by Karin Tanabe
“Perhaps the Americans are more like the Annamites than the French are,” I said. Or perhaps poor people were just the same the world over.
Cam took Lucie downstairs for breakfast once Lucie had tired of watching me get ready.
When my hair was done, my favorite rings were on, and a pair of small emerald earrings were glimmering on my earlobes, Trieu walked me down to the kitchen. All through the empty house, the fans were blowing up the thin curtains in the sitting rooms like the skirts of twirling children.
When we reached the open door to the kitchen, I looked in and saw Lucie, Cam, and our cook, Diep, clustered closely together. Diep was flipping a fried egg into the air, much to Lucie’s delight. She was seated on Cam’s lap, her back arched happily like a cat’s. I stood silently and watched Cam’s hand moving in gentle circles on Lucie’s spine. My stomach tightened at the sight, and not even the sound of my daughter’s laughter, or her enthusiastic phrases in Indochinese, could stop the jealousy that pricked me.
“Nũa!” Lucie shouted, shrieking for more, as the egg landed precisely in the center of the pan. The cook cracked another one so she could continue charming Lucie.
“We are so in awe of Lucie’s Annamese,” said Trieu quietly as she watched them. “What an intelligent child. How did she learn?”
“We all had lessons with a tutor before we came,” I said. “I picked up quite a bit, but Lucie started speaking it with impressive ease after just three months of study. She was like a little parrot with her tutor. She’s quite good, isn’t she?”
“Excellent. And she will be happier here because of it,” said Trieu. “It’s rare. But it is a gift.” We watched as Lucie gave the cook a hug after she flipped an egg onto her plate.
“The van Dampierres’ children loved Diep, too,” said Trieu. “Though they only had boys. Poor Madame van Dampierre. She was such a feminine woman. She deserved to have a girl. As for Cam, even though she’s so young, she treats the children as if they’re her own. She is the oldest of ten children. That’s why she’s so motherly.” Trieu stepped into the kitchen, motioning for me to follow.
“Mama!” Lucie exclaimed, not moving from Cam’s lap. “Look at what Diep can do with eggs! They fly like birds. It’s magic.”
“It really is,” I said, watching the second egg land in the pan, its yolk intact.
“Shall I sit with you while you eat, darling?” I asked her. “On the terrace?”
Lucie hesitated, then looked at the cook. “I want to stay here and see the eggs,” she said, leaning her head against Cam’s shoulder. “May I?” she said after my face fell. “Just for today?”
“Of course, darling,” I replied, forcing a smile. I had counted on her taking to the staff, but perhaps not so quickly. “How amusing,” I said. “Flying eggs.”
I made my way back upstairs, walked down the tiled hallway, stepping only in the middle of it, the slight clack of my low-heeled day shoes the only sound in the house. When I reached the end of the hall, I paused in front of the master bedroom. I leaned against the doorway and looked inside. I’d never had such a large bedroom. Our apartment in Paris was beautiful, but the French didn’t build the same way in their country.
I closed my eyes a minute, remembering my childhood bedroom. In our neglected farmhouse, the walls were a mix of old chipped paint and water leaks. In the bedrooms, there were creaky metal beds everywhere with sagging mattresses that felt like sleeping on wet cardboard. Like the rest of the house, my bedroom was inhabited by children of various sizes with too little space and privacy to properly grow.
I looked at my new bed, already made by one of the servants, the light streaming in to kiss the room, and wished I could transport the restless child that I had been to this place. But it wasn’t worth looking backward. My childhood was lost, but I had Lucie. She, I had vowed when I started to feel her move in my stomach, would have everything I had not. She would be the opposite of me.
I walked into the bedroom and put my hands on the bed. I was tempted to climb back in, my body still not set to the hours of the Orient, but I noticed there was a door to my left slightly ajar. I thought it was the closet, but quickly realized that it was the door to the adjoining room, the small one that Victor had taken for his study. One of the servants must have opened it and forgotten to close it when I was downstairs.
Below the only window in the room was a large wooden desk, simple but well polished, which must have belonged to Théodore van Dampierre. On top were a typewriter, a navy-blue blotter, two of Victor’s pens, and a few Michelin guidebooks. I looked down at the familiar red covers, the picture of the Michelin Man—André and Édouard had noticed one day that a haphazard stack of tires resembled a figure—printed on each cover. I picked up the most recent guide, its familiarity giving me a certain comfort, and ran my thumb over the price indicated on the cover. Twenty-five francs.
There were three drawers on each side of the desk and one wide, shallow drawer between them. Only one had a small silver keyhole in it. Instinctually, I reached for it, but it was locked. I opened the drawer below it. Empty. Then I opened the middle drawer. Inside was a small silver key. I took it up quickly, pressed it between my fingers, and then slipped it inside the keyhole. It unlocked without a sound, and I pulled the drawer open.
Inside was a stack of papers, held together with a metal clip. On the top of the stack was a document I had seen before. I had read it on the boat. It was an internal report that had circulated through the company. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it except that instead of focusing on the factories in France, it went into detail about the plantations in Indochine.
I knew much about the company. But I had never read an internal memo before. All I had ever read were the guidebooks.
But halfway into our boat journey, that changed.
Victor and I had left the small window of our cabin open, and late in the day, despite blue skies, there was a sudden downpour. I jumped up from the top deck and headed down to close it as soon as I felt the drops on my skin, but when I arrived, I was too late. The rain had come in and soaked a folder that was on the small table right below the window. I grabbed it, wiped off the table with a bath towel, and opened the folder to see if there was anything important inside.
It was full of Victor’s papers, and the top one was a memo penned by his uncle Édouard. I scanned it quickly to see just how significant it was, worried that the water stains might upset Victor.
There was quite a lot of damage in the middle, but it was still fully legible. I started skimming from top to bottom. There were a few suggestions for Victor as he headed into his new position and a short economic overview of each plantation. I stopped there, seeing no need to keep reading, but just as I was moving the paper off to dry, a phrase jumped out at me. A moment later, I was sitting on the floor with the paper in my hand reading it carefully.
“Race primitive.”
A primitive race.
When I was a child, I’d been called primitive many times. It didn’t have to do with my race, but something else I couldn’t control. Poverty. “The primitive country children”—I’d heard my teacher say the phrase when I was thirteen or fourteen to speak of my family and others like us. My sister had asked me whom exactly she’d been talking about, and I hadn’t had the heart to respond, “Us, of course.” I’d just shrugged.
“Paresseux.” Lazy. That term, according to the memo, best described “les coolies tonkinois,” the laborers from Tonkin, the northern region where Hanoi was located and where the majority of the Michelin plantation workers were recruited. It went on to describe a typical day’s work for a coolie, beginning at 4:45 a.m. and ending at 5:30 p.m., including nearly two hours of walking. The coolies received five days off a month, but only half days. On those days, they were required to clean their accommodations as well as the homes of the French overseers. Next came recommendations on how to save more money in this time of economic crisis. Perhaps a shorter pause for lunch could be impleme
nted now that the mishap of 1932 was further behind them, allowing more rubber trees to be tapped in a day? Already the plantations were ahead of their competition, the Michelin coolies able to tap over four hundred trees a day when the coolies on competing plantations owned by the Société des Terres Rouges couldn’t even tap three hundred. It was stressed that Victor had to maintain or improve those numbers.
The memo also mentioned the salaries on the plantation, which had recently been cut. Despite that, Victor would be making a salary that was equivalent to the pay of 4,500 coolies. The coolies made two and a half francs a day. In Clermont-Ferrand, the lowest-paid worker made nearly forty francs, they noted, but Indochine was different. Cost of living, it said, was very low. It was a fair wage.
I planned to stop reading then, but at the bottom of the page I saw the words “nombre de morts.” Death toll. It was noted that in 1927 alone, 17 percent of the labor force at Phu Rieng had died. And more recently, it had been 25 percent.
I was so fixated on the figures that I didn’t hear the cabin door open. But I heard it shut.
Victor was standing there, watching me. He didn’t say anything. He simply stared at me, looking from my face to the papers I was holding.
“Did they get wet?” he asked.
“A little,” I managed to say.
He walked over, taking what I was reading out of my hands and closing the envelope.
He placed it under his arm. “It is no great secret that things haven’t been easy on the plantations, for the workers or for the management. You may not have known to what extent, but you’ve read the newspapers. This should not come as a shock.”
“I have,” I managed to say, though they certainly had not printed the mortality rate for coolies.
“I am going to try to change many aspects of our operation, including the welfare of the workers. But the most important thing, taking precedence over everything else, is that the plantations continue to make money. If we don’t have profit, we can’t even feed our men. The second priority, which is equal and forever linked to the first, is to keep the communist element from rising up. After what happened in December, that is imperative. I don’t know what you read from this,” he said, patting the folder, “but you should already know that.”
“I did know that,” I said. “But it’s helpful to be reminded,” I added honestly.
He nodded. “You’re always a wonderful vehicle for change, Jessie, and you have helped me realize that I’ve been complacent in my career. Relying on my bloodline to keep me afloat but not taking it as far as I can. If I succeed in those two tasks, I think we can have a very nice life.”
“I will do anything in my power to help you,” I said earnestly. Victor’s success mattered even more to me than it did to him.
“Good.” He turned for the door. “But please don’t read my papers,” he said without looking back at me.
After that day, I’d felt Victor watching me. When we were alone together, his eyes gave off electricity. I’d felt it when we first met. He would track me, not out of suspicion but out of lust. Now he tracked me out of something else. It felt like suspicion at first, but I realized that it was just contemplation. He was wondering at times who this wife of his was.
When we’d reached Indochine, excitement had replaced the discomfort of that day. But as I looked at the papers again now, my eyes sought the same word on the same water-stained paper. “Primitive.” I flipped the page, not liking the way that word turned my stomach. I was now reading a 1927 report of the Michelin plantations, done by an inspector named Delamarre on behalf of the colonial government. At the top was written “Extremely Confidential.”
I loosened my grip, afraid to wrinkle the pages, and started to read, but nearly dropped everything when I heard a sound at the door.
“Jessie.”
Victor’s voice broke me out of my state. Every fiber in my being stood on end as if I’d just been thrown into a frozen lake.
I looked up at him. He didn’t look angry, just surprised.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice still calm.
He looked at the exact sheet of paper I was holding.
“I thought you were traveling to the plantations today,” I said helplessly.
“Yes. I am,” he said, watching my nervous movements. “But I’m taking the evening train. I received a phone call this morning and was advised to stay in Hanoi through the afternoon as there’s an important meeting that I should attend. Informal but important. The government man I met with this morning suggested it.”
He watched as I struggled with the clip, trying to make the papers look like I had when I found them. I bent the top page accidentally, smoothed it, and started the process over again.
“Let me,” said Victor, reaching out for the papers. He took them gently out of my grasp, placed them in the first drawer, closed it, and locked it with the little silver key. This time, he put the key in his pocket.
I turned away from him and began to walk back into the bedroom, but he caught me by the shoulder.
“Jessie. This is a complicated business. You know that. But I’m here now. I’m going to try to make our plantations both lucrative and peaceful. That’s what I said on the boat, remember?”
“Of course,” I said, relaxing under his touch.
“The men my family has put at the helm, as plantation directors, Theurière at Dau Tieng and Soumagnac at Phu Rieng, they’re an engineer and a military man respectively. I’ve never met them, but my guess is that while they are certainly intelligent, they might lack compassion and economic know-how, the kind that I gained from working with André all these years. All this,” he said, pointing to the stack of papers, “is just an attempt to educate myself about what I’m walking into. Our company isn’t perfect, but we are trying. And succeeding. We’re still turning a profit, more than any other plantation in Indochine. So I don’t want to change that. I want to improve upon it. And avoid a repeat of 1927, when the French overseer was murdered by the coolies, and 1930, and last year.”
I felt very silly. We had spoken at length about the three coolies who had been shot at the end of last year, the very unfortunate result of 1,200 coolies stomping in anger past a guard on the edge of Dau Tieng plantation. Michelin had reduced their rice allocation by a hundred grams and lowered their pay from 0.4 piastres a day to 0.3. It was unfortunate, but the economy dictated it. But the coolies didn’t understand that. Some of the 1,200 men were just angry; others were communists trying to incite change. Men like them were very dangerous in communities like plantations where people lived in close quarters. Victor had to keep things like that from happening again. But I hoped he wouldn’t use the word primitive when he did.
“I didn’t want to get you caught up in all this,” said Victor, running his hand softly across my hair. “I wanted you to just get settled in our pretty house, enjoy lazy days at the club, and spend time with Lucie.”
“But I care about your work, too,” I said, which I did, far more than Victor even knew.
“I know you do. And I need your continued support,” he replied. “I’ve always had that from you.”
“Of course,” I replied, looking up at him. “You always will.”
I was going to say more when we were interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Yes?” Victor called out.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Trieu, appearing at the door. “A note was just left for you. The man who delivered it said it was important.”
Victor motioned to her to bring it to him and opened it before she left the room.
“Wonderful news,” he said without looking at me.
“What is?” I asked, trying to glance at the paper.
“The governor-general can meet me today. In an hour. I put in a request with his office just this morning. It’s not why I stayed in town, but it’s a nice turn of events. I will just have to forgo my other meeting this morning. Unless—”
Victor glanced at me, all worry gone
from his face.
“Unless you would like to go for me. It’s just speaking to one of our security contacts about a man who has been making things difficult for us on the plantations. You just need to write down what the officer says. It’s like secretarial work, really. Would you mind terribly?”
“But won’t he be expecting you?” I said, feeling uneasy.
“He will be. But you can explain that I had to meet with the governor-general. Besides, look at you,” Victor said, grinning. “He’ll be thrilled to speak to a beautiful woman instead.”
“I just have to write things down?” I asked. After my years of teaching, I had often wanted to be more involved with the family company in France, to feel productive and useful. Though Victor was open to it, his mother was strongly against it. She refused to have a daughter-in-law who did anything to get her hands dirty. I once suggested that I teach again instead, and she looked at me as if I’d proposed working as a chimney sweep.
“Yes,” said Victor, still clutching the note about the governor-general. “But you must be there at eleven o’clock sharp. Very sharp. You know how these men in uniform are. He’s no longer in the military, but the habits tend to linger.”
