Your head hurts from thinking about the answer to that question, which is made all the more difficult because of the two holes in your head. After reeducation at the hands of Man, you thought you had hit bottom, with nothing to lose, but you were so very wrong. You had Bon to lose. And the last of your illusions. Not to mention your life. Now, fortunately, you have pulled yourself together, even though, unfortunately, you are dead. Now, perhaps, you are no longer full of self-pity, for you, a nobody, have no self left to pity! You truly have nothing to lose, except now you know that not only is nothing more important than independence and freedom—nothing is sacred. What a joke! But the only revolution you can commit to is the one that lets you laugh and laugh and laugh, because the downfall of every revolution is when it loses its sense of absurdity. This, too, is the dialectic, to take the revolution seriously but not to take the revolutionaries seriously, for when revolutionaries take themselves too seriously, they cock their guns at the crack of a joke. Once that happens, it’s all over, the revolutionaries have become the state, the state has become repressive, and the bullets, once used against the oppressor in the name of the people, will be used against the people in their own name. That is why the people, if they wish to survive and to dodge those bullets, must be nameless.
As for you, nameless, stateless, and selfless, the bullet remains lodged in your head, stuck in the seal between your two minds, as stubbornly wedged as a morsel of gristle and meat between your molars. You wiggle the bullet with your thoughts, but you cannot dislodge it. This bullet with your name on it is embedded where no one can see either it or your name, a thing that would drive you crazy, except that you are apparently already crazy. You must be deranged to write this confession, or maybe you have only been seized by the same impulse that drove Rousseau to write his confession, to acknowledge how “I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that exist.” You have haunted yourself in writing these pages, but you have also sensed a shadow of another steadily creeping over them, a sense of spookiness that makes you uneasy, as if you are being watched, and not just by yourself. And then, one morning—at last!—the spook knocks on the door.
Someone’s knocking on the door, the kind old gentleman says from his bed.
You cannot get up from your bed because the headache induced by the bullet in your brain is too much to overcome. You neither get up nor say anything, but after a pause the knocking continues.
Excuse me, the kind old gentleman says. Someone’s knocking on the door.
The knocking continues. And continues. And continues, until finally you muster what concentration you have left, given the bullet in your brain, and say, Come in.
The door opens and the morning light floods into your chamber, which has its blackout curtains tightly drawn. You squint, and in the dazzling haze you see him enter, a shadow encased in a glowing nimbus, backlit by a halo. You lurch up from your bed, raising a hand to ward off the light, the hand with the burning brand of your oath. Is it—could it be?—tentatively, you extend your other hand toward the shadow framed in the doorway—it is! It’s him! He is here, at last!
Father? you say, a catch in your voice. Father!
The shadow comes into your chamber, carrying a bag in his hand. He throws it onto the foot of your bed with a heavy thump, and when he unzips it, you recognize your leather duffel. He slips his hand into its slit and takes out a pair of shoes—your beautiful, polished brown Bruno Magli oxfords! The shadow throws them onto the floor and inserts his hand into the slit again and removes, one by one, the videos of the orgy, which you recognize by the luscious secretary’s handwriting on the labels. Then he digs into the slit even deeper, all the way into the false bottom, and extracts the two volumes of your confession, rubber-banded and white, which he tosses onto your lap, more than seven hundred pages and approximately a quarter million words, which impress you with their weight, their solidity, their miraculous existence, generated from nothing. But he’s not finished. Your duffel must be bottomless! He reaches in again and produces the most beautiful thing you have seen in your deprived time in Paradise: a gleaming bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey! Come to Daddy, sweet baby! Finally, with the other hand, he brings forth an equally gleaming silver-plated revolver. For a moment you are hypnotized by the light reflecting from the gun. Then you look up. Your eyes have adjusted to the sun’s morning glare, and the shadow’s face is clear to you now. It is not your father after all, but the spookiest of all spooks, the man who knows exactly what you want, the old Indochina hand.
Didn’t I tell you never to commit your thoughts to paper, you stupid bastard? Claude says, offering you the holy water with one hand while with the other he aims the gun at your beaten heart. Now take that goddamned mask off your face.
And you are so happy you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
Acknowledgments
It was a pleasure to revisit many of the thinkers who have influenced me over the years, or to whom I wanted to respond. These are the authors and works that I have discussed, drawn from, or quoted in the text: Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Aesthetics and Politics; Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex; Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings; Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism and A Tempest, which I saw long ago in an unforgettable theatrical production in Berkeley; Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”; Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks; Che Guevara, On Vietnam and World Revolution; Ho Chi Minh, The Case Against French Colonization; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, whose words I give to Blood Brother #1 when he says, “the birth of a being that must proceed from nothingness, absolute beginning, is an event historically absurd”; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions; Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, and his introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth; and Voltaire, whose Candide I first read and was greatly amused by as a boy.
Among the texts that helped me imagine Paris of the early 1980s, oriented around the world of Vietnamese immigrants, refugees, and their French descendants, I am indebted to Gisele Bousquet’s invaluable Behind the Bamboo Hedge: The Impact of Homeland Politics in the Parisian Vietnamese Community, as well as the images in Le Paris Asie: 150 ans de présence asiatique dans la capitale, edited by Pascal Blanchard and Éric Deroo. Also useful in understanding and visualizing France’s relationship to its colonized populations were the essays and images in Sexe, race & colonies: La domination des corps du XVe siècle à nos jours, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boetsch, Dominic Thomas, and Christelle Taraud. For the history of French and CIA involvement in the production and selling of Southeast Asian opium, I relied on Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.
Several people in Paris or with connections to France were generous with their time in talking to me, including Hoai Huong Aubert-Nguyen, Doan Bui, Myriam Dao, Anna Moï, Nguyen Nhat Cuong, Liem Binh Luong Nguyen, Abdellah Taïa, and Quoc Dang Tran. Duc Ha Duong helped secure permission from the Union Générale des Vietnamiens de France for my use of the photo of the three masked men. I am also grateful to Chiori Miyagawa, Jordan Elgrably, Huê-Tâm Webb Jamme, and Laila Lalami for having read the novel in draft form and responding to my questions about the novel and French life and attitudes. In the United States, a visit to an exotic Asian-themed restaurant with food critic Soleil Ho helped me to imagine the bar Opium. I am also appreciative of the work of my graduate research assistants, Rebekah Park and Jenny Hoang, as well as my undergraduate assistants, Yvette Chua, Ivy Hong, Nina Ibrahim, Sunjay Lee, Morgan Milender, Christine Nguyen, Tommy Nguyen
, and Jordan Trinh. They helped give me time to focus on the novel, while Nancy Tan’s copyediting, and additional proofreads by Kait Astrella and Alicia Burns, helped me polish the manuscript. Any mistakes I have made in this book are of course my own.
The MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations provided fellowships that helped greatly in the writing of this book, as did the research support of the University of Southern California and its Dornsife College. My agents Nat Sobel and Judith Weber have been stalwart advisors, and the staff at Sobel Weber Associates have made my life easier, including Kristen Pini and Adia Wright. I am also fortunate to be an author with Grove Atlantic, which has been an ideal home, particularly with Morgan Entrekin’s leadership, Peter Blackstock’s superlative editorial guidance, and the support of Deb Seager, John Mark Boling, Judy Hottensen, Elisabeth Schmitz, and Emily Burns.
Finally, as always, my deep love and commitment to Lan Duong and our children, Ellison and Simone.
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