I arranged to meet Civilai in a coffee shop for old times’ sake. We chose the Hotel Continental in District One because it attracted journalists and writers, and, as cinema people we fitted right in. Civilai intended to travel down on the train from Hue having crossed the seventeenth parallel on foot. I’d sneaked into the south from a field hospital in Ban Tangon on the Ho Chi Minh trail, although then it was still known as the north-south passage. I was a major general in the North Vietnamese army medical corps at that stage. The title was far more glamorous than the position. It seemed that no matter how many stars you had on your epaulette, the blood was always just as red, the mosquitoes just as thirsty and the chances of survival just as random.

Boua and I seemed to be stationed apart more and more often. She was a lieutenant colonel at the nurses’ training facility in Dong Hoi. We saw little of each other. We’d returned to Laos from Paris in ’39, still in love, I supposed. Altogether, I’d been in Paris for seventeen years. I loved the place. I’d imagined us with a cottage in Montreuil, three kids, a garden with an apple tree, and a Pomeranian called Loulou. There’d be a back terrace where Loulou and I would sit on Sundays. I’d drink coffee and cognac while Boua baked tarts in the kitchen.

Boua saw something slightly different. She saw hundreds of young Lao and Vietnamese being mowed down by French machine guns, their bodies rotting on battlefields. And over time, Loulou and the kids got fuzzier, and I could think of nothing more noble than returning to our homeland to overthrow the French—the same French who’d taught me and trained me and who’d brought me homemade petits fours to thank me for lancing their boils.

By the time we left France, Boua had made me feel so ashamed of my selfish ideas that I’d deleted them. For many years, I swore I’d merely tolerated the bastard French and their capitalist values. The mysterious petits fours haunted me in nightmares. When I arrived in Laos, I was every bit as passionate. Boua was passionate for Laos, and I was passionate for Laos . . . through her. Same destination, different route.