Catfish and Mandala (28 page)

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Authors: Andrew X. Pham

BOOK: Catfish and Mandala
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Up ahead across the street, a night alley market is in the final stage of shutting down, street sweepers combing the gutters, desperate merchants trying to sell the last of their perishable goods to bargain hunters. I cross over to the market. Maybe someone can direct me to an affordable inn. I ask two vendors for directions, but they don't know too much about the neighborhood. I pedal slowly down the wide alley, eyes peeled for trouble. People rush in and out of unlit stores, tidying up for the night. Their oil-lamp-cast shadows spook me. At this hour, these are the places where people are knifed for pocket change. It is almost pitch-black. Unnerved, I turn the bike around and hit a pushcart coming out of another alley. My cleat pedals jam and I keel over with a thunk.
They surround me pinned beneath my bike. Hands grabbing me. Two against one. They are masked like robbers. One arm up protecting my head, I jerk free.
A girl's voice pokes through my panic: “
Are you hurt?”
I roll to my feet prepared for a fight. She loosens the scarf veiling her face. A street sweeper.
“
I'm fine. Just a little scratch. No problem. My fault.
”
“Wash your elbow right away,”
says the taller girl.
“The street is very dirty. It'll get infected.”
“Thanks.”
She wants to know why I am wandering around so late at night in the bad part of town. I explain and they offer to show me to an inn nearby. As we leave, she notices my concerned glance at the cart which they are leaving behind. She giggles,
“Nobody ever steals a garbage cart.”
Both girls are unmarried and in their late teens. They are a fun pair. We flirt as they escort me down the dark alleys, comfortable, at home, as though they own them. The taller girl teases:
“Brother, you have it all
backward. You're looking for a room at an hour when other men are looking for roommates.”
I laugh.
“I'm too unattractive for any roommate. The only one that knocked on my door tonight was a cop who wanted some grease!”
They cluck and giggle, perhaps thinking I am lying.
“This is the hotel,”
the shorter girl announces as they deliver me at the steps. “
Don't let them charge you over eight dollars.”
They hammer the metal sheet door with their fists and announce to the doorman that a guest needs a room. They smile and leave, the tall girl sassing me over her shoulder,
“Behave, Big Brother.”
The manager shows me my room. I shower away the market muck and go to bed. Just after I click off the light, someone raps the door gently. I answer it in my briefs, thinking it is the manager bringing the hot tea he promised. It's him all right. He is without the tea but smiling an ingratiating smile. Lined up behind him against the railing of the stairwell are six beautiful giggling girls.
“
Brother,
”
he says, “I thought you might like the company of a sister … or two. Hanoi nights are chilly.”
Early in the morning, I puff my way down the wide and flat boulevard into Hanoi under a graying sky, pedal to pedal with ten thousand workers and students ebbing into the city on creaky bicycles. Here and there, a defiant red sweater bobs, like a maple leaf, in the churn of gray work clothes, olive army uniforms, and white school dresses. After a couple of miles, I see a woman sitting on the side of the road, between her legs a tray of brightly colored rice cakes, the size and shape of charcoal briquettes—I know what they are but have forgotten the name. For practice, I haggle with her awhile and at last, as I make the prospective buyer's exit, she calls me back and we agree on a price—thirty cents—though she seems fairly bitter about it: “
You Viet-kieu are even stingier than poor students. Even they pay me fifty cents.”
I grin at her, but I'm thinking: Darn, I just want one of those cakes to nibble for old time's sake. Fifty cents she wanted. Heck, that's like a doughnut in the States. I am gloating over my victory when she bags me ten cakes and I realize that she was saying
“mot chuc,
” meaning ten,
and I was saying “
mot cuc,
” meaning one lump. Too embarrassed to rectify the problem, I grab the prize and bike out to a park, hand the ill-gotten cakes to a beggar sleeping at the gate, keeping the one morsel for which I'd bargained. The park rings a small lake called Lake of Seven Colors. I sit on a waterfront bench to eat my cake. On a little island in the middle of the lake, a young guy is flying karate kicks, the sun rising over the pink mist behind him.
The one thing a solo traveler can count on finding in an area crawling with backpackers and expatriates is a bargain bed for the night. Usually, the food isn't bad either. I have no idea where Hanoi's tourist town is, so I buy a map and meander. It is an easy task since Hanoi is a more sedate city than Saigon. The traffic is much lighter, and in the cooler air under tree-shaded avenues, the smog is more tolerable. Hanoi lives on a scale more comprehensible than Saigon. The trees are smaller, more abundant, and not so tall and tropical like those of Saigon. I stroll along the fine mansions, taking in their faded, colonial French glories, their expressive arches, French windows, and wrought-iron balconies. Every structure holds itself up proudly in a state of elegant decay. At the north end of Hoan Kiem Lake, I find six young Caucasian travelers, lurking timidly on different street corners. Backpackers, baby-faced, flushed even in the tropic winter, treading about, wide eyes eating up all the sights, the details. Their pilgrim hands clench dog-eared copies of The Lonely Planet Guide to Vietnam. Alas, I have found my home for the next few weeks.
For tourists, everything that happens in Hanoi happens in the backpacker cafés. Anything that can be had, rented, chartered, borrowed, exchanged, and bought can be obtained or arranged in them. They sneak tourists illegally across the border into China for day jaunts, book hotel rooms, lodge people in-house, serve decent Western food, sell traveling supplies, fresh baguettes, and Laughing Cow cheese, which is the staple travel food for foreigners who fear stomach bugs. They book anything. Legal, illegal. You got the dollars, they can find your pleasure.
I bum around Hanoi with Australians, French, Danes, Brits, Germans, and Americans just soaking up the culture, exploring the urban sprawl one district at a time. The city is broken up into ridiculously distinct
commercial sections, guild oriented, another French legacy. If you want to buy shoes, you go to the shoe district, where thirty or so adjacent stores sell only footwear, often the same style and brand. There is a part of town for every category of goods and services: clothing, poultry, silk, jewelry, and electronics. There is even an area with shops making headstones, where dust-covered men kneel on the sidewalk chipping names into slabs of granite. Our favorite is the street of
nem nuong
diners. Around dinnertime, straddling the sunset hour, the street is perfumed and grayed with the smoke of meat sizzling over coals. If you catch a whiff of this scent, you never forget it. It is a heady mixture of fishsauce marinade, burning scallions, caramelized sugar, pepper, chopped beef, and pork fat. Women sit on footstools grilling meats on hibachi-style barbecues. Aromatic, stomach-nipping smoke curls to the scrubby treetops and simply lingers, casting the avenue into an amber haze. When hungry folk flock from all over the city to this spot, they have only one thing on their mind. And the entire street, all its skills and resources, is geared to that singular satisfaction.
The days pass without difficulty. I am at last among friends of similar spirit, all non-Asian, not one of them Vietnamese. And I am happy, comfortable merely to be an interpreter. Every day, we troop off to some part of the city on sight-seeing missions. At night, we congregate for great bouts of drinking and barhopping. We splinter into smaller parties and sign up for organized boat tours in Ha Long Bay and ride rented motorcycles to the countryside. We joke, we romance each other with the wild abandon of strangers cohabiting in exotic moments. We ask about Hanoi and its people, we ask about each other. Bonding, trading addresses, and fervently believing that we will never lose touch.
Patriot-Repose
Uncle Ho was a Caucasian? This is news to me. But I find him encased in a glass box like Snow White. His white hair gleams with a blond tint. His face has that blushing freshness of an intoxicated Aryan. Well, maybe it is the light.
I gawk at him with the rest of the tourists, half of them foreigners decked out in Spandex, cutoff jeans, sports bras, and Birkenstock sandals, the other half Vietnamese, sweaty and hot, quietly suffering in their best Sunday outfits. For Uncle Ho's dignity, the officials don't charge admission to the Mausoleum, but the hourly event seethes with the subdued giddiness of a freak show. Lining the black granite corridor, scowling guards confiscate cameras and hush foreigners who seem to be in a wax-museum mood. An Australian boy, towing his father, chirps, “Are we going to see a dead man? Are we? Is he really dead?” Behind the kid, the Vietnamese visitors are doing a funeral march, barely breathing, heads bowed, not a word. Maybe they are ashamed that their leaders have put Uncle Ho on display in a ghastly tomb against his final wish to be cremated because “land is valuable and should be used for farming.”
I think whatever Vietnamese—Northerners, Southerners, or Vietkieu—feel about this man and his ideologies, they respect him as all
the underdog countries of the world do. For here was a man of inconsequential beginnings who crept through the land of the white man as a menial laborer and returned to wrestle his homeland from empires. Founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party and President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from 1946 until his death in 1969, Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyen Sinh Cuong to a fiercely nationalistic scholar-official of humble means. He studied in Hue at the Quoc Hoc Secondary School, then migrated south to work as a teacher in Phan Thiet, my hometown, the very village where my father, eking out a living as a teacher, met my mother. At the age of twenty-one, Ho signed on to a French ship as a cook's apprentice, the first step of what would become a thirty-year journey that would take him to North America, Africa, and Europe. He settled in London, then Paris, earning a living as a gardener, snow sweeper, waiter, photo finisher, and mastered several languages, including English, French, German, and Mandarin. It was his tenure in the racially prejudiced Western world that led Ho to examine his roots and nurture his sense of patriotism.
How many “Yes, sir!” “Oui, oui, Monsieur!” “Yes, sahib!” did he utter, head bowed submissively? How many times did he long to stroll the cobbled byways of Paris and the marbled corridors of London as an equal of any Frenchman, any Englishman? How often did he gaze upon a white woman and wish for the pleasure of her company, the faintest possibility of her caress? Maybe patriotism has always been at the core of him. Maybe not. But I know; I've felt the patriotic urge. Walking in shoes vaguely similar to his, I know this deep-seated fire—this yearning for self-worth—fueled by the feelings of an unadoptable outsider, is nearly irresistible.
He changed his name to Nguyen Ai Quoc—Nguyen the Patriot—and began to write and debate the issue of Indochina's independence from France. At the green age of twenty-nine, he—an Indochinese laborer, a manservant—tried, without success, to present an independence plan for Vietnam to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. The following year, disillusioned with Western intentions, he became a founding member of the French Communist Party. The Communist Internationals summoned him to Moscow for training in 1923 and later sent him to Guangzhou
(Canton) to found the Revolutionary Youth League of Vietnam, a stepping-stone for the later Indochinese Communist Party. The next decade and a half he shuttled back and forth between the U.S.S.R. and China, once landing in a Hong Kong jail.
At the ripe age of fifty-one, he finally returned, in 1941, to his homeland to help found the Viet Minh Front to extricate Vietnam from the yokes of French colonialism and Japanese occupation. He was arrested and imprisoned for a year, by the anti-Communist Nationalist Chinese. During its insurgency, his Viet Minh received funding and arms from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). Immediately after the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, Ho Chi Minh unleashed an uprising called Cach Mang Thang Tam—the August Revolution. On September 2, 1945, at a rally in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square, Uncle Ho, with OSS agents at his side, declared Vietnam's independence, reading a constitution he drafted that borrowed liberally from the American Declaration of Independence.
Uncle Ho died unmarried and without children. Maybe he was gay. Maybe he was in love with the loveliest of all females: Vietnam. They say Vietnam is like a beautiful woman wooed first by the Chinese, then the French, then the Japanese, then the Americans. The men always say this with undisguised pride—not anger or outrage—but pride, followed by a glint of zealousness when they say Vietnam is now ours. Ours. Though it is clear to me, ours doesn't include Viet-kieu.
Ours is those who believe in Uncle Ho. Those who believe in the thousands of photos of Uncle Ho preserved in museums throughout the country. His visage is old but strong and benevolent. Uncle Ho, the peasant irrigating rice paddies by hand. Uncle Ho, the teacher chalking history on the blackboard for his good students. Uncle Ho, the poet painting Chinese calligraphy. Uncle Ho, the worker shaping the earth with a shovel. Uncle Ho, the protector standing before children. Uncle Ho, your uncle and mine.
An odd, disorienting feeling tickles me as I study his gaunt face, thirty years preserved. I'd first seen that face over two decades ago, the day when Saigon fell. I remember peeping out of steel window shutters and seeing tanks and trucks growling through the street, Uncle Ho's victorious, grinning face emblazoned on their sides. I'd seen him
on stamps, on the new currency of a unified Vietnam. And I had seen him smiling, looking on from the prison wall where they executed my fellow prisoners. I remember him grinning in my nightmares.
One of the four Imperial guards, supposedly as stoic and fearsome as a sphinx, shifts his weight, struggling mightily to stifle a yawn. The spell is broken. We shuffle out. The Australian boy pesters his father for another go around the mummy.
Down by the old section of Hanoi where the houses are nearing a century, a fifteen-year-old girl sitting on the sidewalk asks me if I'd like to buy a snack: rice dumpling with sugarcane syrup. Next to her are two baskets. Her feet are tucked beneath her at awkward angles. She is sitting with a friend, a twenty-something girl with two baskets of papayas, the smaller, green northern breed. They are thin, barefoot peasants from the countryside. I buy rice dumplings and a papaya on the condition that they help me eat the refreshments. Munching and chatting, we sit on the sidewalk, motorbikes sputtering in the narrow street, pedestrians walking around us.
Rice-girl wants to know how much an airplane ticket to America costs. A lot, I say, I had to save for a long time.
“A hundred American dollars,”
Papaya-girl ventures, apparently noting what she considers to be an astronomical sum. I nod vaguely, having no heart for the truth.
“Wow. Oh, my God. Can you imagine that? It would take us five years to save that much,
” murmurs Rice-girl. Her friend nods at the impossibility of saving such a sum.
“
You are good-looking,
” Rice-girl says to me, changing the topic.
“Me? No, I am ugly. I have been traveling very long so I look like a vagrant. No haircut, no shave.”
“No,”
she explains,
“you look good: you have nice clothes.”
“Ah, you mean my old jeans and T-shirt?”
“
That's a nice T-shirt. You can't buy it here.”
“This orange-brown color?”
“No, that's a hugging T-shirt. There's no seam on the side. It's one whole tubular piece of cloth and it's pure cotton.”
“
Oh.
” I hadn't noticed. “
You are very pretty.”
“
Silly man,
” chides Papaya-girl. “
We're not pretty. We're just peasant girls, selling papaya and rice cakes.”
“
What's your name?
” asks Rice-girl, clearly relishing a slice of papaya.
“Pham Xuan An.
”
“
That's a nice name,
” says Papaya-girl, her friend nodding in agreement. “
Xuan An
—
peaceful spring
—
that's pretty.”
“
It's girlish. My mother's idea. What's your name?”
“Mine is not so pretty,”
Rice-girl admits without shame, helping herself to more papaya.
“My family is poor and my parents never went to school.”
“Mine isn't pretty either,”
Papaya-girl admits.
“A name is just a name,”
I reassure them.
“Yes, but I don't have a real one. My parents call me Third Daughter.”
“That's just a title, a nickname. Don't you have a real name?”
“No, my parents can't read or write. Don't you know it's shameful—bad luck—to give your children fancy names when you know they will live poor lives? How would it look if a farmer had a prettier name than a prince?”
They are from a village thirty miles outside of Hanoi. They walk to the highway and ride a three-wheeled Tuk-tuk to Hanoi four days a week. Rice-girl makes her own rice dumplings and Papaya-girl picks her fruit from the family orchard. Neither has enough merchandise for a stall at the market or makes enough to pay for a permit to sell on the street, so they go door-to-door.
A hubbub stirs the crowd at the other end of the street. The girls perk up, swiveling about like startled hares. Hastily, they pick up their plates and stools.
“
Farewell, Big Brother. Thanks for talking with us. The cops are coming, we must go or they'll confiscate our baskets,”
Papaya-girl says, shouldering her staff, the pair of baskets tottering on either end like a balancing scale.
They bow and hurry away. Rice-girl is limping severely, walking on the outer edge of her deformed left foot. It is only noon. Hanoi is big.
No-name is a ten-year-old street boy. A deaf-mute who spends all of his time hanging around the foreign-tourist district. He befriends the tourists and tails them around town. His tourist friends don't know
where he lives. No one on the streets seems to know anything about him. I could only trace his lineage as far back as a month before I met him. A German couple, on a brief three-day tour of Hanoi, had befriended him. They introduced him to a French girl who, before her departure, acquainted the boy with Steve, an Aussie. Steve took the boy to dinner with a group of tourists and introduced him as No-name. The name stuck. Steve bunked in the same dormitory as William. When Steve left on a train to Saigon, he entrusted a map of Hanoi and No-name into the care of William, who wanted desperately to know more about the wordless boy. So I came into the picture, the next foster brother.
No-name's gift is a room-splitting grin, his curse a continually runny nose which he drags on the sleeve of his sweater. He is the magic of the streets. You could be walking, shopping, dining anywhere within the ten city blocks of his stomping grounds, and, suddenly, he materializes out of nowhere walking beside you, standing at your elbow, or making faces at you through restaurant windows. He moves with you as though not a single beat has passed since you were last together. But he is no Oliver Twist who picks your pocket. He is much more dangerous. He steals your heart, and when you leave, your heart breaks as roundly as his.
I find myself lingering in Hanoi because of him. When I tour the city on my bicycle, he hops on the rear bike rack for a ride, laughing his mute laugh:
Ackackackack ack ack!
I carry him, my silly monkey, my little brother. We point to sights we know nothing about and smile at each other. Then he's off to some other part of his domain. Perhaps to visit another tourist. Perhaps to go home—wherever he lives.
He is a soloist, a pariah among the children in the area. A scrappy bright-eyed boy, the runt of the litter. Kids are cruel as only kids can be, and No-name always seems to be ducking from the pranks of one tormentor to the blows of another. They resent his easy camaraderie with the fair-skinned foreigners. These kids are decently dressed, fleshed out, and scrubbed clean, the stamp of children with homes and family. No-name is somewhere along the side, on the edge. He bears the earmark of a child relinquished into the care of a lone grandmother or a kind but poor aunt.
I zealously nurture a morning coffee habit and No-name often pays me a visit during my grumpiest hour. An orange juice for him. An espresso for me. Toast, butter, and cheese all around. He only lets me treat him half of the time. He pays his share with a greasy fist of dime-bills. The waitresses used to shoo him out, but once seven tourists, with me as their translator, assured the owner that if she ever mistreated No-name, we would never eat at her café again. Other tourists would hear about her cruelty. These businesses rely heavily on tourists' word of mouth and so she took the message to heart. Now, every other dawn, No-name sits next to me, contemplating the dust universe in the sunbeam angling through the window while I read the newspapers.

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