Catfish and Mandala (22 page)

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Authors: Andrew X. Pham

BOOK: Catfish and Mandala
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Too jazzed with adrenaline to sleep, I count the geckos scrawling across the ceiling. I am inexplicably happy, thrilled not by my escape but by the goodness of my hosts. This is Vietnam. These are my people. Phan Thiet, the village of my childhood, and Mui Ne, the gateway of our family's flight from the fatherland, await me down the road, merely a day away.
Milk-Mother
I wake full of hopes, aching to get going. Surely Phan Thiet, a puff of a fishing town, couldn't have changed much after two decades. Everything, all my good memories, had happened in this dusty town, on its sandy beaches and among the coconut groves.
I sneak out of Ham Tan before dawn, skipping breakfast to avoid a chance encounter with the mob. The road inland toward Highway 1 is quiet. Peasants are bringing their produce to market. A group of girls carrying huge baskets of home-fired coals on their shoulders greet me so cheerfully I dismount and walk my bike. They laugh and the air around them is perfumed with the scent of soap and riverwashed hair. In their sun-bleached clothes, they smell and look far cleaner than me. They go to market twice a week. Their cargo varies seasonally, sometimes fish, other times vegetables and fruits. For this dry season, the men fire coal, and the women bring it to market, two baskets at a time.
I have a wild urge to marry them all, take them to America, give them American citizenship, and tell them they will never have to walk barefoot on hot asphalt again. But their laughter is so pure and rich that I quell my foolishness and simply enjoy their company until far down the road they board a Tuk-tuk for the next village.
On the main highway, a motley collection of dwellings on halfacre arid farm lots line the road. Mile after mile, children sprout out of the land like weeds. They tag each other down the road to school, sit and play cards right on the edge of the blacktop, paying no mind to the buses roaring by and spraying them with dirt. They hound me on bicycle, wanting candy, practicing their English. Elloo. Ow arrr uu? Fuk you. Fuk you. What yore nam? Where uu from? Bye-bye. They overrun the land like an infestation of locusts. Where is the food to feed all these mouths?
A scrap-metal collector blames it on the government. I meet him sometime after midday and ride with him all the way to Phan Thiet. He chain-smokes hand-rolled cigarettes and rides a rickety one-speed bicycle with a thirty-five-pound truck transmission casing tied to the rear rack.
“The government screwed up,” he says, “and they're trying to fix it, but it's too late. It was all the fighting—the War, then the skirmishes with Cambodia and China. For a long time the government said it was patriotic to get married and raise many children because all the young men had died in the War or were dying in battles against Cambodia. Their message was a big hit. Now they've got a country full of people and no war to thin out the population. The way we're breeding we could drain the country's resources in another generation.”
He was a struggling college student when the South Vietnamese government fell. The Communists drafted him, sent him to burn down the jungle for farming, then planted him on the border to fight Cambodians. Six years later, when it was all over, he returned to Saigon to finish his education at night, paying for it by working as a laborer and driving a cyclo. But it wasn't meant to be. He never got over the strange jungle sickness he contracted at the border, and no one could think straight in night class after twelve hours of hard labor. After a few years, he abandoned his academic pursuit, got married, and fathered a son. To support his family, he found himself riding his bicycle thirty miles a day, collecting and bartering in scrap metal and spare auto parts.
We part ways at the city line, him heading to the poor quarter of the city, me rolling down the main thoroughfare. Narrower than the average unmarked two-lane road, this dusty pipeline happens to be the national highway. No trees, just dirt, sand, and people. The first structure I recognize is the Catholic school Chi and I had attended before my French education days. The ghost tree is gone. It used to litter the street with tamarind pods, which, with sugar, made tasty treats, the Vietnamese equivalent of sourballs. We never dared touch them. The old folks said it had been a hanging tree when the French had the run of the land—ghosts of those unjustly killed haunted the branches and poisoned the fruit. The school is still there but the nuns are gone and the student population has increased tenfold. I dismount and meander through the series of rectangular one-story buildings. At the far end of the school yard, beyond the badminton nets, is a fence of red paper-flower bushes. Chi had rescued me from a pair of bullies there, the four of us standing ankle deep in leafy confetti redder than New Year's paint.
I ride on down the main artery. Houses come closer together as they reach higher toward the tangle of power lines. New structures are going up everywhere, piecemeal, like Lego blocks. Workers weave steel lattices and pour concrete into them to make columns. Shops have blossomed. A big-city intensity has found its way into Phan Thiet. The road expands into a four-lane boulevard to accommodate the commerce, then bridges over a river where the water is logjammed with wooden boats of all shapes and sizes, a living city on the river as far as I can see to the next bend nearly a mile off. Sampans loaded with colorful produce putter across spinach water. A boy perches on a wood piling, defecating into the river. Sitting against the railing at the crown of the bridge, a blind old woman clenches into herself, the whole of her no bigger than a fire hydrant, fitting into the shadow of her farmer's hat. An arm extended, stiff as a twig, a withered palm waiting for alms. I pedal on until I reach the other end of the city. I pay for a room at the edge of town and eat dinner. Feeling slightly under the weather, I turn in for the night.
First thing in the morning, I find my childhood home on the southern lip of the town. It is a motorcycle repair shop. Six greasy
young men are sitting on their hams tinkering with engine parts. Oil and dirt cream the floor. The tenant is a man my age. I chat with him, and at my request he takes me to the backyard. The well still gives sweet water, he says. I tell him that as a boy, I had accidentally drowned three puppies by lowering them into the well for a bath. He walks me to the bedroom in back, partitioned from the shop with sheets of plywood. In the corner, exactly as I remember it, is the divan where I'd slept. It is dirt-stained. On this divan, my father had caned Chi until I took her by the hand to Grandma's house.
We are chatting amiably about the virtues of the house when our eyes meet—a strange moment—and we know we are holding a common thought: the transparency of our situations. Fate could have switched our destinies and no one would have been the wiser. I clear my throat and take demi-steps toward the front door. I thank him for showing me his home. The tides of traffic and horns disorient me as I step into the road short of breath. Feeling guilty, I am very thankful we had the money to escape Vietnam.
I trudge up and down the street but can't recognize Grandma's house. An old woman watches me from her hammock strung just inside her door. On my third or fourth pass, she comes to the door and waves me to her.
“What are you looking for?”
she asks.
“Good morning. I'm the grandson of Mrs. Le—son of her daughter Anh. They used to live somewhere near here. I'm looking for the house.”
“AAAAAA!”
she cries, happily.
“I remember you! I'm Mrs. Sau-Quang. Do you remember me?”
“Oh
…
I'm sorry. I don't.”
I can't place either her name or her seventy-year-old face, flabby, floppy like a Halloween pumpkin left out through November.
Mrs. Sau-Quang beckons me inside and serves me tea, welcoming me like a lost relative and introducing me to her nieces and nephews. She says she knew my grandmother from the day Grandma bought the house way back when. I sit long enough to be polite then beg her to take me to my grandmother's house.
We walk slowly along the drumming traffic and come to a dwelling ten doors down. It is a hovel more suitable for animals than people.
“
This is your grandmother's house. Do you remember it?”
she quizzes me with childish glee.
I shake my head. She flashes a toothless grin, encouraging me to dredge the recess of my memory, but I don't recognize the beggarly shelter where I had spent many lazy summer days.
“Where's the shop? My grandmother had a little store,”
I ask her.
“They knocked it down years ago and built this lean-to for storage.”
“Where are all the trees? I remember walking from my house to Grandma's without stepping out of the shade.”
“Seventy-seven. Everybody chopped them down for cooking fires in the summer of'77. Didn't even last the whole year.”
“Does Hoa—the girl my age—still live next door?”
“No, she married a laborer ten or eleven years back and the whole family moved to Nha Trang. We neighbors-relatives lost touch with them.”
Mrs. Sau-Quang raps the door with her cane and a short man in his late forties lets us in. She introduces me. Mr. Phi, the current owner of the house, agrees to give me a tour. Mr. Phi is a taxidermist and a hunter of wild game. A fetid odor pervades the house. Cages are stacked against walls of rotting plaster. Cobwebs mummify stuffed bobcats, tortoises, peacocks, monkeys, and other furry animals I don't recognize. The blue plaster remains, unwashed. Untouched for twenty years.
“May I see the backyard? I'd like to see the star-fruit tree,”
I ask Mr. Phi, feeling lost. Chi and I had climbed it, ate its fruit, and gazed at the stars.
“Ah, yes. But it is barren. No fruit.”
We file through the house and find my tree out back. It is dying, bleeding sap. It reminds me of Grandma sitting in her sad American room, old and lonely, thousands of miles from her homeland. The tree is a season away from becoming firewood. Bricks barnacle the earth at its foot. No longer a geyser of leaves, it droops like an old woman napping in her seat. Like Grandma, wizened, gnarled, crusty, and crippled. I doubt its main limb could bear my weight now. On the branches two small monkeys flit back and forth, scolding us. They don't go far with the chains around their necks.
“Thank you.1've seen enough,”
I murmur. “
Forgive me, I must go now.”
I retreat to my room at the inn. Where is this place I am seeking? There is only ash. Secretly, I am thankful no one is witnessing this unearthing of my roots. It is true what Vietnamese say: Viet-kieu are the lottery winners. The payoff stretches forth through the ages. America has it all, owns it all. And nowhere else are we safer than in America. That much I suspect is true.
In this Vietnamese muck, I am too American. Too refined, too removed from my
que
, my birth village. The sight of my roots repulses me. And this shames me deeply.
I am awakened by a runner sent by Mrs. Sau-Quang. He brings word for me to come at once. Su is waiting at Mrs. Sau-Quang's house. I hop on my bike, glad that I had hired a motorbike runner to find Su, my nanny. I was too young to remember her, but my mother had told me Su was a kind woman who nursed me the first three years of my life. My milk-mother.
I bow deeply to Su. She bows in return. We sit across from each other in Mrs. Sau-Quang's front room, just staring and smiling. How are you? Well, and you, Auntie-friend? I get by, but are your parents well in America? Yes, they want to know how many children you have. Ten, two passed away, but we are fortunate to have eight obedient children.
The formal words trade back and forth between us. Over and over, she keeps repeating:
“Who would have guessed I would see you after so many years?”
Su moved to the country fifteen years ago when Vietnam was in its deepest depression. Her family farmed, fished, raised pigs, and hired out its labor to whoever needed them. She remembers me but she also remembers other babies she had nurtured. She doesn't see why I'd come back to see her, but she is glad I came. I apologize for not having come for her myself. Mrs. Sau-Quang had told me to wait. It's best, Su says. The runner was lucky to find her, since there are no such things as addresses or road names out in the deep country. Most peasants don't read or write, so they go by name and word of mouth.
“Su has a very difficult life. Pity her. Look at her. Just skin and bone. Can you believe she is only forty-five? Why, she looks sixty. Pity her,”
says Mrs. Sau-Quang. She harps along this line the entire hour, edging in a few words about her own impoverishment as well.
“Do you remember my sister Chi?”
I ask Su.
“Yes, she was a beautiful child. How is she? Is she married? How many children?”
“Chi passed away.”
“So sorry. That is terrible,”
she says.
“What happened?”
The answer has always been on my lips:
“An accident.”
That's what it must have been: An accident. Kind of like one of those calamitous highway pileups on a wide flat stretch of asphalt that would have been an easy, safe passage on any other day except that one foggy morning when everyone was going a little too fast to notice one car was having problems—each man too intent on his own purpose to notice the flashing hazard lights of the troubled driver.

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