arrived on a day when my mother was ill. Marcelle had come into our yellow house, conversed with my mother’s servant Trieu for quite some time, and then talked to me in a way that made me feel very grown up. She’d been wearing green silk that day. A color that I eventually learned was known in Indochine as Nguyen green.
Perhaps I hadn’t seen what I thought I had. Perhaps it was just speaking about Indochine with the taxi driver that made my imagination conjure Marcelle, the old memories flooding me like the rain outside. I’d only spent six years in Indochine, but they were formative years. I arrived at age seven, and when we left in July 1939, just two months before France declared war on Germany, I was thirteen, and a very different child. I suppose I wasn’t a child at all.
My parents didn’t want to leave, even with the war looming, and neither did I, but my father’s family, my grandmother in particular, insisted. The world was descending into madness, she’d said. It was safer for us to be home at such a time. Especially since my mother had just had a baby, my brother Charles.
I had told my mother then that we were already home and she’d nodded and said, “I know. We will come back when the dust settles.” We had never returned. Since 1939, we’d all lived in Paris. Never—much to my parents’ grave disappointment—in Clermont-Ferrand.
The extended Michelin family had made promises to my father, that much I was aware of. I knew that going to Clermont, the fulfillment of those promises, was contingent on peace and prosperity on our plantations. We had prosperity while my father was at the helm, good schools and a nicer orphanage thanks to my mother’s efforts, but we never had peace. He hadn’t been able to get the plantations to settle, as he used to call it. Even when he started spending weeks at a time at Dau Tieng and Phu Rieng when we moved to Saigon, the unrest never stopped. The family in Clermont-Ferrand was disappointed by the ongoing turmoil, the dismal mortality rates, the continued rise in communist activity. They were particularly sensitive to the unrest because from 1936 on, Clermont was no longer immune from it. In June of that year there were twelve thousand strikes in France and Michelin was included. Thousands of workers at our factories hoisted up a red flag and screamed their support for France’s largest labor union. In 1937 it was again my father’s turn to deal with uprisings, a massive strike at Dau Tieng. We sent many men to prison after military intervention, and as my father said, “It didn’t make Michelin look good.”
But since Michelin was still financially prosperous, there were no plans to sell the land. We had held on during the Second World War and during the French Indochina War, even though parts of our plantations had been destroyed and European overseers killed. “Michelin rubber will always come from Indochine,” my father declared.
But Victor Lesage was no longer the one to guarantee that. After we returned, he was placed in charge of the Michelin guides in Paris, which had ceased being printed during the war. But in 1944 the guide was requested by the Allied forces and my father took charge of reprinting our 1939 edition. Within weeks, they were in the hands of all the American soldiers, the maps of utmost importance, and even had translations done by my mother added to the back.
My parents had money and the right name, they’d contributed to the war effort, but they were never let inside the machine at Clermont, even when so many of the Michelins died fighting, a reality that only made the company seem more French, more important, more patriotic. That a decade later they were still making books instead of tires had taken a terrible beating on their pride. They carried that burden, but they carried it together. Through everything, my parents had held on to each other.
Soon after we’d moved back to Paris, I found a picture in the back of an old Michelin guide, made when the covers were blue. The photograph was taken on a beautiful boat in Ha Long Bay and Marcelle and my mother were next to each other, all smiles and lightness, along with the most attractive set of people I’d ever seen. My father was not there.
I loved that my mother looked happy, as it was taken