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

The Spy Who Loved Us 27
The father of one of An’s classmates was a coffin maker. At
night, An slipped out of the house to sleep with his friends in
the empty coffins. (When business was slow, the coffin maker
thought it lucky to have his surplus stock temporarily occupied.)
“It was cozy inside our coffins, and I slept quite well,” An
says. “My father would go out looking for me. When he discovered
I had been sleeping in my friend’s coffins, he would
whip me.”
“Other nights, I went out with my friends to look for ghosts.
We hid near the cemetery, beside a stand of bamboo. They
say that at night, when ghosts appear, they make a noise, and if
you look at a grave, you can see the spirit rising from the body.
This is actually the mist that rises when the rains begin to fall,
but we thought the first exhalations of mist were the spirits of
dead people rising from their graves. So we would lie in wait,
and at night, when the wind blew, the bamboo would knock together
and make a clicking noise, like bones shifting in their
coffins. This was the sound that told us to get ready, the ghosts
are coming.”
As I listen to him tell this story, An reminds me of Tom
Sawyer, conjuring with spirits and getting into mischief, while
back home his father, playing the role of Aunt Becky, is preparing
to tan his backside.
Five kilometers outside of colonial Saigon, the forested
area where An lived would turn pitch black and silent at night,
except for the plaintive cry of the peanut vendor as he made his
rounds from house to house, selling cones of roasted peanuts for
a few pennies apiece. An was sometimes allowed to buy a cone
of peanuts as a special treat. One night, with heavy monsoon
rains beating on the roof, he heard the peanut vendor’s distant
cry. An summons up the plaintive voice from his youth:
yang rang yang, yan cau boi mang, mang dao rang.
Opening the door, An discovered that the peanut vendor
was a boy his own age. His only protection against the monsoon