The Committed

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  You think it’s him? I said, rubbing the photograph’s edges.

  I know it’s him. He was coming out of the embassy. I sat at a café across the street for days and nights, waiting for a chance. I was going to follow him, but he got into a taxi and I couldn’t find one. I think he lives in the embassy and hardly ever goes out. Let’s go to the bathroom.

  You go, I don’t have to.

  Let’s go to the bathroom.

  I followed him, pausing long enough to greet those bohemians of the Union who had become devotees of hashish and the remedy. Students, lawyers, dentists, doctors, and so on, all respectable people who also liked to expand their minds, discreetly.

  You can’t do this forever, Bon said in the bathroom. There’s no future in it.

  You’re one to talk.

  Once I kill the faceless man, I’m done, Bon said. I’ll resign.

  You don’t resign from gangs, I said, hopelessly hoping to divert his attention. And the Boss wants you to kill the Mona Lisa.

  Okay, he deserves to die after what he did to you. After I kill him, then I’ll retire.

  You think the Boss will let you go?

  He knows I’ll kill him if he doesn’t.

  You told him that?

  Guys like him and me and the Ronin don’t have to talk. We just have to see the look in the other’s eyes. It’s guys like you who have to talk. If you don’t talk, you’d die. You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself. At least you can do something meaningful by helping me kill the faceless man. Too bad he didn’t come tonight.

  I was secretly relieved, but I said, I didn’t know you were expecting him.

  The ambassador came.

  Given that the faceless man doesn’t have a face, I assume he’s not very social. But you could always kill the ambassador.

  Then I’d never get the chance to kill the faceless man.

  If you kill the faceless man, you’ll never get the chance to kill the ambassador.

  You got me. Bon shrugged. So I want revenge, too. What’s wrong with that?

  Technically speaking, nothing. Also, technically speaking, how do you plan to get the faceless man when he hardly ever leaves the embassy?

  I have a plan.

  Another plan? My heart beat a little faster. When were you going to tell me what that plan is?

  I’m telling you right now. He produced an envelope from his jacket pocket. Inside were two tickets to Fantasia VIII: Live in Paris next month, with the after party at Opium. When I unfolded the flyer in the envelope, the first thing I saw was her, the one woman I should not have fallen in love with, head tilted back, hair blowing about, red lips slightly parted to reveal just a hint of white teeth and maybe, just maybe, the tip of her tongue. My body still remembered the touch of that tongue. Lana. Two syllables, two taps of my tongue on my palate. L-l-lah-nah! Was that how I cried out her name when we had made love, or had sex, or fornicated, or copulated, or perhaps all of those things at the same time, so many years ago? Laaaannnnnaaaaaaaa!

  Oh, I said.

  Oh, indeed. You’ll get a chance to meet your old love at Opium. Or maybe before, if she’s willing to do something more private.

  What’s the plan?

  Our faceless man has seen a lifetime of Tet celebrations. He didn’t come to Paris to see another one. What he came here for, I don’t know. But he’ll see Fantasia.

  Because he’s a fun-loving guy?

  Because he’s Vietnamese. Every Vietnamese person in Paris is going to be at this show, even the ones who think they’re French.

  Even the communists?

  They’ve been deprived of good entertainment for far too long. He smiled. Especially this communist. The commissar. There were rumors in the reeducation camp that this commissar was a little corrupt. He liked Western music. Pop and rock. Ballads. The sick stuff, the yellow music.

  I nodded. It was true. The sick stuff, the yellow music, was my vinyl collection, which I had given to Man before I left Saigon, with highlights from Elvis Presley, the Platters, Chuck Berry, and, of course, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Man had hauled my records to the reeducation camp, although I had never gotten to hear them there. But I did not mention my precious albums. Instead, I said, What’s going to happen to you and Loan if you get caught? Loan may or may not be a communist, but she is at least surely a leftist. A sympathizer. Otherwise she wouldn’t be in the same room with the ambassador. Doesn’t this make you—

  Don’t worry about Loan, he snapped.

  I had touched a nerve, not because I wanted to, but because so many nerves waited to be touched. Or had some part of me—myself, let’s say—wanted to finger that nerve?

  Like I said, I’m retiring. I’ll finish off the faceless man and then I’ll marry Loan.

  I was so stunned I had nothing to say to yet another plan that he had been keeping from me. Bon smiled at the effect of his announcement on me, and to compound his pleasure he extracted a gun from underneath his blazer, hidden at the small of his back. It was not the gun he would later aim at me but the Mona Lisa’s gun, the revolver with which I had killed myself. A little present for you, he said, handing it to me. Its grip was familiar, as was its heft. The revolver weighed about as much as a soul would, or five souls, or perhaps even three or four or six million souls. Why not? Dead souls, after all, could weigh almost nothing.

  CHAPTER 13

  We went backstage and changed into our costumes for the first skit, where we played farmers. Such costumes, in real life, would be mud-and-sweat-soaked at best and patched rags at worst. But this was an official culture show, versus an unofficial one, so our brown shirts and black pants were neat, clean, and dry, as were our bare feet. I was thus attired and had taken my place on the side of the stage with the other dancers when the Chairman leaped to the stage. His remarks were twice as long as necessary, because they were bilingual, and I was dozing off when he at last finished, having recounted the Union’s history, the importance of Vietnamese culture, and the gratitude of the Vietnamese to France, although he mentioned nothing about the Association protesting outside. Then he introduced the Vietnamese ambassador, and I almost screamed. The ambassador likewise proceeded to torture his audience with a bilingual soufflé of clichés, topped with the whipped cream of excessive compliments slathered onto French culture. Real talent was required to use so many words in two languages to say nothing.

  By now my thighs were silently sobbing, just as the rest of me was, for all of us peasant farmers were squatting on our heels, a pose that goes back millennia but that I, Westernized, had not practiced for many years. Being a bastard, I was perhaps not genetically suited to squat like this, something my mother could do all day long, tending to the fire, cooking, or taking care of infants and young children to earn some money. I could sense the unease among the other farmers as well, who were urban French bourgeoisie who had most likely never even stepped on manure-decked land in either of their ancestral homelands. The faux farmers shifted from heel to heel and tried their best not to grimace, and as the ambassador finally finished, all of us got ready to spring to our feet. Then the Chairman returned to the podium and said, Now for our next speaker . . .

  I groaned softly, as did the other farmers except for Bon, who merely grunted, unaffected by the squatting. The Chairman introduced the night’s guest of honor, a “friend of Vietnam and the Vietnamese people” and a “revolutionary of May 1968.” It was—who else?—BFD. My aunt had mentioned he would be here, delivering an undoubtedly canned speech that threatened to poison me with the botulism of botched ideas. He was the mayor of a different arrondissement, but his arrondissement, the 13th, was seeing more and more Vietnamese settlers, all communist-hating refugees, possibly including some of the protesters. To any one of those refugees, a socialist was just a communist in nicer threads, pink instead of red, a believer in the forced redistribution of wealth through tax
es, social benefits, and the welfare state rather than through land reform, economic collectives, and the police state. BFD would get nowhere with those protesters, but he wanted to prove his support among Vietnamese people of a different ideological kind and of a better class, or so my aunt said.

  A better class of people? I had said. Isn’t that ironic for a socialist to say?

  The French are nothing if not ironic.

  Well, were not all peoples ironic? Did any examples exist of nations that did not say one high-minded thing and then do something underhanded? BFD stepped onto the stage as a walking example of irony, a man of the people wearing a suit so expensive it could have fed a village. He was also an elected official courting an electorate not his own. Maybe he thought his speech would convince some in the audience to move to his arrondissement and vote for him. Or maybe he was following the example of Sartre, who, despite being a committed radical, had also joined in the call to help Vietnamese refugees fleeing from communism. Or maybe BFD, like every politician, could not resist that most basic political exercise of sweating under a spotlight.

  My dear friends, he began. It’s such a pleasure to be here tonight as you celebrate Vietnamese culture. We are two peoples, the French and the Vietnamese, with a long history that also deserves celebration. [applause] You have been a part of France for a long time now, and you remind us of the greatness of French culture and the greatness of Vietnamese culture, which the French have not always appreciated. When we came to Vietnam, we did not always behave the way we should have. Colonization was wrong, my friends. The French should never take away another country’s independence. [applause] When the Vietnamese rose up against us, they taught us a lesson we sorely needed. But by 1968, many of us—including me—stood on the right side of history by supporting Ho Chi Minh. And France as a whole stood on the side of peace. I don’t have to remind you that the peace accords that brought an end to American imperialism in Vietnam were signed here, in our glorious city! Let us hope that the American imperialists have learned their lesson from Vietnam, too. If they have, they, too, will one day thank the courageous people of Vietnam! [applause] As regrettable as French colonization was, we never committed the horrors the Americans did. And we left behind culture. Because of this, I hope the Vietnamese people have forgiven the French. We came to Indochina with noble intentions. We brought liberty, equality, and fraternity. [applause] We built roads. We built canals and drained swamps. We built Saigon. We built lycées and universities so that everyone would have a chance to get an education and govern their country, not just the mandarins. We trained the artists who would paint the glorious paintings of Ho Chi Minh and his freedom fighters. And there would have been no Ho Chi Minh, or his allies, without France. We brought Vietnamese students to France and gave them the tools to fight their revolution—against us! In short, nothing is all good or all bad. And I have met many Vietnamese people who are happy here in France, where they feel at home. Of course they do! Because France is your home! You have come home! [applause] Your presence in France shows us that we can put the past behind us. Your presence tells us we are all French. Your presence in France proves the greatness of our French culture. Long live the Republic! Long live France! [applause]

  Since I could still see any issue from both sides, despite the terrible cramps in my thighs, I could see that BFD was not totally wrong. He might even be almost right. And judging from the enthusiastic clapping of the audience, many evidently agreed with him. And why wouldn’t they? Of course they felt at home here! It was likely the case that they, or their parents, or even their grandparents, would have been at home with France when they were in Vietnam! The Vietnamese who came to France and did not feel at home returned to Vietnam to fight for the revolution or were deported by the French who suspected them of not being French enough. These were the Vietnamese who believed so sincerely in liberty, equality, and fraternity that they did not see the parentheses, which the French used in place of hyphens: “liberty, equality, and fraternity (but just not yet, at least for you).” Flabbergasted, these revolutionaries became the indigestible Vietnamese, the ones who could not swallow France and who could not be swallowed. As for the Vietnamese who stayed in France, French culture had chewed on them since they were in Vietnam. By the time they came to France, they were already, like certain species of cheese, quite soft and easily digestible, qualities inherited by their ideologically pasteurized children.

  The culture show we put on—by the time we could finally get to our feet, wincing and with legs asleep—was meant for easy consumption. A hostile and critical culture show would have been quite interesting to someone as hostile and critical as myself, but my taste is rather outré. For most people, culture shows are dioramas featuring mutual hospitality, rather than the loving violence or violent love that characterized the show of power staged by the French in their colonies. In this case, the Chairman had scripted our extravaganza, which might have been vaguely autobiographical, or at least not wholly fantastical. His was a love story, proffered in misty retrospect by a prosperous, middle-aged doctor, about a young man from a poor, rural family who, by dint of hard work and the benevolent French educational system, wins a scholarship to France, where, by dint of hard work and the benevolent French culture, he becomes a doctor who, by dint of hard work and the benevolence of a French family, wins the love of a winsome French (white) girl who, by dint of hard work and the benevolence of French gustatory habits, maintains her slim French figure while birthing and raising two lovely French children, who have absolutely no problems in being French despite their mixed heritage. The end.

  Oh, how I wanted that life! Who wouldn’t? It was a much better life than my mother had experienced. Although she would have been about the same age as the future doctor, she had seen a much different version of rural northern existence. As a girl, she had nearly died during the great famine that decimated the north, killing a million people when the population of the whole country was perhaps twenty million. A million! So many people, and yet such a paradoxically forgettable event. They died without the benefit of having their picture taken so that the world, or even just the Vietnamese, might remember what our Japanese occupiers did in the name of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity and what the French who served the Japanese did perhaps for liberty, equality, and fraternity, or perhaps just for collaboration. Collaborating was the great twentieth-century sin of the French, who could only mumble the word, the pebbles of the syllables rolling in their mouths. The Algerians might disagree about collaboration being the greatest sin, weighed against the outright massacre of their people by the French colonizers we shared. But who cares what the Algerians have to say? For that matter, who cares what we have to say, especially if we say nothing, as the dead usually do?

  I live among the dead, an invisible bullet having blown my mind. Even so, I have no way to see the dead. I can see only what my mother gave to me, the missing pictures that died with her, of dead people in lanes and fields, skeletons with skin, huddled in clothes too large for them by the time they died, neighbors, playmates, and babies. And who had saved her? My French father! He gave her rice, the same rice that our Japanese rulers had ordered their French flunkies to withhold as a reserve for the Japanese war effort. While my father the colonizing collaborator might have complained about getting rice instead of bread, for my mother that first bite of rice after weeks of starvation was simply the most wonderful meal of her life. My father fed her with spoonfuls of rice for a few days, getting her shriveled stomach used to having food, and then bowlfuls of porridge after that. My poor little mother was a miracle, an orphan of twelve years of age, a survivor in a time of famine with no one to care for her. He saved me, she said. I couldn’t help but fall in love with him even though he was a— She could not bring herself to say “priest” and substituted “man of the cloth,” while she became his “maid.” The fusion of two euphemisms created me two years later, seven pounds of high-explosive antipersonnel ordnance with
a delayed fuse dropped from her bomb bay and waiting to go BOOM! I could see her face even now, forever gentle, forever youthful, having been younger than me when she died. I could remember my shock and then my rage when she told me the story about my father feeding her rice, my mother weeping as she held me close in a way no woman has before or since and said, Forgive him, my darling. I have forgiven him. Without him, I would not have you, whom I love more than my own life. Even if it is the last thing you do, forgive your father.

  What are you crying for? Bon asked me when we stepped offstage.

  Nothing, I said, wiping the tears from my eyes. Absolutely nothing.

  After the show and after I had wiped the slime of my emotional sensitivity off my face, I retrieved the revolver from my duffel bag’s rather crowded false bottom, where it nestled between my confession and the tattered, yellowing copy of Richard Hedd’s Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction. Then I squeezed the revolver into the back of my pants rather than the front, as I always worried about the gun going off and killing my future progeny, even if I never planned on begetting any. The hashish in my jacket pocket giggled and whispered in its usual way at my logic, but the revolver was the masculine, silent type. It distracted me not by making noise, but by pressing against my spine and tailbone with its dark, handsome hardness. All guns want to be used. This one was no exception.

  I toured the party with one part of me trying to figure out how to stop Bon and protect Man, while another part of me chatted with my clientele. I went outside to smoke some particularly potent cigarettes with a couple of them, a doctor and an import-export merchant. Through them and the rest of my clients, I sold my entire stock of goods and made appointments to sell more, although I was not happy about it. When I returned to the party, my aunt waved me over to introduce me to her new friend, whom I at first mistook for a man from a distance. She’s a lawyer, my aunt said in Vietnamese. Just back from Cambodia.