At the time of colonization, France had regarded Indochina, and Vietnam along with it, as a zone of economic operation rather than as a colony to be settled. The French were able to enter the race for rubber by planting trees. It took a lot of determination to keep groups of agricultural workers in one place, in the middle of the bush, to uproot bamboo forests whose roots were thickly tangled in the soil, then to embed the rubber trees before harvesting their sap from one dawn to the next. Every drop of latex obtained was worth the drop of blood or sweat it had cost. The rubber trees could be bled for twenty-five or thirty years, while one man in four among the eighty thousand coolies sent into the plantations succumbed long before. Those thousands of dead, amid the whispering leaves, the murmuring branches, and the breath of the wind, still seek the reason why, during their lifetime, they replaced their tropical forest with trees from the Amazon, why they mutilated them, why they blindly obeyed those tall men with such pale cheeks and such hairy skin who in no way resembled their own elders, with their bony bodies and their ebony hair.
Mai had the copper skin of the coolies, and Alexandre the posture of an owner who was a monarch in his domain. Alexandre came to Mai in anger. Mai came to Alexandre in hate.