I had sat on exactly such a splintery toilet seat throughout my childhood, and remembered very well the catfish jockeying for the best seat at the dining table when I assumed the position. The sight of an authentic outhouse stirred neither any sentimental feelings in me nor any admiration for my people’s environmental consciousness. I preferred a flush toilet with a smooth porcelain seat and a newspaper on my lap as reading matter, not between my legs. The paper with which the West wiped itself was softer than the paper with which the rest of the world blew its nose, although this was only a metaphorical comparison. The rest of the world would have been stunned at the luxurious idea of even using paper to blow one’s nose. Paper was for writing things like this confession, not for mopping up excretions. But those strange, mysterious Westerners had exotic ways and wonders, symbolized in Kleenex and double-ply toilet paper. If longing for these riches made me an Occidentalist, I confess to it. I had no desire for the authenticity of my village life with my spiteful cousins and my ungracious aunts, or the rustic realities of being bit on one’s behind by a malarial mosquito when visiting the loo, which might be the case for some of the Vietnamese extras. Harry was planning to make them use this toilet in order to nourish the catfish, while the crew would bask in a battery of chemical toilets on dry land. So far as I was concerned, I was one of the crew, and when Harry invited me to be the first to bless the latrine, I regretfully declined, softening my rejection with a joke.
You know how we can tell that catfish sold in the markets come from ponds like this?
How so? said Harry, ready to take mental notes.
They’re cross-eyed from looking up at assholes all the time.
Good one! Harry laughed and slapped my arm. Come on, let me show you the temple. It’s really beautiful. I’m going to hate it when the special effects guys blow it up.
Harry may have loved the temple the most, but for me the pièce de résistance was the cemetery. I saw it for the first time that night and returned to it several nights later, after a field trip to the refugee camp at Bataan, where I recruited a hundred Vietnamese extras. The trip had left me dispirited, encountering as I did thousands of ragged fellow countrymen who had fled from our homeland. I had seen refugees before, Commandant, the war having rendered millions of the southern people homeless within their own country, but this mess of humanity was a new kind of species. It was so unique the Western media had given it a new name, the boat people, an epithet one might think referred to a newly discovered tribe of the Amazon River or a mysterious, extinguished prehistoric population whose only surviving trace was their watercraft. Depending on one’s point of view, these boat people were either runaways from home or orphaned by their country. In either case, they looked bad and smelled a little worse: hair mangy, skin crusty, lips chapped, various glands swollen, collectively reeking like a fishing trawler manned by landlubbers with unsteady digestive tracts. They were too hungry to turn up their noses at the wages I was mandated to offer, a dollar a day, their desperation measured by the fact that not one—let me repeat, not one—haggled for a better wage. I had never imagined the day when one of my countrymen would not haggle, but these boat people clearly understood that the law of supply and demand was not on their side. What truly brought my spirits down, however, was when I asked one of the extras, a lawyer of aristocratic appearance, if the conditions in our homeland were as bad as rumored. Let’s put it this way, she said. Before the communists won, foreigners were victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. Now it’s our own people victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. I suppose that’s improvement.
I trembled at hearing her words. For a few days my conscience had been purring smoothly, the crapulent major’s death seemingly behind me in the rear view of my memory, a smear on the blacktop of my past, but now it was hiccuping again. What was happening at home, and what was I doing here? I had to remind myself of Ms. Mori’s parting words. When I told her I was taking the job, she had cooked me a farewell dinner where I almost gave in to the sneaky suspicion that perhaps I really did love her, even if I did have feelings for Lana, too. But as if anticipating such weakness on my part, Ms. Mori preemptively reminded me of our commitment to free love. Don’t feel obligated to me, she said over the orange sorbet. You can do whatever you want. Of course, I said, a little saddened. I could not have it both ways, free love and bourgeois love, no matter if I wanted to. Or could I? Society of any kind was well stocked with satin bilinguals who said and did one thing in public while saying and doing another in private. But Ms. Mori was not one of those people, and in the darkness of her bedroom, clinging to each other in the aftermath of our exercise in free love, she said, You have it in you to do something wonderful with this movie. I have confidence in you that you can make it better than it could be. You can help shape how Asians look in the movies. That’s no small thing.
Thank you, Ms. Mori.
Sofia, goddammit.
Could I really make any difference? What would Man or Ms. Mori think, knowing that I was little more, perhaps, than a collaborator, helping to exploit my fellow countrymen and refugees? The sight of their sad, confused faces had undermined my confidence, reminding me of the ligaments of sentimentality and sympathy that twined my tougher, more revolutionary parts together. I even came down with the hot fever of homesickness, and so it was that when I returned to the base camp, I sought comfort in the hamlet that Harry had created. The dusty lanes, the thatched roofs, the earthen floors of the cottages and their simple bamboo furniture, the piggeries with real pigs already snorting softly in the night, the warble of the innocent chickens, the soupy air, the bite of the mosquitoes, the plop of my unsuspecting foot into a mushy cake of buffalo dung—all of it left me dizzy with the vertigo of sadness and longing. Only one thing was missing from the hamlet and that was the people, the most important of which was my mother. She had died during my junior year in college, when she was just thirty-four. For the first and only time, my father wrote me a letter, brief and to the point: Your mother has passed away of tuberculosis, poor thing. She is buried in the cemetery under a real headstone. A real headstone! He had noted it to say in his own way that he had paid for it, since my mother did not have the savings to afford any such thing. I read his letter twice in numb disbelief before the pain struck, the hot lead of sorrow pouring into the mold of my body. She had been sick, but not this sick, unless she had been hiding the real state of her condition from me. We had seen so little of each other over the past few years, what with me hundreds of miles away at the lycée in Saigon and then thousands of miles abroad. The last time I saw her was the month before I left for the States, when I returned to say good-bye for four years. I would have no money to return for Tet, or for the summer, or at all until I finished my degree, my scholarship paying for only one round-trip ticket. She smiled bravely and called me her petit écolier, after the chocolate-covered biscuits I loved so much as a child and which my father blessed me with once per year on Christmas. Her parting gifts to me were a box of those imported biscuits—a fortune for a woman who had only nibbled on the corner of one once and saved the rest for me each Christmas—as well as a notebook and a pen. She was barely literate and read out loud, and she wrote with a cramped, shy hand. By the time I was ten, I wrote everything for her. To my mother, a notebook and a pen symbolized everything she could not achieve and everything I, through the grace of God or the accidental combination of my genes, seemed destined for. I ate the biscuits on the airplane and wrote all over the notebook as a college diary. Now it was nothing but ashes. As for the pen, it had run out of ink and I had lost it at some point.
What I would give to have those useless things with me now, kneeling by my mother’s tomb and resting my forehead against its rough surface. Not the tomb in the hamlet where she had died, but here, in Luzon, in the cemetery built by Harry just for authenticity’s sake. When I had seen his field of stones, I had asked to have the biggest tomb for my own use. On the tombstone I
had pasted a reproduction of my mother’s black-and-white picture that I carried in my wallet, the only extant image of her besides the rapidly fading ones in my mind, which had taken on the quality of a poorly preserved silent movie, its frames cracked by hairline fractures. On the gray face of the tombstone I painted her name and her dates in red, the mathematics of her life absurdly short for anyone but a grade-schooler to whom thirty-four years seemed an eternity. Tombstone and tomb were cast from adobe rather than carved from marble, but I took comfort in knowing no one would be able to tell on film. At least in this cinematic life she would have a resting place fit for a mandarin’s wife, an ersatz but perhaps fitting grave for a woman who was never more than an extra to anyone but me.
Chapter 10
When the Auteur arrived the next week, he threw himself a welcome party replete with barbecue, beer, burgers, Heinz ketchup, and a sheet cake big enough to sleep on. The prop department fashioned a fake cauldron from plywood and papier-mâché, stocked it with dry ice, and plopped in a couple of strippers with bleached blond hair from one of the bars around Subic Bay, their job to play white women boiled alive by natives. A handful of obliging young local men played the natives, wearing loincloths and shaking nasty-looking spears also concocted by the prop department. With the Vietnamese extras not due for another day, I was the lone representative of my people wandering among the more than a hundred actors and crew members, with an additional hundred or so Filipino laborers and cooks. These locals thought it was a gas to go up to the cauldron and slice carrots into the stripper soup. I could see the film shoot was going to generate tales of the movie people from Hollywood that would be passed on for decades, stretched ever taller for each succeeding generation. As for the extras, the boat people, they would be forgotten. No one remembered the extras.
Although I was neither one of the extras nor one of the boat people, the tide of sympathy pulled me toward them. The current of alienation simultaneously pushed me away from the movie people, even though I was one of them. In short, I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar, which I responded to in my usual fashion by arming myself with a gin and tonic, my first of the evening. I was sure to be defenseless after my fourth or fifth such drink at this party, which took place under the stars as well as under a huge thatched pavilion that served as the canteen. After trading jokes with Harry, I watched the men of the crew crowd around the few white girls on the set. Meanwhile, a blond-wigged band from Manila pounded out a perfect cover of Diana Ross’s “Do You Know Where You’re Going To,” and I wondered if it had perhaps been one of the same Filipino bands that had played in Saigon’s hotels. On the edge of the dance floor sat the Auteur, chatting with the Thespian, while Violet flirted with the Idol at the same table. The Thespian was playing Captain Will Shamus; the Idol was Sergeant Jay Bellamy. While the Thespian had started his long career off Broadway, the Idol was a singer who had flashed to fame with a bubble-gum pop hit so sweet my teeth hurt just on hearing it. The Hamlet was the first movie role for the young man, who had shown his commitment by shaving off the evanescent hairdo much imitated by teenage boys into a GI haircut, then submitting himself to the military drilling required for his role with the enthusiasm of a sexually repressed fraternity initiate. Leaning back on his rattan chair, sporting a white T-shirt and khakis, his perfect ankles exposed because he wore no socks with his boat shoes, he was cool as ice cream even in the tropical weather. That was why he was an Idol, fame his natural aura. Rumor had it that he and the Thespian did not get along, the Thespian being an actor’s actor’s actor who not only stayed in character the entire time but kept his uniform on as well. The GI fatigues and combat boots he wore were the same set he’d donned three days before, when he arrived and became possibly the first actor in history to demand a pup tent instead of his air-conditioned trailer. Since frontline soldiers did not shower and shave, neither had he, and as a result he had begun to give off the aroma of slightly less than fresh ricotta. On his web belt was a holstered .45, and while all the other guns on the set were empty of ammunition or had blanks, his packed real bullets, or so went another rumor that I am fairly certain originated with the Thespian. He and the Auteur discussed Fellini while Violet and the Idol reminisced about a Sunset Strip nightclub. No one paid any attention to me at all, so I sidled over to the next table, where the Vietnamese actors sat.
Or, to put it more accurately, the actors playing the Vietnamese. My notes to the Auteur had actually effected some change in how we were represented, and more than simply how the screams were now all rendered as AIEYAAHHH!!! The most crucial change was the addition of three Vietnamese characters with actual speaking parts, an older brother, a younger sister, and a little brother whose parents had been slaughtered by King Cong. Older brother Binh, nicknamed Benny by the Green Berets, was filled with hatred of King Cong. He loved his American rescuers and served as their translator. Along with the one black Green Beret, he would meet the grisliest of deaths at the hands of King Cong. As for the sister, Mai, she would fall in love with the young, handsome, idealistic Sergeant Jay Bellamy. She would then be kidnapped and raped by King Cong, which served as the justification for the Green Berets utterly annihilating every last trace of King Cong. As for the little boy, he would be crowned with a Yankees cap in the final scene and airlifted into the heavens, his ultimate destination being Jay Bellamy’s family in St. Louis, where he would be given a golden retriever and the nickname Danny Boy.
This was better than nothing, right?
In my naïveté, I had simply assumed that once roles were created for Vietnamese people, Vietnamese actors would be found. But no. We looked, Violet told me yesterday, when we had found time to sip iced tea together on the hotel veranda. Frankly, there just weren’t any qualified Vietnamese actors. Most of them were amateurs and the handful of professionals all overacted. It must be the way they were trained. You’ll see. Just withhold judgment until you see these actors act. Unfortunately, withholding judgment was not one of my strong suits. What Violet was telling me was that we could not represent ourselves; we must be represented, in this case by other Asians. The little one playing Danny Boy was the scion of a venerable Filipino acting family, but if he looked Vietnamese, then I could pass for the pope. He was simply too round and well fed to be a boy living in a hamlet, the typical such stripling having been raised without the benefit of any milk except his mother’s. No doubt the young actor was talented. He had won the hearts of everyone on set when, on first being introduced, he had rendered a high-pitched version of “Feelings” at the bidding of his mother, who was sitting with him now and fanning him as he nursed a soda. During his performance, the maternal affection of this Venus was so strong I was pulled into her orbit, convinced by her that one day, mark her words, he would be on Broadway. You hear how he says feelings and not peelings? she whispered. Lessons in elocution! He does not speak like a Filipino at all. Modeling himself on the Thespian, Danny Boy insisted on inhabiting his role and demanded to be called Danny Boy instead of his name, which I could not remember anyway.
The actor playing his older brother could not stand the child, mostly because Danny Boy stole the show with malicious ease whenever the two appeared next to each other. This was especially galling for James Yoon, the best-known performer on the set after the Thespian and the Idol. Yoon was the Asian Everyman, a television actor whose face most people would know but whose name they could not recall. They would say, Oh, that’s the Chinese guy on that cop show, or That’s the Japanese gardener in that comedy, or That’s the Oriental guy, what’s his name. Yoon was, in fact, a Korean American in his midthirties who could play a decade older or a decade younger and assume the mask of any Asian ethnicity, so malleable were his generically handsome features. Despite his many television roles, however, he would most likely go down in history for a highly popular recurring television commercial selling Sheen, a brand of dishwashing soap. In each commercial, a different housewife would be confronted by a differe
nt kind of sticky dishwashing challenge that could only be solved by the appearance of her chuckling, knowing houseboy, who offered her not his manhood but his ever-ready bottle of Sheen. Relieved and amazed, the housewife would inquire as to how he had come across such cleaning wisdom, whereon he would turn to the camera, wink, smile, and utter the slogan now famous across the nation: Confucius say, Clean with Sheen!
Not surprisingly, Yoon was an alcoholic. His face was an accurate thermometer of his condition, the mercurial redness an indicator that the liquor had worked its way up from his toes to his vision, tongue, and brain, for he was flirting with the actress playing his sister even though neither was heterosexual. Yoon had made his intentions known to me over a dozen raw oysters at the hotel bar, their moist, open ears cocked upward to eavesdrop on his attempted seduction. No offense, I said, his hand on my knee, but I’ve never been so inclined. Yoon shrugged and removed his hand. I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise. In any case, you can’t blame a gay for trying, he said, smiling a smile utterly unlike my own. Having studied my smile and its effect on people, I knew it had the value of a second-rate global currency like the franc or the mark. But Yoon’s smile was the gold standard, so bright it was the only thing you could see or look at, so utterly overpowering in person it was understandable how he had won the role of the Sheen actor. I was happy to buy him a drink to show that I was not bothered by his advances, and he in turn bought me another, and we bonded that night and almost every night that followed.