The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

The Spy Who Loved Us 109
These were happy years for An. He loved the migrating
swallows that nested under the eves of his dormitory, the sunny
California students with their homecoming dances and beach
parties, the taskmaster professors who at the same time were
friendly and accessible. As An reported in the Barnacle, he
learned how to write “the American language of H. L. Mencken,
to enjoy the hi-fi, to rock and roll, to do my homework with the
radio and the familiar heater noise, and to fill my lungs with
the air of the humorous jokes of my dorm mates.”
“I did many things the way we do them in Vietnam, which
my classmates thought was hilarious,” An says. “One day, for example,
I was in the men’s toilet, urinating. I noticed that every
time I went into the bathroom, students would run down the
hall to look at me. When I had finished, they would run out of
the room laughing. Finally, one of the students, a former marine
in the Korean war who was studying on the GI bill, told me
what was happening. ‘An, no one wants to embarrass you, but
we think the way you urinate is very funny. You roll up your pant
leg. Here in America, we pull our pants down.’ This was another
lesson I had to learn, how to unzip my trousers.”
The most important lesson for An was how to disguise the
fact that he was a Communist agent. He had some near misses,
and perhaps his time in California was not as carefree as he
pretends. “My speech class was taught by a former colonel, an
artillery officer in the military reserve. He always gave me a
C minus. ‘In your speeches, you use too many revolutionary
terms,’ he told me. ‘You must change this.’ I tried to explain that
I had learned English from the magazines that were sent to
Vietnam by the French Communist Party. Fortunately, one of
my fellow students was a Canadian, an older woman who was
returning to school to finish her degree. She became my déesse,
one of my female protectors. She began correcting my speeches,
and after that I got a C plus.”
“I also got into trouble with Miss Fowler, my freshman
English teacher. She was a former intelligence officer in World