Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

  My step-grandfather Grandpa Le was a fishsauce baron, born into a sea-heritage that dated back before the Japanese and the French occupation. He used to claim that his ancestors invented fishsauce. The whole town was built on this industry. Everyone knew how it was made and at one time most people in town, when they weren’t dragging the ocean for fish, were putting fresh fish, unwashed and ungutted, into salt barrels to ferment. While they waited on the decomposition process, all they ever talked about was fishsauce. Which fish produced the best-tasting extract? How to mix various types of fish to make a balanced bouquet. Indeed, there were many varieties of fishsauce, each suitable for a certain style of cooking. The finest batches were flavorful enough to be savored directly from the bottle. In a few weeks, a smelly black ooze seeped out the bottom of the barrel. Fisherfolk diluted and bottled this black gold and sold it all over the country. Blend masters—like Grandpa Le—guarded their secrets zealously and made fortunes. In the old days, the village folk prized bottles of fishsauce concentrate as great gifts, the equivalent of fine wine and cash.

  Uncle Long said these days people treated it like an illicit narcotic, hiding their production from the tax collectors, squirreling bottles of it away for bartering. Liberated into Communism or not, Vietnamese needed fishsauce the way we needed air. For us, it was salt and a thousand other spices, the very marrow of the sea to a country of coastal people. It was a good thing Grandpa left us a stockpile of fishsauce when he died.

  Grandma Le’s house and sundry shop sat five yards from the main road, the national highway. The bus dropped us at the front door. Grandma, Auntie Dung, and all my siblings—Chi, Huy, Tien, and Hien—came out to greet us. Grandma took me into her shop and said I could eat as much candy from her store as I could swallow on account that she hadn’t had chance to spoil me as she had my siblings. They had been living with Grandma when we came back from prison. While I was locked up in Saigon, they were running wild with the local kids.

  Auntie Dung took all of us out for milkshakes. We walked down the shady avenue, holding hands, singing, our sandals scrunching on sand—this a beach town—to a kiosk that had been in the same spot under a tamarind tree since I could remember. The vendor, whose laughs were as fresh as the sweet fruits she served, hand-shaved ice for us until her arms ached. Huy and Chi had durian milkshakes made with shaved ice and condensed milk. Tien had his favorite, a breadfruit milkshake. I had soursop.

  The feasting started then and lasted until the moment we left. Grandma didn’t think she would see us again so she made us our favorite dishes. Grandma and Great-Grandaunt, who was so old and stooped I could touch the top of her head, roasted chickens for Huy and Chi, stewed hams for Tien and Hien, and fried mountains of delicious egg rolls for me. Grandma’s little house was full of laughter; the stove in her kitchen, which was separate from the main quarters, never cooled off. They were constantly making treats for us. There was so much to eat, we forgot the rest of the country was beginning to starve.

  I could tell people were hungry because I often watched the store for Grandma. It was a mom-and-pop operation, hardly bigger than an average bedroom, carrying a variety of goods: a dozen bolts of cloth, kitchen knives, flour, candles, several shelves of canned foods, spices, dried edibles, and the occasional baked goods from a local baker. Neighbors came in and bought ingredients, one meal at a time: a grab of dried shrimp, a cup of fishsauce, a few spoons of sugar, a scoop of lard. The bin of white rice stayed full. I sold it by the cup to be offered to portraits of dead ancestors. People ate the red rice, a dry, tasteless wild variety that farmers once fed to chickens and pigs.

  One afternoon while I was snouting through a jar of candy, the cute girl who lived next door came in. She smiled and gave me a nickel-bill and two chipped teacups.

  “My mom needs a tablespoon of cooking oil and half a cup of fishsauce,” she said.

  “What is she making?” I mumbled, trying to swallow a mouthful of sesame caramel and grinning like a moron. My parents had enrolled me in an expensive boys’ prep school. I didn’t know any girls except my friend who used to live in the alley behind our house in Saigon.

  “Stir-fried spinach and onion omelet.”

  “Oh.” I filled one teacup with cooking oil, the other with fishsauce. “You want some peppermint candy?” I handed her a fistful.

  She shook her head, hesitating.

  “It’s free!” I said, grinning so wide my face nearly split.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, it’s all mine.” I exaggerated, pointing at the row of candy jars.

  “Thanks.”

  “My name is An. What’s yours?”

  “Hoa.”

  “What else would you like, Hoa?” I gestured magnanimously at the entire inventory.

  Grandma knew I was pilfering her store for a few smiles from Hoa, but she looked the other way, kindly going inside for a nap when Hoa came around. She was letting me grow up the way she had let Chi find her footing.

  I could tell Chi was different. She smiled a lot, a lopsided grin brought on by growing up among the coconut palms and basking in Grandma’s affection. This place had seeped into her, filled her out, made her a part of it. She was tall and strong. She swam, climbed trees, chopped wood, and practiced martial arts. She bullied the bullies and fasted with Grandma, who was a devout Buddhist. Chi owned the village the way it owned her and she shared it generously with me, something I, the spoiled first son, never expected.

  Early every morning, Chi took Huy, Tien, and me down to the bay to teach us to swim. Grandma sent us off with steamed rice cakes filled with peppered pork and sweet beans. We walked down to the beach, our breakfasts warm in our pockets. These were to be saved for after our swim, but we ate them on the road, knowing there was a meal waiting on the beach. In the water, Chi held each of us up by our stomachs and we learned to dog-paddle. We swam, waded, and built sand castles. Entire clans of fisherfolk, from grandfathers to toddlers, gathered on the shore to bring in the morning catch. When they hauled in the nets, we pitched in, digging our feet into the sand, heaving the lines to their rhythm in a tug-of-war with the sea. The net made a great big U in the water, taking a bite of the ocean as we brought it in. Silvery fish came out of the water like coins pouring, bouncing, hopping out of a slot machine. The fisherfolk went mad with laughter, dashing about, scooping up the jackpot into handwoven baskets, screeching to each other to grab this one or that one before it flopped back into the water. We worked with them, laughing, competing to see who bagged the most. In return, they gave us a couple of fish and lent us a pan and oil. Chi built a driftwood fire on the beach and fried the fish. We pinched the meat from the bones, and ate it off banana leaves with salt and lime, sitting on the sand, watching the sun come up out of the water. It felt as though Chi had never gone to live with Grandma. I never thought we could be so happy again, Chi and me playing as though it had never happened. Like I’d never betrayed her and Leper-boy, three years before.

  The village leper didn’t have a name. People called him Leper-boy although he was at least a young man. Perhaps that was because he was short, very small-boned—“hardly more than a lame chicken,” Grandma used to say. I was in kindergarten then, and he didn’t seem all that much bigger than me. He walked on one leg and crutches. His other foot had withered around the ankle like a bad squash. But he was a great traveler, getting around the village more than most two-legged folks. They said he even made it out to the countryside a couple of times a week. It was how he ate.

  From house to house, he begged with his one gift, singing in a voice so pure the older folks grieved over his tragedy. That misshapen face, they said, cheated him of a professional career in the opera. But really, it was their way of overlooking his malady. Sad, sad, they hushed, his ancestors must have done something horrible to cause him such misfortune.

  An observer of courtesy, Leper-boy made himself scarce in the morning when merchants went to market. Begging from the sellers before they could sell, people believe,
brought bad commercial luck. Leper-boy let the vendors returning from market find him in the afternoon sitting by the side of the road, serenading them a cappella. Kind souls gave him bits of what they could not sell. Snack girls, walking with rounds of rice crackers, as big as trays, stacked three feet high on their heads, would stop. They often gave him a little of what they had left. He thanked them and put their gifts into a bag he slung over his shoulder, the bag a gift from some Buddhist monks, who were also, in their fashion, great beggars.

  Leper-boy didn’t like sesame crackers and shrimp paste as much as he liked tobacco, and he found, in my sister Chi, a suitable trading partner. He exchanged his tidbits with her for cigarette butts she had salvaged from the family’s ashtrays. It was a transaction which my father had forbid. Dad said Leper-boy might be contagious and none of us could talk to him or touch anything he touched. But as children, we were not allowed to have money, and sesame rice crackers and shrimp paste were my sister’s favorite snack.

  Dad came home after work and found Chi snacking. He asked her how she got the food. He knew that without money she couldn’t have bought it. Chi said a friend gave it to her. He asked me and I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I was angry at Chi. Or, simply, I was just spoiled. Full of a first-son righteousness, I told on her. Dad raged through the house, furious at Chi. You dare disobey me! I’ll teach you how to be respectful in this house! He laid her out on the living room divan and broke bamboo canes on her, exacting the Vietnamese punishment in a cloud of blind wrath. Neighbors crowded the front door, begging him to stop. Men shook their heads, women beseeched him for mercy. Yet no one crossed the threshold. It was a man’s right to beat his child. The police weren’t summoned because they wouldn’t have intervened. Mom cried, kneeling beside the divan. Dad rose above them, his visage terrible to behold, an angry god, vengeful and unyielding. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Chi screamed. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! People clamored for mercy. I cried, cowering in the hallway terrified, for I had brought these blows on her. Like striking vipers, the canes blurred through the air, swishing, biting into Chi, one after another. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! She howled. I cringed, covering my ears, knowing well the taste of bamboo, the way it licks out at flesh, first a jolt like electricity, then sharp like a fang, then hot like a burn. The canes broke over her back. The neighborhood women, wringing their shirttails, muttered that Dad’s cruelty was a curse upon our house. The last cane splintered into bits, and Dad stormed away to find another. Mom dragged Chi up and put Chi’s hand in mine. Take her to Grandma’s, Mom told me. Chi and I fled the house. I returned home that evening, but Chi never wholly came back into our lives again.

  Mom came out to Grandma’s a week before Dad. When she finally sent word for him that things were ready, he sneaked out of Saigon and arrived in Phan Thiet by hiding on a cargo train. Dad came into Grandma’s house like a rat crossing a dark street. We were sitting on straw floor mats in the living room eating dinner. He stepped into the pumpkin warmth of our oil lamp and I, familiar with the carefree beach days, saw him as though I hadn’t seen him in months. He was a thin bag of shallow breaths and sweaty skin. Fear had bled away his commanding air. His cheekbones poked out while his eyes sank deeper into his head. His new stoop and rain-sloped shoulders made him small.

  In one step, he reunited the whole family for the first time in over a year. And suddenly, I felt Chi withdrawing to the side. She started lurking on the edge of us, constantly on one errand or another when Dad was around. She developed an eerie knack for sensing him around corners, and she had this ability to melt into the furniture when he came into the room. She never looked him in the eye. Fourteen summers old now, she was too young to have fallen permanently from grace with Dad. There was a wedge between them driven, perhaps, deeper by the fact that she lived with Grandma, who was never fond of Dad in the first place.

  Our last night in Phan Thiet, Chi and I monkeyed up the star-fruit tree and onto the tin roof of the kitchen shack. We picked star fruits and, dipping the wedges in chili-spiced salt, ate them sitting below a glittering sky. The fruit tasted sun-baked, for in full ripeness it was golden, the color of cloud underbellies tickled by a slanting sun. It had a flowery texture halfway between a melon and an apple, though it was less substantial than either. Its juice was sharp, indecisive between sour and sweet, resulting in a dizzied tanginess that made me think of being out in the sun too long. Chi said it was how sunlight tasted.

  I told her a secret game I played when Mom and Dad left me at home alone overnight. I talked to space aliens with my flashlight, flickering photons to the reaches of darkness. Spaceships would come if I ever really needed them, I told her.

  “What would you do if a spaceship came?” Chi asked.

  “I’d ask them to take us to America. Here, your turn.”

  Chi beamed her message into the sky.

  “What did you say to the spaceships?”

  “I sent my wish to the angels.”

  “Angels? They’re up there with space aliens?”

  Chi nodded solemnly.

  “What did you wish for?”

  “I want them to watch over Grandma when we’re gone.”

  Chi wasn’t as excited about going to America as I was. She felt at home in Phan Thiet and she loved Grandma. Chi said she’d asked Mom to let her stay with Grandma, but both Mom and Dad wouldn’t hear of it. We babbled late into the night, waiting to eavesdrop on the adults discussing the escape inside the kitchen shack. Everyone was there, including the fishermen who would be taking us out onto the ocean. Some of them were angry about Uncle Hung’s last-minute decision to stay with Grandma. He said she was too old and needed someone to take care of her. He was convinced that with the continuing food shortages burglars would break into the house and rob her.

  “You’re a turtle!” Mom mocked her brother. “You never stick your neck out to take a chance. A little noise and—fffthhh—in goes your head, scared of everything.” She looked around the room for emphasis and threw up her hands. “There’s nothing for you here. We have relatives who will take care of Mother.”

  Everyone, including Grandma, urged him to go, but nothing could sway him into risking the open sea in a fishing boat. Aunt Dung, his sister, on the other hand, was all for it. She was twenty, and full of fire. A repressed little town with neither opportunity nor food was not for her. Neither were its cowardly men.

  “I’ll take care of Mother better than any relatives,” Uncle Hung said doggedly. “Besides, maybe I’ll go back to Saigon and watch your house so that it’ll be there if you come back.”

  At this, joy bled from Mom’s face. The house was her greatest treasure, their milestone in life, their monumental accomplishment. Banks didn’t make home loans. The house meant security, a departure from their difficult past. They couldn’t sell it because that would look suspicious. They had started out with nothing and now they were about to lose everything.

  “No.” Dad shook his head. “Let it go. The government will confiscate it. I don’t want you implicated in our escape. We won’t be back. If we return, we are as good as dead.” Dad knew if we waited till next spring, he stood a fair chance of being discovered and executed. The cops swept through the neighborhood regularly and dragged people off to labor camps. Properties were “seized” and “redistributed.” If they took Dad, they would send us to live in jungle hamlets.

  Mom nodded, saying over and over that he was right. She was a smart and resourceful woman who had bribed the prison guards to keep her husband alive, making sure he had the little food and medicine he needed to survive the jungle. Besides rescuing him, she had worked with her brother to find seven fishermen with a boat willing to risk the high seas with us. The crew were young men from Phan Thiet, the oldest twenty-five, the youngest seventeen. Phan Thiet was my mother’s hometown so it was the safest place to recruit, but it was also my father’s former government station, the place where he was most likely to be recognized. They had been plann
ing for months. The men had been stashing government-rationed diesel by the pint and hoarding spare engine parts. At first, Dad worried it was a trap, for there were many fishermen-turned-pirates who took passengers out to sea to rob and murder. Then he suspected that it was a military sting to capture would-be escapees.

  “Tai, the skipper, is Mr. Tang’s son,” said Uncle Long, introducing his handpicked crew one by one. When he finished, he vouched for them: “I’ve known every man here since they were kids. All these men are safe. They have as much riding on this escape as you do, Brother Thong. If they’re caught, their families can lose their boats and all fishing privileges. They will become beggars.”

  They began to discuss rations and details of our escape, slated for the next day.

  “Oy! An.” It was Hoa standing in a tree in her backyard, calling me over the fence.

  “Hi, Hoa. You want some star fruit?” I whispered, hoping the adults below couldn’t hear me.

  “Yes. Meet me out front?”

  Chi giggled. My face burned. She said loud enough for Hoa to hear, “Take some chili-salt for your girlfriend.”

  Too embarrassed to say anything, I stuffed my shirttail into my pants, put some star fruit down my shirt, and ran out. Hoa sat on the front porch with me. Other kids were playing Knock the Can in the street.

  “I know what your family is doing,” Hoa said, nibbling the point of a star fruit.

  I pretended I wasn’t listening. Dad had said it was supposed to be a big secret.

  “All those men going into the store, then sneaking behind into the house. They don’t leave until really late at night. They’re fishermen, aren’t they? Your family is going to cross the border, aren’t you?”

  I shook my head, almost feeling my father’s cane on my backside. It was my fault she was hanging around the house every day.

  “Everybody knows. You can tell me. We’re friends, aren’t we?” she insisted, calling our friendship into question, which was more than I could bear.