Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

  He need not say more. They are still debating whether to take me all the way to Hanoi and risk running afoul of the cops at the inspection station north of Hue. I need their friendship more than they need my money.

  At thirty cents a liter of rice wine, friendship goes a long way. Scarface, Bugsy, Redeyes, Shyboy, VC, Dealer, and I cement our friendship with murky rice wine that tastes like a mixture of kerosene, vinegar, sugar, and bad sake. We waltz the bottle and the single shot glass around the table. Each man drinks, grimaces, pours another shot into the glass, hands it to the guy on his left, then eats something from the dishes on the table. If someone has something fatally contagious, we are all history.

  In an alcoholic stupor, I confess that I’m actually a Viet-kieu who is indeed broke and needs to get to Hanoi. They look at me gravely. Scarface mutters that I must make amends. The rest of them agree. Redeyes says I must make it right with everyone present. How? I ask him. He grins and pours me a shot. I toss it down. Scarface pours me a shot. I toss that one down, too. I toss down a shot for every member of the party. They laugh and pound my back. It is a great joke. Redeyes chuckles and says he knew I was lying the moment he set eyes on me, but, hey, what are friends for?

  We drink, sitting together in the cabin, leaning on each other. They want to know about the West and about Western women. Sex before marriage, really? Sex on the first date, you serious? Sex in high school?!

  “Does eating rice make Americans sick?”

  “Is there such a thing as a ten-lane freeway in America?”

  “Do you know O.J. Simpson?”

  With them shoving gizzards, intestines, livers, and hearts at me as though I’ve never seen such delicacies before, I succumb to the peer pressure and swallow. When we finish, Bugsy brings out another party platter, piled high with snails, goat testicles, fish heads, goat blood pudding, pig brain, and some sort of sausage the color of wet ash and old blood. After four bottles of wine, they doze off happily. I retch out the window. They wake, chortle, and curse me for wasting good liquor. I sit like a dead man, watching the land scroll forward and away. It is chilly and a light drizzle softens the distance. On steep hillsides footing the mountains, peasants in plastic ponchos trudge up scraggly slopes, their backs bent under impossibly heavy loads of twigs and cords of firewood. They strain ever uphill, loose pants bunched at the knees, their lean muscular calves, bare, working like knots of rope. They are terribly strong these small, lithe hill people. My train clacks through a crust of shanties, its mournful greeting, then good-bye, belayed on a rush of wind as it crashes through without stopping. A little girl, barefoot in mud, clutches a wooden doll, her eyes stabbing mine, wonders on her face.

  At dusk, Bugsy rouses me from my nap and escorts me to the front of the caboose, where fifteen people gather for dinner. This is an improvement over last night, when Scarface gave me rice cakes and bananas to eat alone on my bunk. In the light of a single oil lamp, I join them elbow to elbow, squatting on the rolling floor of the car. The passengers have cooked a meal of pork stew, steamed vegetables, cabbage soup, and rice. The man next to me hands over a large bowl of rice and a pair of bamboo chopsticks. In a gesture of hospitality and friendship, people within reach start putting morsels of food into my bowl.

  I try a piece of pork and immediately fight down a fit of retching. Someone hadn’t bothered to shave the pig before butchering it. The prickly hair scrapes the roof of my mouth. It feels as though I’ve bitten a chunk off a live pig; I can almost hear it squealing.

  I avoid eating by regaling them with tales of Mexico, America, Japan, Hong Kong, and Indonesia. I tell them of the real world: Mexican Indians scratching a living off arid land, the slum dwellers of America with their concrete-and-bullet jungles, the unwanted Gypsies of Europe, the gentle homeless of Japan, the poor of Hong Kong who live in chicken pens, and the oppressed minorities of Indonesia. It helps them see that heaven really isn’t just a place beyond Vietnam’s borders.

  Our freight train sighs into a way station high up in the hills. It is dark and the drizzle which first greeted us in Hue is still coming down. The gambling gang light their gas lanterns and trundle up and down the train checking wheels, junctions, cargo-car padlocks and generally pulling guard duty. A penny-ante card game is dealt among the women. A group of children squeaks a singsong chant outside. A white-haired old man who boarded at Nha Trang slides open the door, spilling light onto five young faces waiting in the mizzling darkness. They are holding plastic bowls, begging—not for money: Uncles, Aunts, could you spare us your leftover rice, just a fist of leftover rice.

  Like any train hitchhiker, the old man is extremely poor, but he scratches his pocket for a thin roll of dime-bills. He passes them out to the little paupers. We follow his example. We give them the rice and the stewed pork leftovers from dinner. Their mothers come with torches, thank us, and fetch them home to huts not more than ten yards from the tracks. The children are giggling, happy, cartwheeling in the drizzle, by the orange light of the flames. I am wondering to what century this train has transported me. Maybe I am wrong about heaven not lying across the Pacific.

  All the foulness I’ve forced down my throat makes the night pass badly. The toilet is a hole in a dark closet. Rail ties blur beneath. The thunderous noise of the old train punishes a hangover like nothing on this side of hell. By morning, I am groaning in my bunk when the train pulls into the inspection station. Scarface and Bugsy hurry into the cabin carrying luggage, fruit baskets, and blankets. They drape blankets over me, then pile on the luggage and more blankets.

  “Don’t move,” Bugsy says, his fingers closing around my arm like a vise. “If the cops find you, pretend you’re too sick to talk.”

  I don’t need to pretend, although the thought of not being able to get to the toilet is disturbing. The last thing I need is jail time and soiled pants.

  The cops board the caboose and begin their inspection. I can see them through a hole in the blanket. Slowly combing through every closet and compartment, they work like termites from one end of the caboose to the other. One cop enters my compartment. Redeyes trails him inside.

  “What’s in those bags?” asks the cop. I know he’s looking at the piles of luggage covering me. My throat seizes. I am drenched in sweat. My heart beats in my ears. Every breath is a shout.

  “Nothing,” Redeyes replies. “Just some clothes, gifts for my family. Nothing important.”

  “That’s a lot of nothing.”

  A pause.

  Redeyes’ voice shifts into a banter. “How’s the weather here been lately? Cold? It’s hot in Ho Chi Minh City. You’ve been eating, drinking well? Smoke?” I hear him knocking cigarettes out of a pack. A lighter zips.

  Redeyes is speaking again. “Here’s a little something, Brother.” I hear him flicking bills out from a roll of money he keeps in the pocket of his slacks.

  “The weather has been lousy.” The cop is amiable now. “You know how it is.”

  They laugh at this insider’s joke.

  Five minutes later, the train rolls away from the station. I crawl out of my bunk, shivering in my own sweat. The gang gathers for their last round of drinks for the trip. I beg off and crawl into a hammock to sleep. When I wake up, we are chugging into the Hanoi cargo depot. I’ve been on the train for three days and two nights. Expressing my heartfelt thanks, I bid them all farewell and we pour a parting round of rice wine. VC, Shyboy, and Bugsy escort me to the last barrier: the station police.

  VC plucks the glasses off my nose and jams them into my backpack. “Don’t look conspicuous.”

  “Without my glasses, you know, I can’t tell if the Chief is laughing at me.” Chief Redeyes is leaning on the door ten feet from me.

  They cackle as they always do at my frailty. A round of handshaking and backslapping ensues, with me at the center taking the brunt of it. Knowing that I eat bananas like a monkey, Bugsy presents me with a parting gift. Over the last two days, he took pains to buy me all five types of banana grown in
Vietnam, carefully pointing out the virtues of each. He ties a bunch of su bananas, my favorite, to my backpack with a piece of twine. Scarface gives me a smile worth a fist of gold. For a moment, he is handsome and full of good wishes, neither ugly nor wine-happy. Redeyes drapes an arm around my shoulder and reminds me again, “When you’re sick of pushing that bike, just head to the closest train tation and tell them you’re my cousin. They’ll let you ride the freight train as a favor to me.”

  VC carries my panniers. Shyboy walks my bike. We cross the rail yard, duck behind the parked trains, and sneak to the station’s rear gate. The coast is clear. We make a break for it.

  “Halt!”

  A policeman clomps out from the warehouse next to the gate, hand raised at us. Five more uniforms saunter behind him.

  26

  Night-Wind

  There was a power outage the night Chi escaped from the juvenile detention center. A knock at the sliding glass door startled us. Chi shivered on the other side. I unlocked and opened the door but she wouldn’t come in. It scared me seeing my sixteen-year-old sister lurking fearfully outside like a stranger.

  “How did you get here?” I asked her.

  “I jumped the fence. They kept me in a small room. It’s really nice. I had my own TV They fed me. The food is better than the school’s.”

  “How did you find your way back?”

  “I memorized the route the cops took and I asked people along the way. I made it back this morning. I’ve been hiding down by the creek.”

  Huy and Tien fetched Chi’s sweater and jacket from her room. I scraped the leftover rice into a plastic bag along with the rest of Mom’s cabbage soup, and took some oranges from the refrigerator. We gave her the food behind the garage.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Go somewhere for a while. I can’t go back to school, everyone knows about me. I can’t come back here. Dad will kill me.”

  She really believed that.

  “Why don’t you go back to that place where they kept you?”

  “I can’t. They’ll put me into a foster home. Dad is in jail because of me. I’m scared.”

  She equated being around to putting Dad in jail. He was sitting in jail about to be tried for child abuse. Her testimony would put him away, and that would be the end of us all.

  “Where are you going to sleep?” I asked her, reeling in the void that suddenly separated her world and mine.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find some place in San Francisco.” She had been there perhaps three times. I doubted she knew the way. Besides, her English was worse than ours. Two and a half years wasn’t enough time to learn a new language.

  “They’ll find me here,” she said. “There are more Asians in Chinatown.”

  True. It was her only chance.

  “Here, take this.” I handed her two dollars and change, the sum of our savings—Huy’s, Tien’s, and mine.

  She pocketed our parting gift. “I care for you,” she said, and I felt strange because we never say soft things like that.

  She said she’d be back in a few days. I assured her we would have a package ready for her next time. A noise came from Mom’s room and Chi knifed into the dark, a bag of rice soup sloshing in one hand.

  The police released Dad. Things returned to normal. We went to school not fully grasping the gravity of Chi’s situation. Dad went to work. Mom cooked and cut hair. No one talked about it, so pretending that nothing bad had happened was easy. Still, we assembled a survival bag for Chi and stayed up late waiting for her knuckles on our window, but she never returned. Maybe she’d died. Maybe she had gone far away and couldn’t return.

  It was during these nights that I started dreaming in English. Abruptly, I was walking in two camps, each distinct and vastly different from the other. I didn’t feel it then, but one side was beginning to wither. In my sleep, English words gushed out of my mouth and poured into my ears naturally as though I were born with it. My thoughts formulated themselves in the new language. I dreamt Chi spoke to me in perfect English. She said America was scary.

  I was afraid for her, though my fears diminished as the days dragged into months and Chi stopped visiting me in dreams. Secretly, I was glad that she didn’t come back because the court dropped the charges and Dad didn’t go to jail. We would survive. There was enough to eat and, if everything went well, we would be moving away from the dump soon.

  When we did move and the months had stretched into years, we “forgot” Chi. She slipped away from us the way our birth-language slipped from our tongue, in bits, in nuances. The finer subtleties lost like shades of colors washed out under a harsh noon sun. Unused words dried up and faded away. Her name was not spoken. It became awkward and slow when we switched back and forth between English and Vietnamese. At the least, it was difficult and cumbersome to explain to new friends that we had a runaway sister who wanted to be a boy. Even Mom was trying to learn English and Dad no longer made us speak Vietnamese at home. Chi no longer existed and Kay grew up without knowing who the sad, angry stranger in the old family portrait was. Kay spoke a sweet, flawless English; her Vietnamese never escaped its infancy. In our deepening silence, we buried Chi into ourselves, locked her into the basements of our minds. We became embarrassed by our immigrant accent, something that sneaked up on us when we were excited, when we least expected it. Somehow, she became the family’s big shame, as if we’d somehow failed—failed her as we’d failed ourselves.

  27

  Fallen-Leaves

  An was five, his sister ten. They sat on a divan-bed in the dark, digging yesterday-rice from a pot. Fishsauce, old rice, spoons. Salty. The rice had gone crunchy. Nothing in the pantry. The maid had left with the grocery cash. Mom hadn’t been home in days. She was away, business and money. Dad was away, army and money. An missed sitting on his father’s lap for stories—a memory of beer breaths on which great voyages sailed. Chi missed the food her mother used to cook before she made the money that brought many quarrels into the house.

  Outside it began to rain. They abandoned their meal to rush into the street with other children greeting the dounpour. It descended in tiny wet fists. They turned their faces to the sky—though it could not be seen—and swallowed drops falling as fat and sweet as litchis. In the road, the red-brown water had gone knee-deep. Kids dragged each other upriver, up the street, in inner tubes. They jumped, they splashed. The roaring rain tickled. All young faces were grinning.

  An pulled down his shorts and pissed into the river. Chi showed him that she could pee standing as well. No difference, she said to him. He looked at her dubiously. She peed farther than he. See? They laughed, white teeth like small lightning. Two sun-browned delights playing in a drowned gray.

  In doorways, the old folks huddled, looking with old-folk envy on the children frolicking in the deluge, muttering the worn sentiment of a war poem: Monsoon rain falls like tears of grieving lovers; happiness comes easiest to the youngest.

  28

  Hanoi-Visage

  At the sight of the policeman coming out of the warehouse, VC nods at Shyboy, who in one fluid motion, eases himself onto the saddle and pedals off without looking back. VC smiles tightly, “Don’t say anything. I’ll talk to him.”

  VC spins around, instantly jovial, laughing, hands outstretched. He strides into the cop’s path, blocking his view of Shyboy’s escape, duking, jiving like a chum. Shyboy glides beyond the corner and is gone. I trail VC, my face neutral, struggling hard to keep from squinting. Without my glasses, I can’t even see the cop’s face at ten paces, and this makes me extremely apprehensive.

  “Brother! Is that you, Huynh? Yes, it is you. How have you been? In good health?” VC gushes as he tries to shake the cop’s hand. The cop brushes past him, heading straight for me with the directness of a hound dog.

  “Who are you?” he puts the question into my face. “Where are you going?”

  At arm’s length, I can see the displeasure in his face well. I n
od politely, disconcerted at the cigarette sourness of his breath. VC answers for me, “This is my cousin. I’m just giving him a tour.”

  He glowers at VC. The cop looks absurdly small and nasty in his hat, the visor extending a good three inches beyond his nose.

  “Come on, he’s my cousin,” says VC in a tone of mollification.

  “He’s Chinese.”

  “No, he’s Vietnamese. What? I don’t know my own cousin?”

  “Then why doesn’t he talk?”

  “What do you want me to say? My cousin explained it to you already.” I take care not to sound aggressive.

  “You have an accent. It’s not Northern or Southern.” He looks me over carefully. “Give me your identification.”

  A small crowd begins to gather, two privates and a sergeant among the spectators. VC is waving, joking, apparently on familiar terms with most of them. I fumble with my pockets, pretending to look for my papers. If I show my visa and passport photocopy, VC’s lie about my being his cousin is exposed. If I don’t, this cop can arrest me. All Vietnamese are required to carry a photo ID and travel documents at all times. Law enforcement takes this rule seriously.

  VC complains to the crowd, making it obvious that the cop is harassing us. He taps his chest, asking the cop: What’s the problem? Don’t you trust soldiers? The crowd’s mood is shifting, but the cop remains adamant about seeing my ID.

  I hand over all my papers. The cop peruses them, reading and rereading every word, then interrogates me. Why are you here? What is your purpose in Hanoi? How long will you be here? He is obviously doing the routine dance, fishing for a little grease. I’m not giving in, so the minutes squeak by awkwardly. VC grows more indignant at the delay and voices it to the crowd: Come on, he’s one of us. Let him go on his way.