Sympathizer
You know what makes us human? In the mirror, the shorter of the duo slipped a bottle into his pocket. With a weary sigh, Bon reached for the baseball bat beneath the cash register. What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves.
Perhaps the point could have been made more delicately, but he was never one to be interested in delicacy. He was more interested in threatening the shoplifters with severe bodily harm until they fell to their knees, surrendered the items hidden in their jackets, and kowtowed for forgiveness. Bon was merely teaching them the way we had been taught. Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars. For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful. My father was no exception. He was simply more high-minded than most, working the xylophone of his students’ knuckles with his ruler until our poor joints were bruised purple, blue, and black. Sometimes we deserved to be whacked, sometimes not, but my father never showed any regret when evidence of our innocence surfaced. Since all were guilty of Original Sin, even punishment wrongly given was in some way just.
My mother was guilty, too, but hers was such an unoriginal sin. I was the kind bothered less by sinning than by unoriginality. Even in courting Lana, I suspected any sin I committed with her would never be enough because it would not be original. Yet I believed that sinning with her might be enough, since I would never know unless I tried. Perhaps I would glimpse infinity when I lit her up with the spasmodic spark that came from striking my soul against hers. Perhaps I would finally know eternity without resorting to this:
Q. Say the Apostles’ Creed.
A. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth . . .
Even these two thieves had likely heard of this prayer, Christian ideas being so important to the American people that they had granted them a place on the most precious document of all, the dollar bill. in god we trust must even now be printed on the money in their wallets. Bon tapped the shoplifters’ foreheads gently with the baseball bat as they cried, Please, forgive us! At least these cretins knew fear, one of the two great motives for belief. The question the baseball bat would not resolve was whether they knew the other motive, love, which, for some reason, was much harder to teach.
The General arrived at his usual time, and as soon as he did, we left, myself chauffeuring while he sat in the back. He was not verbose as usual, nor did he spend his time poring through papers in his briefcase. Instead, he gazed out the window, which he normally considered a waste of time, and the only command he issued was to turn off the music. In the ensuing silence I heard the muted cello of foreboding, announcing the theme I was sure preoccupied him: Sonny. The newspaper article Sonny had written on the alleged operations of the Fraternity and the Movement had circulated with the ease of the common cold through the exiled community, his microbial allegations becoming confirmed facts and his facts becoming infectious rumors. By the time the rumors reached me, the story was that the General was either broke in his efforts to fund the Movement or wallowing in ill-gotten lucre. This was either the payoff from the US government for keeping mum about its failure to help us at war’s end, or the profits from not just a chain of restaurants, but also drug dealing, prostitution, and extortion of small-time business owners. The Movement, some insisted, was simply a racket, and its men in Thailand a rabble of scurvy degenerates dependent on the community’s donations. Others said those men were actually a regiment of the finest Rangers, bloodthirsty and mad for revenge. According to this ever-proliferating gossip, the General was either going to send these fools to their deaths from his armchair or he was going to return, like MacArthur to the Philippines, to lead the heroic invasion himself. If I was hearing this gossip, then Madame certainly was, and therefore the General, too, all of us tuned in to the humming, crackling AM channel of hearsay. This included the crapulent major, his fat body spilling over the edges of the bucket seat next to me. I dared not turn my head to look, although from the corner of my eye I saw him facing me, all three of his eyes surely wide open. I had not drilled that hole into his head that had given him his third eye, but I had come up with the plot that led to his fate. Now it was this third eye that allowed him to continue watching me even though he was dead, a spectator and not just a specter. I can’t wait to see the end of this little story, he said. But I already know how it’s going to end. Don’t you?
Did you say something? the General said.
No, sir.
I heard you say something.
I must have been talking to myself.
Stop talking to yourself.
Yes, sir.
The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself. But if talking to oneself was the ideal conversation in the cocktail party of one’s imagination, the crapulent major was the annoying guest who kept butting in and ignoring the cues to scram. Plots take on a life of their own, don’t they? he said. You gave birth to this plot. Now you’re the only one who can kill it. So it went for the rest of the drive to the country club, the crapulent major whispering in my ear while I held my tongue for so long it hurt, swollen with the words I wanted to say to him. Mostly I wished for him what I had once desired for my father, a disappearance from my life. After I had received his letter to me in the States that conveyed the news of my mother’s death, I had written to Man that if God really did exist, my mother would be alive and my father would not. How I wish he were dead! In fact, he died not long after I returned, but his death had not brought me the satisfaction I thought it would.
This is a country club? the General said when we arrived at our destination. I checked the address; it was the same as on the Congressman’s invitation. The invitation did mention a country club, and I, too, had pictured that we would drive through winding roads bereft of vehicles and roll up a gravel driveway to a valet waiting in a black vest and bow tie, the pastel prelude to entering a hushed den carpeted with the hides of black bears. On the walls, among the picture windows, would hang the antler-crowned heads of deer, gazing with mordant wisdom through clouds of cigar smoke. Outside sprawled an expansive golfing green that demanded more water than a Third World city, where quartets of virile bankers practiced a sport whose swinging skills required both the brute, warlike force necessary to disembowel unions as well as the coup de grâce finesse of tax dodging. But instead of such a soothing haven where one could always count on an undiminished supply of dimpled golf balls and self-congratulatory bonhomie, the address we arrived at was a steak house in Anaheim with all the charm of a door-to-door vacuum salesman. It seemed an ignoble setting for a private dinner with none other than Richard Hedd, who was visiting on a lecture tour.
After parking the car myself in a lot populated only by American and Teutonic vehicles of recent vintage, I followed the General into the steak house. The maître d’ possessed the mannerisms of an ambassador from a very small country, a careful blend of superciliousness and servitude. Hearing the Congressman’s name, he softened enough to bow his head slightly and led us through a maze of small dining rooms where red-blooded Americans in argyle sweater vests and button-down oxford shirts feasted on inordinate amounts of porterhouse steak and rack of lamb. Our destination was a private room on the second floor, where the Congressman was holding court with several others at a round table large enough for a man to lie on. Each of the attendees already had a drink in his hand, and it dawned on me that our lateness was prearranged. As the Congressman rose, I calmed the tremor in my gut. I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerou
s creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.
Gentlemen, we are delighted you can join us, the Congressman said. Let me introduce you. There were six others—prominent businessmen, elected officials, and lawyers—as well as Dr. Hedd. While the Congressman and Dr. Hedd were Very Important Persons, the others, including the General, were Semi-Important Persons (as for me, I was a Non-Important Person). Dr. Hedd was the main attraction of our dinner party, and the General was the secondary attraction. The Congressman had arranged the dinner for the General’s benefit, an opportunity to expand his network of potential advocates, supporters, and investors, with the big prize being Dr. Hedd. A good word from Dr. Hedd, the Congressman had told the General, can open doors and pocketbooks for your cause. Not by accident, then, were the seats on either side of Dr. Hedd reserved for the General and myself, and I wasted no time in presenting my copy of his book for an autograph.
I see you’ve read this rather closely, the doctor said, riffling through pages dogeared so exhaustively that the book swelled as if waterlogged. The young man’s a student of the American character, said the Congressman. From what the General tells me, and from what I’ve seen, I’m afraid he might know us better than we know ourselves. The men at the table chuckled at such a thought, and I did, too. If you’re a student of the American character, said Dr. Hedd, signing the title page, why are you reading this book? It’s more about the Asian than it is the American. He handed the book back to me, and with the weight of it in my hand, I said, It seems to me that one way to understand a person’s character is to understand what he thinks of others, especially those like oneself. Dr. Hedd regarded me intently over the tops of his rimless glasses, a species of look that always bothered me, even more so coming from a man who had written this:
The average Viet Cong fighter does not have a dispute with the real America. He has a dispute with the paper tiger created by his overlords, for he is no more than an idealistic young man duped by communism. If he understood the true nature of America, he would realize that America was his friend, not his enemy. (p. 213)
Dr. Hedd was not speaking of me, exactly, as I was not the average Viet Cong fighter, and yet he was speaking of me, in the sense that he was dealing in types. Before this meeting I had reviewed his book one more time and found two instances where his categories addressed someone such as myself. On the verso side of me:
The Vietnamese radical intellectual is our most dangerous foe. Likely to have read Jefferson and Montaigne, Marx and Tolstoy, he rightly asks why the rights of man so praised by Western civilization have not been extended to his people. He is lost to us. Having committed his life to the radical cause, there is no going back for him. (p. 301)
In this assessment Dr. Hedd was correct. I was the worst kind of cause, the lost cause. But then there was this passage, written on the recto side of myself:
The young Vietnamese who are enamored of America hold the key to South Vietnam’s freedom. They have tasted the Coca-Cola, as it were, and discovered it to be sweet. Cognizant of our American imperfections, they are nevertheless hopeful about our sincerity and our goodwill in working on those flaws. It is these young people we must cultivate. They will eventually replace the dictatorial generals who were, after all, trained by the French. (p. 381)
These categories existed as pages in a book exist, but most of us were composed of many pages, not just one. Still, I suspected, as Dr. Hedd scrutinized me, that what he saw was not that I was a book but that I was a sheet, easily read and easily mastered. I was going to prove him wrong.
I wager you, gentlemen, said Dr. Hedd, returning his attention to the rest of the table, that this young man is the only one among you to have read the entirety of my book. The table rippled with unembarrassed laughter, and for some reason I felt that it was I who was the butt of the joke. The entirety? said the Congressman. Come on, Richard. I’d be amazed if anybody here even read more than the back cover and the blurbs. Another round of laughter, but instead of being insulted Dr. Hedd seemed amused. He was the king of this affair, but he wore his paper crown lightly. Doubtless he was used to being feted, given the popularity of his books, the frequency of his appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows, and the prestige of his position as a resident scholar at a Washington think tank. Air force generals in particular loved him, employing him as a strategic consultant and regularly dispatching him to brief the president and his advisers on the wonders of bombing. Senators and congressmen loved Richard Hedd, too, including our Congressman and those like him whose districts manufactured the planes used for this bombing. So far as my book is concerned, he said, a little less honesty and a little more politeness in terms of saving face would seem to be needed.
Only the middle-aged man next to me did not laugh or chuckle. His suit was neutral blue, and an inoffensive striped tie was leashed around his neck. He was a personal injury lawyer, a maestro of the class-action lawsuit. Picking at his Waldorf salad, he said, It’s funny you say saving face, Dr. Hedd. Things have changed, haven’t they? Twenty or thirty years ago, no American would have said “saving face” with a straight face.
There were many things Americans would not have said with a straight face twenty or thirty years ago that we say today, said Dr. Hedd. “Saving face” is a useful expression, and I say this as someone who fought the Japanese in Burma.
They were tough, said the Congressman, or so my father told me. There’s nothing wrong with respecting your enemies. In fact, it’s noble to respect them. Look at what they’ve done with some help from us. You can’t drive down the street today without seeing a Japanese car.
The Japanese invested big in my country, too, said the General. They sold motorbikes and tape recorders. I owned a Sanyo stereo myself.
And this was only a couple of decades after they occupied you, the Congressman said. Did you know that a million Vietnamese died of famine during the Japanese years? The comment was addressed to the other men in suits, who did not laugh or chuckle. No kidding, said the personal injury lawyer. “No kidding” was about the only thing one could say when a statistic such as this arrived after the salad and before the hanger steak and baked potato. For a moment everyone squinted at his plate or cocktail, earnest as a patient studying an eye chart. As for me, I was calculating how to repair the damage the Congressman had inadvertently inflicted. He had complicated our task of being pleasant dinner companions by mentioning famine, something that Americans had never known. The word could only conjure otherworldly landscapes of the skeletal dead, which was not the spectral image we wanted to present, for what one should never do was to require other people to imagine they were just like one of us. Spiritual teleportation unsettled most people, who, if they thought of others at all, preferred to think that others were just like them or could be just like them.
That tragedy was a long time ago, I said. To tell you the truth, most of our countrymen here are less focused on the past than they are on becoming Americans.
How are they doing that? Dr. Hedd asked, and as he stared over his lenses it seemed to me that I was being examined by four eyes, not two. They—we, that is—believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I said, the answer I had given to many Americans. This drew approving nods from everyone at the table except for Dr. Hedd, who I had forgotten was an English immigrant. He kept his quadriscopic vision turned on me, those dual eyes and dual lenses unsettling. So, he said, are you happy? It was an intimate question, nearly as personal as asking about my salary, acceptable in our homeland but not here. What was worse, however, was that I could not think of a satisfactory answer. If I was unhappy, it would reflect badly on me, for Americans saw unhappiness as a moral failure and thought crime. But if I was happy, it would be in bad taste to say so, or a sign of hubris, as if I was boasting or gloating.
The waiters arrived at that moment with the solemnity of Egyptian servants ready to be buried alive with their pharaoh, platters with the main cour
ses propped on their shoulders. If I thought that having slabs of meat before us would spare me Dr. Hedd’s attention, I was wrong. He repeated his question after the waiters had departed, and I said I was not unhappy. The fat balloon of my double negative hung in the air for a moment, ambiguous and vulnerable. Presumably, Dr. Hedd said, you are not unhappy because you are pursuing happiness and have not yet captured it. As we all supposedly are, correct, gentlemen? The men murmured an assent through mouthfuls of steak and red wine. Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity. Not only did Dr. Hedd have a measure of both, he also possessed an English accent, which affected Americans the way a dog whistle stimulated canines. I was immune to the accent, not having been colonized by the English, and I was determined to hold my own in this impromptu seminar.
What about you, Dr. Hedd? I asked. Are you happy?
The doctor was unfazed by my question, parsing his peas with his knife before deciding on a sliver of steak. As you evidently realized, he said, there is no good answer to that question.