His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. Okay.
I stood up and leaned on the desk to look right into his eyes. But I didn’t see him. What I saw was the face of the wiry Montagnard, an elder of the Bru minority who lived in an actual hamlet not far from the setting of this fiction. Rumor had it he served as a liaison agent for the Viet Cong. I was on my first assignment as a lieutenant and could not figure out a way to save the man from my captain wrapping a strand of rusted barbed wire around his throat, the necklace tight enough so that each time he swallowed, the wire tickled his Adam’s apple. That was not what made the old man scream, however. It was just the appetizer. In my mind, though, as I watched the scene, I screamed for him.
Here’s what it sounds like, I said, reaching across the desk to pick up the Auteur’s Montblanc fountain pen. I wrote onomatopoeically across the cover page of the screenplay in big black letters: AIEYAAHHH!!! Then I capped his pen, put it back on his leather writing pad, and said, That’s how we scream in my country.
After I descended from the Auteur’s home to the General’s, thirty blocks distant and down the hills to the Hollywood flatlands, I reported my first experience with the motion picture industry to the General and Madame, both of whom were infuriated on my behalf. My meeting with the Auteur and Violet had gone on for a while longer, mostly in a more subdued fashion, with me pointing out that the lack of speaking parts for Vietnamese people in a movie set in Vietnam might be interpreted as cultural insensitivity. True, Violet interjected, but what it boils down to is who pays for the tickets and goes to the movies. Frankly, Vietnamese audiences aren’t going to watch this movie, are they? I contained my outrage. Even so, I said, do you not think it would be a little more believable, a little more realistic, a little more authentic, for a movie set in a certain country for the people in that country to have something to say, instead of having your screenplay direct, as it does now, Cut to villagers speaking in their own language? Do you think it might not be decent to let them actually say something instead of simply acknowledging that there is some kind of sound coming from their mouths? Could you not even just have them speak a heavily accented English — you know what I mean, ching-chong English — just to pretend they are speaking in an Asian language that somehow American audiences can strangely understand? And don’t you think it would be more compelling if your Green Beret had a love interest? Do these men only love and die for each other? That is the implication without a woman in the midst.
The Auteur grimaced and said, Very interesting. Great stuff. Loved it, but I had a question. What was it. Oh, yes. How many movies have you made. None. Isn’t that right. None, zero, zilch, nada, nothing, and however you say it in your language. So thank you for telling me how to do my job. Now get the hell out of my house and come back after you’ve made a movie or two. Maybe then I’ll listen to one or two of your cheap ideas.
Why was he so rude? Madame said. Didn’t he ask you to give him some comments?
He was looking for a yes man. He thought I’d give him a rubber stamp of approval.
He thought you were going to fawn over him.
When I didn’t do it, he was hurt. He’s an artist, he’s got thin skin.
So much for your career in Hollywood, the General said.
I don’t want a career in Hollywood, I said, which was true only to the extent that Hollywood did not want me. I confess to being angry with the Auteur, but was I wrong in being angry? This was especially the case when he acknowledged he did not even know that Montagnard was simply a French catchall term for the dozens of Highland minorities. What if, I said to him, I wrote a screenplay about the American West and simply called all the natives Indians? You’d want to know whether the cavalry was fighting the Navajo or Apache or Comanche, right? Likewise, I would want to know, when you say these people are Montagnards, whether we speak of the Bru or the Nung or the Tay.
Let me tell you a secret, the Auteur said. You ready. Here it is. No one gives a shit.
He was amused by my wordlessness. To see me without words is like seeing one of those Egyptian felines without hair, a rare and not necessarily desirable occasion. Only later, driving away from his house, could I laugh bitterly about how he had bludgeoned me into silence with my own weapon of choice. How could I be so dense? How could I be so deluded? Ever the industrious student, I had read the screenplay in a few hours and then reread and written notes for several more hours, all under the misguided idea my work mattered. I naively believed that I could divert the Hollywood organism from its goal, the simultaneous lobotomization and pickpocketing of the world’s audiences. The ancillary benefit was strip-mining history, leaving the real history in the tunnels along with the dead, doling out tiny sparkling diamonds for audiences to gasp over. Hollywood did not just make horror movie monsters, it was its own horror movie monster, smashing me under its foot. I had failed and the Auteur would make The Hamlet as he intended, with my countrymen serving merely as raw material for an epic about white men saving good yellow people from bad yellow people. I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit. I was maddened by my helplessness before the Auteur’s imagination and machinations. His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). Hollywood’s high priests understood innately the observation of Milton’s Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or antihero than virtuous extra, so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage. In this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l’oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute; we were to be struck dumb.
Have some pho, Madame said. It will make you feel better.
She had been cooking and the house smelled of sentiment, a rich aroma of beef broth and star anise I can only describe as the bouquet of love and tenderness, all the more striking because Madame had never cooked before coming to this country. For women of Madame’s rarefied class, cooking was one of those functions contracted out to other women, along with cleaning, nursing, teaching, sewing, and so on, everything except for the bare biological necessities, which I could not imagine Madame performing, except, perhaps, for breathing. But the exigencies of exile had made it necessary for Madame to cook, as no one else in the household was capable of anything more than boiling water. In the General’s case, even that was beyond him. He could fieldstrip and reassemble an M16 blindfolded, but a gas stove was as perplexing as a calculus equation, or at least he pretended so. Like most of us Vietnamese men, he simply did not want to be even brushed with domesticity. The only domestic things he did were sleep and eat, both of which he was better at than me. He finished his pho a good five minutes before I did, although my slow speed of consumption was not due to lack of will but because Madame’s pho had dissolved me and transported me back in time to my mother’s household, where she concocted the broth from the gray beef bones given by my father from his leftovers. Usually we ate the pho without the thin slices of beef that were its protein, we being too poor to afford the meat itself, except for those rare occasions when my suffering mother scraped together enough wherewithal. But poor as she was, my mother brewed the most wonderfully aromatic soup, and I helped her by charring the ginger and onion that would be plunked into the iron pot for flavor. It was also my task to skim the scum that boiled to the top of the broth as the bones simmered, leaving the broth clear and rich. As the bones continued to simmer for hours, I tortured myself by doing my homework by the pot, the aroma taunting and tantalizing. Madame’s pho harkened back to the warmth of my mother’s kitchen, which was probably not as warm as it was in my memories, but never mind — I had to stop periodically to savor not only my soup but the marrow of my memories.