Читать книгу The Committed - Viet Thanh Nguyen - Страница 11

CHAPTER 2

Although I feared the Boss for good reason, I feared Bon a little bit less. This was a mistake, in retrospect, given that Bon has shot me in the head. I had known Bon for more than two decades, ever since we had met at the lycée. He had seen too much violence and death, and dealt them as well, to be afraid even of someone like the Boss. For most of his life, in a way that was completely unhealthy for everyone but him, Bon had been concerned with what it meant to die. If that was one aim of philosophy, then Bon was a fine philosopher. He had dwelt on death ever since the childhood moment when a Viet Cong cadre aimed the accusatory finger of a revolver at the back of his father’s head, puncturing the fragile shell, revealing what no son should ever see, and awakening a homicidal urge in Bon, one that knew no restraint until his time in reeducation. It was there that Death woke him every morning, holding the broken shard of a mirror close enough for him to see the fog of his breath clouding his image.

In the years before reeducation, hunting and killing had not bothered Bon in the least. After reeducation, he took more care with the offer of employment the Boss gave him in the refugee camp. Having witnessed Bon’s handiwork in saving his life, the Boss had said, I could use a man like you to do things like that.

I don’t hurt innocent people, Bon said.

They studied the man crumpled at their feet, unconscious or perhaps expired, the elements of his face rearranged by Bon in a cubist manner. The Boss shrugged and agreed, since the price of entry into the Boss’s profession entailed a loss of innocence. But the Boss hesitated about Bon’s other stipulation, that he provide a job for me as well.

I don’t employ people like this crazy bastard, he said at last. He could see that I had a screw loose, the trusty screw that had, for years, held together my two minds. Sometimes I did not even notice that I had two minds, since that was my natural condition, even if it was unnatural. Now the threads of the screw were stripped, having been placed under a great degree of stress from my years of being a spy, a sleeper, and a spook. As long as the screw had remained tightly screwed, my two minds had worked together reasonably well. Now I was no longer screwed—­humanity’s universal condition—but was instead unscrewed.

It’s either both of us, Bon said, or neither of us.

That’s the problem with loyalty. The Boss sighed. It’s great until it’s a pain in the ass.

Outside the Boss’s import-export store, we were faced with a dilemma. The Boss wanted us to get to work right away. The Boss also wanted the return of his kopi luwak, which my aunt possessed and might open at any moment. What was to be done?

She did say she’d make the coffee tomorrow, I said. And she didn’t seem enthusiastic, so I don’t think there’s much chance of her drinking it by herself.

All right, Bon said, looking at the sun to determine the time. His watch had been taken from him by our guards in reeducation in order to . . . in order to . . . well, there was no justification for it. Let’s get this done as quickly as we can.

The housing was a short walk away, through an area whose pedestrian architecture was charmless. Unlike the Paris of Maurice Chevalier and Catherine Deneuve, most of the 13th arrondissement was deficient in charm, although it was unclear whether the authorities permitted Asians to live in this quarter because of its ill-favored qualities or whether the presence of Asians added to the unloveliness. Regardless, Bon was satisfied when the weary concierge with the deflated perm showed us his lodgings, the stacks of bunk beds recalling for Bon the military barracks he had loved with true ardor. The atmosphere was nostalgic, too, tangy with masculine sweat that evoked honesty and camaraderie. Otherwise the room was lived in by civilians, judging from the blankets huddled in shame on the mattresses, the rumpled reed mats on the parquet floor, and what passed for a kitchen: a folding table on which sat a rice cooker and a greasy two-burner plug-in stove.

Everyone’s at work, the concierge said. This bunk’s yours.

What’s the rent?

The Boss takes care of that. Good deal, huh?

A good deal for Bon meant an even better deal for the Boss. But with no other recourse than my aunt’s apartment, Bon dropped his duffel on the mattress and said, I’ll take it.

That, as reeducation had taught him, was his unique talent. He could take anything.

Our next stop was Delights of Asia, located on rue de Belleville, where Bon would work as a line cook. Cook? Bon had said. I don’t know how to cook. Don’t worry about it, the Boss had said. The place isn’t known for its food.

In this restaurant not known for its food, the white tiles of the floor throbbed with varicose veins of brown grease, the yellow walls were stained with what I hoped were sticky fingerprints, and the surly waiters and cursing chefs could be heard shouting and cackling whenever the kitchen doors swung open. Next to the register, a stereo played cassettes of high-pitched Chinese and Vietnamese opera. Behind the register was the maître d’ and musical curator, Le Cao Boi, who, from looks to manners, was the typical romantic Vietnamese man: part poet, part playboy, and part gangster.

I love seeing their bodies tense after I hit the play button, he said with a laugh, watching the lone customer leave behind a plate still swarming with worms, which on closer inspection turned out to be greasy and gelatinous noodles. He ejected the cassette and inserted another. Led Zeppelin, “Stairway to Heaven,” he said. That’s better. So! The Boss told me all about you two bad boys.

Le Cao Boi was the Boss’s field marshal. He introduced the restaurant’s employees: the two waiters, the three chefs, the busboy, and the janitor, or, as Le Cao Boi called them, the Seven Dwarfs. Unlike the Seven Dwarfs of Snow White, they were not cute and not even that dwarfish, being merely nasty, brutish, and short. Most notable, as I pointed out to Le Cao Boi, was that seven of them seemed excessive for a restaurant empty at noon on a weekend. He grinned and said, Makes you wonder why the Boss would send me two more employees, doesn’t it?

As must be obvious even to a tourist or stranger, the restaurant was not surviving on its culinary output, being instead an outpost for the Boss’s ambitions to expand from the ghetto of Little Asia to inner Paris, the heart of whiteness, even with its shadows of darkness. This outpost was a front for Le Cao Boi and the Seven Dwarfs, who, besides being short, were angry and ambidextrous. Their favored weapons were cleavers, functional in the kitchen and on assignment, when they would each carry two of the big blades sheathed under their armpits in custom leather holsters.

They’re angry because they’re short, Le Cao Boi said. And they’re hard to beat because they’re short. Someone takes a swing at where they think their heads should be and they hit air. You don’t want all seven coming at you at once, but that’s how they do their job. One cuts off your manhood, another slices your kneecaps, a third hamstrings you, all at the same time. He exhaled a cloud of smoke. But they’re not great on nuance. “Nuance” is not in their vocabulary. Hell, “vocabulary” is not in their vocabulary. That’s what you’re here for.

Le Cao Boi adjusted his aviator sunglasses, which he never removed, not even during lovemaking, or so it was said, especially by him. He was proud of their name-brand status as authentic American Ray-Bans, not, as he liked to point out, cheap imitations. Le Cao Boi was fashion-conscious, from designer socks to hair so streamlined with pomade that not a strand moved regardless of whether he was declaiming poetry (his own), making love (energetically), or swinging his favored weapon, a baseball bat gifted by an American cousin. It was Le Cao Boi’s bitter experience to come as a refugee to France instead of America, the country for which he pined during his youth in Cholon. Le Cao Boi, like the Boss, was ethnic Chinese, son of a Cholon gangster and grandson of a Guangdong merchant who had settled in Saigon at century’s turn. The grandfather sold silk and opium, the father sold only opium, and the grandson sold nothing except his violent services, a great decline over which he ruminated often in his poetry, which was so unspeakably bad that none of it will be quoted here.

Just think of me as Baudelaire with a baseball bat, he said, showing us his prized Louisville Slugger. What a name, he added, rolling the baseball bat on the counter where the depressed cash register stood, its sole purpose in life—to have its keys punched—hardly ever achieved. So, what should we call you? You’re Killer, that’s obvious. I wouldn’t want to see your face when I open the door. But you! Le Cao Boi turned his reflective gaze to me. The Boss said you already had a name. Know what it is?

He offered a smile, the kind that the Americans he admired so much called a “shit-eating grin,” a phrase whose meaning was the exact opposite of what one would suppose. Hello, Crazy Bastard, Le Cao Boi said. I’ve heard a lot about you.

Once, I would have taken offense. But after all I had suffered and seen, perhaps I actually was a crazy bastard. Perhaps that was just another name for a man with two faces and two minds. If so, at least I knew who I was, and that was more than could be said for most. The dual images of myself floating in his lenses reminded me that I was not one but two, not only me or moi but also, on occasion, we or us. We might have been two people in one body, two minds in one shell, but if this was a weakness, to be divided against oneself, it was also a strength, to be one’s own twin. We were not half of anything. As my mother had told me time and again, You are twice of everything!

Okay, enough chitchat, Le Cao Boi said. Small talk kills me. Let’s get to work.

Hey, chief, said one of the dwarfs, emerging from the back of the restaurant. He had droopy eyelids. Grumpy did it again.

Du ma! Le Cao Boi said. Well, why don’t you do something about it?

Du ma! Sleepy said, pointing at me. He’s the new guy.

Good point. Le Cao Boi nodded at me. Follow Sleepy. He’ll show you what to do. After that, we get to the real work.

I followed Sleepy to the back of the restaurant. He paused before a grimy door and said, with a grin, Got to start from the bottom and work your way up, right?

Sleepy laughed mightily at his joke and seemed somewhat resentful when I did not laugh in turn. Grumbling, he kicked open the door and said, Got to keep your hands clean. Clean hands, clean food, am I right? When Sleepy noticed me gagging, tears coming to my eyes, he stood on his tiptoes outside the open door to look down into the toilet and said, Jesus Christ. Ugh. I mean . . . good luck, new guy.

I saw no sign of rubber gloves, not that the interior of such gloves would have been sanitary. The only tools for the excavation of the clogged orifice were a plunger with a short handle and a woefully small rubber cup, as well as a soiled toothbrush of a toilet scrub. If either the plunger or the scrub could speak, they would undoubtedly scream eternally, as I was already doing internally.

I emerged from the toilet some twenty minutes later, trembling and trying not to think of the fine droplets of water that had sprayed all over my clothes and possibly even misted my arms and face. I had seen worse in the refugee camp, but this was supposed to be the City of Light!

All done? Le Cao Boi said. I keep telling Grumpy not to eat the food here. Fair warning. Okay, let’s go. There’s a debt to be collected.

Our destination was in the Marais, popular with Jews and faggots, according to Le Cao Boi, although our target was neither. What he was, Le Cao Boi said, was a client who liked to beat the girls, which could be acceptable, depending on the payment. What was not acceptable was that he had accrued a debt for which he was now in arrears.

Never go into debt for a woman, said Le Cao Boi, pausing outside the door to a travel agency to let a Japanese tourist wander by, a zoom lens the length of his forearm attached to a camera around his neck. Inside, a young couple sat before the travel agent, whose only crime appeared to be combining a knit tie with a short-sleeved plaid shirt. His eyes twitched in fear at the sight of two and a half Asian men who did not appear to be respectable bourgeoisie seeking respite from the low-grade demands of 1980s French capitalism. Bon sat down in the chair next to the young couple and stared at the client. Le Cao Boi explained that we would wait, they should take their time, the Spanish coast was beautiful this time of year. The next few minutes passed awkwardly, at least for the travel agent, with Le Cao Boi meandering around the office, whistling “Stairway to Heaven” as he ran his finger along the posters of beaches and palm trees on the walls, the brochures on the counter, and the backs of the chairs on which the young couple sat.

Bon remained next to them, staring only at the travel agent but keeping the couple in his peripheral vision. They glanced at each other as the travel agent began stuttering, fingers trembling over the binder of travel packages. I watched them all while I stood silently with my back to the wall by the door, and when the young couple smiled nervously and promised to return, I opened the door for them. The travel agent waved his hands at Le Cao Boi and alternated between explaining and begging, but Le Cao Boi ignored him and said to Bon, He’s a thief who beats girls. We couldn’t give you a better job to begin with, could we?

No, you couldn’t have. Bon stood up. This will be easy. At least for me.

As I watched the travel agent tremble and moan as he curled up on the spotless floor—Bon being careful not to extract blood—I understood with a sudden twist of shame that I shared something in common with this man, besides our plaintive desire to live. I also shared his manhood, his lust, his febrile brain that could not pass ten minutes without a sexual fantasy crossing its field of vision. Men were all the same, or at least 90 to 95 percent of them. Bon, perhaps, might be an exception, so pure of heart that even in the oceanic depths of his mind and soul he did not fantasize about the opposite sex. But most men will. And I—I was like most men.

I wept a little for the travel agent, but more for me and myself and my mother, who had to watch me in dismay from above. Le Cao Boi sniffed in disgust, not over the battered travel agent but over my tears. Pull yourself together, man, he said outside the door of the agency.

Bon, embarrassed, said, Get that kopi luwak, and we parted ways. While they returned to Delights of Asia, I made my way to my aunt’s, wiping away my tears, seeing Bon twisting the travel agent’s manhood until the pitiful fellow nearly blacked out and cried for his mama, which made me think of my mother. I had never lived with a woman other than my mother, and I had no idea what to do with a woman who was not my mother and who I was not pursuing. I opened the door to my aunt’s apartment softly and found her at her desk, tucked into an alcove of the hallway. She was editing a manuscript while smoking, or perhaps smoking was the real activity and editing the distraction.

How was your day? She waved her cigarette at me and offered me one.

Nothing remarkable, I said, wondering if the kopi luwak was still intact. Just met my boss and did some work for him.

Freshen up and tell me about it. She pointed toward the bathroom, halfway down the hall. Some guests will be arriving soon and I have told them all about you, my accomplished nephew.

As I would discover over the coming months, my aunt’s apartment hosted a veritable salon for writers, editors, and critics, a crowd of intellectuals so leftist that I was always surprised to see that almost all of them ate with their right hands. My aunt’s career in editing, along with a penchant for socializing and a talent for the subtle stroking of masculine ego—though subtlety was rarely required—had led to an extensive network of friends, mostly male, who traded in words and ideas. At least two or three times a week, a visitor would come by, bearing a bottle of wine or a box of colorful macarons. My aunt consumed wine and macarons heedlessly and without any evident impact on her slim waistline. This talent was due to the fact that she barely ate real food, at least in my presence, filling herself instead with smoke, the aforementioned words and ideas, and those light, sweet macarons.

Can I make you some of the kopi luwak? I called from the kitchen, out of view from my aunt’s nook. To my relief, the gift was untouched. When my aunt said yes, it was then a simple matter to switch the packages and return to the living room with a glass coffee press full of the dark brew. My aunt joined me, and I reported on my day’s activities while we smoked Gauloises and sipped the civet coffee.

I can’t say I taste the difference, she said. Not that it’s not delicious. In fact, it’s quite potent.

It’s psychological. Knowing where it comes from affects the taste.

Just like knowing where this Boss and Le Cao Boi come from, she said. I imagine them as dark and potent, like this coffee. The gangster and the romantic. The violent and the lyrical. Doesn’t that define our homeland’s culture?

Isn’t France our homeland? My father, when he was teaching me in school, would make us repeat after him: la Gaule is the land of our ancestors.

Your father was a colonizer and a pedophile, which go hand in hand. Colonization is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all in the holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission!

When you talk about me like that, I feel like a symbol.

Get used to it, my dear. We French love nothing more than symbols.

That was the nature of our conversation, the discourse refreshing after the reeducation camp’s brute propaganda and the nuts-and-bolts pseudo-realism of the somewhat rusted American Dream. Americans loathed symbols, except for patriotic, sentimental ones like guns, flags, Mom, and apple pie, all of which the average American proclaimed he would defend to the death. One had to love such a practical, pragmatic people, impatient with interpretation, eager just to get the facts, ma’am. If one tried to interpret a movie’s deeper significance with Americans, they would reflexively claim that it was just a story. To the French, nothing was ever just a story. As for facts, the French thought them rather boring.

Facts, my aunt said, are just the beginning, not the end.

Speaking of facts, I thought you were a seamstress.

And I thought you were a patriotic captain who became a refugee. You were given your cover and I was given mine.

By Man? I asked. When she nodded, I said, Have you told him that I am here?

Of course. No reply yet. She regarded me shrewdly. My first loyalty lies with him, my actual nephew, or not even really him, but the revolution you have abandoned.

I didn’t abandon the revolution. It abandoned me.

Disappointments, abandonments, betrayals—unfortunately all typical of revolutions, as with all passionate love affairs. Something happened between you two?

Because I became a refugee again?

Yes. Or is that just another cover? To keep you safe from Bon? He would kill you if he knew you were a communist, wouldn’t he?

My cup was empty except for a fine black silt of coffee ground. Yes.

When you wrote me and asked for help, I agreed—

And thank you for that—

—because of all that you have done for the revolution. And because I want to know what has happened to our revolution. I can recognize propaganda when I see it, and what is coming from our revolution is propaganda. But as imperfect as our revolution may be—and what revolution is perfect?—that does not mean I support counterrevolutionaries. So tell me, my former communist: Are you now a reactionary?

Are communist or reactionary my only choices?

What are your other choices?

You’re an editor, I said. I have something for you to read.

I retrieved my confession from the false bottom of my leather duffel and gave it to her, all 367 pages of it. She had barely had a chance to look at the first page when a knock at the door announced our visitors, dressed well and yet casually, making me aware of my simple white long-sleeved shirt, rolled up to the elbows, and my boring black slacks, and my dusty shoes—an ensemble that made me look like a waiter, which was what I now was. They, too, wore shirts and slacks and had arms, legs, and eyes as I did. But while we shared the same elements that made us human, they were clearly filet mignon, rare and perfectly seared, while I was boiled organ meat, most likely intestine. We were distantly related, in other words, but no one would ever mix us up. The fine quality of the cotton of their shirts, woven by a bedraggled child laborer somewhere in a dark, poor, hot country, was visible from a distance. As for their pants, they fit so well they needed no belts, while my pants were so loose they required a hideous strap of snake leather, provided by the refugee camp and donated, presumably, by somebody of typical American girth from Texas or Florida, which is to say it was long enough for two emaciated Vietnamese.

The first gentleman, whose rumpled black hair was speckled with gray, was a psychoanalyst. The other gentleman, whose sleekly coiffed gray hair was streaked with black, was a politician. He was a socialist, an honorable affiliation in France, and a very happy man, since a fellow socialist had won the presidency last week. The politician was well-known enough that he could be introduced just by his initials, which initially befuddled me.

BHV? I said.

BFD, my aunt repeated.

BFD and the psychoanalyst, who was also a Maoist and who had completed his PhD, regarded me with a curiosity that soon devolved into disdain, which the French have difficulty concealing, since they consider disdain a virtue. My aunt introduced me as a refugee from the communist revolution in my homeland, and these two were leftists for whom the Vietnamese revolutionaries were modern-day noble savages. If I was not one of these noble savages, then I must be an ignoble savage, a situation that was not helped by the fact that my schoolboy French was stiff from not having been used for many years after the lycée. After a few halting rounds of conversation where I rapidly proved that I could not swim in the intellectual, cultural, and political currents of Paris or France or the French—I mentioned Sartre, for example, and did not know that the great existentialist had died two years previous—the Maoist PhD, BFD, and my aunt ignored me. I sat on a corner of the couch in the state of humiliation, a region I have visited quite often, most often when someone called me a bastard. I usually responded with rage, a good mask. But I was not myself, or rather I was both me and myself, my screw quite wobbly, taking comfort from the first and then the second bottle of wine that the visitors had brought, the conversational freight train rushing past me and revealing only glimpses through its windows. Smoking my aunt’s cigarettes, gazing at the ceiling, the carpet, the polished toes of the men’s shoes, I knew I was not just a clown but a dunce.

When my aunt offered hashish, I accepted with relief, unsure of how to exit gracefully from their ménage à trois. But under the spell of the hashish it was all perfectly normal that later in the evening, when the Maoist PhD said farewell, even to me, BFD stayed seated. My aunt closed the door behind the Maoist PhD and said, What a very nice evening. Until tomorrow . . .

She nodded at BFD, who rose, inclined his head to me somewhat mockingly, and followed her into her bedroom. I could hear them laughing behind the door, undoubtedly at me. I laughed with them. I was, after all, the refugee, not the revolutionary, the hick from the hinterlands, the nitwit nephew from the colony, the dumb bastard who was so provincial and prudish that even floating on hashish he was shocked at the idea of his aunt making love to a politician, or any man, even if he was a socialist.

Later that evening, a time bomb of a lesson finally exploded in my head as I lay on the sofa. I was trying to sleep when I suddenly recalled a professor at the lycée who had earned his degree in Paris in the 1930s. We students worshipped and envied him. Indeed, worship and envy pervaded our steamy colony, as they do any colony. Colonizers imagined themselves as divine, and the native middlemen who served them, like my professor, fancied themselves as priests and disciples. Not surprisingly, the colonizers looked down on us as savages, infants, or sheep, while we looked up at them as demigods, masters, or brutes. The danger with worshipping human beings, of course, is that eventually they reveal their flawed humanity, at which point the believer has no choice but to kill the fallen idols or die trying.

Some of us loved the French, our patrons, and some hated the French, our colonizers, but all of us had been seduced by them. It is difficult to be loved by someone, as the French imagined their relationship with us, or to be abused by someone, though the French pretended otherwise, without being shaped by their hand and touched by their tongue. Thus we learned French literature and language under the tutelage of this professor who had actually stepped foot on the soil of la Gaule, our fatherland, as a scholarship student dispatched to absorb the best of French culture. He returned as a sopping wet sponge to us benighted natives, applying himself to foreheads that might be feverish with revolution.

Ah, the Champs-Élysées, the Sponge rhapsodized. Oh, the Eiffel Tower!

And we all swooned, just a little, and dreamed that one day we, too, could board a steamer ship for the metropole with nothing more than a suitcase, a scholarship, and an inferiority complex.

Ah, Voltaire! the Sponge effused. Oh, Descartes! Oh, Rousseau!

In truth, we delighted in reading these masters in the original French for the Sponge’s classes, and we believed what the Sponge told us, that the greatest of literature and philosophy was universal, and that French literature and philosophy was the greatest of the greatest, and by learning French literature and philosophy and language we, too, could one day be Frenchmen, although our lessons in the canon were complicated by our context of a colony. From Descartes, for example, I learned that because I think, therefore I am! But I also learned that in a world divided between the body and the mind, we Vietnamese were ruled by our bodies, which was why the French could rule us with their minds. From Voltaire, I learned that it was best to tend to my own garden, which might mean many things, but when taught to us by the French meant to mind our own business and be happy with our little plots, while the French took care of our entire colony and inflicted Candide-like horrors on us. As for Rousseau, perhaps I learned the most from him, for as I wrote my confession under Man’s heavy-handed guidance in the reeducation camp, the beginning of Rousseau’s own confession came back to me in a flash:

I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imitator. I want to show my fellow-men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man is to be myself . . . As to whether nature did well or ill to break the mould in which I was cast, that is something no one can judge until after they have read me.

Thank you, Jean-Jacques! By you I was inspired to be true to myself, for even if myself was a rotten bastard, I was like no other rotten bastard in history, before or since. I learned to love confessing and have never stopped acknowledging my crimes of violence, torture, and betrayal, all of which our French masters had taught us through the violence and torture they had inflicted on us as they betrayed their own ideals.

These complicated lessons were only reinforced each time I left the hallowed grounds of the lycée and walked the streets of Saigon with a French book under my arm, where, on occasion, I would be abused in the language of Dumas, or Stendhal, or Balzac. Any Frenchman or -woman or child, rich or poor, beautiful or plain, could call us anything he or she wanted and, occasionally, did. Yellow-skinned bastard! Slanty-eyed chink! The most perfectly formed lips and the whitest teeth, borne about by the nicest shoes and daintiest footwear, could spit these seeds at us, ones that would take fertile root underneath our tainted skin, as happened to Ho Chi Minh, who put it best when he wrote about how we, the colonized of Africa and Asia, were to our masters “only dirty niggers and dirty Annamese, good at the very most for pushing rickshaws and receiving the blows of our administrators.”

Some of us ignored the insults, wanting only for our masters to love us.

Some of us could not forget the insults and wanted to slay our masters.

And some of us—me and myself most of all—loved and hated our masters at the same time.

Loving a master who kicks you is not a problem if that is all one feels, but loving and hating must be kept a dirty little secret, for loving the master one hates inevitably induces confusion and self-hatred. That was why I never threw myself as wholeheartedly into the study of French as I did with English and why, ever since leaving the lycée, I had hardly ever spoken a word of French. French was the language of our enslaver and rapist, whereas English was a novelty, heralding an American arrival that spelled the end of our French debasement. I mastered English without ambivalence because it had never mastered us.

Now, in Paris at last, the land of my father, in the company of the socialist BFD and the Maoist PhD, it suddenly struck me that I was not just seen as an other by white people. They also heard me as other, for when I opened my mouth and broke the beautiful china of their French language, they heard what the poet, boy wonder, gun runner, and slave trader Rimbaud must have heard and then plagiarized from some nameless African or Oriental traveler: I is an other.

There was no need for the French to condemn us. So long as we spoke in their language, we condemned ourselves.

I, the other, woke from sleep, but it was as if me, or I, was still dreaming, for I could see through my eyes but I could also see me and myself through the eyes of my aunt and BFD. They walked out of the bedroom rumpled yet elegant, but they saw me as just rumpled. BFD was clad in a blue velvet robe, like a boxer after a victorious round in the ring, a postcoital costume kept for all my aunt’s visitors. My aunt wore a gray satin robe with a turban of the same material wrapped around her hair, an outfit a movie star from the black-and-white era might wear between scenes. They chatted amiably as they smoked and drank civet coffee while skimming the newspapers. BFD had sniffed at the coffee before dipping his tongue in it and then laughing, which made me fantasize about strangling him. Never mock another culture’s food or drink; it is a mortal sin. Brooding over my coffee and toast, I barely paid attention to their conversation, except to note the mentions of le haschisch and les boat-people.

The mention of the latter was prompted by an item in L’Humanité, my aunt’s newspaper of choice (BFD preferred Libération, but L’Humanité, he said, would do). BFD held it up and pointed to the headline about les boat-people and a photograph of a trawler floating in the ocean, as crowded with my countrymen as a metro train at rush hour. But while a rider endures the train’s conditions for only a number of minutes, my countrymen endured their conditions for days and weeks, under full exposure to the sun, wind, and rain, pirates dropping in periodically to select the most succulent parts of the cargo and sharks swimming alongside to window-shop, gazing longingly at the fresh cuts of meat on display.

Very sad, BFD said, very deliberately and very loudly, his lips moving in exaggerated slow motion. You, too. A boat person. Like them. Verrry saaad. They have nothing. We have everything. We must help them. We must help you.

He aimed his finger at me as if his words were not quite enough. I forced myself to smile and swallowed my resentment, which tasted like blood—that is to say, not as bad as you might imagine, given how so many people apparently enjoy dining on rare, juicy meat. The heat of his pity was so strong that it did not make me feel warm. Instead, I boiled, the steam hissing from my ears as I kept my mouth closed after the few conciliatory words I could manage. How could I say that the so-called boat people had already helped themselves by getting on their boats in the first place? How could I say that I refused to be called a “boat person,” a term so overpowering that even the Anglophobic French had simply borrowed and worn it on a regular basis, like un jean and le week-end?

I was not a boat person unless the English Pilgrims who fled religious persecution to come to America on the Mayflower were also boat people. Those refugees just happened to be fortunate that the soon-to-be-hapless natives did not have a camera to record them as the foul-smelling, half-starved, unshaven, and lice-ridden lot that they were. In contrast, our misery was forever recorded in L’Humanité, where we were seen as anything but human. No, the boat people were not human, they did not get the benefit of some romantic painter casting them in oils, standing boldly on the prow of their sinking ships, facing the monstrous elements with the nobility of Greek heroes, enshrined in the Louvre to be admired by tourists and studied by art historians. No, boat people were victims, objects of pity fixed forever in newspaper photographs. Part of me, my mama’s baby, wanted that pity. But the part of me that was a grown man neither wanted nor deserved pity, neither wanted to be called a victim nor deserved to be seen as such, not after all my deeds and misdeeds. If the price of being human was to be recognized through being pitiful, then to hell with humanity! I was a rotten bastard—recognize that!

But instead all I said was: Thank you. Yes, please help them.

BFD stood up to leave, satisfied that he had not only put me and my people in our pitiful place but that he had also gotten me to thank him for his condescension. It occurred to me that if my French was awkward and my Vietnamese was incomprehensible to him, my English was fluent, and nothing would make a Frenchman feel more inferior, and hence angry, than to hear English. Within a corner of every French soul slouched an American, coughing quietly now and again to remind the Frenchman of their shared history, beginning with how the French helped the pitiful upstart Americans in their revolution against the English, only to find themselves needing the aid of these same Americans twice in the World Wars. Then, finally, “Indochina,” whatever that word meant, since we were neither Indian nor Chinese. It was this fantastic Indochina that the exhausted French handed off to the now very loud Americans. How it must hurt to be reminded of the decline of one’s own empire by being confronted with the rise of a new one! Oh, yes, English in this case was an insult and a challenge, especially from one such as me, who was not even American but “Indochinese.”

So, in perfect American English, I said, Did I hear you say hashish? Because I happen to have some, and of a very fine grade.

BFD hesitated, surprised by this yellow parrot. The sleek socialist could have dismissed me in French, but the temptation to prove that he, too, could speak English was too much for him. Well, yes, in fact, I was saying to your aunt that our . . . purveyor . . . has gone missing.

Six months ago, without a word, my aunt added. Her fluent English, like BFD’s, was inflected with a charming French accent, but it was nevertheless not as good as mine, for I could say that most American of things—hee-haw!—which most of the French could not say, except with a great degree of concentration as they tried not to drop their h’s. I suppose that can only mean bad news for the salesman, my aunt went on.

Unless he found religion, I said.

Doubtful, said my aunt. Saïd only cares about money. Speaking of which—if I could be so crass—

No, no, no, I said, knowing intuitively that someone like BFD, a politician, would not buy the goods, at least from me. I held up the sliver of aluminum between my fingers that the Boss had meant for me to pass on to my aunt. This—the glow of my aunt’s lamp struck the aluminum so that it gleamed like distant lightning—this is a gift.