September 20, 1933
“To the Nguyen home?” my driver asked me as I rolled up my window. When I first arrived in 1930, I always drove myself to Khoi’s house, but with the amount we drank, it proved to be a problem when one night I drove my little red car right into a lamppost. Luckily, the damage was minimal, and Khoi had the car repaired for me before Arnaud even noticed, but he insisted that if we were to drink, I had to use a chauffeur. He said he really preferred my body with my head attached.
“Yes, to Mr. Khoi’s, please,” I told Tuan, trying to sound nonchalant. I slipped him enough money in addition to his salary to know that he would always be discreet and wouldn’t spread the news of my affair all over Hanoi, but I still couldn’t shake my discomfort. Arnaud still liked to remind me that before the French colonized Indochine, local women accused of adultery were given a death sentence. And not just a simple bullet to the head. These temptresses were trampled to death by elephants for their sins. When Arnaud thought I was being too flagrant with my affair with Khoi, he would make an elephant noise and wave his arm like a trunk. At least he had not lost his sense of humor in Indochine.
As we rode out of the city, I watched as the buildings started to thin out, the grass growing greener and the trees taller beyond the city limits. Very few of the French lived so far out. This part of the city, the area to the west of the Grand Lac, was reserved for the old world, the moneyed Chinese and Tonkinois.
When we were in Paris, we never bothered to leave the city. We barely left Khoi’s apartment on the Île de la Cité, or Sinh’s or Anne-Marie’s apartments, always aiming for discretion, especially for Anne-Marie, so that her double life would stay hidden. But when Khoi and I finally found ourselves in Indochine together, it was like a whole new world was waiting for us. One lived outdoors. I discovered a side of Khoi that I hadn’t known before, like that he was an exceptional swimmer who could practically breathe underwater. He also knew the names of all the flowers that bloomed around his house, and didn’t mind sitting in the blazing sun for hours. The only times he really came inside were when I visited, and then it was usually right up to the bedroom. After seven years, that part of our relationship hadn’t cooled in the least.
But now, with Jessie and Victor in the colony, we had far less time for days spent in the bedroom. We had much more work to do.
Since Khoi and I had been reunited, we’d been trying to fulfill our promise to Anne-Marie to find out what really happened to Sinh, which had proved, so far, to be an impossible task. We knew Paul Adrien, the man who had killed him, was in France. To avenge our friend’s death, we turned our energies to spreading the message of communism through the growing cells embedded on the plantations, all while bringing major instability to the Michelin machine.
For several years, we’d known that a large communist uprising could be enough to push Michelin out of the colony, to sell their massive holdings. The strike in 1930 involving 1,300 men at Phu Rieng during Tet had nearly caused Michelin to leave. They had viewed it as a communist uprising, when really it had just been their employees asking for basic rights.
Anne-Marie confirmed through company documents she was able to obtain that Michelin management were seriously considering leaving despite the millions they’d poured into their holdings. Even the French newspapers I’d read said the rubber men in Clermont-Ferrand were terrified. That was when we realized that a mass strike, undeniably fueled by communist sentiment, could scare the Michelins out of the colony, the best revenge of all.
Their plantations would take on other ownership, yes, but they would surely bring more humane labor practices. The other plantations in Cochinchina had a retention rate of nearly 90 percent of workers. On Michelin plantations, only 30 percent signed another contract, and those who did so simply couldn’t afford the train journey home. Laborers were better off anywhere but Phu Rieng and Dau Tieng.
After Anne-Marie found the reports, Khoi started to give more money to a communist party member who made frequent trips from Hanoi to the plantations. He also increased the payments to a man he’d hired, Tran Van Sang, to be his eyes and ears on the plantations. We needed a repeat of the Phu Rieng strike, but this time, it needed to occur on both plantations.
But with Victor’s shocking move to the colony, things had changed again. It was imperative that Michelin be turned upside down, and that Victor be viewed as the one who let the communists light the match. For Victor was nearly as complicit in Sinh’s death as André Michelin.
In 1930, Anne-Marie had discovered that Victor had actually transmitted every correspondence between Michelin and the secret police. He had even sealed the envelope that held the death warrant for Sinh. The men in power at Michelin had decided to execute him, but Victor had been the messenger. Now, he was in Indochine to bring peace and prosperity to the plantations and then be rewarded when he returned to France. I was hell-bent on making sure that it never happened. Victor needed to be seen as the family failure, and soon.
Tuan opened the car door for me when we pulled up to Khoi’s home, then drove off to idle elsewhere, as he knew we preferred. I had sent Anne-Marie a photograph of Khoi’s house when I’d first arrived a few months after the 1930 strike—I wanted so badly to feel like we were still tied together, still as close as we’d been in Paris—but she’d never acknowledged it. A different world had started absorbing her by then.
Before I could ring the bell, the imposing front door was opened by Khoi’s head housekeeper, Kim Ly.
“Monsieur Khoi is finishing his morning swim,” she said as she opened the door wider, expressionless as always.
She walked me through the three sitting rooms, even though I could have found my way in the dark, and opened the large glass door that led to the backyard. Unlike in central Hanoi, where Arnaud and I lived, with little space for gardens, Khoi had several acres.
Kim Ly left me silently, and I propped myself against a chair, still in the shadow of the house’s deep roof. I looked out to the pool and watched Khoi’s body move fluidly as he did his laps. Khoi was the only Annamite in all five regions to have a private swimming pool, another detail that made him legendary. He swam another hundred meters before he noticed me, then stopped in the middle of the pool and did a few quick strokes to the edge. He braced his muscular arms on the side and pulled himself out in one smooth motion, then stood up and shook out his thick black hair, which seemed much longer when it wasn’t combed back with pomade. A boy rushed over with a folded white towel and Khoi’s metal-rimmed sunglasses. He put them on, quickly used the towel, and walked up to me in his bathing trunks.
“Hello, darling,” he said in his deep voice, pulling me against him and laughing as I squirmed at his wet touch. “You’re early, yes?”
“I’m late,” I countered.
“Are you? How unlike you,” he said, smiling. “Would you like to swim? The water feels perfect on a day like this. Scorching, isn’t it?”
I looked at his broad, dark shoulders, glistening with beads of water that he had missed with the towel. They trickled down his firm back like tiny pieces of glass.
“Scorching,” I replied.
After seven years, I still had trouble taking my eyes off Khoi. Every inch of him still mesmerized me just as it had the first time we had been naked together. It had been in Khoi’s apartment, in the middle of the day, and when he asked if I wanted to draw the blinds, I’d said no. I hadn’t considered how it would make me sound. My carnal instincts were winning over my modesty, and I’d very much wanted to see him, all of him, in full daylight. As flooded with light as it was in Indochine, it was still how we preferred to make love. That hadn’t changed, but so much had. Our relationship felt far bigger than just us now.
“Let’s head upstairs,” he said, putting his cold lips against my neck. “You can help me get dressed, and I can help you get undressed.”
After we had made love for nearly an hour, we pulled apart on his bed, and one of Khoi’s servants rolled us cigarettes. As soon as he had finished, he lit mine and then Khoi’s.
“I’ll light the rest of Madame de Fabry’s cigarettes,” said Khoi. “Thank you.” He dismissed him with a nod.
“Apologies,” he said, propping himself up higher. “He’s new.”
When I started coming to his home—or La Maison Lua, the silk house, as the outsiders called it—I had been shocked by how many servants he had. None of us had had any in Paris, which had just added to our sense of wildness and freedom. But that was gone here. In Khoi’s house, I soon learned that even when he dismissed them, they stayed right outside the room, waiting in case he called for them. This meant that we wanted for nothing, but they could hear us making love. It was a very strange adjustment after the anonymous student life we’d lived together in France, but Khoi said they were his father’s servants, as was the house, so everything had to remain as it had been.
I fell in love with the silk house immediately. But I found it strange that Khoi lived in it alone while the rest of his family lived in the city.
“My father wants me to live here, and live this way,” Khoi had explained. “In many ways, he is a collaborator just like Sinh’s father. Perhaps not to that extreme, but just one step beneath. As I am his eldest son, he insists that I live like a little French nobleman. He thinks it’s important for me, as the most Western of us all, to entertain the government officials, show off my perfect French, quote their great writers, eat their food in front of them so they think of me as one of the good ones. So that they consider me a friend—inferior, of course, but still a friend. That way, if the colonists succeed in producing silk, like they did rubber, perhaps they’ll let us keep a finger in it. It’s a business decision, and he expects me to play along.”
“But you don’t mind,” I’d said, looking around the house. “Admit it.”
“I used to,” he’d replied. “After Paris, where I embraced a far simpler lifestyle, I minded very much. But now that you’re here, I mind less. Besides, if I say yes to everything my father asks, he tends to ignore my personal life. And right now, we really need him to ignore our extracurricular activities.”
I turned around in bed and looked at the wall to the right of us. On it was a framed picture of Anne-Marie and Sinh. She was in her usual tuxedo, and he was carrying her in his arms like she was a new bride. They were barefoot, and he was walking down stone steps right into the Seine. I remembered the moment so vividly. It had been a few minutes past dawn, and I was just outside the frame as Khoi shot the photo. At first, the two were simply dancing around by the banks, and by the end of it, they were swimming in the river. When we’d heard a police whistle from a nearby bridge, all four of us had run, Khoi dropping the camera but going back for it. It was as if he knew that the film inside would one day be precious to us.
Since leaving Anne-Marie in Paris in 1930, we had had long periods where we’d lost contact with her. She had at first remained in her parents’ home, finishing her university years and adhering to her parents’ demands while still secretly writing for L’Humanité. But in 1932, her parents had discovered that she was still involved with the paper, that she was continuing to spread a communist message in direct opposition to her father’s political beliefs, and this time from right under their roof. Furious, they’d shut her out of their home. With no family, and Paul Adrien still unfindable, there was nothing left for her in Paris. The last we had heard, she was in Rome, having joined an Italian underground political group fighting against Mussolini and fascism.
In the last letter that I received from her, sent from Rome, she had written, “I do dream about coming to Indochine one day, despite my banishment from the colony. I feel perhaps my body would be revived if I went there, if I saw Sinh’s world, met his parents, if they would even meet me. But the truth is, I know my soul wouldn’t make it. You wouldn’t recognize me, Marcelle. I’m a shred of myself.”
“We will just have to be the ones to carry on then,” Khoi had said after we hadn’t heard from her for four months. “We must succeed in pushing the Michelins off their thrones.”
The whole country needed to be taken out of French hands—it became our ultimate goal, because it had been Sinh’s dream. To put the country back in the hands of its sons and daughters. There were over twenty million Annamites in the colony and less than thirty thousand French, and yet they, we, controlled it all. That had to change.
“I want to talk about Victor Lesage,” Khoi said, turning back to me, his body wrapped up in the silk sheets. I nodded. I had thought of little besides the Lesages since they’d arrived.
“That night at the Officers’ Club, he said—”
“He said, according to Arnaud, that he’s determined to make the plantations more profitable than they are. ‘Increase our profit margins, by any means necessary, even in a time of economic crisis.’ He’s also panicked by labor unrest, about the negative newspaper stories that come with it. He deemed all that to be as pressing as their margins. And then he beat them all flat at billiards.”
“Nothing about actually helping the men themselves then,” said Khoi.
“No,” I replied, looking again at the photo on the wall. “Does that surprise you?”
“Nothing about that family surprises me anymore, except how a lovely creature like Anne-Marie came from it.”
“I miss her,” I said, wishing I could do more than just look at her picture. “Victor is who we assumed he would be. Our plan to sink his family’s company, and with it his career, is still the right one. I still see him as the man who mailed Sinh’s death warrant, but we can’t only focus on him. He and his wife are very much a pair.”
“You’re quite sure?” said Khoi. I thought of Jessie waving to the policeman right before Dinh’s body had been left like a sack of garbage in front of his house. That genuine smile. The way her eyes shone with excitement.
“I’m sure,” I replied.
Khoi stood up, pulled on a pair of linen trousers that were hanging over a chair, and fell back on the bed, flicking the ash from his cigarette in the small porcelain dish on his side table. The hand-painted spool of silk thread now forever tied us back to our days in Paris.
“I need to go into the city today,” he said, speaking at a normal volume again.
“Whatever for? I just got here.”
“Business,” he said. “If I don’t want you to be in head-to-toe French silk, then I need to focus as much as I can on Lua Nguyen Thanh, too.”
For the past twenty years, the French government had been trying to break into the local silk industry, setting up a trade group and medium-sized factories in Nam Dinh and Ninh Binh. Their efforts had gone nowhere at first, but since the 1920s, when a French silk company founded in Lyon began investing heavily in the colony, the government had been trying with more gusto to expand its mulberry plantings so it had something to send to the factories. They had even opened a new factory in Phnom Penh, in the far-flung western territories of Indochine, in Cambodia, no longer satisfied with their investments in the north.
“Would you like to stay in the house or come in, too?”
“I’ll go back,” I replied.
“Come, let’s find the rest of my clothes,” he said, jumping up and grabbing me by the hand. We tumbled in our respective states of undress into his closet, and I ran my hands against his suits, all arranged by color, the whites shading into black.
Khoi no longer tried to be the shabby Right Bank intellectual. He now dressed like the man his parents had raised him to be.
I don’t know what I imagined he would become when we were finally in Indochine together. I knew he was not going to be waving a French flag, nor could I see him following Sinh and raising a red one. But now that Khoi had been home for three years, his intentions had crystallized: to work for both his family and his countrymen, refusing to give up the first for the second.
“Are you meeting your father?” I asked, moving over to where Khoi’s silk shirts and jackets hung in his closet, many Nguyen green.
“I am. It’s our weekly conversation where I try to pull him in my direction and he attempts to hold me back. But he’s coming around to investing more money in outside industries.”
“Good, considering that the French are grabbing at silk.”
“It’s not just because of silk, though. It’s not just for us. We must prosper so that we can lead the country out of this darkness. If the communists seize power, how will Indochine survive in a global economy? We will have our independence, but we can’t eat it, can we. I want to make sure our country doesn’t sink when our current captains are forced out,” he said, his voice seeming to bounce off the closet walls.
I knew that Khoi could distinguish between French colonialists and me, but my heart seized at the thought of being evicted with the rest of them. I watched as he turned to the mirror, picked up a comb, and ran it through his thick hair. “Except for me,” I said as breezily as I could. “You can convince the government to make an exception for me. And Arnaud, I suppose.”
“I promise,” Khoi said, smiling. “Even Arnaud. Though he will most likely try to murder me at a chamber meeting before we get to that point.”
“He will not. He’s too lazy.”
“Fine, he will hire someone to kill me, then. But before I convince a new governor to pass the de Fabry law, we need to focus on how to make Indochine an economic power, how to export our products successfully, the very ones the French are robbing us of right now.”
“Like Nguyen silk. Paint the world green,” I said, running my fingers over his jackets.
“Silk, but not just,” he said, watching me. “Resources, but not just. We need to be ready to lead both economically and politically. Right now what do we have? Annamite puppets.”
“Not you,” I said. Khoi was in the chamber of representation of the people of Tonkin and part of the chamber of commerce which Arnaud led.
“Please,” he scoffed as I took one of his blazers from the hanger and put it around my shoulders. “You know as well as I do that the chamber of representation is toothless. We meet once a year and the French don’t even bother consulting us then. It’s an embarrassment. If Sinh hadn’t turned me into an anti-colonial, being a part of that group would have done the trick. And the chamber of commerce only half listens to me, and only because of certain connections,” he said, an amused smile on his face. He slipped the green jacket off my shoulders and put it on his.
“But you’re still part of both chambers.”
“Of course,” he said, looking for shoes that matched. “One, because that way I can remind Arnaud that I am younger and far more virile than him,” he said, grinning. “And two, because when the country is finally ours again, I will already be in a position to help push it the right way. Right now we are forbidden from having political parties. Anyone who tries to organize is followed by the secret police. We can’t even whisper the word independence, or organize without landing in prison.”
“I know all this,” I said, pointing to a pair of brown shoes. Khoi nodded and reached for them.
“Well, my father certainly needs to be reminded. He needs to see that we need more than silk.”
In labor practice, the Nguyens were already closer to a communist model than the punishing ways of the French. Khoi’s family knew the importance of keeping workers for the long term. Theirs was an industry where constant retraining of artisans and laborers was a financial burden. It was in their interest to build loyalty. The French, by contrast, and the Michelins especially, seemed convinced that profits came from spending very little. And the least always went to the workers.
“So, books?” I asked. “Is that next?” Last year Khoi had thrown a thick tome into his swimming pool while rather intoxicated to test the quality of the paper. Since then, he had invested a considerable sum into publishing. Linguistic nationalism was part of economic freedom, he said. Using the Quoc Ngu script. The money in publishing was going to increase tenfold in the coming years, he was sure of it, so why not become an investor, a backer of words, of ideas.
“Yes, books. Paper. But also mining. We’re already invested in Nouvelle-Calédonie, and now the rumor is that they’ve struck gold in Laos. We need to be part of that, too.”
“Gold? Really?” I said, laughing. “Is that what Sinh would want? Mining for gold? Is that going to further the global communist call?”
“It’s not like I personally want to fill my pockets with gold, Marcelle,” he said, taking a step away from me. “It’s for my family in the short term, and my country in the long. I can’t think about the global communist cause right now. I know that’s what Anne-Marie wants. What I imagine you want. The whole world turning together.”
“Of course. Any true communist desires that.”
“Well, I think we both know I’m not a true communist. I’m a true anti-colonial,” he said, calming down. “And right now, supporting the global cause does not support me or Indochine. I need to think about how we will feed ourselves after independence. I need to think about how I can help. I need to think bigger. For my family, and then for my people.”
“Sounds like something Jessie Lesage would say as she extols the benefits of capitalism,” I said, trying to keep the petulance out of my voice. Khoi and I were partners in all the ways that mattered, but his goals were, first and foremost, to protect family and country.
“Ah, the mystery of Jessie Lesage. I think that even before I meet Victor, I need to meet his wife. If you believe she’s complicit, perhaps she is. Can you arrange it?” he asked.
“Of course.” I paused for a moment and looked out the window at the shining water in the swimming pool below us. “Your boat. That’s where we should take her,” I said, smiling at the thought. “She’ll be quite thrown off guard if you can invite the right characters.”
“I’ll do my part,” said Khoi. “But you should invite Red.”
I kissed him and smiled. “I will definitely invite Red. I hope she hasn’t met him yet. This town is about as large as a butter dish.”
“Take a chance,” said Khoi, grinning. “Red is always a chance worth taking.”