Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

  “Shit. I haven’t seen my wife and my daughter in four years. If I’m lucky, I’ll see them again in four more years. My daughter won’t remember me.”

  His wife had taken their daughter to America. Their immigration was sponsored by her mother, who fled to the States in ‘75 when Saigon fell. The rules permitted sponsoring immediate family members only, no in-laws. She left during the lean years, when they were suffering like everyone else. Hung thought maybe they would be together in two or three years, but the bureaucrats leeched him of all his savings and now he is no closer to emigrating than he was when she left. He keeps a shoe box full of pictures of her and their daughter by his bed.

  He shows me a picture of his wife and daughter in Virginia standing in front of their new Honda Accord parked in the driveway of their house. Eyes lowered, he asks, “Is … is this common in America?” The material wealth. What he means is, Can I have this too when I get there? Has my wife passed beyond my means? Does she really need me anymore?

  Much later during one of our drinking binges, he comes out with it: “Tell me honestly, in your best opinion, can I make a living over there? Is there enough work for a video guy like me? Do I have to learn something else?”

  “No, there aren’t many Vietnamese in Virginia. You might be able to make it in Santa Ana, California, or maybe in Houston, Texas, or maybe in the Bay Area, or New York. Video cameras are as common as televisions in America. You might have to start from zero again. Build up your reputation. You’ll have to learn to speak English fluently or you’ll have to rely on the Vietnamese for all your business. That’s tough because plenty of Vietnamese are already doing it.”

  Then there is Khuong, the good son, the respectable, promising academic. Hardworking, studious, he is the most cosmopolitan of the lot, open to modern attitudes and not so fearful of places outside of Saigon. He is the only one who thinks that a solo bike trip to Hanoi is possible.

  “I’ve met two European women who have done it, but they biked together,” he says. “You could do it, but you should pretend you’re Korean or Japanese in case you run into those who don’t like Viet-kieu.”

  His eldest brother, Viet, holds the opposite view. Viet is sharp and streetwise but he prefers to be the affable bear. I like him immensely. He grills me day and night on English grammar, idiom, and slang.

  “How do you say breasts, women’s breasts, in English slang?”

  “Tits?”

  “No, I mean slang. Playing words. Things Americans say on the street.”

  “Melons, cantaloupes, knockers,” I offer. He repeats them carefully. I explain to him the subtleties behind the slang, but I’m not sure of them myself so I make it up as I go.

  “Well, melons and cantaloupe, that should be self-explanatory. The shape and the perfume, I guess. Knockers are these things people mount on their door. They’ve got handles that you grab and bang to let the people know that you’re at the front door. Like a doorbell.”

  “Ha, ha, ha. I get it! Grabbing women’s breasts so they’ll let you in. Give me another one.”

  “Hmm. Headlights.”

  “Headlights? Like on motorbikes?”

  “Well, everyone has a car in America. A car has a pair of headlights. Big, round, very bright.”

  “Ha, ha, ha!” He doubles over, clutching his belly, slapping his thighs. “That’s great! Lowbeam. Highbeam. You’re blinded! Ooooo-hooo!” He sighs with satisfaction. “That’s great! What do Americans call a butt licker?”

  “A brownnoser,” I tell him. “That’s like a sycophant. A brownnoser kisses his boss’s butt and his nose is brown with his boss’s shit.” This one is his favorite. He pens it on the front page of the pocket notebook he carries with his wallet. Viet is trying to solicit Western business partners and worries they might use similar terms on him.

  Viet holds a master’s degree in chemistry. This is no small feat in a school system with a seventy-percent attrition rate. He has worked in various factories, making anything from soap to pesticide. He struck gold four years ago when he perfected a soda flavor that could compete with Tribeco, the dominant soft-drink producer at the time. His one-man company rocketed into a thirty-employee operation that manufactured and distributed soft drinks throughout southern Vietnam. His backslide began two years ago, when Pepsi appeared on the scene. By the time Coca-Cola returned to Vietnam’s market, his operation had dwindled to seven employees. He says the American giants are selling their drinks below cost to steal his market share.

  “Look, I’m selling soda that’s mixed and bottled by hand. Labor cost is almost nil for me. I don’t build big plants. No executives and no managers. No bribes. You know how I handle the bad cops? Sodas! I give them sodas! All foreign companies pay tax-bribes. You tell me, how can they sell a better-tasting soft drink cheaper!”

  Now he’s deep in debt, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, but he keeps a grin on his broad, dark face and tastes all the imitation cola flavors Japanese and Korean vendors hawk to him. Within a few months, he will lose his business and his home. Pepsi and Coca-Cola will win.

  I suspect I will remember my days in Saigon through an alcoholic haze. We drank when I arrived, then we drink just about every other day thereafter. One at a time, they take turns dragging me to street-corner saloons, Vietnamese equivalents of the Spanish tapas bars that serve little food dishes to accompany alcohol. We squeeze ourselves into child-sized plastic chairs and drink beer from plastic one-liter jugs and nibble on barbecued beef, steamed intestines, pan-fried frogs, and boiled peanuts. We eat goat stew and drink goat liquor, two parts rice wine mixed with one part fresh goat’s blood. Halfway through the meal, my bowels heave and I sprint to the toilet.

  During the second week, Viet, Khuong, Hung, and I motorbike out to Snake Village, a good jaunt from Saigon. Their restaurant-bar of choice has thatched walls and a low ceiling made of corrugated aluminum. In the back, a fine mesh of chicken wire fences in two trees and a snake pit. A young woman is standing in one of the trees pulling poisonous snakes out of the branches by their tails.

  We take a coffee table with wooden stools. The waiter serves us a platter of appetizers, an array of pickled fish, fresh herbs, sliced cucumber, and vegetables.

  Khuong seems irritated. “Why don’t you eat the vegetables? They’re washed.”

  “Viet-kieu’s fickleness causes a lot of problems. Refusing to eat the same food as your hosts makes them think that you think you’re too good for them. Their food is filthy, unfit for you,” Hung carols to me, joking, but I get his drift.

  “Well, I’ve eaten everything you’ve handed me and I’ve got the runs twice in two weeks,” I reply in mock reproach. “I can’t go anywhere without looking for the toilet, thanks to you guys. Isn’t that enough?”

  They laugh, mollified. The waiter arrives with warm beer, pours it into plastic mugs, and drops chunks of ice into them. I snatch one without ice.

  “Ice. Why are you afraid of ice? All the bacteria are dead, frozen,” Viet complains.

  I look at him, incredulous. “And you have a master’s in chemistry? Guess that didn’t include a biology class, did it?”

  The bartender, a shriveled man with the pinched face of someone bitten a hundred times, lugs a basket of live, two-foot-long cobras to the table. He reaches inside casually—a magician going for a rabbit—and pulls out a cobra. He whacks its head sharply with a mallet. The snake goes limp in his hand. With a deft glide of his short knife, he opens a slit in the scales, a perfect surgical incision. Blood drips onto his hand. Puffing a cigarette held at the corner of his mouth, he plucks open the skin and shows the beating heart, the size of a chocolate chip, to everyone at the table. Working with the boredom of a shrimper, he severs the arteries and transplants the heart into a shot glass half filled with rice wine. The heart pulses swirling red streamers of blood into the clear liquor.

  Viet seizes the glass and shoots it down his throat. The idea is to swallow the concoction before the heart stops beating. Viet smac
ks his lips, grunts, and grins blissfully. The snake master tosses the carcass to the waiter, who flays it and has the meat grilling over coals before it is Hung’s turn to drink. After Khuong, it is my turn.

  “No, I can’t do it,” I object flatly.

  “You’ve got to.”

  “It’s good for your libido.”

  “I’m not worried about my libido.”

  The bartender, sensing some fun to be had, becomes animated. “Young man,” he says, gesturing grandly with the bleeding cobra in hand. “I’ve drunk heart-liquor once every week for forty-three years. Keeps me healthy. Eleven children, six grandchildren,” he announces, tapping his chest with the handle of the knife. “It’s good for you. Gives you strength. Look at me, I’m not dead.”

  “Don’t be such a wimp, drink up!” They pound the table.

  I look at the bartender’s poisoned body with misgivings. By now the entire place, some two dozen drinkers, has taken an interest in my cowardice. A few enthusiastically cheer me on, spieling a list of beneficial properties and incredible cures.

  “Drink up,” orders Hung, serious now. It is his show, his idea to blow a week’s earnings on this excursion, and he has counted on me to reciprocate his friendship with my follow-through. “You said you want to be Vietnamese. You want to try everything we do. It doesn’t get more Vietnamese than this.”

  I nod.

  The heart drops into the glass. I toss it back, my throat locks. I feel the squishy live organ, tapioca-like, on my tongue. I double over and retch it onto the floor, alcohol up my nose, burning. Hung pounds my back. The audience hoots with laughter.

  That is how Vietnamese men bond. We only talk when we drink. Two nights a week, the three brothers and I drink at home on the floor, a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the center of our circle like a campfire. Viet sends his nephew Nghia down the alley to bang on the door of a neighbor who sells dried fish and squid. Nghia’s mother roasts the fish over coals and serves it to us with plates of pickles and chili paste.

  The women and children always keep clear of the men when we drink. Viet is fond of declaring loud enough for everyone to hear, “We are dealing in men’s business. Let us be.”

  Viet, the oldest male present, ceremoniously starts us off. He pours himself a shot, tosses it back, harrumphs, grins, pours another shot into the same glass, and passes it clockwise. While the next comrade regards his shot of whiskey, Viet gnaws on bits of smoked fish. The four of us do the rounds, drink the shot, pour another, pass it on, eat a piece of fish, over and over until Johnnie is gone. As long as the booze flows, we are free to talk about anything we want. Free to confide our hopes and fears. We chase it all down with a couple of beers, then disband, each to his own bed to sleep it off. The women clean up our mess as we pass out.

  A night like this runs about twenty-five dollars. Many Vietnamese men drink up half of what they make, treating each other to round after round of beer, liquor, whatever is at hand. Their women make do with the money left over, splurging on things for themselves, like material for a new dress, bowls of noodle soup at the market, maybe a cyclo ride.

  The Nguyen women are mysteries to me. Thuy is the dutiful daughter. Viet’s wife, Mo, is the respectful and obedient daughter-in-law. Together Thuy and Mo devote half of their days to cooking, cleaning, and caring for the entire clan, sharing labor and responsibilities. Mo dotes on her two children. Thuy has a passion for Western clothing. Her husband is a tailor. She likes to sew new clothes fashioned after styles she sees in Western magazines.

  The oldest daughter, Hanh, teaches English for a living. Her husband was a Vietnamese Nationalist soldier who was exposed to Agent Orange during his tour of duty. He died eleven years ago when Han, their only child, was four. Han suffers from mental disorders, retardation, and epileptic seizures. Her spine is deformed and she has a clawed hand, which the family covers with a knitted mitt tied so securely she cannot tear it off.

  Hanh is an aging orchid, a gentle beauty who cannot understand why her womb birthed such pain in her only child. She is poor, and without her family there would be no way she could care for Han. At thirty-six, her prospects for a second marriage are dim. Vietnamese men, even much older ones, prefer to marry young women, certainly not an older woman with a handicapped child.

  Moving in the rhythm of their lives, I grow fond of them all. I hear their quiet arguments. Through their amiable ways, I learn about myself and what would have been. But it is Hung who unwittingly shows me his Saigon, a Saigon that I could never forget. Hung and I are the same age, both artists after a fashion. Rebels even, by our own reckoning. He takes me into the depths of the city, parades me on the back of his beat-up’68 Vespa through every hole and dive. He introduces me to Son.

  I believe there are only a handful of men like Son in the world. Likable men who embrace vices in such measure and style that it is difficult to hate them. Son is a womanizer, a photographer, a pimp, a Taoist, a poet, a Buddhist, a drunk, a Catholic, a polygamist, a philosopher—a dreamer. One of the two living Vietnamese Green Berets and a survivor of four plane crashes, he believes he is blessed, living a roguish life at top volume like a child, almost innocent by amorality. Together, Hung and Son show me every vice, depravity. They seek generously to share their world with me, never realizing that their diverting marvels are my wounding horrors.

  13

  Dying-Angels

  The stars gleamed around an emptied moon. A cool breeze rolled off the ocean over the surf, across a road that paralleled the beach, and into the coconut field, combing up the foothills where we hid among the sounding crickets. We hunkered down in the brush, twenty yards of coconut palms separating us and the road. Tien huddled with Huy on my right, whispering so softly I could not make out his words. Bundled in a blanket at my feet, Hien, the four-year-old, wheezed through his snot, eased from crying into slumber by Mom’s sleeping pills. She crouched nearby, keeping one eye on us, the other on the road, where Auntie Dung and Chi waited to flag down Dad. We had been hiding since dusk, nearly six hours in one spot. I was crumbling with fear that my friend Hoa had told someone who might have gone to the police. Mom thought I had eaten something bad. She kept urging me to go up the hill and empty my bowels. I wanted to confess. I was sure Dad had been caught. It was 11 p.m. He was two hours late.

  Sounds of shuffling. Chi came hunched over, then Auntie Dung and Dad. He checked on us and reassured us, patting each in turn. We lay on the sand and waited. Midnight came and went without sign of the boat. Dad said that they had agreed to wait an hour beyond midnight for the fishermen. We waited, but I could tell Mom and Dad were very worried, their panic rising with every minute.

  I prayed with all my heart that we wouldn’t get caught, that my big mouth hadn’t brought the police on the entire family. The wind shook loose a star and it flashed down the sky. Chi, lying beside me, said each star was an angel, and a falling star was a dying angel. She said angels died to balance the world’s good and evil. I counted three disappearing and, feeling very sick, I kept the omen to myself.

  Standing ahead of us and wearing dark clothes almost indistinguishable from the trunks of the palms, Chi and Auntie scanned the ocean for signs of the boat. Huy, Tien, and Hien dozed side by side. Mom and Dad crouched a few feet from me, arguing about why the boat was over an hour late. Dad said to Mom that they should stick with the plan and abandon the beach. Mom shook her head, saying she had a strong hunch that the boat was on its way. He gave in as he usually did when she had a strong feeling about something. Another hour ticked by. Dad became jittery, constantly fumbling with the flashlight intended for signaling the boat if it ever came.

  “We’ve got to go back now,” he whispered to Mom. “We wait anymore and sunrise will catch us out on the road.” The plan was for everyone but Dad to return to Grandma’s house. He would hide out somewhere else until Mom sent word that everything was all right.

  “They’re coming. Just bear it out a little longer,” Mom said calmly. She had entered her s
trange state of total conviction based on her gut feeling. Nothing could sway her.

  Chi and Auntie came back, pointing at a blotch of darkness edging into the bay. It was very faint, its outline blending with the rippling water. Wringing the flashlight, Dad groaned that it might be a patrol boat or worse—one in disguise. Mom urged him to flash them. At last, Dad held out the flashlight covered with a cardboard cone he fashioned to focus the beam. One short flick of the button. The torch stabbed out at the darkness, giving us a sudden jolt of exposure.

  No reply. Chi woke Huy and Tien. We had to run soon, either to the beach or into the hills, but we were moving for sure. Wait. Dad aimed the flashlight again and gave it another flick. Nothing. Mom was mumbling now, not so sure anymore. Dad wrung the flashlight in his hands. Mom and Dad eyed each other. The third flash was to be last, that was the plan. No reply meant the mission was aborted. The boat hadn’t moved for five minutes. Dad raised the flashlight and sent the last beam out to the ocean.

  A light winked back from the boat, twice. Dad flicked out the code: short—long—short. Back came long—short—short: everything fine. Dad gave the word and we dashed to the beach. Dad carried Hien. Everyone except Huy and Tien had a bag to carry. I ran after them, bringing up the rear.

  A fallen branch tangled my feet and I pitched face first into the sand with a yelp. Disoriented, I fumbled for my bag, digging the sand out of my eye. Terrified of being left behind, I wanted to call out but I didn’t dare. I was flailing when a hand lifted me by the elbow.

  It was Chi. “I’ve got your bag,” she whispered. “Hold onto my hand.”

  I clung to it fiercely with one hand and knuckled sand out of my eyes with the other. We crossed the road and stumbled to the beach. Men ran out of the waves toward us. They came out of the night ocean, swimming, running like fish growing legs, becoming men. The water exploded moonlight around them. I was terrified, unsure of who they were until they were upon us. Our young fishermen were as frightened as we were. Silently, they grabbed our luggage and tugged us into the waves. Three men swept up Huy, Tien, and Hien, piggybacking them into the water. Mom, Dad, Auntie, and Chi ran into the surf and began to swim for the boat. I splashed in after them. It wasn’t as cold as I’d anticipated. Maybe I was so scared I couldn’t feel the sting. Although the boat was only fifty yards from shore, it seemed a mile off. I kicked and windmilled my arms as hard as I could, but the waves kept nudging me back to shore. I fell behind. Panic set in as my limbs began to tire. No. I don’t want to be left behind. I shouted for them to wait, but saltwater filled my mouth. The only sound was me sputtering.