Catfish and Mandala (30 page)

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Authors: Andrew X. Pham

BOOK: Catfish and Mandala
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Mouth around a bunch of fries, Cu-Den said, “I heard a couple years ago at our school, there was a girl who passed for a guy. She was Vietnamese, man.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Manh chirped in. “My brother told me about that. Fucking sick, man. Now, THAT'S a fucking deviant. She was like a guy or something. She went into the guys' locker room and all. Nobody knew.”
Cu-Den asked me, “You heard about that, An?”
“Naw.”
“You
anh lon,
ain't you, An?” Manh asked. None of my friends had been to my house or met my family. It was on the better side of town, theirs on the poor side of the toxic creek where we used to live.
“Yup, I'm the oldest in my family. Big Bro, Numero Uno, that's me.”
“You never heard about this?” Cu-Den asked me again.
“No.”
They were perplexed. It was the one big scandal that reverberated down the years at our school. The one dead horse everyone liked to beat. Manh said, “He—I mean she—was a trans, what-cha-call-it … a … a trans-sex, something like that.”
“A transsexual,” I told them, and threw away the rest of my Big Mac. I grabbed the baseball bat: “Rumble-time. Let's kick some ass!”
Blushing-Winter
This is a bad year for you, An, Mom told me. Nothing good will come of it. Don't go anywhere. Don't do anything. Keep your eyes out for omens. You're not American, you hear me? You're Vietnamese. You are not immune to the gods.
When I see the gravel truck driving on the wrong side of the road toward me and two dogs darting into the street, one chasing the other, I realize she may be right. I should have left Hanoi before dawn. I should have left days ago or, maybe, I should have stayed another week. I left today because my fear of Vietnam's Highway 1 has been ulcer-gnawing my gut ever since I left San Francisco.
This morning I woke, devoured a full breakfast, strapped the panniers onto the racks. Then I did the easy thing: I let my legs do what I've trained them to do—piston me right out of Hanoi. Traffic is not too heavy except when it funnels through villages, the national highway ripping through the middle and people crossing the road as casually as strolling across a courtyard. Even dogs have the same attitude about the street.
As the truck bears down on me, I am riding on the outer edge of a clutch of bicyclists and motorbikes. Everyone scatters like gnats before the oncoming truck. I try swerving off the two-lane road, but a group
of children is playing in the dirt. I brake. The first dog scats clear of the oncoming truck. I see the wide eyes of the truck driver, a cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth. He doesn't brake, but instead hammers the horn. Doesn't swerve. Couldn't with the medley of villagers all around him. I plunge off the asphalt and hit a row of plastic chairs in front of a café. The second dog, the size of a golden retriever, abandons the chase and darts back to my side of the road. The trucker pounds the horn again. The scene strobes into slow motion: the beige dog, panicked by the horn, turns and tries to cross the road again. Too late. The truck's shadow swallows it at thirty miles an hour. It clears the first set of tires, then the undercarriage of the truck glances the back of the dog. It wobbles. Just when I think the dog will live, it changes direction, trying to get out from under the moving truck. The rear set of wheels, double mounted, catches the dog squarely. Thud. Without a yelp, the creature goes under the rubber—a flash of beige fur sucked beneath wheels. A loud wet crunch of snapping sinew and collapsing rib cage, a cracking, popping sound.
A great “AW” from the men in the café. The trucker never even slows. He keeps on rolling, and within seconds there is no trace of his passage but dust and a pile of bloody fur in the middle of the road. Across the street is a shack restaurant-bar, their specialty painted on a sign out front: a three-quarter view of a dog's head. Two men come out and drag the carcass into the diner.
I feel nauseous. I can almost smell roasting ginger and dog fat—the smoky arid edge of barbecued ribs dripping on hot coals. I remember my first taste of dog meat. My uncle had forced it down my throat when I was a kid in Saigon. The beerhouse smelled terrible, rancid if it weren't for the cigarette smoke and the grill. Red-faced men talkshouted, tearing into dog ribs with their teeth and tossing the bones on the muddy floor. The owner, a mean-faced old woman, took my money and handed me a small plate of roasted dog meat, the pieces cut thin like nickels. One day, Uncle Hung was drunk and he ordered me to eat it. With him preparing to smack obedience into me, I put a slice into my mouth. It tasted gamy, almost like rabbit. The ginger killed most of the strange meat flavor. “Ha! Ha! Ha! You ate it! You know what this means? In your next life, you'll be reincarnated as a
dog!” I tried to vomit without success and I bawled with fears only an adult could instill. Whenever she visited me, Chi would take pity and go in my place to fetch Uncle Hung's dog meat.
The land is green, every inch of it cultivated. Between the villages, the land becomes a sea of rice paddies, veined with dikes, stretching to the horizon so that the far-off mountains look like islands in the distance. Thatched huts and an occasional cinder-block house of a well-to-do peasant punctuate the rice-paddy ocean like fishing boats. And in stretches, there are the lumpy rock formations resembling those of Ha Long Bay, only here the ocean has been drained. They look like giant Hershey's kisses, five hundred feet tall, all moldy with vegetation and chipped jagged by the weather. The air smells of turned earth. Now and then, a whiff of smoke from a cooking fire.
“Lieng-Xo! Lieng-Xo!”
—Russian! Russian!—the kids shout at me as they come rolling out of the school yard, a moving carpet of little black heads.
In America, I was a Jap, a Chink, a gook; in Vietnam, a Russian.
I wave back, slowing down to avoid squashing a six-year-old.
Ppht! A flying sandal misses my head. Then another. Laughing gleefully, the brats are running and flicking the sandals right off their feet. At me! Left. Right. One. Two. One. Two. Slippers shoot off their little feel like missiles. A hail of sandals smacks my bike. Bap! One hits me on the side of the head. Piss-angry, I swerve to a stop to smack some manners into the monsters. Thunk! Out of footwear ammo, they're chucking stones! I hammer the pedals and plow away fast without serious injury, save to my dignity.
I flee the village totally disconcerted. That is a new one. Mobbed by laughing elementary school children. This country never fails to surprise me. At the next school, ten miles down the road, I pick up speed and blow right by without giving the little monsters a chance to wave hello.
I arrive in Ninh Binh, a mid-sized industrial town sixty miles south of Hanoi, and take a room at the Star Hotel. The teenage bellhop, who is also the concierge, the handyman, the cook, and the roomservice guy, encourages me to book a boat ride with him. Very beautiful, he says. The price he quotes is rather steep so I ride down to the
river for a look. The city is a jumbled mess. Along the riverfront, the cops and government officials have a monopoly on the tourist trade bused down from Hanoi. They want six dollars for the boat ride and two dollars for parking my bike. I decline and go farther down the busy riverfront. A boatwoman smiles at me and waves from her boat. I return the greeting and she runs frantically after me. She guides me by my elbow to a café.
“Boat ride?” she asks, in accented English.
“How much?”
She holds up a victory sign: “Two dollars.” She points to her skinny sampan.
“Okay.”
I tell her I'm Vietnamese and she donkeys into an explosive laugh because she has never approached a Vietnamese before. We talk to the café owner, who lets me lock my bike to a post. The boatwoman crowns me with a conical peasant hat and secretes me down to the river. She doesn't want to be harassed by the cops, who would take a cut of her fee.
For two hours, she poles us downriver and across the wetland, carefully avoiding the more scenic route of the government-sanctioned tour. After the first half hour of chattering about the injustice of the local government, the woman senses that I am in a sight-seeing mood and falls silent. The stone formations here are very similar to those of Ha Long Bay—crumbs dropped when the gods were baking mountains—only smaller, five hundred feet wide, three hundred tall, and surrounded by rice paddies and shockingly green and lush swamp grass that makes the air smell sweet. I crack open a beer I brought with me and offer her one. She declines, saying it isn't right for women to drink, so she accepts it to take home to her husband. I sink low in the canoe, prop my sore feet up on the gunwale, and sip my Vietnamese brew. The world ceases to exist beyond the sweep of my eyes. It is silent but for insects in the reeds, the creaking of our single oar, and the watery swishing and dripping of our passage. We slip along the river, meandering through the green waterscape, coming close to homes and dirt roads, and it feels as though I am traveling through the Venice of Vietnam. Darkness is gathering, and somehow the splendor
of the land blossoms into something even more palpable. The beer tastes wonderful and I am delirious in the cool air current, going downriver under a blushing sky.
Between the sheer blackened cliffs, the winter sun freezes, a soft pink violet in the misty sky, a painter's fancy, a moment thought impossible and forgotten upon passing. Moments stretching back through the ages. But they are here, the peasants flip-flopping down dirt roads, hoes and shovels on their shoulders. The pudding-rich earth at their feet lies like frosting on the land, good enough to eat. Field upon field of rice stretches out in the lowering light, quiet after the day's toil. An old man coughs, his feet dragging. A cluster of girls giggles, pealing clean, vibrant sounds over the whiskery glass of the paddies. A steer clops ponderously, a cart of earthenware creaking behind it. A boy naps on the back of a rare white water buffalo. A handsome young man herds ducks with a bamboo pole as long as a fishing rod.
I sit midstream, breathing softly, unreasonably fearful of this moment slipping away, wishing I could drink in this strange pink of evening. The beauty is so awfully sweet, I think I can taste it somewhere near the center of me.
Vietnamese-Karma
One crisp afternoon in late January 1989, my beat-up Toyota hiccuped back to San Jose. I was taking an unsanctioned religious holiday from UCLA, on my way to pick up Grandma Le for the greatest gathering of the clan since the first Pham set foot in America. We were observing the anniversary of Grandpa Pham's death. Technically, Grandma Le didn't have to attend, but she was lonely and wanted to mingle with the other side of the family. Strange how she couldn't bear to be within sight of
“that arrogant mud-footed prince”
when he was alive. A dozen years after he exhaled his last opiate breath, she was raring to go to the big party held in his honor and looking forward to gossiping with his widow, Grandma Pham, my father's stepmother.
I curbed the car and found her doing tai chi on the sidewalk, heronstepping among the fallen leaves. Beneath her best maroon embroidered silk, she had double-packed herself in thermals and sweaters, hands in child-sized mitts, satin-slippered feet in three layers of hunter's socks. A black beanie swallowed most of her head, including her ears, and a brown wool scarf bandited her face. Her frost-rosy eyes winked at me. It was a marvel the neighbors had stopped staring at this crone doll who suddenly materialized amid their lower-middle-class suburban
enclave two years ago, fresh off the plane from Vietnam. One day they woke up and found a four-foot-nine, eighty-five-year-old woman in black peasant pajamas doing Bruce Lee impressions in slow motion in front of their houses.
“Grandma!”
I shouted, arms wide, walking right into her Rooster Sunrise stance for a hug.
She pulled down her scarf and grinned broadly, showing a silver front tooth, patting my arm, uncomfortable with the open affection but liking it. She squinted at me and said,
“Who are you? You look like An, but I can't remember what he looks like.”
“Grandma!”
“You haven't visited me in a month!”
she squeaked.
“Bad grandson! Aiiya! Aiiya! Aiiya!”
And gave me a couple of karate chops to the arm.
“Aiiya! Aiiya!”
Two soft kicks to the shin.
I laughed and dropped an arm around her shoulder, nodding my chin on the top of her head. She smiled. She didn't laugh anymore. It took too much lung power.
“My school is four hundred miles away, Grandma. That's like driving from Phan Thiet to Da Nang.”
“Hmm. Hmm,”
she mumbled, meaning I should have picked a college closer to home.
“Aha! Grandma, you're wearing makeup.”
“Shuss! It's too cold here. I need some color in my cheeks.”
She pretended to push me away.
“It looks good. Maybe we can find you an elderly gentleman.”
I pinched her arm.
“Aiee! Don't be silly, you impudent boy.”
“You're shy, Grandma.”
“I'm not shy. A girl only needs one husband to lose her shyness. I had three, but I lose them like lizards lose tails.”
Grandma used to be a real looker, with an attitude to boot. Back in Phan Thiet, she was the town's scandal with her history of three husbands. The first was an academic, her high school sweetheart. The second was a professional soccer star—my mother's father. The War claimed them both. The third, Auntie Dung's father, the fishsauce baron, was a polygamist with three wives. He was her true love and
she always kept an altar for him. I had asked her why she still lit incense for him and put fruit on his altar year-round. She said he watched over the family. I teased that he couldn't possibly find her here in America, halfway around the world. She touched her chest:
In here, this place is the same.
“Look what I have for you, Grandma.
” I flashed five Lotto scratch-off cards.
“
Ah, good! Good grandson! Thank you. I neverget enough of these.”
She inspected them for luck and slipped them into her silk jacket.
“
Why do you like to play the lottery so much?”
I asked her.
“I want to leave my grandchildren something,”
she answered matter-of-factly. She had given up everything, forfeiting land and business, to come to America and be with her children and grandchildren. I wondered how she felt not having her own place and needing to rely on her daughter, Auntie Dung, to take care of her. She had no idea her children and grandchildren were scattered and too wound up with American life to be with her daily.
“Auntie Dung and Uncle Hung aren't coming, Grandma?”
“No, they're afraid things might get difficult. You know, your mother and your father's brothers don't adore each other much.”
Grandma still smoldered whenever she talked about how Dad's side of the family had mistreated her daughter. I didn't want her to get fired up, especially with today's festivities. I rubbed my belly and said we ought to get over to the party before they ate everything. I opened the door, ushered her into the passenger seat, and gingerly buckled her in. Grandma was brittle, broke her hip last year. She wanted to know why my car was full of stuff. I waved her off, claiming that I was moving. I didn't want her to know I was living out of my car because I couldn't pay the rent this month. It was still early in the term so the checks from my tutoring and grading jobs hadn't arrived yet. It had been pretty lean stretching a couple of packets of hot dogs an entire week. I had been salivating for days, thinking about this feast. On the backseat was my cooler. There ought to be plenty of leftovers.
That was the one good thing about the Pham women, in-laws included: They knew how to cook. Each had her own specialties.
During Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, they cooked up a warehouse of food and traded dishes around so that every household had the same feast though no one cooked more than one or two entrées. For the anniversary of Grandpa's death, all these treats would be crammed with forty-three hungry mouths into one rickety house in an old section of Cupertino where the neighborhood dated back to the fifties, when Americans had never heard of a place called Vietnam.
Grandma Pham lived with her married daughters and youngest son at the end of an oak-lined cul-de-sac with ruptured asphalt. All four of their cars were parked in the street, a dead pickup on the lawn. Untrimmed shrubs mustached the house. The garage door was holding up three bedrooms tacked together under an open-rafter roof. Stashed on the sides of the structure were curly sheets of discarded plywood, busted bookcases, rusted wheelbarrows, used car tires, and piles of aluminum cans. The balding back lawn was barely visible beneath worktables, sawhorses, mountains of paint cans, Formica sheets, neon machines, and toolboxes. Aunt Hanh's husband was a sign maker. They stayed in one of the bedrooms with their young daughter. Aunt Hang and her husband, both in their late thirties, were full-time college students, engineering hopefuls. They and their two children shared the master bedroom. Grandma Pham had her own room. Uncle Hau, the anchor of this household, lived in the converted garage space, using his professional-programmer income to supplement everyone else's. The economical arrangement cramped his bachelor lifestyle, but that was expected of a dutiful son. Besides, he only dated Vietnamese-American girls. They understood.
The party was in full cry when I walked Grandma through the door, last to arrive. The noisy house smelled of cooking food and too many people, definitely an Asian-house odor. My brothers and sister were drinking sodas and hanging out with our cousins. Grandma Pham, a sparrow of a woman, paired off with Grandma Le and, after brief greetings to everyone, they moused into the bedroom to drink tea and watch videos of Vietnamese soap operas. Mom was hovering in the kitchen with my aunts. She was blatantly avoiding Uncle Hun and Uncle Hong. When my father eloped with her, these two had
come after him with handcuffs. I went around greeting my elders as was proper. It took the better part of an hour because my father had five brothers and three sisters and, with the exception of Uncle Hau, they were all married with children. I bowed and traded pleasantries with each.
Round-faced Uncle Hong, rosy with a beer in him, clapped me on the shoulder. “
How's school, An?”
“Good. How are you?”
“Well. Strong. Engineering, right?”
“Yes, Uncle.”
“Good, you'll make lots of money. Help your parents when they retire.”
“Oh, yes, sure, of course.”
I didn't have much in common with most of my uncles. I hated having to bow, grovel, and show them respect the whole nine yards like a ten-year-old schoolboy just because they were my elders. Uncle Hong was a natural entrepreneur, at the moment a real estate speculator. Uncle Hun was a lifelong technician, a classic worker ant. Slumlord Uncle Hoang was the only Pham nearing millionaire status. He used to have me paint his illegal apartments until I decided to charge him minimum hourly wages. His wife, a beauty queen who didn't get along with the rest of the family too well, didn't show up for the ceremony, causing fierce whispering among the wives-in-law
After the aunts decorated the food and arranged it on Grandpa Pham's shrine, covering every square inch of the red silk tablecloth with meat and fruit, beer, tea, and rice wine, piling it on until the thing creaked ominously, Grandma Pham started the ceremony by lighting the first batch of incense on an altar candle. Head bowed deeply, she prayed to the same black-and-white photo of Grandpa that we had at home. The entire clan lined up for the procession to the altar, in descending hierarchy, oldest to youngest, sons to daughters, grandsons to granddaughters. There were so many of us that we dimmed the house with incense. The smoke detector panicked. Uncle Hun pulled its batteries, and the fire hazard continued unabated. Auntie Hang opened windows and turned on the oscillating fan. Grandma Le wasn't expected to pray to her old nemesis.
Mom was, but she boycotted by stirring the soup pot. I did my deed but filched a couple of egg rolls from the altar.
The clan sat around talking, mostly about money and investment, not a word about Grandpa, waiting for the joss sticks to burn down, which was about half an hour—the time it took for spirits to “eat” the offerings. The women fussed in the kitchen, setting the tables, putting on final touches, and readying pots and pans so they could warm up foods the instant the joss sticks died. Little cousins rioted all over the house, screaming in their cribs, playing tag, shooting space aliens on the television, bullying, pulling each other's hair, yelling, and crying. I couldn't remember all their names, each had two, one Vietnamese and one American. This country had been good to us Phams, we multiplied like rabbits.
By the time they moved the food from the altar to the tables, beer had been flowing steadily among the men for two hours. Spirits were high. Mom was the only woman who flouted tradition by drinking a whole can of beer. The men, none of whom were heavy drinkers, turned bright red, became more passionate and magnanimous with each toast. Jokes roared around the table. Uncle Hong, who was under strict doctor's orders to refrain from alcohol and red meat, threw caution to the wind, this his big once-a-year. My father, who never goes out even on weekends, became alive in the company of his brothers, venting his bottlenecked social needs. Uncle Hien, the former heroin addict and gangster, now married and in good grace with his family, bubbled over with raucous stories, slapping his older brothers on the back.
The uncles had saved me a seat at the table since I was an adult now, five months bordering engineer status. I begged off and roamed the buffet table. The spread was the sort I dreamed about. There were Peking duck with pillowy white buns to be eaten with scallion brushes and sweet plum sauce; roasted pig with cracker-crunchy skin to be savored on angel-hair rice noodles glistening with scallion oil; sweet pork spareribs complete with the three layers of good-fortune fat; several whole boiled chickens for dipping with lime, pepper, and salt; a tub of prawn salad tossed with rice vinegar and pickled carrots, great for making canapes with shrimp chips; green papaya salad with
sugary chili-fishsauce; egg rolls made with ground pork, potato noodles, cat-ear mushrooms, and real crab meat; salad rolls with their translucent rice-paper skin showing slices of steamed pork, for dipping in hoisin sauce; yam and shrimp fritters; grilled lemongrass beef rolled like cigarettes and served on skewers; a whole sea bass steamed in a scallion soy sauce; hills of red sweet rice with drifts of coconut snow; a big pot of crab-and-asparagus soup thick with chicken and cloud-ear mushrooms; anchovy fried rice; scallops with chive dumplings; ginger stir-fried vegetables with watercress and young bamboo shoots; and vinegared beef served with sweet red onion and rice papers. I loaded up two plates, tucked a bottle of beer under one arm, and went into Uncle Hau's bedroom to watch football on the tube with my cousins and brothers.
Halfway through the meal, the conversation in the dining room grew loud. I went out for a third helping to see what was happening. Eating had slowed at the long table, no one reaching to refresh his bowl. My father was beet-faced and talking in a restrained manner. Aunt Huong and her husband looked irritated. Everyone else wore a silly, nervous grin, trying to make light of the tension.

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