Rabo Karabekian and Sam Wu

Rabo Karabekian and Sam Wu form a brief, asymmetrical friendship whose meaning comes into focus through distance: Sam writes to Rabo while he is overseas, and Rabo entrusts him with paintings bought in France. Sam is at once a remembered figure from Rabo’s apprenticeship with Dan Gregory, a source of practical help, and a correspondent whose attention sustains a lonely soldier. After the war, he returns the paintings and the relationship ends without explanation, leaving Rabo unsure whether Sam had liked him at all.

Recognition and First Connection

Rabo first encounters Sam in Dan Gregory’s New York mansion, where the young apprentice is made to eat apart from the household. Rabo sits at an end of the table with his silverware carelessly placed and no napkin, while the other settings are arranged with linen, crystal, fine china, and a candelabrum. As he eats, feeling more alone than ever, a Chinese laundryman enters with clean shirts for Gregory. Rabo recognizes him, though he does not yet understand why Sam seems familiar.

The recognition comes from Gregory’s illustrations. Sam had posed in silk robes and a skullcap as the model for Fu Manchu, the fictional criminal Gregory depicted as the embodiment of the Yellow Menace. The scene joins the two men through an image created by Gregory: before Sam becomes Rabo’s correspondent or custodian, Rabo knows him through a fictional role imposed on his likeness. The contrast between the caricature and the man who later offers practical kindness gives their relationship an early connection to Rabo’s uneasy history with his former master.

Sam’s Offer of Correspondence

Rabo later runs into Sam in New York City shortly before going overseas. Sam asks for Rabo’s address and explains that he has heard on the radio that soldiers abroad can be lonely and should receive letters often. Because Rabo is the only soldier he knows well, Sam says he will write to him. The offer is simple, but it answers the isolation that Rabo had already experienced in Gregory’s house with a regular act of attention.

Sam’s letters become a running joke among the members of Rabo’s platoon. At mail call, they ask whether there is news from Chinatown or tease him that perhaps someone has poisoned Sam’s chow mein. The jokes give the correspondence a visible place in the group’s routine, while also marking Sam as the person on the home front whose messages Rabo can expect. Rabo recalls the relationship as curious and touching: Sam’s letters reach a soldier far from home, even though their connection began only shortly before the departure.

Trust and the Paintings from France

During the war, Rabo buys artworks in France, including a charcoal sketch he believes resembles a Cezanne and a Matisse he especially values; he also acquires a fake Gauguin. He sends these purchases to Sam for safekeeping, describing him as just about the only person in the United States he still knows and trusts. The practical decision makes Sam more than a letter writer: Rabo places valuable objects in his care while separated from them by the war.

Rabo’s reflection that Sam was the only civilian he knew well enough to rely on casts the trust as both personal and a measure of wartime estrangement. The paintings make that trust concrete. Sam holds Rabo’s purchases until after the war, when Rabo retrieves them. He then sells the works, using the proceeds as a modest bankroll for investment and turning away, at that point, from his childhood ambition to become an artist. Sam’s custody therefore connects the correspondence to a consequential transition in Rabo’s life, even though the decision to sell belongs to Rabo.

Separation and Uncertainty

After Rabo gets the pictures back, he never hears from Sam again. He does not know whether Sam liked him much and allows that, for Sam, their connection may have been strictly a wartime activity. The silence is not explained as a quarrel or a deliberate rejection; the narrative leaves Sam’s feelings and reasons unknown. Their relationship consequently has a clear practical ending but no settled emotional one: Sam fulfills his promise to write and returns the paintings, while the friendship does not continue into their postwar lives.

Narrative Significance

Sam’s importance to Rabo lies in a sequence of modest acts rather than in a long shared life: he recognizes the possibility of a lonely soldier, writes to him, and keeps his paintings safe. Set against the exclusion Rabo experiences in Gregory’s household and his isolation overseas, those acts make the relationship a rare instance of dependable human contact. Yet the return of the pictures is followed by silence, and Rabo cannot say whether the attachment was mutual. The account preserves both sides of that bond: the tangible trust Rabo placed in Sam and the unanswered question of what the correspondence meant to Sam.