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

by Andrew X. Pham

While we boys reveled in the family’s poverty, Chi was largely confined to the house for chores and changing Kay’s diapers. With the family on welfare, Dad, a worn-out man in his mid-forties with eight mouths to feed, studied eighteen hours a day, seven days a week for his Associate of Arts degree in computer programming, a two-year program which he was trying to cram into nine months. The migraine headaches and the malaria chills he picked up during his time in the Viet Cong prison plagued him. He merely clenched his jaws and chiseled away at the books. Mom, who hardly spoke any English, spread out a vinyl mat in the living room, put a swivel office chair in the middle, brought out the dresser with the mounted mirror, and was in business. She cut hair for the neighborhood children and permed fancy heads of the local ladies, many of whom were also in the dire strait of public assistance. Mom got the idea from looking around the neighborhood. In the suburban slum of Locke Drive, hustling on the sidelines of welfare was serious business. Saving for the American dream was the immigrant’s religion. The Lees, two doors down from us, ran a convenience store out of their one-car garage. The driveway of the Martinez house across the street hummed with the racket of their after-hours auto-repair business. Recent arrivals from Pueblo, Mexico, the Martinezes were in cahoots with the Lious, a Hong Kong Chinese family up the street, who turned their lawn into a used-car lot. Mrs. Nguye...