A friendly gesture. Unsure if going for coffee means just coffee or a whole meal with plenty of drinking, I blurt, “Sure. Thanks.”
He confers with the constable, then motions for me to follow him. I move to get the bike, but he says, “Leave it. I’ll have someone watch it for you.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. Trust him or insult him? Neither a winning choice. Oh, hell.
We stagger over the mounds of debris that ring the station, then tread around peasants sitting on the ground amid great baskets of produce waiting to load their goods on the next overnight cargo-only train. Red dirt, the color of half-baked clay, kicked up by foot traffic, drifts down on the houses, layering thick over the leafy trees and powdering the farm women’s white shirts. On the side of the road, stooped grandmothers gather the cabbage they laid out this morning to dry in the sun. Dogs scat erratically, noses to the ground, pissing and defecating next to the vegetables.
At a kitchen-shack diner, an establishment held up by four posts and a motley collection of plywood, we sit on low bamboo chairs under a thatched awning. A stray mutt curls up at my feet and shares his fleas with my ankles.
My host orders each of us a liter of draft beer, rice, pork chops, vegetables, and chicken squash soup. The owner-waitress-cook calls a little boy from the street, fishes a greasy wad of money out of a bloodstained pocket, and peels him a five-cent bill. A minute later, he trots back with a lump of ice with a rind of dirt, juggling it between his hands like a hot potato. She wipes the ice with a rag, cracks it with a cleaver, drops the chunks into clear plastic mugs and pours our beer.
My host’s name is Hoang and he wants to hear about my travels. He is a prolific reader of travel literature and magazines about exotic locales with strange names, but he has never been farther than two hundred miles from his home village. Hoang is thirty-five, married with three children. His family of five lives on his meager salary. He seems like a real nice guy, a dreamer of far places and quiet inner glory. For strangers like him, quiet souls who murmur, I wish I could do what you’re doing, I dig deep into my bag of tricks—my tales of the road—and spin the best yarns within my power, casting a sheen on every detail. After my stories and several liters of beer run dry, a wistfulness comes into his eyes.
“I remember the day before the North Army came in,” he said. “The whole village, those that hadn’t fled already, gathered in the market for the news. A merchant who had just come back from Saigon to fetch his family was there, telling everyone that the Americans were taking refugees on their ships.
“My neighbor asked me if I wanted to come with his family. He was my best friend. They had two motorbikes; they got rich working for the local American army base. They rode out of the village that day with what they could put in their bags.
“I got a letter from my friend a couple of years ago. His family is in France and he is an engineer. He is married to a Frenchwoman. They live in a nice house outside of Paris.”
“Many people are still emigrating?”
“No. It’s a dream … Even beggars come back rich.” Breaking the mood with a broad grin, he asks me, “So you really don’t have money?”
“Forty-five dollars is all I have until I get to the Vietcom Bank in Hanoi.”
“That’s six weeks’ wages to me,” he notes, eyeing me. “Well, there may be another way to get you north.”
“How?”
“Hitchhike.”
“You mean on the road with my bike?”
“No, hitchhike a freight train. But you’ve got to pretend you’re a Vietnamese. No one will dare take a Viet-kieu. I admire what you’re doing. If I didn’t have a family, I’d go with you. Leave it to me. I’ll get you north … eventually.” He grins, flourishes his hand like a street conjurer, and pats me on the shoulder, which makes me nervous.
“But what about the constable? Your boss might fire you.”
“The constable: no problem. Once you’re gone, you’re out of his jurisdiction.” He pauses, grinning. “My boss, he’s family—my uncle.”
Hoang confirms my suspicions that the big men believed me when I failed to hock up the cash when the last train rolled out. According to him, I can’t take the passenger train to Hanoi even if he sells me a civilian ticket, because I don’t look native. The officials on the train are certain to give me trouble when I present a civilian ticket.
We stumble back to the station. Hoang suggests I sleep off the booze while he goes to his night class. Hoang and five other rail workers, all drunk, trudge off to their English class with notebooks and pencils in hand like schoolboys, chanting: Times are changing, we must be ready for opportunity, we must learn English, the international language of commerce. They stagger down the road. Hoang yells over his shoulder that I shouldn’t worry, he’ll have me on my way when he gets back.
Night falls. I retire to a broken divan in a dark room. The shredded straw mat reeks of stale beer and sweat. The walls bubble with zigzagging geckos. The air buzzes with crickets, one ricochets off my forehead. Mosquitoes assault my hands and face. Fleas sneak up my pant legs to ravish my calves. I am raw with bites, crazy with itches, hoping Hoang and his boys will come back for me but certain that they’ll pass out drunk somewhere.
I give up on sleep and stroll into the village. It is 11 p.m. Nearly everyone is awake. In the shack-diner, a crowd watches Vietnamese soaps on a nineteen-inch Sony. Across the street, young men hang out at a two-table billiard hall, four posts holding up sheets of corrugated aluminum. Around midnight, I squat in the market square at one of the dozen single-basket food sellers and eat a late supper of rice porridge cooked in chicken stock and scallions.
By moonlight, I stray down to the disused section of the station. Broken, abandoned train cars crowd the rail yard. The dark masks the garbage, the coolness holds down the stink, the still air sick-sweet with a scent of urine and wet hay. Crickets sugar the night. Hammocks creaking. Soft words. Rhythmic breaths, gentle moans seep through caboose windows. Passion-rich this world of beggars, homeless.
Down at the main platform, vendors’ oil lamps dot the dark cement islands between the tracks like fireflies. I am drawn to the lights. A beggar boy and a white-haired man sit on six-inch plastic blocks next to a girl selling hot soy milk from a tin pot. They smile, inviting me into their circle.
“Try some hot milk,” the boy urges me. He looks about ten, naked save for a tattered pair of shorts and mismatched rubber thongs tied to his toeless feet. I saw him earlier hobbling about begging the train passengers and bantering, teasing the food vendors. Cheerful and roguish, he seems to forget his lameness though he dramatizes it well when he works the crowd.
“Egg-milk?” the girl queries. I nod. Smiling, she briskly whips an egg yolk with sugar in a cup with a fork for five minutes, then tops it off with a ladle of hot soy milk. It tastes foamy, sweet, and warm, just like what Great Granny used to give me when I couldn’t sleep. I tell her as much and she blushes with pleasure.
The grandfather is on his way to see his grandchildren. He makes twenty dollars a month as a laborer, so hopping a freight train is the only way he can travel five hundred kilometers once every year to visit them. The beggar boy is waiting for a cargo train to take him into Phan Thiet, where he panhandles every morning in the fish market. He travels widely because beggars ride trains and buses for free. It is considered bad luck to turn them away.
“What about the cops?” I ask them.
Grandfather laughs. “Those crooks?”
“You, Big Brother, you watch out for them,” warns the boy. “The train cops are the meanest. They’ll peel and gut you for everything you have.”
Grandfather and Milk-girl nod solemnly, murmuring for me to be careful. I tell them that in America the police are actually very honest, real good guys. “It must be really nice in America,” says the girl, her eyes dreamy with a young girl’s infatuation.
“You must be able to eat whatever you want, as much as you want,” chirps the beggar boy, swept u
p in the girl’s emotion.
“But I heard work in America is very demanding, isn’t it?” protests the old man. “You can’t go home for a nap during lunch, can you?”
I shake my head. The girl hasn’t heard a word anyone said. “America is really big, isn’t it? It must be so big that people can just disappear into it. So, so big. Fifty states, each as big as Vietnam,” she exclaims, hands on her knees as though ready to take that leap into the thin air of America.
Her aunt’s family has disappeared into the States. Their letters had arrived while they were in Thailand, but once they made it to California, nothing was heard from them. It has been almost a decade. What happened, she asks me over and over. It is too common, Viet-kieu severing ties with relatives in Vietnam. No matter what I say, it is hard for them to understand why relatives are so unwilling to help those left behind. How can people refuse to help when they are living in a country where a teenager can earn more money in a day than a Vietnamese teacher earns in a month?
I stay with them until near morning, when the girl’s sister arrives to relieve her. She has two sisters, and each of them takes an eighthour shift on the basket. Her sister brings a tin pot of soup with udon noodles, chopsticks, spoons, and bowls. Yielding the baskets and clay stove to her sister, she goes home with her empty pot.
During the night, three freight trains stop at the station, but Hoang, who came back on duty after his English class, can’t secure me a passage. One look at me and the cargo supervisors all shake their heads; no one believes I am his cousin—a bona fide Vietnamese. Each mumbles something about getting caught with a Viet-kieu aboard—which could cost them a month’s wage.
At 7 a.m. Hoang manages to press me onto the cargo train of a reluctant acquaintance who owes him a big favor, claiming I am his cousin. Hoang shakes my hand, escorts me to the train, placing a brotherly hand on my shoulder for show, and whispers through his grin, “I wish I could go with you. Watch out for the cops. This guy, Tung, is not really a close friend of mine. After the train rolls, he’ll negotiate your fare with you. It should be much less than what you have with you. Be careful, remember your Vietnamese alias. If he finds out that I lied to him, he’ll dump you at the next station. Good luck, Brother!”
Tung, the train’s cargo supervisor, meets us at the caboose. He is thirty-seven years old and rail-thin with boiling-red drinker’s eyes and withered smoker’s teeth. Tung shows me to the caboose and tells me to stow my bike next to the pig and monkey cages in the rear compartment. The caboose is already packed with ten “unofficial passengers” and four cargo clerks who take an instant dislike to me because I am “imposed cargo.” I introduce myself several times without success. One of the clerks, a man with an angry crimson scar running from his forehead to his jaw, glares at me when I extend my hand. He seems intent on gutting me sometime in the immediate future.
After the train begins to roll, I wonder if this is a mistake. Redeyed Tung shows me to a sleeping compartment reserved for the cargo clerks. Great! Me and Scarface are roomies. It has six hard bunks, three on each side with just enough standing room in the middle. We sit on the lower bunks and five other men file in to join us.
At Redeyes’ suggestion, I introduce myself to this hard-bitten lot. Redeyes sums up my predicament to his compatriots. No one bothers to reciprocate my introduction, so I nickname them—to myself. Bugsy is a short fortyish man with pudgy cheeks and a pair of bunny teeth that pin down his bottom lip. Scarface is a twenty-something punk. Shyboy is a youthful mid-thirtyish man who speaks little and does most of the work. VC is a brawny and loud soldier, a stout military lifer in his late forties, returning from one of his frequent joyrides in liberal Saigon. Dealer is a paunchy hustler, cardsharp, and cigarette smuggler.
They confer and decide that they will take me to Nha Trang for ten dollars, and, perhaps, Hue for twenty dollars more. Hanoi isn’t part of the negotiation yet. Redeyes doesn’t buy Hoang’s story that I am a Vietnamese national who spent years studying abroad in America. He makes it painfully apparent that he doesn’t want to risk getting caught transporting a foreigner on a cargo train—not without adequate compensation. They aren’t allowed to transport luggage, animals, or “unofficial” Vietnamese passengers in the caboose.
Redeyes asks me to stay in the compartment for my “protection.” A couple of passengers are allowed to come in to talk to me. Most have questions about America and Europe, usually about towns where their relatives and friends have emigrated. A young woman named Mai stays with me for an hour asking about the places I have seen. When the train draws closer to Mai’s village, she looks out the window at the rice fields and the huts squatting on the mud flats. “Do you really think it’s beautiful?” she asks me, taking another hard look at the countryside, trying to fathom what is beautiful about poverty.
I reassure her that it is beautiful in its own way. American cities, I confide, are not too attractive. Lots of steel, glass, and concrete. Concrete everywhere. You have to go to a park to see dirt. She giggles into her palm.
“How funny! Americans don’t like concrete. We love it. It’s special. It’s great for floors. We don’t have it, but my aunt does. Her sons bought her a concrete floor for her house. Concrete floors are very cool in the summer. Very nice for taking naps. In the rainy season, concrete floors are very clean, not like our dirt floor. Very easy to clean.”
I have taken concrete for granted. I nod dumbly, looking at this young girl with new respect. She is seventeen but malnutrition has given her the body of a fourteen-year-old. Her fingers and nails are brown from the dye of the leather factory outside Saigon where she works with her older sister. She talks about her family’s poverty frankly, with no shame and with just a touch of sadness that hints at the Asian way of accepting life.
I ask her whether the lifting of the American embargo is a good thing for Vietnam. She doesn’t know, but it couldn’t be bad since her boss is hiring more people, at $1.50 a day, to turn out more leather, which will be sent to Korea, then to America. She hopes to get her fourteen-year-old sister a job at the factory. Sharecropping on poor land isn’t enough to feed a family of eight.
“I hope they take you all the way to Hanoi,” says Mai as she leaves to help her sick mother off the train. Unaccustomed to traveling, they are all reeling with motion sickness. I am sick with the incongruity of our lives. I stare off into the countryside. We are separated by seas of rice paddies.
Suddenly, a barrage of rocks showers the train. One stone strikes the cabin wall near my head and bounces into the passage. More follow. I duck beneath the window and cover my head with my hands.
Scarface finds me crouching on the floor and laughs. “The cow herders are pissed. Last week we hit one of their cattle that got onto the track. The herder wasn’t around so we hacked off enough beef to last us all the way up to Hanoi.”
“Nowhere on earth—nowhere is there a steel road, an asphalt road, and a beach so close together. Ten paces between each! Fire-ship and ocean-ship right next to each other. Magnificent isn’t it?”
Bugsy is howling his excitement in my face, both of us clinging precariously on the open door of the caboose, him throwing an arm wildly toward the ocean, me not wanting to diminish his fervor, nodding with the ready affirmation of a convert.
“The French built it to rape Vietnam. The Americans bombed it to divide Vietnam. We rebuilt it to reunify Vietnam!”Bugsy declares, and chops the air with his hand. It sounds suspiciously like a government slogan. I decide not to tell him that he’s got it all mixed up. It was the Americans who tried to maintain the tracks and the North Vietnamese who were adept at bombing and hijacking trains. Maybe he is thinking about the national highway or the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
“Eight months, that’s all it took to get the entire line working. This Reunification Express Train was inaugurated on 31 December 1976. In eight months, we repaired 1,334 bridges, 27 tunnels, 158 stations, and 1,370 switches! Eighteen goddamn thousand kilometers.”
Flas
hing his crooked incisors, Soft-heart, one of the more congenial passengers to befriend me, pats me on the shoulder, encouraging me to take pride in this Vietnamese accomplishment. His brother, Eager-boy, is standing with us, flushing with pride at this national treasure. I am fond of them, wishing I could take them with me and show them all the tall mountains, the great rivers, the wonders I have seen. The national highway, paralleling the railroad, separates us and the surf crashing in on high tide. From the train, only a few yards above the water, it is a majestic view sweeping the expanse of the bay. We are edging, clacking, along the mountain’s foothills. The wind whips off the water, warm and hard. I fancy we could in two hops splash into the ocean for a quick swim.
Abruptly, the train—our fire-ship—shunts into a tunnel. We are worming into the rocks, in the belly of a metallic night crawler speed-eating its way into the marrow of the mountain. An utterly complete darkness gulps us down. Chilled cavern air, earthy and moist, skirls around us like wraiths. A thousand teeth, the roar of metal on metal bites down.
I am in awe of this train, of this steel road laid by Vietnamese hands. I am in awe of the Vietnamese. I admire them. I respect them, but what I really want is to like them, to find them likable. Perhaps the former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Graham Martin, touched on something when he said in an interview given to author Larry Englemann long after the War: “I never really had any great attachment to the Vietnamese, North or South. I don’t particularly like any of them.” Maybe Vietnamese as a whole are not likable.
And what about Vietnamese Americans? What does that say about us?
I think we are, by our own closed-door admissions, a fractious, untrusting tribe unified only because we are besieged by larger forces.
Morning of my second day, Redeyes summons me into his cabin, where the inner sanctum of the caboose is holding court and presiding over bottles of rice wine. Redeyes invites me to drink with them and, seeing my hesitation, he declares, “We are all friends here. Our lives are simple. We don’t have much but we are friends. And friends drink and eat together. Are we your friends?”
Catfish and Mandala Page 22
