Catfish and Mandala (9 page)

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Authors: Andrew X. Pham

BOOK: Catfish and Mandala
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“Thanks, Brother-friend, but I've got my mind set on going alone.”
Viet and Binh shake their heads. Binh lowers his voice and tells me,
“I don't mean to insult you, but I must tell you it is very difficult and very dangerous. I've taken several tour groups to Hanoi. Many people just give up and ride in the bus. I've never biked it myself. I ride in the bus and hand out sodas to people. Listen to me, my friend. Don't do it.”
“Why? I've read about one American who did it by himself. I'm sure there must be a few others, maybe Europeans, who have made solo bike tours.”
Binh hesitates as though considering whether to let me in on a secret. He draws a deep breath, leans closer, and says with utter conviction,
“You won't make it. Trust me, I've been around a long time. Vietnamese just don't have that sort of physical endurance and mental stamina. We are weak. Only Westerners can do it. They are stronger and better than us.”
Fallen-Leaves
An was four, playing in cheese-colored dirt, watching his truckload of big brothers feathering the blue horizon with dust. His mother had his nine-year-old sister Chi keep an eye on him lest he decide to eat a rock or something.
The green army truck listed from side to side as it kicked sand into the air. The men were yelling, hollering, whooping. The truck stopped, its cloud dissipating onward. Soldiers vaulted out of its tarpaulin back like grasshoppers. Some ran straight into the big plywood house for beer, others stretched and clapped their hands in great pleasure. Giant white men with hair as gold as the chain around his mother's neck tousled An's black hair. He liked their marble eyes, the colors of sky and shallow water. He liked the way they tried to teach him games. They picked him up, grinning, and said words he did not understand. They smelled strange, different, and they moved about with a booming bigness. They planed him through the air, rocketed him into the sky, and gently parachuted him to the ground every time. His father didn't do that, big government official, big businessman, too busy.
A huge black man came out of the truck. He had a head of curly, crinkly black hair as though someone had singed it with a match. An had never seen a man like that. Chi said the man was an Indian, a black Indian as opposed to the green, purple, and red varieties. She said he was made of chocolate. Try it, Chi told An. He ran up and bit the man's forearm. It was salty.
The man yelped and gave An a stick of spearmint gum to teeth on.
Divergent-Rhythm
Hung is a filmmaker. He wears slacks, a white pin-striped shirt, and a dark thin tie. In sunglasses, he strikes a good image of Jim Belushi. The world moves through his viewfinder as one endless stream of pleasures, ripe for his plucking. He ravishes everything that comes his way. He has a weakness for liquor and women. He has studied art, film, photography, but finds himself making a living at producing wedding videos and studio portraits. He earns a small fortune and enjoys frittering it all away. A prodigious beer drinker who harbors serious aversions to physical labor, he lives his life in spurts, in volcanic bouts of work, frolic, drinking, whoring, and sheer listless idleness where he listens to music lying on his back, staring at the ceiling like one gone permanently vacant.
He has an artist's perspective:
“I'm not fat and I'm not obese. I'm something in between—very beautiful, very lovable—undefinable.”
When his mother scolds him about his lack of savings, he grabs the thick rolls around his belly and gives them a good shake. “
I saved it all right here. This is Cho-Lon, Big Market of concentrated food. I'll never starve.
”
His nieces and nephews are afraid of him, as kids often are with someone unstable. Sometimes he gives them exorbitant gifts, other times he slaps and kicks them with such fury one might think him drunk, which usually is the case. It is hard to tell with Hung because,
unlike most Vietnamese, he doesn't color when he's drunk. I know he's soaked when he starts talking about himself.
“Shit. I haven't seen my wife and my daughter in four years. If I'm lucky, I'll see them again in four more years. My daughter won't remember me.”
His wife had taken their daughter to America. Their immigration was sponsored by her mother, who fled to the States in ‘75 when Saigon fell. The rules permitted sponsoring immediate family members only, no in-laws. She left during the lean years, when they were suffering like everyone else. Hung thought maybe they would be together in two or three years, but the bureaucrats leeched him of all his savings and now he is no closer to emigrating than he was when she left. He keeps a shoe box full of pictures of her and their daughter by his bed.
He shows me a picture of his wife and daughter in Virginia standing in front of their new Honda Accord parked in the driveway of their house. Eyes lowered, he asks, “
Is … is this common in America?
” The material wealth. What he means is,
Can I have this too when I get there? Has my wife passed beyond my means? Does she really need me anymore?
Much later during one of our drinking binges, he comes out with it: “
Tell me honestly, in your best opinion, can I make a living over there? Is there enough work for a video guy like me? Do I have to learn something else?”
“No, there aren't many Vietnamese in Virginia. You might be able to make it in Santa Ana, California, or maybe in Houston, Texas, or maybe in the Bay Area, or New York. Video cameras are as common as televisions in America. You might have to start from zero again. Build up your reputation. You'll have to learn to speak English fluently or you'll have to rely on the Vietnamese for all your business. That's tough because plenty of Vietnamese are already doing it.”
Then there is Khuong, the good son, the respectable, promising academic. Hardworking, studious, he is the most cosmopolitan of the lot, open to modern attitudes and not so fearful of places outside of Saigon. He is the only one who thinks that a solo bike trip to Hanoi is possible.
“I've met two European women who have done it, but they biked together,”
he says.
“You could do it, but you should pretend you're Korean or Japanese in case you run into those who don't like Viet-kieu.”
His eldest brother, Viet, holds the opposite view. Viet is sharp and
streetwise but he prefers to be the affable bear. I like him immensely. He grills me day and night on English grammar, idiom, and slang.
“How do you say breasts, women's breasts, in English slang?”
“Tits?”
“No, I mean slang. Playing words. Things Americans say on the street.”
“Melons, cantaloupes, knockers,” I offer. He repeats them carefully. I explain to him the subtleties behind the slang, but I'm not sure of them myself so I make it up as I go.
“Well, melons and cantaloupe, that should be self-explanatory. The shape and the perfume, I guess.
Knockers
are these things people mount on their door. They've got handles that you grab and bang to let the people know that you're at the front door. Like a doorbell.”
“Ha, ha, ha. I get it! Grabbing women's breasts so they'll let you in. Give me another one.”
“Hmm.
Headlights
.”
“Headlights? Like on motorbikes?”
“Well, everyone has a car in America. A car has a pair of headlights. Big, round, very bright.”
“Ha, ha, ha!”
He doubles over, clutching his belly, slapping his thighs.
“That's great! Lowbeam. Highbeam. You're blinded! Ooooo-hooo!”
He sighs with satisfaction.
“That's great! What do Americans call a butt licker?”
“A brownnoser,” I tell him.
“That's like a sycophant. A brownnoser kisses his boss's butt and his nose is brown with his boss's shit.”
This one is his favorite. He pens it on the front page of the pocket notebook he carries with his wallet. Viet is trying to solicit Western business partners and worries they might use similar terms on him.
Viet holds a master's degree in chemistry. This is no small feat in a school system with a seventy-percent attrition rate. He has worked in various factories, making anything from soap to pesticide. He struck gold four years ago when he perfected a soda flavor that could compete with Tribeco, the dominant soft-drink producer at the time. His one-man company rocketed into a thirty-employee operation that manufactured and distributed soft drinks throughout southern Vietnam. His backslide began two years ago, when Pepsi appeared on the scene. By the time Coca-Cola returned to Vietnam's market, his
operation had dwindled to seven employees. He says the American giants are selling their drinks below cost to steal his market share.
“Look, I'm selling soda that's mixed and bottled by hand. Labor cost is almost nil for me. I don't build big plants. No executives and no managers. No bribes. You know how I handle the bad cops? Sodas! I give them sodas! All foreign companies pay tax-bribes. You tell me, how can they sell a better-tasting soft drink cheaper!”
Now he's deep in debt, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, but he keeps a grin on his broad, dark face and tastes all the imitation cola flavors Japanese and Korean vendors hawk to him. Within a few months, he will lose his business and his home. Pepsi and Coca-Cola will win.
I suspect I will remember my days in Saigon through an alcoholic haze. We drank when I arrived, then we drink just about every other day thereafter. One at a time, they take turns dragging me to street-corner saloons, Vietnamese equivalents of the Spanish tapas bars that serve little food dishes to accompany alcohol. We squeeze ourselves into child-sized plastic chairs and drink beer from plastic one-liter jugs and nibble on barbecued beef, steamed intestines, pan-fried frogs, and boiled peanuts. We eat goat stew and drink goat liquor, two parts rice wine mixed with one part fresh goat's blood. Halfway through the meal, my bowels heave and I sprint to the toilet.
During the second week, Viet, Khuong, Hung, and I motorbike out to Snake Village, a good jaunt from Saigon. Their restaurant-bar of choice has thatched walls and a low ceiling made of corrugated aluminum. In the back, a fine mesh of chicken wire fences in two trees and a snake pit. A young woman is standing in one of the trees pulling poisonous snakes out of the branches by their tails.
We take a coffee table with wooden stools. The waiter serves us a platter of appetizers, an array of pickled fish, fresh herbs, sliced cucumber, and vegetables.
Khuong seems irritated. “
Why don't you eat the vegetables? They're washed.”
“Viet-kieu's fickleness causes a lot of problems. Refusing to eat the same food as your hosts makes them think that you think you're too good for them.
Their food is filthy, unfit for you,”
Hung carols to me, joking, but I get his drift.
“Well, I've eaten everything you've handed me and I've got the runs twice in two weeks,”
I reply in mock reproach.
“I can't go anywhere without looking for the toilet, thanks to you guys. Isn't that enough?”
They laugh, mollified. The waiter arrives with warm beer, pours it into plastic mugs, and drops chunks of ice into them. I snatch one without ice.
“Ice. Why are you afraid of ice? All the bacteria are dead, frozen,”
Viet complains.
I look at him, incredulous. “
And you have a master's in chemistry? Guess that didn't include a biology class, did it?”
The bartender, a shriveled man with the pinched face of someone bitten a hundred times, lugs a basket of live, two-foot-long cobras to the table. He reaches inside casually—a magician going for a rabbit—and pulls out a cobra. He whacks its head sharply with a mallet. The snake goes limp in his hand. With a deft glide of his short knife, he opens a slit in the scales, a perfect surgical incision. Blood drips onto his hand. Puffing a cigarette held at the corner of his mouth, he plucks open the skin and shows the beating heart, the size of a chocolate chip, to everyone at the table. Working with the boredom of a shrimper, he severs the arteries and transplants the heart into a shot glass half filled with rice wine. The heart pulses swirling red streamers of blood into the clear liquor.
Viet seizes the glass and shoots it down his throat. The idea is to swallow the concoction before the heart stops beating. Viet smacks his lips, grunts, and grins blissfully. The snake master tosses the carcass to the waiter, who flays it and has the meat grilling over coals before it is Hung's turn to drink. After Khuong, it is my turn.
“
No, I can
'
t do it,”
I object flatly.
“You've got to.”
“It's good for your libido.”
“I'm not worried about my libido.”
The bartender, sensing some fun to be had, becomes animated. “
Young man,
” he says, gesturing grandly with the bleeding cobra in hand. “
I
'
ve drunk heart-liquor once every week for forty-three years. Keeps me
healthy. Eleven children, six grandchildren,
” he announces, tapping his chest with the handle of the knife. “
It's good for you. Gives you strength. Look at me, I'm not dead.”
“Don't be such a wimp, drink up!”
They pound the table.
I look at the bartender's poisoned body with misgivings. By now the entire place, some two dozen drinkers, has taken an interest in my cowardice. A few enthusiastically cheer me on, spieling a list of beneficial properties and incredible cures.
“
Drink up,
” orders Hung, serious now. It is his show, his idea to blow a week's earnings on this excursion, and he has counted on me to reciprocate his friendship with my follow-through. “
You said you want to be Vietnamese. You want to try everything we do. It doesn't get more Vietnamese than this.”
I nod.
The heart drops into the glass. I toss it back, my throat locks. I feel the squishy live organ, tapioca-like, on my tongue. I double over and retch it onto the floor, alcohol up my nose, burning. Hung pounds my back. The audience hoots with laughter.
That is how Vietnamese men bond. We only talk when we drink. Two nights a week, the three brothers and I drink at home on the floor, a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the center of our circle like a campfire. Viet sends his nephew Nghia down the alley to bang on the door of a neighbor who sells dried fish and squid. Nghia's mother roasts the fish over coals and serves it to us with plates of pickles and chili paste.
The women and children always keep clear of the men when we drink. Viet is fond of declaring loud enough for everyone to hear,
“We are dealing in men's business. Let us be.”
Viet, the oldest male present, ceremoniously starts us off. He pours himself a shot, tosses it back, harrumphs, grins, pours another shot into the same glass, and passes it clockwise. While the next comrade regards his shot of whiskey, Viet gnaws on bits of smoked fish. The four of us do the rounds, drink the shot, pour another, pass it on, eat a piece of fish, over and over until Johnnie is gone. As long as the booze flows, we are free to talk about anything we want. Free to confide our hopes and fears. We chase it all down with a couple of beers, then disband, each
to his own bed to sleep it off. The women clean up our mess as we pass out.

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