The raid on the Cholon rice-wine merchant's casino

The raid on the Cholon rice-wine merchant's casino is a recalled police operation in which the unnamed narrator’s secret warning to Man sits alongside the official hunt for a suspected communist tax collector. The raid uncovers an illicit casino, but its aftermath turns the operation into a lesson in extortion and compromised loyalties: the merchant is beaten, cleared, and then made to pay; the narrator accepts a share of the bribe before giving it to Man for the revolution.

Background and preparation

Years later, while out with Bon in Chinatown, the narrator remembers the raid as they prepare for another operation. In Cholon, the rice-wine merchant had moved from the bottom of the narrator’s gray list to the top of his blacklist after enough people identified him as a communist. The crapulent major presented a thick dossier as grounds to neutralize him. Yet the narrator had already tipped off Man and expected the alleged tax collector to be absent when the raid began. That private warning gives the operation a second, concealed audience: the police seek a suspect, while the narrator knows that Man has been alerted.

The police cordoned off the ward with roadblocks on every street and foot patrols in the alleys. Secondary units checked residents’ identification, ostensibly searching for draft dodgers, while the major’s men entered the merchant’s shop. They pushed past his wife and searched the storeroom, where they found a lever that opened a concealed door.

The raid and its immediate outcome

Behind the secret door, gamblers were playing craps and cards. Rice wine and hot soup were served free by waitresses in revealing outfits. As the police rushed in, the players and employees bolted for the rear exit, only to encounter another squad waiting outside. The ensuing arrests brought screaming, clubs, and handcuffs. When the commotion subsided, only the crapulent major, the narrator, and the merchant remained inside.

The merchant protested that he was a businessman, not a communist. The major held up a garbage bag filled with the casino’s cash. The merchant conceded that the police had caught him and offered them the money as a contribution to their cause. The major rejected that description, insisting the cash would go to the government to cover fines and back taxes. But when he asked about future taxes, the exchange made clear that the raid could also secure continuing payments. The narrator, cast as the major’s straight man, affirmed the official explanation while having no power to protect the merchant.

Beating, bribe, and reversal

The merchant spent a week at the interrogation center being beaten. By the end of that week, the police had concluded that he was not a communist operative. The evidence that settled the matter was not an exonerating investigation but a sizable bribe delivered by the merchant’s wife to the crapulent major. The major said he had been mistaken and handed the narrator an envelope containing his share.

The amount was equivalent to a year’s salary, though the narrator notes that such a salary was not enough to live on for a year. Refusing the money, he reasoned, would have aroused suspicion, so he took it. The envelope therefore carried two pressures at once: it was a corrupt payment, and it was a test of the narrator’s cover. His acceptance did not mean he intended to keep the money.

The narrator’s response and the raid’s significance

The narrator considered using the money to support poor young women, then recalled the teachings of his father and Ho Chi Minh about money’s corrupting power. He instead took the bribe to Man at the basilica and gave it to the revolution. Man treated the major’s corruption as evidence of the moral difference between the opposing sides; the narrator’s account complicates that certainty by showing that he, too, had accepted the envelope, even if he redirected it afterward.

The episode thus links the narrator’s covert loyalty to Man with his participation in a compromised police system. His warning helps the suspected tax collector evade the raid, but the merchant is still captured, beaten, and forced into a corrupt settlement. The narrator’s later judgment is pointed rather than exculpatory: the major may have committed worse offenses, but this corruption made him average, not exceptional. The raid’s remembered details—its concealed door, the cash-filled garbage bag, and the envelope passed to the narrator—make the machinery of official authority and private extraction difficult to separate.