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. T
he 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.
CHAPTER 4
After my aunt had gone to sleep, I sat on the sofa with my two new companions, the hashish and the money. The only way to make the hashish stop giggling and whispering at me was to smoke some of it, which made it, and me, relax. Under the dim light cast by the one lamp I kept on, an antique older than me, I surveyed the handful of bills that I had earned that day, with my aunt’s 60 percent already deducted but with the Boss’s 75 percent yet to be deducted. I had earned almost nothing, but did I truly deserve almost nothing? What I had done was exchange the hashish for the money, and before that, I had exchanged something for the hashish with the Boss. I had offered him a part of myself.
The more I stared at the francs, the more they seemed unreal. What made each of those leaves of paper nearly as powerful as a human being, and what made them, together, more valuable than a human being? After all, I would no more harm one of those bills than I would harm a human being.
Actually . . . the specter of Sonny said.
In fact . . . said the equally ghostly crapulent major.
And it was true. I had killed them both, and I had never done more to money than fold it. I had never ripped a corner off a bill, the way little boys tore the wings off captured flies. I had never lit even the smallest denomination just to see how it would burn, in the manner that I had once seen an American child use a plastic magnifying glass to incinerate an ant on the sidewalk. Collectively, money was invulnerable. And individually, a bill like the ones I now found in my possession was protected by that aura of invulnerability, the way an individual cop embodied the entire Repressive State Apparatus. That was how the almost weightless bills I picked up in my hand affected me with their magic.
Perhaps I felt anew the strange power of money because of my new occupation. I had only ever been paid for my work as a soldier, which was, in theory, if not always in practice, an honorable occupation. As a spy, I had never been paid, believing that not even my life was more precious than independence and freedom. But now I was selling hashish, and there was nothing noble or honorable in that, as one part of me understood and as another part of myself did not care. Why should I? For most of my life, I had constantly and desperately believed in something, only to discover that at the heart of that something was nothing. So why not give nothing a chance?
And yet—what would my mother think of my new career? I tried not to think about how much I would have disappointed her. How could I break her heart, when she had given it all to me? But when I thought about what my father might think, I was filled only with happiness. Here I was in the land of my father, infecting it with Eastern drugs, a small payback for how his country had infected mine with Western civilization.
My new job was made easier because my predecessor in supplying hashish, the mysterious Saïd, had built an impressive network of clients over the past decade, with the Maoist PhD being the oldest. Saïd never could get a job with a name like Saïd, the Maoist PhD had told me in parting. A meaningful job, that is. And he wouldn’t do something so simple as change his name.
The Maoist PhD thought of himself as not just Saïd’s client but his patron, helping him become a financially self-reliant young man by introducing him to his many eager friends, colleagues, students, and former students. Now through the Maoist PhD and my aunt, the news of the quality of my goods and the speediness of my delivery circulated through the network. I was a novelty—a Eurasian pharmacologist of the black market, a half-Vietnamese dealer of partly beneficial, partly dangerous goods that were not so good but also not so bad. Over the next few weeks, I made my deliveries with the nonchalant air of the law-abiding citizen, assured in the knowledge that the police tended not to look twice at Asians, or so Le Cao Boi had reassured me. At the restaurant, he pointed to how the Arabs and the blacks did us the unintentional favor of being our racial decoys, drawing the attention of police who thought them to be as brown, sticky, and aromatic as hashish itself.
I looked out the window at the passersby and said, How can you tell who’s Arab?
How do you tell? You tell by looking! It’s obvious!
I wasn’t trying to be dense. I had some understanding of the Arab situation in France: the war that the French had fought with the Algerians right after fighting a war with us; the Pieds-Noirs who had fled from Algeria to France, refugees like us; the hard feelings that always remained after this kind of forcible separation. But I had never met an Arab, and I had not been here long enough so that the differences within French society felt natural to me. To an outsider, another society’s differences always looked odd, which was why the French had a very good understanding of the absurdities of American racism and the specter of THE BLACK, which to Americans was simply the way the world was. But for me, here in France, THE ARAB was an abstraction. Just to provoke Le Cao Boi, I pointed at a man walking by and asked, Is he Arab?
No, Camus, he’s French. (I was not certain that Le Cao Boi had ever read Camus, but in this and other conversations, whenever he got frustrated with me, he would call me Camus, perhaps the only philosopher he had heard of.) Look, there’s an Arab now.
The man walking by wore a white sweatshirt, gray sweatpants, and white sneakers. Yes, I could see it! He could be an Arab! Or he could just be a very tan Frenchman with somewhat curly dark hair. I can’t tell the difference, I said, still having fun at Le Cao Boi’s expense. What are the signs?
The signs? Le Cao Boi wrinkled his forehead, a sure indication the mechanism behind it was working. It’s—I mean—you just can, all right? The hair, the skin, the way they carry themselves, the way they talk. You just haven’t been here long enough to read the signs. Just take my word for it. The police aren’t going to be looking at you except as a harmless foreigner, so long as there’s only one of you. Two of you, still acceptable. Three of you, or us, the French get a little uneasy. Four—forget about it. That’s an invasion.
Since I was already me and myself, I felt already in danger of being too noticeable. So, to accentuate my disguise as an innocent, harmless Asian, I draped a Japanese camera around my neck, borrowed from my aunt. I also wore a small backpack in reverse, the straps around my back, the pack on my chest. With a fedora, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that lent the illusion of a slant to my eyes that were not slanted, at least not to me, and a little bit of cotton wedged behind my upper lip, to imply something wrong with my teeth, my disguise was complete. I was not just a mostly harmless domestic Asian; I was a completely harmless and well-disciplined Japanese tourist. In this disguise, as an innocent visitor intent on taking photographs rather than an invader who might be taking French jobs, I could go almost anywhere.
I confess that I thought I was pretty smart. I had not anticipated that Bon might be even smarter. But he had changed, too, as a result of reeducation, something I began to understand one day when he waved me over to a table at the restaurant on a typically empty afternoon and said, I have an idea.
You have an idea? I said. Bon did not have ideas; I had ideas.
Bon stared at me. There are communists here.
There are communists everywhere.
In our community.
You’re talking about my aunt.
She’s not a part of the community. She’s turned French.
So have a lot of our countrymen here.
They don’t like to get together very much, do they? But one place where we could find them and begin doing some investigations is the Vietnamese Union.
I had heard about this Union. The restaurant had a few m
imeographed flyers announcing the Union’s various activities: promoting the learning of the Vietnamese language, celebrating Vietnamese culture, advocating for the Vietnamese community’s interests in France. Even in Vietnam we had not seen the word “Vietnamese” deployed as often as at the Union, whose official name was the Union for the Advancement of Vietnamese Culture. You think the Union is communist? I said.
Not officially. But everybody knows they’re commies. The Vietnamese government recognizes them. The Vietnamese ambassador comes to their events. And if they look like commies and smell like commies, they’re commies. But if it’s a problem, it’s an opportunity, too. Every problem is an opportunity.
What’s the opportunity?
You’re the opportunity. We can make some money and corrupt some commies all at the same time with what you sell for the Boss. Beautiful, isn’t it?
It was a plan. But Bon was not a planner, he was the action man. Did the Boss give you this idea?
No, but the Boss thinks it’s a great idea.
You went to the Boss? I said. What do you get out of it?
I tag along. Maybe I’ll have the chance to kill some commies.
Does that mean we’ll have to play at being communists?
If I can do it, so can you, he said. There was a light in his eyes that I had seen only when he was with his wife and son and then, after their deaths, when he spoke of killing communists. Now you get a chance to hurt some commies, he said. You should thank me for that.
The Committed Page 7
