Catfish and Mandala (33 page)

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Authors: Andrew X. Pham

BOOK: Catfish and Mandala
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The Colonel smoked the last cigarette of his daily two packs at 2 a.m. and we wrapped up for the night. As I picked up my coat in the darkened living room where Mr. Beckett was wheezing in his sleep, Trieu kissed me good night and whispered, Stay tonight, please. An, I don't feel safe. I was startled, coat in hand, the Colonel waiting expectantly at the door. I squeezed her hand and bowed to the Colonel. Disturbed and confused, I reparked my new sports car a couple of blocks away and waited for the Colonel to go to bed before walking back. I jumped the fence on the side of the house, catted round the back porch, and climbed through Trieu's bedroom window, which she had left unlatched for me.
She woke and nestled her head into the hollow below my collarbone. I said that I couldn't keep sneaking around like this. It was too risky. I wanted her to move into my apartment. Soon, she promised, baffling me. She explained her sudden change of heart casually, as though she was brushing away a strand of hair from her face.
“Dad touched me in the car today.”
Her words burned like a slow fuse. Then the meaning firecrackered in my ears. I went rigid. Oh, Jesus.
She felt anger coiling in me and withdrew instinctively. “Don't worry about it. I can handle myself. Nothing happened. I didn't let him. Go to sleep, hon,” she whispered impatiently, already shutting down. Something terrible in her past froze her up in the face of anger. She rolled to her other side, away from me. A grainy stillness shifted between us. Trieu feigned sleep.
The room was cold, but I burned and could not breathe. There was something wild inside me. How could it be so little to her? And she so indifferent? This was sick. The anger wanted to rise out of my rib-cage and rip the room apart. My head was exploding. The tension ratcheted my gut. I wrestled against blaming her complicity for not seeing it coming. For not running out the door with me this moment. What did he do? What did you do? Has this happened before? A year passed for me in five minutes.
“An, you still awake?”
“Yeah.”
She turned back on her side to face me. I could see the gloss of her eyes. She shelled her hands around mine and held them to her chest. “An, I knew I couldn't tell you.”
“Trieu … How can you be so calm? Why didn't you tell me earlier? How can you pretend through dinner like nothing happened?” I fought to keep my voice level.
She replied with a child's simplicity, “He's my father …”
“No, no, no, no, no. No father does that.” He was a goddamn pig. I wanted to tell her I wanted him locked up. I wished I could fold myself around her and sponge away the pain. I wanted to rage, but what do I know about abuse? I was weak to her vulnerability. What did I know about loss, pain, betrayal? She had been through an adoption gone terribly wrong only to find a worse truth. I wished I were wiser.
At last I asked her what I should have said first: “How do you feel?”
A long pause. Her eyes closed.
“I'm … I'm disappointed.”
I felt my soul down on one knee before her, pledging my eternal fealty, for I could not understand her courage to continue the charade.
She needed him in ways I could not comprehend, and the finality of judging her father was a condemnation she had to make by herself. I touched my lips to her hands.
“Do you know what I like about you, An?”
I did. But I said, “No, what do you like about me?”
“You're good. You're different. One in a million.”
It was her favorite cliché, one she wished to believe. It seemed so easy to go along with her, but the words sat in my throat. Someday I would have to tell her the truth. She made me strive to be something better, but at the heart of it I was no better than the next guy. I tried to be decent because she needed it.
“Can we go to sleep now?” she said. “I have to work early tomorrow.”
“Sure, sure. Everything will turn out all right.”
She turned and backed into me so that we were curving around each other on the twin bed. I draped an arm around her and she held my hand. Sorrow burrowed down my throat to roost in my ribs. Like a child wakened by a nightmare, she was fast asleep again, preserved by her ability to make dandelions of her tragedies. A breath, a wish. Away into the wind.
I had kept telling her—and myself—that I took her as she was. The past did not matter. I never suspected that it was not my decision to make, but a mutual consent we had to negotiate. We were both walking thin ledges, always at cross-purposes, just out of each other's reach. I stared at the darkness all night, keeping vigil over her, watching her sleep, her skin as pale as driftwood. There was an elegant slightness to Trieu I had always fancied I could sketch in three fluid lines, and if I got them right, I would know the whole of her with or without her leave.
I turned off my watch alarm before it rang. I sat on the bed as long as I dared, listening to her even breathing. The Colonel woke early so I had to get out. I should have left. Instead, I stood under the tree outside the Colonel's window and stared, balling my fists. In two steps, I could step through the window and snuff out his life. Garrote him with my necktie. No, he did not deserve that mercy. He needed to know what he meant to his daughter. I wanted him to taste her bitter
disappointment. Then I'd gouge out his eyes, trim his fingers, one knuckle at a time.
A silent night. A coruscating blaze behind my eyes. Night flowers powdered the air, a whitish fragrance. A sickle moon splattered me through the bough of the tree. The lace curtain shifted as if by a breeze, but the air was not moving. In the window, a flame exploded—a match waking a cigarette. Cold wires cycloned into my skin. The Colonel was at the window, looking out into the yard. He drew a deep one, the fat balls of his cheeks, his hooded eyes, glowing in the tobacco's flare. Troll in the window. A Kitchen God gone bad. A monstrosity brought back from the War.
Smelling the smoke that was in his lungs, I was the sniper in the shadow. We were at war all over again, me on the other side.
“Hey! Somebody there! Stop!” Red embers flew from his cigarette.
I heard him bulling down the hallway to get out the back door. A drawer slammed. He was going for his guns. If he discovered me, he'd kill both Trieu and me. I crashed across the yard, vaulted over the fence, and sprinted down the sidewalk. I ran, skimmed, flew across the balance of the night, the pavement a streaking hardness. Glazing orange streetlamps could not hold me. I needed to be away from the twisted vestiges of Vietnam-America, wishing an escape to some distant normal place, an America at large.
Harlot-Heroine
I don't know why I climb into his cyclo. It must be his reversed Hitler mustache—the little tuft located below his lower lip instead of above his upper lip. My cyclo driver must either be on the cutting edge of facial-hair fashion or he is plainly a nerd. In any case, as I was mesmerized by it, wondering what sort of fool would cultivate such a ridiculous-looking thing, he talked me into going for a free tour around Hue, the former imperial city of Vietnam.
There isn't much business at this hour anyway, so let's just cruise the city. No charge.
I suggest we go for
che
, late-night snacks of sweet beans and coconut milk.
He is pedaling me around the city in a budget-rental cyclo so cheap it doesn't have brakes. To stop, Tin jumps off and, with both hands locked on the seat post for dear life, drags himself behind the vehicle, shredding his plastic sandals on the asphalt. On a steep downhill, he shouts a warning and I bail out of the cab to help him haul the cyclo against gravity. On even a moderate incline, Tin lacks the muscle power, so the both of us huff and puff to push it to the top. Of course, once there, we're fighting to keep it from barreling down the other side and crippling bystanders. We eat
che
on the side of the road at a four-stool kiosk. Then I insist on taking my turn at the pedals with him in the passenger seat. He wants me to meet his uncle, who
has been like a father to him since his father died some ten years ago. Tin tells me he has a wife and three young ones. Near his house, his neighbors and cyclo buddies are hollering:
What the heck?
Surprised to see him in the cab—and me in the saddle. Tin shrugs and tells them that I am a foreigner, which seems to satisfy everyone since you never can tell what bizarre things a foreigner might be lusting after. We have tea with his uncle and they make me feel like part of the family. His uncle narrates his nephew's misfortunes.
So young with so many responsibilities and so little money. Talk to him. Maybe you can have some good influence on him. Inspire him.
When Tin drops me off at my hotel, I demand he take something home for his wife and children. He declines, so I press enough money into his hand to make tonight one of his better ones. He takes the cash and tells me that money isn't necessary between friends. I tell him to swing by tomorrow morning, hoping to hire him on as a guide.
I am having breakfast when a tour bus pulls over and parks in front of the café. Road-dazed foreigners totter off the bus and into the hotel across the street. The driver, a young guy, takes a cigarette break in front of the bus. Before his third drag, the police materialize from nowhere, swaggering in their drab olive uniforms and vinyl belts. The pair beelines to the bus, one whipping out a citation pad, the other swinging his nightstick in short, impatient arcs. The driver's jaw drops. He nearly swallows his cigarette, knowing that he and his tour company are going to suffer huge fines.
“This is a no-parking zone!”
barks the cop loud enough for everyone in the café to hear. There is no sign and the space is just an empty dirt lot.
“I'm sorry
,
Officers!”
the driver squeaks, smiling apologetically, placating.
“I'll move it right away.”
“Too late,”
snorts the other cop, barring the driver from the door with his nightstick.
“It'll have to be towed.”
The driver disintegrates into pure panic. They want to see his license and the papers for the vehicle, so reams of multihued permits
and authorizations exchange hands. The owner of the café, from where I am sitting, sends her son to the hotel across the street to warn the hotel owner and the tour operator. In seconds, two older welldressed men emerge, wearing big friendly smiles. They approach with hands extended, each deftly steering one cop to a different end of the bus. Divide and subdue. Seeing now that they are in the presence of money and power, the cops adopt grave, almost serene countenances. A flock of spectators watch the proceedings from a wary distance—this here the only event where onlookers aren't practically trampling on what they're watching.
I turn to the café owners.
“All this for a parking violation?”
She nods.
“Big fines.
”
“Lunch fines?”
She chuckles and looks at me with interest.
“You know the way, eh?”
I shrug.
Within minutes everything is resolved. The big men never stop smiling and the cops never crack as much as a grin. The driver takes the bus across the street into the hotel's courtyard. The big men stroll into the café, each draping an affectionate arm over his cop. The foursome take a table next to mine. The owner rushes to their elbows for the orders: espresso, Coke, beer, omelets, steaks, and four packs of Marlboros, two packs apiece for the cops. Small talk and a few American cigarettes, the ice is broken and they are chatting like old friends. Afterward, the big men show the cops into the hotel. Additional mollification required.
The café patrons, all white foreigners, observe the entire extortion with great amusement, marveling at the brazenness of the transaction.
Tin meets me at the café and pedals us down the river in his rented cyclo. The sky is overcast and the city smells wet and moldy A sprawl of one- and two-story buildings, ancient Hue seems natural in its state of eternal dreariness. Mud slicks the roads. People slop through it, paying no heed to the sludge the way they did in the heyday of Midwestern oil shantytowns. Their feet are covered with it, slimy like grease. The buildings are crumbly, block after block of moss-furred
cement and rained-out plaster. The weather wearing them out more quickly than the dwellers can repair them.
As I requested yesterday, Tin arranges for a woman to take us down the Perfume River in her canoe. I swallow hard at the sight of our vessel, a leaky tin tube, cut in half lengthwise and end-riveted to form a semblance of bow and stern. It's safe, she assures me, as they struggle to keep the canoe from tipping over while I board. I take the bow, Tin the middle, and the woman the stern. All loaded, we glide into the waterway with about four inches of freeboard. If one of us sneezes, we're all going into the river. She navigates us into the channel with the only paddle. Tin is bailing water with the vessel's sole plastic cup. I'm holding my breath.
We slide across the flat liquid face, the color of old moss, upriver to see the boat people. Around Hue, the Perfume River smells. From a distance, the riffraff of boats looks like a mess of daddy longlegs scrawling the water. The boats are uniformly slender with narrow beams and sweeping bows and sterns, a house set amidships. Most boast decent waterlines of at least thirty feet. Whole families live on these boats, eight to twelve people, with just enough room to unroll a sleeping mat. Yet they are a livelier crowd than the folks landlocked in mud-splattered shacks on stilts along the riverbanks of rich red clay. People bathe, wash, and defecate in the river. A barge crosses the water and nearly drowns us in its wake. The concrete sky begins to spit and Tin can't bail fast enough. I call it a day. Both the woman and Tin look visibly relieved.
I pay the boatwoman and Tin, tipping enough to bulge their eyes. I know Tin is trying to enroll his oldest son in school, so I give him a little extra. For your family, I insist, and Tin tells me the gift means much to him. Wet and covered in muck, I go back to the hotel for a bath. Tin and I agree tentatively to meet up around dinnertime. After cleaning up, I amble down to the market by the river to buy bags of candies, which I have come to enjoy giving to the beggar children. I bump into Tin's aunt and invite her to join me for a bowl of noodles.
“That boy Tin is so lazy. His cousin just graduated from college. His sister is a teacher and his brother has a motorbike repair business,”
she whines over
the pungent steam rising from her bowl. “
He's twenty-five already and he hasn't even begun to apply himself.”
“
I thought he was twenty-eight,”
I say. Tin told me yesterday he was twenty-eight.
“No. He's twenty-five. Not even married yet. If he waits any longer, no girl is going to want him because he won't be just old. He'll be old and poor.”
I leave Tin's aunt bitching with other patrons on their menfolk's paucity of character. I stroll along the riverfront, sightseeing, wearing the lost and wary demeanor of a jilted stranger, just another chump tourist.
Sometimes it is as though every Vietnamese is seeking a godfather, a sugar daddy, a saint. In the stark neediness of their lives, dignity doesn't ride shotgun to opportunism. But again they learned to separate both eons ago. And by this, I am not referring to the Saigon alley kids who shout in the foreigners' faces. Gimme a dollar. Gimme ten dollar. Gimme camera. Gimme sun cream. You number one. U.S. number one. Fuck you. You best. You go with my sister, you gimme U.S. dollar. You take me to America. Go home, pigs. Fuck you. Fuck you.
Vietnamese have a saying: “
A thousand years of Chinese rule, a hundred years of French subjugation, and ten years of American domination, but we survived, unified.”
Survive. That's the word. Survive at any cost.
“
What does it imply,”
Professor Khai asks me,
“about the national psyche when its national literary heroine is a prostitute?”
“Vietnam's national heroine is a prostitute?”
I am alarmed, no idea how such a thing could have escaped my attention all these years.
It is raining. We are sitting in a royal box overlooking a pond situated in the center of an Emperor's palace. Other tourists have left and the curators fall to gambling with the guards, so we have free run of the museum grounds. I sit on the throne, playing the part of the prince, Professor Khai at my feet, deep in historical discourse. The weeping sky textures the pond, painting its lily-speckled face with a matted finish. The air smells washed, fresh. If I squint through the smallest cracks of my eyes, I can almost see a ghost retinue of some
long-dead prince who sat on this very throne, his entourage, his wise men, his literati at his feet reciting poetry. That was the age when the literati and intellectuals were court ministers, politicians, noblemen, and ambassadors.
Taking great pains to fill the gaps in my education, the Professor explains that
of kieu
is a story about a prostitute named Kieu, a melodramatic tragicomic poem of 3,254 verses written by an aristocratic scholar named Nguyen Du and published two hundred years ago. Every Vietnamese has read or heard at least parts of this story taught at various levels in school. As the Professor sinks deeper into his narration, he uses big words I don't understand. I interrupt him for definitions so frequently that his initial surprise at my ignorance begins to give way to impatience.
I sit back and grin, having struck a gold mine at last with the Professor. I made his acquaintance on a street corner. He was astride his Honda motorbike, wheels for hire. He speaks English and French and once taught history at the University thirty years ago. His one-time association with Americans resulted in his name's permanent residency on the government's blacklist. He can't get a license to work as a tour guide. So for five dollars, he is giving me a tour of Hue's countryside on his Honda, lectures included.
“
It says everything about the Vietnamese, understand-no?”
says the Professor in his lilting pedantic rambling.
“She is a prostitute. The things she has done are not commendable, great deeds. But don't you see, it is the reasons why she does these things. They are selfless acts. Sacrifices. Everything is there. You must read it.”
I promise him I will.
“It is also her dignity, her sense of humor that makes her the fundamental Vietnamese heroine. Endears her to all Vietnamese. People aspire to her nobility.”
I refrain from telling him that Western scholars describe the Vietnamese as a people who view themselves as victims, punished for a crime they neither understand nor know they have committed. I think there is truth in that, but suspect there are deeper things. I believe they think they are talented but they wonder why they can't forge a lasting, fruitful peace. I think they have struggled for so long,
endured so many horrors, committed innumerable sins, which they've justified, rationalized for their survival. Perhaps, I think, they have lost themselves. Capitalism is still new to the Vietnamese. They are only beginning to discover themselves within it.
After Tin's paid-for friendship, something in me dissipates. I simply let myself flow along, not caring that I ought to seek out more Vietnamese, meet as many of them as I can, to learn all our differences and similarities. I immerse myself in the company of other tourists, and when a Vietnamese assumes that I am Japanese or Korean, I don't bother to make the correction.
In Saigon, I avoided other Western tourists, believing it would color my homecoming in shades less than true. I became lonely and infected with Vietnamese fears of traveling on the open road. In Hanoi, I thrived on the camaraderie and the adventurous spirit of other Western tourists, comfortable in my role of translator, a cultural go-between.

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