The Committed. Viet Thanh Nguyen
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herself in her last letter: tall, thin, with jet-black hair. There ended the resemblance to what I had imagined of her: someone middle-aged with a back permanently bent from working as a seamstress, humbled by her devotion to the revolution. Instead, this woman’s closest relative was a cigarette, judging from the shape of her body and what she held in one hand. She exuded smoke and confidence, and with her aggressive high heels she equaled me in height, although she looked taller, given her slimness, her formfitting gray knit dress, and her hair styled into a peak, a uniform that she would wear every day. Although I knew she was likely in her fifties, she could have passed for someone in her late thirties, blessed as she was by both French style and a half share of Asian genes that rendered her ageless.
My God! She seized me by the shoulders and made kissing sounds as she touched first one cheek and then the other to mine in that charming French manner of greeting, which had never been extended to me by the French in my homeland, including my French father. You two need new clothes. And haircuts!
Yes, she was definitely French.
I introduced her to Bon in French, but he responded in Vietnamese. He had a lycée education, like me, but he hated the French and was here only for my sake. It was true that the French had given him a scholarship, but he had otherwise never benefitted from them in any way, except for traveling on the roads that they had designed, which were hard to be grateful for given that the slave labor of peasants like Bon’s family had built them. My aunt switched to Vietnamese as she led us to the taxi queue, inquiring about our travels and our travails in the purest, most classical version of our language, spoken by Hanoi’s intellectuals. Bon was silent. His own dialect blended the rural north, where our families originated from, and the rural south outside of Saigon. His parents had settled there after our Catholic exodus from the north in ’54, the first of our three refugee experiences. It was either shame for his dialect that kept him quiet or, more likely, seething rage. Anything from Hanoi might be communist, and anything that might be communist was undoubtedly communist, at least to someone as maniacally anticommunist as he was. He wasn’t even thankful for the only gift our communist captors ever gave him, the lesson that what does not kill you makes you stronger. That must mean Bon and I were now supermen.
What do you do? he finally said once we were in the taxi, my aunt between us in the back seat.
My aunt looked at me with great reproach and said, I see my nephew has said nothing about me. I’m an editor.
Editor? I almost said it out loud but stopped myself, for I was supposed to know who my aunt was. In seeking a sponsor for our departure from the refugee camp, I had written to her—not in code this time—because she was the only one I knew who was not an American. She would likely inform Man of my arrival, but I preferred that certainty over returning to America, where I had committed crimes of which I had never been convicted but of which I was not proud.
She named a publishing house I had not heard of. I make my living in books, she said. Mostly fiction and philosophy.
The noise in Bon’s throat indicated how he was not the kind that read, except for the army field manual, tabloid newspapers, and the notes that I stuck on the refrigerator door. He would have been more comfortable with my aunt if she were actually a seamstress, and I was thankful that I had told Bon nothing about her.
I want to hear about everything you’ve been through, my aunt said. The reeducation and then the refugee camp. You are the first ones I’ve met who went through reeducation!
Perhaps not tonight, dear aunt, I said. I did not tell her of the confession I had written under great duress in reeducation, hidden in my leather duffel’s false bottom, along with a disintegrating copy of Hedd’s book, its pages yellowing. I was not even sure why I bothered to hide my confession, for the last person who should read it, Bon, showed no interest in its existence at all. Like me, he had been tortured into writing his own confession many times in the reeducation camp; unlike me, he did not know that it was Man, his blood brother, who was the commissar of the camp. How could he, when the commissar did not have a face? What Bon did know, he said, was that a confession extracted under torture was nothing but lies. Like most people, he believed that lies, no matter how often you told them, never became truth. Like my father, the priest, I was the kind who believed quite the opposite.
My aunt’s apartment was in the 11th arrondissement, abutting the Bastille, where the French Revolution started. A spire that we drove by in the darkness marked the Bastille’s place in history. If I was once a communist and a revolutionary, then I, too, was a descendant of this event that decapitated aristocracy with the finality of a guillotine. Off the highway and into the city, I now felt truly in France, or, even better, Paris, with its narrow streets and its buildings of uniform height and design, not to mention the charming lettering over the storefronts, instantly recognizable from postcards and movies like Irma la Douce, which I had seen in an American movie theater soon after I arrived in Los Angeles as a foreign student. Everything about Paris was charming, as I would eventually discover, even its prostitutes and even on Sundays, in the early morning, after lunch, and in August, when everything was closed.
Over the next few weeks, I would never exhaust myself of that word: “charming”! Neither my homeland nor America could ever be described as charming. It was too moderate of an adjective for a country and a people as hot and hot-blooded as mine. We repulsed or seduced, but we never charmed. As for America, just think of Coca-Cola. That elixir is really something, embodying as it does the addictive, teeth-decaying sweetness of a capitalism that was no good for you no matter how it fizzled on the tongue. But it is not charming, not like freshly brewed dark coffee served in a thimble-sized cup on a miniature plate with a doll’s spoon, delivered by a waiter as assured in the value of his profession as a banker or an art collector.
The Americans owned Hollywood with its loudness and swagger, its generous brassieres and cowboy hats, but the French waged the charm campaign. It was evident in the details, as if Yves Saint-Laurent had designed all of France, from how our taxi driver actually wore a beret, to the name of my aunt’s street, rue Richard Lenoir, to the peeling blue paint on the steel door of my aunt’s apartment building, no. 37, to the echoing darkness of the hallway with its malfunctioning light, to the narrow wooden steps that led, four stories up, to my aunt’s apartment.
The fact that none of this besides the beret was intrinsically charming indicates how the French had an enormously unfair advantage in their charm offensive, at least for those like me who had been, despite our best efforts, nearly completely colonized. I say nearly because even as I was charmed huffing up those stairs, some small, 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