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Authors: Andrew X. Pham

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BOOK: Catfish and Mandala
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In the middle of the night, Uncle Tu makes a racket as he claws his way out of his hammock. I ask him where he is going.
“Going out for a piss,”
he moans.
“My worm isn't as strong as it used to be. Have to pee twice
every
night.”
“Wait. I'll come, too.”
He urinates on the trunk of a tree. I go to the latrine down by the lake. Behind a clutch of brambles, a catwalk bridges out to the latrine platform built over the water, fifteen feet from shore. Since I came back to Vietnam, I have been able to avoid using these fishpond-latrines. I mount the steps and take care of business. Through the latrine-hole cut into the planks, I see the dark water beginning to churn, coming alive, coiling on itself. It is unnerving. The catfish come to feed.
I wake up, cotton-mouthed, with a searing fever. Uncle Tu pours me a bowl of strong tea for breakfast, feels my forehead, and, without a word, starts hanging blankets over the door and the single window. I
complain that it's too stuffy. Keep out the ill wind and evil spirits, he explains. He calls “Sonny” next door and sends him off to find the village's silver coin. The boy scours the area, following the trail of illness from farm to farm. The silver coin is part talisman, part medicinal tool, Uncle Tu says, an heirloom handed down from generation to generation. No one knows who it really belonged to, although everyone uses it when he takes ill. Most of the peasants are too poor to own a silver coin, and those who can afford one don't buy one, preferring the heirloom coin for its legendary healing power. In an hour, the boy returns with the coin. Uncle Tu sends him back out with some money to buy heat-oil, a mentholated herbal oil that makes one's skin feel hot.
I tell Uncle Tu I don't believe “scraping the bad wind” is an effective way to break my fever. He hands me the coin as though an inspection of it would clear my doubts. I unwrap a scrap of crimson velvet, worn smooth and slick with mentholated oil, and pick up the silver coin, which is larger than a silver dollar. Decades of extended use have worn the faces smooth, leaving just a telltale Chinese character.
“It has healed many, many people. Very powerful,”
Uncle Tu says in a tone of benediction. He is very worried about me. “
You must have caught an ill wind out on the pond last night. That's very bad, water spirits are strongest at night.”
He starts rambling about folklore and superstitions, something about the land having power over things that come from it. I tell him that besides spooking me, he isn't doing me any favor by talking nonsense.
“It's not good,”
he repeats to himself. I give in, rationalizing that it doesn't hurt to be sure. When I was a child, my mother used this folk remedy on me and the worst thing I got was a dozen bruises that weren't as nasty as they looked.
Taking off my shirt, I sit hunched over on a stool. Uncle Tu rubs the ointment on my back. His hands are bony and rough like tree bark, but his touch is kind and gentle. I am embarrassed at this physical contact. My father and I have never shaken hands. We do not embrace. I cannot recall our skin ever touching. On rare occasions, we placed a hand on each other's shoulder in congratulations. But here is Uncle Tu, a stranger-once-enemy, drawing on all his skills to heal me with his hands, skin on skin. It is oddly comforting, and I am almost ashamed to admit that much to myself. When the oil is hot on
my skin, he begins to coin-scrape my back with a vengeance, making crimson welts six inches long. Then he proceeds to do the same on my neck and chest. Half an hour later, my upper body is tattooed with bruises, my skin tingling with the heat oil. I roll back into my hammock, feeling strangely better. For good measure, I sneak a double dose of aspirin and doze off. When I wake up, Uncle Tu is hovering nearby. We slurp down a supper of rice porridge sprinkled with diced scallions and
ruoc ga,
shredded chicken jerky, and talk about the War.
“No, I do not hate the American soldiers. Who are they? They were boys, as I was. They were themselves, but also part of a greater creature—the government. As was I. I can no more blame them than a fish I eat can be blamed for what I do.
“You see, their pond is America. Here, in these hills, in this jungle, they are food.
“Me, I am in my land. I am in my water. These hills where I've killed Vietnamese and Americans. I see these hills every day. I can make my peace with them. For Americans, it was an alien place then as it is an alien place to them now. These hills were the land of their nightmares then as they are now. The land took their spirit. I eat what grows out of this land and someday I will return all that I have taken from it. Here is my home, my birthland and my grave.
“Tell your friend Tyle. There is nothing to forgive. There is no hate in this land. No hate in my heart. I am a poor man, my home is a hut with a dirt floor, but he is welcome here. Come and I shall drink tea with him, welcome him like a brother.”
War-Survivors
Seventeen years after the fall of Saigon, Colonel Van of the Vietnamese Nationalist Army was suffering a bitter exile in San Jose, California. Despite his poverty, he had thickened into a burly man, a diesel-powered tank, with M-16 fingers and a grenade of a nose from which he was squeezing out the blackheads. Stringy yellow stubble grassed from his pores as he hunched over a hand mirror on the kitchen table. Sedentary suburbia had fat-armored his five-foot-three structure to two hundred pounds. Muscles shelved his shoulders, sloping to the dome mountain that was his head of baling-wire hair, a galvanized gray. His boulderish face bunched and twitched with excitement over his plot for resurrecting a Nationalist army. He wanted to overthrow the Vietnamese Communist government and reclaim what was rightly his. The Colonel looked up and commanded his proposition to me in attack terms: “SOLAR POWER!”
I choked on a mouthful of spinach. My girlfriend, Trieu, and I were having our weekly dinner with her father—the Colonel—and his second wife. He puffed on his cigarette and scanned my face for reaction. I made a show of coughing on the smoke and reached to crack open the window. Instantly, the pregnant silence melted as the Friday night traffic of Chicanos low-riding the boulevard filled the
room. Windowpanes quivered under the parade of thumping megabass speakers. Down at the corner gas station and the liquor store, cop cars packed the intersection, besieged up and down the blocks by Latinos, Chicanos,
cholos
, and even a number of Vietnamese—the new Americans—strutting, parading like war heroes. Everybody was out sweet on the night except us.
“Brilliant idea! I'd never thought of it,” I exclaimed, pumping in more enthusiasm than I felt. I was taking classes for my advanced degree and working at the Company, becoming a full-fledged suit and walking immigrant-success story, putting in a hard week so I could listen to the Colonel's mad plans on my precious Friday nights.
Sitting next to him at the kitchen table, Trieu struggled with her face as she ate rice one grain at a time and did her best not to look at him and his nose. Having known her father less than a year, she was still adjusting to his rough country manners. The Colonel had put her up for adoption when they first came to the States. She was a toddler and her mother was lost—
disappeared—
during the turmoil of the War. (It was a forced/arranged marriage.) He said he didn't know how to take care of her. A Caucasian couple adopted Trieu and raised her in Georgia. Now that she had matured into a true Southern belle in her third year of college, Trieu found her biological father to be something of a barbarian. But she never said a word because she had moved across the country to live with him for a year to get to know her roots—him. She averted her eyes from the Colonel, who was mowing his blackheads with a fingernail and wiping them on a paper towel, his yield collecting like globs of mung-bean paste.
“Solar power,” the Colonel repeated, pleased but suspicious of my zest. Then, noticing Trieu's studious distraction, he commented to me in Vietnamese,
“She doesn't like it when I do that. I'm teaching her.”
What? I didn't dare ask. She was twenty-one with an I.Q. of 140. My stomach jellied with grave foreboding about my prospective father-in-law. My grandma's karmic predictions bounced around my head like Ping-Pong balls in a dark room. I had real bad feelings about the Colonel, but I couldn't ditch him without losing Trieu.
She smiled adoringly at the Colonel, not understanding a word of Vietnamese. “Daddy, are you talking about me again?”
“Ha-ha-ha. Nooooo! Daddy said you are good girl. Here, Trieu, eat fish. I pick meat for you. No bones.
”
His killer fingers displayed amazing chopsticks dexterity, stripping the fried fish, dipping it in garlic-chili Fishsauce, and placing the morsels in her rice bowl.
“Oh, Daddy,” she purred into his shoulder.
It shouldn't have made me jealous, but I knew too much. I tried not to begrudge her this small joy even though I despised the way the Colonel was manipulating her for his own gain. He hadn't given up trying to marry Trieu to her rich ex-boyfriend. There was also something discomforting about the way he gazed at her, calculating, maybe, but I kept telling myself it was my dislike for him talking. I pulled a grin and reminded myself there were enough bad things in her past that I didn't need to add the Colonel to it.
I had met Trieu on a double date, blind for both of us, who were riding shotgun to bolster our respective friends' courage. On sight, I knew she was the type of girl that wobbled men's knees and fogged their heads—the kind that set off all my alarms. Because I had decided to run the other way, my detachment opened her to me and her melancholy tumbled out in mysterious bits. Happiness, sorrow, and abuse were mixed up like vegetables in a soup—the broth, her essence from moment to moment. Yet I was held not so much by her tragedy as by a single gesture—the way she knitted her long hair, sheets upon sheets of fine caramel webs, with two fingers and tossed it back from her face. It was a gentle, careless motion, the way I supposed she pushed the sadness back from her brown eyes.
She was aristocratic, though with a nasty inclination for sharp humor, which suited me. There was inherent grace in her features, definitely something from her mother's line. Her father couldn't have given her those huge eyes, that delicate nose, the rosy alabaster skin, not of a tropical Vietnam, I didn't believe. The curves of her face fitted the cup of my hand like a sweetening mango. Those high cheekbones I had seen somewhere, on jade statues. Full lips, generous yet silent. But of course, it was her flawless English with its honeyed Southern twists that shackled me. She was Vietnamese and American in all the right measures, something I had aspired to without knowing.
We had been together almost a year. Day before yesterday, the Colonel told me bluntly not to drop by after work because Trieu would be busy. Just this afternoon, she said the Colonel had invited her rich ex-boyfriend to dinner in my absence. And here I was watching them showering each other with fatherly-daughterly affection, faking my admiration for him.
The Colonel turned back to me, all business again:
“We sell solar panels with inverters and rice cookers to farmers. Imagine what a great invention that is. They won't have to worry about gathering firewood or buying coal for cooking.”
I mumbled conciliatory consent. It was obvious why he targeted peasants. Who else would take up arms for the Colonel and his cronies' fantasy about liberating South Vietnam? It was the same song and dance my father played when he was recruiting soldiers. Lend them a hand, give them a present, then ask for their lives in the name of Liberty, Justice, and Freedom.
The Colonel laid out my role in his master plan. I was supposed to put up the initial capital and design a prototype. The Colonel and his cronies would take care of the test. I nodded vague encouragement while Trieu and Mrs. Van did the dishes. I sipped my jasmine tea. The Colonel wove his grandiose dreams. His wife smiled indulgently, wiping her hands on a flour-sack apron. Trieu hovered close over my shoulder. I smelled the honeysuckle fragrance in her hair. The moment was surreal enough for me to banish my doubts, forget the bad things, and pretend this was a normal family. I had learned from my own that if I didn't listen to the words too carefully or focus on the details too closely, everything seemed innocuous.
Then Mr. Beckett started screaming from his bed in the living room.
The Colonel and his wife were live-in caretakers for Mr. Beckett, who was obese, bed-ridden, and suffering from advanced Alzheimer's. Old Mr. Beckett started bellowing that he had to use the bathroom and would someone help him. Mrs. Van pushed herself away from the dinner table and hurried out front. The light clicked on.
“Oh, God! He did it again,”
she moaned, her tired surrender reaching us clearly from the living room. “Mr. Beckett, how many times do I have to tell you? Please don't wet the bed.
”
“Who wetted the bed?” the old man's reedy voice returned full of surprise. A couple of months ago he had stopped recognizing his live-in caretakers.
“You peed in your bed, Mr. Beckett. After we take you to the toilet, we'll have to give you a bath.”
“No. NO! NO! I don't want no bath! I tell you I don't want no bath!”
“I'm sorry, Mr. Beckett. I'm giving you a bath.”
“NO! I tell you I don't want no bath! Somebody help me!”
We went to see the fuss. The poor man suffered the indignity of waiting out his last days in the living room because it was the center of the house, accessible from every part, and closest to the bathroom. Most of the time he had no idea where he was, waking up babbling, Where am I? What have you done with my son? Where's my wife? I want my wife!
No one told Mr. Beckett his wife had passed away three years ago and his son, who lived in the adjacent county, hadn't stopped by for a visit since. An ungrateful son-of-a-bitch was what Mrs. Van called Mr. Beckett's only offspring, but once in a while when Mr. Beckett tripped into one of his half-lucid ramblings about how he used to whip his disrespectful son, she would shake her head and mumble that the wicked old man had this misery coming to him. We usually told Mr. Beckett his son was on his way. A little traffic delay. Your wife is out for groceries. She'll be back any moment. Go back to sleep, Mr. Beckett.
The poor man had let out a gusher and it was dribbling onto the carpet, infusing the musty clapboard house with the saccharine reek of medicated urine. Without a word, we rolled up our sleeves. Although the Colonel and Mrs. Van usually managed on their own—how I didn't know—it took four of us to stagger Mr. Beckett down the hallway of blistered wallpaper and into the bathroom. The old man winced and grunted with pain the whole five yards. His hospital scrub left exposed his saggy white buttocks, moon-cratered with purpleblack bedsores, lumpy as though he had grapes under his skin. The Colonel held Mr. Beckett upright while Mrs. Van sponge-bathed him. Mr. Beckett's senses came back and he realized what he had done. He
hung his head and sat dejectedly, mumbling apologies as Mrs. Van soaped between his legs.
When Mr. Beckett was snoring in a clean bed, we were back in the kitchen for dessert. The Colonel thanked Trieu and she plowed into his ribs for a hug. I sat there unable to make heads or tails of it all. A vanquished commander, formerly of great wealth, power, and corruption, now bathed an old man. A father who gave away his daughter because he didn't want to take care of her, now wanted to give away her hand in marriage for his own purposes. A young American woman shedding her identity to learn love from her biological father. I didn't fit in this puzzle. Sometimes I thought it would be best for both of them if I weren't in the picture.
I lost my appetite, but I gulped down the flan quickly, not wanting to insult their poverty with my waste. The Colonel lit another cigarette and plunged onward with his beloved war stories. White-faced with exhaustion, Mrs. Van slouched at the table and took her tea as though it were medication. Trieu folded her hands in her lap, a dutiful, attentive daughter, listening to her father's stream of words she didn't understand. I tried to translate, but the Colonel was irritated at having his oration interrupted.
The Colonel's mean streak came out in his stories. He relished the gory details of battle. How he killed a Viet Cong with a single blow of his paw. How he sacked an enemy camp that outnumbered his forces five to one. How Saigon politicians, businessmen, and mobsters feared him and paid him “respect” money. The one long-running practical joke he enjoyed most was the one he played on American GIs, particularly the green ones fresh off the plane.
“Those pitiful Americans,”
he said without remorse as he stroked the brush that was his sideburn.
“They were too big to jungle-march for weeks eating rice like Vietnamese. They couldn't get enough energy from rice and they wilted like flowers. The Viet Cong killed the young ones like flies.”
He loved breaking in his green Americans on the first mission by foxholing them three times a night. As usual, the mixed company of American and Vietnamese soldiers struck camp on the frontline by digging foxholes. The Vietnamese knew the Colonel's intentions, so they dug shallow pits or none at all while their American counterparts
dug honest, good-sized holes. In the meantime, the Colonel sneaked off into the jungle for dinner with his lieutenants. After his meal and dessert smoke, the Colonel returned and ordered the men to abandon camp because the enemy had “spied” their position. Ambush was imminent. He marched them in circles for an hour to another spot and had them dig in again. Employing this tactic three times a night, a couple of nights in a row, he turned the green foreigners into a ragged, jangling mess. Upon returning to base, even the veteran American officers begged to be reassigned to other Vietnamese commanders, which was fine with the Colonel. He said the Viet Minh fought harder for American casualties, and he didn't care to be around GIs when the heavy fire came.
I listened to him with open amazement, wondering if he realized the irony of his current situation or the karmic disaster he was heaping onto his daughter. Sins of the father must be redeemed by his children. Maybe that was why our dead ancestors watched over us: guilt.
BOOK: Catfish and Mandala
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