I remember Tien asking me if I thought someday I could take my own life as Chi had done. Could you do it, Andrew, if everyone you loved had forsaken you—no hope left, nothing to live for? Maybe, I told him, I don’t know but I always think I have one last ticket, one last hand to gamble. What would you do then before you die? I’d walk out the door to destinations unknown, spending the sum of my breaths in one extravagant gesture.
Since the day Chi ran away, I have wondered how utterly alone she felt. I have wanted to run away the way she did. In the years it took me to become an American, I haven’t been able to answer the one question that remained framed in my mind from the day she left: How did America treat Chi, one vulnerable yellow in a sea of white faces? At my age “running away” requires a measure of innocence I’ve lost. Riding out my front door with a pocketful of twenties is the best I can do.
Touring solo on a bicycle, I discover, is an act of stupidity or an act of divine belief. It is intense stretches of isolation punctuated with flashes of pure terror and indelible moments of friendship. Mostly, it is dirty work particularly suitable for the stubborn masochist. I was suckered into the adventure, the elegant simplicity of its execution, and, yes, even the glory of its agony.
Along the Pacific Coast, I meet cyclists who lick their chops at the challenge of a six-percent grade or an eighty-mile ride. I am a distracted rider, the sort that thrives on flat roads without wind. I haven’t encountered a mountain I like—from the front side. The only mountains I like are the ones I’ve summited. And there are no mountains finer than the ones I’m coasting down. On the road, I find myself vacillating between elation and abject misery, my senses narrowed to the hundred yards immediately before me. Beyond this, I am solely concerned with my next meal and my next campsite.
I learn it all the hard way. From San Francisco, I curse my way up the California coast. Every fiber in my body balks against the strain of propelling two hundred pounds uphill mile after mile. The second day out, I keel over again, this time halfway up another mountain. My loaded bike topples like a wildebeest felled by one well-aimed bullet. I crawl out from under the bike and try to stand, but my legs give out. I roll onto my belly, my legs locked rigid—a pair of two-by-fours jackknifed by a stampede of charley horses. I bite my knuckles, tears welling in my eyes. High school kids in a red Jeep roar by, laughing. I begin to suspect the authors I’d read weren’t entirely forthcoming about the physical ordeals of bicycle adventures. The next three days, I learn that saddle sore is a euphemism for self-inflicted torture. My crotch is raw. Hitting a pothole feels like jabbing hot coals into the seat of my pants. Every muscle groans and complains with each movement. My back aches. I am so stiff I can barely tie my shoelaces. What am I thinking? My Baja trip could hardly be called cycling: I had dragged that bike through the desert like a crucifix.
A woman I meet at a convenience store says the California wine country is beautiful, so I ride over the mountain to Sonoma Valley. I spend my second night camping illegally at a PG&E power plant. The third night I am at an abandoned train station, the fourth in one of Buena Vista’s vineyards, the fifth at the Carmelite Monastery in Oakville. The grounds-keeping monk tells me that the monastery was originally a haunted estate: the owner had hung himself. Sleep on the road is fitful at best. I sleep with a knife under my pillow of dirty laundry and wake repeatedly at the sounds of broken twigs. One night when my tent collapses, I fight my way out, roaring, a drawn knife in hand, stalking my would-be attackers in my briefs. It is the wind tittering.
I work my way back out to the coast again, up through Mendocino, Fort Bragg, Leggett, the Avenue of Giants, Eureka, Crescent City, and right into Oregon, heading ever northward against head wind and prevailing wisdom. The mornings are chilly, the afternoons blistering hot, the evenings swamped with mosquitoes. The days seem filled with new friends and engaging meals with strangers. Thousands of bicyclists tour the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Francisco every summer, so it isn’t difficult for a soloist heading in the wrong direction to find a cheerful campfire nightly. The day my odometer registers 500 miles, just before coming into Eureka, I feel invincible. I’ve fixed plenty of flat tires, warped rims, loose brakes, and broken spokes. Somehow through the torment, I have developed a taste for bicycle touring. Every time I top a big mountain, I dismount and dance a little victory jig around the bike, not caring who might see me. The coast is gorgeous. I cannot swallow, breathe, soak it in fast enough. At least once a day, there is a moment of absolute perfection when my muscles sing with power, full of vigor, raw and very alive—the air sweet with grass and pine, the whirling chain and the humming tires but extensions of me.
I find myself on the outskirts of Corvallis, Oregon. I am on my way to Portland to visit Patty, a free-spirited traveler whom I’d met in Mexico. A few days earlier, I phoned Patty and she suggested I spend the night with Ronnie, a friend of hers in the area. Ronnie sees me coming from the window of her second-story apartment and starts braying, Hey! You! You’re Patty’s friend, aren’t you? It’s dark. I jump at the fusillade of words and look up at the gesticulating scarecrow haloed in the light spilling from her window.
As soon as I cross the threshold, Ronnie slams the door, barring it with her back and turning the full wattage of her green eyes on me. Glaring from beneath a blond Einstein-fuzz, she leans close and growls, “Patty told you, didn’t she?”
“Uh, told me what?”
“About me.”
“You’re her friend.”
“AAAAAAhahahahahahahahahaha!” Her shrill laugh ices my spine. I grin, hoping to get in on the punch line.
“What’s so funny?”
“You know, I was in there.”
“There where?”
“There,” she hisses, as though I am woefully dense. “Institutionalized! They put me in there for three years.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry. I’m okay now.”
I want to ask her how long ago that was, and how “okay” she is, but I’ve learned my lesson: Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. It might bite. I wish I had camped out on the sod farms. Hoping to provide her some positive reinforcement, I say, “I’m not worried. You look fine to me.”
Ronnie radiates an angel’s goodwill as she tours me through her home. After my shower I join Ronnie, who is making dinner in the six-by-six-foot kitchen. I try to help, but there isn’t enough room for two people around the stove of her suburban hovel. She stirs me a cup of instant tea with tap water and sits me at the kitchen table, which at one time might have been a schoolroom desk.
Crazy Ronnie is into astrology, karma, chakras, energy lodes of the universe, and the wheel of time. She is “a minor goddess” sent to earth to even out the balance between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. I, on the other hand, she confirms, am “a technician—like a worker ant.” I ask her if she is sure. She is. Not even a minor deputy god? Nope, she assures me, no such luck.
“You’ve been working very hard the last millennium,” she explains patiently, “ever since you were put on earth, so on this cycle, you are done with work. You’re out exploring the world, having a good time.”
I agree that I am having a good time on my bike tour. Crazy Ronnie takes that as evidence of my grubby worker-ant status. Despite our celestial disparity, I think her vastly interesting. She gets very excited talking about the true nature of the universe, the Wyrm of the World, voids, angels, and other dimensions. She shrieks, she shouts. She bounces off walls, her arms pinwheeling, a chopping knife in hand.
She stops mid-rambling, turns, and points the blade at me. “Are you a vegetarian?”
Oh, dear. My mind zips to infinity and back. Duh. Truth? Lie? Can this minor goddess tell the difference? I blurt, “Yes! Yes, I am. But I’m not a very good one … I … I have my weak moments.”
“Hmm.” Her green orbs roam my face for duplicity. “Well,” she grunts, “we all make mistakes now and then. But we gotta be strong. You gotta try harder.”
“I w
ill. I really will.”
We chomp on a dinner of veggie-burgers and garden salad. I rabbit into the burnt faux-burger patty, banishing all thoughts of juicy red steaks. It would have been a decent night if she hadn’t told me about the devil rascaling in her apartment. She found him endearing. As I wash the dishes, she roots violently around the apartment, banging drawers and kicking furniture out of her way until she finds a small wooden box. She opens it and pulls out a mishmash ball of twine, thread, and yarn, multicolored, a little psychedelic.
“He did this!” She puts the furry thing under my nose, expecting me to smell traces of the devil. “I save the threads and look what he did to them.”
I don’t sleep much that night. When I do, my dreams are variations of murder. Goddess Ronnie wielding a sword and coming after me, the lowly worker ant. Crazy Ronnie sacrificing me to her devil, tying me up in her ball of psychedelic twine. Vegetarian Ronnie slathering me with mustard and making a sandwich. In the morning, my mind is tangled with a hundred things Crazy Ronnie said. Some outright ludicrous, others oddly insightful. I know she probably told me something important but I don’t know what. I am just jolly to leave her den in one piece.
The next day, a logging truck slows and pulls alongside me. “Hey, Jap!” a man in the passenger seat shouts. Still chugging onward, I look and fluid gushes out the cab’s window and gets me full in the face. I have a sick sensation in the pit of my stomach. Urine? Soda? A paper cup follows the water. They laugh when it bounces off my helmet. The passenger sticks his head out the window and pushes up the corners of his eyes, making “Chinese eyes” at me. They roar off, hooting their horn, laughing, whooping: “Yeah! Right on the head!”
I stand on the side of the road, drenched. The water is no big deal. I’ve had plenty of trash and pennies thrown at me from cars. I usually console myself that it is just one downside of bicycle touring, and that some people throw trash because I am a bicyclist and not because of the slant of my eyes.
Ten miles down the road, I catch up to my antagonists at a truck stop. The empty rig is parked outside the bar. I stand in the parking lot, fuming for ten minutes. Part of me wants to go inside and confront the truckers. Part of me wants to slash their tires. I want to feel my fists smacking into their fleshy red faces. Giving them the full force of my righteous fury. Realizing how badly I want to hurt them, I am glad I don’t have the gun my brother Huy and his boyfriend had offered to loan me.
Before I left, Huy and his Vietnamese-American lover, Sean, took me to Sean’s San Francisco flat to give me safety advice. Even in gay-friendly San Francisco, they never ventured out without a canister of pepper spray, clipping it on their belts like a pager. Sean laid out his arsenal on the coffee table and told me I could have my pick: a stun gun, a semiautomatic 9mm, a snub-nosed .38 revolver, or a .45 Dirty Harry. I said I already had a canister of pepper spray, similar to the ones that mailmen carry. In Mexico, I’d given more than one rabid dog sneezing fits.
“You’re crazy, man,” Sean said, shaking his head. “Forget about it. You know how many rednecks there are between here and Seattle? You’re Asian and who knows what sort of bigots you’re going to come across. They might give you a beating for fun.”
He truly believed it. For him, a gay Asian male, his America was outlined by the boundaries of San Francisco and Berkeley. He grew up in San Francisco and having Asian faces around him had become an integral part of life. Like most Vietnamese who have settled in the Bay Area or in Orange County, California, he couldn’t imagine living in the Midwest or the South, anywhere impoverished of Asian faces. No, to a minority, any white face could be a face of violence—a quiet fear we live with.
Once, when my brother Tien and I were driving through Arizona, a pickup drew alongside us. The scene played out as it had countless times before, the driver and his passenger gave us the one-finger salute: “Go home!”
This time, Tien replied, “To California?”
The day after the trucker incident, I roll into Portland to see Patty. My visit coincides with the birthday of one of her friends. Patty and I cross town to pick up the birthday girl, Pocahontas, a spunky eighty-three-year-old wit-hollering, wine-guzzling, cigar-smoking, poetry-spewing artist. She lives in one of those nasty slum apartments they dole out to seniors a couple of breaths shy of croaking. Except Pocahontas isn’t a geezer by a long shot. As soon as we pull up curbside, Pocahontas descends from her seventh-floor digs in as many seconds.
A dozen souls of the fringe congregate in the flat Patty shares with five women. We are all dirt poor. The three things we have, we have in plenty: wine, bread, and vegan spaghetti. I bring a jug of cheap wine from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. A Merlot of some bad year. Several others show up with wines as well. All reds, and fairly nasty. By some psychic agreement it seems. We have Merlot, Cabernet, Chianti, and Sangiovese. It is a loud meal. Pocahontas starts a noodle-slurping contest and by the time it is over, everyone is splattered with marinara sauce.
Someone lights a hot dog of a joint and passes the homegrown bud around. The giggling starts and lasts all night. Patty uncorks a homemade batch of Irish creme, brews a pot of coffee, and we go nuts with it. Virginia, a flaming-redheaded guitarist who has bicycled through Europe, uncases her guitar and plays. Pierre, a gay French dancer, pirouettes around the room for us, scooping up Pocahontas for a whirl. We drink liters of cheap wine. I recite snatches of poetry. John and Debbie perform a comedic skit. Suddenly, everyone is banging on pots and pans, singing along with Virginia and Bryan. The night crashes on for a long time, and because we are in a great Portland neighborhood on the southeast side, no one calls the cops.
Bryan sings “Blue Moon” and nearly makes me cry. When the revelry comes to a close, and those of us who haven’t gone home already are staring at the ceiling in a hazy bliss, Bryan, who has so very little and could not contribute much to the feast, goes around the room to each person with a gift—a foot massage. I am at once honored and disturbed by his open humility. I fall asleep on the dirty living-room carpet, thinking I belong here. I haven’t talked to an Asian person in weeks. Tonight I forget I am Asian.
Three days later it rains and I know it is time to leave. Fall is on the way. Bryan and Patty see me off.
“You know,” Bryan says, “when it’s all over, you’ll realize that the answer is already within you.”
“It’s almost a cliché, isn’t it?” I say, although I don’t know what the answer is. “When I find it, I still need the rigor of proof.”
They laugh with me. “The road is a wondrous place. Go with an open heart,” says gray-haired Bryan, who has been on the road most of his life.
And they bid me the one true farewell I have come to love: “So long, we’ll see you when we see you.”
As I pedal away with a light heart, I think that perhaps, inside, I am really an aging hippie.
I ride up to Olympia, Washington, then tour the eastern side of the Olympic Peninsula. A more magnificent land I never did see. Then I ferry over to Seattle. I stay in the Emerald City for weeks as a guest of Sasha Kaufman, a woman I met a month earlier at a gas station in a place called Trinity. I spend my time pounding the pavement looking for steerage passage on cargo ships. It is a defunct form of travel rumored to still be in practice on a few ships where a few penniless hopefuls are allowed to work off their passage and board, mostly by tending to filthy chores the crew avoids. I hang out at seamen’s bars and drop queries at various sailors’ and longshoremen’s associations. I even go down to the docks and try to talk to the ships’ officers. No dice. At marinas and yacht clubs, I post ads looking for a crew position on any yacht heading across the Pacific. There aren’t any. It is too late in the season. I wait and wait for calls without any success. The rain begins to roll into Seattle. At last, with my funds dwindling, I give up and buy a one-way plane ticket to Vietnam with a forty-five-day layover in Japan.
7
Japan-Dream
Mom used to whisper to me when I was a kid that
there was Japanese blood in my veins, a fanciful notion, unproven. She never said it in front of my father because it made him angry. No one wanted to be reminded of the Japanese occupation during World War II, especially Dad, who witnessed the atrocities of the Japanese army.
“Pinch it, like this,” Mom told me, grabbing the ridge of my nose between her thumb and index finger, “and pull. It’ll make your nose longer, thinner, and better looking.”
She prided herself on the lightness of our skin. “Don’t play in the sun in the middle of the day! You’ll be dark like a peasant’s kid. And don’t forget to pull on your nose three times a day.”
The Vietnamese harbor a grudging hate-admiration for the Japanese. They cannot forget how the Japanese defiled their country, yet they cannot help feeling a sense of pride that an Asian nation ranks among the world’s industrial powers. And I have heard my elders say Vietnam dreamed about America, but it pragmatically yearned to be Japan. To Vietnam, Japan didn’t embody success, it was success. I wanted to see for myself the third link of this love triangle.
My plane lands in Tokyo’s Narita International Airport on a rainy night. Sleep-deprived, I grumble my way through immigration, drag the boxed bicycle out to the bus loading zone, and reassemble my vehicle at the airport terminal amid swarms of Japanese. I have no idea how to get out of the airport, much less find affordable lodging for the night. Besides a few phrases I’ve gleaned from a Learn Japanese cassette tape, I don’t speak Japanese. Streets signs, in kanji, are useless.
The people at the information booth can’t help me either. According to one supervisor, foreigners have been seen toting touring bicycles out of baggage claim but no one has tried to ride out directly from the airport. I am about to be the first fool to try—at 9 p.m. in the rain. I pace the terminal, frustrated and unsure of what to do. Even if there is room on the bus, I doubt they will let me board with a bike. My funds are a little lean. Besides, I figure, if I am to tour Japan, I might as well start now. Except the only road out is choked with cars and buses. Is it legal to ride in the street? Where in the hell is the sidewalk?
Catfish and Mandala Page 4