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

30 THOMAS A. BASS
An tells few stories about his mother, but one concerns a
family dispute that occurred when he was ten or eleven years
old. “The most beautiful women in the world are French,”
said his father. “No,” said his mother. “American girls are
the prettiest.”
An’s father was surprised to have his opinion contradicted,
since he was an expert on the subject. As a respected member
of the French civil service, he was occasionally summoned to
judge local beauty contests at provincial fairs, and according
to him the French girls—not the Vietnamese or métisses—
were always the most beautiful.
“I asked my mother, ‘How do you know American girls are
beautiful?’ ‘Look at the movies made in Hollywood,’ she said.
‘In their manner, their speech, their gestures, the American
girls are prettier than the French girls. So when you grow up,
you should go to America and marry a woman like this. You will
be happy. Don’t marry a French girl. They are arrogant.’”
To prove his point, An’s father sent him to watch Les Misérables,
a movie about an impoverished French family with a
pretty young French girl as the heroine. An appreciated this lesson
from his father, but the movies he really loved were American
films with Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy and, of
course, his great favorite, Tarzan.
In 1938 An’s family moved from Saigon to Can Tho, the
bustling colonial city that was the economic and cultural capital
of the Mekong delta. An’s father, replacing a Frenchman who
had been mobilized, was officially elevated to the rank of engineer,
and An, in spite of his failed exams, was admitted to
fourth grade, where he finally mastered the devilish French dictée.
Sitting at the confluence of two rivers in a skein of waterways
and canals, Can Tho presides over a region known as Cuu
Long, or Nine Dragons. This is a reference to the nine branches
of the Mekong River which traverse this verdant floodplain. The
city is filled with floating markets and edged with orchards
growing durians, mangosteens, and oranges. Rife with coconut