Civilai was, in many respects, my cultural savior in those tough years. We’d met at the Louxor, a small cinema in La Chapelle, where I worked as an usher and confectionary seller. I’d been there so long most of the patrons knew me by name. Civilai was from a wealthy family and never really had to work for a living. Our backgrounds were so different we really had no right to have become friends, but our love for the cinema drew us together. He told me that he was a Communist. At the time, I really didn’t know what that meant. It seemed everyone in Paris had to have a cause. You had to be something other than yourself: a fascist, an anarchist, a poet. So I paid little heed to Civilai’s constant references to Karl Marx and Lenin. He told me about his pal, Quoc, a Vietnamese who had great plans to go back to Indochina and rescue the slaves in the French colonies. Together they would establish a Communist state, just as soon as Quoc got out of jail in Hong Kong. He seemed, to my mind, to be spending a lot of time in jail.

As a child at the temple in Savanaketh, I hadn’t had many dealings with the French administrators. In fact, I probably viewed them as great white gods educating us natives—through armed force—how to be civilized. I liked their uniforms. It didn’t occur to me they were raping our land. We didn’t have anything when they arrived and several decades later we had even less and were paying taxes on it. But, to a ten-year-old boy, that seemed to be the way of the world. If you had a big gun you had the right to do what you wanted.

But then, in France entre deux guerres, Civilai had become my grapevine to a country I had no other means to communicate with. I had no friends or family back in Laos. Like all the bemused tribesmen and women, who had been corralled together under a Lao flag, I’d been born in a country that I still knew very little about. I’d written ‘Buddhist’ on the application to Ancienne, but the religion of my birth made no more sense to me than the Catholicism drummed into me at school. At 23 I’d already seen more of France than I had of Laos. Without Civilai I would probably have swallowed the colonial line that the country was working in the tropics to improve the lot of ignorant savages. Were it not for a generous fellationist, I would have been one of them.

“Do you ever order just one drink?” I asked my young friend.

He placed the newly arrived drinks like chess pieces on the checkered tablecloth and pushed one toward me: cognac to queen’s pawn two.