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...

Remember, Dad said, behind every company CEO is a gang of janitors and a hive of worker bees. Don’t ever think America is yours. It isn’t.

Her aunt’s family has disappeared into the States. Their letters had arrived while they were in Thailand, but once they made it to California, nothing was heard from them. It has been almost a decade. What happened, she asks me over and over. It is too common, Viet-kieu severing ties with relatives in Vietnam. No matter what I say, it is hard for them to understand why relatives are so unwilling to help those left behind. How can people refuse to help when they are living in a country where a teenager can earn more money in a day than a Vietnamese teacher earns in a month?

When the train draws closer to Mai’s village, she looks out the window at the rice fields and the huts squatting on the mud flats. “Do you really think it’s beautiful?” she asks me, taking another hard look at the countryside, trying to fathom what is beautiful about poverty. I reassure her that it is beautiful in its own way. American cities, I confide, are not too attractive. Lots of steel, glass, and concrete. Concrete everywhere. You have to go to a park to see dirt. She giggles into her palm. “How funny! Americans don’t like concrete. We love it. It’s special. It’s great for floors. We don’t have it, but my aunt does. Her sons bought her a concrete floor for her house. Concrete floors are very cool in the summer. Very nice for taking naps. In the rainy season, concrete floors are very clean, not like our dirt floor. Very easy to clean.” I have taken concrete for granted.

Suddenly, a barrage of rocks showers the train. One stone strikes the cabin wall near my head and bounces into the passage. More follow. I duck beneath the window and cover my head with my hands. Scarface finds me crouching on the floor and laughs. “The cow herders are pissed. Last week we hit one of their cattle that got onto the track. The herder wasn’t around so we hacked off enough beef to last us all the way up to Hanoi.”

“The French built it to rape Vietnam. The Americans bombed it to divide Vietnam. We rebuilt it to reunify Vietnam!”Bugsy declares, and chops the air with his hand. It sounds suspiciously like a government slogan. I decide not to tell him that he’s got it all mixed up. It was the Americans who tried to maintain the tracks and the North Vietnamese who were adept at bombing and hijacking trains. Maybe he is thinking about the national highway or the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Morning of my second day, Redeyes summons me into his cabin, where the inner sanctum of the caboose is holding court and presiding over bottles of rice wine. Redeyes invites me to drink with them and, seeing my hesitation, he declares, “We are all friends here. Our lives are simple. We don’t have much but we are friends. And friends drink and eat together. Are we your friends?” He need not say more. They are still debating whether to take me all the way to Hanoi and risk running afoul of the cops at the inspection station north of Hue. I need their friendship more than they need my money. At thirty cents a liter of rice wine, friendship goes a long way. Scarface, Bugsy, Redeyes, Shyboy, VC, Dealer, and I cement our friendship with murky rice wine that tastes like a mixture of kerosene, vinegar, sugar, and bad sake. We waltz the bottle and the single shot glass around the table. Each man drinks, grimaces, pours another shot into the glass, hands it to the guy on his left, then eats something from the dishes on the table. If someone has something fatally contagious, we are all history.

I fumble with my pockets, pretending to look for my papers. If I show my visa and passport photocopy, VC’s lie about my being his cousin is exposed. If I don’t, this cop can arrest me. All Vietnamese are required to carry a photo ID and travel documents at all times. Law enforcement takes this rule seriously.

My room, a deluxe suite, has “hot showers” provided by an electric heating tank, which takes half an hour to make three gallons of lukewarm water. It hangs from the ceiling like a water reservoir of an old-fashioned toilet with a long pull cord for flushing. Operating instructions are in Arabic.

Com-phon is the Northern style of “commoner’s cafeteria.” Down South, it is called com-dia, rice plates served with entrees on the side or “poured” over steamed rice. Here, a buffet table—a dozen plastic basins of food, some steaming, some cold—adorns the front entrance, announcing the day’s bill of fare to the dusty street. A man fans away the flies with a piece of cardboard. I point out my dinner to him: bitter squash stuffed with ground pork and mushrooms, a small pan-fried trout, melon soup, a piece of fried soybean cake filled with eggplant. He notes my order on a pad, nods me inside, and scoops out servings onto little saucers.

I nearly jump as a furry body brushes my leg—a small dog patrolling the ground for scraps. I’d heard these cat-sized dogs with the pointy muzzles are excellent mousers.

After a couple of miles, I see a woman sitting on the side of the road, between her legs a tray of brightly colored rice cakes, the size and shape of charcoal briquettes—I know what they are but have forgotten the name. For practice, I haggle with her awhile and at last, as I make the prospective buyer’s exit, she calls me back and we agree on a price—thirty cents—though she seems fairly bitter about it: “You Viet-kieu are even stingier than poor students. Even they pay me fifty cents.” I grin at her, but I’m thinking: Darn, I just want one of those cakes to nibble for old time’s sake. Fifty cents she wanted. Heck, that’s like a doughnut in the States. I am gloating over my victory when she bags me ten cakes and I realize that she was saying “mot chuc,” meaning ten, and I was saying “mot cuc,” meaning one lump. Too embarrassed to rectify the problem, I grab the prize and bike out to a park, hand the ill-gotten cakes to a beggar sleeping at the gate, keeping the one morsel for which I’d bargained.

The one thing a solo traveler can count on finding in an area crawling with backpackers and expatriates is a bargain bed for the night. Usually, the food isn’t bad either.

Hanoi is a more sedate city than Saigon. The traffic is much lighter, and in the cooler air under tree-shaded avenues, the smog is more tolerable. Hanoi lives on a scale more comprehensible than Saigon. The trees are smaller, more abundant, and not so tall and tropical like those of Saigon. I stroll along the fine mansions, taking in their faded, colonial French glories, their expressive arches, French windows, and wrought-iron balconies. Every structure holds itself up proudly in a state of elegant decay.

For tourists, everything that happens in Hanoi happens in the backpacker cafés. Anything that can be had, rented, chartered, borrowed, exchanged, and bought can be obtained or arranged in them. They sneak tourists illegally across the border into China for day jaunts, book hotel rooms, lodge people in-house, serve decent Western food, sell traveling supplies, fresh baguettes, and Laughing Cow cheese, which is the staple travel food for foreigners who fear stomach bugs. They book anything. Legal, illegal. You got the dollars, they can find your pleasure.

The city is broken up into ridiculously distinct commercial sections, guild oriented, another French legacy. If you want to buy shoes, you go to the shoe district, where thirty or so adjacent stores sell only footwear, often the same style and brand. There is a part of town for every category of goods and services: clothing, poultry, silk, jewelry, and electronics. There is even an area with shops making headstones, where dust-covered men kneel on the sidewalk chipping names into slabs of granite. Our favorite is the street of nem nuong diners. Around dinnertime, straddling the sunset hour, the street is perfumed and grayed with the smoke of meat sizzling over coals. If you catch a whiff of this scent, you never forget it. It is a heady mixture of fishsauce marinade, burning scallions, caramelized sugar, pepper, chopped beef, and pork fat. Women sit on footstools grilling meats on hibachi-style barbecues. Aromatic, stomach-nipping smoke curls to the scrubby treetops and simply lingers, casting the avenue into an amber haze.

Bonding, trading addresses, and fervently believing that we will never lose touch.

“Lieng-Xo! Lieng-Xo!”—Russian! Russian!—the kids shout at me as they come rolling out of the school yard, a moving carpet of little black heads. In America, I was a Jap, a Chink, a gook; in Vietnam, a Russian.

Halfway through the meal, the conversation in the dining room grew loud. I went out for a third helping to see what was happening. Eating had slowed at the long table, no one reaching to refresh his bowl. My father was beet-faced and talking in a restrained manner. Aunt Huong and her husband looked irritated. Everyone else wore a silly, nervous grin, trying to make light of the tension. It started with a discussion of how the Bay Area had changed so much in the last twelve years. When we first arrived, there were maybe two Vietnamese restaurants and one Vietnamese market, and people were excited when they met other Vietnamese. Now, they all agreed, there were too many Vietnamese in Silicon Valley. My uncles complained about the competition. Father said Vietnamese filled the ranks of the county social services with their friends and relatives, giving them special treatment, corrupting the whole system. It was his roundabout way of criticizing his sister, Huong, whom he felt relied too much on government subsidy. The comment riled his sister, and she wouldn’t let it slide. After all, this wasn’t Vietnam anymore. My father said, “You shouldn’t abuse the system like that. There are people more needy than you.” Indignation swelled her eyes. “What do you mean I shouldn’t? Who are you to talk?” Uncle Hun butted in: “He’s your big brother. You shouldn’t talk to him in that tone.” She wasn’t listening, her eyes trained on my father. Her next shot came out slowly, drawing a careful ...

A red-faced Vietnamese is a drunk Vietnamese. And three drunk Vietnamese scooting along on one motorbike spells trouble.

Haven’t had ice cream since I arrived in Vietnam. Didn’t dare.

It is impossible to travel in Vietnam without encountering clay-pot catfish. If Vietnam ever got around to declaring a national fish, the catfish would be it. Vietnam’s rivers and lakes teem with this hardy creature. Peasants raise catfish in family ponds as they raise chicken in their yards. “Three days old, very, very tasty,” he croons, smacking his lips as he sets it on the stove. He adds a bit of water and a dash of fishsauce. Then both of us settle down to watch it come to a boil. My mouth waters in anticipation. That is the most wonderful thing about clay-pot catfish. It keeps well for weeks without refrigeration. The older the dish, the deeper the flavors, the more evenly the fish fat blends with the sauce of caramelized palm sugar, cracked pepper, and chili. In Uncle Tu’s pot, I see he has splurged and added diced pork fat, whole red chilis, and scallions. The best thing about this dish is that even when all the fish is gone, the dredging is rich enough, especially if the fish head is saved, to be stewed again and poured over rice to make a poor man’s meal—something I did many times when I was a boy.

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.

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.

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 sat back watching, wondering why it sounded so corny—everything uttered. The awkward patting, friendly shoulder slugs exchanged in place of embraces. Why are we spieling these empty words? Where are the tears of joy? Isn’t there something important we’re leaving out? I can feel it and if we don’t say it now, it will never be said. We were filling all those vanished years with small talk.

In the most arid part of the country, where the soil is chalky, the peasants turn to tep farming, transforming the landscape into a surreal grid of rectangular ditches, a quarter of an acre each, maybe ten feet deep, filled with muddy gray water. Men drag fine nylon nets through these ponds for tiny, translucent shrimp no larger than newsprint. Women spread the catch out along the side of the road—the national highway—to dry in the sun and to mix freely with dirt, bugs, and dung. The masses of shrimp smell strangely sweet and briny, looking like giant sheets of lint from laundry dryers. Once dried, the shrimp are fermented into a paste with an unbelievably offensive odor. People use it for cooking. A powerfully pungent condiment, a tablespoon of this paste is sufficient to flavor a twogallon pot of soup.

Coke banners have displaced the Vietnamese flag. You can buy a Coke every five miles from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. It’s everywhere, sold by the case in markets as well as by the can in shacks with a six-pack inventory. At sixty cents a can, it is as dear as a third of a laborer’s daily wage. Coke—or Koh-ka as Vietnamese pronounce it—is a special refreshment, reserved for special events such as first dates and wedding banquets.