of sticky dishwashing challenge that could only be solved by the appearance of her chuckling, knowing houseboy, who offered her not his manhood but his ever-ready bottle of Sheen. Relieved and amazed, the housewife would inquire as to how he had come across such cleaning wisdom, whereon he would turn to the camera, wink, smile, and utter the slogan now famous across the nation: Confucius say, Clean with Sheen!
Not surprisingly, Yoon was an alcoholic. His face was an accurate thermometer of his condition, the mercurial redness an indicator that the liquor had worked its way up from his toes to his vision, tongue, and brain, for he was flirting with the actress playing his sister even though neither was heterosexual. Yoon had made his intentions known to me over a dozen raw oysters at the hotel bar, their moist, open ears cocked upward to eavesdrop on his attempted seduction. No offense, I said, his hand on my knee, but I’ve never been so inclined. Yoon shrugged and removed his hand. I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise. In any case, you can’t blame a gay for trying, he said, smiling a smile utterly unlike my own. Having studied my smile and its effect on people, I knew it had the value of a second-rate global currency like the franc or the mark. But Yoon’s smile was the gold standard, so bright it was the only thing you could see or look at, so utterly overpowering in person it was understandable how he had won the role of the Sheen actor. I was happy to buy him a drink to show that I was not bothered by his advances, and he in turn bought me another, and we bonded that night and almost every night that followed.
As Yoon had tried with me, I had tried with Asia Soo, the actress. Like me, she was of mixed-race descent, although of a much more refined pedigree, in her case a British fashion designer mother and a Chinese hotelier father. Her given name really was Asia, her parents foreseeing that any progeny of their unlikely union would surely be blessed with sufficient attributes to live up to the name of an entire ill-defined continent. She had three unfair advantages over any man on the set, with the exception of James Yoon: she was in her early twenties, was a high-end fashion model, and was a lesbian. Every man on the set, myself included, was convinced that he possessed the magic wand that could convert her back to heterosexuality. If that was not achievable, then he would settle for convincing her that he was the kind of liberated man so open to female homosexuality he would not be offended, not at all, in watching her have sex with another woman. Some of us confidently declared that all high-end fashion models did was have sex with each other. If we were high-end fashion models, so the reasoning went, with whom would we rather have sex, men like us or women like them? Such a question was a little deflating to the masculine ego, and it was with some trepidation that I had approached her at the hotel pool. Hi, I said. Perhaps it was my body language, or something in my eyes, for before I could go any further she laid down her copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and said, You’re lovely, but just not my type. It’s not your fault. You’re a man. Yet again flabbergasted, all I could say was, You can’t blame a guy for trying. She did not, so we, too, were friends.
These, then, were the major dramatis personae of The Hamlet, all recorded in the letter I sent to my aunt, along with glazed Polaroids of myself and the cast, even one with the reluctant Auteur. Also included were Polaroids of the refugee camp and its denizens, as well as newspaper clippings that the General had provided me before my departure. Drowning! Pillage! Rape! Cannibalism? So went the headlines. The General had read them to me with alternating and escalating notes of horror and triumph, about how refugees were reporting that only one in two boats was surviving the crossing from the beaches and inlets of our homeland to the nearest semifriendly shores in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, storms and pirates sinking the rest. Here it is, the General said, shaking a newspaper at me. The evidence that those communist bastards are purging the country! To Man’s aunt, I wrote visibly in my letter about how sad it was to see these stories. Invisibly, I wrote, Is this really happening? Or propaganda? As for you, Commandant, what dream do you think compelled these refugees to escape, taking to the sea in leaky little boats that would have terrified Christopher Columbus? If our revolution served the people, why were some of these people voting by fleeing? At the time, I had no answers to these questions. Only now am I beginning to understand.
Things on set went along smoothly until Christmas, by which time the weather had cooled down considerably, although it still felt like a constant warm shower, according to the Americans. Most of the scenes shot before December were of the noncombat variety: Sergeant Bellamy arrives in Vietnam and promptly gets his camera ripped out of his hand by a motorbike-riding cowboy, a scene shot in the nearby town whose square had been remade in the likeness of downtown Saigon, complete with Renault taxis, authentic Vietnamese-lettered billboards, and haggling sidewalk vendors; Captain Shamus is called to headquarters in the same town, where a general verbally flogs him for blowing the whistle on a corrupt ARVN colonel, then punishes him by dispatching him to command the hamlet; bucolic scenes of rural life with peasants planting rice stalks in paddies, while hardworking Green Berets oversee the construction of hamlet fortifications; a disgruntled Green Beret scrawling, I believe in God, but God believes in napalm, on his helmet; Captain Shamus giving a motivational speech to the village militia with their rusty bolt-action rifles and shuffling, sandaled feet; Sergeant Bellamy leading the same militia in battle drills involving marksmanship, crawling under barbed wire, preparing L-shaped night ambushes; and the first skirmishes between the invisible King Cong and the hamlet’s defenders, which mostly involved the militia firing their one mortar into the darkness.
My moviemaking days were consumed by ensuring that the extras knew where the wardrobe department was and when to shuffle to their scenes, that their dietary needs were met, that they were paid on a weekly basis their dollar a day, and that the roles for which they were needed were filled. The majority of the roles fell under the category of civilian (i.e., Possibly Innocent but Also Possibly Viet Cong and Therefore Possibly Going to Be Killed for Either Being Innocent or Being Viet Cong). Most of the extras were already familiar with this role, and therefore needed no motivation from me to get into the right psychology for possibly being blown up, dismembered, or just plain shot. The next largest category was the soldier of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (i.e., the freedom fighter). All the male extras wanted to play this role, even though from the point of view of the American soldiers this was the category of Possibly Friend but Also Possibly Enemy and Therefore Possibly Going to Be Killed for Being Either a Friend or an Enemy. With a good number of ARVN veterans among the extras, I had no problem casting this role. The most troublesome category was the National Liberation Front guerrilla, pejoratively known as the Viet Cong (i.e., Possibly Freedom- Loving Nationalist but Also Possibly Hateful Red Communist but Really Who Cares so Kill Him [or Her] Anyway). Nobody wanted to be the Viet Cong (i.e., the freedom fighters), even though it meant only playing one. The freedom fighters among the refugees despised these other freedom fighters with an unsettling, if not unsurprising, vehemence.
As always, money solved the problem. After some strong persuasion on my part, Violet agreed to double the wages for those extras playing Viet Cong, an incentive that allowed these freedom fighters to forget that playing those other freedom fighters had once been so repugnant an idea. Part of what they found repugnant was that some of them would be called on to torture Binh and rape Mai. My relationship with the Auteur began to unravel around the question of Mai’s rape, although he was already irritated with me for speaking up on behalf of the extras in regards to their salary. Undeterred, I sat down at his lunch table the day before the filming of her rape scene and asked him whether a rape was really necessary. It just seems a little heavy-handed, I said. A little shock treatment never hurt an audience, he said, pointing at me with his fork. Sometimes they need a kick in the ass so they can feel something after sitting down for so long. A slap on both cheeks, and I don’t mean the ones on their faces. This is war, and rape happens. I have an obligation to show that, although a sellout like you obviously would disagree.
The unprovoked attack stunned me, “sellout” vibrating in my mind with the electrical colors of a Warhol painting. I am not a sellout, I finally managed to say. He snorted. Isn’t a sellout what your people would call someone who helps a white man like me? Or is “loser” a better term?
On this latter point I could not disagree. The man who I presented myself as did belong to the losing side, and pointing out that the American side had lost, too, would not help matters any. All right, a loser is what I am, I said. I’m a loser for believing in all the promises your America made to people like me. You came and said we were friends, but what we didn’t know was that you could never trust us, much less respect us. Only losers like us couldn’t have seen what’s so obvious now, how you wouldn’t want anyone for your friend who actually wanted to be your friend. Deep down you suspect only fools and traitors would believe your promises.
It was not that he let me speak uninterrupted. That was not his style. Oh, that’s rich! he said soon after I began. A moral runt sucks at my teats. A know-it-all who doesn’t know anything, an idiot savant minus the savant. You know who else has an opinion about everything that no one pays any attention to? My senile grandmother. You think that because you went to college people should listen to what you say? Too bad you’ve got a bachelor of science in bullshit.
Perhaps I went too far when I invited him to perform fellatio on me, but he also went too far in threatening to kill me. He’s always saying he’s going to kill somebody, Violet said after I informed her of what happened. It’s just a figure of speech. Promising to gouge out my eyes with a spoon and force-feeding me with them hardly sounded figurative, any more than the depiction of Mai’s rape was simply figurative. No, the rape was a brutal act of the imagination, at least as evidenced by the script. As for the actual shooting of the scene, only the Auteur, a handful of select crew, the four rapists, and Asia Soo herself were present. I would have to wait for a year to see the scene myself, at a raucous movie theater in Bangkok. But I was an eyewitness to James Yoon’s master scene two weeks later, for which he was stripped naked from the waist up and strapped to a plank. The plank was propped on the body of an extra playing a dead militiaman, leaving the somewhat anxious-looking James Yoon to lie with his head angled toward the earth, braced for the water cure that he was about to receive from the same four Viet Cong who had raped Mai. Standing by James Yoon, the Auteur addressed the extras through me, although he never once looked at me, the two of us no longer on speaking terms.
At this point in the script, you’ve just made first contact with your enemy, he said to the rapists. The Auteur had picked them because of the particular ferocity they had displayed in various scenes, as well as their distinctive physical features: the rotten banana brownness of their skin and the reptilian slits of their eyes. You ambushed a patrol and this is the sole survivor. He’s an imperialist puppet, a lackey, a stooge, a traitor. There’s nothing worse in your eyes than someone who sells out his country for some rice and a couple of dollars. As for you, your legendary battalion’s been cut in half. Hundreds of your brothers are dead, and hundreds more will die in the battle to come. You’re intent on sacrificing yourself for the fatherland but you’re naturally fearful. Now comes this sniveling son of a bitch, this backstabber with yellow skin but a white soul. You hate this bastard. You’re going to make him confess all his reactionary sins, then make him pay for them. But most of all, remember this: have fun, be yourselves, and just act natural!
These instructions caused some confusion among the extras. The tallest one, and the ranking noncommissioned officer, a sergeant, said, He wants us to torture this guy and look like we’re enjoying ourselves, right?
The shortest extra said, But what’s that got to do with acting natural? The tall sergeant said, He tells us that every time.
But it’s not natural to act like a VC, Shorty said. What’s wrong? the Auteur said.
Yes, what’s wrong? James Yoon said.
Nothing wrong, the tall sergeant said. We okay. We number one. Then he switched back to Vietnamese and told the others, Look. Who cares what he says. He wants us to act natural but we got to act unnatural. We are motherfuckin’ VC. Got it?
They certainly did. Here was method acting at its finest, four resentful refugees and former freedom fighters imagining the hateful psychology of the freedom fighters on the other side. With no more prodding from the Auteur once the film started rolling, this gang of four began to howl, slither, and slather over the object of their hatred. At this point in the script, James Yoon’s character of Binh, a.k.a. Benny, had been caught on a probe led by the A-Team’s only black soldier, Sergeant Pete Attucks. As established in an early anecdote, Attucks traced his genealogy two centuries back to Crispus Attucks, martyred by the British Redcoats in Boston and the first famous black man to sacrifice his life for the cause of white people. Once Attucks’s genealogy had been explained, his fate was sealed with superglue. In due time, he stepped into a booby trap, a bear-claw clamp made of bamboo spikes that seized his left foot. While the rest of the Popular Forces squad was handily exterminated, he and Binh fired back until Attucks lost consciousness and Binh ran out of ammunition. When the Viet Cong captured them, they committed one of their infamous, heinous acts of desecration on Attucks, castrating him and stuffing his manhood in his mouth. This, according to Claude in his interrogation course, was something certain Native American tribes also inflicted on trespassing white settlers, despite being of a different race thousands of miles away and more than a century past. See? Claude said, showing us the slide of an archaic black-and-white illustration depicting such an indigenous massacre. He followed this with another slide, a black-and-white photograph featuring the similarly mutilated corpse of a GI captured by the Viet Cong. Who says we don’t share a common humanity? Claude said, advancing to the next slide of an American GI urinating on a Viet Cong corpse.
Binh’s fate now rested in the hands of these Viet Cong, who reserved their scarce water not for bathing but for torture. While James Yoon (or his stunt double, in another set of shots) was strapped to the plank, a dirty cloth was wrapped around his head. One of the VC then slowly poured water from a foot above Binh’s head onto the cloth, using Attucks’s own canteens. Fortunately for James Yoon, the water torture only occurred in the shots involving the stuntman. Under the rag, the stuntman had his nostrils sealed and a tube for breathing in his mouth, since one cannot, of course, breathe under the cascade. The sensation suffered by the victim was close to drowning, or so I have been told by prisoners who have survived being put to the question, as the Spanish inquisitors described the infliction of the water cure. Again and again the question was asked of James Yoon, and while the water was surging onto his face, the VC clustered around, cursing, kicking, and punching him—all in simulation, of course. Such thrashing! Such gurgling! Such heaving of the breast and belly! After a while, out under a tropical sun as sultry as Sophia Loren, it was not just James Yoon but even the extras who started to sweat from their efforts. This was what few people realize—it’s hard work to beat somebody. I have known many an interrogator who has strained a back, pulled a muscle, torn a tendon or a ligament, even broken fingers, toes, hands, and feet, not to mention going hoarse. For while the prisoner is screaming, crying, choking, and confessing, or attempting to confess, or simply lying, the interrogator must produce a steady stream of epithets, insults, grunts, demands, and provocations with all the concentration and creativity of a woman manning a dirty-talk sex line. It takes significant mental energy to be nonrepetitive in heaping verbal abuse, and here, at least, the extras faltered in their performance. Blame should not be directed at them. They were not professionals, and the script merely said, VC interrogators curse and berate Binh in their own language. Left to improvise, the extras proceeded to give a repetitive lesson in gutter Vietnamese no one on set would ever forget. Indeed, while most of the crew never learned how to say “thank you” or “please” in Vietnamese, by the end of the shoot everyone knew how to say “fuck your mother,” or “motherfucker,” depending on how one translates du ma. I never cared much for the obscenity myself, but I could not help admiring how the extras squeezed every ounce of juice from the lime of it, spitting it out as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and exclamation, lending it intonations of not only hate and anger, but even, at some points, sympathy. Du ma! Du ma! Du ma!
Then, after the beating, cursing, and application of the water cure, the wet cloth would be unwrapped from Binh’s face to reveal James Yoon, who knew this was his best chance for a supporting actor Oscar. He had been disposed of many times before on-screen as the evanescent Oriental, but none of those deaths possessed this agony, this nobility. Let’s see, he had told me one night at our hotel’s bar, I’ve been beaten to death with brass knuckles by Robert Mitchum, knifed in the back by Ernest Borgnine, shot in the head by Frank Sinatra, strangled by James Coburn, hanged by a character actor you don’t know, thrown off a skyscraper by another one, pushed out the window of a Zeppelin, and stuffed in a bag of laundry and dropped in the Hudson River by a gang of Chinese guys. Oh, yes, I was also disemboweled by a squad of Japanese. But those were all quick deaths. All I ever got was a few seconds of screen time at most and sometimes barely that. This time, though—and here he trotted out the giddy smile of a freshly crowned beauty pageant queen—it’s going to take forever to kill me.
So whenever that cloth was unwrapped, and it was unwrapped many a time during the interrogation session, James Yoon gorged on the scenery with the starved fervor of a man who knew he was not going to be upstaged for once by the perennially cute and unbeatable little boy whose mother would not allow him to watch this scene. He grimaced, he groaned, he grunted, he cried, he wept, he bawled, all with real tears hauled up by the buckets from some well deep inside his body. After this, he yelled, he screamed, he shrieked, he wriggled, he twisted, he contorted, he thrashed, and he heaved, the climax being when he vomited, a chunky regurgitated soup of his salty, vinegary breakfast of chorizo and eggs. At the conclusion of this extended first take there was only cathedral silence on the part of the crew, stunned as they regarded what was left of James Yoon, as scarified and beaten as an uppity slave on an American plantation. The Auteur himself came with a wet towel, knelt by the still strapped-down actor, and tenderly wiped the vomit from James Yoon’s face. That was amazing, Jimmy, absolutely amazing.
Thank you, James Yoon gasped.
Now let’s try it one more time, just to be sure.
In fact, six more takes were required before the Auteur declared himself satisfied. At noon, after the third take, the Auteur had asked James Yoon if he wanted to break for lunch, but the actor had shuddered and whispered, No, don’t unstrap me. I’m being tortured, aren’t I? While the rest of the cast and crew retired to the somnolent shade of the canteen, I sat by James Yoon and offered to shelter him with a parasol, but he shook his head with tortoise determination. No, dammit, I’m seeing this through. It’s only an hour in the sun. People like Binh went through worse, didn’t they? Much worse, I agreed. James Yoon’s harrowing experience would at least be finished today, or so he hoped, whereas a real prisoner’s mortification continued for days, weeks, months, years. This was true of those captured by my communist comrades, according to our intelligence reports, but it was also true of those interrogated by my colleagues in the Special Branch. Did the Special Branch interrogations take so long because the policemen were being thorough, unimaginative, or sadistic? All of the above, said Claude. And yet the lack of imagination and the sadism contradict the thoroughness. He was lecturing to a classroom of these secret policemen in the National Interrogation Center, the unblinking eyes of the windows looking out onto the Saigon dockyards. The twenty pupils of his subterranean specialty, including myself, were all veterans of the army or police, but we were still intimidated by his authority, the way he held forth with the pedigree of a professor at the Sorbonne or Harvard or Cambridge. Brute force is not the answer, gentlemen, if the question is how to extract information and cooperation. Brute force will get you bad answers, lies, misdirection, or, worse yet, will get you the answer the prisoner thinks you want to hear. He will say anything to stop the pain. All of this stuff—here Claude waved his hand at the tools of the trade assembled on his desk, much of it made in France, including a billy club, a plastic gasoline container repurposed for soapy water, pliers, a hand-cranked electrical generator for a field telephone—all of it is useless. Interrogation is not punishment. Interrogation is a science.
Myself and the other secret policemen dutifully wrote this down in our notebooks. Claude was our American adviser, and we expected state-of-the-art knowledge from him and all the other American advisers. We were not disappointed. Interrogation is about the mind first, the body second, he said. You don’t even have to leave a bruise or a mark on the body. Sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? But it’s true. We’ve spent millions to prove it in the lab. The principles are basic, but the application can be creative and tailored to the individual or to the imagination of the interrogator. Disorientation. Sensory deprivation. Self-punishment. These principles have been scientifically demonstrated by the best scientists in the world, American scientists. We have shown that the human mind, subject to the right conditions, will break down faster than the human body. All this stuff—again he waved his hand in contempt at what we now saw as Gallic junk, the tools of old world barbarians rather than new world scientists, of medieval torture rather than modern interrogation—it will take months to wear the subject down with these things. But put a sack on the subject’s head, wrap his hands in balls of gauze, plug his ears, and drop him in a completely dark cell by himself for a week, and you no longer have a human being capable of resistance. You have a puddle of water.
Water. Water, James Yoon said. Can I get some water, please?
I fetched him some water. Despite the water cure, he had not actually had any water except what was absorbed through the wet cloth, which was just wet enough, he said, to be suffocating. As his arms were still bound, I slowly trickled the water down his throat. Thanks, he muttered, just as any prisoner would be grateful to his torturer for the drop of water, or the morsel of food, or the minute of sleep that the torturer doled out. For once I was relieved to hear the Auteur’s voice, calling out, All right, let’s get this done so Jimmy can get back to the pool!
By the final take two hours later, James Yoon really was lachrymose with pain, his face bathed in sweat, mucus, vomit, and tears. It was a sight that I had seen before—the communist agent. But that was real, so real I had to stop thinking about her face. I focused on the fictional state of total degradation that the Auteur wanted for the next scene, which itself required several takes. In this scene, the last one of the movie for James Yoon, the Viet Cong, frustrated because of their inability to break their victim and get him to confess to his crimes, beat his brains out with a spade. Being a bit exhausted from torturing their victim, however, the quartet first decide to take a break smoking Pete Attucks’s Marlboros. Unfortunately for them, they underestimated the will of this Binh, who, like many of his southern brethren, whether they be freedom fighters or freedom fighters, was as laid- back as a California surfer regarding every matter except the question of independence from tyranny. Left alone without the towel around his head, he was free to bite off his own tongue and drown under a faucet of his own fake blood, a commercial product that cost thirty-five dollars a gallon and of which approximately two gallons were used to paint James Yoon and decorate the earth. When it came to Binh’s brains, though, Harry had concocted his own homemade cerebro-matter, a secret recipe of oatmeal mixed with agar, the result being a gray, clumpy, congealed mess that he lovingly daubed on the earth around James Yoon’s head. The cinematographer got especially close to capture the look in Binh’s eyes, which I could not see from where I was watching, but which I assumed to be some saintly mix of ecstatic pain and painful ecstasy. Despite all the punishment inscribed on him, he had never uttered a word, or at least an intelligible one.$pageOut$pageIn

CHAPTER 11

The longer I worked on the Movie, the more I was convinced that I was not only a technical consultant on an artistic project, but an infiltrator into a work of propaganda. A man such as the Auteur would have denied it, seeing his Movie purely as Art, but who was fooling whom? Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.
Man, not surprisingly, understood Hollywood’s function as the launcher of the intercontinental ballistic missile of Americanization. I had written him a worried letter about the relevance of my work on the Movie, and he had written back his most detailed messages ever. First he addressed my concerns about the refugees: Conditions here exaggerated there. Remember our Party’s principles. Enemies of the Party must be rooted out. His second message concerned my fear of being a collaborator with the Auteur: Remember Mao at Yan’an. That was all, but it disspelled the black crow of doubt sitting on my shoulder. When was the last time an American president found it worth his while to write a speech on the importance of art and literature? I cannot recall. And yet at Yan’an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art could not be separated from politics, and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them. By urging me to remember Mao, Man was telling me that my mission with this Movie was important. Perhaps the Movie itself was not terribly important, but what it represented, the genus of the American movie, was. An audience member might love or hate this Movie, or dismiss it as only a story, but those emotions were irrelevant. What mattered was that the audience member, having paid for the ticket, was willing to let American ideas and values seep into the vulnerable tissue of his brain and the absorbent soil of his heart.
When Man first discussed such issues with me, in our study group, I was dazed with his brilliance as well as Mao’s. I was a lycée student who had never read Mao, never thought that art and literature had any relationship to politics. Man imparted that lesson by leading myself and the third member of our cell, a bespectacled youth named Ngo, in a spirited discussion of Mao’s lecture. The Great Helmsman’s arguments about art thrilled us. Art could be both popular, aimed for the masses, and yet advanced, raising its own aesthetic standard as well as the taste of the masses. We discussed how this could be done in Ngo’s garden with blustery teenage self-confidence, interrupted every now and again when Ngo’s mother served us a snack. Poor Ngo eventually died in a provincial interrogation center, arrested for possession of antigovernment pamphlets, but back then he was a boy passionately in love with the poetry of Baudelaire. Unlike Man and Ngo, I was never much of an organizer or agitator, which was one reason, Man would say later, that the committees above decided I would be a mole.
He used the English word, which we had learned not so long ago in our English course, taught by a professor whose greatest joy was diagramming sentences. A mole? I said. The animal that digs underground?
The other kind of mole. There’s another kind?
Of course. To think of a mole as that which digs underground misunderstands the meaning of the mole as a spy. A spy’s task is not to hide himself where no one can see him, since he will not be able to see anything himself. A spy’s task is to hide where everyone can see him and where he can see everything. Now ask yourself: What can everyone see about you but you yourself cannot?
Enough with the riddles, I said. I give up.
There—he pointed at the middle of my face—in plain sight.
I went to the mirror to see for myself, Man peering over my shoulder. There it indeed was, such a part of myself I had long ago ceased to notice it. Keep in mind that you will be not just any mole, Man said, but the mole that is the beauty spot on the nose of power itself.
Man had the natural ability to make the role of a mole, and other potentially dangerous tasks, seem attractive. Who would not want to be a beauty spot? I kept that in mind when I consulted my English dictionary, where I discovered that a mole could also be a kind of pier or harbor, a unit of measurement in chemistry, an abnormal mass of uterine tissue, and, if pronounced differently, a highly spiced Mexican sauce of peppers and chocolate that I would one day try and very much enjoy. But what caught my eye and has stayed with me ever since was the accompanying illustration, which depicted not a beauty spot but the animal, a subterranean, worm-eating mammal with massive clawed feet, a tubular whiskered snout, and pinhole eyes. It was surely ugly to all except its own mother, and nearly blind.
Crushing victims in its path, the Movie rolled with the momentum of a Panzer division toward the climactic firefight at King Cong’s lair, which would be followed by said lair ’s incendiary vaporization by the US Air Force. Several weeks of shooting were required for what amounted to fifteen minutes of screen time popping with helicopters, rocket fire, gun battles, and the utter and magnificent destruction of the elaborate sets that had been raised with every intention of being brought low. Enormous supplies of canned smoke ensured that bewildering mists draped the set every so often, while so many blank rounds were fired, and such significant quantities of detonation cord and explosives used, that all the birds and beasts of the locality vanished in fear and the crew walked around with wicks of cotton in their ears. Of course it was not enough to merely destroy the hamlet and the cave where King Cong hid; to satisfy the Auteur’s need for realistic bloodshed, all the extras also had to be killed off. As the script called for the deaths of several hundred Viet Cong and Laotians, while there were only a hundred extras, most died more than once, many four or five times. The demand for extras was reduced only after the pièce de résistance of the firefight, an awesome napalm strike delivered by a pair of low-flying F-5s flown by the Philippine air force. Most of the enemy thus exterminated, all that was required for the shoot’s last days were twenty extras, a reduced population that left the hamlet a ghost town.
It was here that the living went to sleep but the undead awoke, as for three dawns the set rang to the cry, Dead Vietnamese, take your places! An obedient tribe of zombies rose from the earth, a score of dismembered dead men stumbling forth from the makeup tent all bruised and bloodied, clothing ripped and torn. Some leaned on comrades and hobbled on only one leg, the other leg strapped up to their thigh. In a free hand they carried a fake limb, the white bone protruding, which they positioned somewhere close once they lay down. Others, with an arm inside a shirt and a sleeve hanging empty, carried a fake mangled arm, while a few cupped the brains falling out of their heads. Some gingerly clutched their exposed intestines, which looked for all the world like glistening strings of white, uncooked sausages because that was what they were. The use of sausages was an inspired move, for at the appropriate moment when the shooting started Harry would unleash a stray hound who would dash hungrily onto the scene and begin gnawing madly at the innards of the dead. These corpses were all that remained of the enemy in the smoldering remains of King Cong’s lair, scattered about in grotesque poses where they had fallen after being shot, stabbed, beaten, or choked to death in the bitter hand-to-hand melee between the Viet Cong and the Green Berets, along with their Popular Forces. The dead included numerous unfortunate, anonymous Popular Force troops as well as the four Viet Cong who had tortured Binh and raped Mai, their end dealt to them with appropriate vengeance by Shamus and Bellamy, wielding their KA-BAR knives with Homeric frenzy until
They stood panting in a battlefield from which arose only the hiss of embers.
SHAMUS
You hear that?
BELLAMY
I don’t hear anything.
SHAMUS
Exactly. It’s the sound of peace.
If only! The Movie was not yet complete. An old woman dashed from the cave to fall, wailing, onto the body of her dead VC son. The astonished Green Berets recognized her as the friendly, black-toothed madame of the dismal brothel where they had so often played the venereal disease lottery.
BELLAMY
Christ, Mama San’s VC.
SHAMUS
They all are, kid. They all are.
BELLAMY
What do we do with her?
SHAMUS
Nothing. Let’s go home.
Shamus forgot the cardinal rule of westerns, detective stories, and war movies: never turn your back on an enemy or a wronged woman. When they did, the enraged Mama San seized her son’s AK-47, blasted Shamus from hip to shoulder blades, then fell victim herself to Bellamy, who, spinning quickly, unloaded the last of his magazine. So she died in slow motion, bathed with fourteen lifelike squirts of blood from squibs rigged by Harry, who provided her with two more to bite on. This tastes awful, she said afterward, mouth and chin covered in the fake blood I was wiping off. Was I convincing? Astonishing, I said to her great satisfaction. No one dies like you.
Except, of course, for the Thespian. To ensure that no one could claim that Asia Soo or James Yoon had outacted him, he demanded that his death be filmed eighteen times. The greater acting job was required of the Idol, however, who had to embrace the dying Will Shamus in his arms, a difficult task as the Thespian had still not taken a shower after seven months of shooting. This was despite the fact that no soldier ever passed up the opportunity for a shower or bath, even if it amounted to no more than lathering himself with soap and cold water from a helmet. I mentioned this to the Thespian one night early in the shooting, and he responded with one of those looks of pity and amusement I was by now so used to getting, the kind that implied not only that my fly was undone, but that there was nothing to see even if it was. It is exactly because no soldier has done this that I am, he declared. As a result, no one could force themselves to eat at his table or stand nearer than fifteen or twenty feet, his stink so ghastly that it drew tears to the Idol’s face as he leaned in close with every take, weeping and gagging, to hear Shamus whisper his last words: The whore! The whore!
With Shamus dead the stage was set for Bellamy to call for the Arc Light strike on King Cong’s lair. In the heavens above, an unseen B-52 Stratofortress would squeeze out thirty thousand pounds of dumb bombs onto the lair, the purpose being not to kill the living but to cleanse the land of the dead, to do a victory dance on King Cong’s corpse, to wipe the hippie smile from Mother Earth’s face, and to say to the world, We can’t help it—we’re Americans. The scene was a massive industrial production that required the digging of several trenches, which were then filled with two thousand gallons of gasoline, as well as a thousand smoke bombs, several hundred sticks of phosphorous, a few dozen sticks of dynamite, and untold numbers of rockets, flares, and tracers, all deployed to simulate the explosions coming from King Cong’s detonating ammunition stockpile, supplied by the Chinese and the Soviets. Everyone on the crew had been waiting for this moment, the greatest blowup ever in cinematic history. It is the moment, the Auteur proclaimed to the massed crew during the last week, when we show that making this movie was going to war itself. When your grandchildren ask you what you did during the war, you can say, I made this movie. I made a great work of art. How do you know you’ve made a great work of art? A great work of art is something as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real. Long after this war is forgotten, when its existence is a paragraph in a schoolbook students won’t even bother to read, and everyone who survived it is dead, their bodies dust, their memories atoms, their emotions no longer in motion, this work of art will still shine so brightly it will not just be about the war but it will be the war.
And there you have the absurdity. Not that there was not some truth to what the Auteur claimed, for the absurd often has its seed in a truth. Yes, art eventually survives war, its artifacts still towering long after the diurnal rhythms of nature have ground the bodies of millions of warriors to powder, but I had no doubt that in the Auteur’s egomaniacal imagination he meant that his work of art, now, was more important than the three or four or six million dead who composed the real meaning of the war. They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Marx spoke of the oppressed class that was not politically conscious enough to see itself as a class, but was anything ever more true of the dead, as well as the extras? Their fate was so inane that they drank away their dollar a day every night, an act in which I gladly joined them, feeling a small part of myself dying with them, too. For I had an encroaching sense of the meanness of my accomplishment, that I had been deluded in thinking I could effect change in how we were represented. I had altered the script here and there, and incited the creation of a few speaking parts, but to what end? I had not derailed this behemoth, or changed its direction, I had only made its path smoother as the technical consultant in charge of authenticity, the spirit haunting bad movies that aspired to be good ones. My task was to ensure that the people scuttling in the background of the film would be real Vietnamese people saying real Vietnamese things and dressed in real Vietnamese clothing, right before they died. The swing of a dialect and the trim of a costume had to be real, but the truly important things in such a movie, like emotions or ideas, could be fake. I was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths.
The Movie was just a sequel to our war and a prequel to the next one that America was destined to wage. Killing the extras was either a reenactment of what had happened to us natives or a dress rehearsal for the next such episode, with the Movie the local anesthetic applied to the American mind, preparing it for any minor irritation before or after such a deed. Ultimately, the technology used to actually obliterate natives came from the military-industrial complex of which Hollywood was a part, doing its dutiful role in the artificial obliteration of natives. I realized this, eventually, on the day the final spectacle was supposed to be shot, when, at the last minute, the Auteur decided to improvise with the plentiful quantities of leftover gasoline and explosives. The day before, unbeknownst to me, the special effects wizards had received the Auteur’s instructions: rig the cemetery for destruction. This cemetery had been spared in the original script when King Cong attacked the hamlet, but now the Auteur wanted one more scene illustrating the true depravity of both sides. In this scene, a squad of suicidal guerrillas defiladed amid the tombs, whereon Shamus would call down a white phosphorous strike on the sacred realm of the hamlet’s ancestors, obliterating living and dead with 155 mm shells. I learned of this new scene the morning of its shooting, when the Arc Light strike was originally scheduled. Nope, said Harry. The special effects guys finished prepping the cemetery last night.
I love that cemetery. It’s the greatest thing you built.
You got thirty minutes to take a picture before boom-boom time.

It was only a fake cemetery with its fake tomb for my mother, but the eradication of this creation, in its wantonness and its whimsy, hurt me with unexpected severity. I had to pay my last respects to my mother and the cemetery, but I was alone in such sentiments. The cemetery was abandoned, the crew still having breakfast. Among the tombs now ran a maze of shallow trenches gleaming with gasoline, while bundled to the backs of the headstones were sticks of dynamite and phosphorous. Clusters of smoke bombs were staked to the ground, hidden from camera view by headstones and the knee-high grass that tickled my bare ankles and shins. With my camera slung around my neck I passed by the names of the dead that Harry had written on the tombstones, copied from the Los Angeles phonebook and attached to people presumably still alive. Among these names of the living in this little plaza of the passed, my mother’s name was the only one that genuinely belonged. It was at her headstone I knelt down to say good-bye. The desecration by weather over the past seven months had eroded much of her face in the photographic reproduction, while the red paint with which her name was written had faded to the hue of dried blood on a sidewalk. Melancholy slipped her dry, papery hand into mine as she always did when I thought about my mother, whose life was so short, whose opportunities were so few, whose sacrifices were so great, and who was due to suffer one last indignity for the sake of entertainment.
Mama, I said, my forehead on her headstone. Mama, I miss you so much.
I heard the disembodied voice of the crapulent major, chuckling. Was it just my imagination, or did all the ambient noise of nature cease? In the preternatural calm of my séance with my mother, I thought I might have been successful in communing with her soul, but just when my mother might have whispered something to me, a giant clap of noise ripped the hearing from my ears. At the same time a slap in the face lifted me from my knees and hurled me through a blister of light, knocking me out of focus, one self flying while another self watched. Later, it would be claimed that it was all an accident, the result of a faulty blasting cap that triggered the first explosion, although by then I had decided that it was no accident at all. Only one man could have been responsible for what happened on the set, the man who was so meticulous about every detail that he planned the weekly menu, the Auteur. But at the time of the conflagration, my calm self believed God Himself had struck my blasphemous soul. Through these eyes of my calm self I saw my hysterical, screaming self spread his arms and flail them about like a flightless bird. A great sheet of flame shot up before him, while a wave of heat swept over him with such intensity both he and I lost any sense of feeling. An immense python of helplessness wrapped its smothering grip around us, squeezing us back together into one self with such force I nearly blacked out until my back hit the earth. The meat of my body was now salted, broiled, and tenderized, the world around me afire and stinking of the gasoline sweat emanating from the woolly beasts of black smoke lunging and lurching toward me with ever- mutating faces. Another giant clap tore away the silence clogging my ears as I stumbled to my feet. Meteoritic chunks of earth and rock whizzed by, and I flung one arm over my head and pulled my shirt over my nose and mouth. There was a narrow path through the fire and smoke, and with my eyes blinded by tears and stinging with soot, I ran, yet again, for my life. The shock wave of another explosion slapped my back, an entire tombstone sailed overhead, a smoke grenade tumbled across the path, and a gray cloud blindfolded me. I found my way by avoiding the heat, coughing and wheezing until I reached open air. Still blind, I kept running, hands waving, gasping in oxygen, feeling the sensation a coward always wants to feel and never wants to feel, that he was alive. It was a feeling possible only after surviving a round of Russian roulette with the gambler who never loses, Death. As I was about to thank the God I did not believe in, because yes, ultimately, I was a coward, a blare of trumpets deafened me. In the silence, the earth vanished—the glue of gravity dissolved—and I was propelled skyward, the wreckage of the cemetery blazing before me, receding as I was blown backward, the world passing by in a blurred haze that faded into mute darkness.

* * *
That haze . . . that haze was my life flashing before my eyes, only it unreeled so fast I could not see much of it. What I could see was myself, but what was strange was that my life unreeled in reverse, as in those film sequences where someone who has fallen out of a building and gone splat on the sidewalk suddenly leaps up into the air and flies back through the window. So it was with me, running madly backward against an impressionistic background of blotches of color. I gradually shrank in size until I was a teenager, then a child, and then, at last, a baby, crawling, until inevitably I was sucked naked and screaming through that portal every man’s mother possesses, into a black hole where all light vanished. As that last glimmer faded, it occurred to me that the light at the end of the tunnel seen by people who have died and come back to life was not Heaven. Wasn’t it much more plausible that what they saw was not what lay ahead of them but what lay behind? This was the universal memory of the first tunnel we all pass through, the light at its end penetrating our fetal darkness, disturbing our closed eyelids, beckoning us toward the chute that will deliver us to our inevitable appointment with death. I opened my mouth to scream and then I opened my eyes . . .
I was in a bed shielded by a white curtain, pressed beneath a white sheet. Beyond the curtain came ethereal voices; the ice cube clink of metal; the somersaulting of wheels on linoleum; the maddening squeak of rubber soles; the pitiful beeping of lonely electronic machines. I was dressed in a flimsy crepe gown, but despite the lightness of this and the sheet, a soporific heaviness pressed down on me, scratchy as an army blanket, oppressive as unwanted love. A man in a white coat stood at the foot of my bed, reading a chart on a clipboard with the intensity of a dyslexic. He had the wild, neglected hair of a graduate student in astrophysics; his protuberant belly spilled over the dam of his belt; and he was mumbling into a tape recorder. Patient admitted yesterday suffering from first-degree burns, smoke inhalation, bruises, concussion. He is— At this point he noticed me staring at him. Ah, hello, good morning, said he. Can you hear me, young man? Nod your head. Very good. Can you say something? No? Nothing’s wrong with your vocal cords or your tongue. Still in shock, I’d say. Remember your name? I nodded. Good! Know where you are? I shook my head. A hospital in Manila. The best money can buy. In this hospital, all the doctors not only have MDs. We also have PhDs. That means we are all Philippine Doctors. The MD stands for Manila Doctors. Ha, just joking, my sallow young friend. Of course the MD stands for a medical doctorate and the PhD stands for a philosophy doctorate, which means I can analyze both what I can see and what I cannot see. Everything physical about you is in relatively good shape, given your recent scare. Some damage, yes, but not bad considering you should be dead or seriously maimed. A broken arm or leg, at least. In short, you are remarkably lucky. That being said, I suspect you have a headache of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s va-va-va-voom proportions. I recommend anything but psychoanalysis. What I would recommend is a nurse, but we’ve exported all the pretty ones to America. Any questions? I struggled to speak but nothing came out, so I only shook my head. Rest, then. Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing there’s someone who feels much worse.
With that, he slipped through the curtain and I was alone. Above me the ceiling was white. My sheets, white. My hospital gown, white. I must be fine if everything was all white but I was not. I hated white rooms, and now I was alone in one with nothing to distract me. I could live without television, but not without books. Not even a magazine or a fellow patient alleviated the solitude, and as the seconds, minutes, and hours dribbled away like saliva from a mental patient’s mouth, a deep unease descended on me, the claustrophobic sense that the past was beginning to emerge from these blank walls. I was saved from any such visitations by the arrival later that afternoon of the four extras who played the Viet Cong torturers. Freshly shaven and in jeans and T-shirts, they did not look like torturers or villains but harmless refugees, slightly befuddled and out of place. They bore, of all things, a cellophane-wrapped fruit basket and a bottle of Johnnie Walker. How you doing, chief? the shortest extra said. You look like hell.
All right, I croaked. Nothing serious. You shouldn’t have.
The gifts aren’t from us, the tall sergeant said. The director sent them. That’s nice of him.
The tall sergeant and Shorty exchanged a glance. If you say so, Shorty said. What’s that mean?
The tall sergeant sighed. I didn’t want to get into it this early, Captain. Look, have a drink first. The least you can do is drink the man’s booze.
I wouldn’t mind some, said Shorty.
Pour everyone a drink, I said. What do you mean the least I can do?
The tall sergeant insisted I have my drink first, and that warm, sweet glow of affordable blended scotch really did help, as comforting as a homely wife who understands her man’s every need. The word is that what happened yesterday was an accident, he said. But it’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it? You get in a fight with the director—yeah, everybody’s heard about it—and then you of all people get blown up. I don’t have any proof. It’s just a hell of a coincidence.
I was silent as he poured me another. I looked at Shorty. What do you think?
I wouldn’t put anything past the Americans. They weren’t afraid of taking out our president, were they? What’s to make you think they wouldn’t go after you?
I laughed, even though inside me the little dog of my soul was sitting at attention, nose and ears turned to the wind. You guys are paranoid, I said.
Every paranoid person is right at least once, said the tall sergeant. When he dies.
Believe it or don’t, said Shorty. But look, the reason we all came here wasn’t just to talk about this. We all wanted to say thanks, Captain, for all the work you did during this whole shoot. You did a swell job, taking care of us, getting us extra pay, talking back to the director.
So let’s drink that bastard’s liquor in your honor, Captain, said the tall sergeant.
My eyes welled up with tears as they raised their glasses to me, a fellow Vietnamese who was, despite everything, like them. My need for validation and inclusion surprised me, but the trauma of the explosion must have weakened me. Man had already warned me that for the kind of subterranean work we did, there would be no medals or promotions or parades. Having resigned myself to those conditions, the praise of these refugees was unexpected. I comforted myself with the memory of their words after they left, as well as with Johnnie Walker, forgoing my glass and drinking straight from the bottle. But after the bottle was empty sometime that night, I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go. Now that my room was dark, all I could see was the only other all-white room I had been in, at the National Interrogation Center back in Saigon, working my first assignment under Claude’s supervision. In that instance I was not the patient. The patient, whom I should properly call the prisoner, had a face I could remember very clearly, so often had I studied him via the the cameras mounted in the corners of his room. Every inch of it had been painted white, including his bed frame, his desk, his chair, and his bucket, the only other occupants. Even the trays and the plates with his food and the cup for his water and his bar of soap were white, and he was only allowed to wear a white T-shirt and white boxer shorts. Besides the door, the only other opening was for sewage, a little dark hole in the corner.
I was there when the workmen built the room and painted it. The idea for the all-white room was Claude’s, as was the use of air conditioners to keep the room at eighteen degrees Celsius, cool even by Western standards and freezing for the prisoner. This is an experiment, Claude said, to see whether a prisoner will soften up under certain conditions. These conditions included overhead fluorescents that were never turned off. They provided his only light, the timelessness matching the spacelessness induced by the overwhelming whiteness. White-painted speakers were the final touch, mounted on the wall and ready to broadcast at every minute of the day. What should we play? Claude asked. It has to be something he can’t stand.
He looked at me expectantly, ready to grade me. There was little I could do for the prisoner, try as I might. Claude would eventually find the music he could not stand, and if I did not help him my reputation as a good student would lose a little of its luster. The prisoner’s only real hope of escaping from his situation lay not with me, but with the liberation of the entire south. So I said, Country music. The average Vietnamese cannot bear it. That southern twang, that peculiar rhythm, those strange stories—the music drives us a little crazy.
Perfect, Claude said. So what song’s it going to be?
After a little research, I procured a record from the jukebox of one of the Saigon bars popular with white soldiers. “Hey, Good Lookin’” was by the famous Hank Williams, the country music icon whose nasal voice personified the utter whiteness of the music, at least to our ears. Even someone as exposed to American culture as I shivered a little on hearing this record, somewhat scratchy from having been played so many times. Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high- minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red- blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.
It was with confidence, then, that I chose this song to be played on an endless loop in the prisoner’s room except for the times when I was in it. Claude had assigned me to be the chief interrogator, the task of breaking the prisoner my graduation exam from his interrogation course. We kept the prisoner in the room for a week before I even saw him, nothing interrupting the constant light and music except the opening of a slot in his door three times a day, when his meal was shoved through: a bowl of rice, one hundred grams of boiled greens, fifty grams of boiled meat, twelve ounces of water. If he behaved well, we told him, we would give him the food of his choice. I watched him on the video feed as he ate his food, as he squatted over his hole, as he washed himself from his bucket, as he paced his room, as he lay on his bed with his forearm over his eyes, as he did push-ups and sit- ups, and as he plugged his ears with his fingers. When he did so, I turned up the volume, forced to do something with Claude standing by my side. When he took his fingers out of his ears and I lowered the volume, he looked up at one of the cameras and shouted in English, Fuck you, Americans! Claude chuckled. At least he’s talking. It’s the ones who don’t say anything you really have to worry about.
He was the leader of cell C-7 of terrorist unit Z-99. Based in the secret zone of Binh Duong Province, Z-99 was collectively responsible for hundreds of grenade attacks, minings, bombings, mortarings, and assassinations that had killed a few thousand and terrorized Saigon. Z-99’s trademark was the dual bomb attack, the second designed to kill the rescuers who came to help the victims of the first. Our prisoner’s specialty was the adaptation of wristwatches as triggering devices for these improvised bombs. The second and hour hands were removed from a watch, a battery wire was inserted through a hole in the crystal, and the minute hand was set to the desired delay time. When the ticking minute hand touched the wire, the bomb detonated. Bombs were built from landmines, stolen from US supplies, or bought on the black market. Other bombs were assembled from TNT that was smuggled into the city in small quantities—hidden in hollowed-out pineapples and baguettes and the like, even in women’s bras, which led to endless jokes among the Special Branch. We knew Z-99 had a watchmaker, and before we had known exactly who he was we called him the Watchman, which was how I thought of him.
The Watchman regarded me with amusement the first time I entered his room, a week after we began his treatment. It was not the reaction I expected. Hey, good lookin’, he said in English. I sat on his chair and he on his bed, a tiny, shivering man with a full head of coarse hair, shockingly black in the white room. I appreciate the English lesson, he said, grinning at me. Keep playing that music! I love it! Of course he didn’t. There was a glint in his eye, the briefest hint of unwellness, although that might have come from being a graduate of philosophy from the University of Saigon and the eldest son of a respectable Catholic family who had disowned him for his revolutionary activities. Watchmaking of the legitimate kind—for that was indeed his profession before he became a terrorist
—was simply to pay the bills, as he told me during our initial conversation. This was small talk, get- to-know-you kind of stuff, but lurking underneath the flirtation was our mutual awareness of our roles as prisoner and interrogator. My awareness was compounded by knowing that Claude was watching us on the video monitor. I was thankful for the air-conditioning. Otherwise I would have been sweating, trying to figure out how to be both enemy and friend to the Watchman.
I laid out the charges against him of subversion, conspiracy, and murder, but emphasized that he was innocent until proven guilty, which made him laugh. Your American puppet masters like to say that, but it’s stupid, he said. History, humanity, religion, this war tells us exactly the reverse. We are all guilty until proven innocent, as even the Americans have shown. Why else do they believe everyone is really Viet Cong? Why else do they shoot first and ask questions later? Because to them all yellow people are guilty until proven innocent. Americans are a confused people because they can’t admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can’t have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just. At least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.
I was impressed with his understanding of American culture and psychology, but I could not show it. Instead, I said, So you would rather be presumed guilty?
If you haven’t understood that your masters already believe me to be guilty and will treat me as such, then you’re not as smart as you think you are. But that is hardly a surprise. You’re a bastard, and like all hybrids you are defective.
In retrospect, I do not believe he meant to insult me. Like most philosophers, he simply lacked social skills. In his graceless way, he was merely stating what he and many others thought to be scientific fact. And yet, in that white room, I admit that I saw red. I could have dragged out this interrogation for years if I wanted to, asking him relentless questions that led nowhere as I tried, seemingly, to find his weakness, secretly keeping him safe. But instead all I wanted at that moment was to prove to him that I was, indeed, as smart as I thought I was, which meant smarter than him. Between the two of us, only one could be the master. The other had to be the slave.
How did I prove this to him? One night in my quarters, after my rage had cooled and hardened, it struck me that I, the bastard, understood him, the philosopher, with perfect clarity. A person’s strength was always his weakness, and vice versa. The weakness was there to be seen if one could see it. In the Watchman’s case, he was the revolutionary willing to walk away from the most important thing to a Vietnamese and a Catholic, his family, for whom the only acceptable sacrifice was for God. His strength was in his sacrifice, and that had to be destroyed. I sat down immediately at my desk and wrote the Watchman’s confession for him. He read my scenario the next morning in disbelief, then read it again before glaring at me. You’re saying that I’m saying I’m a faggot? Homosexual, I corrected. You’re going to spread filth about me? he said. Lies? I have never been a faggot. I have never dreamed of being a faggot. This—this is dirty. His voice rose and his face flushed. To have me say I joined the revolution because I loved a man? To say this was why I ran away from my family? That my faggotry explains my love for philosophy? That being a faggot is the reason for my wish to destroy society? That I betrayed the revolution so I could save the man I loved, who you have captured? No one will believe this!
Then no one will care when we publish it in the newspapers along with your lover’s confession and intimate photographs of the two of you.
You will never get me in such a photograph.
The CIA has remarkable talents with hypnosis and drugs. He fell silent. I continued: When the newspapers cover this, you realize it’s not only your revolutionary comrades who will condemn you. The road back to your family will be closed forever, too. They might accept a reformed revolutionary, or even a victorious one, but they will never accept a homosexual no matter what happens to our country. You’ll be a man who sacrificed everything for nothing. You will not even be a memory to your comrades or your family. At least if you talk to me this confession won’t be published. Your reputation will stay intact until the day the war is over. I stood up. Think about it. He said nothing and did nothing except stare at his confession. I paused at the door. Still think I’m a bastard?
No, he said tonelessly. You’re just an asshole.
Why had I done that? In my white room, I had nothing but time on my hands to ponder this event I had whitewashed from my mind, the event to which I am confessing now. The Watchman had infuriated me, pushing me into irrational action with his pseudoscientific judgment. But he would not have been able to do so if I had simply executed my role as the mole. Instead, I confess I took pleasure in doing what I was supposed to do and not supposed to do, interrogate him until he broke, as Claude had requested. He replayed the scene for me later in the surveillance room, where I watched myself watching the Watchman as he stared at his confession, knowing he was out of time, a character in a movie, as it were, that Claude had produced and I had directed. The Watchman could not represent himself; I had represented him.
Brilliant work, Claude said. You really fucked this guy.
I was a good student. I knew what my teacher wanted and, more than that, I enjoyed his praise at the expense of the bad student. For wasn’t that what the Watchman was? He had learned what the Americans taught, but he had rejected those teachings outright. I was more sympathetic to the thinking of Americans, and I confess that I could not help but see myself in their place as I broke the Watchman. He threatened them, and thus, to some extent, me. But the satisfaction I had at his expense did not last long. In the end, he would show everyone what it was that a bad student could accomplish. He would outsmart me by proving that it was possible to sabotage the means of production that you did not own, to destroy the representation that owned you. His final move happened one morning a week after I had shown him his confession, when I got a call at the officers’ quarters from the guard in the surveillance room. By the time I reached the National Interrogation Center, Claude was also there. The Watchman was curled up on his white bed, facing the white wall, clad in his white shorts and T-shirt. When we rolled him over, his face was purple and his eyes bulged. Deep in his open mouth, at the back of his throat, a white lump. I just went to the bathroom, the guard blubbered. He was eating breakfast. What was he going to do in two minutes? What the Watchman had done was choke himself to death. He had been on good behavior for the past week, and we had rewarded him with what he wanted for breakfast. I like hard-boiled eggs, he said. So he had peeled and eaten the first two before swallowing the third one whole, shell and all. Hey, good lookin’ . . .
Turn off that goddamn music, Claude said to the guard.
Time had stopped for the Watchman. What I did not realize until I woke up in my own white room was that time had stopped for me, too. I could see that other white room with utter clarity from my own, my eye peering through a camera in the corner, watching Claude and myself standing over the Watchman. It’s not your fault, said Claude. Even I didn’t think about this. He patted my shoulder reassuringly but I said nothing, the smell of sulfur driving everything out of my mind except for the thought that I was not a bastard, I was not a bastard, I was not, I was not, I was not, unless, somehow, I was.

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