We hung around drinking Coke. Cu-Den did two hundred curls with a dumbbell, working only his right arm. He had been doing it for two years so he was as deformed as a one-pincered crawdad. His goal was to develop a powerful tennis forehand, even though Coach routinely yelled at him to keep the ball in the court—This ain’t baseball, son! No homers, please! Manh divided his attention between MTV and a Playboy magazine he filched from a liquor store. I was on the phone sweet-talking Mai-Ly into letting us copy her chemistry lab report. We made a couple of stabs at our homework until Manh’s uncle picked us up with his van.
I didn’t mind the work. It was fun, clowning around with the guys and drinking sodas we stole from the workers’ refrigerators. Though, of course, if my father knew I was cleaning offices instead of studying, he’d crap a load of bricks. He had levered us off welfare and bought a house, so money was really tight at home. Mom was constantly saving, cutting corners with the groceries. Sometimes, I felt like I had to get some meat in me or I was going to go crazy. I kept on telling her, We’re in America, Mom. You can’t feed a whole family on eight ounces of beef. And my father kept on telling me, Don’t think about material things. Hone your mind. Sacrifice now so you can have later. He told me a slew of other stuff, too, but it didn’t matter to me. I had made it a point not to talk to him, never asking anything and never giving any reply other than yes, no, and I don’t know. Besides, I knew every word before it came out of his mouth. I sacrifice so you can study and make a better life for yourself … blah … blah … blah …
“Shiiiiiiiiiiiit! Check this out! Check this out!” Manh was rubbing himself all over the mahogany conference table. “This is like a whole fucking tree, man! Shit. I wanna work here—I wanna do Tammy Tran on this table.” He bellied onto the gleaming wood and started humping the surface.
“I want Suzzie,” Cu-Den said, and laughed his dirty poodle laugh—barely audible.
I put in my dibs: “Lan is my kinda woman.”
“Naw, man. You get Mai-Ly, An.” Manh started in with his girlie Mai-Ly voice: “You and me, An, we have chemistry.”
“Guess who’s gonna be doing his own chem lab.”
“Oh, fuck. Okay, okay. Sorry, I take it back.”
“Fuck,” Cu-Den breathed, spinning dreamily in the chairman’s seat. “This is gonna be my chair.”
“Yeah, so you can watch me. OoooAaaaa! Yes, baby. Yes!” grunted Manh with the one-track mind. Kneeling on the table, he jizzed us with a bottle of cleaning ammonia.
“Manh, you sick son of a bitch!” Manh’s uncle spat from the doorway. “Get off that table before you scuff the varnish!” Then he turned a wagging finger on us. “You want to be big men in big companies? And what are you doing?” He knew all about our sideline of misdemeanors and braggadocio. “You boys shouldn’t be so dumb. Look at me, you think I got it good? Sure, I’m my own boss and I make good money, but I’m still a janitor. I clean up after the men who sit in those chairs. You boys want to be in those chairs, you study harder. You don’t mess around. You listen to your fathers.”
My father and I had had a falling-out a couple of years before I started hanging with Cu-Den and Manh. I was bossing my brothers around. They didn’t like it, but, too bad, I was first son. It was my right. Occasionally, they balked and sassed me back, and I caned them to teach them respect. Once Huy and I got into a big fight. He disobeyed my order and couldn’t stomach lying down so I could whack his butt with a yardstick. Huy wasn’t much of a fighter so I pounded him blue. My father came home and cussed me out in front of all my brothers. He dressed me down good and I lost face. I hadn’t talked much to him or the rest of the family since. And I didn’t stop caning my brothers until last year when little Hien came at me with a knife and made me realize how screwed up we all were.
One day, we were driving across town, Father up front with Hien. Huy, Tien, cousin Hai, and me in the backseat. I was in seventh grade. Hai got into a scuffle with Huy and Tien. Father blew up. He thought it was me, but I wasn’t a rat so I didn’t squeal on Hai. He pulled over to the side of the road and told me to get out.
I shrugged and got out. No idea where I was. Maybe ten, fifteen miles from home. He drove off.
It took me all day to find my way home, but once there I kept on walking. I climbed an oak-studded hill on the edge of town and I thought about going away like Chi had.
For years after Chi ran away, I read the Bible and said a prayer every night. At first, I prayed for good grades for myself; good grades for my brothers; good health, happiness, and prosperity for Mom and Dad; good health for everybody, Grandma Le in Vietnam, too; world peace; and safety for Chi, wherever she was, if she was still alive. As time passed, I realized that I didn’t get a lot of the things I asked for, so I narrowed my list. I shortened it, one item at a time, until all I prayed for every night was that Chi was all right, wherever she was, if she was still alive. But because we didn’t hear anything from Chi, and because I was growing up, I stopped praying. I stopped hoping for miracles. I was reverting, starting to think of the Almighty—God, Buddha, whatever—the way I did when my childhood began to splinter, late in April of 1975.
It was a couple of days before Saigon fell. There was no school. The city was already beginning to crumble. People panicked in the streets. Everything had suddenly ground to a halt. Nothing for me to do. Even the book kiosks closed. I had a pocketful of change, but couldn’t rent as much as a comic to read. I went out to catch tadpoles at a pond. There was no one in the park except me and a young woman. Standing on a green slope beside the water, she was very pretty in her white ao dai with her long black hair. She was very beautiful in her sadness. She asked me if I saw the lights in the sky. I said the sky is overcast. Look harder, Little Brother, can’t you see the little lights, millions of them floating in the clouds? I didn’t tell her that everyone saw lights if he stood up too fast or if he stared into a bright sky long enough. Look harder, Little Brother, do you see them now, the angels? Do you see them? She was desperate, I heard it in her voice, saw it in the way she turned her sad face to the sky, smiling. Smiling.
Where was He?
She needed the lights so I gave her her angels.
Now, on the verge of following in Chi’s footsteps, I stood on the hilltop and looked at the gray sky. And I could not find it in me to give myself the angels.
When it was dark and I was numb with cold, I went home. All along I knew I was chickenshit, no guts at all.
We did the entire office floor, twenty rooms, four lobbies, and six toilets in four hours. Manh’s uncle frisked us to make sure we hadn’t light-fingered anything. On the way home, he swung us through the McDonald’s drive-up window. We redeemed fists of McD Super Bowl game cards for fries, Cokes, and Big Macs—courtesy of Cu-Den’s brother, who manned the grill at the Golden Arches. He had scored bags of game cards and set us all up with burgers for the whole year.
Manh’s uncle dropped us off at Cu-Den’s house and slapped us three fivers apiece. We bowed and thanked him like good Vietnamese boys. Cu-Den’s mother was at her second job and his brother was out doing some girl. We cocked our dirty feet on the coffee table, chomped the Macs on the sofa, and smeared grease into the cushions. Cu-Den went to the stereo and cranked up “Eye of the Tiger,” the theme from Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, to pump us up for the fight. We sat around eating and talking about girls and sex, talking trash because despite all the marginal stuff we did, we were still geeks. We cared about grades and girls who were too cool to date us because we didn’t have as much as a jalopy to take them to the movies. Cu-Den’s got the heat for Suzzie Nguyen: Suzzie’s got big ones, doesn’t she? Fuck yeah, Manh agreed, I get one, Cu-Den gets the other, and you can watch, An. Okay, sure, I’ll run the videocam for you deviants.
Mouth around a bunch of fries, Cu-Den said, “I heard a couple years ago at our school, there was a girl who passed for a guy. She was Vietnamese, man.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Manh chirped in. “My brother told me about that
. Fucking sick, man. Now, THAT’S a fucking deviant. She was like a guy or something. She went into the guys’ locker room and all. Nobody knew.”
Cu-Den asked me, “You heard about that, An?”
“Naw.”
“You anh lon, ain’t you, An?” Manh asked. None of my friends had been to my house or met my family. It was on the better side of town, theirs on the poor side of the toxic creek where we used to live.
“Yup, I’m the oldest in my family. Big Bro, Numero Uno, that’s me.”
“You never heard about this?” Cu-Den asked me again.
“No.”
They were perplexed. It was the one big scandal that reverberated down the years at our school. The one dead horse everyone liked to beat. Manh said, “He—I mean she—was a trans, what-cha-call-it … a … a trans-sex, something like that.”
“A transsexual,” I told them, and threw away the rest of my Big Mac. I grabbed the baseball bat: “Rumble-time. Let’s kick some ass!”
31
Blushing-Winter
This is a bad year for you, An, Mom told me. Nothing good will come of it. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t do anything. Keep your eyes out for omens. You’re not American, you hear me? You’re Vietnamese. You are not immune to the gods.
When I see the gravel truck driving on the wrong side of the road toward me and two dogs darting into the street, one chasing the other, I realize she may be right. I should have left Hanoi before dawn. I should have left days ago or, maybe, I should have stayed another week. I left today because my fear of Vietnam’s Highway 1 has been ulcer-gnawing my gut ever since I left San Francisco.
This morning I woke, devoured a full breakfast, strapped the panniers onto the racks. Then I did the easy thing: I let my legs do what I’ve trained them to do—piston me right out of Hanoi. Traffic is not too heavy except when it funnels through villages, the national highway ripping through the middle and people crossing the road as casually as strolling across a courtyard. Even dogs have the same attitude about the street.
As the truck bears down on me, I am riding on the outer edge of a clutch of bicyclists and motorbikes. Everyone scatters like gnats before the oncoming truck. I try swerving off the two-lane road, but a group of children is playing in the dirt. I brake. The first dog scats clear of the oncoming truck. I see the wide eyes of the truck driver, a cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t brake, but instead hammers the horn. Doesn’t swerve. Couldn’t with the medley of villagers all around him. I plunge off the asphalt and hit a row of plastic chairs in front of a café. The second dog, the size of a golden retriever, abandons the chase and darts back to my side of the road. The trucker pounds the horn again. The scene strobes into slow motion: the beige dog, panicked by the horn, turns and tries to cross the road again. Too late. The truck’s shadow swallows it at thirty miles an hour. It clears the first set of tires, then the undercarriage of the truck glances the back of the dog. It wobbles. Just when I think the dog will live, it changes direction, trying to get out from under the moving truck. The rear set of wheels, double mounted, catches the dog squarely. Thud. Without a yelp, the creature goes under the rubber—a flash of beige fur sucked beneath wheels. A loud wet crunch of snapping sinew and collapsing rib cage, a cracking, popping sound.
A great “AW” from the men in the café. The trucker never even slows. He keeps on rolling, and within seconds there is no trace of his passage but dust and a pile of bloody fur in the middle of the road. Across the street is a shack restaurant-bar, their specialty painted on a sign out front: a three-quarter view of a dog’s head. Two men come out and drag the carcass into the diner.
I feel nauseous. I can almost smell roasting ginger and dog fat—the smoky arid edge of barbecued ribs dripping on hot coals. I remember my first taste of dog meat. My uncle had forced it down my throat when I was a kid in Saigon. The beerhouse smelled terrible, rancid if it weren’t for the cigarette smoke and the grill. Red-faced men talkshouted, tearing into dog ribs with their teeth and tossing the bones on the muddy floor. The owner, a mean-faced old woman, took my money and handed me a small plate of roasted dog meat, the pieces cut thin like nickels. One day, Uncle Hung was drunk and he ordered me to eat it. With him preparing to smack obedience into me, I put a slice into my mouth. It tasted gamy, almost like rabbit. The ginger killed most of the strange meat flavor. “Ha! Ha! Ha! You ate it! You know what this means? In your next life, you’ll be reincarnated as a dog!” I tried to vomit without success and I bawled with fears only an adult could instill. Whenever she visited me, Chi would take pity and go in my place to fetch Uncle Hung’s dog meat.
The land is green, every inch of it cultivated. Between the villages, the land becomes a sea of rice paddies, veined with dikes, stretching to the horizon so that the far-off mountains look like islands in the distance. Thatched huts and an occasional cinder-block house of a well-to-do peasant punctuate the rice-paddy ocean like fishing boats. And in stretches, there are the lumpy rock formations resembling those of Ha Long Bay, only here the ocean has been drained. They look like giant Hershey’s kisses, five hundred feet tall, all moldy with vegetation and chipped jagged by the weather. The air smells of turned earth. Now and then, a whiff of smoke from a cooking fire.
“Lieng-Xo! Lieng-Xo!”—Russian! Russian!—the kids shout at me as they come rolling out of the school yard, a moving carpet of little black heads.
In America, I was a Jap, a Chink, a gook; in Vietnam, a Russian.
I wave back, slowing down to avoid squashing a six-year-old.
Ppht! A flying sandal misses my head. Then another. Laughing gleefully, the brats are running and flicking the sandals right off their feet. At me! Left. Right. One. Two. One. Two. Slippers shoot off their little feel like missiles. A hail of sandals smacks my bike. Bap! One hits me on the side of the head. Piss-angry, I swerve to a stop to smack some manners into the monsters. Thunk! Out of footwear ammo, they’re chucking stones! I hammer the pedals and plow away fast without serious injury, save to my dignity.
I flee the village totally disconcerted. That is a new one. Mobbed by laughing elementary school children. This country never fails to surprise me. At the next school, ten miles down the road, I pick up speed and blow right by without giving the little monsters a chance to wave hello.
I arrive in Ninh Binh, a mid-sized industrial town sixty miles south of Hanoi, and take a room at the Star Hotel. The teenage bellhop, who is also the concierge, the handyman, the cook, and the roomservice guy, encourages me to book a boat ride with him. Very beautiful, he says. The price he quotes is rather steep so I ride down to the river for a look. The city is a jumbled mess. Along the riverfront, the cops and government officials have a monopoly on the tourist trade bused down from Hanoi. They want six dollars for the boat ride and two dollars for parking my bike. I decline and go farther down the busy riverfront. A boatwoman smiles at me and waves from her boat. I return the greeting and she runs frantically after me. She guides me by my elbow to a café.
“Boat ride?” she asks, in accented English.
“How much?”
She holds up a victory sign: “Two dollars.” She points to her skinny sampan.
“Okay.”
I tell her I’m Vietnamese and she donkeys into an explosive laugh because she has never approached a Vietnamese before. We talk to the café owner, who lets me lock my bike to a post. The boatwoman crowns me with a conical peasant hat and secretes me down to the river. She doesn’t want to be harassed by the cops, who would take a cut of her fee.
For two hours, she poles us downriver and across the wetland, carefully avoiding the more scenic route of the government-sanctioned tour. After the first half hour of chattering about the injustice of the local government, the woman senses that I am in a sight-seeing mood and falls silent. The stone formations here are very similar to those of Ha Long Bay—crumbs dropped when the gods were baking mountains—only smaller, five hundred feet wide, three hundred tall, and surrounded by rice paddi
es and shockingly green and lush swamp grass that makes the air smell sweet. I crack open a beer I brought with me and offer her one. She declines, saying it isn’t right for women to drink, so she accepts it to take home to her husband. I sink low in the canoe, prop my sore feet up on the gunwale, and sip my Vietnamese brew. The world ceases to exist beyond the sweep of my eyes. It is silent but for insects in the reeds, the creaking of our single oar, and the watery swishing and dripping of our passage. We slip along the river, meandering through the green waterscape, coming close to homes and dirt roads, and it feels as though I am traveling through the Venice of Vietnam. Darkness is gathering, and somehow the splendor of the land blossoms into something even more palpable. The beer tastes wonderful and I am delirious in the cool air current, going downriver under a blushing sky.
Between the sheer blackened cliffs, the winter sun freezes, a soft pink violet in the misty sky, a painter’s fancy, a moment thought impossible and forgotten upon passing. Moments stretching back through the ages. But they are here, the peasants flip-flopping down dirt roads, hoes and shovels on their shoulders. The pudding-rich earth at their feet lies like frosting on the land, good enough to eat. Field upon field of rice stretches out in the lowering light, quiet after the day’s toil. An old man coughs, his feet dragging. A cluster of girls giggles, pealing clean, vibrant sounds over the whiskery glass of the paddies. A steer clops ponderously, a cart of earthenware creaking behind it. A boy naps on the back of a rare white water buffalo. A handsome young man herds ducks with a bamboo pole as long as a fishing rod.
I sit midstream, breathing softly, unreasonably fearful of this moment slipping away, wishing I could drink in this strange pink of evening. The beauty is so awfully sweet, I think I can taste it somewhere near the center of me.
Catfish and Mandala Page 26
