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The one who inspected my passport wore the blank mask of all security guards as he studied my photograph and then me. His pale face seemed displeased that someone had granted me access to his beloved country, this man who lacked both an upper lip and a mustache to disguise his lack.
The hero who had liberated France from the Nazis while continuing to enslave us Vietnamese.
Like most refugees we barely had any material belongings, even if our bags were packed with dreams and fantasies, trauma and pain, sorrow and loss, and, of course, ghosts. Since ghosts were weightless, we could carry an infinite number of them.
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.
Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.
Colonizers imagined themselves as divine, and the native middlemen who served them, like my professor, fancied themselves as priests and disciples. Not surprisingly, the colonizers looked down on us as savages, infants, or sheep, while we looked up at them as demigods, masters, or brutes. The danger with worshipping human beings, of course, is that eventually they reveal their flawed humanity, at which point the believer has no choice but to kill the fallen idols or die trying.
The mission of the culture show was to compete with the charms of French life by showing the charms of Vietnamese life, which had become much more charming to the Vietnamese in France after so many years spent away from Vietnam.
A few months into this new episode of my life, I was leaving a small park on passage Dumas when a young man at the gate nodded at me, raised his eyebrow, and held his fingers to his lips in the universal language of the brotherhood of smokers, unified in our death wish.
That was the fate of anyone from a small country, no matter how accomplished. Even when we had names, hardly anyone besides our countrymen knew what they were or could pronounce them.
—who sat beside me and also did nothing as we watched the three policemen do what men have undoubtedly been doing to women since Adam blamed Eve for listening to the serpent.
😢
If prostitution was the world’s oldest profession, then rape was the world’s original crime.
Whoever said the road to Hell was paved with good intentions had gotten it all wrong. If you looked more closely, you could see that the road to Hell was paved with excuses.
All the enormous emotional force in the love that he could no longer give to his wife and child had been converted, in the strange dynamo of his soul, into potential violence he could direct at his enemies.
