ONE
Jessie
November 20, 1933
The house of a hundred suns. That’s what my tai xe called it. The first time he ferried me to the train station, in a black Delahaye 134 as polished as a gemstone, he slowly circled the building, avoiding the rawboned rickshaw drivers. I craned my neck, watching as the car’s exhaust left a trail behind us like a mollusk’s track, and tried my best to concentrate on his words, not the quick tempo of my heart.
“When I was young,” Lanh explained, moving his white-gloved hands to the top of the large metal steering wheel, “the government posted hand-painted advertisements all over the city boasting that railroad construction was booming and that one day the country would have one hundred train stations. I promised myself that I would visit every single one in my lifetime. There were several versions of the advertisement, with different stations featured, but all of them had a bright, many-rayed sun painted at the top. I used to trace those suns with my hand when I passed the posters on my way to school, as the government was kind enough to put them in the poorer neighborhoods, too.”
He turned the car smoothly, his voice quietly laced with enthusiasm. “But as you can see, all roads, even railroads, begin right here. Hanoi. Even if they build a hundred suns in Indochine, this will always be number one. That’s why it gets to be the house, the orb. The rest are simply rays.”
“How many have you visited so far?” I asked.
“Thirteen,” he replied. “But I’m still quite young.”
He cleared his throat and in his pleasant baritone added, “I once told a Frenchman that I called this station the house of a hundred suns, and he laughed in my face. He said, ‘Lanh, don’t be fooled by appearances. Most of those train stops that the government boasts about are in the middle of nowhere and have a train go through every three days at best. The sun shines on them, but they’re also full of malaria and poverty. The rest of Indochine is not like Hanoi.’ He called Hanoi ‘a city kissed by the French.’ He said that the French had brushed their lips against Saigon as well, but that the rest of the country was still waiting to be kissed.”
Lanh shifted his grip and said, “I don’t see it that way, madame.” He caught my eye in the rearview mirror and smiled. It was unexpected, since as a good chauffeur, he knew to keep his gaze on the road and not on his employer or, worse, his employer’s wife. But Lanh must have sensed that on that particular day I would appreciate the personal connection and wouldn’t mind a breach of etiquette.
“Those iron tracks mean freedom. They mean a life away from the one you were born into,” he said softly. “You’ll see. It will grow in importance to you. The house of a hundred suns. Nhà Trăm Thái Dương, as I say in my language.”
I had only been in Indochine for thirty-three days, having arrived from Paris on the first Saturday in September 1933, after a month-long endurance test of a trip, including a four-day sandstorm in the Suez Canal and the dark, shark-dotted waters of the vast Indian Ocean. But on that sun-soaked day in Hanoi, alone with Lanh, it was not my arduous journey to the Orient but my new life that was weighing on me.
Since arriving in the bustling colonial city with my husband, Victor, and our little daughter, Lucie, I had barely left the inviting neighborhood where we lived. The streets were wide and welcoming, and all our neighbors were French. But after a month had ticked quickly by, Victor decided that I’d had more than enough time to get used to Indochine—the singsong tones of the language; the rush of the rickshaws, or les pousse-pousse, as the French called them, as they zigzagged along the avenues en masse; the tan faces shaded by conical hats; the sea of black eyes when they peeled their hats off; the places where the French went to avoid all of it—and that I should see the country outside Hanoi.
The city of Haiphong, to the east of Hanoi, on the coast, was a fine place to start. It was where our boat had come to port and wasn’t entirely foreign to me. The train journey took only six hours, and the first-class cars were touted as luxurious, matching the comfort of any in Europe. French Indochine was our home now, Victor reminded me. It could be for some time—three years, perhaps. Or if he did well in his position, overseeing the vast Michelin rubber plantations in the south in Cochinchina—one of the five French colonies and protectorates that made up Indochine—then perhaps even longer. I couldn’t just spend my time in the house, even if it was lovely.
Our house was painted yellow ochre, set off by dark green shutters on every window, and the sun seemed to be drawn to it, turning the walls gold as it sank in the late evenings. Inside, the rooms were painted a vanilla white and the floors were dark gray and white patterned encaustic tiles, each measuring nearly two feet across. The four staircases were marble, with curved iron railings, and there were balconies or terraces on every floor. The imposing architecture was softened by the comforting whispers of servants who seemed to float through the halls like spirits, their black-and-white raw silk and muslin garments billowing slightly as they hurried from room to room.
I had wanted Victor to accompany me on the trip to Haiphong, but in the end, I traveled alone.
“You’ll feel the country more that way, anyhow,” Victor had said.
Two hours after sunrise, on that October day, Lanh drove me to the Hanoi train station on the route Mandarine. It was an elegant building, constructed from gleaming white limestone and marble, wide and long like a birthday cake, with an elaborate facade. A central clock watched over it all, ticking soundlessly. To Lanh it may have been the house of a hundred suns, but with its French Second Empire style, it felt like a sliver of Paris to me. That feeling of home—as Paris had been my home for eight years—along with the idea of Lanh’s suns warming me, had helped me slip out of the car and onto the train with a brief surge of confidence.
Earlier that morning, after a breakfast of fried eggs and rice, I had dressed in the outfit chosen for me by my servant Trieu, and the hat she had topped it off with was a flat-brimmed affair in a cheerful geranium red, with only a thin similarly colored ribbon for adornment. It was a shade that a very confident woman would wear, she said. I felt like an impostor in it.
Of course, my husband was right. That train trip had brought me a changed perspective of Indochine and had helped me understand how I could define my role as the wife of a Michelin in the colony. It also introduced me to the vast countryside, the stretches of verdant land that existed between cities. It was the parts of the country that the French neglected to change that were the most charming, I observed. I devoured the landscape from the half-open train window, losing myself in the hypnotic churn of the heavy iron wheels, taking in the local stations, all curved and molded in the French aesthetic, imagining Lanh ticking them off a list he’d penned as a child. In the weeks following the trip, those images had also helped pacify me when I was exposed to the country’s darker elements.
The geranium-colored hat had become a good-luck charm. This November morning, I had placed it on my head again. Victor, Lucie, and I—as a family—were taking the train a bit down the coast to Vinh, a town near Cua Lo Beach. Victor said it was a wide white-sand beach, one of the best in Indochine, and was dotted with large villas built by the French. In two days, we were to meet Victor’s young cousin Roland and his family, who were in from Clermont-Ferrand, the seat of the Michelin factories in central France. They were not Lesages like us. They were Michelins. The family was considering staying in Indochine for a month or two, and we were tasked with showing them the best of the country. In his letter to us, Victor’s uncle Édouard—who was in truth his mother’s cousin, but always called uncle out of respect—had made it clear that Roland and his family were to fall in love with the colony at once, as his nephew had found trouble in France in the form of an expensive, press-seeking mistress. He wanted Roland to disappear overseas for a stretch. He also wanted him to find a much cheaper mistress in the process, preferably one that knew very little French, apart from the dirty words.