The Committed

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  Pff! the sweaty French teacher said. Or maybe it was Pfffffffff! He was very French, after all. They did not understand what they read, he said. They corrupted what they were taught. They took things too far.

  Too far? I said it to myself, not wanting to debate the sweaty French teacher, whose approval might help me get out of the refugee camp. “Too far” implied that everything the French had done in their colonies was not too far, although Toussaint Louverture and the Haitians might disagree. If the French had not gone too far in exploiting the Cambodians, would the Khmer Rouge even exist? And wasn’t the student always supposed to go further than the teacher? Wasn’t the student supposed to do what the teacher did, not just follow what the teacher said?

  In our Indochinese case, the teacher extolled liberté, égalité, fraternité, while the teacher’s people enslaved the student’s people. The contradictions mounted when the student read about how the French revolutionaries had gone too far in using the guillotine to behead the French aristocracy, then saw the teacher using the guillotine to behead the native revolutionaries. It was all so confusing! No wonder the natives were so unruly. With the master’s messages quite mixed, the native was inevitably mixed up.

  Just like you, Sonny and the crapulent major whispered over my shoulder. It was uncanny how they always managed to be in unison. They were more harmonious than me and myself. And they were right. I was mixed and mixed up, and perhaps I had gone too far. But all that being said, the Khmer Rouge had definitively, indisputably gone too far. They hated us for having colonized them centuries ago and taking away their land, so they had attacked us in a series of bloody border incursions, and my outraged countrymen had responded with more communist fratricidal behavior by invading what was once Cambodia. The invasion had uncovered evidence of what had been mostly rumors: mass graves. They were all over the country, holding the remains of thousands who had died during the Khmer Rouge’s three years of rule. Probably tens of thousands, the article said. Possibly hundreds of thousands. A picture in the newspaper article showed an open pit with hundreds of bones from disassembled skeletons, heads and rib cages no longer attached, femurs and shoulder blades thrown together, human remains shattered and jumbled, along with the utopian dream of the Khmer Rouge. The pit of my stomach felt as hollow as that dream. Was my revolution the same as their revolution? Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, had written this, which I had once underlined and memorized and which I found that the eschatological muscle had also marked: “In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists.” Yes! I had written in the margins. Yes! the eschatological muscle had likewise scribbled in his margins. Had the Khmer Rouge read this introduction, too? Or had they misread it? Or had they simply inhaled what was in the atmosphere of all revolutions, including the French one? Speaking of the Algerian revolution, Fanon wrote that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,” and so far, my personal experience bore out his analysis. As for Pol Pot and his revolutionaries, wherever their ideas came from, they had simply pursued them to the logical end and eradicated the native bourgeoisie, including many people who were not native bourgeoisie. The Khmer Rouge had so much to prove to us, their colonizers, and to the French, the colonizers of their colonizers. They wanted to show that no one was more committed to revolution than they were, the reddest of the red. But in the end, Pol Pot may have just proven another of Fanon’s points: “The colonized is a persecuted person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”

  The Boss sent Shorty to recover in Heaven, where the semi-lucky son of a bitch would remain for several weeks, given the gravity of his injuries and the generosity of the Boss’s disability allowance. Bon and I moved to the dim, charmless second-story apartment that Sleepy and Shorty had shared in the 5th arrondissement near the Jardin des Plantes. Here we assumed their identities and Bon took up permanent residence, now that Sleepy was permanently asleep. When I mentioned to Le Cao Boi that neither Bon nor I looked anything like Sleepy and Shorty, he said, As someone who’s lived here many years, let me assure you: the French won’t be able to tell the difference.

  They’re short, Bon said. Really short.

  And ugly, I said. Really ugly.

  Don’t flatter yourself, Camus, Le Cao Boi said. You two wouldn’t win any beauty contests, either. In any case, Sleepy and Shorty took over that apartment from another couple of guys a few years ago and were living under their names. But those guys took over that apartment from another couple of guys and were living under their names. Who knows how far back this goes? That’s why the apartment is so cheap. The lease is decades old. And that’s why those first two guys, whoever they are, wherever they came from, will never die. They will live in that apartment forever.

  No wonder why the French feared us. We were not just Invisible Indochinese. We were Immortal Orientals! We died by the ones or by the millions, but we were always reborn. As ugly as we were, we never aged, and we all looked the same, whether we were Chinese or Vietnamese or ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, or even Eurasians like me. Indeed, except for a couple of hesitant glances shot our way over the next few weeks, no one in the building even looked at us or spoke to us. Maybe we were strangers in the building—but maybe we weren’t. The tenants had never looked at these Chinese, or Vietnamese, or Asians, very closely before, so now they could not be certain if we were who we claimed to be. Uncertain of their ability to identify what some Americans with their trademark good-natured humor would call Unidentifiable Fucking Orientals, and what the French might call Ambiguous Asiatics, our neighbors decided to err on the side of their own prejudice, or politeness, and pretend that we did not exist, or that we had always existed.

  But before moving to that apartment, I had returned to my aunt’s to collect my things. I packed up my negligible belongings, hardly enough for a capitalist but not too bad for an ex-communist who was now watered down enough to pass for a socialist. These belongings were sufficient to fill out my leather duffel, with the hefty weight of my confession returned to its false bottom. I had not read it in months, but its mnemonic presence lent the duffel a demonic glow. I told my aunt about my apartment with Bon, and she did not insist that I stay, although she was polite enough to say that I could always come back. Our time together was coming to a slightly awkward end, and fiddling with my duffel, I said, Have you heard?

  About what?

  Man is in Paris.

  She looked genuinely surprised. No, I hadn’t known.

  But you told him about me being here.

  Of course. You knew I would, didn’t you?

  I nodded. You still believe in the revolution.

  Unlike you I can’t believe in nothing, she said. Or rather, like the part of you that the revolution abused, I have to believe in something, even if I also believe in what happened to you.

  Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.

  We learn from those mistakes. You yourself are making a mistake of judging the revolution too soon.

  Too soon? I was flabbergasted. You read what they did to me—

  I didn’t say that was justified. What I’m saying is that all revolutions have excesses. It’s in their nature. People are too exuberant, too passionate. They get carried away. Feelings run high. And sometimes the wrong people are damaged. But you have to put yourself and what happened to you aside. You have to take the long view. Look at America. No one remembers now what happened to the Americans who chose to side with the British king. Should the American Revolution not have happened, or should we condemn it because all those people were exiled? Or look at the French Revolution. The Terror was unfortunate, but look where we are now. Revolutions need to be judged fifty years later, a hundred years later, when the passions have
cooled and the revolution’s accomplishments have had the time to take root and flourish.

  I won’t be alive by then. How convenient.

  Don’t be sarcastic. It doesn’t become you.

  On the contrary, I think it suits me very well.

  She sighed. You know that revolutionaries have to sacrifice themselves. Think about all the communists that the French executed in our homeland. It’s depressing to see that those young martyrs died in their teens, their twenties, their thirties. But they gave themselves up because they believed that the revolution would continue. They made the ultimate sacrifice. You haven’t done that yet. I’m sorry to be harsh, but you need to stop pitying yourself—

  If I don’t pity myself, who will?

  —and separate your subjective feelings about what was done to you from your objective understanding of how revolutions work. You are mistaking your personal experience for political knowledge. I’m sad to say that despite your proclamations of still believing in revolution, you look and sound like a counterrevolutionary. I was hesitant to say this before, but now I know for certain: you are a reactionary.

  I was speechless. To be called a counterrevolutionary and a reactionary was the worst thing anyone could say to me, and even if part of me disagreed in anger, another part of me quailed in doubt. The best response I could muster was to say, If I’m a reactionary, then you’re just an armchair revolutionary.

  That doesn’t mean I may not be right. You believe in Marx, don’t you?

  I hesitated, sensing a trap. I believe in him more than I believe in his followers.

  Exactly. He was a philosopher. Many of his followers aren’t. They’re men of action, and look at what they did to you. But doesn’t everybody philosophize from an armchair? Marx, so far as I know, never used a gun. She was amused to see me speechless again. There’s a bottle of Chablis on ice. Pour yourself a glass and one for me as well. You might as well stay for one last soiree. Friends are coming over.

  My aunt mentioned BFD and the Maoist PhD, the most common visitors to her apartment. I had no desire to see them, but it was hard to turn down free Chablis. Returning from the kitchen with the glasses, I looked in the gigantic gilt-framed mirror hanging over her fireplace. I looked in mirrors often, because as a spy I had always needed to know what I looked like or what I should look like. Like an actor, I practiced my expressions and responses, especially to the questions that I had feared the most: Are you a communist? Are you a spy? Shock, disbelief, anger—that’s what my face had to convey. Now my face had to be pleasant, and the face that stared back at my face was not unpleasant. After my recovery in Heaven, the face in the mirror at least looked vaguely human, which was surely a distortion of the antique glass. Nevertheless reassured, I handed my aunt a glass and took a sip of the Chablis, the chill of which soothed my soul, which was sore and aching even if my face was not.

  Are you going to settle on one of them?

  Settle? My aunt laughed as if I had told the funniest joke ever.

  No husband? I was just making small talk, but small talk is drawn from a deep well. No children?

  For someone who was once a revolutionary, she said with a sigh, you are so depressingly conventional.

  Before BFD and the Maoist PhD came, I went into my aunt’s bathroom, locked the door, and poured out a vial of the remedy onto the glass face of a hand mirror, rolled up a twenty-franc note, leaned close enough to the mirror to see my face, and inhaled the entire dose of white powder through one nostril and then the other. Then I waited, trembling. Hashish was not enough. I needed the power of the remedy to rescue me from the nausea of being—or just being called—a reactionary. By the time BFD and the Maoist PhD arrived, the remedy had calmed me down. I poured them some wine, having at last found a way to be socially useful.

  My dear, BFD said to my aunt, you’re as beautiful as a geisha tonight.

  Not to be outdone, the Maoist PhD said, Darling, only a Gauguin would be worthy of painting you.

  My aunt accepted their compliments gracefully and rolled some of my hashish into tight, slender cigarettes mixed with tobacco. I explained that I had gone away for a week to help at the second-worst Asian restaurant in Paris, this time near canal Saint-Martin, but I needn’t have worried about offering an explanation. No one was curious, and that was fine with me, for I mostly just wanted to enjoy the tender and seductive hashish. I ignored the conversation as they raced through a variety of topics, although a few bits did penetrate my bliss: their approval of the fifth week of paid vacation that had been added to the four weeks of paid vacation under the new socialist regime, although they agreed that a sixth week was needed; their scorn of a Far Right politician who had been making news with his attacks on immigrants and foreigners; their affirmation that France must continue to be a country of hospitality for immigrants and asylum for refugees, like those from Indochina . . .

  Don’t you agree? BFD said.

  So unused was I to being spoken to that it took me a moment to realize he was speaking to me, which he was, because he spoke in English, which was not being polite but being condescending. What? I said, blinking my eyes.

  Don’t you agree that it’s right that France should be a country of asylum?

  Asylum? Why? Are we insane?

  I thought I was being quite clever, but BFD grimaced and said, No, you know what I mean, a country of refuge.

  Ah, I said. It was then, emboldened by the hashish, that I said, Even if they are fleeing from socialists and communists and utopia?

  The Maoist PhD said, I don’t agree with how these refugees are colonial compradors who participated in the colonization of their own country. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not human. They are quite human and so deserve our help, not least because we were the colonizers who ruined your country in the first place.

  I don’t disagree with you there, I said.

  He hasn’t changed, said BFD. He’s too modest to tell you, but he led the Maoist committee against the American imperial war in your country in the sixties.

  It was the right thing to do, the Maoist PhD said.

  He was the most Maoist of all the Maoists, a Mao-Mao, so to speak, said BFD. In fact, he was so Maoist that our nickname for him was—

  Chairman Mao, I said.

  No, even better—Le Chinois!

  They all burst out laughing and I smiled weakly, befuddled. Le Chinois? Was that a compliment, an insult, or both? But since he was the resident expert on Maoism, I asked, Can you still be a Maoist after the Cultural Revolution? Or the Great Leap Forward? You don’t think that the deaths of all those Chinese on the wrong side of the Ideological State Apparatus and the Repressive State Apparatus should make you rethink Maoism? Or what about this—I retrieved the newspaper with the picture of the mass grave and the bones—in Cambodia? The Chinese are supporting the Khmer Rouge. Doesn’t that make you at least queasy about communist revolution?

  The Maoist PhD shook his head sadly over the picture. I saw that this morning, he said. Yes, of course, revolutions make mistakes and sometimes on the scale of the deaths of millions. Tragic? Yes. Wrong? Yes. But if you stop there, you’ve simply stepped into the trap of the capitalists. Ha! they’ll say. Got you! Now your only choice is capitalism and its pseudo-democracy, its trickery of false choices. For if communism is bad, then capitalism must be good, yes? No! Capitalists love to point out how tens of millions have died under Stalin and Mao, all while conveniently forgetting how hundreds of millions have died under capitalism. What were colonialism and slavery but forms of capitalism? What was the genocide of the natives of the Americas but capitalism? But let’s forget about those nasty contradictions of capitalism and focus on what the communists have done!

  What did I tell you? BFD said, pouring himself another glass of wine. Le Chinois!

  I know all that, I said. But that’s all theory—

  No, it’s practic
e. You asked me about Mao and the Cultural Revolution. I am not convinced it was a mistake, for Mao was not on the side of the state. He was trying to purge the state of its reactionary elements and give power back to where it belonged—to the people, to the masses. We will look back on the Cultural Revolution the way we look back at the Paris Commune—a defeat then, but a triumph eventually for the people! As for Mao, he was being infinitely dialectical, realizing, unlike Stalin, who the Vietnamese communists have followed, that you cannot allow the revolution to calcify into the state. Once that happens, the revolution will be corrupted by its own power, which is why you ended up in a reeducation camp. The revolution, like the dialectic, must be perpetual!

  My aunt offered me another hashish cigarette. I accepted dumbly, unable to respond to the theoretical barrage, even in English. The Maoist PhD sipped his wine and took pity on me, saying, You have been through a great deal. I understand. You should understand that you can be forgiven for being on the wrong side of history, but have you really and truly engaged in the self-criticism to realize that?

  Self-criticism? I cried. I am nothing if not self-critical! My entire life is a self-criticism session between me, myself, and I!

  No need to raise your voice, said BFD.

  If you are so self-critical, said the Maoist PhD, do you see where you deviate from the masses?

  Why should I worry about deviating from the masses when I am also me and myself? Am I not a mass? Am I not already a collective? Do I not contain multitudes? Am I not a universe unto myself? Am I not always infinitely dialectical as I synthesize the thesis of me and the antithesis of myself?

  That’s the hashish talking, said BFD.

  I don’t think you should be so harsh on him, said my aunt, and my spirit lifted at this unexpected encouragement, until it plummeted when she said, He’s actually not the absolute reactionary he seems to be. He was actually a communist spy working undercover among the reactionaries, only to be sent to reeducation for having been perhaps too enthusiastic in his pretense to being a capitalist-loving American ally.