Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

  As usual, I leave early, quietly fading into the dawn. Today I am going to Phan Thiet, the place of my birth. Out on the road, I feel vulnerable, especially when passing through villages. Vietnam seems full of villages, squalid gatherings of dwellings and shops every two miles along any road. The road is busy with peasants commuting up to ten miles daily on the saddest-looking bicycles on the planet. I slip into an easy rhythm, conversing with other riders. On the recommendation of a stranger, I take a fork in the road, opting for the more scenic coastal route to Phan Thiet.

  Around noon, a white sun broils the land. Even the road dust feels baking hot. I fry inside my helmet. The sun-block cream is inadequate, milking down my face with my sweat. By one in the afternoon, the red-brown skin on my arms is covered with tiny blisters like fine sprays of sweat. They pop watery when I scratch them. The sun burns my arms raw. I don’t have any long-sleeve shirt except my sweatshirt and my rain jacket. I spot women sitting at sewing machines in thatched huts. They graciously cut up one of my T—shirts to make sleeves for the one I am wearing. Within minutes, I am handsomely outfitted with sleeves. They refuse payment, saying it is a gift. I thank them and get back on the road in better spirits, still thinking I can make Phan Thiet by nightfall.

  The countryside opens up with an endless patchwork of four- or five-acre farms, the houses hidden among the willowy trees and banana palms. In the lightly wooded areas, herders, rangy men with broad-brimmed hats, dusty clothes, and long bamboo staves, move quietly, watching their cattle grazing. The land is rich, green shooting up everywhere—out of the paddies, along the river, between the cracks in the road. The asphalt ends abruptly without road signs, and I find myself struggling on a red dirt road, sandy and full of children trudging home from school. Every five or six miles, there is an abandoned guardhouse with a boom-gate which is no longer levered across the road but raised like a flagpole. These are relics from the dark decade following the War, when the new Communist government kept a firm lid on civilian movement. People had to apply for interprovincial travel. Now children play in these guard stations and people pass through the gates without glancing at them. It seems as though, here in the backcountry, the government simply got bored and went back to the big cities. The only souls making a big racket out here are batches of twelve-year-olds riding two or three to a bicycle, going here and there, racing each other. I catch up with one large group. They are going to the local hot spring. They say they make the six-mile round-trip every other day. The way they twitter and yip, it sounds like the best way to bathe.

  Although there are people everywhere, I am hesitant to ask for directions because everyone wants me to come in for tea. I manage to take several wrong turns. The hungry, curious way people gawk at me makes me feel spoiled, self-indulgent. I am also embarrassed to be “adventuring” through their homes, bedecked in outlandish gear they could never afford. At last, I summon enough courage to talk to a few poor peasants whose villages have only a handful of motorbikes each. Many villagers haven’t ventured farther than a day’s bike distance from the place of their birth. No one seems to have a solid concept of the distance to the next town, Ham Tan. Dusk is falling and I know my shaky legs won’t make it to Phan Thiet. My touring instinct urges me to look for a suitable place to strike camp, but as far as I can see in the weakening light, the land has been cut up into bite-sized lots, each one devoid of trees and surrounded by pigsties, gardens, and rice plots. The air is coarse with smoke from cooking fires.

  Two hours after dark, I creak and bump to a commoner’s inn in Ham Tan village. It is a clean but run-down place that houses merchants and traveling peasants. Bolted to the concrete floor, plywood partitions, three feet short of the ceiling, section the dormitory into individual cubicles. I pay my three-dollar fee and turn my travel papers over to the owner for processing with the local constable. Both natives and foreigners must register every night. Bureaucrats still keep a record of travelers.

  Across from the inn is a corner diner, a corrugated-tin-and-plywood-scrap place, its concrete floor an inch higher than the mud. It has the looks of the shoddiest establishments in the old gold-rush towns, where streets eternally switched between whipped mud and dust fog. Dinner conversations die the moment I step inside, and the only things blaring are the TV and my sixth sense. Raw-faced men crowd four of the six tables, facing the television until I arrive. On the tables are nests of empty beer bottles.

  A woman looks out from the kitchen. She approaches guardedly, twisting a rag in her hands. She eyes the men and asks me, “What do you want?”

  “Hello, Sister. Are you still serving dinner?” I nod toward the inn across the street. “I’m staying over there. The owner recommended your place.”

  She hesitates, then flicks the rag at the back table near the kitchen. I sit obediently, wondering yet again why Vietnamese prefer kindergarten furniture. I haven’t acquired the penchant to sit with my butt lower than my knees. With the tabletop so low, whenever I eat I feel as though I am licking myself like a dog. A string of black ants marches crumbs off the table. Houseflies buzz around my head. People stare openly at me, so I try to keep myself from batting the flies and squashing the ants. I play stoic and take immense interest in the Vietnamese soap opera playing on television.

  “Oy! You,” a man slurs in English. He sits up front and is obviously drunk and talking to me. I groan, pretending not to hear.

  “OY! YOU!”

  Oh, Lord. I show him my friendliest smile and nod, fingering my pocket for the tiny canister of pepper spray.

  The speaker switches to Vietnamese, his English apparently at its limit. “Brother, I want to ask you a question.”

  “Please do.”

  “How is it you speak Viet so well?”

  I grin. This is easy. “I’m Vietnamese.”

  He hitches up one corner of his mouth and blows out a note of disgust. His liquored eyes flicker over to his drinking partner, a shifty man with a knifish look—a perfect killer right out of some bad Chinese mafia movie. He mutters privately to Killer, who smirks in agreement. Pointing a grubby finger in my direction, my antagonist raises his voice: “You’re not Vietnamese. Where’s your birth-roots?”

  “Phan Thiet.”

  “Say it again.”

  “Phan Thiet.”

  “Liar. You’re not from Phan Thiet. You didn’t pronounce it like a man from Phan Thiet.”

  “I’ve been in America a long time. My Viet isn’t perfect.”

  “Liar. You’re Korean, aren’t you?”

  “Chinese,” offers Killer.

  “Japanese,” counters another.

  I am the tallest one present, my skin the palest. My wire-rimmed eyeglasses make me look foreign. Worse, I have a closely cropped crew cut. My hair is straight and spiky. Vietnamese call it “nail hair,” a style commonly seen on Korean expatriates working in Vietnam.

  I should know better, but I insist, “Really, I’m Vietnamese.”

  The drunk bolts up in his seat, pounds the table, then points at his own nose with his index finger. He slur-screeches, “Brother, you call me stupid?”

  “Oh, no, Brother. No,” I blurt, thinking, Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

  He starts spieling his body of knowledge on the matter: “I’ve been to the City [Saigon]. I know what’s going on in the world. All you foreigners come into the country to work. You go to the university, learning about … about mathematics, history, books … all that. You live in the City for a couple of years and you think you can pass as a Vietnamese. I know all about you foreign Asians. My brother-in-law lives in the City. I’m a poor villager, but I’m not dumb.” He encompasses the room with a sweep of his hand. “We’re not stupid!”

  Magically, his insult becomes theirs, and the whole rooms falls in behind him. A hostile grumble rises, amplified by the noisy television. Someone growls, Motherfucker. Another mumbles, Bastard thinks he can come into our place and lie to our faces. The whole affair has taken all of thirty seconds, and I realize with horrible
dismay this is not how I want things to turn out at all. I’m here to learn about them, about my roots, about me—and they look like they want to cut me up. My pepper spray isn’t going to handle this crowd. Damn! I haven’t even eaten yet.

  I raise an appeasing hand, smiling, making chuckling sounds. “You’re all right! I was just joking. Sorry. I am Korean. You’re very sharp. Most people can’t pick me out. I’ve been in the country three years. Studied Viet at the University. Pretty good, eh? So sorry. Beg your pardon.”

  My tormentor seems happy at my concession to his intellect, but his friends appear even more riled. They cuss. I palm the canister beneath the table. A couple of mean-looking guys give me the eye as they mutter among themselves. This is definitely out of hand. I have seen three fights break out in Vietnamese bars over smaller issues than this. The last time, one drunk with a hatchet amputated a few fingers and hospitalized four men before he was subdued. I must get out quickly, but the exit is blocked by this hostile crowd.

  BAM! I jump in my seat. The waitress is next to me, slamming down plates and bowls of food on my table so hard the whole room fixates on her. A huge plate of rice covered with stir-fried cabbage. A bowl of stewed pork and eggs. A bowl of squash soup. A saucer of pickled radish. A mug of hot tea. She glowers at them as she rearranges my meal.

  I gape at the food I hadn’t ordered.

  She turns on the men, challenging them with her hot eyes. She speaks slowly, as though reprimanding boys who should know better: “Let a man eat. Remember your manners.”

  My foe says something under his breath. She whirls on him, fists cocked on hips, yelling: “What, Lang?”

  He turns to the television. She pans the room for dissenters. When no one says a word, she marches back into the kitchen without looking in my direction. I lower my eyes to the food and dig into it cyclo style—chopsticks in one hand for picking up morsels, tablespoon in the other for shoveling rice. I eat binh dan—like a commoner—fast and hungry, sipping soup with the spoon once every three mouthfuls. I am shocked that they actually leave me to my rice. This is the last place I expect the observance of that old custom my father had taught me when I was a boy.

  Father stocked bamboo canes around the house so that whenever I was due for a whacking, he could lay his hand on a wand-of-discipline quicker than I could flee the room. My sister Chi and I must have been rotten kids because he caned us regularly. The only time he didn’t was during mealtimes. If the food had been put on the table, he would postpone the punishment till well after the meal. My mother said that hitting a person when he is eating was the cruelest, most uncivilized thing anyone could do. And that if you caused a person to cry into his rice—souping rice with tears, she said—you would be cursed with the bitterness he swallowed.

  I figure I’m safe until the last bite. Lang and Killer are watching me, plotting something between themselves. The others argue over the pros and cons of Vietnam opening its market. Wondering if and when the waitress will return and bail me out again, I glance at the kitchen and notice a back door near where she washes dishes.

  Halfway through my food—I am still hungry—the TV program switches over to news and everyone turns to the anchorman announcing the headline stories. In a blink, I breeze out of my chair, making for the kitchen. My mouth full, I hand the waitress a large bill and bolt through the back door, across the street.

  The inn owner is sitting at the front door, smoking and chatting with a neighbor. He sees me running and asks if anything is wrong. Abruptly, the waitress is at my elbow. I jump, startled. She hands me the change, unfamiliar with the custom of tipping. She briefs the old man on my dilemma. I stand by looking helpless. He cusses and hollers for his sons and the servants.

  “Go inside. I’ll take care of those dog-spawned. I’m sorry they bothered you. Go, go.”His beatific face now thunderous with anger.

  He doesn’t need to tell me twice. Killer, Lang, and four men are coming toward the inn. By the time they cross the street, I am out of sight. Five of the inn’s men run to the front with machetes. A shouting match ensues. Someone is dispatched to get the police. The bullies back off. I go back to my cubicle, lock the toy door, and crawl inside my mosquito netting.

  Too jazzed with adrenaline to sleep, I count the geckos scrawling across the ceiling. I am inexplicably happy, thrilled not by my escape but by the goodness of my hosts. This is Vietnam. These are my people. Phan Thiet, the village of my childhood, and Mui Ne, the gateway of our family’s flight from the fatherland, await me down the road, merely a day away.

  23

  Milk-Mother

  I wake full of hopes, aching to get going. Surely Phan Thiet, a puff of a fishing town, couldn’t have changed much after two decades. Everything, all my good memories, had happened in this dusty town, on its sandy beaches and among the coconut groves.

  I sneak out of Ham Tan before dawn, skipping breakfast to avoid a chance encounter with the mob. The road inland toward Highway 1 is quiet. Peasants are bringing their produce to market. A group of girls carrying huge baskets of home-fired coals on their shoulders greet me so cheerfully I dismount and walk my bike. They laugh and the air around them is perfumed with the scent of soap and riverwashed hair. In their sun-bleached clothes, they smell and look far cleaner than me. They go to market twice a week. Their cargo varies seasonally, sometimes fish, other times vegetables and fruits. For this dry season, the men fire coal, and the women bring it to market, two baskets at a time.

  I have a wild urge to marry them all, take them to America, give them American citizenship, and tell them they will never have to walk barefoot on hot asphalt again. But their laughter is so pure and rich that I quell my foolishness and simply enjoy their company until far down the road they board a Tuk-tuk for the next village.

  On the main highway, a motley collection of dwellings on halfacre arid farm lots line the road. Mile after mile, children sprout out of the land like weeds. They tag each other down the road to school, sit and play cards right on the edge of the blacktop, paying no mind to the buses roaring by and spraying them with dirt. They hound me on bicycle, wanting candy, practicing their English. Elloo. Ow arrr uu? Fuk you. Fuk you. What yore nam? Where uu from? Bye-bye. They overrun the land like an infestation of locusts. Where is the food to feed all these mouths?

  A scrap-metal collector blames it on the government. I meet him sometime after midday and ride with him all the way to Phan Thiet. He chain-smokes hand-rolled cigarettes and rides a rickety one-speed bicycle with a thirty-five-pound truck transmission casing tied to the rear rack.

  “The government screwed up,” he says, “and they’re trying to fix it, but it’s too late. It was all the fighting—the War, then the skirmishes with Cambodia and China. For a long time the government said it was patriotic to get married and raise many children because all the young men had died in the War or were dying in battles against Cambodia. Their message was a big hit. Now they’ve got a country full of people and no war to thin out the population. The way we’re breeding we could drain the country’s resources in another generation.”

  He was a struggling college student when the South Vietnamese government fell. The Communists drafted him, sent him to burn down the jungle for farming, then planted him on the border to fight Cambodians. Six years later, when it was all over, he returned to Saigon to finish his education at night, paying for it by working as a laborer and driving a cyclo. But it wasn’t meant to be. He never got over the strange jungle sickness he contracted at the border, and no one could think straight in night class after twelve hours of hard labor. After a few years, he abandoned his academic pursuit, got married, and fathered a son. To support his family, he found himself riding his bicycle thirty miles a day, collecting and bartering in scrap metal and spare auto parts.

  We part ways at the city line, him heading to the poor quarter of the city, me rolling down the main thoroughfare. Narrower than the average unmarked two-lane road, this dusty pipeline happens to be the national highway. No
trees, just dirt, sand, and people. The first structure I recognize is the Catholic school Chi and I had attended before my French education days. The ghost tree is gone. It used to litter the street with tamarind pods, which, with sugar, made tasty treats, the Vietnamese equivalent of sourballs. We never dared touch them. The old folks said it had been a hanging tree when the French had the run of the land—ghosts of those unjustly killed haunted the branches and poisoned the fruit. The school is still there but the nuns are gone and the student population has increased tenfold. I dismount and meander through the series of rectangular one-story buildings. At the far end of the school yard, beyond the badminton nets, is a fence of red paper-flower bushes. Chi had rescued me from a pair of bullies there, the four of us standing ankle deep in leafy confetti redder than New Year’s paint.

  I ride on down the main artery. Houses come closer together as they reach higher toward the tangle of power lines. New structures are going up everywhere, piecemeal, like Lego blocks. Workers weave steel lattices and pour concrete into them to make columns. Shops have blossomed. A big-city intensity has found its way into Phan Thiet. The road expands into a four-lane boulevard to accommodate the commerce, then bridges over a river where the water is logjammed with wooden boats of all shapes and sizes, a living city on the river as far as I can see to the next bend nearly a mile off. Sampans loaded with colorful produce putter across spinach water. A boy perches on a wood piling, defecating into the river. Sitting against the railing at the crown of the bridge, a blind old woman clenches into herself, the whole of her no bigger than a fire hydrant, fitting into the shadow of her farmer’s hat. An arm extended, stiff as a twig, a withered palm waiting for alms. I pedal on until I reach the other end of the city. I pay for a room at the edge of town and eat dinner. Feeling slightly under the weather, I turn in for the night.

  First thing in the morning, I find my childhood home on the southern lip of the town. It is a motorcycle repair shop. Six greasy young men are sitting on their hams tinkering with engine parts. Oil and dirt cream the floor. The tenant is a man my age. I chat with him, and at my request he takes me to the backyard. The well still gives sweet water, he says. I tell him that as a boy, I had accidentally drowned three puppies by lowering them into the well for a bath. He walks me to the bedroom in back, partitioned from the shop with sheets of plywood. In the corner, exactly as I remember it, is the divan where I’d slept. It is dirt-stained. On this divan, my father had caned Chi until I took her by the hand to Grandma’s house.