Read Catfish and Mandala Online
Authors: Andrew X. Pham
Catfish and Mandala (3 page)
Thong often daydreamed of the time before his world became undone. His Saigon in April of 1975 was another life. A good life that he didn't think could end even in the final days. He was a teacher, three years retired from the military. His wife, Anh, was a tailor in her own shop with three workers. They had made their fortune before the Americans pulled out in 1972 and they had to shut down their business. Comfortably well-off, they continued to work because it was in their nature. They lived in a three-story house and had five children, one girl, four boys. A shining member of Vietnam's tiny middle class.
It had been very different at the beginning. His family were impoverished refugees, fleeing south in 1946 when the Viet Minh took over North Vietnam. Hers were Southerners scratching out a
living amid civil unrest. They married without the blessings of either family. Under a leaky roof, they scraped, worked hard, and saved prodigiously. Somehow, they got by on love and rice. Then came the
thing
âthe
thing
that catapulted them out of povertyâthat which he would forever keep behind doors closed to his children.
living amid civil unrest. They married without the blessings of either family. Under a leaky roof, they scraped, worked hard, and saved prodigiously. Somehow, they got by on love and rice. Then came the
thing
âthe
thing
that catapulted them out of povertyâthat which he would forever keep behind doors closed to his children.
When the army drafted him, they gave him an officer's commission because he was a college graduate at a time when South Vietnam's annual crop of college graduates was fifty. His fluency in French and English yielded a translator post. In 1967, his education landed him the office of Assistant Chief of Phan Thiet Province, a coastal city-state of central Vietnam. It was a paramilitary post that dealt in psychological warfare. He was only a lieutenant, but under his proctorship were two thousand men. They wrote literature, broadcast Nationalist ideology, pro-American sentiments, and antiâViet Cong messages. They accused, ridiculed, blamed, and generally vilified the Viet Cong, their actions, their theories, and everything they stood for. His men patrolled the countryside and played Good Samaritans, lending the peasants a hand to win their favor, their loyalty.
They swayed the peasants who did not care which side won the war because they were so hungry and poor. It was difficult for simple farmers and fisherfolk to understand how one regime could be worse than another. They paid the poor to spy on the VC movement in the countryside. They kept many from openly joining the VC. They found men to replenish the South Army.
The VC hated propagandists more than they hated the American GIs. They hated propagandists more than they hated the Nationalist Army. More than the Nationalist Air Force. And Thong was the director.
“Get up!” cried the guard from the doorway. It was Hong, the local hoodlum turned VC. He was seventeen, mean as a fighting cock, taut as a bamboo switch. He leaned on the door frame and sucked a cigarette, the tip flaring an evil eye in the half light. “Fuck! Fuckin' lout!” He kicked the closest man, who was old enough to be his father.
They filed out of the hut into the ashen dawn, and marched across the compound, going down the row of barracks, five corrugated steel
buildings wallowing in mud and overgrown grass, the sidings riddled with bullet holes and bleeding rust, the glass windows cracked and furred with dust. They slowed as they came upon the VC mess hall, where the air was fat with aromas of coffee and fried eggs. They marched out of the garrison and onto the dirt road that cut through the rice paddies to the jungle beyond. They left the road at the edge of the jungle and began to work beside it, clearing undergrowth and cutting down trees to prepare the land for farming. The trees and grass were burned in a great bonfire. Black smoke curled skyward. The sky turned a steel-gray and the sun baked the air through the clouds.
buildings wallowing in mud and overgrown grass, the sidings riddled with bullet holes and bleeding rust, the glass windows cracked and furred with dust. They slowed as they came upon the VC mess hall, where the air was fat with aromas of coffee and fried eggs. They marched out of the garrison and onto the dirt road that cut through the rice paddies to the jungle beyond. They left the road at the edge of the jungle and began to work beside it, clearing undergrowth and cutting down trees to prepare the land for farming. The trees and grass were burned in a great bonfire. Black smoke curled skyward. The sky turned a steel-gray and the sun baked the air through the clouds.
Midmorning, rain came down heavily. Warm tears slapped the broad green leaves of the jungle canopy and killed the bonfire. They pounded Thong's back and they pounded the brown earth on the road. The water gushed down, steady and thick, from a gray sky. The dirt road that bandaged the jungle to the rice paddiesâbut parted bothâwas reduced to an endless series of large gray-brown puddles: grayed by the sky, browned by the rich soil. There was no wind, no peals of thunder, no ruptured flashes of lightning, no crackling gunshots in the distance, no muffled booms of artillery fire from the horizon. It was just another rain like those of his youth.
He looked to the road where the rice paddies met the forest. A boy in faded black shorts stood, feet apart, in a fighting stance, ankle-deep in a puddle. Tanned skin a shade lighter than the soil molded around his slim muscles, defining the thinness of his body. One raised arm held a long bamboo stick like a javelin with the sharpened end canted at an angle to the ground. Water plastered straight black hair against his sharp face, young but all edges without a hint of softness. Slanted black eyes riveted on the ground blinking away the water streaming down his face. He stood frozen. At his feet, the rain pockmarked the puddle like pebbles.
A flash of motion, the bamboo stick speared into the water. He thrust his face at the torrential sky and barked a cry of victory. An impaled frog jerked its death throes on the spear tip. He taunted the sky with his prize before stashing it in the burlap pouch at his waist. Thong felt a brief rush of joy, a touch of pride at the boy's success, remembering the simple pleasures of his youth, remembering his first son.
The boy looked at Thong looking at him, then turned away and left the road in long, limber, barefoot strides, heading toward the rice paddies. The curtain of rain closed over the boy and all was silent save sky-water drumming the earth and old men hacking the jungle.
A revolutionâeverything shifted and nothing changed. Thong flailed at the weeds, a boy speared frogs barefoot in the rain.
When the rain stopped, they ate lunch, two fists of rice in a tin of vegetable broth. Because the cut trees were drenched and would not burn, they were marched back to the garrison to clear land mines.
The prison had been a Nationalist garrison during the war, a country outpost far behind the fighting front. It was deep in South Vietnam, but it was viciously fortified. A hundred yards of no-man's-land ringed the garrison, thoroughly infested with land mines, studded with claymore mine posts, laced with miles of barbed wire, and scarred with concentric trenches, all cloaked in thick grass, vines, and small brush.
Given shovels which they dared not use, the prisoners began from the sandbagged walls and worked their way outward. They had already cleared the mines and trimmed the vegetation of the first twenty yards, but everyone still treaded lightly to the outer markers. The VC waited behind the walls with their guns trained on the prison crew. No one spoke save the VC, who wagered on the outcome of today's session.
Thong was to clear a straight path for the log team. He hunched down low and began parting the grass one cluster at a time, searching for the black trigger rods of the canister and ball mines. He probed the ground with his fingers, praying to the gods he didn't believe existed that there were no pan mines in his path. These were completely buried and nearly impossible to find without metal detectors. The soft earth played tricks on his mind, giving under his knees.
He found two canister mines and marked two parallel paths, fifteen yards apart, with ropes. It was the loggers' turn. Everyone else took cover.
Six men pulled on two ropes tied to opposite ends of a log. The team divided and walked on the parallel paths, dragging the log on the ground between them. Eyes quivering on the edge of hysteria,
the loggers trembled, looking like overworked nags strung out by the scent of slaughterhouse blood. One young man in his early twenties cried as he put his back to the task.
the loggers trembled, looking like overworked nags strung out by the scent of slaughterhouse blood. One young man in his early twenties cried as he put his back to the task.
Thong lay flat on the ground, shielding his head, listening. The log rustled the grass. Loggers traded nervous words. An explosion rent the air.
Screams. A man clutched a raw gash in his thigh. Blood spewed out, reminding Thong of a butchered pigâmaking him hungry. Dirt and wood splinters filtered down. A bitter piquancy of gunpowder. Another man sat on the ground, childlike surprise on his face, holding his red squirting wrist, hand blown off.
The VC replaced them with two others and a new log. The work went on until sunset.
Back in the compound, the murky pond captured the clouds fleeing from a crimson waning of light. Prisoners bathed and washed their clothes at the far end of the shimmering water, across from the latrine.
Dinner was rice and catfish soup. They fed the catfish at dawn and ate them at dusk. Then the indigo light fell and silence crept in.
The loudspeakers crackled to life. A smothering stillness glassed them off from the world.
“Stand outside your hut when your name is called. Pham Van Thong ⦔
They came with their oil lamps and dragged Thong out into the dark.
The next day, Thong climbed off the back of an army truck at an unmarked crossroads. The truck spat blue exhaust at him and rumbled back on the dirt track. He stood barefoot and penniless under the blazing sky, looking down the forked roads before him.
Fallen â Leaves
Winter of 1961 in Phan Thiet, Vietnam, came in wet and cold, a damp cloth over the fisherfolk's heads, mildew in their lungs. Along that scraped-up seacoast, ill winds scoured villages like bold ravens, reaching through thatched walls and clawing around crevices with impunity, pilfering the souls of the weak and the unsuspecting.
Thong and Anh lived in a one-room shack, nailed together in a back alley of the fishing town. They were young, in love, and strong, but their hands were like old people's, seasonally water-crinkled from mopping the concrete floor and tending the leaky roof. A baby girl, their first child, slept peacefully in her cribâa cardboard box on their bed. They were cheerful about their meager lot, joking that the heavens were so generous to their rainwater cisterns, they hadn't had to visit the village well in a month.
They were vulnerable, though they did not know it. Their happiness was an unshielded beacon. Those who eloped did not have the protection of their dead ancestors.
One gray day, an ill wind slipped through their curtain-door and wrapped its wings around their first child. The baby girl took sick and became as red as chili-pickled cabbage, then as pale as ivory. She was feverish, then cold. They rubbed her with heat-oil, but the heat did not come back into her tiny chest,
which was hardly bigger than a loaf of bread. No money for medicine. No silver coin to scrape the ill wind from their baby girl. They fretted and they summoned the midwife, but she could do little. No money for Western doctor, Western medicine. The baby coughed. She cried, would not suckle her milk. Another morning, she was cold. Died during the night, not yet a year old.
which was hardly bigger than a loaf of bread. No money for medicine. No silver coin to scrape the ill wind from their baby girl. They fretted and they summoned the midwife, but she could do little. No money for Western doctor, Western medicine. The baby coughed. She cried, would not suckle her milk. Another morning, she was cold. Died during the night, not yet a year old.
Clan-Rift
Four months ago, I emerged from Mexico and returned to the Bay Area, jobless and homeless. I did something unthinkable in America: I moved home to my parents. It was the perfect Vietnamese thing to do, fall back into the folds of the clan. Free food, free shelter while you lick your wounds and plot your resurrection. My non-Asian friends pitied me. My Vietnamese-American friends wondered why I hadn't lived at home in the first place; a good son doesn't leave home until he is married.
It doesn't matter to me. I have to accumulate funds and settle my affairs. I tie up loose ends, freelance all sorts of work for the extra cash, do it all in silence, the whole time wondering if the flash of desert inspiration was only a fluke. No one, not my brothers or my best friends, knows about my plan to bicycle to Vietnam. They say, Andrew is finding himself. He's trying to get his life in order. He's still getting over Trieu. She really devastated him, cheating on him and leaving him like that. When I finally tell them, I lie. Going up the coast, I say. Just going to ride my bicycle up toward Seattle, maybe British Columbia. It's safe. Once-in-a-lifetime thing. It'll do me good. I don't tell them I might not be coming back.
On the dawn of my departure from San Jose, California, I wake groggy from a night of tossing in wistfulness. I fetal beneath my blanket, a jumble of nerves, high with adrenaline, sick with uncertainties, knotted with fear. I could be camping on the road already if it weren't for my mother.
“BAD! Bad day to go on a trip!” she pecked at me day before yesterday, flapping her Chinese calendar in my face, chasing me from the bathroom to the kitchen.
“Look, Mom, I don't believe in your Chinese calendar,” I told her delicately.
She made angry egg-eyes, scolding me in front of the family altar atop the refrigerator, her favorite place to win arguments. “I know these things. I picked our escape date from Vietnam, didn't I?” She regularly pulled proof of her sixth sense. How she had seen a ghost in her dream and begged it not to take the soul of her youngest son, who was deathly ill. How she had predicted which job my father would land. How she had fathomed the good spirits residing in each house they had ever rented or bought. She knew she could spook me.
I caved in. “Yes, Mom. You're right, Mom.”
“Good. Because if you go this day, you will get hurt. Many omens. You wait two more days, the chart is okay, suitable for a Horse-sign like you. Next week is even better.”
“I'll wait two days.”
“Next week better.”
“Two days.”
“No patience, that's you.”
Patience I have aplenty. Courage is what I need. If I don't leave now, I never will. In the face of parental opposition, my determination wanes by the day.
My father has said “Good” to me twice in my life. This time is not one of them. The first “Good” was for making Phi Beta Kappa during my senior year in Aerospace Engineering at UCLA. I showed him the glowing congratulatory letter from the national honor society, then threw it away, too poor to afford the initiation banquet and too proud to request a fee waiver.
He awarded me the second “Good” for landing a cushy engineering post at a major airline. That job was doomed from the start. I graduated out of college and right into a recession. Desperately hungry for work after mailing out a hundred resumes, I hooked one interview. During the office tour, my would-be boss, a turtle-chinned, red-faced thirty-five-year-old-timer, Paul, waxed on about the company's expansion overseas and his getting an M.B.A. in international business to keep abreast of it all.
“I like you,” Paul said, walking round behind me and putting a hand on my shoulder, which I didn't like. “I like you people. Orientals are good workers. Good students, too. Great in math, the engineering stuff.” He smiled at me, reassuring, beaming. “Oh, I think you'll do just fine here. We won't have any trouble at all.”
When I finally resigned, I was no longer a “good Oriental.” I even left behind in my desk three files titled “Stuff Paul Rejected Because He Doesn't Know Any Better,” “Stuff Paul Rejected Because He Didn't Want to Jeopardize His Promotion,” and “Stuff Paul Rejected Because They Didn't Originate from Engineers but from Mechanics Who Have More Practical Experience on the Subject.” I heard later that the files were discovered. Eventually, after a few more escapades with the mechanics, supervisor-bossman Paul was moved “laterally” into a cubicle labeled “independent contributor” on the third floor, where they put troublemakers out to pasture.
Giving up this job and burning my bridges, my father believed, were the undoing of me, and nothing I had done since elicited a “Good” from him. “You don't do that. You do job best you can. You get promotion. You get new job. You say, âThank you very much, sir' and you go. Think about future. You are Asian man in America. All your bosses will be white. Learn to work.”
Yes, Father. Okay, Father. I will, Father.
I can't be his Vietnamese American. I see their groveling humility, concessions given before quarters are asked. I hate their slitty-measuring eyes. The quick gestures of humor, bobbing of heads, forever congenial, eager to please. Yet I know I am as vulnerable as they before the big-boned, fair-skinned white Americans. The cream-colored giants who make them and me look tribal, diminutive, dark, wanting.
So, what the hell, I have to do something unethnic. I have to go. Make my pilgrimage. I roll out of bed and pull on my cycling shorts, T-shirt, and windbreaker. I throw my panniers into the trunk of the car and mount the bike on the rack. Kay, my sister, the youngest in the family and the only one born on American soil, watches me as I gather up my few worldly possessions.
“You're not going to be using your car,” she points out, smiling mischievously.
“You can borrow my car.”
A high school junior, she is the youngest and prettiest of our clan. Her skin glows like a pale rose and her eyes shine with an unlikely hazel. She was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, a month after our arrival in the States. When the nurse handed her to my parents, they insisted that she had made a mistake. This child wasn't theirs. Why, it looked like an American baby! The nurse showed them the only other baby born that day: an African-American child.
Kay grew up to look just like the rest of us, her father's face and her mother's nose. She is a Pham with the exception of her leggy height, brownish hair, light whitish-pink skin, and strange hazel eyes. Her gift is her flawless English, a smooth, clean California-American, middle-class burb. Our English, even Hien's, is only an imperfect prototype. My parents think it has something to do with her having been born on American soil. “American food, American air,” said my mother.
Kay is the final hope of our dysfunctional Vietnamese-American family. I have found myself casually examining her for the wounds we have inadvertently inflicted.
It is your responsibility,
Father always says to us,
to set a good example for your younger siblings
. I abandoned my career in favor of a dream. Tien, an exceptional student, couldn't make up his mind about the trajectory of his education. Huy and Hien are gay. And not one of us breathed a word of Chi's existence to Kay in all these years. She never knew she had a runaway sister. To Kay, Chi came home in a shroud of mystery and died a self-inflicted death within arm's reach of her family, who should have seen it comingâshould have prevented it with love.
It is your responsibility,
Father always says to us,
to set a good example for your younger siblings
. I abandoned my career in favor of a dream. Tien, an exceptional student, couldn't make up his mind about the trajectory of his education. Huy and Hien are gay. And not one of us breathed a word of Chi's existence to Kay in all these years. She never knew she had a runaway sister. To Kay, Chi came home in a shroud of mystery and died a self-inflicted death within arm's reach of her family, who should have seen it comingâshould have prevented it with love.
“An, are you going to be gone long? Can I move into your room?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
She is referring to the guest house I built in the backyard of my parents' house. Although I rarely use it, my mother insists that it remain untouched. The same applies to the rooms belonging to Hien, who is down in San Diego pursuing a bio-engineering degree and medical school, and Huy, who holes up in Berkeley slaving for his law degree. Neither comes home much, each trying to hide his homosexuality from our parents. Empty rooms are Mom's way of keeping us home.
Mom comes from the old world, where mothers are lifelong housewives who expect to be near their children all their lives. Senior homes, retirement communities don't exist in their vocabulary. When her friends explained the concepts of children leaving home at eighteen and parents going into rest homes in their “golden years,” Mom's eyes went wide with disbelief.
“That is so cruel. Strange, strange country.
”
“That is so cruel. Strange, strange country.
”
The last few years, I think my father, who is more culturally savvy, has been talking to her because she has started saying things to us in Vietnamese like
“We'll be all right when we retire. Your father is working a few more years so we'll be financially secure. We're in America; if we live with you, no girl will marry you. And no girl will let you support us. We know it's different here.”
“We'll be all right when we retire. Your father is working a few more years so we'll be financially secure. We're in America; if we live with you, no girl will marry you. And no girl will let you support us. We know it's different here.”
She tries so hard I ache for her, this simple woman who takes pleasure nickeling the grocers for bargains, deals for the family. This woman who lets in every Mormon that comes by the house with pamphlets. This woman who makes egg rolls for cosmetic girls at the department store who give her free makeovers. This woman who eats cold leftovers standing in the kitchen alone because lunch in her American household is too lonely. This woman whom we've shortchanged.
Tien comes out and helps me with the bike. “Mister An,” he says, using the funny form of address we picked up as immigrant kids who didn't know that Mister was followed by a last and not a first name. “Are you ready?”
“Mister Tien. That's it. Let's go.”
Mom steps down from the porch to say good-bye. She places her hand on my arm and I on hers so that we're both touching each other's forearm. Between telling me to be careful and asking me if I'd like her to pack some fried rice to go, she squeezes the back of my
arm. Some oranges, then? She touches my hand. It is awkward, for we have never learned to embrace and we don't throw our arms around each other so easily. But I like the way her fingers dance on my arms fluttering over my shoulders, touching my back. Saying all that she cannot in words.
arm. Some oranges, then? She touches my hand. It is awkward, for we have never learned to embrace and we don't throw our arms around each other so easily. But I like the way her fingers dance on my arms fluttering over my shoulders, touching my back. Saying all that she cannot in words.
I want to hug Kay, but I can't. Don't know how. So I smile and say, “Bye, Kay. Have a good time. Take care of yourself.”
“You too. Bye, An.” She waves that teenage wave, elbow at her side, hesitant fingers rising to chest sketching tiny arcs.
Mom hugs me then. Clumsy, quick.
I feel sick and hot around the eyes.
Father went to work earlier, I heard him leave. He didn't say much about my trip, but last week, I caught him peeking at me through the living room window as I tinkered with my bicycle. To him, this trip and the last one to Mexico are a waste of time. He has plenty to say about it, but he hasn't. He has given me his gift of silence, knowing that at least I am free to construe my own truths about his feelings. It's generous.
He started being generous with me when I told him I wasn't following in his footsteps, no longer a man of the mind, a first-rate engineer. I started freelancing as a technical writer and editor. After I had published a few articles, people sought me out for various assignments, some small, some large. Just enough to keep food on the table. I decided to pursue a career as a freelance writer. Do the American thing, chase your dream, follow your heart. I showed him some of my best published works.
My father said,
Oh, you're just a freelancer.
I heard only the
just
, the diminishing qualifier.
Yes, I'm just a freelancer. Yeah, that's me
. Hitching words together, like boxcars making a train, for a quarter apiece. Sometimes more. I wrote anything. Pen for hire. Words for sale, words I don't own, someone else's birthright. Technical jargon. Differential calculus. Euclidean geometry in easy English. Love ballads. Naturalization applications. Obituaries. Resumes. Letters of recommendation. Business plans. Articles. Interviews. Book reviews. Your view. My view. Whatever you wanted, I wrote, a quarter a word, no byline required. But I wasn't a credentialed writer, so, in his eyes, I was forever the
impostor, the slick fraud called in on midnight contracts and sent out on guerrilla forays. In and out and paid before anyone was the wiser.
Oh, you're just a freelancer.
I heard only the
just
, the diminishing qualifier.
Yes, I'm just a freelancer. Yeah, that's me
. Hitching words together, like boxcars making a train, for a quarter apiece. Sometimes more. I wrote anything. Pen for hire. Words for sale, words I don't own, someone else's birthright. Technical jargon. Differential calculus. Euclidean geometry in easy English. Love ballads. Naturalization applications. Obituaries. Resumes. Letters of recommendation. Business plans. Articles. Interviews. Book reviews. Your view. My view. Whatever you wanted, I wrote, a quarter a word, no byline required. But I wasn't a credentialed writer, so, in his eyes, I was forever the
impostor, the slick fraud called in on midnight contracts and sent out on guerrilla forays. In and out and paid before anyone was the wiser.
Tien and I bucket up to San Francisco, winding on the long I-280 scenic route. I hand him the pink slip to my car with instructions to sell it in a few months. My finances are dismal. My account balance says I'll be traveling on a disintegrating shoestring budget even though I have liquidated nearly everything I own and canceled my health insurance. Aspirin and chicken soup will have to suffice from here on out.
I splurged on two bike racks with panniers and packed them with my old camping gear. My vehicle is a rickety 18-speed hybrid. I didn't know the first thing about bike touring and was lucky to survive the Mexican desert. I'd gone into it with a backpack and a bike, and wound up pushing the bike through sand as often as riding it. This time I am prepared. I have maps, touring gear, and a dime-store handbook on bicycle repair.
It appeals to me. Riding out my front door on a bicycle for the defining event of my life. It is so American, pioneering, courageous, romantic, self-indulgent. I'd read
Miles from Nowhere
by Barbara Savage, who had ridden her bike around the world with her husband, Larry. It is so simple. All I need I learned in grade school.
Miles from Nowhere
by Barbara Savage, who had ridden her bike around the world with her husband, Larry. It is so simple. All I need I learned in grade school.
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