said Anne-Marie, stone-faced. “Took care of him until he had a bullet in his heart.”
“No,” said Khoi, shaking his head. “That can’t be it. You read the letter,” he said, looking at the sheets of paper now on the dining table. “Sinh’s father said the government did a thorough investigation.”
“Sinh’s father is more loyal to France than to his own son!” Anne-Marie yelled. “Isn’t that apparent? He doesn’t want to lose his place in the government, his stature. He didn’t even question it when they told him that Sinh caused his own murder.”
“No,” I replied. “One’s love for their child surely trumps—”
“You don’t know what it’s like there,” said Anne-Marie. “Even you,” she said, looking at Khoi. “You, who should know better, you haven’t even taken the time to know.”
“I have changed, Anne-Marie,” said Khoi calmly. “You helped change me. Sinh changed me.”
“How about we change you for good then? Both of you. This will change you for good,” said Anne-Marie, turning around and reaching into her bag. She grabbed something from inside it angrily, then turned back around and handed Khoi a stack of papers. They were wrinkled, but from the look of the first page, we could tell it was an official government document. I moved and read over Khoi’s shoulder.
“What is this?” I asked Anne-Marie.
“A government report I stole from my father’s office. This,” she said, pointing, “all this was produced by the colonial government. One of their twice-yearly investigations of the Michelin plantation, but as you will see on the third page, the plantation managers are told about them in advance. So all this was observed despite the fact that these plantation managers, that all the staff, knew the inspectors were coming.”
The document was dated less than a year ago, 1928, and was indeed the findings of the general inspector of labor of the two large Michelin plantations in Cochinchina. At the top of the report, I saw the words “Very Confidential.”
The man in question, a government appointee named Delamarre, had visited the plantations over the course of several days. After a rather soft introduction to his colleagues, Delamarre wrote at length about the scars and signs of abuse he observed on dozens of workers.
“One of the coolies,” he’d written, “spoke to me on behalf of his comrades and said that, unfortunately, the workers were horribly treated on the plantation. I asked him if he or his comrades were showing signs of blows, but he said that that very morning, the coolies marked by the blows they received were evacuated by car. But the management had forgotten some,” he noted.
The report went on, with Delamarre writing:
The coolies are subjected to harsh, frequent beatings, and often put at the bar of justice, which is a wooden plank attached to the ground with narrow holes in it to restrain them, and tight wooden restraints around their necks. I asked where the bar of justice was now and two replied that it was installed in their sleeping compartment.
I saw in one room a bar of justice pierced with nine holes. I was in the presence of the plantation overseer, who contemplated the room with utter surprise. Then I heard moans coming from the next room. This door being opened, I saw that the second room was also equipped with a bar of justice including nine holes. A man was attached to it. He was lying on his back, with both feet hobbled in the bar, the lower part of his body naked. He was very thin and visibly sick and carried six deep marks from a rattan cane on his back.
Later I visited the hospital and in one of the rooms I found twenty- nine coolies that had been evacuated the day before my visit. I had them undress and saw that fifteen of them had, on their backs, traces of sharp blows, more or less recent, and of varying numbers and seriousness. A twenty-year-old boy, Tran-van-Chuyen, had on his back eight scars caused by blows from a stick that had deeply cut the flesh. Another one, of the name of Vu-Viet-Thu, aged twenty-one years, had on his back the trace of fifty-six strikes of cadouille, a large wooden stick used for beatings, and had six wounds covered with scabs. He also had two deep wounds on his right cheek.
Later I was informed by one of the plantation officials that several suicides by hanging had recently taken place at Dau Tieng plantation, an epidemic which he said was surely