Читать книгу The Committed - Viet Thanh Nguyen - Страница 12

CHAPTER 3

Oh, what a migraine! And it was due not just to these holes in my head but to the long-lingering hangover from that morning and its ill-considered decision. Oh my God—or my Karl Marx, or my Ho Chi Minh—what had I done? As the General had once told me: Nothing is so expensive as what is given for free. How true, given that I had given him my loyalty freely, and yet I was also spying on him (not to mention seducing Lana). I was his aide-de-camp, Saigon was about to fall, and although he was an American ally, he was speaking of the dangers of American assistance, which Americans gave freely, even though their help always cost a great deal. In our southern Vietnamese case, we had fought the war against communism that the Americans wanted, only to see them abandon most of us in our time of greatest need. So who was paying for this gift, and how much? Was this the beginning of my downfall, when I had barely begun to rise from the downtrodden position that I occupied as a three-time refugee? My intention was to hook BFD for future sales, even if those sales must be conducted through my aunt. He has a reputation to protect, she had said after closing the door behind him. He’s the mayor of the 13th arrondissement.

Even better. I could taste the salty flavor of revenge, which was what I wanted, even if it would leave me thirsty and with bad breath. But in seeking my revenge on the socialist, was I actually becoming that most horrid of criminals? No, not a drug dealer, which was a matter of bad taste. I mean was I becoming a capitalist, which was a matter of bad morals, especially as the capitalist, unlike the drug dealer, would never recognize his bad morality, or at least admit to it. A drug dealer was just a petty criminal who targeted individuals, and while he may or may not be ashamed of it, he usually recognized the illegality of his trade. But a capitalist was a legalized criminal who targeted thousands, if not millions, and felt no shame for his plunder. Perhaps only someone like the Maoist PhD would understand, and indeed he understood so well that he called my aunt later that afternoon and asked for some of the goods, having been informed by BFD of their quality. Unlike BFD, he apparently was not worried about his reputation. If anything, being a known hashish smoker probably enhanced the Maoist PhD’s reputation.

It appears that your product is excellent, she said, hanging up the phone with a hint of reproach in her voice. I wouldn’t have minded a sample of it myself.

I’ll see what I can do, I said, a plan leaping into the waiting arms of my mind, which had not held such a thing for so long. As for my aunt, she had her own plans for me.

I have a friend who teaches French to immigrants, she went on. You need to polish your French. You’re half French, and you should know the language of your father as well as you do English. And you can’t work at that restaurant forever. Or shouldn’t, anyway. Not that there’s anything wrong with working in a restaurant. But you have greater talents.

I thought of my career as a spy, my plans and my manipulations, my ideals and my delusions, my decisions and my blunders. My life as a revolutionary and a spy had been designed to answer one question, one inherited from that vanguard of revolution, Lenin, the one that drove me since my lycée years: WHAT IS TO BE DONE? In my case, I had killed two men, and they were innocent, or mostly innocent, and I was guilty, or mostly guilty. I had killed both of them at the behest of the General, who had committed the error of trusting me enough to make me an officer in the Special Branch, our task to root out communists and dissidents. The General had never suspected me of being a spy, not during our years in Saigon or the years afterward, when I fled with him and his family as refugees to Los Angeles. When Man had ordered me to go with the General to America, he was right: the General and his men would continue to fight the war from there, trying to take our homeland back and defeat the revolution. If best actor awards were given to spies, I deserved one, for I had been suave enough to convince the General that the real spy was my colleague in the secret police, the crapulent major. And when the General decided that the crapulent major should be given a one-way ticket to the afterlife, he chose me to deliver it. I had not pulled the trigger as the crapulent major smiled at me in his driveway—that was Bon—but I was the one responsible for his death.

As for the second man I killed, Sonny, I had known him when we were both foreign students in Southern California in the 1960s, when he was a left-wing activist and I was a communist pretending to be a member of the right wing. Sonny had wisely stayed in California and become a journalist, a perilous occupation in our own country. But our country caught up to him when we refugees came to America, including the General, who suspected Sonny of being a communist agent. Once more the General made me his delivery boy, and if I, his über-competent, super-anticommunist aide, refused, I would have been rightly suspect in his paranoid imagination. I had shot Sonny at close range, and he and the crapulent major had haunted me intermittently ever since, their voices emerging clearly every now and again from the static-ridden channel of my unconscious.

Talents? My laugh sounded weird even to my own ears. What talents?

My aunt looked disconcerted, her sang no longer so froid. You can write, she said. I’m almost done reading your confession, just thirty or forty pages left to go.

I just gave it to you last night.

I’m an editor. I read fast and I don’t sleep much.

What do you think so far?

I think you love your mother. I think you have a problem with women. I think you were treated a bit harshly by Man, who may have had no choice, and yet I think you were too seduced by American culture. You lived a dangerous life as a double agent and a spy, and you were, as you say, a man of two faces and two minds. I wonder what face I am looking at now. And whether you can be trusted.

I could say that you should trust me, but I don’t even trust myself.

Now that is an honest answer. So, you who can sympathize with anyone, what do you think I should do in regards to you? I have welcomed you into my home because you were my revolutionary comrade. But you are not my comrade anymore, are you?

You read about what the revolution did to me!

I read what you said the revolution did to you. But do you not think that perhaps the revolution had reason to be suspicious of you? That you were, or are, in fact too Americanized? Even here in France we are in danger of being Americanized. The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don’t you see that’s how the Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank, but through this infectious disease called the American Dream? You were infected and you barely even realized it! You were an addict, and Man had to cure you. Unfortunately the cure for addiction is always painful.

I was dumbfounded. She had read my confession and this is what she got out of it? So I am wrong, I said, and the revolution was right in punishing me?

From an editorial point of view, I cannot help but admire Man’s methods. My aunt lit a cigarette and smiled. If only I could make all my writers produce this many pages this quickly. You have to respect his rigor, don’t you?

I, who could sympathize with anyone, wanted more than anything for someone to sympathize with me. I had believed that surely my aunt would be gentler than the man for whom I had been spying in America, also the commissar of the camp in which I was later interned, the faceless man, also known as my best friend and blood brother Man, stripped of a great deal of his humanity by an errant napalm strike. Man was very sympathetic to me. He knew me very well, more so than any priest or analyst, but he had used that knowledge to interrogate me and torture me. Unlike Man, my aunt would most likely not torture me. But if she could not understand me, who could?

Maybe, I said, I should get some more of the hashish.

The hemorrhoidal clerk grunted painfully when he saw me at five that afternoon. He struck a match, and the flash of its flame and the hiss of its short, deep breath lit something within me at the moment he lit his cigarette—the fuse of a plot, the long trail of gunpowder in a children’s cartoon that led to the explosive climax.

Could I see the Boss?

Does he want to see you?

Just tell him I have a proposition for him.

The Boss let me wait for an hour, just to show me exactly where I stood, or sat, in his waiting room. At least here, in France, one waited by sitting on a seat versus squatting on one’s well-developed haunches, muscular from a lifelong scarcity of chairs. How many times had I seen my mother squatting on her haunches, her feet flat on the ground, her torso leaning slightly forward to maintain her balance, especially if I was draped on her back? She could squat for hours, forced to stay in a pose that most Westerners could not maintain for more than a minute. She would hum to me, rock me, sing me lullabies, and then, when I was older, tell me fairy tales and recite folk sayings and poems, all while a thin film of sweat glued us together. Every time I waited, I thought of her endless patience, borne not for the sake of whoever was making her wait but for me, who had to wait with her wherever she went. After I grew too heavy for her back, I squatted beside her and the rest of the masses. Then I went to the lycée, and there I became a part of the class that no longer squatted but assumed the right to sit on chairs.

When I was at last called into the office, my buttocks were slightly sore from the hard cup of the plastic chair, ergonomically designed for round Western buttocks rather than flat Eastern ones. I found the Boss sitting on a well-padded chair at a clean desk examining a ledger. Rumor had it that he had never gone to school but was taught on the streets, and anything that he had not learned there, he had taught himself. My heart softened for this poor, abandoned orphan when I imagined what he, with his talent and ambition, could have become with a proper education:

The manager of an investment fund!

The president of a bank!

The captain of an industry!

Or, to consult my Marxist thesaurus:

A vulture of capitalism!

A sucker of blood!

A launderer of profits distilled from the sweat of the people!

I was no longer a communist who believed in a party, but I was still a descendant of Marx who believed in a theory, and that theory offered the best critique of capitalism available. To expect capitalists to critique themselves was like asking the police to police themselves—

What’s the matter? the Boss said. Snap out of it, you crazy bastard.

Sorry, I—or me, or maybe we—muttered.

Do you have the kopi luwak?

He nodded in satisfaction when I placed the package on his desk, and I watched him examine the bean’s anatomy, his letter opener revealing a sliver of the white core. Satisfied, the Boss laid down the blade and said, Anything else?

The hashish . . .

He grinned and leaned back in his chair. Good stuff, right?

So I’ve heard. I haven’t tried it myself.

Good. There are some things you should neither try nor buy.

I saw myself explaining, with the enthusiasm of a sales pitch, the situation with BFD and the Maoist PhD. I gave them a taste of the goods, I heard myself saying. My screw was quite loose at that moment, providing me with enough distance to see myself become what I swore I would never become: a capitalist.

Interesting, the Boss said, the fingers of his hands touching in a steeple. Not that it’s a surprise. Not at all. Even those people would enjoy the things I can give them.

They’re only human. So very human.

Exactly! He was greatly amused, if the smile on his face was any indication. Even the French are only human. The rich, too. Especially the rich.

I’m not sure that they’re rich. They’re intellectuals.

If they don’t work with their hands, they’re rich. And that politician is definitely rich. I know his name. He’s the one in charge of this arrondissement. He’s as bad as the rest of the politicians. They’re all sleazy socialists and caviar communists.

I totally agree, I said, performing my best yes-man act.

But even if you’re not a politician or an intellectual—he turned his palms to me so I could see the map of his toil, the scars and calluses of his personal geography—that doesn’t mean you can’t get rich by working with your hands.

This is a new opportunity. A new market.

Grow or die. That’s my thinking.

It’s a good philosophy.

He checked the symmetrical white cuticles of his fingernails, manicured at a nail salon that he owned, then looked at me again. If eyes were the windows to a soul, he had blackout curtains pulled shut behind his. What do you want?

What I wanted was revenge, but as I watched myself with that unfeeling sense that I was a stranger even to me, all I heard myself say was: You supply, I sell.

He named a price for the goods, per gram. I explained that I was a refugee working a menial job—not that there was anything wrong with the job he had given me, all refugees have to start somewhere, that somewhere being at the bottom, where we offered our bottom to be kicked, which provided endless merriment for the citizenry of our host countries. The point was that I did not have the capital to purchase the goods. Instead of investing my nonexistent financial capital in his goods, I offered to barter my social capital, my access to my aunt’s friends, for his goods. In exchange, I would expand his market and deliver to him profits he would not otherwise have, divided fifty-fifty between us, after deducting the cost of the goods.

Something behind the curtains twitched. Thirty percent.

Forty percent.

He was amused. Twenty-five percent.

It was difficult to negotiate with someone who could take a hammer out of his desk drawer and break your knuckles or kneecaps without compunction or hesitation. You’re too generous, I said. The Boss nodded toward the door and told me to see Le Cao Boi, who would provide me with the goods. In parting he said, I’m not sure whether you’re less crazy or more crazy for wanting to do this.

I’m not crazy.

That’s what the crazy ones always say.

Looking back, it is clear to me now, as it must be to you, that perhaps the balance between my two minds, always precarious, had suddenly tilted too far right, into a place where I could watch myself becoming more and more about me and me alone, the best justification there was for capitalism. Did that make me crazy, as the Boss and many others have claimed? Maybe I was crazy, or a little bit crazy, or maybe I was simply flawed. Yes, I am flawed, we are all flawed, even you, but I blame my flaws on the fact that all my life I only ever aspired to one thing—to be human. That was my first mistake, since I was already human, a fact not always recognized by others. Perhaps Saïd wanted to be human, too, despite being a drug dealer, or perhaps he was smarter than me and took his humanity for granted, which allowed him to be a drug dealer, as he had nothing to prove. Now he had disappeared and left an opportunity, a void in the market. Someone would eventually fill that void. Why not me?

By the time I arrived at the restaurant, an answer was waiting for my rhetorical question, a square brown paper package the size of a croque monsieur, wrapped with string. Sliding the package across the countertop, Le Cao Boi said, Glad you’ve decided to join us. His face was statuesque in its impassivity, the faint ghosts of me and myself floating in the lenses of his sunglasses. I matched his impassivity as I accepted the package and slipped it into a jacket pocket, where it rested against my hip with a pistol’s patience, utterly confident that it would, sooner or later, be used.

Bon watched the transaction from a table where he was refilling bottles of soy sauce with a chemist’s precision, the only person sitting in the barren restaurant. I hope you know what you’re doing, smart guy, he said.

Of course I don’t, I said, implying in my lighthearted way that I indeed did know what I was doing, even if, in fact, I did not. And it will give me a chance to improve my French, I went on. Nothing makes people more talkative than mutual intoxication.

You could just go to school to refine your French.

Yes, but you always told me that not all the answers can be found in books.

I’ll tell you what else you can’t find in a book, Le Cao Boi said. The Boss expects at least a twenty percent return. He doesn’t like to waste his time. Or his goods. In other words, you better make this little investment worthwhile.

Hey, new guy, Sleepy called out from the kitchen. The toilet needs cleaning!

I left the worst Asian restaurant in Paris with the sound of Sleepy’s laughter in my ears, the scent of disinfectant on my hands, and the taste of bile on my tongue. Only a shot of revenge could wash that taste away. I would not be the obsequious Asiatic object of pity, the pathetic or polite little refugee who would agree to begin from the beginning, as a student of my master’s language—

Hey you!

—or as a waiter or a busboy or a dishwasher—

You!

—or a plumber—

YOU!

I froze. The voice, loud and stern, seemed aimed at me, although I was not the only one on the street who turned. Everyone around me pivoted to see a pair of policemen striding toward us, the one in front pointing his finger at me. I knew exactly why. Something was transmitting a signal on the invisible airwaves. Although the packet in my pocket was silent, that did not mean it had nothing to say. No, it exuded a sense of confidence, perhaps even a touch of menace, as all valuable things did. It had power over me, as it was well aware. I could throw it away, of course, destroy it in any number of ways, and it could do nothing to stop me—except simply by existing.

YOU!

The policemen suddenly broke into a run, and my body and mind became quite calm as they braced themselves. I had felt that same stillness on the boat as it soared into the sky, borne on the wave. Hashish, the packet in my pocket whispered, knowing only its own name. Hashish. It knew that it was literally more valuable than me. It had a price that people were willing to pay, whereas my life had almost no value at all. Because no one would pay for me what one would for the goods in the packet, I was now in debt to it. I was about to raise my hands in surrender to it and to the policemen, but they charged right past me, one on either side, close enough that their sleeves brushed mine.

YOU!

They were not shouting at me after all, but at a shambolic man whose hair was so unkempt and skin was so unwashed that he was of indeterminate race or ethnicity, which was the French ideal. Everyone could be French, including the homeless!

One policeman jerked a beer can from the bewildered bum’s hand and shoved him against a wall. The other cop kicked him in the seat of his pants and sent him nearly tumbling to the ground, all while the rest of the upstanding citizens—and me, not to mention myself—stood watching. When the policeman with the beer can hurled it at the back of the bewildered bum, splashing him with its contents, which seemed to defeat the purpose of making him less hideous to Parisian eyes, I averted my own eyes and walked past the scene in silence.

That night, my aunt and I smoked the finest hashish and drank the finest Haut-Médoc and listened to the finest American jazz, that black-and-blue music so beloved by the French partially because every sweet note reminded them of American racism, which conveniently let them forget their own racism. Since I was also black and blue all over, at least on the inside, Nina Simone singing “Mississippi Goddam” was a perfect accompaniment for me. And then there was my aunt, who had finished my confession and was feeling kind of blue herself. She remained unbothered by what had happened to me, imprisoned with a thousand fetid fellows for a year on starvation rations, forced to write and rewrite a confession, and then, for the coup de grâce, thrown into solitary confinement, naked, with sacks over my head, hands, and feet, periodically jolted by low-level electricity that kept me awake for an unknown amount of time, until I could no longer distinguish my body from its surroundings, time itself losing meaning as I was bombarded with an unrelenting sonic attack composed of an infant’s recorded howling, until at last I could pass the final exam. It was this exam, which she had finally gotten to, that disturbed my aunt, leading her to mutter over and over again its only question:

WHAT IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM?

Like every good revolutionary, my aunt already knew the answer, Ho Chi Minh’s most famous slogan, a spell that mobilized millions to rise and die in order to evict the French and then the Americans, to unify our country and liberate it. After she muttered the question, she declaimed the answer, first as an incantation, which was how it was intended to be said:

NOTHING IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM!

And then again with her voice rising, as a question:

NOTHING IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM?

Exactly, I said sadly, shaking my head and giving her for free what had cost me so much to learn. Nothing is, in fact, more precious than independence and freedom.

No, no, no! Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom­—­I mean, independence and freedom are more precious than nothing, not the other way around!

You read my confession. I sighed, then inhaled so deeply from the laced cigarette that my lungs sizzled, the smoke that issued forth reminding me of how everything solid eventually melts into air. Have you learned nothing?

Shut up! she cried. Give me that cigarette.

Doesn’t nothing make more sense after hashish?

No. Nothing makes sense at all after your confession.

Of course it does. You just refuse to make sense of nothing, as most people do. Now if you had gone through reeducation like I had, under the hands of a master revolutionary theorist like Man, you would understand that nothing is contradictory, like everything meaningful—love and hate, capitalism and communism, France and America. Leave it to the simple-minded to understand only one side of a contradiction. You’re not simple-minded, are you?

I hate you, she groaned, eyes closed. Why did I invite you into my house?

It’s all quite funny, if you think about it. Almost as funny as the funniest part of my confession, said by none other than Man himself, which should be engraved on the pedestal of Ho Chi Minh’s statue, if he has a statue. Except that it is unprintable, as the truth too often is: “Now that we are the powerful, we don’t need the French or the Americans to fuck us over—”

“We can fuck ourselves just fine,” she said.

I howled with laughter, slapped my knee, felt tears moistening my cheeks. This hashish was really something else! Come on, I said after my laughter had subsided. Isn’t that funny?

No. She stubbed out her cigarette. That’s not funny.

A trumpet blared and my vision was hazy, and if I could have seen myself in a mirror, I surely would have seen double of me, or two of us, not so much black and blue but red and yellow.

You used to believe in the revolution, she said. What do you believe in now?

Nothing, I said. But isn’t that something?

So you’re going to sell drugs.

Well, I muttered. Even under a cloud of hashish, I could see that her contempt had a point. It’s better than nothing.

My aunt drew herself up from where she had been reclining on the couch and turned off the stereo. So long as you were a revolutionary, I could have you living here for free as my service to the revolution and as an expression of my belief in solidarity, she said. She was remarkably eloquent after the hashish, or perhaps her passion had focused her. But if you’re going to be dealing drugs—

You’re making a moral judgment?

I make no moral judgment. I’m the one smoking hashish. And sometimes criminals make the best revolutionaries, or revolutionaries are condemned as criminals. But if you’re no longer a revolutionary and you’re going to be selling drugs, and sleeping on my couch, and asking me to protect you from Bon by keeping your communist past a secret, then you can afford to split the profits with me.

My mouth, already slightly agape under the influence of the hashish, fell completely open.

What’s the matter? she said, lighting another hashish cigarette. Too contradictory for you?

Walking the next morning to the Maoist PhD’s apartment from the metro, I experienced déjà vu for the second time in less than twelve hours (strange that even my psychic tics or malfunctions were named in the master’s language). The first time was when I offered to split the profits with my aunt fifty-fifty, only to have her counter with sixty-forty, terms to which I had to agree once again. The second time was walking on the Maoist PhD’s street, where I had the eerie sense that I had been there before, since his street evoked for me one of Saigon’s boulevards, or rather, Saigon’s boulevards evoked a street like his. The French had designed Saigon in the spirit of Haussmann’s Paris, with wide thoroughfares and broad sidewalks lined with fetching trees and elegant apartment buildings of no more than six or seven stories, decorated with balconies and capped by garrets where, during the heat of August, one could roast artists or the poor, which we in Saigon could do year-round. Oh, Saigon, Pearl of the Orient! Or so it was called, presumably by the French, using a term of endearment that we ourselves had adapted, for there was nothing the people of a small country liked better than to be flattered, so rarely did it happen. But sometimes we were not just the Pearl of the Orient, and sometimes the Pearl of the Orient did not even refer to us. I had heard the Chinese of Hong Kong claim that their port was the Pearl of the Orient, and when I was in the Philippines, the Filipinos insisted that Manila was the Pearl of the Orient. Colonies were a pearl choker adorning the alabaster-white neck of the colonizer. And sometimes a Pearl of the Orient could be a Paris of the Orient as well. The Parisians and the French and just about everyone meant that as a compliment, but it was a backhanded compliment, the only kind a colonizer could give to the colonized. After all, as the Paris of the Orient, Saigon was just a cheap imitation of haute couture.

I had worked myself into such a lather of resentment that I was practically frothing at the mouth when Paris suddenly gave me a sticky reminder of one way that Saigon was considerably superior. Squish! I stopped and looked with dread and then disgust at the sole of my shoe. Nowhere in Saigon would the unwitting pedestrian have a chance of stepping on canine excrement, because the statistical truth was that we preferred to consume canines rather than keep them as pets, and if we kept them, we never allowed them to wander the streets, for fear that they might be eaten. Vive la différence! Here in Paris, dogs roamed everywhere, liberated to do their business as they pleased. In this case, some degenerate Parisian dog owner, of whom thousands existed, had left the prize almost on the doorstep of the Maoist psychoanalyst’s building. The imprint of my sole was on the thick brown smear, ready for a detective to study my shoeprint. No amount of scraping against the cement would get rid of the foul substance from the crevices of my shoe. I gave up, hesitated before buzzing the Maoist PhD’s apartment, but then remembered the first lesson of capitalism, which was so hard for Vietnamese people to learn: Never be late. I pressed the button.

In the tiny elevator, which offered room for no more than three adults of average French build, or four Vietnamese of average Vietnamese build, or perhaps three and a half Eurasians like me, the odor from my shoe was evident. I kept my sole off the floor, and when the Maoist PhD let me into his apartment, I did my best to walk in that manner, limping, I said, because of a sore ankle. It was not my fault that the French were not as civilized as Asians, who believed, for very good reason, that one should take off one’s shoes before entering a house. In this regard, the French were medieval.

You have a beautiful apartment, I said in rapid-fire English when he greeted me in his rapid-fire French. He hesitated, but in the end he replied in English. Like BFD, he could not pass up the chance to prove to someone like me that he could speak today’s imperial lingua franca. Like BFD, the Maoist PhD’s English was good but accented. He would know all too well how impeccable mine was, judging from the framed posters of The Big Sleep, Vertigo, King Kong, and Frankenstein hanging on the walls. His gilt-edged mirrors were door-sized, his furniture was varnished with age, his Turkish rug was intricate, and his parquet floorboards moaned underfoot. All were fitting decor for an eighteenth-century apartment with exposed beams and a ceiling tall enough to circulate the heated air of a hardworking brain.

I nearly forgave him for being a French intellectual when he poured me two fingers of a brand of fifteen-year-old scotch whose name was so Gaelic I could neither spell nor pronounce it. I closed my eyes in appreciation, shivering and swirling the magic potion in my mouth and over my deprived tongue, which had drunk more wine than spirits here in Paris. I happily offered the Maoist the goods, and the generous soul immediately rolled a cigarette with the product and offered to share it with me in communist fraternity.

Although I surmise that you hate the communists, the Maoist PhD added, lighting the cigarette. I was grateful for the aroma, its scent disguising how something was foul here, namely me. Your aunt told me about your experiences in the reeducation camp.

I was back in the role I could not escape, typecast as the anticommunist patriot of South Vietnam that had been my cover as a spy. How I wished to no longer play the role of the reactionary! I could not claim to be a communist, but did that mean I could not be a revolutionary? Just because one revolution failed, was revolution itself dead? I hadn’t wanted to explain myself to my aunt. For her and for most self-proclaimed revolutionaries like me, “revolution” was a magic word, like God, that foreclosed certain avenues of thinking. We believed in revolution, but what was it? Was it, in the end, really nothing? I wanted her to understand nothing, or help me understand nothing, because I did not yet fully understand what it meant, except that it was somehow revolutionary in its own way. For now, a revolutionary without a revolution, I had to create a new story. So, under the influence of a fine scotch and an equally fine hashish, a pairing that I recommend to all, I said, You might be surprised that I do not hate communists. Do I think they are mistaken? Yes. But their impulse toward revolution—well, that I can support.

I cannot tell you how disappointed I am in the outcome of your country’s revolution, the Maoist PhD said. It is the same as what happened under Stalin. A corruption of communist ideals! The Party elevated itself and the state instead of the people. We of the Left, who opposed the American war in your country, hoped that your revolution would destroy the American empire. But the American empire persists and the genuinely communist society has not been created.

Perhaps something is wrong with the theory if it can’t be put into practice, I said.

But it’s never been put into real practice. Unfortunately, conditions are not yet in place for genuine communism. Capitalism has to win globally and become the worst version of itself before communism can subvert it. The workers of the world have to see that capitalism is only interested in profit, not them, and that it will inevitably reduce them to slave labor as it maximizes profit. See Marx, Capital, volume one.

When will this triumph of capitalism happen?

The Maoist PhD blew a cloud of smoke. Whole swathes of the world still have to fall completely to capitalism before we see a genuine global uprising of the oppressed. Take Africa, for example. Capitalism looted Africa, first for slaves and then for resources. Capitalism will continue to exploit Africa with renewed cruelty. Someone must provide the cheap labor for cheap goods, and then those same workers have to buy the expensive goods imported into their country that have been made from the resources extracted from their country. Ah, the perpetual motion machine of capitalist fantasy! But once that happens, a proletariat is created and then a middle class, and even as some of the poorest are lifted out of absolute poverty, the gap in inequality widens and widens, as the wealthy become wealthier at a much faster rate than the very poor become a little less poor. This inevitable process is built into capitalism, which means that the conditions for revolution are inherent in capitalism itself.

Have you ever lived through a revolution? I said.

May 1968, the Maoist PhD said proudly. I will never forget how we students all over the world almost changed the world, until we encountered what Althusser—my teacher Louis Althusser—called the “Repressive State Apparatus.” I was studying for my doctorate with him but I still manned the barricades here. I admit to throwing a cobblestone or two. Our friend, the future BFD—no one called him just by his initials then—did the same. The police—that is, one part of the Repressive State Apparatus­—­tear-gassed and beat us. Never will I forget the blow of that baton! That baton taught me as much as theory and philosophy have ever taught me. That baton made real what Benjamin—Walter Benjamin—argued in “Critique of Violence”—that what makes the state legitimate is not the law but violence. The state wants to monopolize violence, the monopoly of violence is named the law, and the law legitimates itself. The police are not there to protect us, the citizens, but to protect the state and its rule of law. That is why one proper response to the blow of the baton is revolution in the streets! And student revolutions in streets around the world, from Tokyo to Mexico City, only echoed the revolutions in Algeria and Vietnam, where the Algerians and the Vietnamese confronted not batons but bullets. The Vietnamese were revolting against the monopoly of violence that was colonization! And by doing so, they revealed how illegitimate colonization actually was. They fought against not only the Repressive State Apparatus but also what Althusser described as the Ideological State Apparatus, which gets us to believe in the laws that are written against our self-interest! Why else would workers believe that capitalism is for them? Why else would the colonized believe in the white man’s superiority? The blow of that baton told me that what Che Guevara called for was true: we will need a hundred more Vietnams to flower across the world.

But at least three million people died during our war, I said slowly, my cloudy brain trying to perform basic mathematical functions. If you multiplied this by one hundred . . . it would equal . . .

At that point my cognitive abilities ended, as my math could not rise to that level of misery. I could not tell whether I wanted to laugh, to cry, to shout, or to commit myself to an asylum. I, too, believed in everything he said, but unlike the Maoist PhD, I had lived through a revolution and its consequences. And it was not just capitalism that created fantasies through these Ideological State Apparatuses and enforced them through Repressive State Apparatuses—so did communism. What was the reeducation camp but a Repressive State Apparatus designed to carry out the work of the Ideological State Apparatus? The reeducation camp’s task was to turn the inmates into people who would swear that they were free even if they were enslaved, proclaim that they had been remade when they had only been broken. Che Guevara and the Maoist PhD saw the Vietnamese revolution only from afar, with all its glamorous makeup, whereas I had seen it up close, denuded. Three million people dead for a revolution was, arguably, worth it, although that was always easier to say for the living! But three million people dead for this revolution? We had simply traded one Repressive State Apparatus for another one, and the only difference was that it was our own. I suppose the point for a Maoist like the PhD was that you had to see the bottom before you could be inspired to rise up. Perhaps my problem was that I thought we Vietnamese had hit bottom, under the French, and then saw there was another bottom beneath that with the Americans, when in reality, there was yet another bottom to discover—our own.

That’s why I needed whiskey or one of its cousins to make life livable, but when I looked at my glass, it was already empty. The Maoist PhD was by now somewhat high and relaxed, unattuned to social niceties, and instead of refilling my barren vessel, he said, Speaking of criminals, I have never met a Vietnamese drug dealer before.

I do like to think of myself as a trendsetter.

Maybe it’s your Eurasian heritage.

It has to be my Eurasian heritage.

The Vietnamese have done incredibly well here.

Tell me about it.

Doctors, lawyers, artists. They have not needed to go into the illicit trades, or perhaps their inclination to obey the law is part of their cultural tendency to pursue the honorable professions. And the Vietnamese are very good at improving the services that they engage in.

It’s in our blood.

Ironically, perhaps it’s because the Vietnamese here are deracinated that they do not deal in drugs or consume them. After all, if we look back in history, there is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, the Arabs have hashish.

Being neither Chinese nor Arab, I was not sure how this koan applied to me, and I turned it over in my mind for a second before I found the right response: And what does the West have?

The West? The Maoist PhD smiled. The West has woman, or so Malraux said.

I smiled back, and we smiled at each other for a moment.

Well, I said. I suppose I’m getting back to my European roots.

I always tell my students that they should strive to be the first of their kind.

I guess I’m a true original then, I said, rubbing the sole of my shoe into his Turkish rug. And I intend to be so very good at being bad.