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

The Spy Who Loved Us 25
looked like the black necks of two geese intertwined with each
other,” An says. The boat survived the storm, but An’s mother,
then pregnant with An’s sister, decided that a waterborne life
was too dangerous for her firstborn son, and An was sent to live
with his paternal grandparents in Hué.
They lived in a brick house, built by An’s father, which was
occupied by An’s grandfather and his first and second wives and
An’s half uncle and aunt. After delivering her second child in
Hué, An’s mother rejoined her husband in the south. “I was
abandoned there to live with my grandfather at the age of two,”
An says. He is not using the word abandoned by accident. This
first separation from his parents would be followed a few years
later by another separation, which An calls his exile.
It was two years before An saw his parents again. They came
to Hué on the death of his grandmother, and after the funeral,
they took An back to Cochin China. No longer living on a boat,
the family occupied a house in Gia Dinh province outside
Saigon, which at the time was a provincial city of a few hundred
thousand souls surrounded by rice fields, rubber plantations, and
forests. Few roads had been cut through the countryside (An’s
father was charged with mapping where they would go), so people
traveled the area on jungle paths, mostly on foot and occasionally
by tilbury, a small two-wheeled cart pulled by a horse.
And so began An’s lifelong love affair with Saigon. He spent
hours along the Saigon River, swinging in the banyan trees and
jumping in the water. He made friends with the workers in
the Ba Son shipyard who cast him fanciful metal coins to play
with. He rode the trolley to Cholon, the Chinese district, and
then rode back to the movie theater near the bridge at Da Kao,
where he watched films of Johnny Weissmuller playing Tarzan.
“It was a beautiful dream of freedom in the jungle,” An says of
those movies. “I thought under Communism I would live like
Tarzan. I put this dream into the revolution.”
“Look at Tarzan!” An exclaims. “What does he have? Only
his loincloth. When you are a Communist you become Tarzan,