Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

“Fuck your mother!”

  Cross-eyed jumps into the exchange: “Mind your own business, fool.”

  The man chuckles. “Mind yourself. Look at you all. You’re a disgrace to your uniforms.”

  “You shut up or I’ll break your head!” howls Bloody-Mustache, at the limit of his tolerance.

  “Vomit-face, you break my head? Ha! What a bunch of losers.”

  Cross-eyed shrieks, the cords jumping out of his neck, “Coward, come here and say it to my face!”

  The solider shrugs and saunters across the street, his two buddies closing behind. The drunks charge and a six-man brawl erupts in the middle of the national highway. Fists fly, thudding into faces. They kick each other sloppily, looking absurd in their plastic flip-flops.

  With a nod to the shopkeeper, I hop on my bike. “Thank you, Sister, but I won’t need that Coca-Cola.”

  She bobs her head vigorously “Go. Go quickly, Brother.”

  I pour everything I have into the pedals, then summon more. One, two. One, two. Steady hammering strokes. Something hot burns in the pit of me and keeps the chain humming on the highest gear. The asphalt blurs by, and within a few breaths I fly beyond the village, cutting across the cornfields, heading home, wherever that is.

  42

  Brother-Brother

  “An, I called Huy in Berkeley yesterday to tell him to come home for Thanksgiving,” Mom told me in her high-pitched catastrophic voice. “That Laura girl answer the phone! You know, that punk-rock girl with the nose ring and purple hair. She’s living there in his apartment! You tell him I don’t want him involve with her. You tell him, he should not live with her!”

  “Mom, Huy is not sleeping with her,” I said gently. “He’s sleeping with Sean.”

  “WHAT?! What you mean?”

  “He’s gay … likes boys.”

  “You shut up! Don’t talk ridiculous!”

  “I’m serious. He’s gay.”

  We were standing in her kitchen next to the fridge. I could tell the news startled her badly so I decided not to venture on to Hien’s homosexuality. We all had discussed at length how to break the news to the folks. The family was still grieving Minh’s suicide and each one of us was dealing with it in his own way. Tired of his closet, Huy wanted to come clean with our parents. Mom wrung the hand cloth, looking at the wall. She didn’t say a word for minutes. I could hear chopsticks rattling in her head, calculating, gauging the omens, scheming.

  “An, you tell him Laura is a nice girl. I like her. He should date her. Bring her home for dinner.”

  Huy showed up for Thanksgiving dinner with Sean. They looked so similar it was almost incestuous. They were both tall, lanky with preppy-boy buzz cuts: blue jeans, white T-shirts, and suede shoes. Four-eyed all around. Mom and Father received Sean warmly, treating him just like another one in the long succession of guy “friends” Huy dragged home on vacation from college.

  Mom and Father gave up on the turkey they could never get right. Thanksgiving at the folks’ had degenerated to an international potluck. Huy and Sean brought Chinese honeyed walnut prawns and chive dumplings. Kay’s boyfriend, Trinh, brought Vietnamese yamand-shrimp fritters with fishsauce. Father made his classic spht-pea-and-ham soup, another hideous newspaper recipe. I made a pot roast. Hien showed up with fruit tarts and ice cream. He didn’t invite his boyfriend because they weren’t at that stage yet. Tien brought antipasto and wine. His girlfriend, Ann, provided half a pound of French pate. As always, Mom steamed a pot of rice.

  Father had stopped saying grace over Thanksgiving dinner a long time ago. We all knew he was an atheist who on his best days might venture to admit he had agnostic inclinations. Eventually, the table conversation turned to each of our personal lives. Mom wanted to know about mine and Huy’s marriage prospects.

  “I’m very different from An and Tien,” Huy said, piling his plate with food. Hien just looked on, nowhere near coming out to his family.

  “How’s your nice friend Laura?” Mom asked Huy, switching to Vietnamese because she was serious but trying not to let it show.

  “She’s fine. She’s not at my apartment anymore. She was just staying until she found her own place.”

  “Ah,” Mom murmured, clearly disappointed. Father concentrated on his food. He could be very deaf when he wanted.

  Tien, Kay, and I were grinning tightly, trying not to laugh. Poor Sean began to sweat.

  “How did you boys become friends?” Mom probed with a straight face.

  Huy and Sean exchanged glances. Sean replied, “We met at a party.”

  “You play sports together? Huy likes tennis.”

  “Oh, yes, Huy and I play tennis.”

  “Ah, you and Huy are good friends,” Mom concluded, not wanting a confirmation. “Best school buddies. Tennis partners. That’s good.”

  Huy had told me he was gay a couple of months before Thanksgiving. It was right after his college graduation. He took me out to lunch, steak fajitas at a local cantina. At Huy’s instruction, the waitress kept the margaritas coming. I was fairly toasted by the time he hit me with: “An, I’m gay.”

  I looked at him, trying to reconcile what he was saying. Huy was a great practical joker, but something about his demeanor, a touch of fear maybe, told me he wasn’t kidding. Because I didn’t know what else to say, I patted him on the shoulder and said, “Okay, Huy. I’m okay with it.”

  He looked so relieved I had no idea he had been that worried about how I would react. He heaved a big sigh and we sat there measuring each other over the salt-crusted rims of our goblets. It was brave of him. Minh’s death had given him that. I realized Huy was making his peace with everyone.

  We began to talk haltingly, the conversation forced. I asked him whether he had ever been with a woman. He said he was never interested. Not even once? Never. But all those girls hanging around you, Huy. All those opportunities. They were crazy about your starving-artist looks and your dimples. He shrugged and said girls didn’t turn him on. Why don’t you just try? I asked. He smiled knowingly at me: Why don’t you try a guy?

  I was discovering my brother for the first time. His life came out one secret at a time.

  “I’ve been gay all my life, Mister An. Ever since I was a kid. As long as I can remember.”

  I saw him all over again: the four-eyed boy who ate his Froot Loops cereal with a toothpick; the fifth-grader addicted to Chinese salty-sour dried plums, who saved the pits so he could suck on them later; the straight-A high school senior who, on a Friday night, wept at his desk, tear-smearing his SAT course work, because Father forbade him to go to the biggest seniors’ party of the semester—Why, the SAT exam is only two months away, you must study! I won’t let you ruin your education like your brother An, who couldn’t even get into UC Berkeley! He got only one lousy scholarship.

  “You know, Huy, I’m sorry I screwed things up for you guys. Father came down hard on you.”

  “It’s okay,” Huy said generously. “Dad meant well. I’m successful. I had my fun in college.”

  We talked a long time. We settled the bill and tipped our waitress so she could go home, then started another bar tab. He walked me through his “gay history.” He lectured me on his community’s terminology. Gay sex. Anal sex. Top. Bottom. Rice queens. Potato queens. The joy of oral sex. He even offered to give me the number of a famous gay practitioner of this art—reciprocation not expected. No woman could possibly know more about a penis than a man. Just close your eyes.

  “You know, my roommate is gay,” Huy said.

  “Ray? Good looking, Speedo model, GQ cover-boy Ray?”

  “Ultragay. He thinks you’re decent looking.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Oddly, I was somewhat flattered. “Really. Cool.”

  Huy rolled his eyes and snorted, “Well, don’t get a big head, Mr. An.”

  “I could take that three ways.”

  We laughed. It felt very good talking plainly to each other.

  43

  Father-Son

&nbs
p; “Prostitutes,” Father said to me. “I should have taken Huy and Hien to prostitutes. Your uncles urged me but I didn’t listen. Now it’s too late; they’re gay.”

  His favorite adage had come to haunt him: When you’re young, you go looking for trouble. When you’re old, trouble comes looking for you. He was forever mulling over his thousand woes, whipping himself for every wrong turn he’d made, wondering how he could have changed each of our lives for the better. A long time after Chi had died, Father was facing retirement and was petrified of it. He confessed to me: “I don’t think I can retire. I must work, be busy until the day I die. My mind cannot rest, because I am a man of regrets.”

  We were sitting in the living room at 2 a.m. in the months immediately before I left on my bicycle. Warm milk for him. A beer for me. The television on mute, splashing our faces blue. The world asleep, everything silent. These were the parameters of our father-son communication, for there had never been father-son moments and we had never learned how to talk. Our love and resentments went both ways; him loathing the way I squandered the opportunities he had secured for me with his sacrifices; me hating his indirect urgings and silent expectations. Of course, these were things we never broached facing each other.

  “Your mother wants me to retire, but I’m afraid to retire. What will I think about? My mind cannot rest.”

  He didn’t say it but the words hung there between us: It’s my punishment for my punishing Chi. He seemed suddenly old and rotting with doubts, doomed like a worm-eaten clipper banished from all harbors in its shortening days. Condemned to die at sea. Disconcerted, I tried to humor him. “Oh, Father. What is there to regret? Look at yourself. Look at your children. You’ve done well. You’ve lived a full life and now is the time to enjoy your golden years.”

  He turned from me and I caught his awful sadness in profile. “I should have been a better father to you boys. I should have been more like an American father. They know how to cherish their children. I should have taken you camping … or something.”

  An emptiness waited between us as I fumbled to find something to say as he tried to utter what was really at his core.

  “Chi,” he said at last. “I shouldn’t have beaten her like that. I was wrong.”

  “It was a long time ago, Father.”

  “I didn’t know better. It is the Vietnamese way You beat your children if you love them. You beat them to show them the right way to live. You beat them to let them know they are important to you.”

  “I know, Father.”

  There lurked something else in him. I could feel it.

  “My father beat me. I didn’t know any other way,” Father said, averting his eyes. Shoulders heaving, he was fighting his face, shocked at himself over his sudden confession.

  “I know you meant well, Father.” I wanted to tell him I forgave him, but he did not ask. And I could not presume. “The rest of us turned out decent.”

  We did, Father, we really did. Huy and Hien are gay, but not because you beat them. They are gay, not because you forced them to study and forbade them to have girlfriends. They are happy now, handsome successful men. Tien inherited your mind. He is kind, brilliant, and thoughtful, as you are at your best. Kay has all the best parts of us. And I have caged my beast, have not struck in anger since Hien pulled the knife—the best thing Hien could have done for me.

  “My father was violent. I was an abused child,” Father said. “He was abusive. And … I was abusive.”

  I wished with all my might that he hadn’t said it. For him, it was too much. He was a man of the old world, given to the old ways, the harsher values. He wasn’t American, not like me. With this conception of his having been an “abused child”—this American definition—he could not survive, for all his guilt, real and imagined, came crashing down on his age-brittle shoulders. Where was his survival instinct—the one that refused to understand victimization—when he needed it most?

  I knew his father—my grandfather, the opium addict who was doomed in his delusions of lost grandeur. I knew his son, Uncle Hien, also an addict. The way Grandpa Pham chained his son to a post like a dog to cure Uncle Hien of what he could not cure himself. Once, Uncle Hien’s street gang visited him at the house and slipped him a mini-saw in a baguette, something they must have read in a spy novel. Grandpa chased them into the street with a machete. My father was my grandfather’s sort of man, only he was cursed with a dose of sensitivity that surfaced in his old days. He was a giver, a ready sacrifice for his family.

  He was a worrier, a planner, a schemer, his brain an algorithm with too many variables which frequently crashed and never yielded the optimal solution. But, again, that was the best thing about him. He was a man of logic, a programmer with a program that could be rewritten and continually updated. He was an intellectual, the quintessential Vietnamese, a man given to passion and mountainous determination. He was a poet, a tireless, award-winning translator of French verse. He was enamored with classical guitar music. And although I never knew it during my school years when he was discouraging me from becoming a painter, he was himself a fair artist. All this in a man whose life was a mad saga: the first son of an abusive aristocrat, a teenager who lost his mother, a war and famine survivor, a refugee from the North Vietnamese Communists, a ditchdigger, a star academic, a disobedient son who wedded his beloved, a civic official, a soldier, an officer in the Nationalist Army, a government propagandist, a teacher of mathematics, a successful businessman, a prisoner in the labor and reeducation camp, an escapee from Communist Vietnam, a penniless refugee in America, a janitor, a college student, a programmer, a software engineer. Amid his travails, his daughter ran away, became a man, came home fourteen years later, and, at last, committed suicide.

  He was forever forced to rewrite his paradigm, even if only to survive. Now, looking down the road of his dwindling years, he found that his shifted philosophy—from the Vietnamese to the American way—laid the blame of what he interpreted as our collective misfortunes squarely on his shoulders. The easiest lesson had always eluded him. A survivor does not have the luxury of counting his blessings.

  After Grandpa Pham passed away, Father clipped a short newspaper article, hardly more than a blurb, taped it to the lampshade in the living room, and left it there for ten years. It was written by a man who, after his father’s death, regretted never having said I love you, Dad.

  44

  Viet-Kieu

  The closer I come to Nha Trang the more frequently I see group tours busing to local points of interest. The locals are familiar with the tourist traffic and don’t shout “Oy! Oy!” at foreigners. The main road loops around a mountain and enters the outskirts of the city from the south side. There is a shortcut, some high school kids point out to me, up the mountain and along the cliff. It’s a good sporting ride, they say I’m about to bag 120 miles today and have no wish to climb a mountain. I come into the city the easy way.

  Although the outlying area is a mirror image of all the other dusty little towns, the city center is far more developed than anything I’ve seen. I limp the battered bike through town, heading toward the water where the locals have told me there is lodging. Shady lanes unroll between banks of sprawling buildings set back behind brick fences. There’s a nice flavor here predating the Liberation of’75. I was just a kid then, but I remember Mom being very hip with her bellbottoms and buggy sunglasses. She must have wasted scores of film rolls in Nha Trang, her favorite city. The breeze is fresh, sweet, not salty like Phan Thiet. Out on the beachfront boulevard, I am suddenly in Waikiki! Someone has ripped it out of Hawaii and dropped it in downtown Nha Trang. A colossal skeleton of the Outrigger Hotel is being framed on the beach practically in the surf line. Tall, gleaming towers of glass and steel are already taking residence a stone’s throw from the water. The sandy stretch of beach is jammed with fancy restaurants, bars hopping with modern rock, jazz, and Vietnamese pop. Aromas of grilled food turn heads and sharpen appetites. Along the avenue, fat Europeans and Austral
ians pad about in thong bikinis, sheer sarongs, and Lycra shorts, dropping wads of dollars for seashells, corals, lacquered jewelry boxes, and bad paintings, loot, mementos, evidence.

  I take the cheapest room available to a Viet-kieu at a government-run hotel (for some reason, Danes and Germans get lower rates), jump through a cold shower, then get back on my bike to head to the Vietnamese part of Nha Trang, where the food is cheaper and better. I am ravenous. Diarrhea be damned. Tonight I’m going to eat anything I want. After nearly three months of sporadic intestinal troubles, I’m still hoping that my system will acclimatize. I’m Vietnamese after all, and these microorganisms once thrived in my gut as thoroughly as in any Vietnamese here.

  I eat dinner at an alley diner, nine tables crammed between two buildings lit with a couple of bare light bulbs. The family running the place says they are happy to have me, although they generally don’t like foreigners. Eat too little, drink too little, but talk too much, they complain. Foreigners like to sit and sit and talk. Vietnamese eat and get out. Lounging is done in coffeehouses and beer halls. No problem. I prove to them I’m Vietnamese. I down two large bottles of Chinese beer and gorge myself on a monstrous meal of grilled meat served with a soy-and-pork-fat gravy, wrapping the meat in rice paper, cucumber, mint, pickled daikon, sour carrot, fresh basil, lettuce, chili pepper, cilantro, and rice vermicelli. Then I clear out quickly. I go to a hotel to check on a friend who might be in town. As a tour guide, he is a regular at the hotel. The concierge confirms that my friend Cuong and his tour are in town. I leave him a note and wait for him at an icecream parlor down the street.

  “Hello! Andrew!”

  “Cuong!”

  I met him a few weeks after I arrived in Saigon. We bummed around the city several times with his girlfriends. I like him. We both agreed to check on each other when in Nha Trang or Vung Tau, both major cities on his itinerary.

  He skips across the street, penny-loafing around the dog shit as he dodges motorbikes. Cuong doesn’t wear sandals. No more. Not ever again. He told me, You can tell a Vietnamese by the way he wears his sandals. Is the stem firmly held between the toes? Or does the ball of the heel drag beyond the sandal? Do the sandals flap like loose tongues when he walks? Does he know there is mud between his toes? All this from a man who—in his own words—“dribbled away [his] youth as a roadside petrol-boy selling gasoline out of glass bottles, wiping down motorbikes, hustling for dimes, and playing barefoot soccer in the dirt.”