Mai had been assigned to infiltrate Alexandre’s plantation. She was happy to be able to save a few trees every day, making an incision that was too deep, thereby preventing the sap from running again, stopping the flow to the detriment of the boss’s profit. She rose every morning at four o’clock to assert her love of country by destroying her boss Alexandre, inflicting on his property a long, slow death, one tree at a time, one incision at a time, like the death by a thousand cuts of Chinese emperors.
Her love for Alexandre put an end to her mission.
Alexandre had dragged Mai by her hair all the way to his room. He had ordered her to perform the usual services of his con gái. Not only had Mai refused, but she had thrown herself at him, hatchet in hand, ready to slice his throat at a forty-five-degree angle.
Mai intended to kill Alexandre or, at the very least, to chase him from the property, then from the country. Alexandre was an old wolf, hardened by the wealth of latex, by the stings of fire ants, and by the hot winds that burned his Gallic skin.
She had been waiting for this moment ever since she’d arrived at the plantation. Driven by the desire to kill, to avenge her people, she had rushed at Alexandre’s eyes, two jade balls. Mai was unsettled by the serenity of his gaze, her incendiary momentum instantly stopped short by the sudden feeling that she had gone back to her native village, to the dense green calm of Ha Long Bay. As for Alexandre, in his profound weariness from being loved by no one, he’d given up, hoping for a long rest, the end of a hundred-year-long struggle perpetuating itself in this foreign land that by force of circumstance had become his own.
If researchers had got wind of the love story between Mai and Alexandre, maybe the Stockholm Syndrome would have been called the Tây Ninh Syndrome, or Bên Cui, or Xa Cam. Mai, a steadfast teenager, possessed by the mission she’d been assigned to, had not known to be wary of love and its absurdities. She didn’t know that the impulses of the heart can be more blinding than the noonday sun, with no warning or logic. Love, like death, need not knock twice in order to be heard.
This lightning strike that became love between Mai and Alexandre would ultimately sow discord in their circles. The idealistic and romantic dreamers wanted to see in it the possibility of a better world, symbiotic, entangled. The realists and the politically committed would condemn the recklessness, the carelessness of blurring limits while reversing roles.
On this landscape of closeness and rivalry, the birth of Tâm, child of the master and his labourer, two enemies, still had something about it that was ordinary and banal.