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Loved, I suppose.’ He will later testify that what he feels, after his brush with death, is ‘Peace
ever since the operation at Long Binh’ (HW, 181).
Madame Phan’s home is a refuge for such spirits as well as for orphans, for all have lost
their homes to the cosmic war at the end of the last great age. She is a Bodhisattva-figure,
devoting her life to helping those who are homeless or hungry, including, like Langford who
helps his NVA captors, members of the Viet Cong. Claudine Phan acts as Langford’s mentor
and healer. She helps him find his way in Asia, but when he has matured as a saviour-figure
and it is his turn to help her, with the Communists poised to enter Saigon, she refuses. Even
though she is at great risk of being punished for her Western connections and capitalistic past,
and while she is very interested in saving her sons from the Communists, her unfailing
compassion for those who need her prevents her from seeking her own salvation.
One of the girls who is harboured by Claudine Phan is Kim Anh, the beautiful but
crippled street-girl who Langford takes under his wing. For some reason, she disappears from
Claudine Phan’s house after spending time convalescing there after the operations Langford
arranged to repair the damage to her foot. Langford had planned to marry her, and spends
considerable time searching for her, but to no avail. The suggested explanation is that Kim
Anh’s ‘uncle’ has taken her away to work as a prostitute, but this is never clearly resolved.
What is clear, however, is that a marriage between Kim Anh and Langford would have ended
Langford’s developing role as a saviour-figure. Her disappearance, however, reinforces that
role. An equally likely explanation of Kim Anh’s fate, then, is that the Taoist-minded Chinese-
French Claudine Phan has spirited Kim Anh away.
Kim Anh’s central role in Langford’s life came earlier and conforms to the tradition of
Indian epic literature when the apsarasas descend on earth ‘merely to shake the virtue of
penitent sages, and to deprive them of the power they would otherwise have acquired through
unbroken austerities’ (Garrett, 40). The accumulation of psychic energy through the
performance of tapas—the building up of sakti described by Billy Kwan—often led to threats
against the position of the gods as rulers of the universe. Harvey Drummond illustrates the
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