As for my aunt and me, being connoisseurs of criticism did not prevent us from being deeply gratified to see our people on-screen, even if dancing in a leotard or strutting in a miniskirt. For the first time since we lived in our homeland, we starred in our own show. For all its frivolity, Fantasia was political, as I had learned when I was released from reeducation and came to Ho Chi Minh City, a Saigon renamed for a new era. There I discovered that Uncle Ho’s revolutionary nephews considered this kind of singing, dancing, and lovemaking to be reactionary and dangerous. Good communists listened to blood-stirring red music that hailed blood-soaked revolution, while we who loved yellow music were sick cowards who refused class struggle and hard work. But somehow, despite my reeducation, or because of it, I still loved a good love song, while a red ode to the masses marching toward a glorious scarlet dawn only made the blood pool in my legs. Fantasia might have been mere entertainment, but so what? As the anarchist Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.” How did our so, so serious revolutionary leaders not understand that to own the means of entertainment was also revolutionary! What was wrong with self-determination of this kind, given that entertainment was probably the fourth human priority after sustenance, shelter, and sex? I could hardly wait to watch episode two of Fantasia, and was just about to say so, when Bon finished wiping his tears away and said, I have another idea.
Another idea? my aunt said. What was the first?
I assumed Bon would say nothing, but instead he smiled and said, Sell hashish to the Union and kill communists.
My aunt raised an eyebrow. How interesting, she said. You know, in France, it’s the communists who most support the Vietnamese.
The wrong kind of Vietnamese.
You’d be surprised who might be a communist, my aunt said, looking at me, which made Bon look at me, too. My blood went cold.
Nothing surprises me, Bon said. Communists are everywhere.
Indeed they are, my aunt said. Hypothetically speaking, what if you discovered that a friend was secretly a communist? Even your best friend here? Your blood brother?
Bon laughed at the impossibility of this scenario, but like a good philosopher, he played along. I’d kill him, of course, he said, smiling at me. It’s a matter of principle.
I, too, laughed at the absurdity of this bad joke and stood up to turn off the TV. Fantasia was definitely over.
CHAPTER 5
“God is dead, Marx is dead, and I don’t feel so well myself,” a droopy-eyed wit once said at one of my aunt’s salons. Only later did I find out that he was the playwright Eugène Ionesco, not that I had ever seen one of his plays. I must correct that, but then again, it feels like I am already living in one of his plays, from what I know of them. After all, the screw holding together my two minds had loosened so much that it had come out completely. How many people were completely screwed because their screw was forever lost? But consider the opposite. Might it not be better to not be screwed, or at least not screwed so tightly? If one were totally screwed together, how could one move at all? And didn’t the screw holding one together eventually loosen, as all screws must, with the torque of time?
As I was not enough of a capitalist—pardon me, enough of a drug dealer—to afford the kind of screwdriver needed to tighten my screw, I addressed that widening space in my head with the therapist I could afford: a Sony Walkman, another marvelous device invented by capitalism during my time in reeducation. As a man of two minds, I can admit to the successes of capitalism, as I can admit to the charm of French culture. I merged the two with the Walkman, which played cassettes that could fit in one’s palm, forty-five minutes of music on each side. With my headphones on, I floated through Paris on my magic carpet of hashish, sunglasses cloaking my eyes. Unlike Le Cao Boi’s authentic and expensive aviators, mine were inauthentic ones that did not have the Ray-Ban logo imprinted on a corner of the lens. Even though they tended to slide down my nose, I wore them day and night, above and underground, camera around my neck and backpack on my chest, the curious Japanese tourist ready to offer the simpering smile of the exotic Asiatic in an Occidental land. Invisible so long as I was also inaudible, I explored Paris in my free time or on my deliveries, the city a setting for a musical performed by my headphones. Having once visited the parts of the city that could have served as decorations on wedding cakes, from Notre-Dame to the Eiffel Tower, from the Louvre to Sacré-Coeur, I avoided them. I preferred the grimier quarters or the small parks where I could sit on a bench near the bums and drunks, my not-so-distant cousins, and watch the innocent pigeons. I wondered who was madder, me, the supposedly crazy bastard, or Bon, the martyr intent on throwing himself once more onto the pyre of a grand idea, a lost cause, a last gasp. Bon and I were mad enough to join the biweekly rehearsals for the culture show, where our limited talents turned us into background dancers, if “dancing” was the right word. One of our skits was about rural life, where our entire performance consisted of mimicking plowing, shoveling, hoeing, and heaving in highly stylized, possibly poetic ways that cast farming as a bucolic lifestyle and the backbone of our culture, whereas I am fairly sure that farming was a sweaty, hot mode of hellish, backbreaking survival that left little time for culture. No matter! The mission of the culture show was to compete with the charms of French life by showing the charms of Vietnamese life, which had become much more charming to the Vietnamese in France after so many years spent away from Vietnam. They all needed their own kind of nostalgia, as the producers of Fantasia well understood. And the rehearsals provided me with the opportunity I thought they would, to smoke cigarettes with the other performers, have a few drinks afterward, drop a hint about the goods, give a few samples, and quietly build a new customer base of the young and cool, students and professionals, plus hardworking types who also needed some rest and relaxation and were quite surprised, as well as pleased, to discover that they could get the goods from someone somewhat like them. The only difficulty in gaining the confidence of the young and the cool was that most of them, French born, could speak French faster than me, and with the newest, hippest argot that I did not know.
Who’s that friend of yours who teaches French? I asked my aunt.
You’ll love him, she said, giving me the address. He’s a communist.
So I began taking advanced morning classes, near the Gare du Nord, with adult students from every corner of the former French colonies, while also delivering my goods throughout Paris. I used my profits to buy an excellent pair of brown leather oxfords from Bruno Magli, recommended to me by BFD. They look good and you can walk or stand all day in them, he said. He had looked at my dusty, cracked, faux-leather slip-ons, bought from a street vendor on the way to the Jakarta airport. You can always judge a man by his shoes. BFD’s judgment irritated me but I also could not forget it. I wore the Bruno Magli shoes with pride and polished them weekly, succumbing to the capitalist seduction that Marx warned about: loving a commodity, a thing, as if it were an actual living being, an affair that could only be short-lived at best.
A few months into this new episode of my life, I was leaving a small park on passage Dumas when a young man at the gate nodded at me, raised his eyebrow, and held his fingers to his lips in the universal language of the brotherhood of smokers, unified in our death wish. Jean-Claude Brialy was singing a song with Anna Karina that I loved, “Ne dis rien,” and I was humming along. In a good mood, I smiled, took out my packet of cigarettes, and offered him one, making sure it wasn’t one laced with hashish. When he said something to me, I took off the headphones, continuing to smile mutely, a Japanese tourist, and was hence surprised when he, smiling back, said, We hear you have some terrific hashish?
Domo arigato, I said, pretending not to understand. It was not a good idea to sell to strangers, and I bowed and backed away for two steps before bumping into a hard, muscular body. The young man behind me was, like the one in front of me, wearing blue Levi’s jeans,
an unzipped jacket, and a T-shirt, except that one T-shirt featured the Beatles, the other the Rolling Stones. We were alone in the small park, a deliberate choice of these young men, who appeared to be the Arabs about whom Le Cao Boi had warned me. They had the careless lankness of youth, protected from knowing what they would look like in twenty years’ time, a knowledge that we middle-aged men possessed, to our regret. The inertia of age and the easily accessible pleasures of French baked goods had helped me regain all the fat I had lost during reeducation, plus extra, giving me a small swell over my belt and another little bulge under my chin. I was a soft, round andouillette, my guts tightly packed inside me, and they were the serrated knives ready to slice me open.
Don’t pretend you’re Japanese, said Beatles. We know you’re Vietnamese.
Vietnamese? Rolling Stones said. I thought you were a chink.
The word he actually used was Chinois, which only meant “Chinese,” but inflected and emphasized the proper way—with a certain amount of spit—it was an epithet, one I had heard quite a few times from our French colonizers. It saddened me to hear this word said by someone who should know better, but responding to his insult would only inflame the situation. Trying to calm the situation by expressing genuine curiosity about their origins or ancestry, I said, What are you?
Algerian, you rat’s ass, Beatles said.
Rolling Stones scowled and said, We’re butter.
Butter? I said. If anyone should be butter, it should be me, yellow, soft, and easily melted. Why are you butter?
Butter! Rolling Stones shouted. Butter!
Beatles sighed and said, Shit, we’re French. Now give us the hashish.
Let’s talk about this, I said. My Algerian brothers, have you never read Ho Chi Minh’s case against French colonization? We should not be fighting each other, we should not be robbing each other, we should be working together against our abusive stepfather! Forget the “Marseillaise,” whose lyrics are a little too murderous for me. Let’s sing “The Internationale” instead! Come on, you wretched of the earth, with gusto! Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!
My little speech appeared to confound them, for they paused and frowned, and perhaps if just one of them had said, Maybe he has a point, we could have changed history itself—at least my history—but they were impulsive teenagers and Rolling Stones shook his head, refusing the dialectical thread of solidarity I had thrown at him, and said, Give us the hashish, you stupid bastard!
I had tried, hadn’t I?
Sure you did, Sonny said.
If you say so, the crapulent major added.
Some hashish then, I muttered, making as if to unzip the backpack. They took a step toward me, but there was just enough distance between us that I could swing the backpack as hard as I could, waist up, toward the jaw of Beatles, where the two bricks at the bottom of the backpack connected with a crack as loud as the battle cry unleashed from my gut, BASTARD, there never being a time when my belly was not full with that word, and while I thought that I had gotten used to it, I was only used to being called a crazy bastard, which had an element of truth to it, whereas the absolutely real truth here was that these two should have called me brother, or cousin, or maybe uncle, because we were related—were we not?—our mutual ancestors being the Gauls, who had the gall to call us their descendants, with Algerians the oldest sons, as my father had told our class, while we Indochinese were the gifted middle children, destined to be clerks, assistants, adjutants, and minor bureaucrats, unlike the Cambodians and the Laotians and so on down the empire’s chain of being, each of us clinging to a link as we looked up toward the red cheeks of the slightly less oppressed simian above us, yearning for a benevolent white hand to help us claw past the undeserving creatures in our way and onto that beautiful battleship named La Mission Civilisatrice, which had shelled Haiphong and killed six thousand civilians, but who’s counting? We were just natives, who did not count.
Bastard! screamed Rolling Stones, punching me before I could swing the backpack one more time. Fucking slope!
Rolling Stones punched me again and a bell rang in my head, and I felt almost nostalgic at hearing myself called un bridé, which I had not heard since the days of French colonialism in Saigon, and while the rest of my French might have faltered, my memory of being called a slant, a slope, or a chink, depending on one’s interpretation, was as unforgettable as knowing how to say merci and au revoir, and whether my eyes actually slanted was really just a technicality. I was much more concerned with how, when I fell, I heard something crack in the expensive Japanese camera around my neck, which was not as alarming as Rolling Stones jumping on me and choking me, which made my eyes bulge out and expanded my peripheral vision, so that I could see Beatles dripping blood and tears onto the park’s packed earth and holding his nose, possibly broken by the bricks, a trick I had come up with on my own, although decades of socializing with Bon had undoubtedly led me to absorb some of his predisposition for violent anticipation, such as always having a means of self-defense and usually more than one, a strategy that counts in mounting an offensive as well, for in assaulting me Rolling Stones was not only choking me, leading my highly constricted larynx to gag in protest, but also wrenching my head up to pound it repeatedly against the packed earth, both strategies damaging my perception, now mottled and dappled with flares of light such as one might see when falling in love, or so I’ve been told, or when one is about to faint and perhaps die, as I knew from personal experience, and as it was absolutely necessary to prevent these latter outcomes, I let Rolling Stones progress in his attempt to murder me so as to distract him from seeing how I had pulled my legs up until my thighs were against his back as he straddled me, the hems of my pants riding up and exposing my socks, into one of which I had tucked a switchblade, a lesson Bon had taught me, and as I tugged the switchblade free something stiff pressed against my waist, for Rolling Stones was erect, a fact that meant he would certainly kill me then, his teeth bared now not just in fury and rage but hatred and self-hatred, and when I pushed the button that opened the switchblade the edge of the knife sliced into my palm, which barely registered given the red film descending over my vision and the roar of my blood rushing in my head, loud but not loud enough to prevent me from hearing Rolling Stones shouting, Fucking yellow bastard chink slope, slurs that made me flush with nostalgia for that more innocent time when colonialism was photographed in black and white, with no audio recordings so that one could hear the way “Annamite” must have sounded on a French tongue and in a Vietnamese eardrum, a spit wad sodden with contempt and condescension, with what was visible of our oppression quite distant, perhaps charming, so that even rebels with their heads locked in cangues or peasants carrying white men on their backs appeared picturesque and quaint, as my own impending death was remote to me, my senses receding and my extremities numb except for the weight of the body on my belly and the cool handle of the switchblade in my slippery hand, which I had managed to reverse so that the six-inch blade could finally snap out, and with the last vestiges of my consciousness I drove the blade into the nearest part of the body on me, which elicited a scream and led to one hand falling away from my neck, an encouragement for me to stab once more, the result being another scream and Rolling Stones’s other hand letting go as he wrenched away, and when I drove the blade into him again and again, he was fortunate that it only found his buttocks and the bone of his pelvis, the pain forcing him to fall off me, thrashing about and kicking me, who, now freed from his grasp, kicked back, rolled away, and staggered upright only to nearly trip over Beatles, on his hands and knees and shaking his head and turning his face toward me with such fire in his eyes that I slammed my knee into his face, and if his nose had not been broken before it was now, but as this one of my enemies fell down the other rose up, Rolling Stones howling and clutching at his bleeding ass but very much physically capable of damaging me, except that psychologically he was distracted by pain, marking him as
an amateur, for if he were a professional, as Bon had told me many times, he would know that the mind was as important to survival as the body, a fact that I knew well because I had endured years of hardening as a spy followed by the finishing school of reeducation, which, not having killed me, had made me as unkillable as a cliché, and certainly stronger than this young man, who had sufficient desire to kill me but not the wiliness, experience, and requisite fear of death that I had learned through the lifetime of bitterness and resentment that one knows as a bastard, me and myself, with me in pain and gagging while myself was clear-eyed and in control, closing on him quickly and stabbing him several more times in the region of his heart and vital organs, the sensation similar to inserting a knife into a whole, raw chicken, except that his rib cage and sternum deflected the blade twice, jarring my wrist, when all I wanted was for him to stop and lie down and leave me alone and promise not to kill me, but my French was only good enough to say, Stop, stop, stop, meaning that he should stop and that I should stop, but neither of us could stop until one of us was down, he, on his knees, on his side, on his face, not seeing me as I left the park quickly, scooping up my backpack with one hand as I snapped the switchblade shut with the other, not looking to see if Rolling Stones was dead or if Beatles was getting up, thankful that the empty park that was their advantage was now their disadvantage and grateful that I was wearing dark clothing, as Bon told me I should always do, not just to be fashionable, as was the mode in Paris, but because blood was less visible on dark clothing and I could keep my bleeding hand in the pocket of my pants while I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt, which Bon had also told me I should wear on those occasions when I might need to hide my hideous appearance, as I did while walking rapidly to the Nation metro station, beginning to hear cries and shouts behind me when I was some distance away, so dazed that I did not realize until later that I should have gone to the rue des Boulets station right around the corner from the park, but still I managed to keep my pace steady, even on hearing the wail of a siren crying, You’re dead, you’re dead, as I neared the metro, the sound fading as I sprinted down the stairs, backpack around my chest again, and the camera, its lens cracked and its cap missing, bouncing around my neck as I passed the gates and went down more stairs and through a tunnel before I made it to the nearest platform, not caring what the train or its direction was, just happy to finally stop, lean against a wall, and surreptitiously retrieve a handkerchief from my backpack, something a gentleman should always have, not only to wipe away the secretions of another’s body or his own but to use as a tourniquet or a bandage, in this case for my right hand, which I thrust into my pocket again, the skin of my heart stretched tight from adrenaline and fear, its drumbeat drowned out only by the grumble of the train whose approach reminded me to focus my eyes enough so that I could enter without tripping and sit down next to a grizzled old man, one who was none too kempt and a little odorous, all the better for me, for we both appeared slightly degenerate together, which was better than appearing degenerate by oneself, especially if one were a battered Japanese tourist on a very bad trip, benefitting from the general callousness of the urban masses, especially those surviving metros and subways, their eyes occasionally turning to me before quickly flicking away, except for the one little pigtailed girl who pointed at me and said, rather loudly,
The Committed Page 9
