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Authors: Andrew X. Pham

BOOK: Catfish and Mandala
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Sometimes, I wondered why Chi's final days with us on Locke Drive did not take on a more explosive texture. I suspected it was because the flavors surrounding Dad's last quarrel with Chi were the very flavors of our lives in its absolute normalcy. It was the first time we were all under one roof living as a family, free from the appraising eyes of the church that sponsored us. Tossing in America without a net, we were learning English, we were learning about each other. Just beginning to weave the fabric of our family there in the tiny threebedroom duplex, our halfway house to the promised land. What I remember most were the ingredients of the everyday—the smells, the sounds, the jars and hums of an immigrant family, new to being immigrants as well as being a family. I remember the nauseous perm chemicals of Mom's salon. The apartment's moldy carpet that knew more floods than any of us. The bulk meat stewing in fishsauce, Mom's attempt to save money. Incense burning eternally on the family altar,
sending ever more prayers to heaven for yet another deliverance. Our eight bodies sweating without air-conditioning. The dump down the street sneaking into the house on a breeze. The convoy of dump trucks rumbling through the street. Mayo and bologna sandwiches. And homemade French fries leaving an oily, smoky tang on everything. The neighborhood shrill with heavy metal, yelling kids. The television warbling nonsense. Mom's incessant complaints. Us boys quarreling. Baby Kay crying.
Our house at times took on the grimy madness of a roadside diner halfway to hell. This was the context of our downfall.
Chi didn't come home from school that day, but the cops came for Dad after he returned from work. They had a warrant for his arrest. Showed it to him. Said his daughter Chi was in a detention center, a safe place. Handcuffed him in his own living room in front of his wife and children. Took him away in a patrol car flashing red lights, all the neighbors standing on the curb watching the spectacle the way we did when the cops came for them. Mom cried, yelling in Vietnamese, no idea what the cops were saying to her. Chi's high school teacher said bruises don't lie; Dad was a child beater.
Jungle-Station
Jungle shadows nip the heel of the day's last passenger train as it lumbers toward Muong Man Station. I fight down a surge of panic. Early in the morning, I ride back into Phan Thiet from Mui Ne and hop the peasant commuter train out to this way station. With $45 in my pocket, I know the train is my only chance of reaching Hanoi, some one thousand miles north. Several Vietnamese informed me the ticket was $30, but the Muong Man Station officials want $120 because I am a Vietnamese American, the porters want $10 for handling my bicycle because it has heavy luggage panniers, and the constable wants $40 because his salary is $25 a month. $170 in total.
“Where are your American papers?”
demands the constable with a doughy face peppered with blackheads.
“I left them in Saigon with my relatives.” A
street-savvy friend had informed me of the brisk black-market trade in Vietnamese-American legal documents. After all these years, I sometimes feel as though my American skin is only as thick as my passport. This makes me very nervous about taking my “return ticket to America” on the road.
“Ho Chi Minh City, not Saigon!” he barks. “Travel is not permitted without a passport. A photocopy is not acceptable.”
Inside the decaying way station, sweat steams in the heat. Sour. Workers' sandals flap on the dirt, powdering the air. Rust scabs the window's metal grilles. Door hinges dangle on doorless frames. I sit in the center of the office on a long bench surrounded by seven uniforms. The stationmaster, a thick joint of beef grizzled with graying black hair, lounges behind a desk with one leg cocked on an open drawer. The constable plants his hams against the edge of the desk and eyes my bicycle and the loaded panniers, no doubt appraising their value. Three conductors and a pair of deputies form the spectator gallery to my right. They scowl, not buying my pleas of poverty. Foreigners aren't poor. Can't be. Especially not Viet-kieu.
The underlings file out to meet the train, leaving me with the two honchos. Outside, the beggars, vendors, and peasants stir out of the shade onto the hot concrete, buzzing toward the ancient iron monster as it groans to rest. Healthy beggars abruptly develop the gaits of cripples. Vendors sing their wares, clawing at the passengers, jabbing sandwiches, bags of peanuts, pouches of sugarcane juice, T-shirts, straw mats, and tawdry gifts through the windows, pleading for a buyer. Peasants are frantic to get their baskets of produce aboard before the whistle blows again.
Four laborers haul pigs individually caged in woven baskets and drop them on the concrete. The pigs squeal, pissing terror, yellow urine running across the pavement. The stench wafts into the room on a hot breeze and infects me with the animals' fear.
“May I go now? That's my train.”
I manage a smile and inch to the edge of the bench. They have detained me in this room for two hours, causing me to miss one train already.
“Here, I'll help you out: $140 U.S. dollars,”
the station boss offers.
I carefully explain again that I have only enough for the regular fare. The constable frowns, orders me to stay in the room and goes out with the stationmaster, cursing cheap foreigners.
Alone, I watch the peeling strips of ceiling boards flex in the wind playing in the rafters. I am still hungry and weak from my bout of stomach flu. The minutes tick by. The stationmaster pokes his head into the room and says,
“The train's leaving in two minutes. Changed your mind? It's the last passenger train today. Do you want to pay now?”
“Go through my bags! If I've got any money in there, it's yours!”
He shrugs and leaves. Two minutes. The whistle blasts twice. The train sighs northward without me. Practically broke and emotionally exhausted, I consider abandoning my bike trip altogether and retreating to the villa in Vung Tau until the fever and the diarrhea pass. Touring Vietnam isn't shaping up as I had hoped. This morning while I was eating breakfast, a pickpocket stole my pepper spray. Afterward, a minivan came within inches of hitting me head-on, my closest call yet after months of bike touring. I am miserable with flea and mosquito bites and, between bouts of diarrhea and unexplainable fevers, I haven't felt well since I stepped off the plane. Every Vietnamese I meet corrupts me with the certainty that I will die if I attempt to bicycle the country. Now the train officials strong-arm me:
No passport? Then you must stay here in this jungle.
An hour later, still detained at the station on the constable's order, I watch the rail crew work.
“Yes, that's what I said, you idiot!”
a conductor explodes into a telephone receiver.
Squatting on their hams in the dirt, four junior conductors, deep in a heated debate, don't even look up. They shuffle pebbles along a line drawn in the dirt. The station manager is testing them on traincar sequence management and track scheduling. With a single track, it is paramount to keep the northbound and the southbound trains from meeting.
The conductor bellows:
“The train left fifteen minutes ago, you idiot!”
A roar of curses and victory whoops rolls out from the room behind. The laborers are gambling with the rest of the station staff, most of whom are relatives.
“Yeah, you come out here,”
says the man, dripping each word into the receiver.
“Come out here and I'll cut off your balls.”
A baby wails.
“Your mother!”
He hammers the receiver into its cradle, lights a cigarette, and saunters over to inspect my bike. Finally, his curiosity gets the better of him.
“Hey!”
He turns to me.
“Hungry? You want to go for coffee?”
A friendly gesture. Unsure if going for coffee means just coffee or a whole meal with plenty of drinking, I blurt,
“Sure. Thanks.”
He confers with the constable, then motions for me to follow him. I move to get the bike, but he says,
“Leave it. I'll have someone watch it for you.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. Trust him or insult him? Neither a winning choice. Oh, hell.
We stagger over the mounds of debris that ring the station, then tread around peasants sitting on the ground amid great baskets of produce waiting to load their goods on the next overnight cargo-only train. Red dirt, the color of half-baked clay, kicked up by foot traffic, drifts down on the houses, layering thick over the leafy trees and powdering the farm women's white shirts. On the side of the road, stooped grandmothers gather the cabbage they laid out this morning to dry in the sun. Dogs scat erratically, noses to the ground, pissing and defecating next to the vegetables.
At a kitchen-shack diner, an establishment held up by four posts and a motley collection of plywood, we sit on low bamboo chairs under a thatched awning. A stray mutt curls up at my feet and shares his fleas with my ankles.
My host orders each of us a liter of draft beer, rice, pork chops, vegetables, and chicken squash soup. The owner-waitress-cook calls a little boy from the street, fishes a greasy wad of money out of a bloodstained pocket, and peels him a five-cent bill. A minute later, he trots back with a lump of ice with a rind of dirt, juggling it between his hands like a hot potato. She wipes the ice with a rag, cracks it with a cleaver, drops the chunks into clear plastic mugs and pours our beer.
My host's name is Hoang and he wants to hear about my travels. He is a prolific reader of travel literature and magazines about exotic locales with strange names, but he has never been farther than two hundred miles from his home village. Hoang is thirty-five, married with three children. His family of five lives on his meager salary. He seems like a real nice guy, a dreamer of far places and quiet inner glory. For strangers like him, quiet souls who murmur,
I wish I could do what you're doing
, I dig deep into my bag of tricks—my tales of the road—and spin the best yarns within my power, casting a sheen on
every detail. After my stories and several liters of beer run dry, a wistfulness comes into his eyes.
“I remember the day before the North Army came in,”
he said.
“The whole village, those that hadn't fled already, gathered in the market for the news. A merchant who had just come back from Saigon to fetch his family was there, telling everyone that the Americans were taking refugees on their ships.
“My neighbor asked me if I wanted to come with his family. He was my best friend. They had two motorbikes; they got rich working for the local American army base. They rode out of the village that day with what they could put in their bags.
“I got a letter from my friend a couple of years ago. His family is in France and he is an engineer. He is married to a Frenchwoman. They live in a nice house outside of Paris.”
“Many people are still emigrating?”
“No. It's a dream … Even beggars come back rich.”
Breaking the mood with a broad grin, he asks me,
“So you really don't have money?”
“Forty-five dollars is all I have until I get to the Vietcom Bank in Hanoi.”
“That's six weeks' wages to me,”
he notes, eyeing me.
“Well, there may be another way to get you north.”
“How?”
“Hitchhike.”
“You mean on the road with my bike?”
“No, hitchhike a freight train. But you've got to pretend you're a Vietnamese. No one will dare take a Viet-kieu. I admire what you're doing. If I didn't have a family, I'd go with you. Leave it to me. I'll get you north … eventually.”
He grins, flourishes his hand like a street conjurer, and pats me on the shoulder, which makes me nervous.
“But what about the constable? Your boss might fire you.”
“The constable: no problem. Once you're gone, you're out of his jurisdiction.”
He pauses, grinning.
“My boss, he's family—my uncle.”
Hoang confirms my suspicions that the
big men
believed me when I failed to hock up the cash when the last train rolled out. According to him, I can't take the passenger train to Hanoi even if he sells me a civilian ticket, because I don't look native. The officials on the train are certain to give me trouble when I present a civilian ticket.
We stumble back to the station. Hoang suggests I sleep off the booze while he goes to his night class. Hoang and five other rail workers, all drunk, trudge off to their English class with notebooks and pencils in hand like schoolboys, chanting:
Times are changing, we must be ready for opportunity, we must learn English, the international language of commerce.
They stagger down the road. Hoang yells over his shoulder that I shouldn't worry, he'll have me on my way when he gets back.
Night falls. I retire to a broken divan in a dark room. The shredded straw mat reeks of stale beer and sweat. The walls bubble with zigzagging geckos. The air buzzes with crickets, one ricochets off my forehead. Mosquitoes assault my hands and face. Fleas sneak up my pant legs to ravish my calves. I am raw with bites, crazy with itches, hoping Hoang and his boys will come back for me but certain that they'll pass out drunk somewhere.
I give up on sleep and stroll into the village. It is 11 p.m. Nearly everyone is awake. In the shack-diner, a crowd watches Vietnamese soaps on a nineteen-inch Sony. Across the street, young men hang out at a two-table billiard hall, four posts holding up sheets of corrugated aluminum. Around midnight, I squat in the market square at one of the dozen single-basket food sellers and eat a late supper of rice porridge cooked in chicken stock and scallions.
By moonlight, I stray down to the disused section of the station. Broken, abandoned train cars crowd the rail yard. The dark masks the garbage, the coolness holds down the stink, the still air sick-sweet with a scent of urine and wet hay. Crickets sugar the night. Hammocks creaking. Soft words. Rhythmic breaths, gentle moans seep through caboose windows. Passion-rich this world of beggars, homeless.
Down at the main platform, vendors' oil lamps dot the dark cement islands between the tracks like fireflies. I am drawn to the lights. A beggar boy and a white-haired man sit on six-inch plastic blocks next to a girl selling hot soy milk from a tin pot. They smile, inviting me into their circle.
“Try some hot milk,”
the boy urges me. He looks about ten, naked save for a tattered pair of shorts and mismatched rubber thongs tied to his toeless feet. I saw him earlier hobbling about begging the train passengers and bantering, teasing the food vendors. Cheerful and roguish, he seems to forget his lameness though he dramatizes it well when he works the crowd.
“Egg-milk?”
the girl queries. I nod. Smiling, she briskly whips an egg yolk with sugar in a cup with a fork for five minutes, then tops it off with a ladle of hot soy milk. It tastes foamy, sweet, and warm, just like what Great Granny used to give me when I couldn't sleep. I tell her as much and she blushes with pleasure.

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