The Sympathizer (20 page)

And neither must we let them forget their resentment, I added. That’s where newspapers can play a role, on the culture front.

But only if the journalists do their work as they should. The General tossed the newspaper back on the table. “Resentment.” That’s a good word. Always resent, never relent. Perhaps that should be our motto.

There’s a ring to it, I said.

CHAPTER 9

M
uch to my surprise, Violet called me the next week. I don’t believe we have anything to talk about, I said. He reconsidered your advice, she said. I noticed that she actually used complete sentences with me this time. He’s tempestuous and doesn’t take criticism well, as he’s the first to admit. But after he cooled down, he thought there were some usable ideas in your notes. More than that, he respects you for standing up to him. Not too many people are willing to do that, which makes you an ideal candidate for what I’m proposing. We need a consultant who can get things right when it comes to Vietnamese matters. We’ve already researched the history, the costumes, the weapons, the customs, anything we could find in a book. But we’ll need that human touch you can provide. There are refugees from Vietnam in the Philippines who we’ll be using as extras, and we need someone to work with them.

From far away floated the susurrus of my mother’s voice: Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything! Despite all the disadvantages of my poor, muddled heritage, my mother’s endless encouragement and fierce belief in me meant that I never backed down from challenge or opportunity. Their offer was four months of paid vacation in a tropical paradise, six months if the shoot went over schedule, and perhaps not so much a paradise if the local rebels got a little too overconfident, and perhaps not so much of a vacation as a working jaunt, and perhaps not so much paid as underpaid, but the upshot was that I needed a respite from my American refuge. Remorse over the crapulent major’s death was ringing me up a few times a day, tenacious as a debt collector. Also always there at the crowded back of my mind, front and center in the Catholic chorus of my guilt, stood the major’s widow. I had given her only fifty dollars at the funeral, which was all I could afford. Even underpaid, I would be able to save money, given how my room and board would be included, and from this provide some support for the major’s wife and children.

They were innocents to whom wrong had been done, as I had once been an innocent child to whom wrong was done. And not by strangers, but by my own family, my aunts who had not wanted me to play with my cousins at family gatherings and who shooed me away from the kitchen when there were treats. I associated my blood aunts with the scars they inflicted on me during the New Year, the time all other children remember with such fondness. What was the first New Year I could remember? Perhaps the one when I was five or six. I huddled with the other children, solemn and nervous, facing the prospect of approaching each adult and making a little speech wishing him or her health and happiness. But although I forgot not a word, and did not stumble like most of my cousins, and radiated sincerity and charm, Aunt Two did not grace me with a red envelope. The entire maternal family tree was watching me, on its gnarled branches my mother’s parents, her nine siblings, my three dozen cousins. I do not have enough, this wicked witch said, towering above me. I am one short. I stood immobilized, my arms still folded respectfully across my chest, waiting for a magical envelope or an apology to appear, but nothing more was forthcoming until, after what seemed to be several minutes, my mother laid her hand on my shoulder and said, Thank your aunt for her kindness in teaching you a lesson.

Only later, at home, on the wooden bed we shared, did Mama weep. It did not matter that my other aunts and uncles gave me red envelopes, although when I compared mine with my cousins’, I discovered that my sums of lucky money were but half theirs. That’s because you’re half-blooded, said one calculating cousin. You’re a bastard. When I asked Mama what a bastard was, her face inflamed. If I could, she said, I’d strangle him with my bare hands. Never in my life has there been a day when I learned so much about myself, the world, and its inhabitants. One must be grateful for one’s education no matter how it arrives. So I was grateful, in a way, for my aunt and my cousin, whose lessons I remember much more than many nobler things that passed before me in school. Oh, they’ll see! my mother wept, squeezing me with such force I was nearly breathless, my face pressed against one comforting breast while my hand squeezed its plush other. Radiating through thin cotton fabric was the hot, rich muskiness of a young woman’s body after a humid day spent mostly on feet or haunches, preparing food and serving. They’ll see! You’ll work harder than all of them, you’ll study more than all of them, you’ll know more than all of them, you’ll be better than all of them. Promise your mother you will! And I promised.

I have shared this story with only two people, Man and Bon, censoring just the part about my mother’s breasts. This was at the lycée, at separate moments of intimacy in our early adolescence. When Bon heard it, we were fishing in the river, and he flung down his rod in fury. If I ever meet this cousin, he said, I’ll beat him until half his blood is coming out of his head. Man was more measured. Even at that age, he was calm, analytical, and precociously dialectical-materialist in his attitude. He had treated me to sugarcane juice after school, and we were sitting on a curb, little plastic sacks in hand, sipping through straws. The red envelope is a symbol, he said, of all that’s wrong. It’s the color of blood, and they singled you out for your blood. It’s the color of fortune and luck. Those are primitive beliefs. We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do. They take advantage of things, like your cousins, and they don’t question things. As long as things work for them, then they support those things. But you see the lie beneath those things because you never got to take part. You see a different shade of red than them. Red is not good luck. Red is not fortune. Red is revolution. All of a sudden I, too, saw red, and in that throbbing vision the world began to make sense to me, how so many degrees of meaning existed in a single color, the tone so potent it must be applied sparingly. If one ever sees something written in red, one knows trouble and change lie ahead.

My letters to my aunt, then, were not written in such an alarming shade, even if the cipher I used to code my sub rosa reports disturbed me. Here was one representative example of Richard Hedd’s highly esteemed
Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction
:

The Vietnamese peasant will not object to the use of airpower, for he is apolitical, interested only in feeding himself and his family. Bombing his village will of course upset him, but the cost is outweighed ultimately by how airpower will persuade him that he is on the wrong side if he chooses communism, which cannot protect him. (p. 126)

From these kinds of insights, I reported on my decision to take the Auteur’s offer, a job I characterized as
undermining the enemy’s propaganda
. I also coded the names of the officers in the General’s vanguard. Just in case my letter would be read by any eyes other than those of Man’s aunt, I kept my tone upbeat about life in Los Angeles. Perhaps unknown censors were reading refugee mail, looking for dejected, angry refugees who could not or would not dream the American Dream. I was careful, then, to present myself as just another immigrant, glad to be in the land where the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed in writing, which, when one comes to think about it, is not such a great deal. Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.

It was in the name of happiness, I told my aunt, that I helped the General toward the next step in his plan, the creation of a nonprofit charitable organization that could receive tax-deductible donations, the Benevolent Fraternity of Former Soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. In one reality, the Fraternity served the needs of thousands of veterans who were now men without an army, a country, and an identity. It existed, in short, to increase their meager measure of happiness. In another reality, this Fraternity was a front that allowed the General to receive funds for the Movement from whoever wished to donate, which was not primarily the Vietnamese community. Its refugee members were hobbled by their structural function in the American Dream, which was to be so unhappy as to make other Americans grateful for their happiness. Instead of these refugees, broke and broken, the main donors were to be magnanimous individuals and charitable foundations interested in boosting America’s old friends. The Congressman had mentioned his charitable foundation to the General and me at a meeting at his district office, where we presented him the idea for the Fraternity and asked if Congress might help our organization in some way. His district office was a modest outpost in a Huntington Beach strip mall, a two-story arrangement of shops on a major intersection. Drenched in café au lait stucco, the mall was bordered by an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot. Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness. As a sign of his humility and closeness to the people, the Congressman had chosen such a strip mall for his headquarters, and in the windows were plastered white campaign signs with
CONGRESSMAN
in red and his name in blue, as well as his last campaign slogan:
ALWAYS TRUE
.

An American flag decorated one wall of the Congressman’s office. On another wall hung photos of him posing with various tuxedoed luminaries of his Republican Party: Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, John Wayne, Bob Hope, and even Richard Hedd, whom I recognized immediately from his author photograph. The Congressman offered us cigarettes and we partook for a while, canceling the side effects of the smoke by simultaneously inhaling good cheer, the healthy air of pleasantries concerning wives, children, and favorite sports teams. We also spent some time discussing my forthcoming adventure in the Philippines, which the Madame and General had both approved. What was that line from Marx? the General said, stroking his chin thoughtfully as he prepared to quote my notes about Marx. Oh, yes. “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” Isn’t that what’s happening here? Marx refers to peasants but he may as well refer to us. We cannot represent ourselves. Hollywood represents us. So we must do what we can to ensure that we are represented well.

I see where this is going, the Congressman said with a grin. He rubbed out his cigarette, leaned his elbows on his desk, and said: So what can this representative do for you? After the General explained the Fraternity and its functions, the Congressman said, Great idea, but Congress isn’t touching that. No one even wants to say the name of your country right now.

Understood, Congressman, the General said. We do not need the official support of the American people, and we understand why they would not be enthused.

But their unofficial support is another matter altogether, I said.

Go on.

Even if Congress will not send money our way, there’s no preventing civically minded people or organizations, for example charitable foundations, from helping the cause of our traumatized and needy veterans. They’ve defended freedom and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the American soldier, sometimes giving blood and sometimes giving limbs.

You’ve been talking to Claude.

It’s true Claude planted certain ideas in my head. During our Saigon days, he mentioned that it was routine for the CIA to fund various activities. Not in its name, as that might be illegal or at least quite questionable, but through front organizations controlled by its agents and sympathizers, oftentimes respectable people of varied careers.

And the lucky recipients of such money were themselves often front organizations.

Indeed, with all these front organizations professing to help the poor, or feed the hungry, or spread democracy, or aid downtrodden women, or train artists, it can sometimes be difficult to know who does what and for whom.

Let me play devil’s advocate. There are many good causes to which I, for example, might donate. But to be frank, there is only so much money that I, for example, might have. Inevitably, self-interest comes into play.

Self-interest is good. It’s an instinct that keeps us alive. It’s also very patriotic.

Absolutely. So: What is my self-interest in this organization of yours?

I looked at the General. It was on his lips, one of two magical words. If we possessed the things these words named, we would propel ourselves to the front rank of American citizens, able to access all the glittering treasures of American society. Unfortunately, we had only a tentative grasp on one. The word that identified what we did not possess was “money,” of which the General might have enough for his own use, but certainly not for a counterrevolution. The other word was “votes,” so that together “money votes” was “open sesame” to the deep caverns of the American political system. But even when just one-half of that magical combination floated from my aspiring Ali Baba’s lips, the Congressman’s eyebrows rippled ever so faintly. Think of our community as an investment, Congressman. A long-term investment. Think of us as a small, sleeping child who has not yet awaken and grown. It is true this child cannot vote. This child is not a citizen. But one day this child will be a citizen. One day this child’s children will be born as citizens, and they must vote for somebody. That somebody might as well be you.