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An looks like one of the nice, clean-cut young men who joined fraternities and mastered social drinking. He was taller than the average Vietnamese, a scrappy boxer and swimmer who once thought, after failing his school exams for the second year in a row, that he might become a Vietnamese gangster. “I don’t want to talk about myself,” An says frequently. ” Then without skipping a beat he begins recalling in minute detail scenes from fifty years ago. He leans forward in his chair. He gesticulates with his fingers, which are long-boned and nearly translucent with age.

They’re dirty. They’re inhuman. The Americans are very clean people. They have beautiful Yorkshire pigs, Berkshire pigs, which are much bigger than Vietnamese pigs. ” Telling me this story, An begins to grunt like a Yorkshire pig on its way to slaughter. He is a brilliant mimic. I am hearing a perfect Yorkshire grunt here in Saigon. “At the stockyards, where the pigs are killed, an American wearing fine shoes and a necktie opens a gate leading to a big metal machine. He pushes a button. The pig falls down.

One of his most important jobs at Time was to submit weekly coordinates for all the troop emplacements and battles in the ongoing war. In spite of their privileged position as civil servants, An’s family members were not oblivious to the suffering around them. Forced labor and an immiserated peasantry formed the base of the colony’s economy. Ngo Vinh Long, in his book Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants Under the French, describes how Vietnam’s rubber plantations functioned as slave labor camps, with annual death rates higher than twenty percent.