She’s completely insane, Madame declared. We’ve been trying to keep her insanity within the family, but now that she’s strutting in public as a singer—Madame said the word as if it were communist—there’s nothing we can do. Someone persuaded her that she had talent as a singer, and she took the compliment seriously. She is rather talented, I said. Don’t start! Don’t encourage her! Look at her. She looks like a slut. Is this what I raised her to be? What decent man would want to marry that? Would you, Captain? Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. No, Madame, I said, I wouldn’t want to marry that, also the two-faced truth, for marriage was not the first thing on my mind when I saw her onstage. Of course not, she fumed. The worst thing about living in America is the corruption. At home, we could contain it in the bars and nightclubs and bases. But here, we will not be able to protect our children from the lewdness and the shallowness and the tawdriness Americans love so much. They’re too permissive. No one even thinks twice of what they call dating. We all know that “date” is a euphemism. What parent not only allows their daughter to copulate in her teenage years, but willingly encourages it? It’s shocking! It’s an abnegation of moral responsibility. Ugh.
Somehow, at lunch, the conversation turned exactly in this direction, allowing Madame to repeat her points to the Congressman and his wife, Rita, a refugee from Castro’s revolution. She bore a passing resemblance to Rita Hayworth, with ten or fifteen years and pounds added to the movie star at her most glamorous period, circa Gilda. Castro, she said, in the way Madame said singer, is the devil. The only good thing about living with the devil, General and Madame, is that one knows evil and can recognize it. That is why I am happy you are here today, because we Cubans and Vietnamese are cousins in our shared cause against communism. These words sealed the bond between the Congressman and Rita and the General and Madame, who was comfortable enough that she eventually mentioned Lana to them while the mute housekeeper policed the empty dishes. Rita immediately sympathized. She was the domestic equivalent of her husband, an anticommunist warrior housewife to whom nothing was just an isolated incident but was almost always a symptom by which the disease of communism could be linked to poverty, depravity, atheism, and decay of many kinds. I won’t allow rock music in this house, she said, gripping Madame’s hand to console her for the loss of her daughter’s virtue. None of my children will be allowed to date until eighteen and, so long as they live in this house, will have a curfew by ten. It’s our weak spot, this freedom we allow people to behave any way they please, what with their drugs and their sex, as if those things aren’t infectious.
Every system has its excesses that must be checked internally, the Congressman said. We let the hippies steal the meaning of the words “love” and “freedom,” and we’ve only just begun to fight back. That fight begins and ends in the home. Unlike his public persona, the Congressman in private was soft-spoken and measured in his tones, baronially assured as he sat at the head of the table, the General and Madame to either side. We control what our children read and listen to and watch, but it’s a tough fight when they can just turn on the television or radio any time they want. We need the government to make sure Hollywood and the record labels don’t go too far.
Aren’t you the government? the General said.
Exactly! Which is why one of my priorities is legislation that regulates movies and music. This is not censorship, only advice with teeth. But you can bet the Hollywood and music types don’t like me at all, until they meet me, that is, and see I’m not some kind of ogre out to feast on their creations. I’m just trying to help them refine their product. Now one thing that happened as a consequence of my work on the subcommittee is that I became friendly with some of the Hollywood people. I’ll admit I had my prejudices about them, but some of them are actually smart and passionate guys, too. Smart and passionate—that’s what I care about. The rest, we negotiate. Anyway, one of them is making a movie about the war and wanted my advice. I’m going to give him some notes on his script about what he got right and wrong. But the reason I mention it to you, General, is because the story’s about the Phoenix Program, and I know you’re an expert on that. Me, I left before that even got started. Maybe you can give some feedback. Otherwise who knows what kind of Hollywood story they’re going to make.
This is why I have my captain, the General said, nodding toward me. He is, in effect, my cultural attaché. He would be more than happy to read the screenplay and offer his insight. When I asked the Congressman for the title, I was taken aback. Hamlet?
No, The Hamlet. The director’s also the writer. Never served a day in the armed forces, just got fed John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies as a kid. The main character’s a Green Beret who has to save a hamlet. I did serve two years on an A-Team in a number of hamlets, but nothing like this fantasyland he’s cooked up.
I’ll see what I can do, I said. I had lived in a northern hamlet only a few years as a young boy, before our flight south in ’54, but lack of experience had never stopped me from trying anything. This was my mind-set when I approached Lana after her commanding performance, my intent to congratulate her on her new career. We stood in the restaurant’s foyer, by an imposing photograph of the newlyweds displayed on an easel, and it was here that she studied me with the objective, unsentimental eye of an art appraiser. She smiled and said, I was wondering why you were keeping your distance from me, Captain. When I protested that I simply had not recognized her, she asked me if I liked what I saw. I don’t look like the girl you knew, do I, Captain?
Some men preferred those innocent schoolgirls in their white ao dai, but not me. They belonged to some pastoral, pure vision of our culture from which I was excluded, as distant to me as the snowcapped peaks of my father’s homeland. No, I was impure, and impurity was all I wanted and all I deserved. You don’t look like the girl I knew, I said. But you look exactly like the woman I imagined you would one day become. No one had ever said anything like this to her, and the unexpected nature of my remark made her falter for a moment before she recovered. I see I’m not the only person who’s changed since coming here, Captain. You’re so much more . . . direct than you were when you lived with us.
I don’t live with you any longer, I said. If Madame had not appeared at that moment, who knew where the conversation would have taken us then? Without a word to me, she seized Lana by the elbow and pulled her toward the ladies’ room with a force that would not be denied. Although that was the last I saw of her for quite a while, she returned in my fantasies many times over the subsequent weeks. Regardless of what I wanted or deserved, she inevitably appeared in a white ao dai, her long black hair sometimes framing her face and sometimes obscuring it. In the nameless dream city where I encountered her, my shadow self wavered. Even in my somnambulent state I knew that white was not only the color of purity and innocence. It was also the sign of mourning and death.
Chapter 8
We own the day, but charlie owns the night. Never forget that. These are the words that blond twenty-one-year-old Sergeant jay bellamy hears on his first day in the torrid tropics of ’Nam from his new commanding officer, Captain will shamus. Shamus was baptized in the blood of his own comrades on the beaches of Normandy, survived another near-death experience under a Chinese human-wave attack in Korea, then hauled himself up the ranks on a pulley oiled with Jack Daniel’s. He knows he will not ascend any higher, not with his Bronx manners and his big, knobby knuckles over which no velvet gloves fit. This is a political war, he informs his acolyte, the words emanating from behind the smoke screen produced by a Cuban cigar. But all I know is a killing war. His task: save the prelapsarian Montagnards of a bucolic hamlet perched on the border of wild Laos. What’s threatening them is the Viet Cong, and not just any Viet Cong. This is the baddest of the bad—King Cong. King Cong will die for his country, which is more than can be said for most Americans. More important, King Cong will kill for his country, and nothing makes King Cong lick his lips like the ferric
scent of the white man’s blood. King Cong has stocked the dense jungle around the hamlet with veteran guerrillas, battle-wizened men (and women) who have slaughtered Frenchmen from the Highlands to the Street Without Joy. What’s more, King Cong has infiltrated the hamlet with subversives and sympathizers, friendly faces only masks for calculating wills. Standing against them are the hamlet’s Popular Forces, a ragtag bunch of farmers and teenagers, Vietnam’s own minutemen trained by the dozen Green Berets of the US Army Special Forces A-Team. This is enough, Sergeant Bellamy thinks, alone in his watchtower at midnight. He’s dropped out of Harvard and run far from his St. Louis home, his millionaire daddy, and his fur-cloaked mother. This is enough, this stunningly beautiful jungle and these humble, simple people. This is where I, Jay Bellamy, make my first and maybe my last stand—at the hamlet.
This, at any rate, was my interpretation of the screenplay mailed to me by the director’s personal assistant, the thickish manila envelope arriving with my name misspelled in a beautifully cursive hand. That was the first whiff of trouble, the second being how the personal assistant, Violet, did not even bother to say hello or good-bye when she called for my mailing information and to arrange a meeting with the director in his Hollywood Hills home. When Violet opened the door, she continued with her bewildering manner of discourse in person. Glad to see you could make it, heard a lot about you, loved your notes on The Hamlet. And that’s precisely how she spoke, trimming pronouns and periods, as if punctuation and grammar were wasted on me. Then, without deigning to make eye contact, she inclined her head in a gesture of condescension and disdain, signaling me to enter.
Perhaps her abruptness was merely part of her personality, for she had the appearance of the worst kind of bureaucrat, the aspiring one, from blunt, square haircut to blunt, clean fingernails to blunt, efficient pumps. But perhaps it was me, still morally disoriented from the crapulent major’s death, as well as the apparition of his severed head at the wedding banquet. The emotional residue of that night was like a drop of arsenic falling into the still waters of my soul, nothing having changed from the taste of it but everything now tainted. So perhaps that was why when I crossed over the threshold into the marble foyer, I instantly suspected that the cause of her behavior was my race. What she saw when she looked at me must have been my yellowness, my slightly smaller eyes, and the shadow cast by the ill fame of the Oriental’s genitals, those supposedly minuscule privates disparaged on many a public restroom wall by semiliterates. I might have been just half an Asian, but in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t. Funnily enough, I had never felt inferior because of my race during my foreign student days. I was foreign by definition and therefore was treated as a guest. But now, even though I was a card-carrying American with a driver’s license, Social Security card, and resident alien permit, Violet still considered me as foreign, and this misrecognition punctured the smooth skin of my self-confidence. Was I just being paranoid, that all-American characteristic? Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But as she advanced along the polished bamboo floors, steering clear of the dusky maid vacuuming a Turkish rug, I just knew it could not be so. The flawlessness of my English did not matter. Even if she could hear me, she still saw right through me, or perhaps saw someone else instead of me, her retinas burned with the images of all the castrati dreamed up by Hollywood to steal the place of real Asian men. Here I speak of those cartoons named Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Number One Son, Hop Sing—Hop Sing!—and the bucktoothed, bespectacled Jap not so much played as mocked by Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The performance was so insulting it even deflated my fetish for Audrey Hepburn, understanding as I did her implicit endorsement of such loathsomeness.
By the time I sat down opposite the director in his office, I was seething from the memory of all these previous wounds, although I did not show it. On the one hand, I was sitting for a meeting with the famed Auteur, when once I was just another lovelorn movie fan passing Saturday afternoons in the cinematic bliss of matinee screenings from which I emerged, blinking and slightly shocked, into sunlight as bright as the fluorescent bulbs of a hospital birthing room. On the other hand, I was flummoxed by having read a screenplay whose greatest special effect was neither the blowing up of various things nor the evisceration of various bodies, but the achievement of narrating a movie about our country where not a single one of our countrymen had an intelligible word to say. Violet had scraped my already chafed ethnic sensitivity even further, but since it would not do to make my irritation evident, I forced myself to smile and do what I did best, remaining as unreadable as a paper package wrapped up with string.
The Auteur studied me, this extra who had crept into the middle of his perfect mise-en-scène. A golden Oscar statuette exhibited itself to the side of his telephone, serving as either a kingly scepter or a mace for braining impertinent screenwriters. A hirsute show of manliness ruffled along his forearms and from the collar of his shirt, reminding me of my own relative hairlessness, my chest (and stomach and buttocks) as streamlined and glabrous as a Ken doll. He was the hottest writer-director in town after the triumph of his last two films, beginning with Hard Knock, a critically lauded movie about the travails of Greek American youth in the inflamed streets of Detroit. It was loosely autobiographical, the Auteur having been born with an olive-tinged Greek surname he had bleached in typical Hollywood fashion. His most recent film declared that he had had enough with off-white ethnicity, exploring cocaine-white ethnicity instead. Venice Beach was about the failure of the American Dream, featuring a dipsomaniac reporter and his depressive wife writing competing versions of the Great American Novel. As the foolscap mounted endlessly, their money and their lives slowly drained away, leaving the audience with a last image of the couple’s dilapidated cottage strangled by bougainvillea while beautifully lit by the sun setting beyond the Pacific. It was Didion crossed with Chandler as prophesied by Faulkner and shot by Welles. It was very good. He had talent, no matter how much it might have pained me to say so.
Great to meet you, the Auteur began. Loved your notes. How about something to drink. Coffee, tea, water, soda, scotch. Never too early for scotch. Violet, some scotch. Ice. I said ice. No ice, then. Me too. Always neat for me. Look at my view. No, not at the gardener. José! José! Got to pound on the glass to get his attention. He’s half deaf. José! Move! You’re blocking the view. Good. See the view. I’m talking about the Hollywood sign right there. Never get tired of it. Like the Word of God just dropped down, plunked on the hills, and the Word was Hollywood. Didn’t God say let there be light first. What’s a movie but light. Can’t have a movie without light. And then words. Seeing that sign reminds me to write every morning. What. All right, so it doesn’t say Hollywood. You got me. Good eye. Thing’s falling to pieces. One O’s half fallen and the other O’s fallen altogether. The word’s gone to shit. So what. You still get the meaning. Thanks, Violet. Cheers. How do they say it in your country. I said how do they say it. Yo, yo, yo, is it. I like that. Easy to remember. Yo, yo, yo, then. And here’s to the Congressman for sending you my way. You’re the first Vietnamese I’ve ever met. Not too many of you in Hollywood. Hell, none of you in Hollywood. And authenticity’s important. Not that authenticity beats imagination. The story still comes first. The universality of the story has to be there. But it doesn’t hurt to get the details right. I had a Green Beret who actually fought with the Montagnards vet the script. He found me. He had a screenplay. Everyone has a screenplay. Can’t write but he’s a real American hero. Two tours of duty, killed VC with his bare hands. A Silver Star and a Purple Heart with oak leaf clusters. You should have seen the Polaroids he showed me. Made my stomach turn. Gave me some ideas, though, for how to shoot the movie. Hardly had any corrections to make. What do you think of that.
It took me a moment to realize he
was asking me a question. I was disoriented, as if I were an English as a second language speaker listening to an equally foreign speaker from another country. That’s great, I said.
You bet it’s great. You, on the other hand. You wrote me another screenplay in the margins. You ever even read a screenplay before.
It took me another moment to realize there was another question. Like Violet, he had a problem with conventional punctuation. No—
I didn’t think so. So why do you think—
But you didn’t get the details right.
I didn’t get the details right. Violet, hear that. I researched your country, my friend. I read Joseph Buttinger and Frances FitzGerald. Have you read Joseph Buttinger and Frances FitzGerald. He’s the foremost historian on your little part of the world. And she won the Pulitzer Prize. She dissected your psychology. I think I know something about you people.
His aggressiveness flustered me, and my flustering, which I was not accustomed to, only flustered me further, which was my only explanation for my forthcoming behavior. You didn’t even get the screams right, I said.
Excuse me.
I waited for an interjection until I realized he was just interrupting me with a question. All right, I said, my string starting to unravel. If I remember correctly, pages 26, 42, 58, 77, 91, 103, and 118, basically all the places in the script where one of my people has a speaking part, he or she screams. No words, just screams. So you should at least get the screams right.
Screams are universal. Am I right, Violet.
You’re right, she said from where she sat next to me. Screams are not universal, I said. If I took this telephone cord and wrapped it around your neck and pulled it tight until your eyes bugged out and your tongue turned black, Violet’s scream would sound very different from the scream you would be trying to make. Those are two very different kinds of terror coming from a man and a woman. The man knows he is dying. The woman fears she is likely to die soon. Their situations and their bodies produce a qualitatively different timbre to their voices. One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else’s pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual. In this country, for example, someone fleeing for his life will think he should call for the police. This is a reasonable way to cope with the threat of pain. But in my country, no one calls for the police, since it is often the police who inflict the pain. Am I right, Violet?