When the crowd was inside, the Korean manager gestured toward a seating area already set up. There were paper plates with croissants on them, one on each plastic chair’s seat. The mob muttered among themselves, laughing as they mocked the ridiculous gesture. The Korean didn’t seem to be bothered by this: He just gestured to the customary table of iced water.
“Ha!” Tuan blurted out, as dramatically as he could, and he declared, “We know Focus is water-soluble!” He said it in Vietnamese, both because he remembered that the Korean spoke enough to understand him, and because he was saying it for the benefit of his fellow dissidents anyway.
“Aren’t you thirsty?” the sweating Korean said in passable Vietnamese, as he took a cup from the table and drank the water. “It’s so hot today …” Tuan realized the man was looking at him, a curious expression on his face. Did the man recognize him? And why did the possibility make him feel relief, of all things?
“Chan-mul?” Tuan said. Even all these years later, he still remembered the Korean words for “cold water.” His words had the desired effect: The manager seemed surprised, even as he nodded. “What’s in it?” he asked, switching to English.
“Nothing,” said the Korean manager, his face so guileless Tuan believed him.
“We’re not thirsty,” Tuan said in Vietnamese, shoving the table aside. “You won’t stop us that easily.”
Now the man was really staring at Tuan, searching his memories for some hint, and Tuan’s earlier relief began to sour. He didn’t remember. This man who’d … ruined his life, he didn’t remember him at all. Tuan raised one foot and kicked over the table, sending the cups tumbling as the jugs shattered, their contents puddling on the floor. Members of Tuan’s group started shouting, and a few of them kicked the chairs away, the croissants flying off into the darkness of the factory interior. One of them even struck at the manager with a length of iron pipe, which the Korean blocked with his forearm, yowling in pain.
“I’ll tell you what we’re really here for,” Tuan shouted in English, straining to be heard over the crowd, and only then becoming aware of a strange scent in the air. Then he noticed a soft hissing sound that had begun earlier, but he hadn’t consciously registered. He coughed, his throat tightening as all the natural indistinctness of the world around him began to fade and as details began to jump out at him: the droplets of sweat on his skin, the dizzying lightheadedness, the Korean’s eyes with their vastly dilated pupils, staring at him in the darkness, and the creaking of a door somewhere in the distance.
It was the entrance to the factory being shut from the outside, he realized, as the interior of the factory was plunged into darkness lit only by the screens of a dozen cell phones. Tuan sniffed the air and realized that it hadn’t been the water that’d been dosed: It was the air. There was a gas, an invisible gas. And it wasn’t a sleeping gas, or tear gas. With a flicker of panic, and an astonishing clarity of mind, he realized why the sensation was so familiar: The knowledge simply snapped into focus, and Tuan immediately understood, without even the slightest inclination to panic, that the air inside the factory was dosed with Focus.
A drop of sweat trickled down the Korean’s forehead as he shook his head, and with a resigned smile, he said, “Oh, I already know …”
As they passed the burning tire factory, My Linh gaped at what she and her friends had done. Trucks roared down the streets, loaded with young men and women armed with tools and pipes, cheering like fans at a soccer match. Past them wove hundreds of scooters piloted by angry young men and women, the passengers seated behind the drivers waving banners and flags that decried China, the Free Trade Agreement with America, the government approval of generic Focus for factory use, and three or four other issues besides.
But all of that was normal, or had been normal in past riots. What turned My Linh’s stomach was how the army had already shown up. It always took the army a day or two to show up: long enough for a few factories to burn down, for the crowd to vent for a while. Better they attack a few factories than the National Assembly, after all. Yet there were military trucks out already, only a few hours after the beginning of the disturbances. It made no sense at all.
She tried to call her father again but found her phone couldn’t even connect to the cellular network at all. Up the street, a group of university students—boys in clean white dress shirts, girls in jeans and blouses—clashed with a small group of soldiers who for some reason were all wearing gas masks. She sniffed the air for any hint of tear gas, but found none, and wondered what the masks were for. Debris—old tires, piles of products, desks and workbenches hauled doors—were all burning, black smoke and a heavy toxic stink filling the drones-choked air. Now, My Linh was suddenly certain that what she’d seen on the government’s hidden chat logs was true: this had been planned days before, and high-level people had known about it.
But then why were all the factories burning?
Except they weren’t, she realized. Only some of them were, she realized. They passed a Japanese tire factory wreathed in flames, a cheering crowd of rioters hauling enormous tires out and rolling them, ablaze, into the street. Just a little further down the road, a Singaporean textiles shop sat placid and calm,
