The Committed. Viet Thanh Nguyen
mouth.
And now to polish the wax on Bon’s story:
I thought . . . I thought . . . if he could see the beauty of our culture, he could forget the war’s horror. I hoped . . . hoped . . . if he could see our people sing and dance, even if he cannot sing and dance—I looked down, a salty tide of genuine emotion lapping against my toes—his voice might come back . . . and that we, former soldiers of the south, might be friends with you, many of whom, or so I’ve been told, sympathize with our former enemies. But we are enemies no longer. Now’s the time to be friends. Don’t you agree?
If I was the crazy bastard, then Bon was the lucky bastard, because after this story and the meeting was concluded, all the girls and women surrounded him, each hoping to be the princess who could return the hero’s voice with a kiss (or more, if needed). Bon was grateful for the excuse of having lost his voice, since nothing frightened him more than speaking to women, including killing people, which he regarded mostly as a technical challenge and only occasionally a moral one. He was a very moral person who had joined his church choir in Saigon partly out of faith and partly out of hoping to meet his future wife, which he did. He and his future wife had sat across the aisle from each other on a bus trip to the Catholic shrine of La Vang, before the war’s cross fire destroyed it. She almost tripped getting off the bus, accidentally or deliberately, and he had grabbed her elbow. That was the excuse Linh needed to say hello, initiating a conversation that would not end until she died on the tarmac of the Saigon airport without the chance to say goodbye. Even now he saw her dead face and the face of his dead son, Duc, just a little boy. Ever since their deaths he had refused to think of another woman, much less speak to the few women to whom he had been attracted. The loneliness and sadness that resulted was the fate he thought he deserved for living.
Poor Bon! I didn’t care if he was a killer. He was my blood brother, my best friend, and it pained me that ever since the death of his wife and son—my godson!—he had nobody to love him but me, which was a horrible fate. To then be unexpectedly encircled by a half dozen women, gazing at him as if he were an infant lying in a cradle, made him lose the voice he actually had. All he could do was smile, nod, and shrug, a mute pantomime that suited him perfectly. Muteness was a kind of freedom from the world for him, if not for those who wanted to speak to him. But since they could say only so much to a man who could not or would not talk back, they eventually rotated to me, the one who would benefit even more than Bon from his muteness.
But not all the women were looking at me. One of them, still turned toward Bon, was writing in a notepad with a fountain pen gripped in a most delicate, graceful hand. When she looked up and saw him watching her, she smiled and silently offered him the notepad and pen.
My name is Loan, she had written, as if he were not only mute but deaf. Do you want to come watch us practice?
Bon surprised himself by writing yes.
As we left the meeting, I was uncertain about who was more astonished, Bon or me. He bore with him a sheet of paper with Loan’s name and phone number and the time, date, and location of the next practice for the dancers and singers. I was going to ask him if he was ready to kill any of the nice people whom we had met, including the Chairman, who seemed to me like he could be a communist, when Bon, even though he was supposed to be mute, said, Look.
Fortunately, no one else was in the Union’s foyer. He pointed to a bulletin board, on which was pinned a large poster with garish colors and bold lettering, the most significant word of which was FANTASIA. The next most significant words were EPISODE 7. Various singers and dancers, male and female, single or in duos, trios, or quartets, populated the poster. They wore suits and ties, or spandex and glitter, or modest ao dai and conical hats, or fishnet stockings and bras. I understood immediately that Fantasia the show was based on the nightclub in Los Angeles of the same name, a place where I had passed a night soaked in cognac and testosterone, my tongue hanging out at the sight of the one woman I should have kept my eyes, hands, and mind off of: Lana.
Oh, Lana! When the General had learned of my love affair with her in Los Angeles, he had dispatched me on a suicide mission to retake our country, the mission that had led to my capture and the reeducation camp. My reeducation had clearly taught me nothing, for the sight of Lana ignited the puddle of passion sloshing inside my gas tank. She posed by herself on the poster among the others, a headliner, barely wearing a slinky and kinky black dress that reached to the ankle but which overcompensated for that modesty by having a slit for her leg cut up to the pelvic bone, revealing her amazing leg in all its bare glory, a leg that ended in a foot harnessed into a high-heeled shoe that with its six-inch spike was both a heinous device of podiatric torture and also a potentially homicidal tool.
Don’t even think of it, Bon said, but I already was.
If this forthcoming episode of Fantasia was the seventh, that meant six episodes had preceded it, all available on something called videotape, a technology that had come into the world while I was in the dark ages of my reeducation. The machines used to play videocassettes were expensive, but even after earning almost nothing, my profits from selling the goods provided me with more disposable income than I had ever known. If I were sensible, I would have put my money in the bank and become even more capitalist, using money to conjure more money. But when was I ever sensible?
My aunt already owned a small Japanese television, and hooking up the videocassette recorder was a simple matter. Then I called Bon and told him to come over and watch.
She’s a communist, he said.
Put it aside for a night, I said. You were already here one night. It didn’t kill you. You didn’t kill her. She’s a civilian. And you do your best not to kill civilians, remember?
The pause on the line meant he was thinking. I’m not going to kill her. I just don’t want to be in her apartment.
Why was it so important for me to get Bon to visit my aunt’s apartment? Because I sensed he was changing, and I wanted to change him more. Something had shifted inside him despite himself. He was still ferocious and committed, but he was willing to meet Loan. He was admitting to being lonely. Perhaps that was my point of leverage in my effort to budge him, just a little, from the rock of his fanatical anticommunism, which would lead him to kill me if he found out about my communist past. Besides my self-interest, however, I just wanted him to be less lonely. To find, once again, a family.
You have to see Fantasia with your own eyes. And you have to see it with other Vietnamese people. Because it’s a show about us, by us, and for us. We’re the stars and the emcees, the singers and the dancers, the actors and the comedians, the performers and the spectators! We’re doing what we do best—sing, dance, and have fun!
I heard him breathing over the line.
All right, I said, you don’t sing or dance. But I know you love watching other people sing and dance. We did it all the time in the clubs in Saigon. We took it for granted back then that we would be entertained in our language, by people with our faces. Now here’s our chance again. Come on, Bon!
When, after a moment, he agreed, I knew his loneliness was greater than his hatred. He came bearing a bottle of wine, albeit cheap wine. But the social grace was still a measure of how far he had come from the reeducation camp. Neither my aunt nor he mentioned their last, awkward meeting, and both settled down on the couch to an unspoken truce, with the aid of Fantasia. The show had been filmed live in Los Angeles, in a shadow Hollywood where our people had ascended to be the stars. The awesomeness of that feat was evident whenever the camera cut to the audience and showed ecstatic, smiling faces, the viewers absolutely delighted as they watched what our people of the south do best: make a spectacle of themselves. Leave it to the people of our north, where I was born, to dwell on ideology, politics, scholarship, and poetry. They saw the people of the south, where I had grown up, as decadent and indecent. Perhaps that was so, but while the northerners offered a utopia that could be found nowhere, the southerners had created a Fantasia that could be experienced everywhere there was a television, a dreamland where men fearlessly wore sequins and women fearlessly wore . . . almost nothing. These men and women did the cha-cha, the tango, and the rhumba. They sang classics as well as covers of Western pop songs. They performed original numbers, some so new I had not heard