Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

  He smoothes his shirt, fingers the ironed pleats of his gray slacks, straightens his pin-striped blue tie with red polka dots. Then, grinning, he steps closer and pumps my hand enthusiastically. “Calvin,” he corrects me. “I’m sticking with your suggestion: Calvin. It’s easier for the foreigners to pronounce.” I’d come up with the name at his request. He wanted something that started with a “C” and was short and sharp and American.

  “You made it! You’re not hurt? No?” he says, patting me on the arm and looking me over. “A little thinner and darker, yes. Incredible. You biked all that way? Yes, yes, of course you did.”

  “You got my message?”

  “Of course. May I join you?” he queries, forever the Vietnamese gentleman. I fill him in on all that happened since I last saw him nearly two months ago. When a waitress brings him his chilled Coke—no ice, just like the way foreigners drink their soda—he thanks her. She looks at him, a little startled to hear a Vietnamese man uttering platitudes like Westerners. Calvin has picked up the habit because he finds it more genteel and civilized.

  I first made his acquaintance at a sidewalk café. He took me for a Japanese and wanted to practice his English. When I told him I was a Vietnamese from California, he was very uncomfortable using the term Viet-kieu, explaining that people said it with too many connotations. Sometimes, it was just a word, other times an insult or a term of segregation. “Vietnamese are Vietnamese if they believe they are,” he had said by way of explanation, and I liked him on the instant.

  By Saigon standards, Calvin is a yuppie who came into his own by the most romantic way possible—by the compulsion of a promise made to his mother on her deathbed. One afternoon, when we were touring the outer districts of Saigon on his motorbike, Calvin pointed to a pack of greyhound-lean young men, shirtless, volleying a plastic bird back and forth with their feet. “That was me. That’s how I was until I was twenty-two. Can you believe it? I threw away all my young years, working odd jobs and messing around. I just didn’t care.” His mother bequeathed him, her only child, a small sum, which he spent on English classes, not bothering to finish up high school. With what little remained, he bribed his way into a job as a hotel bellhop and worked his way up. He entered a special school for tour guides. After three years of intense training, he makes four hundred dollars a month plus two hundred in tips. Now, twenty-nine, single, and rich even by Saigon standards, he fares better than college grads who are blessed if they can command two hundred dollars a month. His biggest regret: “I wish my mother could see me now.”

  Calvin sips his Coke and plucks a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, the American cigarette one of his main props for marking himself one of the upwardly mobile. “I’m down to half a pack a day,” he mumbles apologetically, offering me a smoke. I decline. He puts his cigarette down saying: “Dirty, dirty Vietnamese habit.” Calvin keeps a list of “dirty Vietnamese habits” and steels himself against them.

  I tell him that Americans used to call cigarettes “white slavers.” He considers that for a moment then smirks. “That has a double meaning for us, doesn’t it.” He counts the cigarettes remaining in the pack. “Last one today,” he announces. He seems to want my approval so I nod. Vindicated, he ignites the last of his daily nicotine allowance. He sighs the smoke downwind. “Tell me. Tell me everything about your trip.”

  As I recount the events since I last saw him, Calvin grows increasingly excited, digging me more for the details of Vietnam than for the actual mechanics of bike touring. How did the police treat you? Hanoi people are more formal than Southerners, aren’t they? You think Uncle Ho’s body is a hoax? What’s the countryside like? Is it pretty like the Southern country? He flames another cigarette and orders us a round of beer. By our third round, he has chain-smoked into a second pack of Marlboros.

  Late in the night, when I am sapped of tales from the road, Calvin, who is beer-fogged, leans back in his chair and asks, “America is like a dream, isn’t it?”

  After all I’ve seen, I agree. “Sure.”

  We contemplate the beer in our glasses. I ask him, “Do you want to go there?” I don’t know why I ask him this. Maybe, believing that he is my equivalent in Vietnam, I want him to say he really loves the country and that it is magical, wonderful in ways I have yet to imagine. More powerful, more potent than the West.

  Calvin sounds annoyed. “Of course. Who wouldn’t?” He pauses, taking long, pensive drags on his cigarette. “But perhaps only to visit. To see, understand-no?”

  “Why?”

  “Simple. Here … here, I am a king.” He leans over the table, shaking the cigarette at me. “In America you, I mean all you Viet-kieu, are guests. And guests don’t have the same rights as hosts.” He sits back, legs crossed at the knees, and throws a proprietary arm over the city. “At least, here, I am king. I belong. I am better than most Vietnamese.”

  “No, we’re not guests. We’re citizens. Permanent. Ideally we are all equal. Equal rights,” I insert lamely, the words, recalled from elementary school history lessons, sounding hollow.

  “Right, but do you FEEL like an American? Do you?”

  Yes! Yes! Yes, I do. I really do, I want to shout it in his face. Already, the urge leaves a bad taste in my mouth. “Sometimes, I do. Sometimes, I feel like I am a real American.”

  I wish I could tell him. I don’t mind forgetting who I am, but I know he wouldn’t understand. I don’t mind being looked at or treated just like another American, a white American. No, I don’t mind at all. I want it. I like it. Yet every so often when I become really good at tricking myself, there is always that inevitable slap that shocks me out of my shell and prompts me to reassess everything.

  How could I tell him my shame? How could I tell him about the drive-bys where some red-faced white would stick his head out of his truck, giving me the finger and screaming, “Go home, Chink!” Could I tell him it chilled me to wonder what would happen if my protagonist knew I was Vietnamese? What if his father had died in Vietnam? What if he was a Vietnam vet? Could I tell Calvin about the time my Vietnamese friends and I dined in a posh restaurant in Laguna Beach in Southern California? A white man at the next table, glaring at us, grumbled to his wife, “They took over Santa Ana. And now they’re here. This whole state is going to hell.” They was us Vietnamese. Santa Ana was now America’s Little Saigon.

  Could I tell Calvin I was initiated into the American heaven during my first week Stateside by eight black kids who pulverized me in the restroom, calling me Viet Cong? No. I grew up fighting blacks, whites, and Chicanos. The whites beat up the blacks. The blacks beat up the Chicanos. And everybody beat up the Chinaman whether or not he was really an ethnic Chinese. These new Vietnamese kids were easy pickings, small, bookish, passive, and not fluent in English.

  So, we congregate in Little Saigons, we hide out in Chinatowns and Japantowns, blending in. We huddle together, surrounding ourselves with the material wealth of America, and wave our star-spangled banners, shouting: “We’re Americans. We love America.”

  I cannot bring myself to confront my antagonists. Cannot always claim my rights as a naturalized citizen. Cannot, for the same reason, resist the veterans’ pleas for money outside grocery stores. Cannot armor myself against the pangs of guilt at every homeless man wearing army fatigues. Sown deep in me is a seed of discomfort. Maybe shame. I see that we Vietnamese Americans don’t talk about our history. Although we often pretend to be modest and humble as we preen our successful immigrant stories, we rarely admit even to ourselves the circumstances and the cost of our being here. We elude it all like a petty theft committed ages ago. When convenient, we take it as restitution for what happened to Vietnam.

  Calvin senses my discomfort. It is his talent, a marked skill of his trade. He looks away, reaching for yet another cigarette to cover the silence I opened. He asks me the one question that Vietnamese throughout Vietnam have tried to broach obliquely: “Do they look down on Vietnamese in America? Do they hate you?”

&nb
sp; I don’t want to dwell on that. Vietnamese believe that white Americans are to Viet-kieu as Viet-kieu are to Vietnamese, each one a level above the next, respectively. And, somehow, this shames me, maybe because I cannot convince myself that it is entirely true or false. I divert the thrust and ask him, “You are Westernized. You know how different foreigners are from Vietnamese. How do you feel showing them around the country?”

  “I like the work. Many of them are very nice. Curious about our culture. I like the Australians most. Rowdy and lots of trouble, but they respect Vietnamese.”

  “But don’t you see the reactions on their faces when they see our squalor? Don’t you hear the things they say about us? Don’t tell me you’ve never heard it.”

  He looks uncomfortable, drawing deep from his nicotine stick, sighing the smoke to the stars. Then to his credit and my everlasting respect for him, he says quietly, facing the sky, “I do. I can’t help it but I do. I take them out on the Saigon streets, you know, the poor parts because they ask me. They want pictures. I see them flinch at the beggars, the poverty of Vietnamese. The chicken-shacks we live in.”

  A wordless lull falls between us. We’re both drunk. I am irritated at having to delve into a subject I avoid, and feeling mean-spirited I have goaded him onto equally disconcerting ground.

  “It’s very hard being a tour guide. Sometimes I feel like a pimp.” He switches into his tour-guide English: “Here, look at this, sir. Yes, ma’am, these are the average Vietnamese. Yes, they are poor. Yes, sir. Here is our national monument. Very big. Very important to Vietnamese. You impressed? No, not so big?” He shrugs, saying, “I know they’ve got bigger monuments in their countries. Older, more important. What do our little things mean to them?”

  The silence tells me we are moving too far into no-man’s-land. One more cigarette. More beer. Tusking the smoke out of his nostrils, he seems to brace himself, gathering force like a wave, building before cresting white. As his beliefs come barreling out, I know the crushing impact of his words will stay with me, for in them I catch a glimpse of myself and of the true Cuong, the Cuong that came before and is deeper than the suave Calvin facing me. “Vietnamese aren’t ashamed of our own poverty. We’re not ashamed of squatting in mud huts and sleeping on rags. There is no shame in being poor. We were born into it just as Westerners are born white. The Westerners are white as we are yellow. There is already a difference between us. Our poverty is minor in the chasm that already exists. A small detail. The real damning thing is the fact that there are Viet-kieu, our own brothers, skin of our skin, blood of our blood, who look better than us, more civilized, more educated, more wealthy, more genteel. Viet-kieu look kingly next to the average Vietnamese. Look at you, look at me. You’re wearing old jeans and I’m wearing a suit, but it’s obvious who … who is superior. Can’t you see? We look like monkeys because you make us look like monkeys just by your existence.”

  “Is this truly how Vietnamese see us Viet-kieu?”

  “Some call you the lost brothers. Look at you. Living in America has lightened your skin, made you forget your language. You have tasted Western women and you’re probably not as attracted to Vietnamese women anymore. You eat nutritious Western food and you are bigger and stronger than us. You know better than to smoke and drink like Vietnamese. You know exercise is good so you don’t waste your time sitting in cafés and smoking your hardearned money away. Someday, your blood will mix so well with Western blood that there will be no difference between you and them. You are already lost to us.”

  I listen with dismay as his observations fall on me like a sentence, but I can tell in the back of his mind he is saying: And I want to be more like you because that’s where the future is. He must suspect I am doubting what he has told me the first time our paths crossed: “Vietnamese are Vietnamese if they believe they are.”

  Calvin and I bid each other good night, each going his own way He has to resolve a fracas of intoxicated Australians in his charge back at the hotel. In our drunkenness, our conversation crossed forbidden boundaries and we are both depressed. Maybe it is just the beer wearing off. I pedal down to the beach for some sea air. As I coast along the ocean boulevard, a gorgeous girl, unusually tall for a Vietnamese, dressed in the traditional ao dai like a college student, tails me on her expensive motorbike, a Honda Dream, the Vietnamese Cadillac. Hello, she says in English. Hello, I smile. She thinks I’m Japanese or Korean. How are you, she asks me. Good, I say—always glad to talk to students eager to practice their English. And you, I say to keep the conversation going, how are you? You are very pretty, she tells me. No, I chuckle, standing now with her on the dark sidewalk, you are pretty. Very pretty. Pretty enough, I fancy silently to myself, for me to fall madly in love with. My heart dances ahead of me with improbable possibilities. Wild schemes streak through my head ratting out ways for me to stay in Nha Trang longer to make her acquaintance. Maybe get a job here. There are so many foreign companies, it should be easy. And on and on. Hopeful. I am smiling.

  Then she says, “You go with me?”

  “Yes, sure. Where? Anywhere! Let’s go!”

  “You go with me very cheap. You go. Me very cheap, very good. You go with me very cheap. Very, very cheap. I make you happy.”

  My smile feels waxy. I turn away, looking at the surf rolling on the white sand, the moon pearling us all. She parrots it over and over.

  No, yes, maybe, later, I must meet a friend now, see you soon, bye, I blurt for the sake of blurting and I ride away from the tourist boardwalk with my money, my opportunities, my privileges, my life. I look back once and see her glossy cherry lips mouthing those words to me, a red wound in the neon night of Nha Trang.

  45

  Chi – Me

  It was dark.

  Christmas lights winked merry in the neighborhood.

  But we felt no cheer.

  It was only Chi-Minh and me, our final moment. We were ambling down broken sidewalks in the cold.

  I said something. Hard times, he said, hard times. Dead leaves crunched beneath our feet. Wood smoke trapped the night but there was no fireplace warmth in the air. You all right? I asked, trying to catch his eyes in the gloom.

  Slow, heavy steps. Sighs. Silence. Our hands deep in our empty pockets. Big dark trees blotting out the stars.

  Minh, you remember the star fruits we used to eat on the roof? —Yeah.—Me, too. I thought I caught him smiling. But it was dark.—Star fruit and chili-salt, good wasn’t it? he said.—Yes, pretty good. You know, they’re importing star fruits: you can buy them in any supermarket now.—But, he shook his head, not as good as the star fruits from Grandma’s tree.—No, I admitted, never that good.

  You, okay?—Yeah.—You sure?—Hard times, just figuring things out.

  We came to an intersection. The streetlamp had burnt out. Winter leaves piled the gutters like old letters from forgotten seasons. Headlights swept across us. Abruptly, we felt naked. We should have made the crossing, or we should have turned the corner. But we didn’t. We stood there uncertain. I should have placed a hand on his shoulder.

  Lonely, he said.

  Your ex … ?

  Just figuring things out.

  Take care of yourself, okay?

  Yeah.

  We gotta hang out together more. Soon, okay?

  Yeah, sure.

  It was my season of unraveling. And his as well. I couldn’t remember all, what it was he said. Nor what I said. Maybe he wished I’d said something. And I him. Perhaps we should have shared our troubled hearts. But in the end—my long-staying memory—I heard only the wavering catch in his voice.

  Some nights I lie in moonlit fields, thinking of him, star fruits, and dying angels.

  46

  Blue-Peace

  The road goes on and on before me and there is nothing to do but to get on it and push the pedals round and round. The days march at me single file. I have grown accustomed to the pocked asphalt rolling beneath my worn tires. Dysentery has left me on a lasting high, a
feeling of someone whose fever has just broken and is taking his first breath of fresh air. It seems I have gone through all the colors, through all the land I knew.

  After Nha Trang, the land dries up. The sky hurts with a whispering blue. The air chafes, a marine tinge, rough on its hot grainy edge. Down by the strung-out coast, the sea lies open, three shades deeper than the bright above. The road is black and broad, curving round sandstone mountains and cutting straight through the flat beige stretches. Suong rong—dragon bones, squatty Vietnamese cacti—cast the vast empty into a shallow prickly graveyard. They say dragons came here to die. The land scorched itself in sorrow over the great beasts’ passing.

  Somewhere near Ca Na, I duck into the thatched shade of a roadside café perched on stone pilings by the water. A waitress brings me an espresso—Vietnamese chicory-roasted coffee, a gift, a legacy of the colonial French. A tool of subjugation, a crutch in the Vietnamese progress, Calvin had fumed at me, hating the image of idle, jobless Vietnamese men lounging in white plastic chairs, espresso presses before them, the black drops oozing down painstakingly He had forsworn this rite of his countrymen, opting for the teas of the older ways. I sip the mud, preferring it without the sweetened condensed milk Vietnamese adore. It is good, bitter, but wholesome like this desert shore.