by Karin Tanabe
Wandering back to the Salle des Pas Perdues, the room of lost steps, I looked at my mother’s watch, flipping it around to the face, and realized it was time to make my way to the trains. I entered the Salle d’Échanges and was suddenly flooded by sunlight streaming in from the pointed glass canopies. It was still raining, but the drops were falling much softer now. When I reached the middle of the platform, I surveyed the tracks, remembering a story my mother had once told me about one of the strangest days we spent in Indochine. I wondered which one of the tracks I was looking at now would take me to Normandy, to Deauville, where my husband and children were waiting for me to begin our holiday. I had stayed back to finish our first Michelin guide to Italy and had closed it with the decision to award no stars. Italian cuisine was all one flavor, I’d determined: tomato.
Then, in the noise of the station, I heard something. A name called out, the name of a man I had never met.
Across the platform was Marcelle de Fabry, in a green silk dress. Walking toward her was Nguyen Khoi.
I moved a few steps back, not wanting to be seen. I was thirty years old now, and Marcelle surely wouldn’t be able to place me as the seven-year-old girl she’d made such an impression on, but I didn’t want to take the risk.
I had never seen Khoi before. I had stared at his picture many times in the newspapers, and had followed his movements over the years because of Lanh. Once my family sailed back to France, Lanh returned to Hanoi to be closer to his sister and started working as the driver for the governor-general, thanks to a good word from my father. Despite the miles between us, we exchanged letters often. It was he who told me that during the war for independence Khoi’s beautiful house, one filled with a wife and four children, had been taken over by the government and turned into a boarding school.
Lanh and I also wrote about the train stations. We still called Hanoi’s the House of a Hundred Suns and Saigon’s the Second Sun. Saint Lazare, we decided, was the Waiting Sun. One awaiting his arrival. And we wrote about the people we had shared our lives with. He told me about Trieu and her role in the rise of the Communist Party. About how she had traveled to China and had led an underground cell in Tonkin upon her return. She’d married a fellow leader and had been in prison herself when he was shot by a French firing squad in 1940. Now she worked for the party in the north, no longer hiding her political identity.
Khoi had his arm around Marcelle now, who was as elegant as I remembered. She looked as if she’d been born in that color green, and he was as striking as in the picture on the boat, even though his hair way starting to gray.
It was Lanh who had told me of Marcelle de Fabry’s divorce after the Second World War. Almost a decade later, in 1954, he wrote to say Khoi had moved with his wife and children to Paris, as they had lost everything in the revolution. Nguyen silk had been nationalized, all the family’s private property seized by the government. He had come to Paris and was living as other moneyed Vietnamese were, as an émigré. In 1955 he had been granted a divorce and two months later had married Marcelle, the woman who haunted me, and my family; the woman who’d always had his heart.
Lanh once said that all roads led to train stations, and as I had learned in my childhood, Lanh was seldom wrong. I looked around me, at the station that Claude Monet had painted eleven times, at the people waiting for their trains. There were no shoeblacks desperate for customers, no bags so worn at the edges that the clothes were falling out at the seams. The porters didn’t have glassy eyes, the sugarcane had been replaced with chocolates and roasted hazelnuts. And almost everyone looked cut from the same cloth. Except for Marcelle and Khoi.
To some, I imagined, they were just two elegant people well into middle age. To others they were an upsetting sight—a pair who shouldn’t be together. But they were proof that the outside world didn’t matter, all you needed was two—coupled with a youthful daring that for them was proving to be ageless. In France the color green meant money, envy, new beginnings. In Viet Nam it meant Nguyen lua. And for those few souls who didn’t know the silk company, the color green meant lust. That’s what they were to me. The passion of a nation desperate to be its own, the desire of two people trying to live differently. I looked again at the woman who was still audacious enough to wear three yards of green silk in a rainstorm and then closed my eyes, listening to the light tap of the raindrops. It now sounded like applause.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to:
My brilliant, lovely, and amazing-in-every-way editor, Sarah Cantin at St. Martin’s Press. Sarah, can you believe this is book five together? What an honor to have worked on every one of my novels with you. Thank you for championing this story and making it sing like only you can.
Bridget Matzie, my wonderful agent, who guides each project with an expert hand.
The brilliant team at St. Martin’s, especially Sally Richardson, Jennifer Enderlin, George Witte, Andrew Martin, Lisa Senz, Katie Bassel, Michael Storrings, Rachel Diebel, Sallie Lotz, Brant Janeway, and Jordan Hanley.
Eagle-eyed copy editor Mary Beth Constant.
Liz Ward, who yet again served as my first reader and editor. Liz, I stand in awe of your way with words.
Professor Martina T. Nguyen, who so generously gave her time and expertise to this project and helped me make sure that I was honoring a country, its history, and its people to the best of my abilities.
Yolande Vu for her invaluable help translating phrases from English to Vietnamese.
Rachel and Jim Dougan, who have championed me and my work since my first book and were especially helpful with this one. I hope to one day be as creative as the both of you.
My squad in Washington, D.C., and beyond who kept me sane and motivated every step of the way, especially Raia Margo and Aliénor van den Bosch.
D. Neary, forever an inspiration.
Georgia Bobley, my favorite early reader.
Kari-Lynn Rockefeller for cheering me on and constantly dropping knowledge.
Professor Kathleen Hart and the Vassar College French Department for feeding my love of French and teaching the works of brilliant francophone writers from all over the world.
The staff of the Washington, D.C., Wing who supported me, and made me laugh even when I was crashing on deadline. I’m so lucky to have written this book in such a gorgeous space and with so many talented women by my side.
My brother Ken, a force of positivity.
My incredibly patient husband, Craig. Always the anchor, allowing me to be the sail. You are in a class apart.
My parents. In so many ways, this book is for you. A brilliant, wonderful Asian man and a beautiful European French-speaking woman still in love fifty-plus years later.
I am so appreciative that I had the following resources to turn to as I wrote:
Les plantations Michelin au Viêt-Nam by Eric Panthou; The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation by Trần Tử Bình; French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochine by Marie-Paule Ha; Dumb Luck by Vu~ Trọng Phụng; Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants Under the French by Ngo Vinh Long; Métisse Blanche by Kim Lefèvre; The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber by John A. Tully; On and Off Duty in Annam by Gabrielle von Hoenstadt; Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 by Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery; the Bates College honors thesis “Private Union, Public Conflict: Life and Labor at Michelin in the Twentieth Century” by Madeleine Curtis McCabe; “The Scientist, the Governor, and the Planter: The Political Economy of Agricultural Knowledge in Indochina During the Creation of a ‘Science of Rubber,’ 1900–1940” by Michitake Aso, and the websites entreprises-coloniales.fr, belleindochine.free.fr, saigoneer.com, and historicvietnam.com.
To see a list of all the Vietnamese words and phrases used in this book with full diacritical marks, please visit my website, at www.karintanabe.com.
Also by Karin Tanabe
The Diplomat’s Daughter
The Gilded Years
T
he Price of Inheritance
The List
About the Author
KARIN TANABE is the author of The Diplomat’s Daughter, The Gilded Years (soon to be a major motion picture starring Zendaya, who will produce alongside Reese Witherspoon/Hello Sunshine for Sony/TriStar), The Price of Inheritance, and The List. A former Politico reporter, she has also written for The Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, and Newsday. A graduate of Vassar College, Karin lives in Washington, D.C. To learn more, visit KarinTanabe.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Map
One. Jessie
Two. Jessie
Three. Jessie
Four. Jessie
Five. Jessie
Six. Marcelle
Seven. Jessie
Eight. Marcelle
Nine. Jessie
Ten. Marcelle
Eleven. Jessie
Twelve. Marcelle
Thirteen. Jessie
Fourteen. Jessie
Fifteen. Jessie
Sixteen. Marcelle
Seventeen. Marcelle
Eighteen. Marcelle
Nineteen. Jessie
Twenty. Jessie
Twenty-One. Jessie
Twenty-Two. Marcelle
Twenty-Three. Jessie
Twenty-Four. Marcelle
Twenty-Five. Jessie
Twenty-Six. Marcelle
Twenty-Seven. Marcelle
Twenty-Eight. Jessie
Twenty-Nine. Jessie
Thirty. Jessie
Thirty-One. Marcelle
Thirty-Two. Jessie
Thirty-Three. Jessie
Thirty-Four. Jessie
Thirty-Five. Jessie
Thirty-Six. Jessie
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Karin Tanabe
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
A HUNDRED SUNS. Copyright © 2020 by Karin Tanabe. All rights reserved.
For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Michael Storrings
Cover photographs: Asia © Mauritius Images
GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo; woman © Malgorzata
Maj/Arcangel
Map illustration by Rhys Davies
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-23147-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-23149-9 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250231499
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First Edition: April 2020