was our home now, Victor reminded me. It could be for some time—three years, perhaps. Or if he did well in his position, overseeing the vast Michelin rubber plantations in the south in Cochinchina—one of the five French colonies and protectorates that made up Indochine—then perhaps even longer. I couldn’t just spend my time in the house, even if it was lovely.
Our house was painted yellow ochre, set off by dark green shutters on every window, and the sun seemed to be drawn to it, turning the walls gold as it sank in the late evenings. Inside, the rooms were painted a vanilla white and the floors were dark gray and white patterned encaustic tiles, each measuring nearly two feet across. The four staircases were marble, with curved iron railings, and there were balconies or terraces on every floor. The imposing architecture was softened by the comforting whispers of servants who seemed to float through the halls like spirits, their black-and-white raw silk and muslin garments billowing slightly as they hurried from room to room.
I had wanted Victor to accompany me on the trip to Haiphong, but in the end, I traveled alone.
“You’ll feel the country more that way, anyhow,” Victor had said.
Two hours after sunrise, on that October day, Lanh drove me to the Hanoi train station on the route Mandarine. It was an elegant building, constructed from gleaming white limestone and marble, wide and long like a birthday cake, with an elaborate facade. A central clock watched over it all, ticking soundlessly. To Lanh it may have been the house of a hundred suns, but with its French Second Empire style, it felt like a sliver of Paris to me. That feeling of home—as Paris had been my home for eight years—along with the idea of Lanh’s suns warming me, had helped me slip out of the car and onto the train with a brief surge of confidence.
Earlier that morning, after a breakfast of fried eggs and rice, I had dressed in the outfit chosen for me by my servant Trieu, and the hat she had topped it off with was a flat-brimmed affair in a cheerful geranium red, with only a thin similarly colored ribbon for adornment. It was a shade that a very confident woman would wear, she said. I felt like an impostor in it.
Of course, my husband was right. That train trip had brought me a changed perspective of Indochine and had helped me understand how I could define my role as the wife of a Michelin in the colony. It also introduced me to the vast countryside, the stretches of verdant land that existed between cities. It was the parts of the country that the French neglected to change that were the most charming, I observed. I devoured the landscape from the half-open train window, losing myself in the hypnotic churn of the heavy iron wheels, taking in the local stations, all curved and molded in the French aesthetic, imagining Lanh ticking them off a list he’d penned as a child. In the weeks following the trip, those images had also helped pacify me when I was exposed to the country’s darker elements.
The geranium-colored hat had become a good-luck charm. This November morning, I had placed it on my head again. Victor, Lucie, and I—as a family—were taking the train a bit down the coast to Vinh, a town near Cua Lo Beach. Victor said it was a wide white-sand beach, one of the best in Indochine, and was dotted with large villas built by the French. In two days, we were to meet Victor’s young cousin Roland and his family, who were in from Clermont-Ferrand, the seat of the Michelin factories in central France. They were not Lesages like us. They were Michelins. The family was considering staying in Indochine for a month or two, and we were tasked with showing them the best of the country. In his letter to us, Victor’s uncle Édouard—who was in truth his mother’s cousin, but always called uncle out of respect—had made it clear that Roland and his family were to fall in love with the colony at once, as his nephew had found trouble in France in the form of an expensive, press-seeking mistress. He wanted Roland to disappear overseas for a stretch. He also wanted him to find a much cheaper mistress in the process, preferably one that knew very little French, apart from the dirty words.