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

32 THOMAS A. BASS
In 1941 An’s father was transferred back to his old territory
near the U Minh forest. An’s family, which now included his
younger sister and two younger brothers, moved to Rach Gia,
while An stayed behind in Can Tho. His French teacher, Truong
Vinh Khanh, assumed the role of An’s absent father. Khanh
was the loving and appreciative counterpart to the stern Pham
Xuan Vien. Deeply cultured in Vietnamese and French literature,
Khanh was also a sportsman and, like An, he had a keen
sense of humor. A French citizen from a wealthy landowning
family, Khanh had an unusual appreciation for the United
States, which he sensed would be the next major influence
shaping Vietnam.
Khanh had the worldly tolerance required to appreciate a
student like An, who never worked hard enough to get more
than middling grades but possessed an abundance of good
humor and animal spirit. The two of them exercised every day
with Khanh’s punching bag and sparred in his boxing ring. “I
loved him so much. He taught me all sorts of things,” says An.
An’s American friends claimed him as one of their own,
but his early training was deeply French. Whenever he had
difficulty finding a word in English, it was the French term
that came to mind. His sense of Vietnamese nationalism and
his early training in Marxist theory and Communism were borrowed
from France. “We students knew about patriotism and
nationalism, and how did we know these things?” An asks. “Because
we were taught by the French.”
“In our first year of secondary school we were allowed to
learn Vietnamese for only an hour a week. The rest of the instruction
was in French. They taught us about the French Revolution,
the origins of France, French solidarity, French wars,
the history of World War I and France’s other wars against
Germany, French religion, Catholicism, the royal court and
nobility, French law. There was a strong emphasis on civic education,”
An says, referring to the idea of a united people, with
rights incarnated in a constitutional state.