that I could think of them before I opened my mouth. At the Governor-General's, a servant whom Monsieur and Madame disliked would need to be careful, but one whom his fellow servants disliked would not last the night. Think of it as having thirteen enemies as opposed to two, Anh Minh told me. He had kindly excluded himself from the count of possible assassins, and that fact I also stored away. Overall, my oldest brother preferred to limit his lessons to the goings-on of the kitchen. I always knew when Minh the Sous Chef was preparing to teach. First he would wipe his fingers on the handkerchief that he always kept in his pocket, then he would throw his head back, tendering his throat to the blades of the kitchen's ceiling fans. From out of his mouth then came praise for the merits of Breton butter, heavily salted and packed in tins, which was served to Monsieur with his morning baguettes. Madame preferred preserves, in thick glass jars with hand-lettered labels, made from yellow plums that have the name of a beautiful French girl. "Mirabelle," Anh Minh repeated so that I, too, could see her. When old Chaboux passed away and young Blériot arrived to take his place, my brother told me that these French chefs were purists, classically trained, from families of chefs going back at least a century. Minh the Sous Chef agreed that it was probably better this way. After all, the chef de cuisine at the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon—a man who claimed to be from Provence but who was rumored to be the illegitimate son of a high-ranking French official and his Vietnamese seamstress—had to be dismissed because he was serving dishes obscured by lemongrass and straw mushrooms. He also slipped pieces of rambutan and jackfruit into the sorbets. "The clientele was outraged, demanded that the natives in the kitchen be immediately dismissed if not j ailed, shocked that the culprit was a harmless-looking Provençal,' incensed enough to threaten closure of the most fashionable hotel in all of Indochina, and, yes, the Continental sent the man packing!" said Anh Minh, delivering another lesson in the shortest amount of time possible.
Anh Minh believed that if he could save three minutes here, five minutes there, then one day he could tally them all up and have enough to start life all over again. Even then, I knew that every night those minutes saved were squandered away in a deep sleep from which my brother awoke with nothing but the handkerchief in his pocket. But in the kitchen with Minh the Sous Chef, I was content just to listen. Anh Minh, being the first, had inherited the voice that we, the three brothers who followed, coveted. If I closed my e yes, the Old Man was there with his river tones, low and close to the earth, a deep current summoning me from ashore. He was there without the floating islands of sewage, the half-submerged bodies of newborn animals, the swirling pools of dried-up leaves and broken branches. Making its way through Anh Minh's parted lips, the Old Man's voice, purified, said, "I believe in you." In the kitchen of the Governor-General, I learned from my brother's words and found solace in the Old Man's voice. I received there the benediction that I would otherwise never hear.
"Stupid! Hey, Stupid, get me my box of chew."
The Old Man was talking to me all right, but he could have been talking to any of my brothers instead. By the time we were able to walk, we had learned our name. "Stupid" was shared by us like a hand-me-down. We were all the same until one of us redeemed himself, collecting small tokens, brief glimpses of the man whom the Old Man wanted us to be.
One became a porter for the railroads, second-class, but he hoped to see the interior of first before too long. The French had tattooed the countryside with tracks, knowing that mobility would allow them to keep a stranglehold on the little dragon that they called their own. Every day, mobility pounded on the shoulders of my second oldest brother. Every day, Anh Hoàng was shoved into the ground by the weight of the vanity cases of French wives. They,