Lana

Lana is The General and Madame’s eldest daughter, a scholarship student, art-gallery employee, and nightclub singer whose reinvention unsettles her parents’ expectations and captivates The unnamed narrator. Once known as Lan, she grows from a tomboy forced into the white ao dai of a respectable schoolgirl into a self-directed performer in California. Her changing public image carries a private history of resistance: she has fought to choose her education, her work, and the shape of her adult life, even as her family tries to govern her through ideals of feminine respectability.

Identity and Background

Lana was a young girl when her family fled south from a northern hamlet in 1954. During her school years, she was a tomboy who had to be coaxed or physically constrained into wearing the white ao dai each morning. The garment later acquired a meaning beyond family dress: Western male writers treated the schoolgirl’s covered body as an alluring image of Vietnamese culture, converting modest clothing into an exotic spectacle. Lana’s actual personality resisted that projection. She was an excellent student, and academic achievement became one of the ways she asserted her will.

Her scholarship to Berkeley sharpened the conflict at home. The General and Madame regarded the university as a communist enclave of radical professors and revolutionary students, and wanted her to attend a women’s college instead. Lana had applied to none of their preferred schools. When they forbade Berkeley, she swallowed sleeping pills; after recovering, she made a second attempt by throwing herself into the Saigon River. Pedestrians rescued her, and the parents eventually relented. She left for Berkeley in the fall of 1972 to study art history, a subject her parents hoped would cultivate feminine sensibility and prepare her for marriage. She graduated cum laude, but did not return to the family home.

During summer visits in 1973 and 1974, she looked increasingly unlike the schoolgirl her parents remembered: bell-bottomed jeans, feathered hair, tight blouses, and clogs marked her as someone altered by life abroad. Madame reportedly lectured her about preserving her virginity and observing Three Submissions and Four Virtues. After graduation, Lana chose to live independently. The General described her as an unfilial daughter, while remaining unusually unwilling to tell The unnamed narrator what she was doing.

Reinvention as a Performer

The unnamed narrator encounters Lana again at a wedding in California, where she is singing with a band. The contrast between her and the other female singer makes her transformation legible. The other performer, dressed in a chartreuse ao dai, sings sentimental songs of distant soldiers and lost Saigon. Lana instead wears a black leather miniskirt and gold silk halter top, and performs energetic rock and blues numbers associated with bands entertaining American troops and Americanized youth. Her version of modernity is not simply a change of clothes: she commands the stage, draws younger dancers onto the floor, and leaves The General and Madame seated at their honored table, visibly disapproving.

After the wedding, Lana studies The unnamed narrator with an appraising, unsentimental gaze and asks whether he likes what he sees. He tells her that she is no longer the girl he knew, but looks like the woman he imagined she would become. She recognizes that he, too, has changed since the family’s Saigon years. Madame interrupts their conversation, takes Lana by the elbow, and pulls her toward the ladies’ room. The encounter nevertheless lingers in The unnamed narrator’s fantasies, where Lana sometimes returns in the white ao dai of her earlier life. In those dreams, its symbolism turns double: white suggests not only innocence but mourning and death.

At a later gathering of Vietnamese exiles, Lana performs under a single name. Her stage costume—a red velvet bustier, leopard-print miniskirt, black lace gloves, and thigh-high boots—extends the deliberate theatricality of her earlier appearance. Yet her performance is not only spectacle. She sings I’d Love You to Want Me, a song The unnamed narrator associates with unrequited love, then offers a multilingual version of Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) in English, French, and Vietnamese. He contrasts her rendition with Nancy Sinatra’s: Lana has grown up in Saigon, where gang violence, grenade attacks, terror bombings, and invasion made the song’s violence part of lived memory. The layered languages join love and violence in a song about childhood companions who shoot one another, turning popular music into a vehicle for memories of both home and war.

Beliefs, Intimacy, and Family Conflict

Lana tells The unnamed narrator that music and singing keep people alive, give them hope, and allow them to feel; feeling, in turn, makes love possible. Her confidence in that claim accompanies a wide-ranging set of convictions. She supports birth control, gun control, rent control, civil rights, gay liberation, nonviolence, and national self-determination for the Third World. She admires Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thich Nhat Hanh, and imagines the market’s invisible hand moderated by socialism. She likes Billie Holiday, Dusty Springfield, Elvis Phuong, and Khanh Ly, believes Vietnamese people can sing the blues, and prefers New York if she cannot live in Los Angeles. Most striking to The unnamed narrator is her readiness to state her opinions openly, unlike the pattern he associates with Vietnamese women who hold their views back until marriage.

Her empathy appears clearly when Bon, speaking about the fall of Saigon, tells her that his wife and child are dead. Bon rarely discusses Linh and Duc with anyone besides The unnamed narrator. Lana embraces him and rests his head against her cheek as he weeps. The unnamed narrator watches her give Bon her full attention, feeling love for both his friend and Lana. Her response is not a performance for the room; it interrupts his absorption in her appearance and reveals a capacity for tenderness that complicates his desire.

Lana and The unnamed narrator later spend an evening together at her apartment. At home she looks like a college student in a Berkeley sweatshirt and faded jeans; she cooks, shares wine, and watches television with him. Their conversation turns from his suspicion that the Auteur tried to kill him to fantasies about killing people. Lana treats such thoughts as common imaginings rather than proof of madness, then speaks of imagining her own mother dead. The unnamed narrator admits that he has also thought about killing his father, a priest, and tells her about being the child of a Vietnamese woman and a French priest. When she asks whether he has forgiven his father, he acknowledges that his feelings remain unresolved, especially when he thinks of his mother.

Lana leans toward him and rests a hand on his knee, suggesting that forgiveness may be overrated. He withdraws instead of accepting the intimacy, saying that something must be done before he can do what needs to be done with her. He leaves for Sonny’s apartment, where he is preparing to carry out a killing. Later, he returns to Lana; the narrative confirms that they spend a night together. Lana tells him that he is everything her mother would hate. Her remark makes their attraction part of her resistance to parental control, while his return binds their intimacy to the violence and divided obligations governing his life.

Independence and Narrative Significance

Lana’s independence has material as well as performative dimensions. After graduating, she does not move back into her parents’ home; she supports herself through work at an art gallery in Brentwood and sings in nightclubs. The unnamed narrator learns these details during their conversation over drinks, alongside her political beliefs and musical tastes. They establish a life with choices that are her own, rather than merely an image of liberation staged for an audience.

The General and Madame eventually confront The unnamed narrator at the airport as he prepares to leave on a mission. They say they have regarded him as an adopted son and accuse him of trying to seduce their daughter. Their anger is sharpened by the wedding encounter and by the spectacle of Lana and The unnamed narrator at the nightclub. The General says he had wanted The unnamed narrator by his side and would not have let him go except for this situation. The accusation reveals how Lana’s private decisions have become entangled with the family’s authority and with the narrator’s place in it.

Lana is therefore more than the object of The unnamed narrator’s desire. Her stage persona challenges the sentimental, backward-looking image of the lost homeland; her multilingual songs make exile audible through the collision of languages and histories. At the same time, her gestures of care toward Bon and her frank conversation with The unnamed narrator resist reducing her to either a symbol or a fantasy. The narrative gives her a life marked by decisions—choosing Berkeley, leaving home, working, singing, and speaking plainly—while showing how other people, especially The unnamed narrator and her parents, try to interpret or claim those decisions.