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

234 THOMAS A. BASS
the Communists, but his family honor was saved. An’s words
bring tears to Franchini’s eyes.
Franchini is a métis, a mixed-race Eurasian with a Corsican
father and Vietnamese mother. “In Vietnam, no one trusts
métis,” he says. “They know too much. They pass for Europeans
while staring at the world through Asian eyes. They are
spies in the houses of their fathers and mothers. They are useful
but treacherous.”
Pham Xuan An is also a métis, a cross between Vietnam and
America. He too is a spy in the houses of his mother and father,
a fish swimming in all the waters of the world. If the history of
Vietnam is one long story of treachery and ambivalence, the
métis incarnates this history in his skin, with Franchini and An
being exhibits A and B.
Today Franchini works as one of France’s busiest nègres, a
ghostwriter who pens the books of politicians and TV personalities.
When Franchini launches into a story, it is so richly embroidered
that I imagine him working it up later that evening
into a book chapter or screenplay. “I would never dare to write
about Pham Xuan An,” he tells me. “He lived in a world where
nothing was the way it appeared. You can’t just write the facts
of his life. The interest is psychological, and with the Vietnamese
there is always something ambiguous, something mysterious.
It’s a country that could have been created by Salvador
Dali. You know his surreal painting of les montres molles, the
soft watches? Everything in this painting, called La persistencia
de la memoria, is twisted, deformed, pliable. Time and
space melt into each other, and everything is surrounded with
an air of mystery. This is Vietnam. It is an ambiguous world, just
like the one imagined by Salvador Dali.”
Four-star general Mai Chi Tho, An’s former boss, emerged
after the war as one of Vietnam’s most powerful figures,
serving as head of the Party committee governing South Vietnam
and as minister of the interior. At Tho’s villa in central Saigon—