Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

  “Yes, we’re leaving,” I admitted.

  We sat quietly. She picked up pebbles with her toes. The kids in the street were laughing, having a good time at their game. I wished I had brought some of my toys from Saigon to give her.

  “You’ll come back and visit?”

  “Sure, I have to visit my grandma, don’t I?”

  I gave her my flashlight and she let me hold her hand. My palm turned sweaty, but she didn’t let go. I liked the feel of her hand. It was soft and it made me dizzy. All my blood was dammed up in my ears.

  Early in the morning, Mom ordered us into tattered clothes. The lot of us were going to pass as peasants. She had bought each of us a pair of sandals, known as Viet Cong sandals because they were made out of used tires, the cheapest footwear available. Mom and Aunt Dung hired two rickshaws to take us out of town. Going to visit relatives out in the countryside to have a picnic, Mom explained to the drivers. After they dropped us well beyond the fisherfolk’s shanties that ringed the town, we walked for several hours on back roads and trails. The sandals retained their tire curvature and rubbed our feet raw. Huy and Tien began to bawl about the blisters on their toes, but I was too frightened about having told Hoa about our escape to care. If she’d told anyone, we were all going to jail again.

  We threw away the sandals and went barefoot. Chi held up bravely, carrying Hien on her back for miles when he was too tired to walk. We were supposed to meet up with Dad sometime late that night, then halfway to dawn our fishermen would come for us. I was frightened that I wouldn’t be able to make the swim to the boat. Yet as we walked deeper into the trees, I found myself becoming entranced by the coconut forest. The palms swayed gently in the evening breeze, their naked trunks sweeping into the sky, their splaying leaves, bright green oranging in the sunset, arcing out and down like frozen fireworks. Not a soul traveled the road.

  It seemed, then, that we could simply walk out of Vietnam and right into America, beautiful free America, somewhere at the end of this wondrous road. It seemed so easy I didn’t think about the thousands of boat people who died trying to escape Vietnam, or about the Vietnamese navy shooting at boats on sight. I almost forgot that this truly was our last gamble.

  9

  Mecca-Memory

  Rain mists the glass pane as the airplane sinks through the clouds and banks into the midnight sky over Ho Chi Minh City. Outside the window a feeble dusting of streetlamps marks the dark sprawl beneath. I search for signs of old Saigon, neon messages, bright boulevards. Nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness. Gone, too, are the red tracers of bullets ripping the night sky.

  I am afraid,. This unnameable apprehension isn’t something I had anticipated. The hardships of a pilgrimage lend no courage for facing mecca. In the past few months, I have biked 2,357 miles, sleeping in ditches along the road, cooking meager meals of steamed rice and boiled eggs over campfires, and bathing in creeks. I am tired, nearly broke, and scared. Surprise. So I toss back yet another lowball, this one a toast to my twenty-year anniversary since I had forsaken this city. Here’s to you, Saigon. I’ve come for my memories. Give me reconciliation.

  The cabin tilts in descent. Passengers, mostly Vietnamese, begin fighting their luggage out of the overhead compartments, spilling packages into the aisles, rallying toward the exit. A Vietnamese couple across the aisle furtively jam uneaten airline cheese and crackers into their handbags, squirreling away the freebies, knowing better but unable to resist old immigrant habits. A middle-aged pair, luggage in hand, rush up from the rear and plop down in the empty seats next to me. Sporting a lavender double-breasted suit and half a pound of gold around his blubbery neck, the man grins at me. At my inquisitive stare, he bobs his head and offers, “Almost there … How do you do?”

  “How’re you doing?” I answer instinctively, the American rhetorical salutation. Then, honoring our common etiquette, I address him in Vietnamese, “Uncle-friend, are your family-relatives welcoming you at the airport?”

  “Yes, my brothers and sisters,” he fumbles, surprised at my Vietnamese, gauging the ethnic shape of my face. “Brother-friend, you’re Vietnamese?” I nod. “I was sure you were Japanese or Korean. Sure you’re not a half-breed?”

  I shake my head, taking no offense at his bluntness. “One hundred percent Vietnamese,” I announce in a tone final enough for anybody.

  He laughs, amused at my Americanized idiom. “Okay! Whole, undiluted-concentrated fishsauce you are!” Then on a more friendly note: “Visiting family-relatives?”

  “Yes, perhaps. Distant relatives-neighbors. I don’t remember them very well. I’m really just visiting the fatherland.” But no Vietnamese American returns unless he has a family to visit. He pauses, eyeing me again, probably thinking I am one of those lost souls he’s heard about. America is full of young-old Vietnamese, uncentered, uncertain of their identity. The older generation calls them mat goch—lost roots.

  “Too bad. What a shame,” he mumbles to his moon-faced wife, who concurs with clicks of her tongue. She whispers to him. He scribbles something on the back of a business card. “Here’s the address of my brother’s house in Saigon where we’re staying. Call us if you get lonely. And don’t forget to put ten dollars in your passport for the immigration officials. They’ll let you through the gate faster.”

  I thank him and wrangle with myself again whether to slip the bureaucrats a little grease. I don’t know if my tiny canister of pepper spray or my eight-inch fillet knife is legal. Plenty of Vietnamese Americans who visited Vietnam returned with harrowing tales of the grubby nasties at the airport, and I have been fairly disturbed at the prospect of losing my bike.

  He wishes me luck, claps me on the shoulder, then sprints with his wife in tow up to seats closer to the exit. The printed side of his card gives his American profession: a realtor in Santa Ana, a member of Century 21. Another Vietnamese-American immigrant success story coming home all spelled out in jewelry and gaudiness.

  Copies of the same fable, some exaggerated, some true, stock the plane, every one of them beside himself with giddiness. Husbands and wives squawk directions at each other, squeezing hands, grinning the victor’s grin. Young children caught up in the rush of adrenaline wail. Their triumphant homecoming is at hand.

  The Japanese and Koreans, all business travelers, flinch, scorn thinly veiled, drawing back from the Vietnamese. From both ends of the plane, flight attendants, round sensual faces distorted in desperation, scream in Korean-accented English, ordering the horde to put their luggage back into the overheads. On the intercom the captain orders the passengers to return to their seats for the landing. A duffel bag becomes unzipped and rains new toys into the aisle: action figures, fistsized teddy bears, and Ping-Pong paddles. Somewhere up front, a little boy howls, and on the instant the party shifts into full cry. Mutiny.

  A tall European flight attendant spearheads the assault, her smaller Korean counterparts covering her flanks. With small white hands, they wrestle the Vietnamese one by one into seats. They slam closed the overhead compartments. Someone complains about his bruised fingers. Harsh Korean, countered by Vietnamese curses, rattles the cabin. The din alone should send the plane tumbling out of the sky.

  Mortified by the Vietnamese’s behavior and equally dismayed that I feel an obligatory connection to them, I sink deeper into my seat, resentful, ashamed of their incivility. My grandmother used to say to me when I was unruly: A monkey in a prince’s gown is still a monkey.

  Eventually the plane touches down and they mob the exit. The flight attendants dive into the fray for another round of taming the animals. Last off the plane, I bang my way out, lugging a helmet, two backpacks, and a rolled sleeping mat. The wet night heat wraps around me. I realize I should have changed during the flight but I was too drunk. Still am. Under my insulated Lycra bicycle tights and fleece, both caked with dirt and sweat, is a full-body thermal. It is winter in Japan, tropical in Vietnam. Early this morning, after forty-five days of touring a thousand miles of Japan,
I pumped my bike directly onto the departure ramp at Tokyo’s Narita Airport with no time to spare. I tossed my bike and panniers unboxed onto the conveyor belt, fretted through the immigration checkpoint, and ran to the boarding gate, helmet still strapped on my head.

  I tail the other passengers across the tarmac toward the docking gate, surprised at Saigon’s sleek new facility. I expected something more native, maybe a little burnt-out or run-down, at best a quaint shanty like the Maui airport in Hawaii. Tan Son Nhat International Airport seems fairly modern and in good working condition, comparable in size to an airport of a small Stateside city.

  “Visa. Passport,” demands a Vietnamese immigration official behind a counter. The sign above him reads: DO NOT PUT MONEY IN YOUR PASSPORT. So I pass over the paperwork minus the grease.

  “Pham, Aan-rew,” he pronounces, lifting an eyebrow, then rolls the words at me, sneering: “Viet-kieu.” Foreign Vietnamese.

  I ignore the slight, pretending I don’t understand Vietnamese, and as I had hoped, his English isn’t enough to prolong the questioning regarding my intentions in Vietnam. He makes me pay five dollars to a woman who takes a Polaroid of me “for extra paperwork.” Fifteen minutes and I collect my papers and pass through immigration.

  I edge into the press of people at the baggage claim just in time to see the handler, wearing flip-flops, dragging my bike backward on a moving conveyor belt through a portal. The bike jams in the small door, squeaking loudly against the rubber belt. The idiot was too lazy to lead the bike around the long way. He hollers to someone on the other side to give the bike a good push.

  I drop everything, shouting as I blade through the crowd, then leap clear over the moving belts and luggage. I help him work the bike free of the door. One pannier rack is bent. One brake grip on the handlebar is broken off. The rims look irreparable. Something heavy settles on me. This cheap old bike has taken me far, farther than my imagination. Thanks to nitwits in flip-flops, it is practically scrap metal. Oh, God, if this is how I see the Vietnamese, what sorry sights they must be to Western eyes.

  “Stupid!” I wrench my bike from him.

  Broken bike on one shoulder, one backpack on the other, one backpack on my back, and a set of panniers in hand, I make my way toward the jam of people pressed against the customs gate. People are jostling and elbowing each other to get to the X-ray machines. The officials randomly open boxes and invite their owners into rooms for inspection, doing the routine shakedown dance. White foreigners are off-limits; Viet-kieu are fair game, easy pickings.

  Ten minutes in line and I am no closer to the exit. This is a Vietnamese line: shove your way to the front, bumper-car your path through the mess. One Vietnamese-American woman pushes my bags back so she can move her cart forward. It is hot and claustrophobic. Under my thermal, I sweat like a pig next to a roasting pit. Ten more minutes. I snap. I take the offensive, amused at my ability to summon the Vietnamese in me, the grubbing-snatching-edging Vietnamese behavior anathema to the Western me. It doesn’t get me far with this crowd, so I spice it up with a dash of American commandeering bullheadedness.

  I lift my bike above my head with one arm and bellow: “Out of my way! I’m coming through!”

  I swipe two men with the dirt-caked wheels, knock the head of a third with the handlebars. He yipes and falls back, head in his hands. Another man elbows me. I poke him hard in the ribs with a pedal and he too reels back protesting. I throw him a look, angry enough to toss the bike with it. Grandma was right about monkeys.

  An uproar. Officials yell in English and Vietnamese. They can’t tell whether I am Vietnamese. You can’t go that way. I barrel through a gap between two X-ray machines, snarling back at them in English: “I’m next! I can’t fit this bike through the machine. Can’t you see that?”

  With the bike over one shoulder, I grab my backpack and panniers coming out of the scanner. I simply turn and walk out the door. The officials are objecting. I become conveniently deaf. Somehow they let me go, giving up on the crazy Asian wearing a bike helmet and filthy clothes.

  Outside, the street is wet. The rain has stopped. A crowd of several hundred presses forward, angling for a glimpse inside, each searching for his relatives. There must be a welcoming party of ten for every person coming off the plane. Then there is a brigade of cyclo and taxi drivers hustling for a fare. I search their faces and they search mine.

  Twenty years have passed since I’ve seen Grandaunt Nguyen, my grandmother’s cousin-in-law As a child, I used to play with her sons, whom I must call Uncle despite the fact that we are the same age. I have never written them, nor they me. I half hoped they wouldn’t come. I wanted to return, quiet and alone, to fold myself into the city, but my mother learned of my flight number through my brother and told them I was coming.

  “An! An!”

  Someone calls my Vietnamese name. A man pushes through the crowd. He is smiling and waving at me. I can’t place him, so I grin.

  “How are you?” he asks in good English.

  “Khoe. Chu sau?”—I’m fine. And you, Uncle?

  “Noi teing Viet duoc, ha?” He is genuinely surprised I speak the language. “Remember me? I’m Khuong.”

  They emerge from the crowd and surround me, my grandaunt, whom I remember from pictures, and her three sons: Viet, a jovial, dark, portly thirty-five; Khuong, a slim, pockmarked, good-humored thirty-two; and Hung, a fat, pale, mustached playboy of twenty-eight. Two decades stand awkwardly between us, the crowd around us oblivious, pressing in. We exchange pleasantries. How was your trip? I’m so sorry the plane was late and you waited for me. How’s your mother? You all waited here two hours in the rain? Did you really bike all this way?

  But what I want to do is hug them or shake their hands. No room for either. A hug too familiar. A handshake too disrespectful to an elder. So I grin and bow and sweat profusely in my thermal.

  “Is this all you have?” asks my grandaunt in a tone that makes me ashamed.

  I nod, coloring, because I have neither money nor gifts for them, only some traveler’s checks and camping gear, no room for gifts for fourteen people and not much money to play the good-conquering-son returning home with a cargo of treasure. The Vietnamese I know who came back brought on average three thousand dollars’ worth of gifts. Every passenger off the plane has cartloads of goodies: cameras, microwaves, computers, microscopes, tennis rackets, badminton rackets, boom boxes, clothes, soap, shampoo, facial cream, perfumes, cognac, Johnnie Walker by the case, bicycles, electric rice cookers, Walkmans, Discmans, stereo systems, hair dryers, cosmetics, books, music cassettes, CDs, train sets, Japanese geisha dolls in glass display cases, videocassettes, videocams, metal welding kits, car parts, moped parts, tools, and anything else that can be bought and fit into a shipping box.

  I didn’t have a single gift.

  At 2 a.m., we take a taxi-van back to the Nguyens’ houses. My three “uncles” ride back on their motorbikes.

  Away from the airport, the buildings look dilapidated, water-damaged, their metal doors shut tight. Straying vendors sell food from baskets by the light of oil lamps, feeding the beggars who can’t sleep. Thin blankets drawn over their faces to keep the mosquitoes at bay, the homeless sleep on the street, lining the side of the road like casualties of war, scavenged and toe-tagged by the clean-up crew. Around them, an endless crush of buildings, weeping concrete, and clothesline rags hem in narrow streets. At the larger intersections, lighted billboards loom above the dark, odd ornaments at the joints of the city, some sort of somatic dreams hawking Honda motorbikes, Samsung color TVs, IBM computers, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Suzukis.

  There’s a cool stink to the city, a scent warped by too many people, too many things, and softened by the wet night. I turn, sniff-swallowing it all snake-like while fielding questions from Grandaunt.

  Turning to and fro, desperately trying to penetrate the dark beyond the erratic sweeps of the taxi’s headlights, I feel out of phase, a man panning for the memories of a boy. The purr of the van’s en
gine sounds empty in this supposedly live city. The old angst, now unfamiliar, worms back through the years at me. Memories. My manchild fascination. I scan the gutters half expecting discarded uniforms of the deposed South Vietnamese Nationalist Army, like those the boy-me had scavenged off the streets on Saigon’s final night. The night of our own downfall.

  It was a night of madness and spectacular fires. I was eight and wild with greed for all the loot people had tossed in the street. You could find almost anything that night. The defeated army discarded guns, ammo, helmets, knives, uniforms, boots, water tins, and heaps of things covered with the flat green paint of army-issued equipment. Fugitives, peasants, and city dwellers left belongings where they dropped them: baskets, food, clothes, chairs, sleeping mats, pottery, wads of no-longer-valid currency. The night was choked with those who fled, those who hid, those who scavenged, and those who went mad with fear, or greed, or anger.

  The bullies chased me down the alley. I heard them pounding the pavement hard on my heels. They were yelling. BANG! A shot went off. I couldn’t tell if they were shooting at me. Maybe they were shooting in another part of the neighborhood. Guns had been going off around the city all day, but I was pretty sure they were shooting at me.

  Earlier, I had been down by the empty lot showing off some of my loot to the other kids. Mom and Dad were busy packing suitcases and burning documents, so I was able to sneak out of the house and scavenge the streets. All the kids had something, mostly guns, ammo, and broken telephones. Some had pliers and were using them to take the tips off the bullets to get at the gunpowder. We drew dragons in the dirt with the powder and ignited them. I was firing my name when the older bullies came around. They had pistols and demanded we hand over our loot. The biggest bully wanted my pistol, which wasn’t the black metal army kind. It was a shiny, pug-nosed six-shooter.