Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

by Andrew X. Pham

Grandmother closed her hands over mine and asked me quietly if I wanted to read my birth fortune. It was from the hand of the same monk, written twenty-seven years earlier. She pressed into my chest a yellowed fortune-scroll, crushed and tattered, its secret bound by an umbilical cord of red twine. I looked at this relic from a distant world, dreading its power. I said no, quit my job, and bicycled into the Mexican desert.

I had been pedaling and pushing through the forlorn land, roaming the foreign coast on disused roads and dirt tracks. When I was hungry or thirsty, I stopped at ranches and farms and begged the owners for water from their wells and tried to buy tortillas, eggs, goat cheese, and fruit. Every place gave me nourishment; men and women plucked grapefruits and tangerines from their family gardens, bagged food from their pantries, and accepted not one peso in return. Why, I asked them. Señor, they explained in the patient tone reserved for those convalescing, you are riding a bicycle, so you are poor. You are in the desert going nowhere, so you are crazy. Taking money from a poor and crazy man brings bad luck. All the extras, they confided, were because I wasn’t a gringo. A crew of Mexican ranchers said they liked me because I was a bueno hermano—good brother—a Vietnamito, and my little Vietnam had golpea big America back in’75. But I’m American, Vietnamese American, I shouted at them. They grinned—Sí, sí, Señor—and grilled me a slab of beef.

Tyle says, “So, where are you from?” “Bay Area, California.” “No. Where are you from? Originally”. I have always hated this question and resent him for asking. I hide my distaste because it is un-American. Perhaps I will lie. I often do when someone corners me. Sometimes, my prepared invention slips out before I realize it: I’m Japanese—Korean—Chinese—mixed—race Asian. No, sir, can’t speak any language but good old American English. This time, I turn the question: “Where do you think?” “Korea.” Something about him makes me dance around the truth. I chuckle, painfully aware that “I’m an American” carries little weight with him. It no doubt resonates truer in his voice. The blond giant holds me with his green eyes, making me feel small, crooked. So I reply, “We nips all look alike.” But it isn’t enough. He looks the question at me again, and, by a darkness on his face, I know I owe him. “I’m from Vietnam.” A flinch in the corner of his eye. He grunts, a sound deep from his diaphragm. Verdict passed. He turns his back to me and heaves into the cactus forest. I stand, a trespasser in his camp, hearing echoes—Chink, gook, Jap, Charlie, GO HOME, SLANT-EYES!-words

Many Vietnamese Americans “have been back.” For some of us, by returning as tourists we prove to ourselves that we are no longer Vietnamese but Vietnamese Americans. We return, with our hearts in our throats, to taunt the Communist regime, to show through our material success that we, the once pitiful exiles, are now the victors. No longer the poverty-stricken refugees clinging to fishing boats, spilling out of cargo planes onto American soil, a mess of open-mouthed terror, wide-eyed awe, hungry and howling for salvation. Time has veiled the days when America fished us out of the ocean like drowning cockroaches and fed us and clothed us—we, the onus of their tragedy. We return and, in our personal silence, we gloat at our conquerors, who now seem like obnoxious monkeys cheating over baubles, our baggage, which mean little to us. Mostly, we return because we are lost.

My father has said “Good” to me twice in my life. This time is not one of them. The first “Good” was for making Phi Beta Kappa during my senior year in Aerospace Engineering at UCLA. I showed him the glowing congratulatory letter from the national honor society, then threw it away, too poor to afford the initiation banquet and too proud to request a fee waiver. He awarded me the second “Good” for landing a cushy engineering post at a major airline. That job was doomed from the start. I graduated out of college and right into a recession. Desperately hungry for work after mailing out a hundred resumes, I hooked one interview. During the office tour, my would-be boss, a turtle-chinned, red-faced thirty-five-year-old-timer, Paul, waxed on about the company’s expansion overseas and his getting an M.B.A. in international business to keep abreast of it all. “I like you,” Paul said, walking round behind me and putting a hand on my shoulder, which I didn’t like. “I like you people. Orientals are good workers. Good students, too. Great in math, the engineering stuff.” He smiled at me, reassuring, beaming. “Oh, I think you’ll do just fine here. We won’t have any trouble at all.” When I finally resigned, I was no longer a “good Oriental.” I even left behind in my desk three files titled “Stuff Paul Rejected Because He Doesn’t Know Any Better,” “Stuff Paul Rejected Because He Didn’t Want to Jeopardize His Promotion,” and “Stuff Paul Rejected Because They Didn’t Originate from Engineer...

Kay is the final hope of our dysfunctional Vietnamese-American family. I have found myself casually examining her for the wounds we have inadvertently inflicted. It is your responsibility, Father always says to us, to set a good example for your younger siblings. I abandoned my career in favor of a dream. Tien, an exceptional student, couldn’t make up his mind about the trajectory of his education. Huy and Hien are gay. And not one of us breathed a word of Chi’s existence to Kay in all these years. She never knew she had a runaway sister. To Kay, Chi came home in a shroud of mystery and died a self-inflicted death within arm’s reach of her family, who should have seen it coming—should have prevented it with love.

Empty rooms are Mom’s way of keeping us home. Mom comes from the old world, where mothers are lifelong housewives who expect to be near their children all their lives. Senior homes, retirement communities don’t exist in their vocabulary. When her friends explained the concepts of children leaving home at eighteen and parents going into rest homes in their “golden years,” Mom’s eyes went wide with disbelief. “That is so cruel. Strange, strange country.” The last few years, I think my father, who is more culturally savvy, has been talking to her because she has started saying things to us in Vietnamese like “We’ll be all right when we retire. Your father is working a few more years so we’ll be financially secure. We’re in America; if we live with you, no girl will marry you. And no girl will let you support us. We know it’s different here.” She tries so hard I ache for her, this simple woman who takes pleasure nickeling the grocers for bargains, deals for the family. This woman who lets in every Mormon that comes by the house with pamphlets. This woman who makes egg rolls for cosmetic girls at the department store who give her free makeovers. This woman who eats cold leftovers standing in the kitchen alone because lunch in her American household is too lonely. This woman whom we’ve shortchanged.

Touring solo on a bicycle, I discover, is an act of stupidity or an act of divine belief. It is intense stretches of isolation punctuated with flashes of pure terror and indelible moments of friendship. Mostly, it is dirty work particularly suitable for the stubborn masochist. I was suckered into the adventure, the elegant simplicity of its execution, and, yes, even the glory of its agony.

Crazy Ronnie is into astrology, karma, chakras, energy lodes of the universe, and the wheel of time. She is “a minor goddess” sent to earth to even out the balance between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. I, on the other hand, she confirms, am “a technician—like a worker ant.” I ask her if she is sure. She is. Not even a minor deputy god? Nope, she assures me, no such luck.

Before I left, Huy and his Vietnamese-American lover, Sean, took me to Sean’s San Francisco flat to give me safety advice. Even in gay-friendly San Francisco, they never ventured out without a canister of pepper spray, clipping it on their belts like a pager. Sean laid out his arsenal on the coffee table and told me I could have my pick: a stun gun, a semiautomatic 9mm, a snub-nosed .38 revolver, or a .45 Dirty Harry. I said I already had a canister of pepper spray, similar to the ones that mailmen carry. In Mexico, I’d given more than one rabid dog sneezing fits. “You’re crazy, man,” Sean said, shaking his head. “Forget about it. You know how many rednecks there are between here and Seattle? You’re Asian and who knows what sort of bigots you’re going to come across. They might give you a beating for fun.” He truly believed it. For him, a gay Asian male, his America was outlined by the boundaries of San Francisco and Berkeley. He grew up in San Francisco and having Asian faces around him had become an integral part of life. Like most Vietnamese who have settled in the Bay Area or in Orange County, California, he couldn’t imagine living in the Midwest or the South, anywhere impoverished of Asian faces. No, to a minority, any white face could be a face of violence—a quiet fear we live with. Once, when my brother Tien and I were driving through Arizona, a pickup drew alongside us. The scene played out as it had countless times before, the driver and his passenger gave us the ...

And they bid me the one true farewell I have come to love: “So long, we’ll see you when we see you.”

My step-grandfather Grandpa Le was a fishsauce baron, born into a sea-heritage that dated back before the Japanese and the French occupation. He used to claim that his ancestors invented fishsauce. The whole town was built on this industry. Everyone knew how it was made and at one time most people in town, when they weren’t dragging the ocean for fish, were putting fresh fish, unwashed and ungutted, into salt barrels to ferment. While they waited on the decomposition process, all they ever talked about was fishsauce. Which fish produced the best-tasting extract? How to mix various types of fish to make a balanced bouquet. Indeed, there were many varieties of fishsauce, each suitable for a certain style of cooking. The finest batches were flavorful enough to be savored directly from the bottle. In a few weeks, a smelly black ooze seeped out the bottom of the barrel. Fisherfolk diluted and bottled this black gold and sold it all over the country. Blend masters—like Grandpa Le—guarded their secrets zealously and made fortunes. In the old days, the village folk prized bottles of fishsauce concentrate as great gifts, the equivalent of fine wine and cash.

At this, joy bled from Mom’s face. The house was her greatest treasure, their milestone in life, their monumental accomplishment. Banks didn’t make home loans. The house meant security, a departure from their difficult past. They couldn’t sell it because that would look suspicious. They had started out with nothing and now they were about to lose everything. “No.” Dad shook his head. “Let it go. The government will confiscate it. I don’t want you implicated in our escape. We won’t be back. If we return, we are as good as dead.” Dad knew if we waited till next spring, he stood a fair chance of being discovered and executed. The cops swept through the neighborhood regularly and dragged people off to labor camps. Properties were “seized” and “redistributed.” If they took Dad, they would send us to live in jungle hamlets. Mom nodded, saying over and over that he was right. She was a smart and resourceful woman who had bribed the prison guards to keep her husband alive, making sure he had the little food and medicine he needed to survive the jungle. Besides rescuing him, she had worked with her brother to find seven fishermen with a boat willing to risk the high seas with us. The crew were young men from Phan Thiet, the oldest twenty-five, the youngest seventeen. Phan Thiet was my mother’s hometown so it was the safest place to recruit, but it was also my father’s former government station, the place where he was most likely to be recognized. They had been planning for months. ...

But no Vietnamese American returns unless he has a family to visit. He pauses, eyeing me again, probably thinking I am one of those lost souls he’s heard about. America is full of young-old Vietnamese, uncentered, uncertain of their identity. The older generation calls them mat goch—lost roots.

“Is this all you have?” asks my grandaunt in a tone that makes me ashamed. I nod, coloring, because I have neither money nor gifts for them, only some traveler’s checks and camping gear, no room for gifts for fourteen people and not much money to play the good-conquering-son returning home with a cargo of treasure. The Vietnamese I know who came back brought on average three thousand dollars’ worth of gifts. Every passenger off the plane has cartloads of goodies: cameras, microwaves, computers, microscopes, tennis rackets, badminton rackets, boom boxes, clothes, soap, shampoo, facial cream, perfumes, cognac, Johnnie Walker by the case, bicycles, electric rice cookers, Walkmans, Discmans, stereo systems, hair dryers, cosmetics, books, music cassettes, CDs, train sets, Japanese geisha dolls in glass display cases, videocassettes, videocams, metal welding kits, car parts, moped parts, tools, and anything else that can be bought and fit into a shipping box. I didn’t have a single gift.

When I ask them about road conditions to Hanoi, Grandaunt launches into her litany of why I should abandon my trip. “The roads are dangerous,” she says. “The country is not safe.” “People are very poor,” Granduncle adds, in agreement. “This isn’t Japan or America. This is worse than Mexico.”He’s never been out of the country. “They’ll kill you for a bicycle,” says Viet. “I was stabbed right around the corner by two muggers. They wanted my motorcycle.” Hung shows me the scar beneath his shirt. “One thousand seven hundred kilometers on a bicycle to Hanoi! A bicycle! When your parents find out that you’re going to ride a bicycle to Hanoi, they’ll be sick with worries. Think about your parents. They didn’t bring you into this world so you can waste your life. Be considerate. Don’t do it. There’s nothing out there but jungle and bandits. You’ll die,” Grandaunt concludes with absolute certainty.

After the hour-long breakfast, we take my bike out to a major “auto shop,” a ten-by-fifteen-foot storefront where a dozen mechanics tinker with bicycles and motorbikes. The vehicles are fixed right on the curb by grease-blackened men and boys who work with shoddy hand tools. The cement is runny with oil. The bike needs a major tune-up after my one thousand miles in Japan, and I’m not up to it. The airport baggage handlers have damaged the rims beyond my ability to true them. The broken brake isn’t working properly either, no matter how much I fiddle with it. Then there is the puncture in my “puncture-proof” tire. I carry three types of repair patches and try all of them, but Saigon’s humidity foils every one. The bike guru is a shirtless little Vietnamese, a five-foot-one, silverhaired grandfather. Since he is the shop’s revered expert with the most seniority, the other mechanics defer to him the honor of working on my foreign bicycle. He spends a full five minutes marveling at my clunker, going over everything from the quick-release hubs to the grip-shifters to the cleat pedals. When he gets to work, he is amazingly fast. Somehow with a couple of wrenches, pliers, and a hot-patch press, he perfectly trues the wheel, fixes the brake, and gets the bike to purr like a kitten in twenty minutes. He seems so enamored with the bike that I suggest he give it a test ride. At first he declines, claiming it is too big for him. I insist, and he capitulates with a childlike grin and l...

Around sunset, Viet decides it would be funny to give me a tour of the city at rush hour, when the streets are legally open for trucks and every sort of traffic. Saigon is already so crowded its streets can’t handle the large trucks and commercial vehicles during the day. City ordinance requires all vehicles larger than a minivan to park in sprawling dirt lots beyond the city limits and wait until 6 p.m. before assaulting the urbanscape. Viet laughs when I ask him for a helmet. “People can’t even afford eyeglasses. Prescription glasses! And you’re talking about a helmet? A helmet costs sixty American dollars—that’s twice as much as a teacher makes a month. Nobody wears them anyway. It’s too hot here, and people think you’re scared if you wear a helmet.” With that, he guns the Kawasaki down the alley, narrowly missing the kids playing soccer with a tennis ball. The roads are so people-thick I can reach out and touch four other motorists at any moment. Viet works the horn, the brakes, and the gas constantly. The whole time, all I can say is, Oh, shit. Oh, God. Look out! to which his reply is a published fact: head injuries resulting from traffic accidents are the number-one cause of accidental deaths in Saigon. I see no helmets and extremely few eyeglasses. Nobody gives way to anybody. Everyone just angles, points, dives directly toward his destination, pretending it is an all-or-nothing gamble. People glare at one another and fight for maneuvering space. All parties are equ...

The intersections are the worst, particularly for those who need to make a left. Traffic lights are rare. Where there is one, there is never a turn signal. When Viet wants to make a turn, he simply does it, plunges in ahead of the coming traffic, hoping that his timing is right so they don’t run us over. He goes into it, blasting his horn, dodging moving obstacles as aggressively as everyone else. At the free-for-all junctions, Viet waits until enough traffic going in our direction accumulates—this never takes more than ten or fifteen seconds—and moves forward with the flow when our team inches into the intersection. With such a large contingent, the cross traffic screeches to a halt to prevent collision. But close calls and accidents—if one can call them that—are common, so Viet instinctively worms into the center of the pack to minimize our chances of being hammered on either flank. Do it the Vietnamese way, he hollers at me. Let others take the risk. Travel on their lee and let them take the hits. It is more difficult than it sounds because everyone else uses the same principles. No one wants to get hit, but there’s always a hothead who happily leads the effort.

Viet is sharp and streetwise but he prefers to be the affable bear. I like him immensely. He grills me day and night on English grammar, idiom, and slang. “How do you say breasts, women’s breasts, in English slang?” “Tits?” “No, I mean slang. Playing words. Things Americans say on the street.” “Melons, cantaloupes, knockers,” I offer. He repeats them carefully. I explain to him the subtleties behind the slang, but I’m not sure of them myself so I make it up as I go. “Well, melons and cantaloupe, that should be self-explanatory. The shape and the perfume, I guess. Knockers are these things people mount on their door. They’ve got handles that you grab and bang to let the people know that you’re at the front door. Like a doorbell.” “Ha, ha, ha. I get it! Grabbing women’s breasts so they’ll let you in. Give me another one.” “Hmm. Headlights.” “Headlights? Like on motorbikes?” “Well, everyone has a car in America. A car has a pair of headlights. Big, round, very bright.” “Ha, ha, ha!” He doubles over, clutching his belly, slapping his thighs. “That’s great! Lowbeam. Highbeam. You’re blinded! Ooooo-hooo!” He sighs with satisfaction. “That’s great! What do Americans call a butt licker?” “A brownnoser,” I tell him. “That’s like a sycophant. A brownnoser kisses his boss’s butt and his nose is brown with his boss’s shit.” This one is his favorite. He pens it on the front page of the pocket notebook he carries with his wallet. Viet is trying to solicit Western business partners and w...

I suspect I will remember my days in Saigon through an alcoholic haze. We drank when I arrived, then we drink just about every other day thereafter. One at a time, they take turns dragging me to street-corner saloons, Vietnamese equivalents of the Spanish tapas bars that serve little food dishes to accompany alcohol. We squeeze ourselves into child-sized plastic chairs and drink beer from plastic one-liter jugs and nibble on barbecued beef, steamed intestines, pan-fried frogs, and boiled peanuts. We eat goat stew and drink goat liquor, two parts rice wine mixed with one part fresh goat’s blood. Halfway through the meal, my bowels heave and I sprint to the toilet.

During the second week, Viet, Khuong, Hung, and I motorbike out to Snake Village, a good jaunt from Saigon. Their restaurant-bar of choice has thatched walls and a low ceiling made of corrugated aluminum. In the back, a fine mesh of chicken wire fences in two trees and a snake pit. A young woman is standing in one of the trees pulling poisonous snakes out of the branches by their tails. We take a coffee table with wooden stools. The waiter serves us a platter of appetizers, an array of pickled fish, fresh herbs, sliced cucumber, and vegetables. Khuong seems irritated. “Why don’t you eat the vegetables? They’re washed.” “Viet-kieu’s fickleness causes a lot of problems. Refusing to eat the same food as your hosts makes them think that you think you’re too good for them. Their food is filthy, unfit for you,” Hung carols to me, joking, but I get his drift. “Well, I’ve eaten everything you’ve handed me and I’ve got the runs twice in two weeks,” I reply in mock reproach. “I can’t go anywhere without looking for the toilet, thanks to you guys. Isn’t that enough?” They laugh, mollified. The waiter arrives with warm beer, pours it into plastic mugs, and drops chunks of ice into them. I s...

That is how Vietnamese men bond. We only talk when we drink. Two nights a week, the three brothers and I drink at home on the floor, a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the center of our circle like a campfire. Viet sends his nephew Nghia down the alley to bang on the door of a neighbor who sells dried fish and squid. Nghia’s mother roasts the fish over coals and serves it to us with plates of pickles and chili paste. The women and children always keep clear of the men when we drink. Viet is fond of declaring loud enough for everyone to hear, “We are dealing in men’s business. Let us be.” Viet, the oldest male present, ceremoniously starts us off. He pours himself a shot, tosses it back, harrumphs, grins, pours another shot into the same glass, and passes it clockwise. While the next comrade regards his shot of whiskey, Viet gnaws on bits of smoked fish. The four of us do the rounds, drink the shot, pour another, pass it on, eat a piece of fish, over and over until Johnnie is gone. As long as the booze flows, we are free to talk about anything we want. Free to confide our hopes and fears. We chase it all down with a couple of beers, then disband, each to his own bed to sleep it off. T...

I believe there are only a handful of men like Son in the world. Likable men who embrace vices in such measure and style that it is difficult to hate them. Son is a womanizer, a photographer, a pimp, a Taoist, a poet, a Buddhist, a drunk, a Catholic, a polygamist, a philosopher—a dreamer. One of the two living Vietnamese Green Berets and a survivor of four plane crashes, he believes he is blessed, living a roguish life at top volume like a child, almost innocent by amorality. Together, Hung and Son show me every vice, depravity. They seek generously to share their world with me, never realizing that their diverting marvels are my wounding horrors.

They knew pain and they knew joy and all the selflessness that was required to take a person from that one place to the other.

Vietnam is a country of food, a country of skinny people obsessed with eating.

Solely on his salutation, I know we will be friends. This is easy because the Vietnamese form of address allows two people to assess each other and extend overtures of friendship. It has several tiers, each indicating the nature of acquaintance (informal, formal, business, friends, intimate) as well as the hierarchy. Just by pronouns used, one can discern the type of relationship between two people. For instance, if Tam refers to himself as toi (I) and calls me anh (big brother, or, in this context, you), then the relationship is formal and equal, with neither having the upper hand despite age; however, if Tam is in fact younger than me, then unless there is something else—social, economic status—to normalize the age difference, Tam is being disrespectful by not referring to himself as em (little brother). And if I were, say, fifteen years older than he, Tam should use chu (uncle) and chau (nephew). There are many forms, including regional variations. Tam calls me ban: friend. I like him instantly.

Cua ve are taxi dancers / hospitality girls. The price of a dance with them is a drink. A man goes to the bar and buys two drinks, one for himself and one for the woman of his choice. The bartender brings the woman the drink, usually a diluted orange juice or colored water, and directs her to the man who bought the drink. A man who doesn’t want to dance can take the woman back to his table for a chat and, usually, light fondling.

Busing in Vietnam is a freewheeling enterprise, somewhat akin to the stagecoaches of the old American West. Privately owned buses, driven by the owners and their relatives, go bumping from town to town hailing freight, livestock, and produce and picking up riders standing on the side of the road like hitchhikers. A stripped-down traveling show, they roar along, working every minute, shooting from village to village, laughing and cajoling a livelihood from the highway boredom. They haul on a skeleton crew of four—any more and there are too many mouths to feed, any less and they’re liable to be cheated by their customers. The driver is always and only the driver, keeping his eyes on the road and muttering prayers to the Buddha mounted on the dashboard. There couldn’t be a more serious lot of drivers in the world. These guys deal in life and death daily, their whole family riding on their performance, the bus their vehicle, the whole family’s savings and possibly their coffin on wheels. In my brief travels here, I’ve seen several dead buses, smashed, rolled belly-up, and disemboweled by salvagers.

They are a smooth crew, the four of them: the driver, the owner, the mechanic, and the bagman. The owner collects the cash and handles all financial matters, from buying petrol to bribing cops. The mechanic doubles as a relief driver and a baggage handler. The bagman, their barker, leans out the open door when the bus is under way and shouts fares-destinations to prospective passengers standing on the side of the road. Most crew are family members or relatives. Fares are standard. Buses equipped with air-conditioning, televisions, or karaoke machines charge about twenty percent more.

Cops usually collect anywhere from five to thirty percent of the bus’s net income.

The dealer’s compatriot works the aisle, shaking people awake, dangling his string of pills in their faces. There are a few takers. After all, a string of ten pills costs less than a bowl of noodles, about as cheap as medicine gets. The tirade of medicinal benefits keeps getting longer. Then I hear the real breakthrough: It cures cancer, all cancers. More buyers. A fair quarter of the passengers have coughed up cash for the miracle medicine, but not enough to please the pair. They go on the aggressive, publicly interrogating passengers individually to see why each failed to jump on this spectacular one-time offer. Thirty minutes into the intimidation program, they have extricated money from three-quarters of the passengers. The peasant woman next to me explains in my ear that the pair are part of large gangs that prey on buses throughout southern Vietnam. If the bus owners don’t let them aboard, they’ll slash the bus tires. Buses have been known to be put to the torch by gangsters. She has seen them slash a girl’s face. Madame acts as though the snake-oil salesmen aren’t raping her passengers. Driver concentrates on the road. Bagman and Mechanic sit dejectedly on crates, putting up with the salesmen without a word.

Four hours out, Bagman licks his chops and bellows, “Bridge stop,” which in Vietnamese means rest-room break.

I swing onto a hammock next to Driver, who peeks at me from beneath his arm, apparently feigning a nap. “What’s it like in japan?” he whispers without shifting his reposed position, keeping up the charade for the benefit of his passengers. I feel funny telling a traveling man about traveling, and, in fact, telling a second party about the culture of a third party, a little like snitching, gossiping.

It was summer so I said I’d fancy a slushy margarita. Frank dug into his high-draped white trousers, pulled out a fiver, then stabbed me with it saying, “Drink one on your trip for me.” I accepted his money, drank a margarita to Frank twenty miles down the road, then fell flat on my ass because in my dehydration, the tequila lambadaed straight to my head.

Bagman and Mechanic hang out the doors and scoop up more passengers. They make a game of bagging people on the fly. One little guy, shouldering a heavy bag, flip-flops frantically after the bus like a threelegged dog. Bagman and Mechanic reach down and monkey-yank the man aboard without losing their cigarettes. The poor guy is huffing open-mouthed with either terror or exhaustion, but then he suddenly grins.

He returns the courtesy and we perch together, looking out of our rattling cage at naked kids playing in the Mekong tributaries, the color of Dijon mustard. Since Saigon, the land has been a hundred and fifty miles of rustic farms and thatched huts. Brown mud and clayish red earth peek through like stitching in the mat of intense, lush green, almost violent, a hundred shades of green. In the distant rice paddies, plodding water buffalo are moving rocks; white ducks drift like patches of snow. But it is hot and humid and the smell of the land is thick in the air. From certain angles, it is a testament to coffee-table books.

In the rural south, bicycle rickshaws are more practical. Unlike big-city cyclos designed for short distances, say, under five miles at a snail’s pace, the country bicycle rickshaw easily belts out ten miles a haul over unimproved roads.

I grew up here. A village up-River.” “Up the Mekong River?” “Uh, yes.” He looks puzzled as though there exists no other river in the world. Like everyone I meet who lives or makes a living on the Mekong River, he refers to it the way peasants refer to Saigon as the City.

I have heard this all before. Everyone has a plan for getting rich off foreigners. And as one who is privy to both worlds, I am perceived as a gold mine of free advice. I am used to entrepreneurs of every creed ribbing me: What the heck, Brother, they say, spill the beans. Let us in on the secret so we can roll in the dough. I have been propositioned many times, there is no graceful way to back down. He is smiling the conspirator’s grin. I wince and grab my stomach, doubling over, grunting. He jumps to his feet. “What’s wrong? Stomachache? Is it the food?” “Maybe. Maybe it’s something I ate on the bus,” I moan, lying.

The greatest war tunnel in the history of man, Cu Chi was over 260 kilometers of tunnels, traps, barracks, ammunition dumps, and military headquarters, all designed for the final assault on Saigon. Now it is a major tourist attraction and a venue for government propaganda. Tourists, two-thirds foreigners, one-third Vietnamese, come by the busloads. The staff are soldiers and civilians, some dressed in black pajamas and handwoven scarves, uniforms of Viet Cong guerrillas. We were grouped with other Vietnamese visitors seated in a large gazebo to watch a war video about American atrocities spiced with a hefty dose of commentary on the evil of Western capitalism. A young soldier led us into a maze of trails twisting back and forth through the jungle. Great bomb-gouged pits, now weeded with vegetation, gaped like giant satellite dishes, testimonies of unsuccessful U.S. attempts to destroy the tunnels. He showed us invisible trapdoors, tiger pits for men, and grenade-rigged manholes. We shimmied down ladders into caverns, hand-dug in secrecy one scoop of earth at a time. These once served as the headquarters of the Cu Chi operation. Although some areas had been enlarged to accommodate foreign tourists, the chambers were anything but spacious. Most were barely five feet ten inches in height, the tunnels three feet tall. The air was hot and wet, full of the mustiness of packed earth. It was difficult to take a lungful. It had to be breathed in sips. In some sections, the subterra...

After half an hour tunneling on our hands and knees, we escaped to the surface, gasping. Another group headed down. A well-fed British woman in her fifties was desperately wriggling into the opening. Her male companion and a Vietnamese tour guide struggled to help her into the passage. One tried to keep the woman from getting stuck, the other tried to prevent her from falling through. Standing next to us, two Vietnamese soldiers watched with amazement plain on their faces. They were both about five feet tall and a hundred pounds—roughly the size of the Vietnamese Rat People who built the Cu Chi Tunnels. “How do Westerners get so fat?” one soldier asked another. After due reflection, the man replied, “Eggs and butter.” His companion nodded in deep agreement, both of them mentally calculating—the wealth—how many dozen eggs and pounds of butter it took to amass a three-hundred-pound body.

We trade addresses, but being folks of the road, they know as well as I do that it is unlikely that we will ever cross paths again. So I teach them the truest farewell I know, the one I received from Tom and Patty when I left Portland, Oregon: “So long, I’ll see you when I see you.”

I take a Tuk-tuk—the cheapest transportation available—into Rach Gia some seven miles away. The vehicle looks like an army truck shrunk to clown size. It has the footprint of a Volkswagen Beetle and a tiny two-stroke engine hardly larger than that of a lawn mower. I cram into the toy vehicle with fourteen other people, including the driver and his sidekick, and one duck.

During the night, it snowed a thin layer. Dad rose at his usual 5 a.m., made his lunch of ham and cheese on white—he preferred rice but wanted to fit in at work—and went to his janitorial job. I found his small, black footsteps mincing over fresh snow in the wintry stillness. I felt very sorry for him. He was so utterly alone in a foreign land, poor with the weight of the entire family to bear. There was no wake here for him to make his peace with Grandpa. No brother, sister, or friend to partake of his grief. For Dad, life in America wasn’t easy. In Vietnam, he was a teacher and an officer with two thousand men under his command. In Shreveport, he was a janitor in an industrial plant. It was physically demanding. His back was killing him. He’d injured it in the labor camp. And for Mom, America was a lonely, scary place. After she delivered Kay, Mom rarely left the house. She didn’t know anyone and she didn’t speak a word of English. The supermarket used to be her favorite destination. Dad got mad at her because she could never make up her mind. The choices were stupefying. After they stripsearched her for sampling a grape at the supermarket, she did her shopping only once a week, making Dad drive her to a different grocery store across town every Saturday.

I was confused about the whole religion argument. I asked Auntie Dung why Americans go either up or down when they die, but Vietnamese go in a circle. We go up to the sky and stay there awhile—like Grandpa Pham—to watch over our children, then come back down again for another go on earth. Auntie said you have to believe in one or the other, not both. I said, Huh? But what about this sin thing? Now that we’re Christians, can we really sin and all we have to do is pray for forgiveness and we’re forgiven, just like that? Over and over? But if we were just Vietnamese, Mom said we collect our sins like stones in a bucket to be counted when we come full turn on earth again. Auntie said you have to pick one or the other, not both. I said I hope my bucket doesn’t get too full because I don’t want to be reincarnated as a pig and end up skewered on a spit.

I am the tallest one present, my skin the palest. My wire-rimmed eyeglasses make me look foreign. Worse, I have a closely cropped crew cut. My hair is straight and spiky. Vietnamese call it “nail hair,” a style commonly seen on Korean expatriates working in Vietnam.

My mother said that hitting a person when he is eating was the cruelest, most uncivilized thing anyone could do. And that if you caused a person to cry into his rice—souping rice with tears, she said—you would be cursed with the bitterness he swallowed.

Behind the dunes where the road ends is the most forlorn café I’ve ever seen. There is no structure save a couple of strings of lights and laundry lines. The sand, speckled with bits of ocean-splintered wood, is strewn with rusted lawn chairs, a few plastic tables, and six tattered sun umbrellas. The proprietor, a nervous Vietnamese man named Han, serves three Brits warm beers. I lean my bike against a tree and ask the man for permission to spend the night on one of his hammocks under the stars. He says that he’d welcome any company to help him guard the café against burglars. The Brits tell me, in their polite British way, that they think I am insane and leave in a car with their tour guide and driver.

With a couple of hundred dollars in his pocket, the only footing Dad could afford was in south San Jose, smack in a den of poverty, alcoholism, drugs, and domestic violence—a street where the cops came by daily, so regularly that the residents had a running joke: If you can’t find cops at Winchell’s Doughnuts, you’ll find them on Locke Drive.