Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

  There is magic in this place: I could be anywhere. The turquoise idyll, the tittering waves. On the mustard sand, coils of bleached rope lace broken seashells and bamboo crab cages. A skinny sand-colored dog woofs, warning the boys against sticking their heads in the traps. Way out, a one-man fishing boat sputters, zippering white on blue.

  For some unexplainable reason, I leave my bike and belongings at the café without concern and run down to the beach, my backpack heavy with beer, candies, and cupcakes I bought from bus-stop vendors. I stroll along the chewed-up coast, boulder-hopping from one beach to the next for the sheer joy of it. Chi and I had done this long ago during one of our family vacations. We scrabbled along the rocky shore and climbed up a cliff where we looked down on the hulking wreck of a mighty freighter jutting out of the jade water. The waves frothed white around it, and, in the westering sun, the rusted hull had this bright coppery color that looked like cheap orange soda held against light. Chi said it was the most beautiful color she had ever seen.

  The crab-cage kids find me napping in the sun. I hand out candies and cakes. One of the boys grabs two cupcakes and runs off chattering. Soon he comes back, a watermelon balanced on his shoulder. A girl uses a sharp stone to open the melon. We eat it in gobs, scooping out the red foam with our fingers, sticky juice running down our necks. I hold a watermelon-seed-spitting contest, awarding prizes to all contenders.

  They spit the black seeds, they shoot them in sprays of saliva. They swallow their ammo, giggling and reminding me of the first time I won a watermelon-seed-spitting contest. Decades ago at a Christian summer camp, I flew a seed a magical thirty-two feet, five inches to claim a gold medal—my bursting joy made from the cap of a babyfood jar. After two years in the States, I had learned that I could earn forbearance, if not acceptance, from my peers if I made myself unobtrusive. Mediocre grades, adequate athletics. A moderate disappointment to the teachers. So it was special for me—the only nonwhite kid at a camp of three hundred—to receive their applause. I remember thinking then that maybe this America wasn’t so bad after all. And that the last time I had seen a crowd of Asian faces I was in Vietnam.

  But now, I miss the white, the black, the red, the brown faces of America. I miss their varied shapes, their tumultuous diversity, their idealistic search for racial equality, their bumbling but wonderful pioneering spirit. I miss English words in my ears, miss the way the language rolled off my tongue so naturally. I miss its poetry. Somewhere along the way, my search for roots has become my search for home—a place I know best even though there are those who would have me believe otherwise.

  Phan Thiet, the town of my birth, the end of my journey, lies only a few hours’ ride away, but the marching drums that have driven me onward for a year now have abruptly quieted. An unexpected lull. The finish line seems unimportant, secondary, symbolic. So when the sun is setting behind the desert, I do as I did—it seems now—so long ago: I lay out my bedroll on the sand and wait for the stars to wake. First time in Vietnam no one invades my camp. I am alone.

  A year ago, in the days immediately before I met Tyle, I had found myself camping on a deserted beach in Baja. One morning, I woke on that sandy rim of the Pacific with a sea tanginess upon my lips and the chill of the northerly in my bones. I opened my eyes and it struck me a silent-thunderous blow: the solidity of the sand, the futile passion of the surf, the pensive vastness of the sea, the swollen anger of the sky, all a chaos of gray.

  A powerful melancholy clamped over me and cheated away my warmth. I curled in my blanket, staring at the fisting sky. In a fleeting moment, a rhythm paced through, the reason for all the reasons I had been searching. Like turning to catch a movement seen out of the corner of my eye, I reached for that sublime. But it was gone, fleeing through my fingers like shiny flecks of sand in a receding tide. I stood on the shore secure, comforted by an unwordable glimpse that was already fading into a hunch.

  This feeling is with me now. Three nights and days, I sleep and play by the ocean. During the day, I look out on the water and let the memories roll over me. I swim in the ocean of morning gray and wade in the surf of evening gold. The blue here is so vast, no war could ever measurably sap it, not even the one in me. My faults, all my shortcomings, my wrongs against Chi-Minh, pale away, disintegrating, in this desert-ocean-peace. I remember the joy of our being near each other. I know my love for her now, refelt my love for her then and all the love I felt for her in the between years. It isn’t forgiveness I seek. All my sins, my sorrows but a drop of ink in this blue vastness.

  And my standing here and all the roads opening before me are not my tribute to Chi but her gifts to me.

  I know now Crazy Ronnie was right. Hugging herself in the premature August chill, she stood at the foot of the stairwell of her urban hovel, bidding me farewell: “The perfection of intention. In the end, it is all that matters.” Just then the sun burned through the trees and baked the stucco facade of the apartment, and she was engulfed in this lustrous glow that I knew would be how I shall always remember her. And although I did not understand it then, I knew that what she said chimed with significance.

  I wade into a blue-green pool, the warm water lolls soft and clean against me. I swim, rejoicing in my aloneness. Someone cries from the beach. A-lo! A-lo! An old woman laughs at me. I grin. She shucks her rubber sandals, stumbles in fully clothed, fat arms jiggling above her head, waving greetings. A-lo! Okay! Okay! she yells, exuberant.

  I laugh at the sight of her, a portly grandmother splashing like a child, her white peasant shirt billowing in the water. We stand on flat stones, chest deep across from each other, beaming. She says something in English, but I can’t understand her, so I keep smiling and nodding. She laughs, I laugh with her. She tries a phrase in French. I shake my head. Never thinking I could understand her, she prattles in Vietnamese, It is beautiful, no? Very beautiful, very peaceful here, isn’t it?

  I smile.

  I smile at her from my anonymity, refusing to answer in our common tongue. I don’t want her to leave. I don’t want to disappoint herwith my commonality, to remind her of our shared history. So, I let her interpret my half-truths. At this I am good, for I am a mover of betweens. I slip among classifications like water in cupped palms, leaving bits of myself behind. I am quick and deft, for there is no greater fear than the fear of being caught wanting to belong. I am a chameleon. And the best chameleon has no center, no truer sense of self than what he is in the instant.

  No guilt. I realize suddenly, looking into her joy-gushing face. We stand on separate islands, nothing between us except our designs. And the perfection of our intention is enough. We: friends sharing a sea bath. Our skein of history casts no shade on this moment. I wish at once Tyle were here in my shoes under this sky. Maybe he would understand that his past wrongs can be mended with the totality of his regrets, a pure desire that things might have been different, a wish of wellness for the survivors. Forgiveness is a hollow gift when there is no mountain to move as compensation for the wrongs. For our truths change with time. There is nothing else. No mitigating circumstances and no power to undo the sins. No was. Only is. Between us, there is but a thin line of intention.

  Epilogue

  “You-me: one. Not two. One. No difference,” Son shouts at me in his best English, driving his imperative into my soul with the sheer force of his conviction.

  And I shout back at him: “Yes, Brother! Yes! Yes, no difference!”

  We are mad-drunk. Hung is looking on, smiling, sweating beer. At our feet, three milk crates of empty Tiger bottles clutter the sidewalk. Traffic whizzing by, riders lying on the horn as always. I have made it back to Saigon penniless and Son and Hung are giving me the best farewell party a guy can wish for. The girls—Son’s girls—dropped by earlier and knocked off a couple of Tigers apiece, all four of them, before going back to work.

  “Come on, you have time. Just an hour, eh?” Son is begging to give me a parting present: a roll in the sheets with one of his girls—my pick
. My plane leaves in ninety minutes.

  “Thanks Son, but I’ve got to go. I’m too drunk, my friend.”

  “Shit! Fuck! Shit!” Son sputters. Then he apologizes as though he is responsible for my inebriated state.

  Hung, grinning like the Kitchen God, is mopping his face with a roll of toilet paper that doubles as napkin dispenser in his beerhouse. Hung tambourines his hand and croons, “Unbearable.” He laughs merrily, all game. “Don’t worry, I’ll get you to the airport on time. Let’s go see our little sisters. They like you a lot. They think you are one sick, crazy guy.”

  The alcohol has uncaged my lust, made me dangerous. I know if I ever step into that massage parlor again, if I ever set eyes on Son’s harem again, I’ll stay in Vietnam and drink and whore my days away with Hung and Son because it is too easy. I like them too much. I could burn up a decade here as easily as flaming a whole matchbook at once.

  I shake my head.

  “What will you do in America?” Son asks, reverting back to English as he usually does when he is serious.

  The answer falls on me, a drop of water from a blue sky: “Be a better American.”

  Son just looks at me, his face unreadable, and after a moment I find myself grinning, feeling inexplicably good. I struggle to my feet and clasp Son’s hands in mine. His hands are dark, soft like an old woman’s; the fight—the iron of the Green Beret—has gone out of them. I will probably never see him again. U.S. Immigration approved his papers because he spent five years in a labor camp for being a Green Beret, but the Vietnamese bureaucrats won’t let him go. They say once he arrives in America they have no guarantee he will support his nine illegitimate children stranded in Vietnam. His old nemesis has a chain around his neck and he knows it. Son accepts his lot, a lover of life.

  “So long, Son.”

  “Do not say good-bye, my friend Andrew.” Son stalls me with a raised hand. “You are not gone from me. I have you in my heart.”

  I straddle the Vespa behind Hung, who insists on taking me to the airport. Son doesn’t budge an inch. I doubt he could. He slouches in the low beach chair, his legs splayed out on the concrete before him like an overturned frog, his massive hands dangling from his wrists dripping over the plastic armrests. Impotent. His vitality seems to have ebbed suddenly from him. Then he smiles this half-grin which I have come to adore greatly, and I know all the wickedness, the mislaid idealism, the precocious humor are alive within that withered shell of history. We pull away and I look around. Son is not getting smaller. He is still grinning with half of his face. My waylaid Buddha.

  It takes the Boeing 747 twenty-two hours to bring me back to where I had started running a year ago. Our captain announces our arrival in San Francisco and the cabin begins to boil with the nervous energy of nearly a hundred immigrating Vietnamese. They have come under a U.S.—sanctioned program for those who had served America during the war and had been imprisoned for three years or more by Communist Vietnam. Out of concern for these first-time fliers, the flight attendants seated them in the center seats far from the windows, which might make them nauseous. They are jumpy, anxious, like caged animals smelling freedom, in a panic to get a glimpse of the promised land. The FASTEN SEAT BELT sign is on, but they scoot up and down the aisle like children jostling for a look at the Christmas tree, clambering into empty seats and leaning over other passengers to get to the windows. One older Vietnamese man, whose seat is across the aisle from mine, is practically in my lap. I insist he take my window seat. We peer through the Plexiglas together.

  Below, the curling headland of Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco, comes into view. It is late February, the hills lush, almost tropical if it weren’t for the chill. I remember that finger of land and the punishing, dangerous road that climbs along that enchanting coast. The nights I slept on the side of the road. The hundred friends I made along the way, the Vietnam vets, the hippies, the housewives, the fading retirees. All the ordinary, the extraordinary people who took me into their homes, their lives even, for an evening. I can taste again my stifling fears, my irrepressible joys of struggling up this coast. Below me, all my sweetest memories of America.

  “This is America?” the man asks me in a reverent tone, eyes never leaving the window, nose pressed to the glass like a child wishing himself into a baker’s shop.

  “Yes, Brother,” I smile. “Welcome home.”

  Praise for Andrew X. Pham’s

  Catfish and Mandala

  “At once lyrical, smart, unafraid, and provocative,

  Andrew X. Pham … gives Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux,

  even Jon Krakauer a run for their money.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “[Pham] fuels his memoir and travelogue, full of both

  comic and painful adventures, with a broad appreciation

  of the variety and vividness of creation. The people,

  the landscapes, the poverty, and grime of Vietnam live for

  us through him, a man full of sadness and unrequited

  longing and love … . [A] powerful memoir of grief

  and a doomed search for cultural identity.”

  —Vince Passaro, Elle

  “In his passionate telling, his travelogue acquires the universality of a bildungsroman.”

  —The New Yorker

  “One of the unlikeliest seriocomic travel adventures on record.”

  —Outside

  “An insightful look at Vietnam today and also a powerful

  examination of the crucible of cultural identity.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “A remarkable, engaging book … singular and absolutely mesmerizing.”

  —Multicultural Review

  Acknowledgments

  Where do our stories end and others’ begin? Are the borders negotiable?

  My eternal gratitude to my parents, Thong and Anh Pham, for their sacrifices, their perseverance, their love, their good intentions. And may they forgive me for writing this book.

  For letting me tell our stories, my thanks to my aunt Hai Dung, my sister Kay, and my brothers Huy, Tien, and Hien.

  I am deeply indebted to Stephanie D. Stephens, who was there when I penned the first as well as the last sentence of Catfish and Mandala. She single-handedly edited the manuscript—the only person to have read the entire work before I sent it out to literary agents. Her encouragement, enthusiasm, and faith in this project sustained me through some difficult passages.

  For their friendships, I thank Deborah Hansen and Lisa McKenzie. Because we had agreed on it, thank you, Jessa Vartanian. To my devoted friend Pamela Andreatta, all my best wishes, my fondest affection.

  My humble gratitude to the Nguyen family for everything, and to all the wonderful people I met on the road who opened their hearts and homes to me: Patty Smythe, Sasha Kaufman, Jim Faulkner, Dianna Hoffman, Marty Nelson, Donna Bronson, Son, Calvin Luong, Tam Nguyen, and Uncle Tu. And to yet countless others whose names I have lost, forgotten along the way.

  I am grateful to my friend and longtime newspaper editor, Lorraine Gengo, who gave me my first chance at freelance writing, and her successor, Sharan Street, for being a friend.

  Many thanks to my beautiful agent, Jandy Nelson, for her unwavering faith and all the beers we drank together, and my editor, John Glusman, for his sensitivity.

  CATFISH AND MANDALA. Copyright © 1999 by Andrew X. Pham. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.

  www.picadorusa.com

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  please contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin’s Press.

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  First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus
and Giroux

  Designed by Abby Kagan

  eISBN 9781429979924

  First eBook Edition : January 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pham, Andrew X.

  Catfish and Mandala : a two-wheeled voyage through the landscape and memory of Vietnam / Andrew X. Pham.

  p. cm.

  1. Pham, Andrew X., 1967— . 2. Vietnamese Americans—Biography. 3. Pham, Andrew X., 1967——Journeys. I. Title.

  E184.V53P455 1999

  915.9704’44—dc21

  [B]

  99-22711 CIP