A dark form turned back toward me. It was Tai, the captain. With me clinging to his neck, he plowed over the swell like a fish. He heaved me into the boat and climbed in, the last one aboard. There was barely any room to sit. The boat wasn’t much bigger than the ones Chi and I found abandoned on the beach. It was ten meters, roughly thirty feet, about the length of five big beds placed end to end. Dad was talking furiously with Tai and Hanh, the first mate. Mom hissed for them to get going.
Someone started the engine. It rattled, coughed. Nothing. He tried it again and again. Same result. Mom was clutching the jade Buddha pendant around her neck. A sick silence engulfed us. Dad looked afraid, his face so very gaunt in the moonlight. We crouched helplessly, watching the man inside the tiny engine house mid-deck. On the fourth try, the engine heaved to life, and the pilot pointed us out to the dark.
Huddling on the smooth wooden deck, I steadied myself against the gunwale as the boat rose and dipped with the waves. I flattened my palms against the smooth planks and felt the engine vibrating, clacking like a big baby rattle. Hien was snoring, drugged to the whole experience. Huy and Tien changed into dry clothes and, already bored, curled up to sleep. I was cold, tired, but I was too scared and excited to sleep. I had never been in a boat before.
The fishing boat had four sections. The foredeck was used to store sailing gear. It was also the head, the toilet a gallon tin can. We crowded just aft, on the holding deck where the fish usually go. There wasn’t enough room for everyone to lie down so we took turns. I sat against the shallow gunwale, hugging my knees to save space, worried that one good lurch of the boat could pitch me overboard. Behind me was the engine house. It provided access to our stash of food, water, and diesel below deck. One man always stayed inside to keep an eye on the engine and the seawater sloshing in the bilge. Most of the crew congregated in the stern cockpit. It was slightly larger than the mid-deck, but, with the pilot and the big tiller, two men had to sit on the roof of the engine house.
Dad was arguing with Tai at the stern, furious about the two extra young men whom he had never met. They weren’t part of the plan. He didn’t trust them. Seventeen people were too much for a tiny boat. How could we clear land before sunrise? Tai shrugged, they were his cousins. He pointed at the beach, saying that he had forgotten about the tide change. The grounded boat wouldn’t budge until the tide returned. Dad was angry that the new deckhands were too inexperienced. They were both seventeen. Tai was twenty-five and his first mate, Hanh, was twenty-two. The crew milled about, rearranging bags of provisions and jugs of water, looking uncomfortable.
A faint seam of violet was opening on the horizon when everything happened at once. Without enough room to sit on deck, the men started to throw their fishing net overboard, pretending to be laying out their net in case someone was watching from ashore. As the net was paid out to port, the boat was turned slightly in the same direction to keep the net from fouling the propeller. Within minutes, the engine died. The man in the engine house was frantic, shouting that it sounded as though something inside the engine broke. The boat slowed, then stopped, bobbing in the swells like a cork. The men scrambled, trying to figure out what happened.
“The net is caught in the propeller!” a crewman cried. Our inexperienced pilot had not kept the boat on a steady port curve. When a large swell had gone under the keel, he overcorrected to starboard, swinging the stern directly into the net-curtain. The propeller sucked up the lines until it choked.
Someone pointed to a pinpoint light—a patrol boat—rounding the peninsula behind us to port. “Down, down! Everybody down,” ordered Tai. “Keep working the net like you’re fishing.”
We lay down. I peeped over the side at the white dot in the distance. It seemed to just hover on the water. Not coming closer, not going away. Waiting. One of the men slipped over the side with a knife to cut the propeller loose. Another followed with a flashlight. We bobbed in the waves, helpless. A man surfaced, sputtering that the other man was tangled in the net. Three more went over the side with knives. An eternity sloshed by. They all came up. The rescued man was pulled onboard, coughing seawater, his leg bleeding from a superficial cut. Someone muttered that blood attracted sharks.
Two men went back down to hack the net from the propeller. They couldn’t get it off. The strands were too strong, wound too tightly around the shaft. There wasn’t a knife sharp enough among them, though they all had knives to fight Thai pirates. Six men, all capable divers, took their turns against the net. Tai, the best swimmer and strongest man aboard, was under hacking madly until they pulled him aboard like a dead fish. Mom burrowed into her bags and produced a cooking knife she had impulsively seized from the family altar the day before during prayer. Hanh slid into the water with it. Mom was in the throes of her “feeling” again, whispering to everyone that her “prayer-sent knife” was equal to the job. The outline of the patrol boat came toward us slowly from port. Standing on the foredeck, a pair of crewmen made a show of pulling in the net.
Tai surfaced on the starboard side, hidden from the patrol boat. The knife was sharp, he gasped. It was cutting through the net. Tai relayed the blade to Tieu, who slipped overboard to take his turn underwater. The patrol boat was only a few hundred yards off. A pair of crewmen stood, fussing with the net. The rest of us lay flat on deck, out of sight. The patrol boat slowed, then veered slightly from us, heading to shore. The sun’s crown was nudging out of the water, its aurora blossoming a nub of orange. Figures of men were visible on the other boat. They must have thought we were fishermen since our net was out and we weren’t making for the open sea.
A quiet cheer went up when Tieu surfaced and announced that the propeller was freed. They waited until the patrol boat was well out of sight and started up the engine. Again we headed out, this time toward the sunrise. There was no doubt among the crew that, had our boat been running, the patrol would have given chase. Our misfortune saved us.
Afternoon of our first day on the ocean, we sighted a small freighter. Although the fishermen claimed it was a good sailing day, sunny, moderate wind, average seven-foot waves, we were seasick. Except for Dad, who seemed to be holding up, Mom, Chi, Auntie, and us boys vomited, making the deck slippery. I felt horrible. My stomach fisted. Sour mush gushed out of my mouth. I broke out in a cold sweat, curling up in my own fish-smelling fluid. The sun yoyoed across the sky. It was hot, white, and round—like the pearls Mom had sewn into the crotch of my pants for safekeeping. My skin hurt, burning. I couldn’t keep food down. None of the women and children could. The men, on the other hand, were in high spirits, joking and singing as though we were all on a holiday.
It was a long time after they sighted the ship that I could distinguish it from the sea behind us. No one could tell what type of ship it was. With neither radio nor binoculars, there was no way to tell from which country the ship hailed. The men agreed that it must be a Vietnamese or a Russian ship because we hadn’t gone far since dawn. At full speed, our fishing boat made eight, maybe nine knots—a little under ten miles per hour. We couldn’t have been more than fifty miles offshore. Tai took the tiller and swung us away from the direction of the ship, but, a few minutes later, it seemed as though the ship had changed course. It was coming closer, and now we could make out its bow, pointing straight at us. Dad told Mom to make a Japanese flag. One of the men dove below and brought up her satchel. Mom started working furiously, digging out her red dress and a white sheet she brought in case we needed it for bandages. She couldn’t thread a needle in the lurching boat, so she used safety pins. In minutes, we had a Japanese flag, a red dot on a white sheet. They hoisted it high at the stern. Tai kept us steady on course. Then all we could do was sit and wait.
The younger crewmen started to panic. There was talk of getting rammed or captured. Manh, who couldn’t swim, was terrified. I didn’t know enough to be scared until I saw Dad’s face. The last time he looked like that, we were imprisoned and he nearly got executed. Mom shut her eyes tightly, head bowed,
and prayed and prayed so hard I was sure we were as good as caught. I thought what a shame it was since I was just beginning to feel less seasick. And it was such a nice day to be out on the ocean—water, sky, and sunshine all the way around as far as my eyes could see.
14
Alley-World
I sit at the table with my bicycle, sweating. The midmorning breeze curling in from the alley singes. Granduncle Nguyen brings me a hot cup of espresso sweetened with condensed milk. He has made me one every morning since I came back to Saigon. It is a considerate courtesy which he can ill afford and which I cannot drink because it is too sweet. Telling him would be an unbearable breach of manners. So I bow saying, Thank you, Granduncle. You shouldn’t have. Mmmm, it’s delicious. And dump it down the toilet.
I take a cup of tea up a creaky ladder to the sun-drenched roof. In tropical Vietnam, the roof serves the same function as the American basement: a junk depot. I spider across the ramshackle storage shed, rainwater cisterns, and garden, entangling myself in a maze of laundry lines. Toward the front of the building, right up against the barbed wire that discourages burglars from prowling the rooftop, I duck under the wet laundry and settle down on a large old U.S. Army ammunition box, rusted in jungle-green paint, the rectangular kind that makes a good field stool. I rearrange the wet clothes into a shelter to soften the sun’s sting. Under cotton underwear and fake Levi’s, between a potted pepper plant and a tomato plant, I sip my tea and watch life unfolding in the alley. Nostalgia descends on me like a sweet sickness. I have done this often, long ago in my tower above the alley of my childhood.
My room overlooked the lane behind our house. Back then, the city streets forbidden to me, I spent the bulk of my childhood in a nook, scarcely larger than a closet, but hardly big enough to be called a room. I had fancied it a nest or a sort of treehouse, for it was built into the landing of the stairwell between the first and second floors, almost a secret space, above the kitchen and below the bathroom. It was six by eight feet with a single bare light bulb screwed into a socket on a low ceiling I could touch standing on a footstool. In the far corner, two small windows were set together at a right angle like a contracted bay window so that they jutted out the back of the building, giving a prime view of all the happenings up and down the alley.
Two bookcases lined the opposing walls. The shelves sagged with books, some mine, most my father’s. A portable AM radio sat next to the pen and inkwell on a board nailed into the wall nearest the windows to serve as a writing ledge. I used the varnished flat top of a wooden trunk set against the fourth wall as a napping spot. In the sunny season, the wooden planks were cool to the touch, but my sweat would make the varnish sticky. In the rainy season, the planks were cold and I would cover them with a straw mat.
From the windowsill, my favorite reading spot, I watched, smelled, and listened to the alley-world outside. A stone’s throw down the path, the alley dead-ended at the side of a sooty building with a big dark door. That was where my uncle Hung, who stayed with us months at a time, sent me bodily out of the house, with a smack behind the head and a boot on the rear, to fetch his favorite snacks—beer, cigarettes, and ginger-roasted dog meat.
They dragged five or six dogs in there each day. The dogs barked, howled often through the night. In the morning, they hung the dogs just inside the door by their hind legs and used a cleaver to cut their throats. Sometimes the wind skirled in the alley and brought the reek of guts and blood mingled with smoke to my window.
But there were many other odors of the market that came up from the alley. A dumpling bar crowded a corner three doors down from ours. A fat woman sat in the center surrounded by four big pans on which she poured, steamed, and rolled pork dumplings like crepes. Two low bars fenced in the woman and her daughter, who helped from behind. One the other side, customers crouched on footstools and ate her fresh dumplings with garlic-chili fishsauce. Across from the alley, the Chinese medicine shop, a narrow one-door one-window establishment, smelled of pungent herbs and faintly sweet medicines.
Then there were those who brought their business to the alley in baskets to sell as they sat on wood blocks, backs to the walls. Up and down the crowded alley shoppers, pressing past each other, bargained with vegetable vendors, tofu women, noodle sellers, sausage makers, fortune-tellers, and trinket merchants. The aromas of food battered the stink of the alley. Above the din of the market were the shouts of playing children.
As a child, I spent all my time in this room, especially when my parents locked me in the house for days while they went out of town on business trips. It wasn’t too bad because I had a friend. She was my age and she lived on the first floor of the building behind ours. It had a folding metal rail door that her parents always kept locked. At night, when the shops closed and the alley merchants had gone home, she came to the front. Hands on the bars and face looking out between them, she talked with me.
“What happened at school today?” she hollered up across the alley.
“Not much. The teacher hit my hand with the ruler.”
“Again? I thought you studied.”
“I did. I always get so nervous in front of class I can’t recite my lesson. What about you?”
She grinned. “I got good marks for my lessons. They don’t hit us so much at my school.”
“I wish I could go to your school. I don’t belong in mine.”
She went to a public school and so did all my brothers and older sister. I was the first son, so my parents put aside a small fortune to enroll me in the best school in the country, a private French institution for boys. All the other kids were rich and smart. I was neither. My clothes were always older than theirs and they all had private tutors.
I turned on my radio, the volume way up, and we sang along and danced. Then she shifted her television so I could watch cartoons with my father’s pocket binoculars. She was my best friend, although we never met beyond her bars and my window.
Things changed after the country fell. Mom and I came back to the house after our imprisonment. Chi, Huy, and Hien boarded with Grandma Le. Tien went back to live with Grandma and Grandpa Pham. I stayed with Mom. She busied herself with getting Dad out of prison. We always went out to Minh Luong Prison and Labor Camp together, but I stayed home alone when she went to various cities to petition for Dad’s release. As part of her preparation, she cooked me her “magic pot” of catfish. She’d take half of the fish to eat on her journey and leave me the clay pot with the other half, giving me the choicest meat, the part just behind the head.
She locked me inside our three-story building and said, “By the time you finish this pot, I’ll be home.”
So I ate it fast. It was all gone in two days. There was nothing left in the clay pot except sauce, bones, and the big catfish head. I had saved every scrap of fish, bones and all, like Mom told me, and put them back into the pot after every meal. Then I would give it a squirt of fishsauce and bring the pot to a boil. For the next meal, I would add a little water, maybe a dash of pepper, and boil it again. When there was no more meat, the pot magically kept on yielding plenty of peppery, fishy, sweet, salty, buttery sauce, tasty enough to be poured on plain white rice for a meal. And sure enough, Mom came home before the clay-pot catfish ran out of magic.
After tea, I bike out to Ly Thai To Boulevard where we used to live. The street has become one of Saigon’s major arteries. Nothing looks familiar. The buildings have been renumbered, but some have the new numbers, some the old numbers, some none at all. The block is mangy with signs and billboards, and the whole place looks, smells, and feels grimy with oil and soot. On the third pass, I find our house. It has been converted into a community health clinic, a big Red Cross sign out front.
My heart dips at the sight of it. The front of the building has been demolished and rebuilt farther back to make room for motorbike parking. I peek inside. There have been some major structural modifications. The head nurse greets me at the door. When I tell her that my family once lived here, she exp
resses concern that I might be one of those Viet-kieu returning to reclaim properties the government or squatters seized. I assure her I am only here for my childhood memories. Sighing relief, she tours me through the clinic. The building seems new, small, strange. There is nothing left of my youth. After fifteen minutes, she returns to work, leaving me milling about the house trying to—as she puts it—“visit the humble life that came before.”
The staff and the patients begin to stare, which makes me feel misplaced. What was I thinking? Did I really believe that coming here would bring back dead memories? I guess I was hoping something miraculous would happen. Something spontaneous that would make everything all right and justify all the hardships I have gone through. I had been banking on a stupid Hollywood ending, too embarrassed to admit as much to myself.
Too many things changed. Too much time passed. I’m different now, a man with a pocketful of unconnected but terribly vivid memories. I was looking to dredge up what I’d long forgotten. Most of all, I am wishing for something to fasten all these gems, maybe something to hold them in a continuity that I can comprehend.
Catfish and Mandala Page 10