Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

  It doesn’t matter to me. I have to accumulate funds and settle my affairs. I tie up loose ends, freelance all sorts of work for the extra cash, do it all in silence, the whole time wondering if the flash of desert inspiration was only a fluke. No one, not my brothers or my best friends, knows about my plan to bicycle to Vietnam. They say, Andrew is finding himself. He’s trying to get his life in order. He’s still getting over Trieu. She really devastated him, cheating on him and leaving him like that. When I finally tell them, I lie. Going up the coast, I say. Just going to ride my bicycle up toward Seattle, maybe British Columbia. It’s safe. Once-in-a-lifetime thing. It’ll do me good. I don’t tell them I might not be coming back.

  On the dawn of my departure from San Jose, California, I wake groggy from a night of tossing in wistfulness. I fetal beneath my blanket, a jumble of nerves, high with adrenaline, sick with uncertainties, knotted with fear. I could be camping on the road already if it weren’t for my mother.

  “BAD! Bad day to go on a trip!” she pecked at me day before yesterday, flapping her Chinese calendar in my face, chasing me from the bathroom to the kitchen.

  “Look, Mom, I don’t believe in your Chinese calendar,” I told her delicately.

  She made angry egg-eyes, scolding me in front of the family altar atop the refrigerator, her favorite place to win arguments. “I know these things. I picked our escape date from Vietnam, didn’t I?” She regularly pulled proof of her sixth sense. How she had seen a ghost in her dream and begged it not to take the soul of her youngest son, who was deathly ill. How she had predicted which job my father would land. How she had fathomed the good spirits residing in each house they had ever rented or bought. She knew she could spook me.

  I caved in. “Yes, Mom. You’re right, Mom.”

  “Good. Because if you go this day, you will get hurt. Many omens. You wait two more days, the chart is okay, suitable for a Horse-sign like you. Next week is even better.”

  “I’ll wait two days.”

  “Next week better.”

  “Two days.”

  “No patience, that’s you.”

  Patience I have aplenty. Courage is what I need. If I don’t leave now, I never will. In the face of parental opposition, my determination wanes by the day.

  My father has said “Good” to me twice in my life. This time is not one of them. The first “Good” was for making Phi Beta Kappa during my senior year in Aerospace Engineering at UCLA. I showed him the glowing congratulatory letter from the national honor society, then threw it away, too poor to afford the initiation banquet and too proud to request a fee waiver.

  He awarded me the second “Good” for landing a cushy engineering post at a major airline. That job was doomed from the start. I graduated out of college and right into a recession. Desperately hungry for work after mailing out a hundred resumes, I hooked one interview. During the office tour, my would-be boss, a turtle-chinned, red-faced thirty-five-year-old-timer, Paul, waxed on about the company’s expansion overseas and his getting an M.B.A. in international business to keep abreast of it all.

  “I like you,” Paul said, walking round behind me and putting a hand on my shoulder, which I didn’t like. “I like you people. Orientals are good workers. Good students, too. Great in math, the engineering stuff.” He smiled at me, reassuring, beaming. “Oh, I think you’ll do just fine here. We won’t have any trouble at all.”

  When I finally resigned, I was no longer a “good Oriental.” I even left behind in my desk three files titled “Stuff Paul Rejected Because He Doesn’t Know Any Better,” “Stuff Paul Rejected Because He Didn’t Want to Jeopardize His Promotion,” and “Stuff Paul Rejected Because They Didn’t Originate from Engineers but from Mechanics Who Have More Practical Experience on the Subject.” I heard later that the files were discovered. Eventually, after a few more escapades with the mechanics, supervisor-bossman Paul was moved “laterally” into a cubicle labeled “independent contributor” on the third floor, where they put troublemakers out to pasture.

  Giving up this job and burning my bridges, my father believed, were the undoing of me, and nothing I had done since elicited a “Good” from him. “You don’t do that. You do job best you can. You get promotion. You get new job. You say, ‘Thank you very much, sir’ and you go. Think about future. You are Asian man in America. All your bosses will be white. Learn to work.”

  Yes, Father. Okay, Father. I will, Father.

  I can’t be his Vietnamese American. I see their groveling humility, concessions given before quarters are asked. I hate their slitty-measuring eyes. The quick gestures of humor, bobbing of heads, forever congenial, eager to please. Yet I know I am as vulnerable as they before the big-boned, fair-skinned white Americans. The cream-colored giants who make them and me look tribal, diminutive, dark, wanting.

  So, what the hell, I have to do something unethnic. I have to go. Make my pilgrimage. I roll out of bed and pull on my cycling shorts, T-shirt, and windbreaker. I throw my panniers into the trunk of the car and mount the bike on the rack. Kay, my sister, the youngest in the family and the only one born on American soil, watches me as I gather up my few worldly possessions.

  “You’re not going to be using your car,” she points out, smiling mischievously.

  “You can borrow my car.”

  A high school junior, she is the youngest and prettiest of our clan. Her skin glows like a pale rose and her eyes shine with an unlikely hazel. She was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, a month after our arrival in the States. When the nurse handed her to my parents, they insisted that she had made a mistake. This child wasn’t theirs. Why, it looked like an American baby! The nurse showed them the only other baby born that day: an African-American child.

  Kay grew up to look just like the rest of us, her father’s face and her mother’s nose. She is a Pham with the exception of her leggy height, brownish hair, light whitish-pink skin, and strange hazel eyes. Her gift is her flawless English, a smooth, clean California-American, middle-class burb. Our English, even Hien’s, is only an imperfect prototype. My parents think it has something to do with her having been born on American soil. “American food, American air,” said my mother.

  Kay is the final hope of our dysfunctional Vietnamese-American family. I have found myself casually examining her for the wounds we have inadvertently inflicted. It is your responsibility, Father always says to us, to set a good example for your younger siblings. I abandoned my career in favor of a dream. Tien, an exceptional student, couldn’t make up his mind about the trajectory of his education. Huy and Hien are gay. And not one of us breathed a word of Chi’s existence to Kay in all these years. She never knew she had a runaway sister. To Kay, Chi came home in a shroud of mystery and died a self-inflicted death within arm’s reach of her family, who should have seen it coming—should have prevented it with love.

  “An, are you going to be gone long? Can I move into your room?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  She is referring to the guest house I built in the backyard of my parents’ house. Although I rarely use it, my mother insists that it remain untouched. The same applies to the rooms belonging to Hien, who is down in San Diego pursuing a bio-engineering degree and medical school, and Huy, who holes up in Berkeley slaving for his law degree. Neither comes home much, each trying to hide his homosexuality from our parents. Empty rooms are Mom’s way of keeping us home.

  Mom comes from the old world, where mothers are lifelong housewives who expect to be near their children all their lives. Senior homes, retirement communities don’t exist in their vocabulary. When her friends explained the concepts of children leaving home at eighteen and parents going into rest homes in their “golden years,” Mom’s eyes went wide with disbelief. “That is so cruel. Strange, strange country.”

  The last few years, I think my father, who is more culturally savvy, has been talking to her because she has started saying things to us in Vietnamese like “We’ll be all right when we retire. Your father is workin
g a few more years so we’ll be financially secure. We’re in America; if we live with you, no girl will marry you. And no girl will let you support us. We know it’s different here.”

  She tries so hard I ache for her, this simple woman who takes pleasure nickeling the grocers for bargains, deals for the family. This woman who lets in every Mormon that comes by the house with pamphlets. This woman who makes egg rolls for cosmetic girls at the department store who give her free makeovers. This woman who eats cold leftovers standing in the kitchen alone because lunch in her American household is too lonely. This woman whom we’ve shortchanged.

  Tien comes out and helps me with the bike. “Mister An,” he says, using the funny form of address we picked up as immigrant kids who didn’t know that Mister was followed by a last and not a first name. “Are you ready?”

  “Mister Tien. That’s it. Let’s go.”

  Mom steps down from the porch to say good-bye. She places her hand on my arm and I on hers so that we’re both touching each other’s forearm. Between telling me to be careful and asking me if I’d like her to pack some fried rice to go, she squeezes the back of my arm. Some oranges, then? She touches my hand. It is awkward, for we have never learned to embrace and we don’t throw our arms around each other so easily. But I like the way her fingers dance on my arms fluttering over my shoulders, touching my back. Saying all that she cannot in words.

  I want to hug Kay, but I can’t. Don’t know how. So I smile and say, “Bye, Kay. Have a good time. Take care of yourself.”

  “You too. Bye, An.” She waves that teenage wave, elbow at her side, hesitant fingers rising to chest sketching tiny arcs.

  Mom hugs me then. Clumsy, quick.

  I feel sick and hot around the eyes.

  Father went to work earlier, I heard him leave. He didn’t say much about my trip, but last week, I caught him peeking at me through the living room window as I tinkered with my bicycle. To him, this trip and the last one to Mexico are a waste of time. He has plenty to say about it, but he hasn’t. He has given me his gift of silence, knowing that at least I am free to construe my own truths about his feelings. It’s generous.

  He started being generous with me when I told him I wasn’t following in his footsteps, no longer a man of the mind, a first-rate engineer. I started freelancing as a technical writer and editor. After I had published a few articles, people sought me out for various assignments, some small, some large. Just enough to keep food on the table. I decided to pursue a career as a freelance writer. Do the American thing, chase your dream, follow your heart. I showed him some of my best published works.

  My father said, Oh, you’re just a freelancer. I heard only the just, the diminishing qualifier. Yes, I’m just a freelancer. Yeah, that’s me. Hitching words together, like boxcars making a train, for a quarter apiece. Sometimes more. I wrote anything. Pen for hire. Words for sale, words I don’t own, someone else’s birthright. Technical jargon. Differential calculus. Euclidean geometry in easy English. Love ballads. Naturalization applications. Obituaries. Resumes. Letters of recommendation. Business plans. Articles. Interviews. Book reviews. Your view. My view. Whatever you wanted, I wrote, a quarter a word, no byline required. But I wasn’t a credentialed writer, so, in his eyes, I was forever the impostor, the slick fraud called in on midnight contracts and sent out on guerrilla forays. In and out and paid before anyone was the wiser.

  Tien and I bucket up to San Francisco, winding on the long I-280 scenic route. I hand him the pink slip to my car with instructions to sell it in a few months. My finances are dismal. My account balance says I’ll be traveling on a disintegrating shoestring budget even though I have liquidated nearly everything I own and canceled my health insurance. Aspirin and chicken soup will have to suffice from here on out.

  I splurged on two bike racks with panniers and packed them with my old camping gear. My vehicle is a rickety 18-speed hybrid. I didn’t know the first thing about bike touring and was lucky to survive the Mexican desert. I’d gone into it with a backpack and a bike, and wound up pushing the bike through sand as often as riding it. This time I am prepared. I have maps, touring gear, and a dime-store handbook on bicycle repair.

  It appeals to me. Riding out my front door on a bicycle for the defining event of my life. It is so American, pioneering, courageous, romantic, self-indulgent. I’d read Miles from Nowhere by Barbara Savage, who had ridden her bike around the world with her husband, Larry. It is so simple. All I need I learned in grade school.

  Tien wants to come with me, but he can’t tear himself from his filial obligations. Besides, I tell him, it is something I have to do by myself. Deep down, I believe he knows why I am leaving, the reasons I need to find before I can mend the mess that is my life. As the third son, Tien carries his parents’ failed hopes for the family’s first son, me. He is the only one in the family with whom I can talk about my sister Chi. Her death left a silent, dark hole in our family like an extinguished hearth no one could relight. We talk around her history, unknowingly lacing her secret and our shameful failures deeper into ourselves.

  Tien parks us in the tourist lot at the San Francisco end of the Golden Gate Bridge. He snaps a few pictures of me leaning on my old bike and my brand-new, untested gear, the bridge looming in the backdrop. Then he hands me a bag of PowerBars, the very stuff I avoid religiously.

  “Good luck,” he says, and shakes my hand.

  I mount my bike and pedal shakily across the bridge. It is the first time I’ve ridden the bike fully loaded.

  Thin strokes of clouds score a sky as blue as a blessing. A brisk wind washes across the bridge. I wobble through the throngs of pedestrians and cyclists with a ready grin for everyone I pass. A light-headedness buoys me as if ambrosia courses in my veins. I am intoxicated with a feeling of rightness, a psychological snapping together of mating parts, a lucid moment of geometrical perfection. A liberating bliss.

  “Yes!” I shout over and over as I race away from San Francisco.

  The euphoria lasts until I crank up the cliffs of Highway 1. I’m not a cyclist. The bike is heavy. My precious enthusiasm dissipates with every incline. My map shows an inland road meandering some way from the coast rejoining Highway 1 at Stinson Beach. Confident that it will spare me grueling coastal hills, I huff up the grade, too exhausted to venture a guess why this stretch of blacktop was named Panoramic Road. It steadily gets steeper without a sign of leveling out. I inch up the mountain, pulling over to breathe at every half mile.

  At one turn, I look up and the peak of Mount Tam rears over me. Good God, I have been climbing the road to the highest peak in the area on my first day! Stupid! Stupid!

  That evening, I squeak into Pan Toll State Campground drenched in sweat, shaking with fatigue. My knee bleeds from a fall I’d taken a couple of miles back, when the road was too steep and I couldn’t uncleat my feet from the pedals fast enough. My odometer reaches 18.7 miles. That leaves, oh, about 4,000 miles to go … Whoopee … Great … Somewhere out there ahead of me are Portland, Seattle, Tokyo, Fuji, Kyoto, Saigon, and Hanoi.

  5

  Fallen – Leaves

  Anh’s aunt took pity on her and gave her two wedding presents, both heirloom secrets, mere words in the ear.

  Anh put the first gift to work in her kitchen. With pennies for market scraps, she cooked small but tasty meals for her husband, who worked very hard. He was taking on a double teaching load at the high school and doing extra academic jobs on the side, working the elbows of his shirt and the knees of his pants as thin as rice paper. Despite Anh’s savory food, he grew thin, and his gauntness and fierce determination made his students fear him, the rigid academic. Every day he woke to a breakfast of the previous night’s leftovers. For lunch he ate cold rice balls Anh wrapped in leaves with shreds of dried meat. Although each morsel she served him was exquisitely flavored and he adored every dish she cooked, there simply wasn’t enough rice to put meat on his bones, not with the way he was working.

  She put the second gift
to work in her washtubs, taking in her landlord’s wash to reduce the rent. Then she took in her neighbors’ laundry to bring in a little more money for groceries. She was young so she was strong. Many times each day, she carried water, ten gallons a haul, from the village well to her house, where she perched on a block of wood to do the wash. Using her aunt’s homemaker secret, she scrubbed, stomped, pounded, wrung each piece of clothing until her fingers ached and her palms were raw. She hung the laundry in her patch of alley-sun and kept a close watch for thieves. Then she pressed shirts and pants with a coal iron, folded and delivered them to their owners.

  Anh worked through spring, summer, fall, and winter. One more year passed, and she gave birth to another baby girl. And she continued to work, six days a week, year after year. People heard about her, the woman who could remove difficult stains from any shirt and iron such hard creases that they were as good as sewn into the pants. They sought her out and gave her the grime they could not banish and the pleats they could not set straight.

  Coming home after each long day of work, Thong felt a squeezing tremble of love in his chest when he saw his wife hunched over great tubs of wash. He told her she was working too hard. She must think of the baby. Look at the way her great belly was practically dragging on the floor. No, no, she told him. The child was strong. Look at the way he clung so high in her ribs, surely this must be a boy, their first son.

  They had buried two coffee cans full of money beneath their bed. Soon there would be another. And the country was changing with the War. Opportunity was in the air. Thong said the Nationalists had drafted him, but he stood a fair chance of rising in the bureaucratic ranks because of his education. Thong and Anh were happy. They talked of buying that little tavern way out in the countryside near the American army base.

  6

  Headwind – Tailspin