Los Angeles

Los Angeles is the first substantial home the unnamed narrator makes in exile, but not a simple refuge. Its rented rooms, storefronts, campus offices, and restaurant kitchens give Vietnamese arrivals ways to survive and gather; they also expose the distance between the lives they had held in Vietnam and the precarious work available to them in America. For the narrator, the city becomes both a working address and a vantage point from which to observe how exile reshapes a community’s relationships, ambitions, and sense of time.

Resettlement and First Homes

After arriving in San Diego, the narrator sought help from his former professor, Avery Wright Hammer, who had earlier helped him obtain a scholarship. Professor Hammer became his sponsor, arranged a clerical job in the Department of Oriental Studies, and collected money from former teachers. That assistance paid for the narrator’s bus ticket to Los Angeles, several motel nights, an apartment deposit near Chinatown, and a used 1964 Ford. The sequence makes resettlement concrete: entry into the city depended on personal sponsorship and a small fund assembled by others, not simply on reaching American soil.

The narrator then canvassed neighborhood churches to find a sponsor for Bon. At the Everlasting Church of Prophets, a modest storefront beside an auto-body shop and a vacant lot, Reverend Ramon agreed to sponsor and nominally employ him. By September, the two men were reunited in an apartment near Chinatown, living in what the narrator calls genteel poverty. A radio and television bought with the remainder of the sponsor’s money made up their last necessities. Los Angeles offered them a place to stay, but the modest furnishings and dependence on sponsorship mark how little security that arrival initially provided.

Their apartment also became a setting for Bon’s postwar grief and economic marginalization. He worked nights as the church janitor, paid in cash, and received welfare because he had no reportable income. The narrator describes a routine of frozen meals, cheap beer, and exhaustion: Bon spent his benefit money on beer and food stamps on a week’s supply of frozen dinners, while the two men drank together until they passed out. The contrast between Bon’s military capacities and the civilian work available to him is stark. A man able to parachute, march long distances under a heavy load, and shoot accurately had no evident employer in the city who needed those skills.

The General’s Los Angeles

The General and Madame also settled in Los Angeles, sponsored by the sister-in-law of an American colonel who had once advised him. They rented a bungalow near Hollywood rather than the villa of the General’s former life. For months, the narrator found the General unemployed, drinking cheap beer and wine and moving between fury and melancholy. Madame, meanwhile, took on the practical labor of making a household function: finding schools for the children, paying rent, shopping, cooking, cleaning, and finding a church. The reversal left the General, once a military commander, reduced to a figurehead who occasionally shouted at his children while Madame managed the family’s daily survival.

At the beginning of April, the General opened a liquor store on Hollywood Boulevard. Its location in view of the Internal Revenue Service represented a reluctant accommodation to American economic life: he had to earn a living and pay taxes on it. The shop was on the boulevard’s less fashionable eastern end, away from the movie-premiere glamour of the Egyptian and Chinese theaters. Bon worked there as a clerk and also served as a deterrent to robbers and shoplifters. In the cramped storeroom, among cartons and office supplies, the narrator met the General and Claude; the former commander’s new business became the place where old military and intelligence relationships continued under altered circumstances.

The narrator’s visits also reveal how unevenly the family adapted. Madame’s labor had already made her the household’s effective authority before the store opened. The liquor business gave the General a new role, but did not restore his former standing. His change of occupation is therefore less a triumphant reinvention than a concession to the material rules of his new home. Los Angeles lets him establish a business, but the shop’s ordinary commercial obligations stand in uneasy contrast to the military authority and political ambitions he continues to cherish.

Work, Refugee Networks, and Public Life

The narrator’s own employment at the Department of Oriental Studies placed him at a college’s administrative threshold, screening students who wanted to see the secretary or department chair. A student-newspaper profile presented him as a graduate, an honor student, the college’s sole Vietnamese student, and a rescued refugee. It also described his military service inaccurately. In an interview, he claimed to have been a quartermaster who tracked supplies and never killed anyone; in fact, he had served as an infantry officer and worked with the Special Branch. He judged that acknowledging this history would be difficult on a campus shaped by antiwar activism. Los Angeles thus offered him a professional foothold while requiring him to conceal parts of the experience that defined his previous life.

The city was also one node in a much wider refugee geography. In a letter marking the first anniversary of Saigon’s fall, the narrator recalls how sponsorship determined where exiles could settle. Some went to California, while others were dispatched to states whose names they struggled to pronounce. Before leaving camp, refugees exchanged addresses and telephone numbers, creating an informal communication network to compare jobs, taxes, welfare, racism, and the presence of people who looked and ate like them. Although the narrator imagines that a concentrated Vietnamese community might have supported its own institutions and political representative, refugees were dispersed by bureaucratic decision. In practice, small groups found one another in basements, churches, backyards, and at beaches, assembling fragments of communal life across distance.

Los Angeles also became a base for the General’s political project. The General and the narrator presented the idea for the Benevolent Fraternity of Former Soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to a Congressman at his district office in a Huntington Beach strip mall. The Fraternity could serve veterans who had lost their army, country, and identity, while also acting as a channel for donations to the General’s Movement. Its funding depended chiefly on sympathetic individuals and charitable foundations rather than the impoverished refugee members it purported to support. The city’s commercial landscape, with its strip malls and parking lots, supplies the setting for this negotiation between refugee need, American philanthropy, and political organization.

Food, Memory, and Exile’s Clock

The General and Madame later opened a Vietnamese restaurant on Broadway in Chinatown. The restaurant occupied a former chop suey house whose grease-speckled walls, worn linoleum, dull yellow paint, and harsh overhead lights offered little of the elegance the General wished he could provide. Its staff were veterans, including men who had served in Special Forces and airborne units, now waiting tables in trucker caps and ill-fitting shirts. The narrator sees courage in the enterprise because it asked American customers to accept unfamiliar food, while the General calls owning a restaurant degrading. The same business can therefore signify practical ingenuity and the painful loss of status.

Food elsewhere in the city carries a similar double charge. At a noodle shop in Monterey Park, the narrator eats rice porridge and fried crullers with the crapulent major, who works as a gas-station attendant while his wife sews in a sweatshop. The major describes their hardship, including the twins conceived in camp and given the American names Spinach and Broccoli. His job depends partly on making customers laugh and feel sorry for him. The scene connects the city’s everyday commerce to refugee survival: employment is available, but often at a cost measured in diminished dignity, exhausting work, and the need to perform one’s own hardship for an employer.

A hardwood clock carved in the shape of Vietnam hangs in the restaurant near the defeated republic’s flag. Its hands pivot in the south, with the dial’s numbers arranged around Saigon. The object turns displacement into a question of time: return remains imaginable as a distance, but the years required to reach it may be endless. For the narrator, this clock gathers the city’s larger meaning. Los Angeles is where refugees earn wages, find one another, and build organizations, yet the measure of their lives remains oriented toward a country they have lost. The city is not a resolution to exile but the place where its routines, memories, and unfinished political hopes take shape.