The Sympathizer (35 page)

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 dangerous 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 courses 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.

Isn’t yes the good answer? said the assistant district attorney.

No, because happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game, sir. Dr. Hedd slowly turned his head in an arc as he spoke, making sure that he saw every man in the room. For someone to be happy, he must measure his happiness against someone else’s unhappiness, a process which most certainly works in reverse. If I said I was happy, someone else must be unhappy, most likely one of you. But if I said I was unhappy, that might make some of you happier, but it would also make you uneasy, as no one is supposed to be unhappy in America. I believe our clever young man has intuited that while only the pursuit of happiness is promised to all Americans, unhappiness is guaranteed for many.

Gloom descended on the table. The unspeakable had been spoken, which people like the General and myself could never have uttered in polite white company without rendering ourselves beyond the pale. Refugees such as ourselves could never dare question the Disneyland ideology followed by most Americans, that theirs was the happiest place on earth. But Dr. Hedd was beyond reproach, for he was an
English
immigrant. His very existence as such validated the legitimacy of the former colonies, while his heritage and accent triggered the latent Anglophilia and inferiority complex found in many Americans. Dr. Hedd was clearly aware of his privilege and was amused at the discomfort he was causing his American hosts. It was in this climate that the General intervened. I’m sure the good doctor is right, he said. But if happiness is not guaranteed, freedom is, and that, gentlemen, is more important.

Hear, hear, General, said the Congressman, raising his glass. Isn’t that what the immigrant has always understood? The rest of the guests also raised their glasses, even Dr. Hedd, smiling enigmatically at the General’s redirection of the conversation. Such a move was typical on the General’s part. He knew how to read a crowd, a crucial skill for raising money. As I had reported to Man through my Parisian aunt, he had already achieved a degree of fund-raising success, drawing from a handful of organizations to which he had been introduced by Claude, as well as his own contacts among Americans who had visited our country or done tours of duty there. These were well-connected men of pedigree, as were those who served on the boards of trustees for these organizations. The amount of money they gifted to the Fraternity was moderate by their standards, hardly anything to draw the attention of auditors or journalists. But once the Dollar Bill was dispatched abroad to Thailand, some extraordinary hocus-pocus called the exchange rate happened. The Dollar Bill might buy a ham sandwich in America, but in a Thai refugee camp the modest green Dollar Bill transformed into colorful Baht, ready to feed a fighting man for days. For a little more Baht, our fighting man could be clothed with the latest in olive drab. Thus, in the name of helping refugees, these donations met the basic necessities of food and garb for the secret army, consisting, after all, of refugees. As for guns and ammunition, they were supplied by the Thai security forces, who in turn received their pocket money from Uncle Sam, carried out with complete transparency and full congressional approval.