The narrator’s friendship with James Yoon

The narrator’s friendship with James Yoon grows from wary first contact into a bond expressed through repeated evenings together and, later, the narrator’s attentive presence during an exhausting film shoot. Its defining contrast is between Yoon’s long-denied opportunity to occupy the screen and the narrator’s knowledge that the staged suffering he performs resembles torture inflicted on real prisoners.

Identity and First Contact

James Yoon is a Korean American actor in his mid-thirties, widely recognizable from television but rarely remembered by name. His flexible appearance allowed him to play characters of different Asian ethnicities and ages, making him a marketable figure in an industry that treated Asian performers as interchangeable. A recurring commercial for Sheen dishwashing soap made his face nationally familiar: as a houseboy, he offered housewives cleaning advice and delivered the commercial’s celebrated slogan. His success therefore coexisted with a narrow form of visibility, one built around service roles and a deliberately generalized Asian identity.

The narrator initially knows Yoon through the film set and its pecking order. Yoon plays Binh, an older brother whose scenes with the child playing Danny Boy are liable to be stolen by the boy’s charm. That professional irritation belongs to a larger environment in which Vietnamese characters are being represented by other Asian actors; Yoon himself is valued partly for how easily he can be made to signify a variety of Asian identities. His screen presence is both an asset and a constraint: the actor is familiar to audiences, yet his past roles have repeatedly made him disposable.

Yoon’s approach to the narrator is personal as well as sociable. Over a dozen raw oysters at the hotel bar, he makes a pass, placing a hand on the narrator’s knee. The narrator declines without hostility. Yoon removes his hand, explains his readiness to assume men might be interested, and treats the attempt as something for which he need not apologize. Rather than allowing the refusal to harden into embarrassment, the two continue the evening over drinks. The narrator buys one to show that he is not offended; Yoon buys another in return. Their bond begins not with perfect mutual understanding but with a boundary openly stated and accepted.

From Barroom Ease to Friendship

The narrator is struck by the difference between their smiles. He thinks of his own as having little currency, while Yoon’s seems to command the room; the smile that made Yoon effective in advertising is also, in person, a source of warmth and ease. The narrator’s willingness to meet Yoon’s advance with generosity helps turn a potentially awkward encounter into friendship. They bond that night and, as the narrator recounts, on almost every night that follows.

Yoon’s drinking is visible in the changing redness of his face, which the narrator reads as a measure of how far the alcohol has affected him. The account does not make that observation the basis of their friendship; instead, it places their recurring companionship amid the informal routines of the set and hotel bar. Yoon also flirts with the actress playing his sister, despite the fact that neither is heterosexual. His behavior presents him as forthright and socially unembarrassed, while the narrator’s refusal shows that their closeness does not depend on romantic reciprocity.

Their friendship also takes shape against Yoon’s career history. He recounts a long inventory of screen deaths: beaten, stabbed, shot, strangled, hanged, thrown from heights, drowned in a laundry bag, and disemboweled. Those deaths had generally occupied only seconds of screen time. In the current production, however, Binh’s extended torture gives Yoon a rare chance to sustain a performance rather than vanish almost as soon as he appears. The narrator understands why this role matters to him: Yoon sees it as an opportunity to make a supporting character’s death impossible to dismiss.

The Torture Scene and the Narrator’s Care

In the scene, Binh and Pete Attucks have been captured after fighting back; Attucks is mutilated, and Binh is restrained on a plank. The production simulates water torture with a wet cloth over the actor’s face and water poured onto it. Yoon’s stunt double handles the most physically dangerous portion, with his nostrils sealed and a breathing tube in his mouth. Yoon performs the surrounding ordeal—beatings, curses, choking, and repeated exposure of his face—as the Viet Cong interrogators demand a confession from Binh. The difference between performer and stunt double does not make the scene effortless: Yoon works through the repeated takes until his grief and distress register as more than a brief, conventional screen death.

The director requires six further takes after the first extended performance. After the third, Yoon refuses the lunch break and asks not to be unstrapped. The narrator stays with him beneath a parasol while the cast and crew leave for the shade. Yoon insists on seeing the scene through, comparing his limited time in the sun with the far worse ordeals endured by prisoners. The narrator confirms the comparison: real captives, including people interrogated by the narrator’s communist comrades and by his own colleagues in Special Branch, could remain under interrogation for days, weeks, months, or years. His reassurance is also an acknowledgment that the performance has brought a real history of coercion onto the set.

After the final take, Yoon’s arms are still bound, and he asks for water. The narrator fetches it and slowly trickles it down Yoon’s throat. The small act carries the weight of the scene: during the simulated water cure, Yoon has received no actual drink, only the water absorbed by the cloth, which has been just sufficient to make breathing feel suffocating. The narrator recognizes the prisoner-like dependence in the gesture of giving water, but here he can answer the need rather than control it. When the director calls the shoot finished so Yoon can return to the pool, the ordeal has ended for the actor, though not for the historical victims whose experience it imitates.

Friendship Across Performance and Memory

Yoon’s work exposes the difference between depicting torture and enduring it. The narrator has previously witnessed the Communist agent being tortured in the room used as a movie theater, and the film scene recalls that experience so forcefully that he tries to concentrate on the director’s fictional requirements instead of the agent’s face. Later, the narrator’s recollection specifies the agent’s sexual assault by policemen and the degrading aftermath. That memory gives his care for Yoon a particular tension: he can offer water and companionship to an actor performing distress, while knowing that the corresponding violence outside the film set was neither controlled nor safely concluded with a final take.

The friendship is thus made visible through ordinary reciprocity and a moment of practical tenderness, but it is not sentimentalized. Yoon accepts the narrator’s refusal at the bar; the narrator accepts Yoon’s determination to continue filming; and, once the actor needs help, the narrator stays beside him and brings him water. Their bond allows the novel to hold together two forms of visibility: Yoon’s hard-won screen time as a performer and the suffering of prisoners whose bodies were not acting. It also gives the narrator a companion at the point where entertainment, professional performance, and remembered violence become difficult to keep apart.