The Committed. Viet Thanh Nguyen
with an unrelenting sonic attack composed of an infant’s recorded howling, until at last I could pass the final exam. It was this exam, which she had finally gotten to, that disturbed my aunt, leading her to mutter over and over again its only question:
WHAT IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM?
Like every good revolutionary, my aunt already knew the answer, Ho Chi Minh’s most famous slogan, a spell that mobilized millions to rise and die in order to evict the French and then the Americans, to unify our country and liberate it. After she muttered the question, she declaimed the answer, first as an incantation, which was how it was intended to be said:
NOTHING IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM!
And then again with her voice rising, as a question:
NOTHING IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM?
Exactly, I said sadly, shaking my head and giving her for free what had cost me so much to learn. Nothing is, in fact, more precious than independence and freedom.
No, no, no! Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom—I mean, independence and freedom are more precious than nothing, not the other way around!
You read my confession. I sighed, then inhaled so deeply from the laced cigarette that my lungs sizzled, the smoke that issued forth reminding me of how everything solid eventually melts into air. Have you learned nothing?
Shut up! she cried. Give me that cigarette.
Doesn’t nothing make more sense after hashish?
No. Nothing makes sense at all after your confession.
Of course it does. You just refuse to make sense of nothing, as most people do. Now if you had gone through reeducation like I had, under the hands of a master revolutionary theorist like Man, you would understand that nothing is contradictory, like everything meaningful—love and hate, capitalism and communism, France and America. Leave it to the simple-minded to understand only one side of a contradiction. You’re not simple-minded, are you?
I hate you, she groaned, eyes closed. Why did I invite you into my house?
It’s all quite funny, if you think about it. Almost as funny as the funniest part of my confession, said by none other than Man himself, which should be engraved on the pedestal of Ho Chi Minh’s statue, if he has a statue. Except that it is unprintable, as the truth too often is: “Now that we are the powerful, we don’t need the French or the Americans to fuck us over—”
“We can fuck ourselves just fine,” she said.
I howled with laughter, slapped my knee, felt tears moistening my cheeks. This hashish was really something else! Come on, I said after my laughter had subsided. Isn’t that funny?
No. She stubbed out her cigarette. That’s not funny.
A trumpet blared and my vision was hazy, and if I could have seen myself in a mirror, I surely would have seen double of me, or two of us, not so much black and blue but red and yellow.
You used to believe in the revolution, she said. What do you believe in now?
Nothing, I said. But isn’t that something?
So you’re going to sell drugs.
Well, I muttered. Even under a cloud of hashish, I could see that her contempt had a point. It’s better than nothing.
My aunt drew herself up from where she had been reclining on the couch and turned off the stereo. So long as you were a revolutionary, I could have you living here for free as my service to the revolution and as an expression of my belief in solidarity, she said. She was remarkably eloquent after the hashish, or perhaps her passion had focused her. But if you’re going to be dealing drugs—
You’re making a moral judgment?
I make no moral judgment. I’m the one smoking hashish. And sometimes criminals make the best revolutionaries, or revolutionaries are condemned as criminals. But if you’re no longer a revolutionary and you’re going to be selling drugs, and sleeping on my couch, and asking me to protect you from Bon by keeping your communist past a secret, then you can afford to split the profits with me.
My mouth, already slightly agape under the influence of the hashish, fell completely open.
What’s the matter? she said, lighting another hashish cigarette. Too contradictory for you?
Walking the next morning to the Maoist PhD’s apartment from the metro, I experienced déjà vu for the second time in less than twelve hours (strange that even my psychic tics or malfunctions were named in the master’s language). The first time was when I offered to split the profits with my aunt fifty-fifty, only to have her counter with sixty-forty, terms to which I had to agree once again. The second time was walking on the Maoist PhD’s street, where I had the eerie sense that I had been there before, since his street evoked for me one of Saigon’s boulevards, or rather, Saigon’s boulevards evoked a street like his. The French had designed Saigon in the spirit of Haussmann’s Paris, with wide thoroughfares and broad sidewalks lined with fetching trees and elegant apartment buildings of no more than six or seven stories, decorated with balconies and capped by garrets where, during the heat of August, one could roast artists or the poor, which we in Saigon could do year-round. Oh, Saigon, Pearl of the Orient! Or so it was called, presumably by the French, using a term of endearment that we ourselves had adapted, for there was nothing the people of a small country liked better than to be flattered, so rarely did it happen. But sometimes we were not just the Pearl of the Orient, and sometimes the Pearl of the Orient did not even refer to us. I had heard the Chinese of Hong Kong claim that their port was the Pearl of the Orient, and when I was in the Philippines, the Filipinos insisted that Manila was the Pearl of the Orient. Colonies were a pearl choker adorning the alabaster-white neck of the colonizer. And sometimes a Pearl of the Orient could be a Paris of the Orient as well. The Parisians and the French and just about everyone meant that as a compliment, but it was a backhanded compliment, the only kind a colonizer could give to the colonized. After all, as the Paris of the Orient, Saigon was just a cheap imitation of haute couture.
I had worked myself into such a lather of resentment that I was practically frothing at the mouth when Paris suddenly gave me a sticky reminder of one way that Saigon was considerably superior. Squish! I stopped and looked with dread and then disgust at the sole of my shoe. Nowhere in Saigon would the unwitting pedestrian have a chance of stepping on canine excrement, because the statistical truth was that we preferred to consume canines rather than keep them as pets, and if we kept them, we never allowed them to wander the streets, for fear that they might be eaten. Vive la différence! Here in Paris, dogs roamed everywhere, liberated to do their business as they pleased. In this case, some degenerate Parisian dog owner, of whom thousands existed, had left the prize almost on the doorstep of the Maoist psychoanalyst’s building. The imprint of my sole was on the thick brown smear, ready for a detective to study my shoeprint. No amount of scraping against the cement would get rid of the foul substance from the crevices of my shoe. I gave up, hesitated before buzzing the Maoist PhD’s apartment, but then remembered the first lesson of capitalism, which was so hard for Vietnamese people to learn: Never be late. I pressed the button.
In the tiny elevator, which offered room for no more than three adults of average French build, or four Vietnamese of average Vietnamese build, or perhaps three and a half Eurasians like me, the odor from my shoe was evident. I kept my sole off the floor, and when the Maoist PhD let me into his apartment, I did my best to walk in that manner, limping, I said, because of a sore ankle. It was not my fault that the French were not as civilized as Asians, who believed, for very good reason, that one should take off one’s shoes before entering a house. In this regard, the French were medieval.
You have a beautiful apartment, I said in rapid-fire English when he greeted me in his rapid-fire French. He hesitated, but in the end he replied in English. Like BFD, he could not pass up the chance to prove to someone like me that he could speak today’s imperial lingua franca. Like BFD, the Maoist PhD’s English was good but accented. He would know all too well how impeccable mine was, judging from the framed posters