While we boys reveled in the family’s poverty, Chi was largely confined to the house for chores and changing Kay’s diapers. With the family on welfare, Dad, a worn-out man in his mid-forties with eight mouths to feed, studied eighteen hours a day, seven days a week for his Associate of Arts degree in computer programming, a two-year program which he was trying to cram into nine months. The migraine headaches and the malaria chills he picked up during his time in the Viet Cong prison plagued him. He merely clenched his jaws and chiseled away at the books. Mom, who hardly spoke any English, spread out a vinyl mat in the living room, put a swivel office chair in the middle, brought out the dresser with the mounted mirror, and was in business. She cut hair for the neighborhood children and permed fancy heads of the local ladies, many of whom were also in the dire strait of public assistance. Mom got the idea from looking around the neighborhood.
In the suburban slum of Locke Drive, hustling on the sidelines of welfare was serious business. Saving for the American dream was the immigrant’s religion. The Lees, two doors down from us, ran a convenience store out of their one-car garage. The driveway of the Martinez house across the street hummed with the racket of their after-hours auto-repair business. Recent arrivals from Pueblo, Mexico, the Martinezes were in cahoots with the Lious, a Hong Kong Chinese family up the street, who turned their lawn into a used-car lot. Mrs. Nguyen next door took in tailoring work at night and ran a day-care center. Old Mrs. Chen, a Chinese-Vietnamese grandmother who lived with her children and collected social security, operated an underground catering business. Every day, she cooked dinner for some thirty neighbors who moonlighted at second jobs and didn’t have time to fuss in the kitchen. Locke Drive was a busy place, a loud place, an industrious place—if you knew where to look.
One of our white neighbors, Mr. Slocum, once asked Dad, “Why are you people killing yourself working around the clock like that?”
Dad replied, “How can you kill yourself when you are already in heaven?”
But Dad was realistic because his heaven was full of traps. While Mom made friends with her egg rolls and fried rice, and Dad was the friendly neighbor who lent his tools as readily as he lent his back, they were telling us: We’re different. Never forget that we are different. You are better than they. You must study harder, work harder, and be better than they in every way.
Remember, Dad said, behind every company CEO is a gang of janitors and a hive of worker bees. Don’t ever think America is yours. It isn’t.
We plotted and we schemed and we dug our escape tunnel in humble silence. No one was to know. We would leave them all behind. Leave them with the dump and the drugs and the cops and the incarceration statistics. Locke Drive wasn’t home, but a minefield we had to cross to get to the real America where we could live in comfort, in anonymity. Away from this noisy place dangerous with the occasional frustrated husband a little done in with liquor. Vicious with young punks strutting wild on the taste of easy drug money. Redolent with ethnic cooking, stinky with the offal of the entire city. We would escape. That was the mantra of our daily lives. We were so certain we were above it all. We never thought our family might not make it through this minefield without a casualty.
We escaped it every other Sunday. Government food stamps were neither amusement-park tickets nor movie passes, so Dad took the family to the beach. Mom bought baguettes and made pungent Vietnamese sandwiches with margarine, cilantro, pickled carrots, onions, cucumber, black pepper, chili pepper, and a squirt of soy sauce mixed with rice vinegar—a concoction that reeked to American noses. Traditionally, the sandwiches got fattened with pate and cured ham, but that was expensive, so Mom substituted with homemade Vietnamese bologna, cha. Our family of eight sardined into our ancient Malibu sedan with beach balls, badminton rackets, towels, and coolers—flea-market treasures. On the way over the Santa Cruz mountains, Dad pulled over at the midpoint to the summit to cool off the engine. We sat in the car watching the traffic whizzing by, our windows down, the car smelling oddly addictive with a mixture of mountain pine, car exhaust, and Mom’s spicy sandwiches.
Hien and Kay fidgeted in the front seat between Mom and Dad. In the back, Chi and I both got window seats because we had seniority over Huy and Tien. The Malibu’s radio didn’t work so Dad and Mom did most of the talking. It was interesting to hear Dad talking to Mom or his brothers, but he always sounded stiff when he talked to us. We had question-answer sessions that sounded like a poorly written script.
Dad: “How are your classes going?”
Me: “Great, Dad. I’m getting straight A’s. A-plus in math and science.”
Dad: “Are you still drawing?”
Me: “Not much. Just like you told me.”
Dad: “Good. Artists never make any money They always die poor. Huy, how about you, Son?”
Huy: “All A’s except one B-plus, Dad.”
Dad: “Tien?”
Tien: “Two B-pluses, Dad, and four A’s.”
Dad: “Hmm. You two should be more like your older brother. He has straight A’s. I sacrifice so you can go to school. You must study hard and be the best.”
Dad rarely asked Chi anything. On these trips, she was silent, laying her head on the door frame, eyes fixed on the mountain pines blurring by. I didn’t know her like I used to when we were playmates. Now, she was toeing adulthood. Chi wasn’t attractive. Handsome, strong, perhaps, but never cute or feminine. Her coarse black hair, cropped close, limped hopelessly around her unhappy face—flat and big like a cutting board, kids used to tease her. Some kids inherited the good parts of their parents. Chi got all the unflattering features of hers.
At sixteen, she was as tall as Dad and much stronger. The beam of her shoulders matched any boy’s her age. Every morning, she hammered through her routine of fifty push-ups, a hundred sit-ups, and twenty pull-ups without breaking a sweat. Trained in martial arts since age eleven, she held the equivalent of a black belt. Her chest was flat but thick and tight. And only I knew why. Chi bandaged her chest, like someone with broken ribs, to hide her breasts. She had been doing it since puberty. Once in Saigon when Chi and I went swimming at a public pool, we were both in bathing trunks. The pool owner yanked us out of the water and pointed at her nubby twelve-year-old bee stings. Cover that up with a bra or I’ll kick both of you out. She didn’t have a bra, so he booted us and kept our money. The other kids laughed at Chi as we gathered our clothes and shuffled out. The chest bandaging followed soon after that.
Unlike the rest of us, Chi hated these beach outings. Dad always took us to Carmel, a posh beach town of wealthy retirees and movie stars. He didn’t have much of a choice. The first time Mom saw it, she exclaimed, “Ooooo! So pretty. It’s almost like Nha Trang.” She repeated it many times, smiling at the memories. As newlyweds, Mom and Dad had often vacationed in Nha Trang, commemorating their budget excursions with lots of pictures.
So Dad took her to Carmel without fail. As soon as he landed the troops on the sand, Mom trudged off with him in tow to take pictures of her sitting on dunes, footing the surf, and leaning against windcarved pines. We boys stripped to our shorts and charged into the waves and built sand castles. Chi stayed with baby Kay and the cooler. In 90-degree heat, she was clad in a pair of cutoff jeans and a dark T-shirt to hide her chest bandage. She didn’t bring the bathing suit Mom bought her. No intention of ever wearing anything that betrayed the fact that she was a girl. When Mom and Dad returned, Chi grabbed a sandwich and an orange and vanished into the dunes. No one would see her until it was time to leave.
We picnicked out of brown paper bags, chomping on homemade sandwiches and drinking sodas in paper cups. It was not always a comfortable place. The good-looking people—tall blond folks of sandy, burnished skin, long legs, and jewel eyes, the locals—gave us a wide berth, and gave us the eye. Without being told, we boys knew, faces buried in smelly sandwiches, that we were playing in someone else’s backyard.
Chi must have known her life would veer away from ours at some point.
She must have stared at the dark ceilings for years, wondering what was wrong with her. Why was she so different? She must have known her unique orientation was in the eyes of her parents a perversion which they discounted as her troubling adolescence. She must have known the momentum of tradition would sunder her fragile world of secrets—her microcosm of one.
The first thing Chi did when we moved to California was throw away all her dresses and skirts. From her first day at high school, she wore men’s clothing. Her teachers, misled by her confident male body language, instinctively classified her as a boy. One thing rearended another and suddenly it avalanched beyond her control. Whether she wanted it or not, Chi had a new identity. At school, she was a he. And she used the boys’ locker room and competed in boys’ sports. She didn’t speak much English then, but what friends she had were all boys. She was one of them.
Things had gone quietly for a year and a half on Locke Drive until she had a row with Dad. He knew about her chest-bandaging and he tried to teach her how to be a normal girl. Chi, mirroring her father’s stubbornness, had sassed him. So Dad schooled his child, measuring out his love, in the way his father had taught him. He caned her.
How our lives became unhinged in those three days, I can’t recall precisely. Some of it happened while I was in school, and my parents never talked about it. And we kids never had the audacity or the bluntness to ask them.
After we came to America, Dad didn’t whip us as frequently. He heard it was frowned upon here, but once in a while, when the pressure to survive was great and we were less than exemplary, he lit into us. He was a good man but there was much of his father in him, the rigid traditionalist who espoused discipline, pride, and honor. These things gave him the right footprint to set off the mines of Locke Drive. It was the sort of predatory place that had evolved to break his sort of man. One way or another, the price had to be paid. No family made it through unscathed.
Sometimes, I wondered why Chi’s final days with us on Locke Drive did not take on a more explosive texture. I suspected it was because the flavors surrounding Dad’s last quarrel with Chi were the very flavors of our lives in its absolute normalcy. It was the first time we were all under one roof living as a family, free from the appraising eyes of the church that sponsored us. Tossing in America without a net, we were learning English, we were learning about each other. Just beginning to weave the fabric of our family there in the tiny threebedroom duplex, our halfway house to the promised land. What I remember most were the ingredients of the everyday—the smells, the sounds, the jars and hums of an immigrant family, new to being immigrants as well as being a family. I remember the nauseous perm chemicals of Mom’s salon. The apartment’s moldy carpet that knew more floods than any of us. The bulk meat stewing in fishsauce, Mom’s attempt to save money. Incense burning eternally on the family altar, sending ever more prayers to heaven for yet another deliverance. Our eight bodies sweating without air-conditioning. The dump down the street sneaking into the house on a breeze. The convoy of dump trucks rumbling through the street. Mayo and bologna sandwiches. And homemade French fries leaving an oily, smoky tang on everything. The neighborhood shrill with heavy metal, yelling kids. The television warbling nonsense. Mom’s incessant complaints. Us boys quarreling. Baby Kay crying.
Our house at times took on the grimy madness of a roadside diner halfway to hell. This was the context of our downfall.
Chi didn’t come home from school that day, but the cops came for Dad after he returned from work. They had a warrant for his arrest. Showed it to him. Said his daughter Chi was in a detention center, a safe place. Handcuffed him in his own living room in front of his wife and children. Took him away in a patrol car flashing red lights, all the neighbors standing on the curb watching the spectacle the way we did when the cops came for them. Mom cried, yelling in Vietnamese, no idea what the cops were saying to her. Chi’s high school teacher said bruises don’t lie; Dad was a child beater.
25
Jungle-Station
Jungle shadows nip the heel of the day’s last passenger train as it lumbers toward Muong Man Station. I fight down a surge of panic. Early in the morning, I ride back into Phan Thiet from Mui Ne and hop the peasant commuter train out to this way station. With $45 in my pocket, I know the train is my only chance of reaching Hanoi, some one thousand miles north. Several Vietnamese informed me the ticket was $30, but the Muong Man Station officials want $120 because I am a Vietnamese American, the porters want $10 for handling my bicycle because it has heavy luggage panniers, and the constable wants $40 because his salary is $25 a month. $170 in total.
“Where are your American papers?” demands the constable with a doughy face peppered with blackheads.
“I left them in Saigon with my relatives.” A street-savvy friend had informed me of the brisk black-market trade in Vietnamese-American legal documents. After all these years, I sometimes feel as though my American skin is only as thick as my passport. This makes me very nervous about taking my “return ticket to America” on the road.
“Ho Chi Minh City, not Saigon!” he barks. “Travel is not permitted without a passport. A photocopy is not acceptable.”
Inside the decaying way station, sweat steams in the heat. Sour. Workers’ sandals flap on the dirt, powdering the air. Rust scabs the window’s metal grilles. Door hinges dangle on doorless frames. I sit in the center of the office on a long bench surrounded by seven uniforms. The stationmaster, a thick joint of beef grizzled with graying black hair, lounges behind a desk with one leg cocked on an open drawer. The constable plants his hams against the edge of the desk and eyes my bicycle and the loaded panniers, no doubt appraising their value. Three conductors and a pair of deputies form the spectator gallery to my right. They scowl, not buying my pleas of poverty. Foreigners aren’t poor. Can’t be. Especially not Viet-kieu.
The underlings file out to meet the train, leaving me with the two honchos. Outside, the beggars, vendors, and peasants stir out of the shade onto the hot concrete, buzzing toward the ancient iron monster as it groans to rest. Healthy beggars abruptly develop the gaits of cripples. Vendors sing their wares, clawing at the passengers, jabbing sandwiches, bags of peanuts, pouches of sugarcane juice, T-shirts, straw mats, and tawdry gifts through the windows, pleading for a buyer. Peasants are frantic to get their baskets of produce aboard before the whistle blows again.
Four laborers haul pigs individually caged in woven baskets and drop them on the concrete. The pigs squeal, pissing terror, yellow urine running across the pavement. The stench wafts into the room on a hot breeze and infects me with the animals’ fear.
“May I go now? That’s my train.” I manage a smile and inch to the edge of the bench. They have detained me in this room for two hours, causing me to miss one train already.
“Here, I’ll help you out: $140 U.S. dollars,” the station boss offers.
I carefully explain again that I have only enough for the regular fare. The constable frowns, orders me to stay in the room and goes out with the stationmaster, cursing cheap foreigners.
Alone, I watch the peeling strips of ceiling boards flex in the wind playing in the rafters. I am still hungry and weak from my bout of stomach flu. The minutes tick by. The stationmaster pokes his head into the room and says, “The train’s leaving in two minutes. Changed your mind? It’s the last passenger train today. Do you want to pay now?”
“Go through my bags! If I’ve got any money in there, it’s yours!”
He shrugs and leaves. Two minutes. The whistle blasts twice. The train sighs northward without me. Practically broke and emotionally exhausted, I consider abandoning my bike trip altogether and retreating to the villa in Vung Tau until the fever and the diarrhea pass. Touring Vietnam isn’t shaping up as I had hoped. This morning while I was eating breakfast, a pickpocket stole my pepper spray. Afterward, a minivan came within inches of hitting me head-on, my closest call yet after months of bike touring. I am miserable with flea and mosquito bites and, between bouts o
f diarrhea and unexplainable fevers, I haven’t felt well since I stepped off the plane. Every Vietnamese I meet corrupts me with the certainty that I will die if I attempt to bicycle the country. Now the train officials strong-arm me: No passport? Then you must stay here in this jungle.
An hour later, still detained at the station on the constable’s order, I watch the rail crew work.
“Yes, that’s what I said, you idiot!” a conductor explodes into a telephone receiver.
Squatting on their hams in the dirt, four junior conductors, deep in a heated debate, don’t even look up. They shuffle pebbles along a line drawn in the dirt. The station manager is testing them on traincar sequence management and track scheduling. With a single track, it is paramount to keep the northbound and the southbound trains from meeting.
The conductor bellows: “The train left fifteen minutes ago, you idiot!”
A roar of curses and victory whoops rolls out from the room behind. The laborers are gambling with the rest of the station staff, most of whom are relatives.
“Yeah, you come out here,” says the man, dripping each word into the receiver. “Come out here and I’ll cut off your balls.”
A baby wails.
“Your mother!” He hammers the receiver into its cradle, lights a cigarette, and saunters over to inspect my bike. Finally, his curiosity gets the better of him. “Hey!” He turns to me. “Hungry? You want to go for coffee?”
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