The Committed

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  The last time I had tasted sacramental wine was when I attended Mass at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Saigon, a replica, on a reduced scale, of the Notre-Dame in Paris, suitable for us as miniatures of our French masters. Now I had seen the real Notre-Dame, like my professor the Sponge before me, and the sight of it made me aware of how our colonized, tropical version was but a doll’s house. In this toy version of Notre-Dame, Man and I knelt in April 1975, both of us spies infiltrated into the southern army, he my superior giving me my mission: flee with the remnants of the southern army to America, and from there spy on their efforts to take their country back from our victorious communist revolution. While we knelt and shared our conspiracy in whispers, the old women who attended Mass every day chanted their prayers. I had always dreaded their droning as they counted their rosaries, their eyes fixed on the crucified Christ hanging above the altar. I preferred kneeling before Madeleine while I traced with my tongue the Vietnamese alphabet, which was not so different from the French alphabet. My father had taught me that alphabet, and now I spelled it on Madeleine, rehearsing every letter over and over again as she cried out in her mother tongue and as I added punctuation and accent marks for good measure, until I—at long, long last—was literate.

  BFD was all smiles when he got into the convertible, and perhaps I was, too. Grant me my small triumph; let me for a moment be a sea anemone gently swaying in a current of happiness. I had not felt such exhilaration since my first encounter with a woman, in my freshman year at Occidental College, in that paradise known as Southern California, with a French major who liked to call me her petit métis. I would have been outraged by anyone except a beautiful blonde calling me by that name. A beautiful blonde could call me anything. So what if her hair turned out to be dyed? I forgave her that bit of camouflage, since I myself, in disguise as a harmless foreign student, was unlike how I appeared, not that any of us are exactly how we appear.

  My apologies if I took a long time, BFD said, interrupting my reverie. He tapped the steering wheel to another song, having switched cassettes to a greatest hits compilation of yé-yé music, a style I found quite charming. How could one not like “Les Sucettes,” especially as sung by France Gall? I hummed along as BFD jockeyed his Italian steed past the various examples of Peugeot, Renault, and Citroën cars that few people except the French seemed interested in owning. I lost track of the time! BFD said, puffing on his cigarette enthusiastically. Very easy to do with Morning Peony and Beautiful Lotus. Young women know how to make a man feel like a man!

  They did? Had I missed out by not consulting Morning Peony and Beautiful Lotus? I desperately needed to feel like a man! Or perhaps I just wanted to feel like a man. Not needing to be a man seemed . . . liberating. Perhaps that was what I needed, to need fewer things. To need less. To want . . . nothing?

  But, I said, do you know how to make a woman feel like a woman?

  He honked savagely at an offending German vehicle that had cut in front of him, the Bavarian beast reminding him of both his French weakness and that of his Italian convertible, which, like its country of origin, was both beautiful and underpowered. Ask any woman who has been with me, he growled. Their satisfaction is guaranteed! Of course—he glanced at me from the corner of his eye—some people doubt their ability to satisfy women. That has never been the case with me.

  I suppressed the urge to gouge BFD in the eye, which, both Claude and Bon had told me, was the second-quickest way to take down a man. But we were traveling at a very fast speed through the dark and I did not want to die in a car crash like Camus, who had at least known fame before his sudden death. What had I accomplished? Nothing. And I had a mission to fulfill with BFD, one that required me not to antagonize him but to maximize one of my greatest talents, flattery. Still, I could not help but ask the most obvious question: You don’t think that the act of paying these young women might make it hard to determine whether they are truly satisfied?

  I assume they were satisfied because I paid them, he said. Does capitalism debase them and me? Of course it does! Which is why I’m a socialist. If we had socialism, these young women would not need to be ladies of the night. They would want to be ladies of the night. And they would not need madams or pimps; they would own a share of the profits. They would be sexual stockholders rather than the sexual proletariat!

  Something was wrong in BFD’s self-satisfied, triumphant logic of erotic socialism, just as something felt wrong when I paid Madeleine, including when I did that most un-Vietnamese of things and tipped her. By that I mean a real tip, not the one dollar or five francs that most Vietnamese thought sufficed, regardless of the fare. By real tip I mean 10 percent, a sum that would horrify most Vietnamese people, especially Vietnamese men, especially in this case. They would argue that I had done all the work—work that no Vietnamese man would ever do or at least admit to doing—and gotten nothing in return. But I had wanted nothing in return.

  Look, I said, changing the subject, if you enjoyed this little visit to Heaven, I know of a place even more heavenly than Heaven.

  BFD grinned and squeezed my shoulder in a spontaneous show of affection, or perhaps a calculated one. If this place that is more heavenly than Heaven has more beauties like Morning Peony and Beautiful Lotus, I will be there, he said. Oh, the body of a twenty-five-year-old is extraordinary! And then when they are one of your kind—delicious! Your women—oh, my friend, you are so fortunate. They are unbelievable. So delicate, so intuitive, so hairless, so ageless, so tireless. The Asiatic woman knows men better than Western women do. She knows men better than we know ourselves. She is perfect!

  And with that he brought his fingers to his lips and blew an appreciative kiss into the air, intended for this Asiatic woman whom I had never met, even though I had met thousands of Asiatic women. Was there an exclusive club of Asiatic women kept on reserve only for white men?

  The only drawback to her, continued BFD, although it is also the source of her attraction, is that she is essentially unknowable.

  Unknowable? I said.

  Inscrutable. Like you.

  Like me?

  Yes. BFD turned to look at me even though the convertible was still hurtling at a terrific pace along the darkened periphery of central Paris. I can intuit a great deal from people. I am a politician, after all. But with you—it’s impossible, I must admit. Your face is as imperturbable as . . . as the Mona Lisa’s.

  I don’t know if I’m inscrutable. Perhaps unreadable.

  What’s the difference?

  If I’m unreadable—if all these Asians you refer to are unreadable—perhaps we are only unreadable to those who do not know how to read.

  Semantics—

  And even if we are inscrutable, what does that make white people? Are white people ever referred to as inscrutable? No, you would say that a white person who is hard to read has a poker face, which has a positive connotation, a strategic one, suggesting a careful withholding of information, whereas we are just inscrutable because you white people believe that we always have something to hide—

  There you go again, with your “white people” this and your “white person” that. He snorted and waved his finger in my face. You’re nothing more than a communitarian.

  You, of all people, accuse me of being a communist?

  Communitarian, you idiot! Communitarian! A miserabilist! Someone who wallows in his misery, who cannot transcend the petty circumstances of his identity or his obsession with skin color, who cannot think outside of his little group, his community, and who can never ever just be human, much less universal!

  Was I hearing right? A white man of the same culture as Victor Hugo—the man elevated to a saint by our Cao Dai religion—the man who had given the world Les Misérables (which I confess to not having yet read because, you know, it was a thousand pages long)—this man was accusing me of being a miserabilist, as if acknowledging misery was a bad thing? How terrible misery is, l
et’s never wallow in it! Except, of course, when it came to acknowledging the misery of the working class or of the French, in which case such wallowing was not apparently miserabilism but universalism.

  You! I shouted, as he was shouting, neither of us watching the road anymore. You—who are so upset that I called you and your fellow white people white—you are the one who calls me and my kind Asiatic!

  I call you Asiatic because you call yourself Asiatic!

  I have never called myself Asiatic! You are upset because I made you see yourself. You like to think of yourself as just a man, not a white man, unless you call yourself white, with a certain kind of self-aware irony. But for me to call you a white man is unacceptable, downright racist, even if you yourself and all white people routinely say of someone “an Asiatic woman” or “a black man,” as if a black man were not just a man as you are just a man. So what if I noticed your whiteness—how unforgivable! I suppose the only thing ruder would be to notice your penis.

  You stupid, vulgar bastard! You accuse me of racism yet again when all I have said is how much I love Asiatic women? What kind of—

  Racist love is still racist! As for me not being universal—why? Because I’m yellow? Because I’m only half white? Because I’m a refugee? Because I’m from your former colony? Because I have the wrong accent? Because my looks are disdained? Because my food is offensive? If Jesus Christ, child of refugees, born poor in a stable, a colonized person, a hick from the backwaters, despised by his society’s leaders and by the rulers of his leaders, a humble carpenter—if this Jesus Christ became universal—then so can I, motherfucker!

  The convertible slammed to a stop before my aunt’s address, so give BFD credit for delivering me to my destination rather than throwing me out onto the street. I flung open the door and jumped out onto the sidewalk, and thank the god I did not believe in that I did not step into a pile of shit, because if that had happened I probably would have murdered BFD right then and there for being a representative of a race, or a nation, or a people, or a culture, that bestowed more freedom and love and understanding on its dogs than its yellow people. But not having stepped into dog shit, I felt free, even though I had lost my cool and blown my cover as the inoffensive Asiatic, the friendly Vietnamese, the grateful colonial subject. I slammed the door shut, and only when I looked at BFD did I realize how much I had offended him, for he was, finally, at a loss for speech. Instead of spilling words from his mouth, he had pulled his eyes into slants with the tips of his index fingers, a pose he held for just a moment before taking his fingers from his eyes, sneering at me, and dashing away with a screech and a burst of hazy diesel fumes, leaving me stunned on the sidewalk. My heart was pumping terribly fast from the vileness of our exchange, and I stepped away from the door of my aunt’s building to calm down. What a paradox, the people who professed never seeing race in fact seeing race fairly often!

  Hiding in the shadows of the street, I inhaled deeply and closed my eyes. BFD would not ruin my evening. I would not let him destroy what had been good between Madeleine and me, a memory I would carry until my death. That doesn’t happen often, she had said afterward, cuddling up to me. She did not mean the tip. That, she whispered into my postcoital neck, was a real gift. And lying there with her in that most unnatural and shocking of sexual positions—cuddling—I could not remember the last time I had given anyone a gift.

  CHAPTER 15

  I returned to the Boss’s restaurant in Paris the next afternoon, feeling a mix of guilt and shame, a concoction familiar to me as a reluctant Catholic, for I had been forced to drink it every day of my childhood. Did the people who did not see race even as they saw race actually have a point? Perhaps, for example, I had underestimated the worst Asian restaurant in Paris. It could be so much more than the worst Asian restaurant­—­it very well might be the worst restaurant in Paris, period. Why insult ourselves even in denigrating ourselves? If Michelin published a guide to the worst restaurants, ours would merit three stars! A perverse pride inflated me, but I deflated rapidly when Grumpy, mopping the floor when I walked in, pointed wordlessly toward the stairs leading down to the toilet.

  Merde? I asked.

  Merde, he confirmed.

  Merde! The single most useful word in the French language, easy to pronounce and eloquently expressive of conditions from the literally fecal to the unpleasantly existential. I sighed and headed for the toilet, but Le Cao Boi stuck his head out from the kitchen door and said, Come here, Camus. The Ronin and Bon were in the kitchen as well, along with a couple of the dwarfs preparing the flesh of an unknown dead animal that might eventually pass for a dinner entrée, whacking away with their cleavers as bridges of ash trembled at the tips of their cigarettes. The sight of Bon reminded me of what I had been longing for and dreading, the coming of Fantasia in two weeks, when I might see my beloved Lana again, if I was lucky, and Man, if I—and he—was unlucky. With our fatal rendezvous impending, I still had no idea how to save him, and I was happy to accept the comfort of a cigarette that Le Cao Boi offered me. Bon lit it, and the Ronin said, We found your shoes.

  My shoes?

  You remember we tracked you through your shoes? That tracker is state-of-the-art American surveillance technology and not a cheap device. I got a call from the old Indochina hand who lent it to me. I had to admit that I totally forgot about getting it back. Then it occurred to me the other night that when we found you, you were shoeless. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t noticed your shoes lying around in that cellar. Now, what if, I asked myself—

  He walked off in my shoes.

  The Ronin grinned and pointed at the industrial metal box on the counter next to him, its green cathode ray screen displaying a grid and one blinking dot, moving slowly. I’ve looked at this for a couple of days, the Ronin said. He’s returned to the same spot two nights in a row and stayed there all night. I assume he’s going back there tonight.

  This is going to be fun, Le Cao Boi said with a laugh. He poured us each a shot of execrable Chinese liquor that looked like water and had no taste except for the rope burn that it left inside the esophagus. I gagged, tears in my eyes, but Bon seemed unaffected. My lack of manliness amused the Ronin, who chortled as he poured himself a second shot and hummed with pleasure after downing it.

  It’s true, he said, smacking his lips. This will be so much fun!

  We did not leave right away to find the Mona Lisa. First, I had to descend into the basement and unplug the victimized toilet’s choked throat. Since we had so few customers at the restaurant, and since none of them ever finished a meal, the chances that the culprit was a customer were low. Meanwhile each of the restaurant staff regularly swore that it was not he who was responsible for the disaster but one of the others.

  It does make you wistful, doesn’t it, said Le Cao Boi, after I returned from the toilet trembling and blinking away tears, for the way we did it in the homeland, sitting over a stream or a pond, looking at the stars, listening to the cicadas? The benefit of fresh air! Never a clogged toilet or stinky bathroom. You just didn’t want to be downstream. Here, have another, you’ll feel better.

  He poured me an additional shot of the abominable Chinese liquor, and the sting of it did, in fact, help me forget what I had just seen and smelled. To witness the interior of human beings was never, ever a pleasant experience.

  We left in the early evening, setting forth in the van that the restaurant used for supplies, except that it had been repainted with the names of fictional electricians, LES FRÈRES CHIEN. Le Cao Boi drove badly, probably on purpose, for there were no other seats and Bon and I were stuck in the cavernous, grimy, windowless hold, sliding back and forth on the floor while Le Cao Boi chuckled. No one’s going to wonder why an electrician’s van might be parked on their street, the Ronin said from the passenger seat, where he sat with the tracking device in his lap, along with a map with the coordinates of where the Mona Lisa had been staying. We rode fo
r a half hour, from city streets to the periphery, all of us smoking while Le Cao Boi controlled the stereo and played a mix of pop and rock songs whose standout was “Seasons in the Sun,” to which all four of us—and at least a couple of my ghosts—sang along with tears in our eyes:

  Goodbye my friend, it’s hard to die

  When all the birds are singing in the sky

  Now that the spring is in the air

  Pretty girls are everywhere

  Think of me and I’ll be there

  The song had the appropriate mix of upbeat pop, downbeat melancholy, and accessible philosophy that perfectly expressed our Vietnamese sensibility. This included the honorary Vietnamese sensibility of the Ronin, who, like all white men who sought honorary Vietnamese status, found it easily given, for we were all bemused, amused, and honored that anybody not Vietnamese wanted to identify with us, which was, of course, just another sign of our country’s small status and our collective mental colonization. The French and the Americans, as well as the Chinese and Japanese, simply took it for granted, as all imperialists did, that everybody wanted to be French or American or Chinese or Japanese.

  We had joy, we had fun

  We had seasons in the sun

  But the hills that we climbed

  Were just seasons out of time

  So we entertained ourselves until Le Cao Boi parked the van outside the building where the Mona Lisa lived and said, Now we wait.

  The Ronin tapped the screen of the tracking device and said, He’s moving. A few kilometers away. He looked at me. You’ll have to identify him.

  We passed the next couple of hours with one person in the front and the other three in the back, smoking, playing cards, and gambling, which, after war and ahead of romantic love, has ruined more Vietnamese lives than any other cause. But we were gangsters! Ruining lives, including our own, was the stated intent and existential hazard of our profession. The only things we did not do to pass the time were drink alcohol and smoke hashish, for, as the Ronin proclaimed, we were working. I had lost all my money and was sitting in a corner of the van resentfully watching Le Cao Boi and Bon gamble with my cash when the Ronin said from the front seat, He’s getting close. Bon and I slipped on long-haired brown wigs and woolen hats, followed by tinted glasses for Bon and my inauthentic aviator sunglasses for me. Then we took off our jackets and pants and put on another set of jackets and pants from a garbage bag of disguises, procured by the Ronin from who knows where. Le Cao Boi started the van and pulled out, and I squatted between his seat and the Ronin’s. He studied the monitor of the tracking device and said, Left, right, right, straight, and so on as we drove to intercept the Mona Lisa, who was apparently moving slowly, probably on foot after having left the RER station. Through the windshield, I could see a dusty, dreary zone of lackluster apartment buildings, which, like their residents, had never been given a decent chance at life. If the metropolitan center of postcard Paris was an architectural feast of swoon-inducing traditions, this unappetizing colony of the banlieue was architectural fast food. Then we turned a corner and I saw the Mona Lisa only a few meters away, walking in my Bruno Magli shoes. He came toward us towing a grocery cart, one of the most charming aspects of life in Paris, where the residents walked to get their daily sustenance, which kept them reasonably trim, unlike the average American of plush posterior who drove any distance longer than a block.