Catfish and Mandala (40 page)

Authors: Andrew X. Pham

BOOK: Catfish and Mandala

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“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 girlsâSon's girlsâdropped 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 girlsâmy 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 fightâthe iron of the Green Beretâhas 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.âsanctioned 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 â¦ gives Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux,
even Jon Krakauer a run for their money.”

âSan 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 â¦ . [A] powerful memoir of grief
and a doomed search for cultural identity.”

âVince Passaro,
Elle

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

â
The New Yorker

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

â
Outside

“An insightful look at Vietnam today and also a powerful
examination of the crucible of cultural identity.”

â
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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

âMulticultural 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 manuscriptâthe 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.

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

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., 1967â . 2. Vietnamese AmericansâBiography. 3. Pham, Andrew X., 1967ââJourneys. I. Title.

E184.V53P455 1999

915.9704'44âdc21

[B]

99-22711 CIP