I had heard about this Union. The restaurant had a few mimeographed flyers announcing the Union’s various activities: promoting the learning of the Vietnamese language, celebrating Vietnamese culture, advocating for the Vietnamese community’s interests in France. Even in Vietnam we had not seen the word “Vietnamese” deployed as often as at the Union, whose official name was the Union for the Advancement of Vietnamese Culture. You think the Union is communist? I said.
Not officially. But everybody knows they’re commies. The Vietnamese government recognizes them. The Vietnamese ambassador comes to their events. And if they look like commies and smell like commies, they’re commies. But if it’s a problem, it’s an opportunity, too. Every problem is an opportunity.
What’s the opportunity?
You’re the opportunity. We can make some money and corrupt some commies all at the same time with what you sell for the Boss. Beautiful, isn’t it?
It was a plan. But Bon was not a planner, he was the action man. Did the Boss give you this idea?
No, but the Boss thinks it’s a great idea.
You went to the Boss? I said. What do you get out of it?
I tag along. Maybe I’ll have the chance to kill some commies.
Does that mean we’ll have to play at being communists?
If I can do it, so can you, he said. There was a light in his eyes that I had seen only when he was with his wife and son and then, after their deaths, when he spoke of killing communists. Now you get a chance to hurt some commies, he said. You should thank me for that.
Thank you, I said.
Would our war never end? At least for Bon, it appeared that it never would, not until he was dead or incapable of continuing in his quest to kill all the communists in the world. Like many people, he saw the world in an either/or fashion, communist or anticommunist, evil or good. Whereas his vision of the world was a mirror image of how the communists saw things, I felt being forced to choose between communism and its opposite was a false choice, imposed by the Ideological State Apparatuses of both sides. The most difficult thing, when offered two false choices, was imagining a third choice, withheld deliberately or otherwise. This was the most basic lesson of the dialectic, the swing between thesis and antithesis that allowed one to reach a synthesis. Whether the thesis or the antithesis was communism or anticommunism, the point was that they composed the polar opposites of what the West unironically called the Cold War, as fought between the USA and USSR. But the synthesis was the recognition that this war had been extremely hot for us Asians, and Africans, and Latin Americans. Seeing the failures of both communism and anticommunism, I chose nothing, a synthesis that neither capitalists nor communists could understand. You may think that I am being a nihilist, but you could not be more wrong. While nihilists thought life was meaningless and rejected all religious and moral principles, I still believed in the principle of revolution. I also believed that nothing was full of meaning—in short, that nothing was actually something. Wasn’t that a kind of revolution in itself?
In this state of mind, I ventured forth with Bon two weeks later to the next meeting of the Union, whose membership appeared to consist entirely of respectable Vietnamese. In France, unlike in the United States, respectable people could include communists or communist sympathizers, and it was strange to think that some of them would likely be attending the meeting. This particular meeting’s purpose was to plan the annual Tet show, the Chairman of the Tet committee explained to Bon and me, the only newcomers.
There will be traditional dancing and singing, the cheerful Chairman said. He was an ophthalmologist by trade, a slender, white-haired man with long fingers suitable for a pianist or a gynecologist. Both his Vietnamese and French were flawless, and I made up for my jealousy by pitying how he wore a tweed blazer at least a size too large for him, the cuffs brushing the bases of his thumbs. The Chairman did not believe, as I did, that every man should have a tailor, who was as important as a priest, for it made no sense to be good if one did not look good.
There will also be traditional costumes and foods, he went on. It’s a way for us to present our authentic Vietnamese culture.
I nodded sympathetically, even vigorously, and said, Promoting our authentic culture is very important, to which the cheerful Chairman nodded even more vigorously.
Although I did not say so out loud, I wondered if perhaps authentic Vietnamese culture should also include gambling, which we taught to our children during Tet celebrations and then wondered why we had a predilection for gambling as adults; or smoking and drinking coffee in cafés, for which, if there were an Olympic competition for such a sport, we Vietnamese men would be gold medal contenders, for we treated these cafés, inherited from the French, as second homes away from abrasive wives and pesky children; or drinking beer, cognac, and wine (preferably of the native rice kind) until we reached the doorway to oblivion, whereon some of us beat the aforementioned wives and children or each other; or getting a good deal, even at the expense of our customers or our merchants or our principles, and then being outraged when we ourselves were cheated; or gossiping about our friends and relatives, whom we loved to backstab even more than stabbing our enemies, whose backs were harder to reach; or taking pride in the accomplishments of our neighbors and countrymen, until they accomplished too much, whereupon we resented them and waited for the sweet opportunity to gleefully witness their downfall; or making the women stay in the kitchen and serve the men, or expecting said women to reproduce at least six or seven times, and hopefully more, until their uteruses were as dusty as the Sahara—all aspects of our culture we performed much more frequently than a fan dance, or singing a snatch of opera or folk song, or wearing a silk gown, or reenacting a courtship ritual in the rice paddies, which only ever happened once in a lifetime, if at all, and if it did, likely involved scraping off the buffalo dung encrusted between our toes and swatting away the squadrons of dive-bombing mosquitoes.
But it seemed bad manners to bring up these issues when all the Chairman and his committee wanted was to enshrine the beauty of our culture and share it with others, even if staging a culture show was really an acknowledgment of one’s cultural inferiority. The truly powerful rarely needed to put on a show, since their culture was always everywhere. Americans knew their culture was ubiquitous, whether burgers or bombs. As for the French, they exported the Parisian Dream, a street show for tourists who went gaga over wine and cheese and accordion music. Mentioning none of this, I volunteered at the meeting’s end for the song-and-dance routines, betting that any hashish-smoking bohemians would be found there. I volunteered Bon for the dancing and singing as well, even though he clearly did not look like a dancer, and he certainly could not be a singer, not after I spoke on his behalf and explained that he was mute. This, too, was Bon’s idea.
Ah bon? the Chairman said, an expression I loved almost as much as oh là là.
A war wound, I said, my voice catching. I had not planned on any emotion for this fake story—where was it coming from?
The atmosphere was hushed, all the members of the Tet committee focusing their attention on us now.
No one knows the cause of his muteness, I said, tears once more coming to my eyes. I could feel Bon staring at me as I told the story that I had invented. A B-52 bomb landed almost on top of us. After that, he lost his voice. Perhaps the blast damaged something in his throat. Or perhaps it’s all psychological.
I sobbed. My story had me, and I had them. I saw it in their eyes, their slightly parted lips, the holding of the collective breath.
You see, that B-52 attack caught us in the open. It wasn’t meant for us. It was meant for the guerrillas. But the Americans bombed us, their own friends, I continued. Bon twitched but said nothing. The Americans vaporized almost an entire battalion of southern soldiers. The Americans call it “friendly fire.” I just call it fire. The only thing you could hear were the bombs and, afterward, the screaming of whoever was left. But there wasn’t much left. All those voices gone forever . . . perhaps thinking of all our young comrades lost so tragically made my friend lose his own voice.
Oh