October 4, 1933
“Have you ever been to Haiphong?” I asked Trieu as I prepared for the journey. It was just past seven in the morning, but I was already dressed.
“Yes, I’ve been,” Trieu said. “With Madame van Dampierre. She attended a party at the opera house there, Nhà hát Tây—or the Western Theatre, in French—and Cam and I traveled with her since she insisted on bringing all the boys. I think what you are doing, traveling alone, is a better idea. It’s very modern for a woman to travel alone. A foreign woman especially.”
“Yes, I’m excited, but I’m a bit anxious about silly things,” I said, sure that my nerves showed. “Such as, what if I miss my train or can’t find the hotel that Victor has reserved for me?” I went on. “Part of me wishes he was coming along,” I admitted. “Though that doesn’t sound very modern of me, does it?”
“If something like that happens, then you just ask for help,” Trieu said, kindly. “And all the pousse-pousse drivers know the Hôtel du Commerce. It’s the prettiest in Haiphong. It’s even prettier than the Métropole here. They’ll expect that that’s where you’re going. Unless Lanh has arranged a car?”
“No, I asked him not to. I prefer to take a pousse-pousse. You can see so much more that way. Hear everything, too.”
Trieu nodded and looked at my outfit, my gray pants and short-sleeved white blouse with a slightly puffed sleeve, all cinched by a thin alligator-skin belt.
She pointed at my head and turned back to the closet, emerging with a hat, a bright geranium-colored straw boater with a narrow grosgrain ribbon that edged the crown. It was designed by Reboux and cost a pretty penny, but I hadn’t worn it yet, wondering if it was a bit much for a day hat. It was wide-brimmed, with a dramatic dip on the left side, but I had to admit it was striking.
“You should wear this,” Trieu said. “Un canotier en paille. I think it’s your prettiest straw hat. And you’ll feel confident in it. The color is something only a self-assured woman would wear. One who doesn’t get nervous.”
She placed the hat gently on my head, so as not to muss my waved hair, and I looked at my reflection in the mirror.
“Isn’t it pretty?” asked Trieu. “There’s something about the color that makes it even lovelier.”
“Yes, there is,” I said, smiling. I looked at it from all angles and then moved to my dressing table. I reached into a drawer and applied a bold lipstick to match, my hand trembling slightly.
“Beautiful,” she said approvingly.
When Trieu was gone, I checked my suitcase again and added one last thing to my handbag. Victor had left me an envelope with 1,000 piastres, the equivalent of 300 American dollars, in it. He said I was to give it to the contact as a bonus.
I placed it carefully inside my bag, both wishing I didn’t have to carry such a sum of money with me and reminding myself that I was foolish to let my nerves get the better of me. How many husbands let their wives be involved in their work? Especially such important work. All Marcelle did was sun herself at the club all day. She certainly wasn’t allowed to have any involvement with Arnaud’s business dealings at the chamber of commerce.
I had decided to come to Indochine, and I had to be devoted to us prospering here. I looked at my reflection and saw a very competent woman looking back at me.
“Off to the house of a hundred suns?” said Lanh when he opened the door of the Delahaye for me. I got in slowly, then sat up rigidly in the back seat.
“The what?” I asked. “The house of a hundred suns?”
“That’s what I call la gare de Hang Co,” he said, closing my heavy door. He sat down in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition, and gently moved the car out of our driveway, launching into the story of why he chose that moniker.
I smiled, thinking about a young, hopeful Lanh. Haiphong was just a ray, then. A simple sun ray.
At the station, Lanh didn’t leave my side until he’d made sure the stationmaster was there to take care of me. In fact, the stationmaster and a porter met the car as it pulled up in front of the elegant building, then stayed with me until the train arrived.
Once inside the black steam-engine-powered train, I again sat rigidly, my back barely grazing the seat behind me, highly aware of the amount of piastres I was carrying.
The car was half full, and I was thankful that so far no one had sat beside me, or across the aisle. I felt a breeze and looked up to see eight fans on the carriage’s ceiling, one on either side of the four round light fixtures. The walls were a polished wood, the windows large and separated by decorative mirrored paneling—it looked as elegant as any train I’d ridden in France, perhaps even nicer.
A few men in light traveling suits boarded, hanging their hats on the hooks near every window. I watched for other female passengers, but there was only one in the car, and she seemed to be accompanying her husband. I kept my head in my book, Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, which I’d brought with me from France.
As the steam engine hissed and the train started to move, the wheels chugging beneath us, I turned to watch the house of a hundred suns slowly disappearing, and then the city of Hanoi receding, too, as the train made its way to the mile-long Paul Doumer Bridge. In the distance I could see a tennis club, home to a game that was as popular in Indochine as it was at home. The train pushed past it quickly, and the houses and buildings thinned out even more as we started the bridge crossing. Below us flowed the Red River, palm trees leaning from its banks. The water, which looked murky during the day, especially from a distance, looked bright and dusted in yellow sunlight as we rode over it.
Beyond the river, the view gave way to rice paddies, the earth tamed into squares, the people working the land bent over, shielded by their conical hats while their feet sank in the mud. The rice paddies were almost an iridescent green, the plants pointing straight up into the sunny sky.
I didn’t close my eyes on the four-hour journey, as the sight of the countryside proved to be very calming. But eventually open space gave way to the sights of a city and the nerves crept my way again. When we stopped, I rushed off the train, the first to disembark. I reached for my bag, ignoring the porters trying to help me, and hurried across the station lobby’s marble-tiled floor.
I still had three hours before I had to meet the recruiter, but I quickly hailed one of the waiting rickshaws, climbed in with the driver’s help, and turned to look back at the facade of the small station. This particular sun ray was bright yellow.
After a quick ride through the city, which felt tiny after Hanoi, I checked into the hotel, the Hôtel du Commerce, an ornate white building that resembled a grand hotel in Venice.
After a long nap, made possible with the help of a very large whiskey, I changed into fresh clothes, a pair of white trousers, wide in the leg, and a dark blue blouse, perfect to set off the hat, which I wanted to keep. Trieu was right; it was something a confident woman would wear.
At five p.m., with the money tucked into my bag, I headed off in another rickshaw. I knew that somewhere behind me was the grand opera house Trieu had mentioned, and beautiful homes painted with yellow and orange ochre, like ours, but I wasn’t going anywhere near them. Victor had told me that the address I was headed to housed another café. The Café Mat Troi—it had the same name as the one where the communist had been thrown in Hanoi. He apologized but said that all cafés in Indochine seemed to have the same name.
“I suppose it’s high time we import our creativity, too,” he’d said, giving me a kiss on the head.
I sat at a glass table outside the café and ordered a Pernod and soda, not allowing myself anything stronger, as I knew it might push me from feeling bold to feeling sick.
“Madame Lesage,” said a Frenchman approaching me. He was tall and handsome and dressed more like Victor than someone who spent time with coolies in a port town. “Welcome back to Haiphong. I take it your journey was a pleasant one.”
“It was,” I said, his presence putting me at ease. His movements suggested that he’d been in Indochine for many years. He sat and ordered a fine à l’eau.
“I won’t keep you,” he said. “I’m sure you have better things to do than spend time by the dock, but this is the paper your husband requested. It’s very important,” he said quietly. “Though I suppose he knows that since he sent you.”
“Thank you,” I said, taking it from him and placing it in my bag. As I did, I reached for the money and handed it over quickly, relieved to have it out of my possession. “May I ask what exactly it is? This paper?” I said, realizing Victor had never told me. Now I felt rather embarrassed that I didn’t know what I was collecting.
“It’s a list of names,” he said. “Men that already work for you, but that are perhaps up to something untoward. Men that shouldn’t be trusted. They should, if possible, be sent back north, away from the plantations, away from you,” he said, smiling. “Men like that are capable of starting an uprising. Or worse.”
I reached back into my bag, unfolded the paper, and looked at it.
“All of these?” I asked glancing up at him. There were ten on the page. “Are you sure?”
“All,” he responded firmly. “That is what the recruiters who work farther north, on the rice farms, said. They get their information directly from men who were on the plantations but have come back home.”
“I suppose I’m glad we have such capable people working up north, then.”
“We have to,” he said. “It’s 1933. The northern corners of the country are about to ignite.”
“Well, it is I who won’t keep you,” I said. “Will you be traveling today?” I asked as I stood. “Or do you live in Haiphong?”
“I live here,” he confirmed. “I know most of us live in the bigger cities, but I’ve always liked Tonkin. The climate is much better here, and the pretty women all eventually make their way through,” he said, smiling at me. “On their way into the colony, or on their way out. Less malaria, too.”
“A winning combination,” I said.
“I think so,” he said pleasantly. “Will you be all right walking alone? Can I accompany you to your hotel or somewhere else? Or fetch you a taxi?”
“That’s kind of you, but I’ll be fine,” I said, feeling relief. I’d had nothing to worry about. There seemed to be no corpses ready to land at my feet.
“Well, then,” he said, reaching for my hand, “I hope our paths cross again soon.”
I walked slowly back toward the center of town and then, on a small side street near the opera, stopped to sit on a sunny bench and fully exhale. What had I been so nervous about?
I left the city after that, in a taxi with all the windows open, my hair flying everywhere, and spent the rest of the day in the countryside, wanting to see more of what I’d passed on the train. I was a helpful woman. A good wife.