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.
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 w
ar 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.
The Committed Page 5
