you, in your way, want things to be wrapped in the same gloss as in France.”
“I do not want you to be French. I barely want to be French.”
“I know you don’t want me to physically be French,” he said, pensively. “But the thing of it is, Marcelle,” he continued as he paced, “would you be here, in my home, as my lover, if I didn’t wear Western clothes? Would you even have spoken to me in Paris if I were wearing an ao gam instead of a suit? If I had a long goatee instead of having just had a shave? Or what if my French was heavily accented? Or if I didn’t smell the way that is familiar to you, bathed in Acqua di Parma cologne? If I didn’t have a Parisian tailor and money? What if I didn’t have the kind of wealth that rivals any of the smug Europeans here? Would you still want me then?”
“Yes, I would,” I spat out in frustration. “I don’t care about your money. You know that. I care about you. And I care about what is fair. What is right. That’s what we’ve been working toward since I first came here, haven’t we? Finding justice for Sinh, for Anne-Marie. Trying to turn Michelin into something less terrible, keeping Lua Nguyen Thanh from being pulled away from your family. Khoi, I fell in love with the person that cared about doing these things. Who cared deeply about his family when I met him, and increasingly about his country.”
He looked at me, his expression slightly calmer but his eyes full of grief. We had wandered into the backyard, too restless to stay indoors. “Sinh changed me, enormously. But now, I don’t know. It feels strange to be pulling all these strings from this perch.”
He looked up at his beautiful house, which rivaled a home in Versailles or Neuilly-sur-Seine. It was cream-colored, with rows of tall windows on each of the four floors, wrought iron balconies, and, on the top floor, rounded dormers puncturing the slate mansard roof. It was, by consensus, one of the prettiest homes in the north.
“Khoi, no one forced you into this giant house,” I said wearily, turning away.
“I know. Look, I never declared myself a communist,” he said. “I don’t want to live in a hut and eschew all Western ideals. I still believe in capitalism, to an extent, just not colonialism. But these days, everything is different. After Yen Bai and the Nghe-Tinh uprisings three years ago, your delightful government decimated the communist and nationalist parties. The leadership went into hiding. I do think the communists will be the ones to eventually move us in the right direction. With complications to men like me, but most of the country is not men like me. As for the French,” he said, looking at me meaningfully, “they did force me into this house. I would not be allowed to figure so prominently as a member of the chamber of commerce if I wasn’t living like this, following their rules of so-called civility. Nor would I be allowed such economic freedom. That’s the part I’m hung up on right now, for some reason. It’s something you don’t seem to understand.”
“I’m trying,” I said, biting back my annoyance.
“My father,” said Khoi, pausing. “He, who thirty years ago managed to take his silk business beyond the borders of Indochine, providing to all of Southeast Asia, has somehow managed to keep the French out of our business. Until last year anyway. And that’s in part because he’s always done his best to assimilate. He’s been breaking his back to be French enough since the day he was born.”
“I have met your father many times,” I said. “His back is just fine.” I saw a servant walking toward us with fresh bottles of water and fell quiet. I had met Khoi’s father many times, but I had never met his mother, Tham. I’d only laid eyes on her once. It was the week I’d arrived in Hanoi. I was desperately curious to see the woman who had borne and raised the man I was in love with, so I’d hidden in the shadows near his family’s city house, a stately deco home far from the neighborhoods on the east side where the French lived. I saw her emerge just past dusk, dressed in a long, white, beaded gown, evidently heading to somewhere glamorous. No doubt it was a home or club that I would