The Sympathizer Read Online Free PDF Page A

dear Commandant. I confess that the name still hurts. Perhaps, for variety, he could call me mongrel or half-breed, as some have in the past? How about métis, which is what the French called me when not calling me Eurasian? The latter word lent me a romantic varnish with Americans but got me nowhere with the French themselves. I still encountered them periodically in Saigon, nostalgic colonizers who stubbornly insisted on staying in this country even after their empire’s foreclosure. Le Cercle Sportif was where they congregated, sipping Pernod while chewing on the steak tartare of memories that had happened on Saigonese streets they called by their old French names: Boulevard Norodom, Rue Chasseloup-Laubat, Quai de l’Argonne. They bossed the native help with nouveau riche arrogance and, when I came around, regarded me with the suspicious eyes of border guards checking passports.
    It was not they who invented the Eurasian, however. That claim belongs to the English in India, who also found it impossible not to nibble on dark chocolate. Like those pith-helmeted Anglos, the American Expeditionary Forces in the Pacific could not resist the temptations of the locals. They, too, fabricated a portmanteau word to describe my kind, the Amerasian. Although a misnomer when applied to me, I could hardly blame Americans for mistaking me as one of their own, since a small nation could be founded from the tropical offspring of the American GI. This stood for Government Issue, which is also what the Amerasians are. Our countrymen preferred euphemisms to acronyms, calling people like me the dust of life. More technically, the Oxford English Dictionary I consulted at Occidental revealed that I could be called a “natural child,” while the law in all countries I know of hails me as its illegitimate son. My mother called me her love child, but I do not like to dwell on that. In the end, my father had it right. He called me nothing at all.
    No wonder, then, that I was drawn to the General, who, like my friends Man and Bon, never sneered about my muddled heritage. Upon selecting me for his staff, the General said, The only thing I’m interested in is how good you are at what you do, even if the things I ask you to do may not be so good. I proved my competence more than once; the evacuation was merely the latest demonstration of my ability to finesse the fine line between the legal and the illegal. The men had been picked, the buses arranged, and, most important, the bribes for safe passage bestowed. I had paid the bribes from a satchel of $10,000 requisitioned from the General, who had submitted the request to Madame. It’s an extraordinary sum, she said to me over a cup of oolong in her salon. It’s an extraordinary time, I said. But it’s a wholesale bargain for ninety-two evacuees. She could not disagree, as anyone who placed their ears to the railroad tracks of gossip in the city could report. The rumble was that the price of visas, passports, and seats on evacuation airplanes ran to many thousands of dollars, depending on the package one chose and the level of one’s hysteria. But before one could even pay a bribe, one needed to have access to willing conspirators. In our case, my solution was a louche major whom I had befriended at the Pink Nightclub on Nguyen Hue. Shouting to be heard over the psychedelic thunder of CBC or the pop beats of the Uptight, I learned that he was the airport’s duty officer. For a relatively modest fee of a thousand dollars, he informed me who the guards at the airport would be for our departure, and where I might find their lieutenant.
    All this arranged, and myself and Bon having retrieved his wife and child, we assembled for our departure at seven o’clock. Two blue buses waited outside the villa’s gates, windows encased in wire grilles off which terrorist grenades would theoretically bounce, unless they were rocket-propelled, in which case one relied on the armor of prayers. The anxious