Authors: Andrew X. Pham

Catfish and Mandala (11 page)

BOOK: Catfish and Mandala

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Alley-World

I sit at the table with my bicycle, sweating. The midmorning breeze curling in from the alley singes. Granduncle Nguyen brings me a hot cup of espresso sweetened with condensed milk. He has made me one every morning since I came back to Saigon. It is a considerate courtesy which he can ill afford and which I cannot drink because it is too sweet. Telling him would be an unbearable breach of manners. So I bow saying,
Thank you, Granduncle. You shouldn't have. Mmmm, it's delicious.
And dump it down the toilet.

I take a cup of tea up a creaky ladder to the sun-drenched roof. In tropical Vietnam, the roof serves the same function as the American basement: a junk depot. I spider across the ramshackle storage shed, rainwater cisterns, and garden, entangling myself in a maze of laundry lines. Toward the front of the building, right up against the barbed wire that discourages burglars from prowling the rooftop, I duck under the wet laundry and settle down on a large old U.S. Army ammunition box, rusted in jungle-green paint, the rectangular kind that makes a good field stool. I rearrange the wet clothes into a shelter to soften the sun's sting. Under cotton underwear and fake Levi's, between a potted pepper plant and a tomato plant, I sip my tea and watch life unfolding in the alley. Nostalgia descends on me like a
sweet sickness. I have done this often, long ago in my tower above the alley of my childhood.

My room overlooked the lane behind our house. Back then, the city streets forbidden to me, I spent the bulk of my childhood in a nook, scarcely larger than a closet, but hardly big enough to be called a room. I had fancied it a nest or a sort of treehouse, for it was built into the landing of the stairwell between the first and second floors, almost a secret space, above the kitchen and below the bathroom. It was six by eight feet with a single bare light bulb screwed into a socket on a low ceiling I could touch standing on a footstool. In the far corner, two small windows were set together at a right angle like a contracted bay window so that they jutted out the back of the building, giving a prime view of all the happenings up and down the alley.

Two bookcases lined the opposing walls. The shelves sagged with books, some mine, most my father's. A portable AM radio sat next to the pen and inkwell on a board nailed into the wall nearest the windows to serve as a writing ledge. I used the varnished flat top of a wooden trunk set against the fourth wall as a napping spot. In the sunny season, the wooden planks were cool to the touch, but my sweat would make the varnish sticky. In the rainy season, the planks were cold and I would cover them with a straw mat.

From the windowsill, my favorite reading spot, I watched, smelled, and listened to the alley-world outside. A stone's throw down the path, the alley dead-ended at the side of a sooty building with a big dark door. That was where my uncle Hung, who stayed with us months at a time, sent me bodily out of the house, with a smack behind the head and a boot on the rear, to fetch his favorite snacksâbeer, cigarettes, and ginger-roasted dog meat.

They dragged five or six dogs in there each day. The dogs barked, howled often through the night. In the morning, they hung the dogs just inside the door by their hind legs and used a cleaver to cut their throats. Sometimes the wind skirled in the alley and brought the reek of guts and blood mingled with smoke to my window.

But there were many other odors of the market that came up
from the alley. A dumpling bar crowded a corner three doors down from ours. A fat woman sat in the center surrounded by four big pans on which she poured, steamed, and rolled pork dumplings like crepes. Two low bars fenced in the woman and her daughter, who helped from behind. One the other side, customers crouched on footstools and ate her fresh dumplings with garlic-chili fishsauce. Across from the alley, the Chinese medicine shop, a narrow one-door one-window establishment, smelled of pungent herbs and faintly sweet medicines.

Then there were those who brought their business to the alley in baskets to sell as they sat on wood blocks, backs to the walls. Up and down the crowded alley shoppers, pressing past each other, bargained with vegetable vendors, tofu women, noodle sellers, sausage makers, fortune-tellers, and trinket merchants. The aromas of food battered the stink of the alley. Above the din of the market were the shouts of playing children.

As a child, I spent all my time in this room, especially when my parents locked me in the house for days while they went out of town on business trips. It wasn't too bad because I had a friend. She was my age and she lived on the first floor of the building behind ours. It had a folding metal rail door that her parents always kept locked. At night, when the shops closed and the alley merchants had gone home, she came to the front. Hands on the bars and face looking out between them, she talked with me.

“What happened at school today?” she hollered up across the alley.

“Not much. The teacher hit my hand with the ruler.”

“Again? I thought you studied.”

“I did. I always get so nervous in front of class I can't recite my lesson. What about you?”

She grinned. “I got good marks for my lessons. They don't hit us so much at my school.”

“I wish I could go to your school. I don't belong in mine.”

She went to a public school and so did all my brothers and older sister. I was the first son, so my parents put aside a small fortune to enroll me in the best school in the country, a private French institution for
boys. All the other kids were rich and smart. I was neither. My clothes were always older than theirs and they all had private tutors.

I turned on my radio, the volume way up, and we sang along and danced. Then she shifted her television so I could watch cartoons with my father's pocket binoculars. She was my best friend, although we never met beyond her bars and my window.

Things changed after the country fell. Mom and I came back to the house after our imprisonment. Chi, Huy, and Hien boarded with Grandma Le. Tien went back to live with Grandma and Grandpa Pham. I stayed with Mom. She busied herself with getting Dad out of prison. We always went out to Minh Luong Prison and Labor Camp together, but I stayed home alone when she went to various cities to petition for Dad's release. As part of her preparation, she cooked me her “magic pot” of catfish. She'd take half of the fish to eat on her journey and leave me the clay pot with the other half, giving me the choicest meat, the part just behind the head.

She locked me inside our three-story building and said, “By the time you finish this pot, I'll be home.”

So I ate it fast. It was all gone in two days. There was nothing left in the clay pot except sauce, bones, and the big catfish head. I had saved every scrap of fish, bones and all, like Mom told me, and put them back into the pot after every meal. Then I would give it a squirt of fishsauce and bring the pot to a boil. For the next meal, I would add a little water, maybe a dash of pepper, and boil it again. When there was no more meat, the pot magically kept on yielding plenty of peppery, fishy, sweet, salty, buttery sauce, tasty enough to be poured on plain white rice for a meal. And sure enough, Mom came home before the clay-pot catfish ran out of magic.

After tea, I bike out to Ly Thai To Boulevard where we used to live. The street has become one of Saigon's major arteries. Nothing looks familiar. The buildings have been renumbered, but some have the new numbers, some the old numbers, some none at all. The block is mangy with signs and billboards, and the whole place looks, smells,
and feels grimy with oil and soot. On the third pass, I find our house. It has been converted into a community health clinic, a big Red Cross sign out front.

My heart dips at the sight of it. The front of the building has been demolished and rebuilt farther back to make room for motorbike parking. I peek inside. There have been some major structural modifications. The head nurse greets me at the door. When I tell her that my family once lived here, she expresses concern that I might be one of those Viet-kieu returning to reclaim properties the government or squatters seized. I assure her I am only here for my childhood memories. Sighing relief, she tours me through the clinic. The building seems new, small, strange. There is nothing left of my youth. After fifteen minutes, she returns to work, leaving me milling about the house trying toâas she puts itâ
“visit the humble life that came before.”

The staff and the patients begin to stare, which makes me feel misplaced. What was I thinking? Did I really believe that coming here would bring back dead memories? I guess I was hoping something miraculous would happen. Something spontaneous that would make everything all right and justify all the hardships I have gone through. I had been banking on a stupid Hollywood ending, too embarrassed to admit as much to myself.

Too many things changed. Too much time passed. I'm different now, a man with a pocketful of unconnected but terribly vivid memories. I was looking to dredge up what I'd long forgotten. Most of all, I am wishing for something to fasten all these gems, maybe something to hold them in a continuity that I can comprehend.

I thank the nurse and step outside. On the sidewalk, it feels infinitely odd that I am standing in the same place where I had played as a boy, twenty years ago. Here, I had waited for my school bus. Locked inside the house most of the day, I yearned to play on this hot pavement, my domain. Of the people who crossed my kingdom, I remember one peasant woman most poignantly.

It was the day before the fall of Saigon. She had paused in front of my house. Her plastic sandal had slipped off her foot. She lowered to the ground the two baskets that hung from the ends of the bamboo staff she shouldered. In one basket, a baby wailed. Quieting her child
with a sliver of sugarcane, she tipped back the rim of her conical hat fashioned of palm leaves and dragged a soiled white sleeve across her brow. Fear flickered over her face as she looked behind.

Hundreds of people were fleeing the column of smoke rising to the gray sky. Some came on bicycles laden with belongings. Most scrambled on foot, peasants with possessions in their baskets. Fathers pushed carts. Little children rode piggyback on their older siblings. Mothers lugged bundles with young ones in tow.

A few cars, horns blaring, plowed a path through the mass that spilled into the street. When the cars ran out of gas, drivers abandoned their vehicles and fled with their families on foot. Children screamed. Gunshots crackled sporadically somewhere in the neighborhood. People shouted, urging each other to hurry. Some pushed against the tide, calling the names of those they'd lost in flight, craning their heads above the crowd. Clothing, baggage, carts, baskets, and bicycles littered the street, left where their owners had dropped them.

The scene frightened me. I ventured onto the sidewalk and asked the woman with her baby where she was going.

“To the harbor,” she said. “There are American ships there. It's over. The Viet Cong are coming!” Her answer panicked her. The baby bawled.

She was thirsty. I fetched her a glass of water. She asked me why my family wasn't leaving. Was it because we owned land and this house?

I told her I didn't know. I only knew my mother cried this morning when my uncle told her the country fell. Maybe we were leaving, too. Where, I didn't know, but we were going somewhere. My mother had been packing all day and my father had been gone since this morning to bring all my brothers back home from grandparents' house and uncle's house where they boarded. Even without the madness outside, I knew it was a big occasion because I couldn't remember the last time that we were all under one roof.

I would have gone on, but she wasn't listening. As suddenly as she had stopped, the woman shouldered her load and her baby and hurried away, her sandals slapping on the concrete.

A fat, dark woman comes out of the building next to the clinic and asks me, “
Uncle, what are you looking for?
”

She uses the honorific “uncle” although she is older than me, so I bow in return.
“Older Sister, I used to live here with my parents before the Liberation. I've returned to see the old neighborhood.”

“Really! Are you Uncle Pham's son?”

I nod, amazed that anyone remembered my father. It had been two decades and we hadn't lived here more than two years.

My return excites her. She touches my arm.
“How are your parents? Is your mother, Aunt Anh, doing well? Are all of you in America or Europe?”

“Yes, they are doing very well. Healthy and prosperous in America.”

“I knew it! Your father was wise to leave when he did. A week after he left, the police came to your house.”

I don't need to press her on the details. Any business that brought the police out to one's home at night was very bad. I realize now how narrow our escape was, how it was common for neighbors to turn informers.

“Forgive me, Older Sister, I was so young, I don't recall your name.”

“Oh, Lord, you don't remember me? I'm Fourth Sister. Ask your parents about me. They remember. Are you An or Huy?”

“An.”

BOOK: Catfish and Mandala

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