Thank you, I said.
Would our war never end? At least for Bon, it appeared that it never would, not until he was dead or incapable of continuing in his quest to kill all the communists in the world. Like many people, he saw the world in an either/or fashion, communist or anticommunist, evil or good. Whereas his vision of the world was a mirror image of how the communists saw things, I felt being forced to choose between communism and its opposite was a false choice, imposed by the Ideological State Apparatuses of both sides. The most difficult thing, when offered two false choices, was imagining a third choice, withheld deliberately or otherwise. This was the most basic lesson of the dialectic, the swing between thesis and antithesis that allowed one to reach a synthesis. Whether the thesis or the antithesis was communism or anticommunism, the point was that they composed the polar opposites of what the West unironically called the Cold War, as fought between the USA and USSR. But the synthesis was the recognition that this war had been extremely hot for us Asians, and Africans, and Latin Americans. Seeing the failures of both communism and anticommunism, I chose nothing, a synthesis that neither capitalists nor communists could understand. You may think that I am being a nihilist, but you could not be more wrong. While nihilists thought life was meaningless and rejected all religious and moral principles, I still believed in the principle of revolution. I also believed that nothing was full of meaning—in short, that nothing was actually something. Wasn’t that a kind of revolution in itself?
In this state of mind, I ventured forth with Bon two weeks later to the next meeting of the Union, whose membership appeared to consist entirely of respectable Vietnamese. In France, unlike in the United States, respectable people could include communists or communist sympathizers, and it was strange to think that some of them would likely be attending the meeting. This particular meeting’s purpose was to plan the annual Tet show, the Chairman of the Tet committee explained to Bon and me, the only newcomers.
There will be traditional dancing and singing, the cheerful Chairman said. He was an ophthalmologist by trade, a slender, white-haired man with long fingers suitable for a pianist or a gynecologist. Both his Vietnamese and French were flawless, and I made up for my jealousy by pitying how he wore a tweed blazer at least a size too large for him, the cuffs brushing the bases of his thumbs. The Chairman did not believe, as I did, that every man should have a tailor, who was as important as a priest, for it made no sense to be good if one did not look good.
There will also be traditional costumes and foods, he went on. It’s a way for us to present our authentic Vietnamese culture.
I nodded sympathetically, even vigorously, and said, Promoting our authentic culture is very important, to which the cheerful Chairman nodded even more vigorously.
Although I did not say so out loud, I wondered if perhaps authentic Vietnamese culture should also include gambling, which we taught to our children during Tet celebrations and then wondered why we had a predilection for gambling as adults; or smoking and drinking coffee in cafés, for which, if there were an Olympic competition for such a sport, we Vietnamese men would be gold medal contenders, for we treated these cafés, inherited from the French, as second homes away from abrasive wives and pesky children; or drinking beer, cognac, and wine (preferably of the native rice kind) until we reached the doorway to oblivion, whereon some of us beat the aforementioned wives and children or each other; or getting a good deal, even at the expense of our customers or our merchants or our principles, and then being outraged when we ourselves were cheated; or gossiping about our friends and relatives, whom we loved to backstab even more than stabbing our enemies, whose backs were harder to reach; or taking pride in the accomplishments of our neighbors and countrymen, until they accomplished too much, whereupon we resented them and waited for the sweet opportunity to gleefully witness their downfall; or making the women stay in the kitchen and serve the men, or expecting said women to reproduce at least six or seven times, and hopefully more, until their uteruses were as dusty as the Sahara—all aspects of our culture we performed much more frequently than a fan dance, or singing a snatch of opera or folk song, or wearing a silk gown, or reenacting a courtship ritual in the rice paddies, which only ever happened once in a lifetime, if at all, and if it did, likely involved scraping off the buffalo dung encrusted between our toes and swatting away the squadrons of dive-bombing mosquitoes.
But it seemed bad manners to bring up these issues when all the Chairman and his committee wanted was to enshrine the beauty of our culture and share it with others, even if staging a culture show was really an acknowledgment of one’s cultural inferiority. The truly powerful rarely needed to put on a show, since their culture was always everywhere. Americans knew their culture was ubiquitous, whether burgers or bombs. As for the French, they exported the Parisian Dream, a street show for tourists who went gaga over wine and cheese and accordion music. Mentioning none of this, I volunteered at the meeting’s end for the song-and-dance routines, betting that any hashish-smoking bohemians would be found there. I volunteered Bon for the dancing and singing as well, even though he clearly did not look like a dancer, and he certainly could not be a singer, not after I spoke on his behalf and explained that he was mute. This, too, was Bon’s idea.
Ah bon? the Chairman said, an expression I loved almost as much as oh là là.
A war wound, I said, my voice catching. I had not planned on any emotion for this fake story—where was it coming from?
The atmosphere was hushed, all the members of the Tet committee focusing their attention on us now.
No one knows the cause of his muteness, I said, tears once more coming to my eyes. I could feel Bon staring at me as I told the story that I had invented. A B-52 bomb landed almost on top of us. After that, he lost his voice. Perhaps the blast damaged something in his throat. Or perhaps it’s all psychological.
I sobbed. My story had me, and I had them. I saw it in their eyes, their slightly parted lips, the holding of the collective breath.
You see, that B-52 attack caught us in the open. It wasn’t meant for us. It was meant for the guerrillas. But the Americans bombed us, their own friends, I continued. Bon twitched but said nothing. The Americans vaporized almost an entire battalion of southern soldiers. The Americans call it “friendly fire.” I just call it fire. The only thing you could hear were the bombs and, afterward, the screaming of whoever was left. But there wasn’t much left. All those voices gone forever . . . perhaps thinking of all our young comrades lost so tragically made my friend lose his own voice.
Oh my God, a matron said, hand to mouth.
And now to polish the wax on Bon’s story:
I thought . . . I thought . . . if he could see the beauty of our culture, he could forget the war’s horror. I hoped . . . hoped . . . if he could see our people sing and dance, even if he cannot sing and dance—I looked down, a salty tide of genuine emotion lapping against my toes—his voice might come back . . . and that we, former soldiers of the south, might be friends with you, many of whom, or so I’ve been told, sympathize with our former enemies. But we are enemies no longer. Now’s the time to be friends. Don’t you agree?
If I was the crazy bastard, then Bon was the lucky bastard, because after this story and the meeting was concluded, all the girls and women surrounded him, each hoping to be the princess who could return the hero’s voice with a kiss (or more, if needed). Bon was grateful for the excuse of having lost his voice, since nothing frightened him more than speaking to women, including killing people, which he regarded mostly as a technical challenge and only occasionally a moral one. He was a very moral person who had joined his church choir in Saigon partly out of faith and partly out of hoping to meet his future wife, which he did. He and his future wife had sat across the aisle from each other on a bus trip to the Catholic shrine of La Vang, before the war’s cross fire destroyed it. She almost tripped getting off the bus, accidentally or deliberately, and he
had grabbed her elbow. That was the excuse Linh needed to say hello, initiating a conversation that would not end until she died on the tarmac of the Saigon airport without the chance to say goodbye. Even now he saw her dead face and the face of his dead son, Duc, just a little boy. Ever since their deaths he had refused to think of another woman, much less speak to the few women to whom he had been attracted. The loneliness and sadness that resulted was the fate he thought he deserved for living.
Poor Bon! I didn’t care if he was a killer. He was my blood brother, my best friend, and it pained me that ever since the death of his wife and son—my godson!—he had nobody to love him but me, which was a horrible fate. To then be unexpectedly encircled by a half dozen women, gazing at him as if he were an infant lying in a cradle, made him lose the voice he actually had. All he could do was smile, nod, and shrug, a mute pantomime that suited him perfectly. Muteness was a kind of freedom from the world for him, if not for those who wanted to speak to him. But since they could say only so much to a man who could not or would not talk back, they eventually rotated to me, the one who would benefit even more than Bon from his muteness.
But not all the women were looking at me. One of them, still turned toward Bon, was writing in a notepad with a fountain pen gripped in a most delicate, graceful hand. When she looked up and saw him watching her, she smiled and silently offered him the notepad and pen.
My name is Loan, she had written, as if he were not only mute but deaf. Do you want to come watch us practice?
Bon surprised himself by writing yes.
As we left the meeting, I was uncertain about who was more astonished, Bon or me. He bore with him a sheet of paper with Loan’s name and phone number and the time, date, and location of the next practice for the dancers and singers. I was going to ask him if he was ready to kill any of the nice people whom we had met, including the Chairman, who seemed to me like he could be a communist, when Bon, even though he was supposed to be mute, said, Look.
Fortunately, no one else was in the Union’s foyer. He pointed to a bulletin board, on which was pinned a large poster with garish colors and bold lettering, the most significant word of which was FANTASIA. The next most significant words were EPISODE 7. Various singers and dancers, male and female, single or in duos, trios, or quartets, populated the poster. They wore suits and ties, or spandex and glitter, or modest ao dai and conical hats, or fishnet stockings and bras. I understood immediately that Fantasia the show was based on the nightclub in Los Angeles of the same name, a place where I had passed a night soaked in cognac and testosterone, my tongue hanging out at the sight of the one woman I should have kept my eyes, hands, and mind off of: Lana.
Oh, Lana! When the General had learned of my love affair with her in Los Angeles, he had dispatched me on a suicide mission to retake our country, the mission that had led to my capture and the reeducation camp. My reeducation had clearly taught me nothing, for the sight of Lana ignited the puddle of passion sloshing inside my gas tank. She posed by herself on the poster among the others, a headliner, barely wearing a slinky and kinky black dress that reached to the ankle but which overcompensated for that modesty by having a slit for her leg cut up to the pelvic bone, revealing her amazing leg in all its bare glory, a leg that ended in a foot harnessed into a high-heeled shoe that with its six-inch spike was both a heinous device of podiatric torture and also a potentially homicidal tool.
Don’t even think of it, Bon said, but I already was.
If this forthcoming episode of Fantasia was the seventh, that meant six episodes had preceded it, all available on something called videotape, a technology that had come into the world while I was in the dark ages of my reeducation. The machines used to play videocassettes were expensive, but even after earning almost nothing, my profits from selling the goods provided me with more disposable income than I had ever known. If I were sensible, I would have put my money in the bank and become even more capitalist, using money to conjure more money. But when was I ever sensible?
My aunt already owned a small Japanese television, and hooking up the videocassette recorder was a simple matter. Then I called Bon and told him to come over and watch.
She’s a communist, he said.
Put it aside for a night, I said. You were already here one night. It didn’t kill you. You didn’t kill her. She’s a civilian. And you do your best not to kill civilians, remember?
The pause on the line meant he was thinking. I’m not going to kill her. I just don’t want to be in her apartment.
Why was it so important for me to get Bon to visit my aunt’s apartment? Because I sensed he was changing, and I wanted to change him more. Something had shifted inside him despite himself. He was still ferocious and committed, but he was willing to meet Loan. He was admitting to being lonely. Perhaps that was my point of leverage in my effort to budge him, just a little, from the rock of his fanatical anticommunism, which would lead him to kill me if he found out about my communist past. Besides my self-interest, however, I just wanted him to be less lonely. To find, once again, a family.
You have to see Fantasia with your own eyes. And you have to see it with other Vietnamese people. Because it’s a show about us, by us, and for us. We’re the stars and the emcees, the singers and the dancers, the actors and the comedians, the performers and the spectators! We’re doing what we do best—sing, dance, and have fun!
I heard him breathing over the line.
All right, I said, you don’t sing or dance. But I know you love watching other people sing and dance. We did it all the time in the clubs in Saigon. We took it for granted back then that we would be entertained in our language, by people with our faces. Now here’s our chance again. Come on, Bon!
When, after a moment, he agreed, I knew his loneliness was greater than his hatred. He came bearing a bottle of wine, albeit cheap wine. But the social grace was still a measure of how far he had come from the reeducation camp. Neither my aunt nor he mentioned their last, awkward meeting, and both settled down on the couch to an unspoken truce, with the aid of Fantasia. The show had been filmed live in Los Angeles, in a shadow Hollywood where our people had ascended to be the stars. The awesomeness of that feat was evident whenever the camera cut to the audience and showed ecstatic, smiling faces, the viewers absolutely delighted as they watched what our people of the south do best: make a spectacle of themselves. Leave it to the people of our north, where I was born, to dwell on ideology, politics, scholarship, and poetry. They saw the people of the south, where I had grown up, as decadent and indecent. Perhaps that was so, but while the northerners offered a utopia that could be found nowhere, the southerners had created a Fantasia that could be experienced everywhere there was a television, a dreamland where men fearlessly wore sequins and women fearlessly wore . . . almost nothing. These men and women did the cha-cha, the tango, and the rhumba. They sang classics as well as covers of Western pop songs. They performed original numbers, some so new I had not heard them before. They acted in vulgar comedic skits. The audience especially loved the bit featuring men dressed up as women, constantly tugging the hems of their skirts, complaining about the runs in their stockings caused by their hairy legs, cupping their unrealistically American-sized breasts in order to adjust them, and flaunting backsides so padded they could have protected an American football player. Oh, how we howled at those scenes! We, as in the audience at the filming and as in Bon, my aunt, and me. Oh, Fantasia!
This was our Hollywood, but as was too often the case in Hollywood movies, the worst thing about the show was the ending. For the final number, the entire troupe of singers and dancers returned to the stage, the men respectably attired in Western suits and the women in Eastern ao dai, serenading the audience with an original song whose title said it all: “Thank You, America!” Additional memorable, if unimaginative, lines included:
Thank you, Germany!
Thank you, Australia!
Thank you, Ca
nada!
Thank you, France!
The geography lesson continued, and I wondered what handful of bewildered souls had found themselves swept up by the whirlwind of war and deposited in, say, Israel, a lovely country, I am sure, but surely a very depressing one for people like us. Still, regardless of our exile, we apparently found at least some degree of gratitude for being taken in, leading to this appreciative, heartfelt ballad to all the countries that had welcomed us.
Unfortunately—though this was a strange trait for a Vietnamese—I hated nothing more than appreciative, heartfelt ballads. My aunt, being an intellectual, and a French intellectual in particular, likewise detested them. Bon, being a killer, should have hated or at least been unmoved by them, but he shocked me by weeping, or weeping as much as he could, which amounted to a few trickles of tears accompanied by some sniffling, the equivalent to an emotional breakdown in a normal person.
But you think America betrayed us, I said as the credits rolled.
That doesn’t mean everyone betrayed us.
You think France raped our country.
Why do you have to ruin everything? he cried. Just enjoy the damn song!
And then it struck me that what he was crying about was not the endless, schmaltzy gratitude that host countries demanded of refugees who came from countries raped and bombed by the host countries. He was crying about the story of the song, enacted by an attractive duo playing a husband and wife separated by the war, the woman fleeing to America with their children, the man left behind as a prisoner of war. Eventually he escaped on a refugee boat—no, not a boat, a “vessel,” a more dignified term, for his journey and those of thousands of refugees equaled the greatest boat journey of all, Homer’s Odyssey. Surviving that odyssey, he made it to America. Here he was reunited with his wife, who wore a very flattering miniskirt, and his boy and girl, who were impossibly cute and talented, playing the piano and violin, respectively, as their parents embraced. That was why Bon was so moved: he was remembering his dead wife and son, my godson, with whom he would never be reunited except, perhaps, in Heaven.
The Committed Page 8
