Catfish and Mandala (34 page)

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Authors: Andrew X. Pham

BOOK: Catfish and Mandala
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A group of us meet at the DMZ Bar to party. Most of them either have just returned from touring the De-Militarized Zone or are booked for the next day's tour. Hue is a major destination for many Vietnam vets because of the DMZ. Even those who weren't stationed there come to see it. It also holds some significance for the families of Americans who have lost fathers, brothers, and sons here.
During the evening, I meet Cao, one of the DMZ tour guides.
“
It is very sad. I see them come here,”
Cao says, shaking his head.
“They get very emotional. They cry. Sometimes they just walk around as though they are lost. Lost their soul, you know. I feel very sorry for them. Maybe they aren't as tough as we are. They are big and strong but they have soft hearts.”
“Do you see many Viet-kieu taking the DMZ tour?”
“Very, very few. It's more for the Westerners.”
“Why do you think Vietnamese soldiers can forget more easily than American soldiers?”
He pulls a half-grin. It is a question he must have contemplated many times. “
We live here. They don't. It's like, say, you and me falling in
love with the same girl. We both had good and bad times courting her, maybe she hurt us both. I win and marry her. You go home to your country far away. After twenty years, all you have of her are memories, both the good and the bad. Me, I live with her for twenty years. I see her at her best and at her worse. We make peace with each other. We build our lives, have children, and make new history together. Twenty years and you have only memories. It is not the forgetting but the new history with the girl that is the difference between you and me.”
After working the tour for nearly two years, Cao seems to have developed great empathy for aging American veterans on pilgrimages for inner peace. He resents the script the government forces him to read on the tour. It is too harsh against Americans, he says. The war is over, there is no need to mock. He wants to know about Vietnam veterans in America, so I tell him about Tyle and Big Jake.
Big Jake and I crossed paths in a coffee shop along the California coast, near Eureka. I had pulled into a café for breakfast, waiting out a storm. He came in, poured his pockets into his hand, and counted out a cup of coffee in a manner that made me think that he was either very frugal or extremely poor. The harried waitress said, “How you doin' today, Big Jake?” He touched the bill of his weathered baseball cap the way they did in the old days, saying, “Sue,” the corners of his mouth cracking behind the graying beard, showing what might have passed for a friendly grin in this dying lumber town. Beneath the counter, she had saved him a piece of cherry pie, explaining that they couldn't sell it anyway. And looked the other way as he secreted a dollop of something from a paper bag into his coffee.
He straddled the stool next to me. Two loners starved for conversation, we started to talk, gruffly at first. Crappy weather, ain't it? Yeah, the Old Man's pissing a barrel today! But as always with Vietnam vets, he asks me where I was from
originally
.
“I tell you, what we did to your people was a tragedy. A fucking disaster. I'm too fucked up now to say whether we should have gone in there in the first place. I just wish I didn't.” He was still wrangling with himself about America and its fight against the spread of Communism.
Big Jake had college aspirations before Vietnam. Now he pined for the occasional salvaging jobs, looking forward to heaving his six-footfour frame of two hundred fifty pounds up and down torched mountains, toting a chain saw among widow makers. “I'm not half as strong as I used to be and some of these young guys worry about having me along.” When he wasn't working, he wrote. It gave him great pleasure. It was cathartic.
“No, I don't hate you. I always figured you people hated me more. We went into your house and tried to do our good deed. You see, if we'd succeeded, we would have gotten all the glory. And I suppose, since we failed, we gotta take the blame as well. It's only right.
“What I hate is this goddamned country, all the fucking politicians and the wishy-washy conservatives. I'm like the guy that was sent over to a stranger's house to sort it out, you know? I'm in the house settling shit that should have been between brothers. I come back, and my family takes off. They hate me. I ain't nobody. Still can't get a decent job and I'm all fucked up in the head. I picked up some disease over there and the fucking bureaucrats want me to fill out forms to prove that what I did for them made me sick. Fuck. This world is fucked up.”
He reeled away toward the door, mumbling to himself. I, the yellow-skinned devil, had chased him from his half-eaten pie. Then he swerved back around, his hand extended to me: “Good luck.”
Fallen-Leaves
An was four. Sitting in a cave of sheets. Cowboys and Indians.
The great house of concrete floor, plywood walls, and tin roof was no place for a lone boy among strange adults.
He had no friends. He carried a cricket in a matchbox in his pocket.
A plastic six-shooter in hand, he was hiding from red-Indians. The cave was a big table with a thin mattress on top, too high for him to climb. A white cotton sheet draped over the sides, coming almost to the ground. He was sitting on the floor. The plywood air was hot, the concrete cool.
A woman came into the room. He could only see her feet, her red high heels, but he recognized her voice. A man came in after her. Big, black soldier boots, dark-green pants. They were laughing, speaking a language An did not understand. They closed the door. He was trapped, in trouble because he knew he wasn't supposed to be in this room.
The boots stood close to the high heels, woman giggling, man laughing roughly. Wet mouth sounds. Perfume. Clothes going boneless to the floor. Bare feet stepping on each other. Skinny woman legs. Blond hair man legs. Giggling.
An knew this was bad—Dad would beat him. He was told not to come here.
They got on top of the table and the world began to rock and creak and the white sheet fluttered and they made noise and the table shuddered and An was scared and everything was moving and it was very loud.
Gaping-Fish
I leave Hue with some trepidation for the day's ride. Every Vietnamese I'd ever talked to made such a huge deal of Hai Van Pass that by the time I get there it is anticlimactic. It is all jungle out there, they said, nothing to see. Trees and more trees—a bandit behind every bush. Many people died there. Watch out for snipers. You might not make it up in one day. Just hitch a ride on a bus.
I come to the foothills around noon and lunch at a riverside café. A shantytown has sprung up to cater to the bus traffic going over the pass. The sky is overcast and the air is humid. At the foot of the climb, a bicyclist is pissing on the shoulder of the road, holding himself with one hand and giving me the thumbs up with the other: Okay! Okay! I click into first gear and granny up the mountain. From half a mile up, the sweep of the bay is stunning. No time to rest, I snap a picture and continue upward. The road scales the cliff above the sea. I can't see much ahead. A scrim of fog melting into the steep green slopes hides anything beyond thirty yards. I have a sensation of climbing toward heaven. The breeze is sweet. It is uncannily quiet save for the sporadic bus traffic and the surf huffing far below. For the first time since leaving Hanoi, I go for five minutes at a time without seeing a soul. I am the only cyclist. I stop on the side of the road to have a cup
of tea with a group of workers who paint concrete blocks, petite retaining walls that could only prevent motorbikes, not buses, from going over the cliffs. I am looking everywhere: There are no bandits unless the wood gatherers and the family tending a way station moonlight as outlaws. The vista is lush, grand, reminding me of the Northern California coast. With all the horror stories hounding me, I top the mountain in about an hour. A couple of cafés cling to the rocky peak along with a few abandoned munitions bunkers. Two dozen children selling postcards, candies, and beer lie in ambush. The sun washes the other side of the mountain range. Gentle hills undulate away to the hem of the sky. A large lake glimmers far inland. Warm sun on my back, I plow down the mountain, racing buses, passing them, enjoying great shouts and cheers from the passengers.
In the late afternoon, I take a small fork toward the ocean, heading out to an ancient town called Hoi An. Around a bend, a crowd gathers over a woman who has fainted on her back in the middle of the dirt road. The men sacking rice in a milling barn nearby come out to gawk. I linger, but being an outsider, I don't want to intervene. They can't shake her awake so they carry her to the side of the road out of traffic. Everyone is talking and no one appears particularly concerned, although some obviously know her. A man explains that she lives in a small hamlet six miles away and has been looking for work and begging at the market. She was on her way home when she fainted. As the woman comes to, someone floats an idea that one of the young men with motorbikes take her home. They refuse, saying it is too far. The woman attempts to stand up and passes out again. The sun is going down and no one is helping her up. I approach the oldest man present, a senior miller. I hand him some money and ask him to hire a motorbike driver to take her home and buy her some rice and medicine. Instantly, several young men step forward saying they are for hire. A merchant woman returning from market offers to sell her food at a discount.
It is twilight when I get lodging in Hoi An. I dump my gear, shower, and strike out for dinner. Picking a restaurant is no easy task in a city famous for its food. Closer to the riverfront, the houses stand true and strong, well-preserved specimens of antiquity, dating to well
over a century and looking like a “spaghetti Eastern” Hong Kong movie set. Weather-stained and aged black, the great beams and wooden awnings of these humble structures were framed together without metal fasteners by long-dead master craftsmen. Row after row of carefully kept homes line the newly paved road like dignified old poets. The inhabitants seem more gentle and happy than in any other Vietnamese town I've yet seen. Just about every house has set up shop selling something, but the air of competition pervasive elsewhere is absent here.
I sniff my way into a restaurant that wafts wonderful, seductive aromas. I take a table next to a lone diner, a German man. As solo travelers often do, we start with a nod, a grin and wind up sharing a table just to talk. Dressed in pressed khaki, expedition grade, he has the looks of a corporate gentleman on safari: grayed hair conservatively but impeccably trimmed; large, soft, pink hands; shrewd, appraising eyes, hazel-gray; substantial girth that suggests good living. He is a wealthy consultant and published writer on corporate management, a lively retiree who is globe-trotting to compile a list of must-see wonders. His local destinations are the Cham ruins not far from town. We gripe about the business ethics of Vietnamese over a seven-course dinner. Foreign companies are required to have Vietnamese partners to do business in Vietnam. The combination of bureaucratic red tape and corruption kills most enterprises within a year. Many small companies find themselves swindled by their own Vietnamese business partners. One foreign businessman I met in Saigon estimated that besides the big conglomerates, nine out of ten joint ventures—not one out of three according to the official government figures—collapse or fail to meet business projections within three years.
As we polish off the meal with fruit tart, flan, and coffee, our twenty-five-year-old chef joins us. He tries to convince us to return, promising exotic creations worthy of our distinguished palates. The local cuisine, of which he is a recognized practitioner, is a strange mix of French, Chinese, and Vietnamese.
“Please, you must come back and try my specialty—Gaping Fish,”
he bubbles, with barely enough patience for me to translate to my companion, the German epicure.
“It is a dish I learned from a great Chinese
chef when I went to Canton to study. I can make it with any sauce you want, garlic-lemon-butter, French tomato and mushrooms, or Chinese sweet-andsour. Anything.”
The epicure suggests that I inquire what kind of animal is a gaping fish.
Our chef claps his hands grandly like a magician:
“Any fish you want!”
“
So, it's a recipe?”
I ask.
“Yes! Big secret. You see, it's very hard to make. First, I must tell the fisherman that I need the fish alive so he'll keep it in a bucket for me. I take two bamboo sticks that I cut myself. They must be the right thickness and length,”
he explains, holding his hands eight inches apart.
“I stick them into the fish's mouth, piercing its brain just so. This paralyzes the fish. It is alive but it cannot move. I don't gut it. I heat up oil just right. put fish in hot oil, vertically so that the head is not in the oil. If the head gets in the oil, the fish dies right away. The fish is paralyzed so it doesn't flip around and splash oil. I don't want to get burned,”
he adds, grinning.
I motion for him to slow down so I can translate. He repeats the sequence again for my benefit, grabbing my arm, reminding me to interpret it correctly The German epicure looks like he's holding down a hiccup:
Echt? Nein! Wirklich?
“
I cook fish just right. If the oil is too hot, the fish dies too soon. If the oil is not hot enough, not all the meat will be cooked,”
our chef plows on, mistaking the German's gasps for amazement.
“That's the real hard part. You must know when that is. You must be able to tell if it is about to die. You don't want it to die. Some species of fish are tougher than others, and every fish is different. You must take everything into consideration: How big? When was it caught? Young fish or old fish?”
“Really? But how can you tell when it's about to die?”
I ask, trying not to let my macabre curiosity show. “
It'
s not flopping around. It's probably not breathing either, once you've put it in the oil.”
“Ah-ha!”
he exclaims, poking himself in the eyes.
“You watch the eyes!”
The epicure and I look at each other, speechless.
Our brilliant chef pauses for effect, one hand poised, a conductor about to plunge into the grand finale.
“I put it on a plate covered with
fresh lettuce, pour the sauce of your choice on top.” He pantomimes the act. “Bring it to your table myself. Then I take the bamboo sticks out. And if the fish doesn't gape,”—he mouths the gaping part, making
O's
with his lips—“if it's dead, you don't pay. Free. On the house. I guarantee you that as you eat the cooked flesh of the fish, it is still alive! Alive and gaping!”
The epicure's eyes balloon. He's about to hurl all seven courses back onto the table. The chef takes this as an incredulous but interested look, and begins to elaborate on which organs of the fish will be cooked and edible. With a little luck, there might even be a tasty sack of eggs. I clam up. The German crowbars himself out of his seat and declares the evening's revelry at an end. I tell him I might see him out at the Cham ruins tomorrow A group of young backpackers are sweeping down the street looking for a pub. I wave hello and they invite me along. There are eight of us, but within minutes we double in number. Most of us have seen one another around in other cities. Vietnam is a small country. Tourists keep meeting up with friends they've made along the way. We randomly pick a watering hole and drink all night. The lucky owner is beside himself with joy.
In the morning, I rent a motorbike and ride out thirty miles to My Son to look at the Cham ruins. Six of last night's party join me for the trip. When we get to the village, we immediately discover that a gang of brutes has a vise grip on the tourist trade. They say we are required to pay hefty parking charges and a “foreigners” admission price. We must also hire their tour guide. Fees paid, we are driven by a group of motorbike taxis half a mile to a refreshment concession stand where the drivers dump us and instruct us to purchase overpriced sodas. The vendors take me for a Japanese, so I eavesdrop on them and find out that the gate to the Cham ruins is a hundred yards down the road. I lead the whole group to the gate. Our three “tour guides” follow sheepishly. At the entrance, a gatekeeper tries to extort more from each person.
I find my German epicure sitting on weeded-over stones. He grimaces, greatly vexed by his tour guides. He had paid them a hundred dollars to rent him a car. They took his money, told him at the last minute that the car had broken down, motored him out here on the back of a motorbike. “A worthless pile of brick surrounded by
extortionists. The Cham ruins in Thailand are a thousand times better,” my German friend grumbles as he stomps off to find his driver for the bumpy hour ride back to town. Our own tour guide doesn't speak more than a dozen words of English. He reads from a notebook every time we come to the remnants of a building. His thick accent is impossible to understand. We split up and wander off on our own. There isn't much left on the two-acre lot, just a few tombs with walls a yard thick to commemorate a historical period spanning a thousand years.
As we leave, we cross another group of tourists coming in, the last group for the day. The gatekeepers are giving them an extraordinarily hard time. A couple of them think it grossly unfair to pay to bring in their cameras even though they promised not to take any pictures. The gatekeepers demand that the photo equipment, in total worth several thousand dollars, must be left at the gate with them. The tourists balk at this suspicious scenario. Six of them, mostly college students, are sitting on the ground eating their sandwiches because the guards demanded fees for food carried past the gate. One Italian girl broke down sobbing at the harassment. I intervene without success. When our group heads back, we take the Italian girl with us. After the drivers drop us back at the diner where we had left our rented motorbikes, they demand tips—this in a country where tipping is an unheard-of notion.
I meet up with Carolyn, an Australian friend I made in Hue. We shack up in the same dormitory and spend a couple of days together touring the town. I rent a 100cc Russian Minsk and roar off with her on the backseat. We zoom around the countryside, trying to get lost, watching peasants work, me serving as her translator. They think we are married. I like touring with Carolyn because she is so openly enamored of the people, choosing to overlook their foibles much more readily than I do. In her company, I like the country more. We go to the beach every day to hang out with the flock of children selling fruit and sodas. They infest the beach like sand fleas and descend in a selling frenzy on every visitor except us, whom they count as friends.
“Vietnamese are so sweet. This country is so rustic. So beautiful,” Carolyn sighs, sunbathing on one of Vietnam's most pristine beaches, bemoaning the fact that the country is changing so fast.
I tell her I think most of Vietnam looks in pretty bad shape, like every Third World country.
She disagrees. “We should help them preserve their culture.”
“We don't preserve our own culture. We can't. It is a changing thing.”
“It's natural to want to preserve beautiful things. I think Vietnam is beautiful.”
“Perhaps,” I say, “that's because your images are not wearing their rags.”

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