on us. As for Rousseau, perhaps I learned the most from him, for as I wrote my confession under Man’s heavy-handed guidance in the reeducation camp, the beginning of Rousseau’s own confession came back to me in a flash:
I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imitator. I want to show my fellow-men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man is to be myself . . . As to whether nature did well or ill to break the mould in which I was cast, that is something no one can judge until after they have read me.
Thank you, Jean-Jacques! By you I was inspired to be true to myself, for even if myself was a rotten bastard, I was like no other rotten bastard in history, before or since. I learned to love confessing and have never stopped acknowledging my crimes of violence, torture, and betrayal, all of which our French masters had taught us through the violence and torture they had inflicted on us as they betrayed their own ideals.
These complicated lessons were only reinforced each time I left the hallowed grounds of the lycée and walked the streets of Saigon with a French book under my arm, where, on occasion, I would be abused in the language of Dumas, or Stendhal, or Balzac. Any Frenchman or -woman or child, rich or poor, beautiful or plain, could call us anything he or she wanted and, occasionally, did. Yellow-skinned bastard! Slanty-eyed chink! The most perfectly formed lips and the whitest teeth, borne about by the nicest shoes and daintiest footwear, could spit these seeds at us, ones that would take fertile root underneath our tainted skin, as happened to Ho Chi Minh, who put it best when he wrote about how we, the colonized of Africa and Asia, were to our masters “only dirty niggers and dirty Annamese, good at the very most for pushing rickshaws and receiving the blows of our administrators.”
Some of us ignored the insults, wanting only for our masters to love us.
Some of us could not forget the insults and wanted to slay our masters.
And some of us—me and myself most of all—loved and hated our masters at the same time.
Loving a master who kicks you is not a problem if that is all one feels, but loving and hating must be kept a dirty little secret, for loving the master one hates inevitably induces confusion and self-hatred. That was why I never threw myself as wholeheartedly into the study of French as I did with English and why, ever since leaving the lycée, I had hardly ever spoken a word of French. French was the language of our enslaver and rapist, whereas English was a novelty, heralding an American arrival that spelled the end of our French debasement. I mastered English without ambivalence because it had never mastered us.
Now, in Paris at last, the land of my father, in the company of the socialist BFD and the Maoist PhD, it suddenly struck me that I was not just seen as an other by white people. They also heard me as other, for when I opened my mouth and broke the beautiful china of their French language, they heard what the poet, boy wonder, gun runner, and slave trader Rimbaud must have heard and then plagiarized from some nameless African or Oriental traveler: I is an other.
There was no need for the French to condemn us. So long as we spoke in their language, we condemned ourselves.
I, the other, woke from sleep, but it was as if me, or I, was still dreaming, for I could see through my eyes but I could also see me and myself through the eyes of my aunt and BFD. They walked out of the bedroom rumpled yet elegant, but they saw me as just rumpled. BFD was clad in a blue velvet robe, like a boxer after a victorious round in the ring, a postcoital costume kept for all my aunt’s visitors. My aunt wore a gray satin robe with a turban of the same material wrapped around her hair, an outfit a movie star from the black-and-white era might wear between scenes. They chatted amiably as they smoked and drank civet coffee while skimming the newspapers. BFD had sniffed at the coffee before dipping his tongue in it and then laughing, which made me fantasize about strangling him. Never mock another culture’s food or drink; it is a mortal sin. Brooding over my coffee and toast, I barely paid attention to their conversation, except to note the mentions of le haschisch and les boat-people.
The mention of the latter was prompted by an item in L’Humanité, my aunt’s newspaper of choice (BFD preferred Libération, but L’Humanité, he said, would do). BFD held it up and pointed to the headline about les boat-people and a photograph of a trawler floating in the ocean, as crowded with my countrymen as a metro train at rush hour. But while a rider endures the train’s conditions for only a number of minutes, my countrymen endured their conditions for days and weeks, under full exposure to the sun, wind, and rain, pirates dropping in periodically to select the most succulent parts of the cargo and sharks swimming alongside to window-shop, gazing longingly at the fresh cuts of meat on display.
Very sad, BFD said, very deliberately and very loudly, his lips moving in exaggerated slow motion. You, too. A boat person. Like them. Verrry saaad. They have nothing. We have everything. We must help them. We must help you.
He aimed his finger at me as if his words were not quite enough. I forced myself to smile and swallowed my resentment, which tasted like blood—that is to say, not as bad as you might imagine, given how so many people apparently enjoy dining on rare, juicy meat. The heat of his pity was so strong that it did not make me feel warm. Instead, I boiled, the steam hissing from my ears as I kept my mouth closed after the few conciliatory words I could manage. How could I say that the so-called boat people had already helped themselves by getting on their boats in the first place? How could I say that I refused to be called a “boat person,” a term so overpowering that even the Anglophobic French had simply borrowed and worn it on a regular basis, like un jean and le week-end?
I was not a boat person unless the English Pilgrims who fled religious persecution to come to America on the Mayflower were also boat people. Those refugees just happened to be fortunate that the soon-to-be-hapless natives did not have a camera to record them as the foul-smelling, half-starved, unshaven, and lice-ridden lot that they were. In contrast, our misery was forever recorded in L’Humanité, where we were seen as anything but human. No, the boat people were not human, they did not get the benefit of some romantic painter casting them in oils, standing boldly on the prow of their sinking ships, facing the monstrous elements with the nobility of Greek heroes, enshrined in the Louvre to be admired by tourists and studied by art historians. No, boat people were victims, objects of pity fixed forever in newspaper photographs. Part of me, my mama’s baby, wanted that pity. But the part of me that was a grown man neither wanted nor deserved pity, neither wanted to be called a victim nor deserved to be seen as such, not after all my deeds and misdeeds. If the price of being human was to be recognized through being pitiful, then to hell with humanity! I was a rotten bastard—recognize that!
But instead all I said was: Thank you. Yes, please help them.
BFD stood up to leave, satisfied that he had not only put me and my people in our pitiful place but that he had also gotten me to thank him for his condescension. It occurred to me that if my French was awkward and my Vietnamese was incomprehensible to him, my English was fluent, and nothing would make a Frenchman feel more inferior, and hence angry, than to hear English. Within a corner of every French soul slouched an American, coughing quietly now and again to remind the Frenchman of their shared history, beginning with how the French helped the pitiful upstart Americans in their revolution against the English, only to find themselves needing the aid of these same Americans twice in the World Wars. Then, finally, “Indochina,” whatever that word meant, since we were neither Indian nor Chinese. It was this fantastic Indochina that the exhausted French handed off to the now very loud Americans. How it must hurt to be reminded of the decline of one’s own empire by being confronted with the rise of a new one! Oh, yes, English in this case was an insult and a challenge, especially from one such as me, who was not even American but “Indochinese.”
So, in perfect American English, I said, Did I hear you say hashish? Because I happen to have some, and of a very fine grade.
BFD hesitated, surprised by this yellow parrot. The sleek socialist
