In summer, when they murdered Thouan, I couldn't think of anything else. Thouan had slipped into drugs in handleren his senior year, I assume as a consumer as well as an intermediary dealer. It was in the newspaper, that a particularly gruesome murder had happened in a Thun stairwell. Apparently dealers had visited Thouan at his apartment, but the latter did not release the drugs, whereupon they stab him several times. Thouan tried to flee down the stairwell, vain. There was blood everywhere.
In the third year of business school, Thouan had switched to us from the adjacent high school because of poor performance.
Soon the seating arrangement was like this, that I and Thouan had our seats together at the back desk next to the door.
Thouan war Vietnamese. Up to this moment I know next to nothing about Vietnam's history let alone, where the country is on the map.
Nobody cared about Thouan, Thouan didn't seem interested in anyone. I never met anyone, who was as taciturn as he was. When asked something, he started rocking in his chair and had to go deep, Fishing deep within yourself for a crusted word. Sometimes, during class, where neither of us were really present, I started whispering to him. How he got there? where his father is? What he wants to be later?” Thouan said, his father is a criminal, not here, far away in the US. And he, Thouan, I want to go to America later and become a criminal there.
He was well on his way to it. What did he hope for?? financial wealth?
There was something devious about his gaze, he was like at half-mast, his nasal bone seemed to have been broken before. In the last half year, while we were studying for the final exams, Thouan came to school less and less, nobody knew, where he stayed, no one asked about him. During the final exam, Thouan missed most of the time, so also in shorthand, easy, that was learned last year, and that Thouan had almost always skipped. What did a crook have from the abbreviation?! Apart from that, the computer came along and revolutionized everything!
When the principal announced in nineteen ninety-six that the exams had passed successfully, he mentioned Thouan Ngyuen as the first and only graduate in twenty years, who failed the commercial high school exam. Thouan was not at the announcement.
He lived another six months, then his career as a petty criminal was over.
If Thouan had screamed and fought for his life? That was it, what I've been asking myself for the longest time, this summer.
Whether it's behind his silent, deeply hardened, at best gave a voice to a sneering mask, which broke out of him at the end, loud as an incessant falling rock?
Thouan asked me once: “May I have a photo of you?”
He took her, without batting an eyelid and put it in his jeans pocket. His jeans fell to the hollows of his knees, as he staggered bowleg-legged out of the classroom, and I looked after him, as long as, until I couldn't see him anymore.
Vietnam is a country in Southeast Asia and borders the South China Sea. From nineteen fifty-five to nineteen seventy-five there was a bloody civil war in Vietnam between north and south Vietnam. The south was supported by the French and by the US against communist North Vietnam, which was supported by the Soviet Union. It was one “Proxy war” of the Cold War. About four million Vietnamese civilians and one million Vietnamese combatants lost their lives. As a result of the war, many refugees left their country in the 1970s. The USA, who themselves mourned the deaths of many, took in over two million so-called Vietnam War veterans.