Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

  I thank the nurse and step outside. On the sidewalk, it feels infinitely odd that I am standing in the same place where I had played as a boy, twenty years ago. Here, I had waited for my school bus. Locked inside the house most of the day, I yearned to play on this hot pavement, my domain. Of the people who crossed my kingdom, I remember one peasant woman most poignantly.

  It was the day before the fall of Saigon. She had paused in front of my house. Her plastic sandal had slipped off her foot. She lowered to the ground the two baskets that hung from the ends of the bamboo staff she shouldered. In one basket, a baby wailed. Quieting her child with a sliver of sugarcane, she tipped back the rim of her conical hat fashioned of palm leaves and dragged a soiled white sleeve across her brow. Fear flickered over her face as she looked behind.

  Hundreds of people were fleeing the column of smoke rising to the gray sky. Some came on bicycles laden with belongings. Most scrambled on foot, peasants with possessions in their baskets. Fathers pushed carts. Little children rode piggyback on their older siblings. Mothers lugged bundles with young ones in tow.

  A few cars, horns blaring, plowed a path through the mass that spilled into the street. When the cars ran out of gas, drivers abandoned their vehicles and fled with their families on foot. Children screamed. Gunshots crackled sporadically somewhere in the neighborhood. People shouted, urging each other to hurry. Some pushed against the tide, calling the names of those they’d lost in flight, craning their heads above the crowd. Clothing, baggage, carts, baskets, and bicycles littered the street, left where their owners had dropped them.

  The scene frightened me. I ventured onto the sidewalk and asked the woman with her baby where she was going.

  “To the harbor,” she said. “There are American ships there. It’s over. The Viet Cong are coming!” Her answer panicked her. The baby bawled.

  She was thirsty. I fetched her a glass of water. She asked me why my family wasn’t leaving. Was it because we owned land and this house?

  I told her I didn’t know. I only knew my mother cried this morning when my uncle told her the country fell. Maybe we were leaving, too. Where, I didn’t know, but we were going somewhere. My mother had been packing all day and my father had been gone since this morning to bring all my brothers back home from grandparents’ house and uncle’s house where they boarded. Even without the madness outside, I knew it was a big occasion because I couldn’t remember the last time that we were all under one roof.

  I would have gone on, but she wasn’t listening. As suddenly as she had stopped, the woman shouldered her load and her baby and hurried away, her sandals slapping on the concrete.

  A fat, dark woman comes out of the building next to the clinic and asks me, “Uncle, what are you looking for?”

  She uses the honorific “uncle” although she is older than me, so I bow in return. “Older Sister, I used to live here with my parents before the Liberation. I’ve returned to see the old neighborhood.”

  “Really! Are you Uncle Pham’s son?”

  I nod, amazed that anyone remembered my father. It had been two decades and we hadn’t lived here more than two years.

  My return excites her. She touches my arm. “How are your parents? Is your mother, Aunt Anh, doing well? Are all of you in America or Europe?”

  “Yes, they are doing very well. Healthy and prosperous in America.”

  “I knew it! Your father was wise to leave when he did. A week after he left, the police came to your house.”

  I don’t need to press her on the details. Any business that brought the police out to one’s home at night was very bad. I realize now how narrow our escape was, how it was common for neighbors to turn informers.

  “Forgive me, Older Sister, I was so young, I don’t recall your name.”

  “Oh, Lord, you don’t remember me? I’m Fourth Sister. Ask your parents about me. They remember. Are you An or Huy?”

  “An.”

  “It’s so fortunate to see you again. Anything about our neighborhood look familiar?”

  “No, Fourth Sister. I was hoping you could walk me around the neighborhood. I don’t remember the alleys too well. A lot must have happened since the Liberation.”

  Fourth Sister laughs and tells me to lock my bike inside her house. She takes me into the alleys and introduces me to the people living there, but no one remembers me nor I them. Old houses have been felled, newer ones, dingier ones, have taken their place, and my old playground, the nooks, the corridors, the hidden alcoves have long been paved over. Yet the place isn’t as dirty as I’d expected. In fact, it seethes a headiness of incense, frying garlic, and the sweat of too many people.

  “Where is the dog-meat restaurant?” I ask Fourth Sister.

  “Gone. After Saigon opened up a few years ago, things got better, so people don’t eat dogs much anymore. It’s sinful.”

  “Where is the Chinese apothecary? The dumpling bar, the tofu women?”

  “All gone.”

  “No, no.” I couldn’t have come all this way for naught. “What about the house behind mine—the one in the alley? I just want to see that alley house behind mine.”

  “They smashed all the alley homes a long time ago. New homes are built right against the back of all the street-front houses. No more alley.”

  “But what about the people who used to live there? The Vo family.”

  “Gone. All gone. Who do you remember?”

  “The daughter. I don’t remember her name.”

  “Come. Meet the new people and some of the old ones who are still here.”

  I want to leave. This place is empty. But she draws me by my elbow deeper into the concrete shade of the back byways gauzy with crisscrossing laundry lines and green with cheap paint. She steers me, nudging me sideways through the crowd of short men, invalid seniors, black-toothed matrons, and naked children who squat in the alley eating stinky, pungent noodles sold out of home kitchens. She walks me past the meat sellers whose wares are single sides of pork displayed on banana leaves on the ground, introduces me to the women who scrub their laundry at the front steps, tells the cigarette-suckling men where I am from. She shoves me into strangers’ homes, shouting jubilantly: A Viet-kieu, our oum neighborhood Viet-kieu comes back to see his roots. Let him in to see your house. Let him see how humbly we live.

  They rush questions at me. Do you live in the Country of Oranges [Orange County] in the sate of Cali (California]? I hear all Viet-kieu live there. What do you do for a living? How much do you make? Are you married? Would you like me to be your matchmaker? I’ll find you a good wife. Meet my sister. You bring us gifts? How about a hundred dollars? Here’s my uncle’s address in New York; find him and ask him why he stopped writing and sending us money. Here’s my photo, find me an American husband.

  They laugh with me, at me. I desperately want to be away from this foreign place. So sorry, but I must go now. I’m late for an appointment. I leave, bowing, nodding, smiling, running. Fourth Sister trails me all the way back to her house. As I fumble with my bike lock, she pours a cup of tea, stale-cold, and presses the blistered porcelain into my hand.

  She speaks with an urgency that makes me pause. “We are so poor. Life is so tough here. People who have Viet-kieu in their family live better. They buy motorbikes, open big business, make good living. I’m poor. My family is poor. Can you help us? Will you be our benefactor?”

  I try to explain something to her about life in America. And that I don’t know her. I try not to let my disappointment show. I come searching for truths, hoping for redeeming grace, a touch of gentility. But, no. The abrasiveness of Saigon has stripped away my protective layers. I am raw and bare and I ask myself, Who are these strangers? These Vietnamese, these wanting-wanting-wanting people. The bitter bile of finding a world I don’t remember colors my disconsolate reconciliation between my Saigon of Old and their muddy-grubby Saigon of Now. Saigon gnaws at me … its noise … its uncompro-. mising want … its constant … Memememememememememe …

/>   15

  Beggar-Grace

  The Saigon I see isn’t visceral. I’d be deceiving you if I took your hand to walk you through it. It isn’t just something you see. It’s what you feel, an echo in the blood that courses through you. It is a collage, a vanishing flavor, a poison, a metallic tinge, a barbarous joy, strange impressions unconvictable in the usual conventions.

  It is easy for me to say because I am cowering in a bar, exclusive, situated high above the muck. Easy, for today I was wounded, my armor finally pierced. Now, through this tinted window, I see a Saigon evening like the dozens of others before. I see the setting sun grinding down on the ancient treetops and the prickly antennas atop the shouldering buildings. It glowers, a fist of coal in a sea of smog thick as dishwater. In the glimmering heat, the narrow roads swarm with headlights of motorbikes, bright beams wildly fingering the asphalt arteries, companions of the horns, the screeching, badgering, warring horns, persistent always. The air throbs, salty, wet with exhaust, dank with perspiration. The people, the skinny dark people suffocate, enduring.

  Kiosks hedge the street, no sidewalks, catching the drift of humanity churned up by the traffic. The sandwich makers, old ladies with oily hands, dusty skin like yesterday’s bread, lather pork fat onto tiny loaves. On the curbs, the shirtless men of sun-jerked sinew in boxer shorts and rubber sandals, squatting on their hams, grill meat over coals in metal pans. A dog, patchy fur over ribs, sniffs the droppings of another. In an alley, a mother and daughter fry dough cakes, selling them wrapped in dirty newspapers. Next to them, laborers hunch on plastic footstools slurping noodle soup from chipped bowls. TVs squawk, flickering foreign images to a score of spectators each. They’re watching an American travelogue dubbed in Vietnamese. Tonight, we tour Yosemite and luxuriate in the hospitality of the Ahwahnee Hotel.

  People shout, curse, barter, laugh, whine, edging words into the traffic, hustling for money. The buildings press narrow, ten feet wide, and stretch thrice as long, every other one a storefront, open for business, selling, selling, selling anything, everything. Food, paper, spare parts, clothes, candies, color TVs, fake watches, cheap Chinese fabric, screwdrivers, wrenches, rice dishes, Coca-Cola, cigarettes, gasoline in soda bottles, penny-lottery tickets, imported tins of biscuits, and everything has a buyer, everyone is for sale.

  Across the city on a darker avenue in a place they call Hang Bong—the Row of Flowers—life drifts in on the evening breeze. First come the snack vendors, two-basket merchants of sweet jelly drinks and tapioca desserts, each armed with a bead flame winking from an oil lamp. They cater to the buyers and sellers of perfumed nights. Next, the police make their entrance in ill-fitting olive uniforms, black kneeboots, and white vinyl belts, nightsticks and Russian pistols riding awkwardly on their hips, here for their cut of the night’s transactions.

  Then, the flowers blossom from nowhere onto the nightscape: women who look like girls, and girls who look like women, and hags who hug the darkest shadows, cosmetics of another sort. They stroll out from the maw of dark alleys. They walk in from afar by twos and threes, hand in hand like sisters going to the market. They ride in on motorbikes, ferried to the Row of Flowers by friends, family, lovers, others.

  Last come the buyers. The upwardly mobile and the raving destitute. Locals who squander weeks of wages for a moment of release. And down by the well-lit sections of the avenue not far from the big hotels and the sewer that is the Saigon River, foreigners pluck the choice bouquets that blossom here. They flourish on this street, women of sheikhs. Everything for sale. Up front.

  There is a place called the Turtle Fountain not far from my old elementary school, the French Catholic institution I had dreaded. I had spent many a joyful afternoon dallying at this spot as a boy. It was a place in the city where I went to be alone, although no one is really alone in this city of nine million. The smog and heat are more bearable out on these old boulevards under the tall trees planted long ago by French civic designers. This fountain is one of the few remnants built by the deposed Nationalists that the Communist regime has allowed to stand. Now the hoboes and the homeless families cling to it, camping under its elaborate awnings and washing in the fountain.

  Six streets pour traffic into this intersection. The honks and purrs spin counterclockwise around the fountain with its fringe lawn-garden, footpaths, and benches. A bustling trade of sidewalk concessions rings the traffic. Cafés and food stands mark their territory by the foot. In addition to these is a steady stream of vendors passing through with their pushcarts, their baskets of food, bells clanging, calling out their wares. The acrid bite of exhaust is blunted by the smell of food: sweet meat grilling on coal, soy-sauce-soaked liver sizzling, roasting ears of corn dripping with pork fat and scallions, pork buns warming in tiers of great bamboo steamers, pork chops sautéing in fishsauce and garlic, sesame dough balls browning in woks of oil. From the tattered folding lawn chairs, all facing the traffic—amphitheater seats—Vietnamese congregate to drink and nibble on bits of food. Most just watch the traffic go by.

  Earlier this afternoon, Viet, Nghia, and I came out to the Turtle Fountain for a round of iced coconuts at my usual table. The proprietor reluctantly pulled herself from a card game, nabbed three coconuts from a Styrofoam cooler, cleaved the tops off, plunked them down, and rejoined her game. The beggars began to make their way toward us. I had grown inured to the daily pleas of beggars and no longer felt the instinctive urge to reach for my wallet, especially in front of Viet, who got into a fit whenever he saw me giving money.

  Saigon was thick with almsfolk, every market, every street corner maggoty with misshapen men and women hawking their open sores and pus-yellow faces for pennies. The air near them stank with the pepperiness of red boils, rotting flesh. Crippled boys lay on crude skateboards and crabbed along with sandal-covered hands, a begging cup clamped between their brown teeth. Old women with hungry, vacant eyes sat in the gutter, cradling one-eyed babies with heads the size of watermelons. Then there were begging bards: duets of one-legged guitarists and quadriplegic singers who sang supine on a wheeled board.

  Last week, I visited Grandaunt at her stall in the Ben Thanh Market. It had taken her four years of selling in the street to save enough money to buy the leasing contract of this five-by-five-foot stall. While we were chatting, a child and her blind mother begged me for two pennies. I reached for my wallet, but Grandaunt, who had caught me giving money to beggars before, placed a restraining hand on my arm. I wanted to give the child my paltry change, but it would mean disobeying Grandaunt, and thereby causing her to lose face. Seeing my discomfort, Grandaunt said gently to the little girl, “He’s family, little one.”

  The child bowed and moved on to the next stall, leading her milky-eyed mother by the hand. This tiny girl whom I could lift with one arm respected the custom: beggars forgo shopkeepers. This child had shown more grace than I in our empty transaction. I stood in her wake, moved by something I couldn’t name.

  By the time we were through with our coconuts, we had turned away six or seven beggars. We were about to leave when she came. She was six, maybe seven, maybe ten. It was difficult to tell because street children were generally so malnourished that their growth lagged by several years. She carried a baby in a shoulder sling on her chest. They were both ragged and thin.

  I looked in her face and the breath went out of me. She looked back, an exact image—a younger image of Trieu, a former lover I had thought someday would be my wife. I must be crazy, but the likeness was there. The war had orphaned Trieu and the only token of her childhood was a yellowed photo that I had committed to memory. This beggar-child had the same braided ponytail and huge gleaming eyes set in a persimmon face. The resemblance resonated a hundred what-ifs and I heard them as though I were trapped in a time portal.

  I wanted to give this child something. A wild thought needled my mind: I could be her godfather. Send her a monthly stipend for schooling and food. I wanted to hug her. But I sat helpless and wordless, as though saying s
he would have no mercy, not a single penny from me.

  Viet shook his head at me, a warning against giving handouts. Annoyed, he dismissed the child with a flick of his hand.

  Knowing her work had reached its end, she pointed at our empty coconuts. Scabs tattooed the length of her arm. She whispered, “Uncle, if you are finished with these, may I have them?”

  I could not move, watching with the impotence of a specter. Viet grunted his assent, motioning her to move on.

  “Thank you, Uncle,” she said, and gathered two shells, one in each small hand. She wanted to take the third as well, but couldn’t with the baby hanging on her chest. She sat down not ten steps from us and tilted each shell above her mouth. A few drops. I was mesmerized by her fingers. Dirty little fingers scraping bits of white coconut. Licking fingers. Sweet juice. Sharing slivers with the baby.

  I was her. She, me. She was Trieu. Could be my sister Chi. Could be my own daughter. Random. My world—her world. But for my parents’ money, I could be any one of the thousands of cyclo drivers, vacant-eyed men wilting in cafés, hollow-cheeked merchants angling for a sale. Everything could shift, and nothing would change. No difference. The shoes to be filled were the same.

  She left our coconut shells on the ground and skipped away across the busy street, the baby jostling awkwardly on her hip.

  Something awoke in me. Silent minutes passed and at last I stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Viet asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  He looked slighted, but it no longer mattered to me, his feelings, his culture. Vietnamese. Honor. Obligations. Respect. I hated it all.

  I climbed on my bike and rode after the beggar-child, going in the opposite direction of the circling traffic. Frantically, I searched for her braided ponytail bobbing among the tables. From café to café I went, stopping on the curb and peering into the dark. She appeared just coming out of the kitchen diner, sucking on an orange wedge, the baby riding her hip.