Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

  We are chatting amiably about the virtues of the house when our eyes meet—a strange moment—and we know we are holding a common thought: the transparency of our situations. Fate could have switched our destinies and no one would have been the wiser. I clear my throat and take demi-steps toward the front door. I thank him for showing me his home. The tides of traffic and horns disorient me as I step into the road short of breath. Feeling guilty, I am very thankful we had the money to escape Vietnam.

  I trudge up and down the street but can’t recognize Grandma’s house. An old woman watches me from her hammock strung just inside her door. On my third or fourth pass, she comes to the door and waves me to her.

  “What are you looking for?” she asks.

  “Good morning. I’m the grandson of Mrs. Le—son of her daughter Anh. They used to live somewhere near here. I’m looking for the house.”

  “AAAAAA!” she cries, happily. “I remember you! I’m Mrs. Sau-Quang. Do you remember me?”

  “Oh … I’m sorry. I don’t.” I can’t place either her name or her seventy-year-old face, flabby, floppy like a Halloween pumpkin left out through November.

  Mrs. Sau-Quang beckons me inside and serves me tea, welcoming me like a lost relative and introducing me to her nieces and nephews. She says she knew my grandmother from the day Grandma bought the house way back when. I sit long enough to be polite then beg her to take me to my grandmother’s house.

  We walk slowly along the drumming traffic and come to a dwelling ten doors down. It is a hovel more suitable for animals than people.

  “This is your grandmother’s house. Do you remember it?” she quizzes me with childish glee.

  I shake my head. She flashes a toothless grin, encouraging me to dredge the recess of my memory, but I don’t recognize the beggarly shelter where I had spent many lazy summer days.

  “Where’s the shop? My grandmother had a little store,” I ask her.

  “They knocked it down years ago and built this lean-to for storage.”

  “Where are all the trees? I remember walking from my house to Grandma’s without stepping out of the shade.”

  “Seventy-seven. Everybody chopped them down for cooking fires in the summer of’77. Didn’t even last the whole year.”

  “Does Hoa—the girl my age—still live next door?”

  “No, she married a laborer ten or eleven years back and the whole family moved to Nha Trang. We neighbors-relatives lost touch with them.”

  Mrs. Sau-Quang raps the door with her cane and a short man in his late forties lets us in. She introduces me. Mr. Phi, the current owner of the house, agrees to give me a tour. Mr. Phi is a taxidermist and a hunter of wild game. A fetid odor pervades the house. Cages are stacked against walls of rotting plaster. Cobwebs mummify stuffed bobcats, tortoises, peacocks, monkeys, and other furry animals I don’t recognize. The blue plaster remains, unwashed. Untouched for twenty years.

  “May I see the backyard? I’d like to see the star-fruit tree,” I ask Mr. Phi, feeling lost. Chi and I had climbed it, ate its fruit, and gazed at the stars.

  “Ah, yes. But it is barren. No fruit.”

  We file through the house and find my tree out back. It is dying, bleeding sap. It reminds me of Grandma sitting in her sad American room, old and lonely, thousands of miles from her homeland. The tree is a season away from becoming firewood. Bricks barnacle the earth at its foot. No longer a geyser of leaves, it droops like an old woman napping in her seat. Like Grandma, wizened, gnarled, crusty, and crippled. I doubt its main limb could bear my weight now. On the branches two small monkeys flit back and forth, scolding us. They don’t go far with the chains around their necks.

  “Thank you.1’ve seen enough,” I murmur. “Forgive me, I must go now.”

  I retreat to my room at the inn. Where is this place I am seeking? There is only ash. Secretly, I am thankful no one is witnessing this unearthing of my roots. It is true what Vietnamese say: Viet-kieu are the lottery winners. The payoff stretches forth through the ages. America has it all, owns it all. And nowhere else are we safer than in America. That much I suspect is true.

  In this Vietnamese muck, I am too American. Too refined, too removed from my que, my birth village. The sight of my roots repulses me. And this shames me deeply.

  I am awakened by a runner sent by Mrs. Sau-Quang. He brings word for me to come at once. Su is waiting at Mrs. Sau-Quang’s house. I hop on my bike, glad that I had hired a motorbike runner to find Su, my nanny. I was too young to remember her, but my mother had told me Su was a kind woman who nursed me the first three years of my life. My milk-mother.

  I bow deeply to Su. She bows in return. We sit across from each other in Mrs. Sau-Quang’s front room, just staring and smiling. How are you? Well, and you, Auntie-friend? I get by, but are your parents well in America? Yes, they want to know how many children you have. Ten, two passed away, but we are fortunate to have eight obedient children.

  The formal words trade back and forth between us. Over and over, she keeps repeating: “Who would have guessed I would see you after so many years?”

  Su moved to the country fifteen years ago when Vietnam was in its deepest depression. Her family farmed, fished, raised pigs, and hired out its labor to whoever needed them. She remembers me but she also remembers other babies she had nurtured. She doesn’t see why I’d come back to see her, but she is glad I came. I apologize for not having come for her myself. Mrs. Sau-Quang had told me to wait. It’s best, Su says. The runner was lucky to find her, since there are no such things as addresses or road names out in the deep country. Most peasants don’t read or write, so they go by name and word of mouth.

  “Su has a very difficult life. Pity her. Look at her. Just skin and bone. Can you believe she is only forty-five? Why, she looks sixty. Pity her,” says Mrs. Sau-Quang. She harps along this line the entire hour, edging in a few words about her own impoverishment as well.

  “Do you remember my sister Chi?” I ask Su.

  “Yes, she was a beautiful child. How is she? Is she married? How many children?”

  “Chi passed away.”

  “So sorry. That is terrible,” she says. “What happened?”

  The answer has always been on my lips: “An accident.”

  That’s what it must have been: An accident. Kind of like one of those calamitous highway pileups on a wide flat stretch of asphalt that would have been an easy, safe passage on any other day except that one foggy morning when everyone was going a little too fast to notice one car was having problems—each man too intent on his own purpose to notice the flashing hazard lights of the troubled driver.

  “She became too American,” Old Quan had said to me after Chi’s suicide. An elderly Vietnamese American who had seen his share of horrors, Old Quan was, for a time, my good friend and mentor until I, too, became too American for him.

  “Your sister Chi—too selfish, too into herself. She wants to be herself. That’s wrong. All wrong. To live a good life, you live for others, not for yourself. Your parents bring you into this world so you be what they want. What do you think: I plant a tree for shade. I water it. I put fertilizer in soil. I wait and I work hard for tree, but when tree is big, tree don’t give me shade. Maybe tree give me thorns. Is that good? What do you think?

  “Your sister, she not know how to ignore desire. Not know how to accept herself. She not see her duty to parents. To her, desire is above—higher—than duty to parents … She not know sacrifice.”

  We always worked for those behind us, those who brought us into the world and pointed out the gate to the Empire beyond the barbed wire. Our father sacrificed for us as his father had sacrificed for him, each one of us racking up a debt so large we’d never dare to contemplate pursuing our own dreams. No, there are no independent visionaries in a line of sacrifices.

  Since I met Su four days ago, I have been in bed, feverish and lonely, coming up empty-handed in the village of my birth. I am bedridden, waking up merely to sip broth and orange juice. A
nd spewing my innards into the toilet. I am feverish. I am cold. My joints ache. Maybe it is a stomach flu. I don’t know. I keep asking the innkeeper if Su has dropped by to see me. She hasn’t. Having given Su much of my money as a gift, and wining and dining Mrs. Sau-Quang’s sons as etiquette demanded, I cannot afford to go to the doctor. I am nearly out of cash. Phan Thiet doesn’t have a large bank where I can dredge my bank account for my emergency funds. I will have to end the trip here and return to Saigon. I don’t have the strength to go on. What is the point anyway?

  It can’t end here. I must beg my way north, crawl if I have to. It seems not only cowardly but selfish and dishonest to quit now. Not after all Chi went through. I rise from bed on the fifth morning. My fever breaks sometime in the night and my sinuses are clear. I know I am better as I wake. The stench drifting into my room from the sewer and the salt flat is just as bad as it was the first day I arrived. I pack my panniers and head to the door without breakfast.

  “No. No!” Hai, the inn owner, beseeches me, hands flapping like crow wings. “You’re not leaving today, are you? You, you are so sick. Are you crazy? You’re weak. You’ll catch an ill wind and you’ll end up in the hospital.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I assure her, putting on my confident face. “I feel great. I get sick, but I recover fast.” Two lies. I feel woozy and clammy. Recovery of any sort isn’t my strong suit and I haven’t been sick in years—not even a cold—until I set foot in Vietnam.

  “Just one more night. How about it? I’ll cook something special for dinner,” Hai offers, smiling sweetly, practically begging.

  The truth is I can’t afford to stay here much longer anyway. Hai has been overcharging me blatantly, quadrupling the price of everything from orange juice to aspirin to laundry service to room fees. She is bleeding me to death financially and my unanticipated departure is something of a shock to her business plan.

  “Thank you, Sister. But I have been looking forward to seeing Mui Ne for a very long time. You know, it’s where my family escaped.”

  “Ah, your border-crossing point,” she says appreciatively.

  With that, I ride away, dropping vague promises to come back for a few nights if I make tracks through town again. I fight the bike into the sandy road, joining the light traffic of trucks, bicyclists, and motor scooters. I feel exhilarated to be back on my bike. The sea wind wipes away the bedridden fuzziness in my head, giving me a clean slate. A few miles out, the land turns arid. Over a couple of rises, I peek at blue water. The road hems the coast for a mile or two, perching lightly on a rocky lip not ten yards above the surf. Then, abruptly, the road sweeps down into a coconut forest and I remember it all, our walking down this road with my mother twenty years ago. It is plush, shady, and airy beneath the palm canopy. Between this green roof and the white sand carpeting there is only quiet air bathing the ropy trunks of the coconut palms. With only the soft hiss of the sea breeze, the silence is eerie.

  Deeper in, I realize it isn’t quite the same place I’d left. The forest now teems with people. They have thinned it out and built huts on one-acre lots. I leave my bike by the side of the road and plod across the sand to see if the forest is thoroughly perforated with dwellings. It is. An old man rises from his hammock nap to tell me not to waste my time. The whole peninsula is populated, he says. They migrated down from central Vietnam a decade ago. I sigh, thank him, and go on my way. There are too many children and the school system can’t teach them all at once so there are two sessions, one in the morning, one in the evening. At the changeover during midday, hundreds, maybe thousands, of white-and-blue uniformed schoolchildren flood the road. Soon they shed their uniforms, and the sandy floor of the thinned-out coconut forest is alive with half-naked children playing, shouting, running. They trail me, smiling, waving, yelling, “Tay! Tay!”—Westerner, westerner.

  I track the road, over and over, looking for the precise spot where my family had staged our escape, but it is hopeless. The landmarks are all gone. The locals say that for every house swept away in the last big storm several years ago, five more took its place. There are even restaurants, shops, and hotels right on the beach. One very fancy resort, featured in several travel magazines, hogs up a prime tract of beachfront land and boasts a manicured garden and South Pacific—style bungalows, protected behind a Cyclone fence, topped with barbed wire, besieged on all sides by ramshackle huts inhabited by skinny, half-naked people. Despite the fancy amenities, it reminds me of Minh Luong Prison. I avoid the commercial lodging and scout the area for a camping spot.

  I climb the brow of a hill. Off in the distance, a mighty flotilla of wooden fishing vessels moors in the crescent cusp of the bay. Bobbing gently in the winter sea, nose to the beach, they are the color of driftwood save the bright, gaudy trimmings of eyes and dragon heads like those of the ancient Phoenician warships. The bay is rimmed by a village thriving like undergrowth beneath the palms. A fisherwoman, mending her strung-up net, suggests I go to the other side of the peninsula and camp on the back bay. It’s more peaceful, she explains. The kids won’t pester you there. “Pester” in context could mean anything, including stealing.

  On the other side is a long, gorgeous stretch of near-white sand dunes lapped by three-foot swells. It is desolate in comparison. The fisherfolk switch bays by the season. Here, the late December wind whips onto the beach with a mild cut, just enough to chill someone bare-chested. Behind the dunes where the road ends is the most forlorn café I’ve ever seen. There is no structure save a couple of strings of lights and laundry lines. The sand, speckled with bits of ocean-splintered wood, is strewn with rusted lawn chairs, a few plastic tables, and six tattered sun umbrellas. The proprietor, a nervous Vietnamese man named Han, serves three Brits warm beers. I lean my bike against a tree and ask the man for permission to spend the night on one of his hammocks under the stars. He says that he’d welcome any company to help him guard the café against burglars. The Brits tell me, in their polite British way, that they think I am insane and leave in a car with their tour guide and driver.

  In the middle of the night, a cop comes by on a motorbike and shines his flashlight in my face. Han tells the cop to fuck off. The cop tells Han to go fuck himself. I groan and pull my jacket over my face. They squabble, apparently friends. The cop wants Han to fry him some eggs. Han tells the cop to fuck off because he doesn’t have any eggs. If you want eggs, you’ll have to go down to one of the farms and tax them out of some eggs. I doze off and wake up a few minutes later to see them drinking rice wine and the cop eating a bowl of instant noodles. They tell tall tales under Christmas lights powered by a car battery.

  24

  Chi-Daughter

  “In the end …” Grandma intoned, summoning the very words a Buddhist monk had composed for Chi on the day of her birth, “in the end, it will be as if she had no brother or sister. No father or mother. Her life will be a difficult journey. She will die at thirty-two, alone of a broken heart. This child should be loved, for in the end she will have no one.”

  A Vietnamese first son is worth his weight in gold, all his life. But I don’t think that’s why Chi wanted to be a boy. She was just never meant to be a girl. That simple. I had always known she was different. Unusual. A strong, quiet, and thoughtful first child, Chi carried herself in such an unassuming way that I instinctively looked to her as my older brother. Perhaps I even resented it as a child because I was the first son. While I reaped the prodigal privileges, I suspected they should have been her honor.

  Nine months after we came to America, we weaned ourselves from the charity teats of the First Baptist Church of Shreveport, Louisiana. Mom couldn’t handle being the only Asian family in town and Dad wanted to be closer to his brothers who had settled in California. A bunch of ingrates, we loaded a U-Haul with the secondhand loot the church had given us and said amen to the South. We bolted through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and right into sunny California—as close to Vietnam as you can get, my uncle had claimed. With a couple of hundred doll
ars in his pocket, the only footing Dad could afford was in south San Jose, smack in a den of poverty, alcoholism, drugs, and domestic violence—a street where the cops came by daily, so regularly that the residents had a running joke: If you can’t find cops at Winchell’s Doughnuts, you’ll find them on Locke Drive.

  We lived in a gutter-level unit that flooded with every heavy rain. Barbed wire separated our backyard from no-man’s-land, a desolate plain of bulldozed dirt, beyond which trickled a toxic creek weeded with trash. Standing at our front door, I could wing a rock over the chain-link fence of the city dump down the street. It was a colossal stadium of debris, four football fields wide and three stories deep, the sides treacherous ravines.

  It wasn’t as bad as it looked. Even though, on humid summer days, the stench stewing off the raw trash turned my stomach and made Mom sick, the tainted air became as familiar to us as our own body odors. Besides, it was a treasure land of odd trinkets and toys, and the creek provided a vast stomping ground infested with imaginary enemies and very real poison oak. Seagulls wheeled across the sky, making the dump look like beachfront property. My brothers and I became street urchins, lurking in empty lots, the creek, and the dump because the local kids—whites, blacks, and Mexicans—were out to kick our skinny Asian asses. Some of them routinely took potshots at us with BB guns. Go home, Chinks! Kids’ style of picking fights was different in America. In the old country, kids took a running slug at the sight of a foe. Here, they squared off like cocks, traded insults, and shouldered each other for an eternity before the first blow landed. After a month of fighting, usually walking away with the heavier damage, we pocketed stones and slingshots whenever we left the house.