The house of a hundred suns. That’s what my tai xe called it. The first time he ferried me to the train station, in a black Delahaye 134 as polished as a gemstone, he slowly circled the building, avoiding the rawboned rickshaw drivers. I craned my neck, watching as the car’s exhaust left a trail behind us like a mollusk’s track, and tried my best to concentrate on his words, not the quick tempo of my heart.
“When I was young,” Lanh explained, moving his white-gloved hands to the top of the large metal steering wheel, “the government posted hand-painted advertisements all over the city boasting that railroad construction was booming and that one day the country would have one hundred train stations. I promised myself that I would visit every single one in my lifetime. There were several versions of the advertisement, with different stations featured, but all of them had a bright, many-rayed sun painted at the top. I used to trace those suns with my hand when I passed the posters on my way to school, as the government was kind enough to put them in the poorer neighborhoods, too.”
He turned the car smoothly, his voice quietly laced with enthusiasm. “But as you can see, all roads, even railroads, begin right here. Hanoi. Even if they build a hundred suns in Indochine, this will always be number one. That’s why it gets to be the house, the orb. The rest are simply rays.”
“How many have you visited so far?” I asked.
“Thirteen,” he replied. “But I’m still quite young.”
He cleared his throat and in his pleasant baritone added, “I once told a Frenchman that I called this station the house of a hundred suns, and he laughed in my face. He said, ‘Lanh, don’t be fooled by appearances. Most of those train stops that the government boasts about are in the middle of nowhere and have a train go through every three days at best. The sun shines on them, but they’re also full of malaria and poverty. The rest of Indochine is not like Hanoi.’ He called Hanoi ‘a city kissed by the French.’ He said that the French had brushed their lips against Saigon as well, but that the rest of the country was still waiting to be kissed.”
Lanh shifted his grip and said, “I don’t see it that way, madame.” He caught my eye in the rearview mirror and smiled. It was unexpected, since as a good chauffeur, he knew to keep his gaze on the road and not on his employer or, worse, his employer’s wife. But Lanh must have sensed that on that particular day I would appreciate the personal connection and wouldn’t mind a breach of etiquette.
“Those iron tracks mean freedom. They mean a life away from the one you were born into,” he said softly. “You’ll see. It will grow in importance to you. The house of a hundred suns. Nhà Trăm Thái Dương, as I say in my language.”
I had only been in Indochine for thirty-three days, having arrived from Paris on the first Saturday in September 1933, after a month-long endurance test of a trip, including a four-day sandstorm in the Suez Canal and the dark, shark-dotted waters of the vast Indian Ocean. But on that sun-soaked day in Hanoi, alone with Lanh, it was not my arduous journey to the Orient but my new life that was weighing on me.
Since arriving in the bustling colonial city with my husband, Victor, and our little daughter, Lucie, I had barely left the inviting neighborhood where we lived. The streets were wide and welcoming, and all our neighbors were French. But after a month had ticked quickly by, Victor decided that I’d had more than enough time to get used to Indochine—the singsong tones of the language; the rush of the rickshaws, or les pousse-pousse, as the French called them, as they zigzagged along the avenues en masse; the tan faces shaded by conical hats; the sea of black eyes when they peeled their hats off; the places where the French went to avoid all of it—and that I should see the country outside Hanoi.
The city of Haiphong, to the east of Hanoi, on the coast, was a fine place to start. It was where our boat had come to port and wasn’t entirely foreign to me. The train journey took only six hours, and the first-class cars were touted as luxurious, matching the comfort of any in Europe. French Indochine