Chapters 7–9 Summary and Analysis
Chapter 7
As time progresses, the narrator feels increasingly haunted by his role in the major's death and begins to "see" him as an apparition. The General, by contrast, seems to have been energized by the execution, even eulogizing the man at the funeral.
When a fellow refugee invites them to his wedding, the narrator, grateful for a distraction, takes Sofia Mori as his date. To his surprise, he recognizes one of the singers providing the evening's entertainment: Lana, the General's daughter, absent since attending college in the Bay Area long before the evacuation. Now that she is a grown woman, he finds her unexpectedly mesmerizing. She's not the only familiar face he encounters—Sonny, the journalist, is there covering the wedding for the paper yet again.
A Congressman, clearly courting the political support of the Vietnamese refugee community, takes the stage. He invites the General and Madame to lunch the next weekend, and the narrator chauffeurs them to the meal.
During lunch, the Congressman reveals that there may be some interesting work on offer: he's become friendly with some Hollywood producers, and they need to hire a Vietnamese liaison to help with accuracy on their new film. Declining the offer himself, the General recommends the narrator instead—he is, the General insists, his "cultural attaché."
Chapter 8
The narrator receives the screenplay from the famous Auteur and makes copious notes about its cultural mistakes. He finds it rife with inaccuracies, but one stands out to him as especially egregious: the movie takes place in Vietnam, and yet not one Vietnamese character has a decent line. The Auteur, offended by his corrections, insists that he's done plenty of research and angrily sends the narrator home.
Visiting the General and Madame after this altercation, the narrator is surprised by Madame's culinary talents—though she's a brand-new cook, having learned anew in the time since their evacuation, she serves him pho that perfectly evokes the missing sensory experience of their homeland. "You should open a restaurant," he tells her.
Showing the narrator the latest edition of Sonny's Vietnamese-language newspaper, the General points to a troubling article: while reporting the major's death, the reporter questions the official story of a robbery gone wrong, positing that a military man such as he might have had dangerous enemies. He also shares what—to him—constitutes some good news: he's slowly assembling a crew to continue their fight in the homeland.
Chapter 9
To his surprise, the narrator receives a call from Violet, the Auteur's assistant, the very next week. The Auteur has reconsidered, she tells him, and what's more, he respects the narrator's candor. She makes him a job offer he can't resist—four paid months on location, room and board included. Needing a vacation and seeing an opportunity to undermine the Auteur's propaganda, he accepts.
As a means of rerouting funding for his covert initiative, the General founds a nonprofit organization that accepts charitable contributions. With the narrator's help, he asks the Congressman for support. Using euphemistic language, they strike a deal: in exchange for the Congressman's money, the General will facilitate some votes.
The narrator departs for the film shoot, which is set to take place in the Philippines, and finds himself feeling pulled in two directions—both strangely homesick at the sight of armed militants in the airport terminal and missing the Western comforts of his newly adopted territory. The film set, comprising ersatz replicas of familiar Vietnamese locales, feels especially inviting in the middle of this ambiguity, and the narrator soon adopts a headstone in the film set's cemetery as a stand-in for his own mother's grave.
Analysis
(This entire section contains 843 words.)
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Analysis
In these chapters, the pull between the narrator's Eastern and Western influences becomes more acute.
He finds himself overwhelmed by the sensory experience of Madame's traditional Vietnamese food, yearning for his own childhood and his mother's cooking back home. Around the same time, he also finds himself unbelievably drawn to Lana, the General and Madame's daughter, who has abandoned many of the expectations of their home culture to adopt a Western lifestyle.
This cultural push and pull is echoed when the narrator travels to the Philippines to consult on the movie set. Though the setting is only an imitation of his own homeland, he experiences two dueling types of homesickness: at the familiar sights of an environmental and political climate like his own, he feels homesick for Vietnam. At the same time, he's become quickly accustomed to many of the elements of comfort unique to American life and experiences homesickness in the other direction, too—as with his racial and social ambiguity and his political allegiance, the narrator is yet again in a position where partial belonging in two places prevents him from truly belonging anywhere.
On the trip, he's particularly struck by one assertion in his travel guidebook: that the East is "infinitely complex." This, he points out, is both true and completely meaningless—there is no place for which such a statement wouldn't be true, as infinite complexity is a natural and unambiguous state of human life.
