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Authors: Andrew X. Pham

BOOK: Catfish and Mandala
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Catfish-Dawn
I am a Vietnamese-American man. In my work boots, I am of average height, of medium build, and not too ghastly of face. I like going to the movies and reading novels in cafés. If I had to choose one cuisine to eat for the rest of my life, I'd take Italian without hesitation, though I do harbor secret cravings for hickory-smoked baby-back ribs and New Orleans gumbo. And I like buying cookbooks more than cooking. I enjoy tennis, basketball, baseball, football, and, lately, yes, hockey—from the bleachers or in my La-Z-Boy. My choice daily wear is a pair of five-year-old Levi's and a mock turtleneck (I have a drawerful, all the same size, same brand, different colors). I don't wear yellow, red, orange, or anything bright: they complicate the laundry process. No G-string underwear. Socks, plain white or black only.
My family arrived in America on September 17, 1977. I was ten. Of the Vietnam War I knew little, recalling only vignettes and images. Too young to know about its politics until I was about to enter American middle school. Fifth grade, Mr. Jenkin's class, I raised my voice against a teacher for the first time. Eighteen months in America, that much English learned. He was lecturing on the history of the Vietnam War. Something he said must have set me off because I shouted at him, summoning forth adults' drunken words I'd picked
up eavesdropping: America left Vietnam. America not finish war. One more day bombing, Viet Cong die. One more day! No. America go home! America chicken! Mr. Jenkin colored, a tomato-flush rising from his buttoned collar to his feathery blond hair. I could tell he wanted to strike me, but I knew they didn't do that in America so I didn't say I was sorry. Chopping the air with his hand, he screamed, No! No! Wrong! And five minutes of English I couldn't understand.
Much later, I realized with some guilt that perhaps his brother had died in the War, and if it had gone on, he might have lost another. I wish I could tell him now that what I really meant was that my father was in prison because of the War. I was shouting about our imprisonment, about the dark wet cells, the whippings, the shootings, the biting rats, and the fists of dirty rice we ate. These things I remember unfogged by the intervening years. Somehow terribly vivid, irreducible.
I was there. After Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, our family fled deeper south, hoping to find a boat that would take us to Thailand. Outside of Rach Gia, a port city, the Viet Cong had set up a road barricade and caught us along with some three hundred people heading toward the coast to flee the country. Women and children were locked, fifty to a room, in a wing separate from the men. We took turns sleeping on wet concrete, side by side. After a month, the women and children were released with permission to go home. The men were either executed or trucked off to the jungle to work.
My mother and I regularly visited my father at the Minh Luong Prison and Labor Camp. We lodged with peasant families and stayed for weeks near the compound so she could watch him working in the field under guard. Hiding behind bushes, I watched him whenever I could find him. Like her, I felt that if I kept my eyes on him, stayed vigilant enough, bad things wouldn't happen. Some nights, she lay awake until dawn after hearing gunshots snap in the nearby woods, where they executed prisoners.
Two decades have thundered by since his imprisonment. Although we rarely talk beyond the safe grounds of current events, education, investment, and work, he has frequently shared his tales about the Viet Cong reeducation camp with me. The adventure stories he had told me as a boy on his knee were replaced by his death-camp saga. I
believe it had something to do with my being his first son, with my having been there at the prison watching over him, witnessing what he thought were his death rites. In the years of telling, they became almost as much my stories as his. And this was strange, since my father and I have never shared much, never done father-and-son things, no camping trips, no fishing excursions; no ball games, no hot dogs in the park; no beers and Super Bowl on the tube. Still, the stories passed back and forth between us even when I had grown and moved away. My father, Pham Van Thong, was bequeathing his rarest pearls of wisdom, imparting a sense of value for life.
Of his last days in the death camp, Thong remembers the silence most. It was a thick creature that sat on his chest and lodged its fists in his throat. In the Viet Cong prison hut, he heard only his heart. Above, an indigo sky spilled light into the room, dyeing the gaunt faces of his fellows squatting on the dirt floor, fifty-four prisoners waiting for the execution call.
It came twice every week over the loudspeakers. Sometimes days passed between the calls, sometimes the calls came back-to-back.
Every evening just after they had scraped the last of the rice and the broth from their tins, silence fell as crickets wooed the coming night. The hut stank with fear and the food in their belly soured. Always, someone vomited.
He waded through his swamp of emotions. As the end neared when the indigo was deepest, two feelings remained. Sorrow for his wife, his children. Regret for a thousand things not done, a thousand things not said, a thousand things taken for granted.
His best friend in prison, Tuan, a helicopter pilot, edged close to him. Sitting on his hams, Tuan leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Thong, promise me.”
He squeezed Tuan's shoulder. It was December 17, 1975. If they called his name tonight, Tuan would die and his promise would be worthless. Tuan believed the VC would release Thong in a few years. He would carry Tuan's last words to his wife and son. Thong didn't
tell Tuan he believed that death was the only way out of Minh Luong Prison.
“Promise me!”
“Tuan …”
“You'll get out soon. Your wife's uncle is a VC colonel—a war hero.”
“The bribes didn't work, Tuan. We're broke. Anh borrowed and sold everything we owned.”
“No, she'll find a way. Anh is smart.” Tuan had never met her.
The gloom obscured his friend's face, but Thong could pick out the hollow cheeks and the wild vacant eyes. Before Vietnam fell, Tuan was a handsome young officer with all the promise of a good military career. He was only twenty-eight. He was married to his high school sweetheart and they had a son. On nights when it was very cold and the prisoners huddled together for warmth, he would speak of her, the way she moved and intimate things. Things not meant for the ears of others, but in this place it was all he had. All that kept him going.
Tuan's quivering voice was rife with self-reproach. “I shouldn't have confessed that I was a pilot. I was scared. When they said the penalty for lying on the confession essay was execution, I lost my mind. I wrote down everything. I confessed everything. Everything I could remember.”
Thong didn't.
“Thanh said I was honest. That's why she loves me. I shouldn't have written about my service in the air force.”
He wanted to tell Tuan they wouldn't call tonight, wouldn't come for him, wouldn't punish him. But he didn't. It would have been a lie. He wanted to hear Tuan's voice because it might be the last time they talked. A dying man had the right to talk, Thong said, and they were all dying. If the executioner didn't kill them tonight, jungle diseases would kill them soon enough. Then there were the minefields, the hundreds of land mines they were forced to unearth and defuse with shovels. Death always came round, one way or another.
“You'll be all right,” Tuan said, reassuring his friend even through his fear. “You're just a teacher. They don't punish teachers.”
Tuan didn't know his secret. No one in the prison did.
“They'll let you go soon. You only violated martial law.”
Tuan murmured himself to silence. There were nervous movements in the hut. Someone in the far corner retched. The loudspeakers crackled and screeched to life, whipping a charge of adrenaline through the room.
“Bastards!” someone hissed in the dark. “Why at night? Why do they only call at night?”
Silence answered him.
“If they are going to kill me, I want to die in the sun,” the man said, his voice rising on a false note of courage. “Why do they only come at night?”
A voice replied from across the darkness. “They are afraid of what they do. It is easier to kill in the dark.”
Someone else said, “No laws, no reasons, no mercy.”
“It is the way of the Viet Cong. I know them,” an old voice said. It was Khuong, the fisherman. He was in his sixties. He had given fifteen years to the Nationalist Army.
The first man shouted out the window, “Cowards!”
“Shut up!” a new voice trilled.
“Yes, shut up. It'll go hard for us if you don't.”
The murmurs of consent angered the first speaker. His voice, tinged with fear, became a shout. “You're all cowards. You wait like chickens—they kill you like chickens. When they kill me, I'm not going to kneel. No shooting in the back of the head. I'll look at the eyes of the man who pulls the trigger.”
Khuong replied, “You won't. It is dark. The night hides everything.”
The loudspeakers blared. “Stand outside your hut when your name is called.” Without preamble it rattled off names like a shopping list. “Nguyen Van Tung, Do Nhan Anh, Tran Truc Dang …”
A wail pierced the hut. A man across the room convulsed on the ground. The loudspeakers boomed, “Vo Ba Sang.” Oh, God. Not the auto mechanic.
“Le Tin Khuong.” The village fisherman. “Dinh Yen Than.” The pig farmer. “Vu Tan Khai.” The town storekeeper. They were killing
all the locals linked to the Nationalists. People were turning in their own neighbors.
Thong stared at his friend. Tuan's family had lived in this province for generations. They both heard it: “Phuoc Tri Tuan.”
Then it was over: thirteen names, six from their hut. Tuan retched on his mat and curled up in it shaking. Thong held him. Sang, the mechanic, took his place at the door, seemingly at peace with his lot.
The guards came in with oil lamps. Thong saw the fear, the ugly fear of the spared, and knew his face mirrored it. He saw the terror of the condemned and the way the tallowy light danced wicked shadows on their twisted features. The VC took the fisherman, the farmer, the storekeeper, and another man.
They dragged Tuan away by his ankles. He did not resist and he did not speak. Tuan gave Thong no final look and no parting words. It was so quick and simple how the VC had taken him and plunged them back into darkness.
Thong sat on his mat in a vile mixture of grief and relief. He had learned to block out the VC's “trials” broadcast over the loudspeakers. They invariably followed the same script: an account of offenses against the country, a conviction, and a death sentence—never a defense or a last rite. Occasionally, a few men were not tried. Tuan was the fourth one tried and his crimes were the same as those before and after him.
A long, long silence followed. Then eleven sharp pistol reports, distance-softened. It was over. They never knew what happened to the remaining two men.
Thong woke three hours before dawn. He heard some other early risers moving in the dark and hurried to be the first out of the hut. The smart ones woke early to use the latrine before the morning rush. Not all could go before the guards came to take them out to work.
The bloat-bellied moon sagged low on the horizon and silhouetted the guard tower just beyond the barbed-wire fence. The night sounds of the jungle hummed and the earth was cold and rough beneath his bare feet. Outside the compound, the sentries shadowed the perimeter on their watch, ignoring him.
The latrine was a wooden structure overhanging the edge of a shallow pond inside the prison fence. He snagged handfuls of grass and climbed up the five-stepped ladder. The latrine reminded him of a hangman's platform, the kind in the American Western movies his wife was so fond of. Only this one did not have a hanging post and in place of the trap door was a circular hole situated over the water. The surface beneath the latrine began to churn, roiling with catfish. He squatted over the opening and proceeded. The catfish fought wildly for their meal, leaping out of the water. He shifted to avoid the splashes. And so it went—the fish leaping and him shifting—until the business was concluded and the soiled grass discarded.
As he made his way back to the hut, others strayed out one by one to the pond. The clouds had swallowed the stars on the horizon. He crawled back to his bed and, before he remembered, he moved to huddle against Tuan for warmth. Tuan's straw mat was still there, reeking of the sourness of vomit and the cloying sweetness of urine.
Thong curled up and wound himself tightly in his blanket and Tuan's. The wind snaked through the thatched wall and ran cold tendrils over his scalp. He rolled onto his other side and bumped against Danh, a prison mate who lay perfectly still. Danh could have been dead. Thong could not tell and he did not wake him. If Danh were dead or dying, there was nothing Thong could do and nothing the VC would do besides tossing Danh into the mass grave in the woods and covering him with a thin layer of dirt.

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