Occidental College

Occidental College is the Southern California college where the unnamed narrator spent six years in the 1960s, outwardly pursuing an education and covertly learning how Americans thought. The institution gave his intelligence assignment an academic setting: he was sent there not to study practical infrastructure, but to understand the country whose power and culture he was meant to observe.

Setting and Role

The narrator recalls Occidental College as a small, sylvan college in Southern California, a place set apart from the immediate demands of war. Its motto, Occidens Proximus Orienti, accompanied his years in what he remembers as an idyllic, sunlit world. The campus was not merely where he lived as a student; it was the environment in which he learned to interpret American life from within.

The narrator’s status at the college was deliberately divided. He was both a scholarship student and a spy-in-training, and the lone representative of his people in that setting. His fellow conspirator Man assigned him to learn American ways of thinking. The college therefore served as the institutional cover for an intelligence mission whose primary field was culture rather than military operations.

Studies and Cultural Training

The narrator describes his assignment as a psychological war. At Occidental College, he read American history and literature, worked on his grammar, and absorbed American slang. The education was designed to give him more than factual knowledge: he sought fluency in the habits, language, and assumptions through which American society understood itself.

He completed both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree and became an expert in American studies. His recollection of reading Emerson on a campus lawn links the formal task of study to a more personal encounter with American thought. Emerson’s remark about consistency struck him as applicable not only to America but also to the narrator’s homeland, making the college a vantage point from which he could compare two societies and their contradictions.

Mentorship and Lasting Connections

Occidental College also connected the narrator to Professor Hammer, who became his most important teacher after Claude and Man. Claude, Professor Hammer’s college roommate, had told him about a promising Vietnamese student who needed a scholarship to study in America; Professor Hammer helped secure that scholarship. He later guided the narrator’s American studies and, despite working outside his own field, supervised the narrator’s senior thesis, “Myth and Symbol in the Literature of Graham Greene.”

The mentorship continued after the narrator’s student years. When the narrator later sought help leaving the refugee camp, Professor Hammer volunteered to sponsor him and arranged a clerical position in the Department of Oriental Studies. His later assistance underscores the college’s lasting significance in the narrator’s American life: Occidental College was both the setting of his cultural training and the beginning of a relationship that continued to provide practical support after his education ended.