reptilian part of my brain—the savage native in me—resisted the charm long enough to recognize it for what it was: the seduction of subjugation. It was that feeling that made me all but swoon at the shapely baguette that graced my aunt’s dining table. Oh, baguette! Symbol of France, and hence symbol of French colonization! So spoke one side of me. But the other side said, at the same time, Ah, baguette! Symbol of how we Vietnamese have made French culture our own! For we were good bakers of the baguette, and the banh mi we created with baguettes were far tastier and more imaginative than the sandwiches the French fashioned from them. That dialectical baguette, along with a cucumber salad in a rice wine vinaigrette, a pot of chicken curry with potatoes and carrots, a bottle of red wine, and, eventually, a caramel flan in a dark brown puddle of caramelized sugar, was the repast prepared by my aunt. How I had longed for these dishes or anything like them! Fantasies of food had beckoned to me during the endless months spent in the reeducation camp, located somewhere in Hell’s inner circle, and then in the refugee camp in Hell’s outer fringes, where the best that could be said about our diet was that it was insufficient and the worst that it was rancid.
My father taught me how to cook Vietnamese food, my aunt said as she spooned the curry into our bowls. My father was a soldier like the two of you, but a forgotten one.
The very mention of a father caused my heart to pause. I was in the land of my father, the patriarch who had rejected me. Would my life have been different if he had recognized me as his son and claimed my mother as his mistress, if not his wife? Part of me yearned for his love, and the other part of me hated myself for feeling anything for him besides scorn.
The French drafted my father to fight in the Great War, my aunt went on. Both Bon and I sat on the edges of our chairs, waiting for her to pick up her spoon or tear into the baguette, the signal to attack the meal lying so provocatively before us. Eighteen years old and swept from tropical Indochina to the metropole, along with tens of thousands of others. Not that he saw Paris until well after war’s end. And he never returned home. His ashes sit in my bedroom, on top of my bureau.
There’s nothing sadder than exile, poor Bon said, fingers trembling on the tablecloth. For most of his life, he would never have said anything remotely philosophical, but his own exile and the tragic loss of his wife and son had made him increasingly ruminative. Bring the ashes home, he continued. Only then will your father’s spirit truly know peace.
You would think such talk might blunt our appetites, but Bon and I were desperate to eat anything besides the subsistence rations of a nongovernmental organization tasked with keeping refugees alive but nothing more. Besides, the French and the Vietnamese shared a love for melancholy and philosophy that the manically optimistic Americans could never understand. The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.
So we talked and ate, but just as important, we drank and smoked and thought freely, indulging three of my bad habits, all of which reeducation had denied me. To satisfy those habits, my aunt not only opened successive bottles of red wine but also uncapped a Moroccan canister on her dining table that held two kinds of cigarettes, with and without hashish. Even “hashish” sounds charming, or at least exotic, in comparison to “marijuana,” America’s drug of choice, despite how both come from the same plant. Marijuana was what hippies and teenagers smoked, its symbol the terminally unfashionable band called the Grateful Dead, whom Yves Saint-Laurent would have lined up and shot for popularizing tie-dyed T-shirts. Hashish evoked the Levant and the souk, the strange and the exciting, the decadent and the aristocratic. One might try marijuana in Asia, but in the Orient, one smoked hashish.
Even Bon shared one of the potent cigarettes, and it was then, hunger sated, bodies and minds relaxed, feeling more than a touch French in our smug post-supper bliss, which was for refugees nearly as pleasurable as postcoital bliss, that Bon noticed one of the framed pictures on the mantel.
Is that—he stood up abruptly, staggered, caught his balance, and then walked across the fringes of a Persian rug to the fireplace. It’s—he pointed a finger at the face—it’s him.
When I said to my aunt that it seemed that they knew someone in common, she said, I can’t imagine who.
Bon turned from the mantel, red with rage. I’ll tell you who. The devil.
I leaped to my feet. If the devil was here, I wanted to meet him! But on closer inspection . . . That’s not the devil, I said, looking at a colorized photo of a man in his prime, white-haired and goateed, a halo of soft light around his head. It’s Ho Chi Minh.
Once I had been a dedicated communist like him, my mission continuing even in America, where I had worked to support the revolution at home by doing my best to scupper the counterrevolution abroad. I had kept this secret from nearly everyone, especially Bon. The only ones who knew my communist sympathies were my aunt and her nephew, Man. He, Bon, and I were blood brothers, the Three Musketeers, or perhaps, as history may judge us, the Three Stooges. Man and I were spies, secretly working against the anticommunist cause that Bon held so dear, the subterfuge squeezing us into all manner of difficult situations, our method of escape usually involving someone’s death. Even now Bon believed Man to be dead and me to be as anticommunist as he was, for he had seen how the communists had scarred me in reeducation, something he thought they would only do unto their enemies. I was not an enemy to communism, merely someone with a near-fatal weakness in being able to sympathize with communism’s actual enemies, including Americans. What reeducation had taught me was that dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance. Sympathy for the enemy might as well be sympathy for the devil, tantamount to betrayal. Bon, devout Catholic, fervent anticommunist, certainly believed this. He had killed more communists than anyone I knew, and while he realized that some of those he had killed were perhaps only mistaken for communists, he had faith that both History and God would forgive him.
Now he aimed his finger at my aunt and said, You’re a communist, aren’t you? I grabbed his hand out of reflex, knowing that if his finger were on a trigger, then my aunt might be dead in a moment. Bon slapped my hand away, and my aunt raised an eyebrow and lit a cigarette of the unlaced kind.
I’m a fellow traveler rather than a communist, she said. I have enough humility to know that I’m not a real revolutionary. Just a sympathizer. She was as nonchalant about her politics as only the French could be, a people so cool that they had almost no use for the air-conditioning that Americans demanded. Like my father, I’m more Trotskyist than Stalinist. I believe in power for the people and international revolution, not a party running the show for its own country. I believe in the rights of man and equality for all, not collectivism and the revolution of the proletariat.
Then why have a picture of the devil in your home?
Because he’s not the devil but the greatest of patriots. When he lived in Paris he even called himself Nguyen the Patriot. He believed in the independence of our homeland, as do you and I, as did my father. Shouldn’t we celebrate what we have in common?
She spoke calmly and with reason. She might as well have been speaking a foreign language to Bon. You’re a communist, Bon said conclusively. When he turned to me, he had the wild and frantic look of a wounded tomcat backed into a corner. I can’t stay here.
I knew then that my aunt’s life was safe. In Bon’s rigid honor code, repaying hospitality with murder was immoral. But it was nearly midnight and we had nowhere else to go.
Sleep here tonight, I said. Tomorrow we’ll find the Boss. His address was in my wallet, written down in the Pulau Galang camp before the magicians in charge of the camp’s departures had teleported the Boss to Paris a year ago. The mention of the Boss calmed Bon down, for the Boss owed him his life and had promised to take care of us if we ever made it here.
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