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

250 THOMAS A. BASS
Pulling another book from the shelf, the maxims of Jean de
La Bruyere, An tells me, “You have to read these when you are
in a bad mood.” He is about to quote from one of his favorites
when a coughing fit forces him back into his chair.
“I haven’t prepared for my death,” he tells me. “I want to be
cremated. I prefer to have my ashes dropped in the Dong Nai
River, near where I was born. But it’s up to them to decide.”
Them is the Communist Party. Through Asian indirection or a
spy’s aversion to naming names, An often leaves his old bosses
unidentified. “I don’t want anyone visiting my tomb,” he says.
“People should save their time and effort for more useful things.
I’m like Ho Chi Minh; he didn’t want a mausoleum either.”
It was forbidden in his will, but Ho Chi Minh got a mausoleum
anyway. An too will get a state funeral. I ask him what
will become of his books and papers when he dies. “My son will
choose what to do with them,” he says.
As if on cue, Pham Xuan Hoang An, or Little An, as everyone
calls him, arrives home from work and walks into the salon
to greet me. He is an urbane young man, a rounder, fleshier, but
at the same time more nervous and high-strung version of his
father. A bachelor in his mid-forties, Hoang An lives at home in
the converted garage behind the house. “He has been a student
all his life, first in Russia, then America,” An says to me one day
about his son. (Little An spent six years in Russia and another
six years in the United States, studying journalism at the University
of North Carolina and law at Duke University.) “The only
place he hasn’t studied yet is China,” An says. “It’s a life I would
like to have led.”
An’s two younger sons have not fared as well as Little An.
Working sporadically as midlevel functionaries, they too live at
home, where the youngest son is now in charge of training An’s
fighting cocks. An’s daughter, a doctor who no longer practices,
lives in California with her family. “I worked very hard
too,” An says. “In fact, I worked all the time, except for a five-