Catfish and Mandala
Excerpt from page 106 to page 109
Last week, I visited Grandaunt at her stall in the Ben Thanh Market. It had taken her four years of selling in the street to save enough money to buy the leasing contract of this five-by-five-foot stall. While we were chatting, a child and her blind mother begged me for two pennies. I reached for my wallet, but Grandaunt, who had caught me giving money to beggars before, placed a restraining hand on my arm. I wanted to give the child my paltry change, but it would mean disobeying Grandaunt, and thereby causing her to lose face. Seeing my discomfort, Grandaunt said gently to the little girl, “He’s family, little one.”
The child bowed and moved on to the next stall, leading her milky-eyed mother by the hand. This tiny girl whom I could lift with one arm respected the custom: beggars forgo shopkeepers. This child had shown more grace than I in our empty transaction. I stood in her wake, moved by something I couldn’t name.
By the time we were through with our coconuts, we had turned away six or seven beggars. We were about to leave when she came. She was six, maybe seven, maybe ten. It was difficult to tell because street children were generally so malnourished that their growth lagged by several years. She carried a baby in a shoulder sling on her chest. They were both ragged and thin.
I looked in her face and the breath went out of me. She looked back, an exact image—-a younger image of Trieu, a former lover I had thought someday would be my wife. I must be crazy, but the likeness was there. The war had orphaned Trieu and the only token of her childhood was a yellowed photo that I had committed to memory. This beggar-child had the same braided ponytail and huge gleaming eyes set in a persimmon face. The resemblance resonated a hundred what-ifs and I heard them as though I were trapped in a time portal.
I wanted to give this child something. A wild thought needled my mind: I could be her godfather. Send her a monthly stipend for schooling and food. I wanted to hug her. But I sat helpless and wordless, as though saying she would have no mercy, not a single penny from me.
Viet shook his head at me, a warning against giving handouts. Annoyed, he dismissed the child with a flick of his hand.
Knowing her work had reached its end, she pointed at our empty coconuts. Scabs tattooed the length of her arm. She whispered, “Uncle, if you are finished with these, may I have them?”
I could not move, watching with the impotence of a specter. Viet grunted his assent, motioning her to move on.
“Thank you, Uncle,” she said, and gathered two shells, one in each small hand. She wanted to take the third as well, but couldn’t with the baby hanging on her chest. She sat down not ten steps from us and tilted each shell above her mouth. A few drops. I was mesmerized by her fingers. Dirty little fingers scraping bits of white coconut. Licking fingers. Sweet juice. Sharing slivers with the baby.
I was her. She, me. She was Trieu. Could be my sister Chi. Could be my own daughter. Random. My world—her world. But for my parents’ money, I could be any one of the thousands of cyclo drivers, vacant—eyed men wilting in cafes, hollow-cheeked merchants angling for a sale. Everything could shift, and nothing would change. No difference. The shoes to be filled were the same.
She left our coconut shells on the ground and skipped away across the busy street, the baby jostling awkwardly on her hip.
Something awoke in me. Silent minutes passed and at last I stood up.
“Where are you going?” Viet asked.
“Nowhere.”
He looked slighted, but it no longer mattered to me, his feelings, his culture. Vietnamese. Honor. Obligations. Respect. I hated it all.
I climbed on my bike and rode after the beggar—child, going in the opposite direction of the circling traffic. Frantically, I searched for her braided ponytail bobbing among the tables. From café to cafe I went, stopping on the curb and peering into the dark. She appeared just coming out of the kitchen diner, sucking on an orange wedge, the baby riding her hip.
I waved her to me. She came warily.
“Here, Little Niece, take this and buy something to eat for yourself and the baby.” I gave her all the money in my pocket. Not much.
She looked at it, shocked, eyeing me with such gratitude that I was ashamed. She bowed. Voice trembling, she mumbled, “Thank-you-very-much-Uncle, thank-you-very-much. Little-Niece-thanks-Uncle-very-much.”
And she seemed to want to say something else but didn’t. And I wanted to say something, but couldn’t. In that moment, she seemed so awfully old. I felt terribly young. She jammed the bills into a pocket on her shirt where she held the baby. She hurried away, a lightness in her step. From across the street, she turned, waved bye, and smiled.
Abruptly, the easing of tension I had felt as I gave her the money vanished. It was only my selfish conscience. I stood there sickened for her, gasping at her tragedy and my part in it. Oh, child. What have they done to you? What have I done? Her parents will send her back here again and again on the off chance of a windfall like today’s. Oh, God. Why is she here? This beautiful child. What is her birth-fortune?
But on this afternoon in this city of webbed intentions on this hot sidewalk, I stood rotten with doubts, more lost than I had ever been in my life. Why do I care for this persimmon-faced child? Is it simply because she bears a likeness to someone I once knew? Is that what it takes to remind me that I am Vietnamese? That I am human, capable of feeling the misery of another? If so, I am a worse bigot than those I despise, those who have hounded me in America.
A grayness swept through me, but I wanted to feel the pain. Deserve it. All my life I have held pain in check, kept grief at a distance. I got on my bike and pedaled into the traffic, spooling into the six-way intersection. I could not stop. I felt a spark ignite something flammable in me, and my insides combusting. I couldn’t stop and I didn’t trust - didn’t know - the wetness welling up behind my eyes. So my legs pumped me headlong with the traffic, round and round the park I flew. Blue exhaust teared my eyes, seared my nostrils. In the circling, my mood spiraled downward, inward, powerless. There was nothing I could tear down. Nothing to smash my fist into. Roaring. A monster eating my heart.
I raced around the intersection. A madman. I went faster than cars and motorcycles. Reckless young men gave chase, but I left them behind. I rode, hands on the bars, not fingering the brake. A dark Herculean strength burst forth from the pit of me. Faster and faster I raced and I knew I was heading toward an accident, but the realization was remote, misty behind my red anger. Drivers honked, swerved. I went faster still. Sweat slanted down my forehead and salted my eyes. My chest burned.
My Saigon was a whore, a saint, an infanticidal maniac. She sold her body to any taker, dreams of a better future, visions turned inward, eyes to the sky of the skyscrapers foreign to the land, away from the festering sores at her feet. The bastards in her belly – tainted by war, pardoned by need, obscured by time - clamored for food. They laughed, for it is all they know. She hoped for a better tomorrow, hoped for goodness.
Then there was nothing. The wildfire swept past. Ashen, I pulled over. Without a word, Viet, his nephew, and I went home. At the house, I parked my bike just inside the gate. The tears came without warning and I had to turn away from my uncles and aunts and nephews and nieces. I cried into the wall, the sobs racking my shoulders. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide in this little house, in this crowded neighborhood. I wept uncontrollably, as I did when I heard my sister Chi had committed suicide - my father cutting her free from a yellow nylon rope. I had known then, as I knew now, that I was weeping for her and I was weeping for myself because I was not there in the months before her death. Although we had lived in the same city, I had avoided her, too engrossed in my own life, my own problems.
This time my tears made my relatives ashamed for me. Yet, in this alley—world of theirs where there was no space, no privacy, they gave me both. My aunt said to her son, “He got dust in his eyes. It’s painful. Nghia, go upstairs and fetch him the bottle of eyedrops.”
When the eyedropper was in my hand, they dispersed. They never mentioned my shame, my unmanliness. Never asked me why.
