CHAPTER 12

The morning of the day that my aunt was going to retrieve me from the sanitarium, I took one last walk around the fields. How long had I been here? Almost two months? I had not known as restful a time as this for years. I had not burst into tears once, nor felt the pendulum of my mood swing too drastically. I had been almost . . . happy. Nothing could disturb me, not even the present that my aunt had given me on one of her visits. A new book from our old friend, she said. We’re going to translate it. I almost recoiled at the sight of the name on the cover—Richard Hedd, the author of Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction, the cipher we had used to send each other coded messages. His new book was titled, in English, The Evil Empire’s Oriental Origins. The other name on the cover was of the man who endorsed it, Henry Kissinger, credited as “Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize,” a punch line so funny it made me laugh. If I knifed somebody on the street, I was a murderer. But if I, like Kissinger, national security adviser to President Nixon, was agreeable to fleets of bombers dropping tons of bombs on thousands of innocent people, then I was a statesman. And if I negotiated a deal to temporarily halt my war of pacification, then I could be lauded for bringing peace. If Hitler had triumphed, he might have won the Nobel Peace Prize, too, since nothing brought peace more effectively than exterminating as many of one’s enemies as possible.

But I digress. Here is what Kissinger had to say about Hedd’s newest work: “An illuminating and insightful exploration of the Soviet mind, which, as Hedd shows with devastating effect, is its own worst enemy.” The thesis of the book was summarized in capital letters on the back cover:

THIS PENETRATING ANALYSIS BY A SEMINAL AUTHOR REVEALS HOW THE SOVIET UNION IS NOT TRULY EUROPEAN BUT RATHER ORIENTAL. LENDING NEW MEANING TO “ORIENTAL DESPOTISM,” RICHARD HEDD SHOWS HOW EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST WHEN IT COMES TO COMMUNISM VERSUS DEMOCRACY.

So communists were Orientals now? I was so flummoxed, being tainted by both communism and Orientalism, that I admit to not having yet read the book on that last day in Paradise. I much preferred spending my leisure time listening over and over to Johnny Hallyday songs in a futile attempt to understand his musical appeal, while also reading celebrity gossip in Paris Match (where I learned that the mayor of Paris and his wife had adopted a Vietnamese girl, a fate I envied). But I was carrying Hedd’s book on that last walk, anticipating that I would need to show my aunt that I appreciated her gift.

I sat down on a bench under a gazebo and opened the book, flipping quickly to the end—512 pages!—and reading the first lines of the last page:

We must renew our commitment to democracy and victory, because democracy and victory are not inevitable. We have the advantage of a superior—indeed, exceptional—system of democratic thinking and belief, inherited from the Greeks and refined over millennia. They, however, have brute power. They do not hesitate to slaughter millions, even if those millions are their own. History has shown that sometimes the brutish win. The Soviets are attempting to demonstrate that sad, ugly truth once more in Afghanistan. We must be committed to ensuring that Afghanistan is their Vietnam.

“Their Vietnam”? What did that mean? Was that like saying, We’ll always have Paris? Except that when people said “Paris” they meant flaky croissants, and the Eiffel Tower, and a cruise on the Seine like the one Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn took in Charade, and a nice glass of Sancerre, and gazing on Notre-Dame while an accordion-playing mime in a beret and striped shirt entertained them, and so on and so on and so on. And, God help me—here I use “God” figuratively—I believed in this Paris, too! A Paris that existed as much as God existed. But when a man like Richard Hedd said “Vietnam,” what he and most of his readers thought about were napalm, and burning girls, and bullets to the head, and crowds of faceless people under conical hats wearing basic black outfits that could have been the height of haute couture in Paris given the right circumstances. “Vietnam,” in shorthand, was war, tragedy, and death, and so on and so on, and how, I begged to know, would it ever cease being that way?

By the time my aunt came to pick me up, I was still gnawing on the thighbone of that question. There were so many bones in the past, ready to be dug up, that I would never run out of things to chew on. I wanted to stop, truly, but someone as guilty as me had no right to do so. Perhaps I had the right to forget the past only if I had been punished for my crime. The problem was that while I had been punished quite relentlessly in the reeducation camp, it had been for only one crime, watching the CIA-trained southern policemen rape the communist agent without trying to stop them. Meanwhile, all my other crimes were unpunished: betraying Bon, helping him kill the crapulent major, killing Sonny, and, most recently, being implicated in the demise of Beatles, Ugly, and Uglier. At least I had finally said that I was sorry to Sonny and the crapulent major. An apology was, at least, a beginning. But if this was the beginning, what was the ending?

My aunt pulled up to the entrance of Paradise in a charming Italian convertible borrowed from BFD. It’s nice to have rich friends and benefactors, she said. I had told her that my care had been paid for by my very generous boss, who was concerned about my nervous breakdown, which was a lie that bordered on the truth. I was nervous, and I was broken down. How are you feeling now? she said as we pulled away from Paradise.

I turned to look at the stone farmhouse that had been converted decades ago into the main office of Paradise, and I sighed wistfully. Paradise was the nicest place that I had ever lived, and all I had to do to live there was to die. I’m feeling great, I said, but when she did not look like she believed me, I felt the urge to explain myself further: I’ve had seven weeks of doing nothing. Those seven weeks felt more like seven months—

Maybe you should move back in with me. I don’t know if all this work you’re doing at the restaurant is good for you. Or living with Bon. It can’t be good for you if you had a nervous breakdown. You can sleep on my couch and you don’t have to pay rent.

What about your commission on the hashish?

No, you’re still going to keep paying me that as long as you’re selling to my friends. But otherwise just go back to school and focus on your French. She glanced at the copy of Black Skin, White Masks on my lap. Did you actually read that in French?

I did, I said. My French is really good now, practically back to where it was when I left the lycée.

That was colonial schoolboy French. You cannot hope to be French unless your French is perfect, she said. Even in America, if you speak perfect English but look like you or I do, you aren’t really American, are you?

I could hardly dispute her argument, but I said, You think you’re totally French? And that white people think you’re French?

Of course I’m French! We’re not like the Americans, who are truly racist. Look at how they treat black people. Slavery! Lynching! Segregation! Rape! Perpetual second-class citizenship. My God, it must be awful to be a black person in America. You can never stop being black in America. What is the fashionable term now? “Afro-American”? Imagine always having to live with a hyphen dividing you! Here, anyone can be French. But you must want to be French. You must look in the mirror and see a French person, not an Asian person or some kind of color. Do you want to be French?

I hesitated. Part of me indeed longed to be French, the part of me that could not help but salivate before a tender slab of foie gras. I could have been French if my father had only recognized me as his son, but instead he disavowed me, a disavowal that differed little from the forgetfulness that was the most important ingredient for enjoying foie gras, for if we could see how it was made, with a farmer force-feeding the poor goose with enormous amounts of grain through a funnel until its liver was about to burst, then perhaps we would not have such a taste for the delicacy, which, like many delicacies, was salted with misery. Even so, I wanted to say yes, truly, yes yes yes—

Do you want to be French? There they were, the hands of French culture and civilization being extended to me by my aunt, who was the living embodiment of what I could be, of what France promised. All I had to do was say—

No, I said. No.

Then that is where the problem lies.

I was the problem, of course. I was always the problem. When I looked in the mirror, I saw someone neither French nor American nor Vietnamese. No, I was not a nation. I was nobody, negation at best, bastard at worst. I took heart from Fanon, who wrote from the position of the Negro, who was also a kind of bastard, at least in the eyes of the Negrophobic. His dilemma was also my dilemma: “As I begin to recognize that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognize that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it.” For the Negro, there was no denying being a Negro, just as there was no way of me denying being a bastard. While people in general were alienated from themselves under capitalism, as Marx argued, so that even the middle class felt itself to be unhappy despite its wealth, people of color—and I counted myself as one—were doubly alienated because racism compounded their experiences under capitalism and its dancing partner, colonialism. There was only one solution to this alienation that was created not by the Negro or the bastard, but by the real bastards, the racists and colonizers who blamed the victim for the conditions that the victimizer created. And that solution was “to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.”

Yes! I, too, was universal, and my universal identity was to be me and utterly me, even if I was completely fucked up, and isn’t that what the French wanted? The French saw our shared past as a tragic happenstance of history, a romantic love story gone wrong, which was half correct, whereas I saw our past as a crime that they had committed, which was completely correct. And who are you going to believe? The rapist or the product of the rape? The civilized or the bastard?

I do hope you’ll come and stay, my aunt went on. But I do have to warn you that someone is staying with me for a couple of nights right now.

Let me guess. Fifty-fifty chance. Our friend the Maoist PhD?

No.

BFD?

What did I say about you being depressingly conventional? I just sleep with them, I wouldn’t actually let them stay more than a night. You’ll meet her at the show.

My aunt was so full of surprises that somehow I was not even surprised.

We navigated through a quarter whose streets were narrower than the average French mind, finally finding parking around the corner from la Mutualité, where the Union’s Tet culture show was taking place. Turning the corner of rue Saint-Victor on foot, we saw a noisy crowd gathered outside the hall, two or three dozen Vietnamese, from the looks of them, asserting their Frenchness or aspirational Frenchness by engaging in one of the most popular French national pastimes, protesting. Their signs said COMMUNISM IS EVIL, DOWN WITH COMMUNISM, HO CHI MINH IS A MURDERER, et cetera, ad nauseam. They shouted these and other slogans in Vietnamese, while the people entering the hall spoke in muted French. The protesters exuded the je ne sais quoi of being recent refugees. Was it the men’s pants bunching at the ankles, drawing attention to dusty shoes? Or the women’s unfashionable haircuts with blunt bangs?

Oh là là, murmured my aunt, which I think meant that it was a little uncomfortable to have so many Vietnamese people in one place, not just gathering for some tasteful affirmation of their origins, like eating a meal or staging a culture show, but making noise. Making noise was not something the Vietnamese did in France. Making noise was something Vietnamese people in Vietnam or America did. The people of Vietnamese descent in France were quiet, discreet, charming, and, most of all, harmless. They were of a better class, or had been until now, imagining themselves as French (at their assimilatory best) and exiles (at their individualistic worst). But there was nothing assimilationist or individualistic about this crowd of tacky refugees.

Communists! a woman shouted, pointing at us. I wanted to say, I’m an ex-communist, if you please, but refrained. My aunt, on the other hand, aimed her finger right back and said, Communism unified and freed the country. People like you kept the country divided and now you’re trying to divide us with your anticommunism.

You stupid bitch—

You’re the stupid bitch, you fat cow—

One could not be both a bitch and a cow, but perhaps a bastard had no right to point that out. I pulled my aunt through the door, unsure whether she was suddenly being very Vietnamese or simply very Parisian, as rudeness was second nature to both cultures.

So embarrassing, my aunt muttered once we had passed the threshold. Those people!

Indeed, I murmured back as the Chairman of the Union emerged from the crowd attending the reception before the show. He was in a considerable state of distress. My dear, he said to my aunt, for they were already acquainted, who are these people?

These people are our people, I wanted to say, but that was not entirely true. The protesters outside saw themselves as Vietnamese who happened to be in France, whereas the people inside saw themselves as French who happened to have a connection to Vietnam. Given these two choices, perhaps being a bastard was not so bad after all. I spotted Bon, who had always accepted my being a bastard, in the foyer. He loitered in a corner, wearing human camouflage: clean-shaven face, brushed hair, and a passable gray double-breasted suit with exaggerated shoulder pads, all of which, I assumed, could be credited to Loan. I had not seen him so presentable or so uncomfortable since before the fall of Saigon, when Linh made him dress like an adult.

You don’t look like shit anymore, Bon said by way of greeting.

And you look like a normal human being, I replied.

Oh, yeah? Because I feel like shit. I should be outside with the Association.

The Association?

The Association for Free Vietnamese People. They’ve decided they’re not going to let the communists of the Union speak for all Vietnamese people. I should be with them protesting these people, not inside pretending to be friends with these people.

I saw Loan approaching, and I said, You’re doing it for Loan, not for yourself.

He grimaced and kept quiet as Loan came up, dressed in a silken red ao dai with silken yellow trousers, which were either the colors of the anticommunist flag (if looked at in one way) or the colors of the communist flag (if looked at the other way). Either way, the young woman wearing these colors resembled the willowy maidens who symbolized our country itself in the lacquer paintings and mother-of-pearl engravings found in nearly every home and certainly every curio shop. Bon brightened and smiled tenderly, which was somewhat discomfiting since the Bon I knew and loved was a melancholic murderer. Darling, she said, and Darling, he said back, utterly bewildering me, for the world was a very confusing place if Bon could find love and I, someone wont to fall in love every few months, could not. Loan invited me to her apartment for dinner, insisting on it with great warmth. Her hospitality touched me, reminding me of humanity—not only hers, but mine.

I would be honored, I said.

You look wonderful, she said by way of parting, moving on to greet friends who had made it through the protest. Even though one part of me knew she was lying, the other part of me wanted to believe her. Perhaps I was actually on my way back to humanity, feeling my way blindly, aided by small kindnesses. Bon spoiled my mood when he whispered, Got something to show you, and took a photo from his blazer’s inner pocket. A picture of the bastard.

At first I thought he meant me, but the picture was of someone else, a man wearing a brown fedora, a dark blue overcoat, and . . . a white mask. Unlike the masks of tragedy and comedy, crying and laughing, this mask was smooth, featureless, and expressionless, covering most of his face except for slots for his eyes and mouth. Behind him, a pedestrian had turned to look over her shoulder, concerned and puzzled by a man wearing a mask. At least she was not horrified and shocked by a man without a face.

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.