PROLOGUE
We
We were the unwanted, the unneeded, and the unseen, invisible to all but ourselves. Less than nothing, we also saw nothing as we crouched blindly in the unlit belly of our ark, 150 of us sweating in a space not meant for us mammals but for the fish of the sea. With the waves driving us from side to side, we spoke in our native tongues. For some, this meant prayer; for others, curses. When a change in the motion of the waves shuttled our vessel more forcefully, one of the few sailors among us whispered, We’re on the ocean now. After hours winding through river, estuary, and canal, we had departed our motherland.
The navigator opened the hatch and called us onto the deck of our ark, which the uncaring world denigrated as merely a boat. By the lopsided smile of the crescent moon, we saw ourselves alone on the surface of this watery world. For a moment we were giddy with delight, until the rippling ocean made us giddy in another way. All over the deck, and all over one another, we turned ourselves inside out, and even after nothing remained we continued to heave and gasp, wretched in our retching. In this manner we passed our first night on the sea, shivering with the ocean breezes.
Dawn broke, and in every direction we saw only the infinitely receding horizon. The day was hot, with no shade and no respite, with nothing to eat but a mouthful and nothing to drink but a spoonful, the length of our journey unknown and our rations limited. But even eating so little, we still left our human traces all over the deck and in the hold, and were by evening awash in our own filth. When we spotted a ship near the horizon at twilight, we screamed ourselves hoarse. But the ship kept its distance.
On the third day, we came across a freighter breaking through the vast desert of the sea, a dromedary with its bridge rising over its stern, sailors on deck. We screamed, waved, jumped up and down. But the freighter sailed on, touching us only with its wake. On the fourth and fifth days, two more cargo ships appeared, each closer than the one before, each under a different flag. The sailors pointed at us, but no matter how much we begged, pleaded, and held up our children, the ships neither swerved nor slowed.
On the fifth day, the first of the children died, and before we offered her body to the sea, the priest said a prayer. On the sixth day, a boy died. Some prayed even more fervently to God; some began doubting His existence; some who did not believe in Him began to; and some who did not believe disbelieved all the more strongly. The father of one of the dead children cried, My God, why are You doing this to us?
And it struck us all then, the answer to humanity’s eternal question of Why?
It was, and is, simply this: Why not?
Strangers to one another before we clambered aboard our ark, we were now more intimate than lovers, wallowing in our own waste, our faces green, our skin blistered by salt and baked into the same shade by the sun. Most of us had fled our motherland because the communists in charge had labeled us puppets, or pseudo-pacifists, or bourgeois nationalists, or decadent reactionaries, or intellectuals of the false conscience, or because we were related to one of these. There was also a fortune teller, a geomancer, a monk, the priest, and at least one prostitute, whose Chinese neighbor spat on her and said, Why is this whore with us?
Even among the unwanted there were unwanted, and at that some of us could only laugh.
The prostitute scowled at us and said, What do you want?
We, the unwanted, wanted so much. We wanted food, water, and parasols, although umbrellas would be fine. We wanted clean clothes, baths, and toilets, even of the squatting kind, since squatting on land was safer and less embarrassing than clinging to the bulwark of a rolling boat with one’s posterior hanging over the edge. We wanted rain, clouds, and dolphins. We wanted it to be cooler during the hot day and warmer during the freezing night. We wanted an estimated time of arrival. We wanted not to be dead on arrival. We wanted to be rescued from being barbecued by the unrelenting sun. We wanted television, movies, music, anything with which to pass the time. We wanted love, peace, and justice, except for our enemies, whom we wanted to burn in Hell, preferably for eternity. We wanted independence and freedom, except for the communists, who should all be sent to reeducation, preferably for life. We wanted benevolent leaders who represented the people, by which we meant us and not them, whoever they were. We wanted to live in a society of equality, although if we had to settle for owning more than our neighbor, that would be fine. We wanted a revolution that would overturn the revolution we had just lived through. In sum, we wanted to want for nothing!
What we most certainly did not want was a storm, and yet that was what we got on the seventh day. The faithful once more cried out, God, help us! The nonfaithful cried out, God, You bastard! Faithful or unfaithful, there was no way to avoid the storm, dominating the horizon and surging closer and closer. Whipped into a frenzy, the wind gained momentum, and as the waves grew, our ark gained speed and altitude. Lightning illuminated the dark furrows of the storm clouds, and thunder overwhelmed our collective groan. A torrent of rain exploded on us, and as the waves propelled our vessel ever higher the faithful prayed and the unfaithful cursed, but both wept. Then our ark reached its peak and, for an eternal moment, perched on the snow-capped crest of a watery precipice. Looking down on that deep, wine-colored valley awaiting us, we were certain of two things. The first was that we were absolutely going to die! And the second was that we would almost certainly live!
Yes, we were sure of it. We—will—live!
And then we plunged, howling, into the abyss.
CHAPTER 1
I may no longer be a spy or a sleeper, but I am most definitely a spook. How can I not be, with two holes in my head from which leaks the black ink in which I am writing these words. What a peculiar condition, being dead yet penning these lines in my little room in Paradise. This must make me a ghostwriter, and as such, it is a simple, if spooky, matter to dip my pen into the ink flowing from my twin holes, one drilled by myself, the other by Bon, my best friend and blood brother. Put your gun down, Bon. You can only kill me once.
Or maybe not. I am also still a man of two faces and two minds, one of which might perhaps yet still be intact. With two minds, I am able to see any issue from both sides, and while I once flattered myself that this was a talent, now I understand it to be a curse. What was a man with two minds except a mutant? Perhaps even a monster. Yes, I admit it! I am not just one but two. Not just I but you. Not just me but we.
You ask me what we should be called, having been nameless for so long. I hesitate to give you a straight answer, as that has never been my habit. I am a man of bad habits, and every time I have been broken of one—never having given up such a thing willingly—I have always gone back to it, whimpering and dewy-eyed.
Take these words, for example. I am writing them, and writing is the worst of habits. While most people squeeze what they can from their lives, suffering for their paychecks, absorbing vitamin D as they enjoy the sunshine, hunting for another member of the species with whom to procreate or just to rut, and refusing to think about death, I pass my time with pen and paper in my corner of Paradise, growing ever whiter and thinner, frustration steaming from my head, the sweat of sorrow sticking to me.
I could tell you the name I have in my passport, VO DANH. I assumed this name in anticipation of coming here to Paris, or, as our French masters taught us to call it, the City of Light. We, Bon and I, arrived in the airport at night on a flight from Jakarta. Stepping out of the airplane, we were gripped by a sense of relief, for we had reached asylum, the fever dream of all refugees, especially those rendered refugees not just once or twice but three times: 1954, nine years after I was born; 1975, when I was young and reasonably handsome; and 1979, just two years ago. Was the third time the charm, as the Americans liked to say? Bon sighed before he pulled his airline-provided sleeping mask over his eyes. Let’s just hope France is better than America.
That hope was ill-advised if one judged countries by their border officials. The one who inspected my passport wore the blank mask of all security guards as he studied my photograph and then me. His pale face seemed displeased that someone had granted me access to his beloved country, this man who lacked both an upper lip and a mustache to disguise his lack. You’re Vietnamese, this white man said, the first words ever uttered to me on visiting my father’s homeland for the first time.
Yes! I am Vo Danh! Along with my best French accent, I gave the border policeman my most fawning smile, ingratiating to the point of being grating. But my father is French. Maybe I am also French?
His bureaucratic brain processed this statement, and when he finally smiled, I thought, Ah! I have made my first joke in French! But what he said was: No . . . you . . . are . . . definitely . . . not . . . French. Not . . . with . . . a . . . name . . . like . . . this. Then he stamped my passport with my date of entry, 18/07/81, and flicked it across the counter, already looking over my shoulder at the next supplicant.
I met Bon on the other side of passport control. We had at last stepped foot on la Gaule, as my father had taught me to call France in his parish school. It was fitting, then, that the airport was named after Charles de Gaulle, the greatest of great Frenchmen in recent memory. The hero who had liberated France from the Nazis while continuing to enslave us Vietnamese. Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity! No one was spared, not even the Americans or the Vietnamese, who bathed daily, or the French, who bathed less than daily. No matter our nationality, we all become accustomed to the aroma of our own contradictions.
What’s wrong? he said. Are you crying again?
I’m not crying, I sobbed. I’m just so overcome to be home at last.
By now Bon was used to my unpredictable bursts of tears. He sighed and took me by the hand. In his other hand, he carried only one bag, a cheap cloth duffel, a gift of the United Nations. His bag was nowhere near as fashionable as my leather one, presented to me by my old mentor Claude when I graduated from Occidental College in Southern California. My old man gave me one just like it when I left Phillips Exeter and went to Yale, Claude had told me, his eyes misting. Although he was a CIA agent who saw interrogation and assassination as his trade, he could be sentimental about some things, such as our friendship and high-quality men’s furnishings. I held on to the leather bag for this same nostalgic reason. Even though it was not very large, the bag, like Bon’s, was not full. Like most refugees we barely had any material belongings, even if our bags were packed with dreams and fantasies, trauma and pain, sorrow and loss, and, of course, ghosts. Since ghosts were weightless, we could carry an infinite number of them.
Passing the baggage carousels, we were the only passengers not pulling suitcases or pushing trolleys burdened with luggage and touristic expectation. We were not tourists, or expatriates, or returnees, or diplomats, or businessmen, or any class of dignified traveler. No, we were refugees, and our experience in a time machine called an international jetliner was not enough to dispel the year we had languished in a reeducation camp or the two years we had passed in a refugee camp on an Indonesian island called Galang. The stainless steel and glass and tile and bright lighting of the airport disoriented us after the bamboo and thatch and mud and candles of the camps, and we walked slowly and haphazardly, bumping against other passengers as we sought the exit. Eventually we came to it and the doors slid open, and we emerged under the vast ceiling of the international arrivals area, where a crowd of expectant faces inspected us.
A woman called out my name. It was my aunt, or, to put it more accurately, the woman who I pretended was my aunt. During my years in the United States as a communist spy inserted into the shabby ranks of the exiled South Vietnamese army, I had written her periodic letters, ostensibly regarding my personal travails as a refugee, but really encoded with secret messages in invisible ink about the machinations of some elements of this army who hoped to take back our homeland from communist rule. We had used Richard Hedd’s Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction as our common cipher, and it was her task to pass on my messages to Man, blood brother to me and to Bon. I greeted her with relief and trepidation, for she knew what Bon did not and could not ever know, that Man was a spy, as I had been. He was my handler, and if eventually he became my torturer in that reeducation camp, didn’t that suit me, a man with two minds? And if my aunt was not really my aunt, wasn’t that perfect for a man with two faces?
She was really Man’s aunt, and she looked exactly as she had described herself in her last letter: tall, thin, with jet-black hair. There ended the resemblance to what I had imagined of her: someone middle-aged with a back permanently bent from working as a seamstress, humbled by her devotion to the revolution. Instead, this woman’s closest relative was a cigarette, judging from the shape of her body and what she held in one hand. She exuded smoke and confidence, and with her aggressive high heels she equaled me in height, although she looked taller, given her slimness, her formfitting gray knit dress, and her hair styled into a peak, a uniform that she would wear every day. Although I knew she was likely in her fifties, she could have passed for someone in her late thirties, blessed as she was by both French style and a half share of Asian genes that rendered her ageless.
My God! She seized me by the shoulders and made kissing sounds as she touched first one cheek and then the other to mine in that charming French manner of greeting, which had never been extended to me by the French in my homeland, including my French father. You two need new clothes. And haircuts!
Yes, she was definitely French.
I introduced her to Bon in French, but he responded in Vietnamese. He had a lycée education, like me, but he hated the French and was here only for my sake. It was true that the French had given him a scholarship, but he had otherwise never benefitted from them in any way, except for traveling on the roads that they had designed, which were hard to be grateful for given that the slave labor of peasants like Bon’s family had built them. My aunt switched to Vietnamese as she led us to the taxi queue, inquiring about our travels and our travails in the purest, most classical version of our language, spoken by Hanoi’s intellectuals. Bon was silent. His own dialect blended the rural north, where our families originated from, and the rural south outside of Saigon. His parents had settled there after our Catholic exodus from the north in ’54, the first of our three refugee experiences. It was either shame for his dialect that kept him quiet or, more likely, seething rage. Anything from Hanoi might be communist, and anything that might be communist was undoubtedlycommunist, at least to someone as maniacally anticommunist as he was. He wasn’t even thankful for the only gift our communist captors ever gave him, the lesson that what does not kill you makes you stronger. That must mean Bon and I were now supermen.
What do you do? he finally said once we were in the taxi, my aunt between us in the back seat.
My aunt looked at me with great reproach and said, I see my nephew has said nothing about me. I’m an editor.
Editor? I almost said it out loud but stopped myself, for I was supposed to know who my aunt was. In seeking a sponsor for our departure from the refugee camp, I had written to her—not in code this time—because she was the only one I knew who was not an American. She would likely inform Man of my arrival, but I preferred that certainty over returning to America, where I had committed crimes of which I had never been convicted but of which I was not proud.
She named a publishing house I had not heard of. I make my living in books, she said. Mostly fiction and philosophy.
The noise in Bon’s throat indicated how he was not the kind that read, except for the army field manual, tabloid newspapers, and the notes that I stuck on the refrigerator door. He would have been more comfortable with my aunt if she were actually a seamstress, and I was thankful that I had told Bon nothing about her.
I want to hear about everything you’ve been through, my aunt said. The reeducation and then the refugee camp. You are the first ones I’ve met who went through reeducation!
Perhaps not tonight, dear aunt, I said. I did not tell her of the confession I had written under great duress in reeducation, hidden in my leather duffel’s false bottom, along with a disintegrating copy of Hedd’s book, its pages yellowing. I was not even sure why I bothered to hide my confession, for the last person who should read it, Bon, showed no interest in its existence at all. Like me, he had been tortured into writing his own confession many times in the reeducation camp; unlike me, he did not know that it was Man, his blood brother, who was the commissar of the camp. How could he, when the commissar did not have a face? What Bon did know, he said, was that a confession extracted under torture was nothing but lies. Like most people, he believed that lies, no matter how often you told them, never became truth. Like my father, the priest, I was the kind who believed quite the opposite.
My aunt’s apartment was in the 11th arrondissement, abutting the Bastille, where the French Revolution started. A spire that we drove by in the darkness marked the Bastille’s place in history. If I was once a communist and a revolutionary, then I, too, was a descendant of this event that decapitated aristocracy with the finality of a guillotine. Off the highway and into the city, I now felt truly in France, or, even better, Paris, with its narrow streets and its buildings of uniform height and design, not to mention the charming lettering over the storefronts, instantly recognizable from postcards and movies like Irma la Douce, which I had seen in an American movie theater soon after I arrived in Los Angeles as a foreign student. Everything about Paris was charming, as I would eventually discover, even its prostitutes and even on Sundays, in the early morning, after lunch, and in August, when everything was closed.
Over the next few weeks, I would never exhaust myself of that word: “charming”! Neither my homeland nor America could ever be described as charming. It was too moderate of an adjective for a country and a people as hot and hot-blooded as mine. We repulsed or seduced, but we never charmed. As for America, just think of Coca-Cola. That elixir is really something, embodying as it does the addictive, teeth-decaying sweetness of a capitalism that was no good for you no matter how it fizzled on the tongue. But it is not charming, not like freshly brewed dark coffee served in a thimble-sized cup on a miniature plate with a doll’s spoon, delivered by a waiter as assured in the value of his profession as a banker or an art collector.
The Americans owned Hollywood with its loudness and swagger, its generous brassieres and cowboy hats, but the French waged the charm campaign. It was evident in the details, as if Yves Saint-Laurent had designed all of France, from how our taxi driver actually wore a beret, to the name of my aunt’s street, rue Richard Lenoir, to the peeling blue paint on the steel door of my aunt’s apartment building, no. 37, to the echoing darkness of the hallway with its malfunctioning light, to the narrow wooden steps that led, four stories up, to my aunt’s apartment.
The fact that none of this besides the beret was intrinsically charming indicates how the French had an enormously unfair advantage in their charm offensive, at least for those like me who had been, despite our best efforts, nearly completely colonized. I say nearly because even as I was charmed huffing up those stairs, some small, reptilian part of my brain—the savage native in me—resisted the charm long enough to recognize it for what it was: the seduction of subjugation. It was that feeling that made me all but swoon at the shapely baguette that graced my aunt’s dining table. Oh, baguette! Symbol of France, and hence symbol of French colonization! So spoke one side of me. But the other side said, at the same time, Ah, baguette! Symbol of how we Vietnamese have made French culture our own! For we were good bakers of the baguette, and the banh mi we created with baguettes were far tastier and more imaginative than the sandwiches the French fashioned from them. That dialectical baguette, along with a cucumber salad in a rice wine vinaigrette, a pot of chicken curry with potatoes and carrots, a bottle of red wine, and, eventually, a caramel flan in a dark brown puddle of caramelized sugar, was the repast prepared by my aunt. How I had longed for these dishes or anything like them! Fantasies of food had beckoned to me during the endless months spent in the reeducation camp, located somewhere in Hell’s inner circle, and then in the refugee camp in Hell’s outer fringes, where the best that could be said about our diet was that it was insufficient and the worst that it was rancid.
My father taught me how to cook Vietnamese food, my aunt said as she spooned the curry into our bowls. My father was a soldier like the two of you, but a forgotten one.
The very mention of a father caused my heart to pause. I was in the land of my father, the patriarch who had rejected me. Would my life have been different if he had recognized me as his son and claimed my mother as his mistress, if not his wife? Part of me yearned for his love, and the other part of me hated myself for feeling anything for him besides scorn.
The French drafted my father to fight in the Great War, my aunt went on. Both Bon and I sat on the edges of our chairs, waiting for her to pick up her spoon or tear into the baguette, the signal to attack the meal lying so provocatively before us. Eighteen years old and swept from tropical Indochina to the metropole, along with tens of thousands of others. Not that he saw Paris until well after war’s end. And he never returned home. His ashes sit in my bedroom, on top of my bureau.
There’s nothing sadder than exile, poor Bon said, fingers trembling on the tablecloth. For most of his life, he would never have said anything remotely philosophical, but his own exile and the tragic loss of his wife and son had made him increasingly ruminative. Bring the ashes home, he continued. Only then will your father’s spirit truly know peace.
You would think such talk might blunt our appetites, but Bon and I were desperate to eat anything besides the subsistence rations of a nongovernmental organization tasked with keeping refugees alive but nothing more. Besides, the French and the Vietnamese shared a love for melancholy and philosophy that the manically optimistic Americans could never understand. The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.
So we talked and ate, but just as important, we drank and smoked and thought freely, indulging three of my bad habits, all of which reeducation had denied me. To satisfy those habits, my aunt not only opened successive bottles of red wine but also uncapped a Moroccan canister on her dining table that held two kinds of cigarettes, with and without hashish. Even “hashish” sounds charming, or at least exotic, in comparison to “marijuana,” America’s drug of choice, despite how both come from the same plant. Marijuana was what hippies and teenagers smoked, its symbol the terminally unfashionable band called the Grateful Dead, whom Yves Saint-Laurent would have lined up and shot for popularizing tie-dyed T-shirts. Hashish evoked the Levant and the souk, the strange and the exciting, the decadent and the aristocratic. One might try marijuana in Asia, but in the Orient, one smoked hashish.
Even Bon shared one of the potent cigarettes, and it was then, hunger sated, bodies and minds relaxed, feeling more than a touch French in our smug post-supper bliss, which was for refugees nearly as pleasurable as postcoital bliss, that Bon noticed one of the framed pictures on the mantel.
Is that—he stood up abruptly, staggered, caught his balance, and then walked across the fringes of a Persian rug to the fireplace. It’s—he pointed a finger at the face—it’s him.
When I said to my aunt that it seemed that they knew someone in common, she said, I can’t imagine who.
Bon turned from the mantel, red with rage. I’ll tell you who. The devil.
I leaped to my feet. If the devil was here, I wanted to meet him! But on closer inspection . . . That’s not the devil, I said, looking at a colorized photo of a man in his prime, white-haired and goateed, a halo of soft light around his head. It’s Ho Chi Minh.
Once I had been a dedicated communist like him, my mission continuing even in America, where I had worked to support the revolution at home by doing my best to scupper the counterrevolution abroad. I had kept this secret from nearly everyone, especially Bon. The only ones who knew my communist sympathies were my aunt and her nephew, Man. He, Bon, and I were blood brothers, the Three Musketeers, or perhaps, as history may judge us, the Three Stooges. Man and I were spies, secretly working against the anticommunist cause that Bon held so dear, the subterfuge squeezing us into all manner of difficult situations, our method of escape usually involving someone’s death. Even now Bon believed Man to be dead and me to be as anticommunist as he was, for he had seen how the communists had scarred me in reeducation, something he thought they would only do unto their enemies. I was not an enemy to communism, merely someone with a near-fatal weakness in being able to sympathize with communism’s actual enemies, including Americans. What reeducation had taught me was that dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance. Sympathy for the enemy might as well be sympathy for the devil, tantamount to betrayal. Bon, devout Catholic, fervent anticommunist, certainly believed this. He had killed more communists than anyone I knew, and while he realized that some of those he had killed were perhaps only mistaken for communists, he had faith that both History and God would forgive him.
Now he aimed his finger at my aunt and said, You’re a communist, aren’t you? I grabbed his hand out of reflex, knowing that if his finger were on a trigger, then my aunt might be dead in a moment. Bon slapped my hand away, and my aunt raised an eyebrow and lit a cigarette of the unlaced kind.
I’m a fellow traveler rather than a communist, she said. I have enough humility to know that I’m not a real revolutionary. Just a sympathizer. She was as nonchalant about her politics as only the French could be, a people so cool that they had almost no use for the air-conditioning that Americans demanded. Like my father, I’m more Trotskyist than Stalinist. I believe in power for the people and international revolution, not a party running the show for its own country. I believe in the rights of man and equality for all, not collectivism and the revolution of the proletariat.
Then why have a picture of the devil in your home?
Because he’s not the devil but the greatest of patriots. When he lived in Paris he even called himself Nguyen the Patriot. He believed in the independence of our homeland, as do you and I, as did my father. Shouldn’t we celebrate what we have in common?
She spoke calmly and with reason. She might as well have been speaking a foreign language to Bon. You’re a communist, Bon said conclusively. When he turned to me, he had the wild and frantic look of a wounded tomcat backed into a corner. I can’t stay here.
I knew then that my aunt’s life was safe. In Bon’s rigid honor code, repaying hospitality with murder was immoral. But it was nearly midnight and we had nowhere else to go.
Sleep here tonight, I said. Tomorrow we’ll find the Boss. His address was in my wallet, written down in the Pulau Galang camp before the magicians in charge of the camp’s departures had teleported the Boss to Paris a year ago. The mention of the Boss calmed Bon down, for the Boss owed him his life and had promised to take care of us if we ever made it here.
All right, he said, hashish, wine, and exhaustion blunting his murderous instincts. He looked again at my aunt with something like regret, the closest he might ever come to actual regret. It’s not personal.
Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.
My aunt retired to her bedroom, leaving us in the living room with a sofa and a pile of bedding on the Persian rug.
You never told me she was a communist, Bon said from the sofa, his eyes bloodshot.
Because you never would have agreed to stay here, I said, sitting down next to him. And blood’s more important than belief, isn’t it? I raised my hand to him, the one with the red scar on the palm, the mark of our blood brotherhood, sworn back in Saigon one night in a grove on the grounds of our lycée. We had sliced our palms and gripped each other’s hands, mingling our blood then and forever.
Now, ...
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