Fowler and Phuong

I have witnessed this scene played out before me so many times before this one. There sits an old man from the land where there is no sun sitting with a young woman of native descent. They are together, but not engaged in displays of gross affection in the street or the tawdry nightclubs hanging over the river. No, what they are doing is much more intimate. They are sharing a meal at a restaurant designated for foreigners. Where am I in all this? I am listening to their conversation from another table. Its rude, I know, but I cannot help it. Their language is not part of the background noise I filter out every day. It is not my fault if I start analyzing bits and pieces of what they are saying.

“My time is very free.”

He sits in a chair dressed as he might have done as a student in 1962. His neck rises out of a striped shirt with the collar buttoned without a tie. Spots from sun exposure gently appear here and there out of the lightly colored hairline (Maybe this is not his first time in the East?) His accent is American. Perhaps he was involved in the war that happened long ago and fell in love with the thought of being born into a new society without the familiar restrictions. I look at him and I can only think of one name: Fowler. Even though he is not English and sarcastically bitter at every phrase, I can superimpose the fictional character over the person I see in front of me. The young woman sitting across from him must then Phoung. The pairing come to life out of the imagination of an Englishman, who must have dreamed of all Americans being quiet during some moment of rage. Of course, I am being ridiculous. Both the wars in Indochina have run their course, we are not in Saigon, and the nature of their relationship is unknown. Yet there is something very familiar in the way that they are sitting across from each other. The old man could be anyone, but the woman has to be Phuong. Everything that leapt across the page at me fits her description completely. Her gaze is always looking down, always looking at her food or her feet. She is impenetrable in attitude, composed and capable only of expressing complacence and joy. She is the east as Phuong embodied it; indifferent to the major powers that threw bombs around in the name of democracy or communism, but not impervious to the taking monetary rewards that they offered.

“Sometimes I tired.”

His English is slipping. He has obviously spent a lot of time around people who do not speak it as their native tongue and begun to mimic their inflections by habit. He must have had a wife back in his own country for he is far too old and inveterate to have lived by himself for so long. Whether or not he is weighed down by a sense of Catholic guilt is doubtful. From the way he is sitting, his shoulders are raised too high to be weighed down by a millstone of mortality and sin. He cannot be Fowler in appearance. He is too uncomplicated to be the real thing.

“If we study at my hotel, is that okay?”

Does he love her? Did Fowler ever really love Phuong? In small sense perhaps he did, but it was hard to guess if Fowler loved anything at all. He treated everyone he knew with contempt so cold and typical of an Englishman. However, he was trying to save both her and her country from innocent ravages of Pyle. The American had to be stopped, we all know that. The sad part is that he was reborn into the conscience of so many others trying to accomplish the same mission. Maybe this man is trying to save the woman sitting across from him from something, a rescue from a drab little life in the middle of a hot tropical country. I doubt if she thinks that she needs saving at all.

“When I was young, my mother would take me to Banteay Srei, sometimes to Kulen Mountain.”

Does she love him? We would all loved to have read a scene in which Phuong and Fowler embraced in some passionate, fervent explosion of emotion, calling each other “Darling!” and dancing off into the sunset together. This would make us more of a prisoner of our own culture than we already are. Maybe a Hollywood actress in dark eyeliner could perform in such a travesty, but not Phuong. The whole thing would be as foreign to Phong as a man who comes from the land where there is no sun. There will be no big American holiday. These two people eating together will have to find a way to bridge that gap of age and culture just as Phuong and Fowler did. They do not have the war, The London Times, or Pyle to hinder them.

Instead they have only themselves.