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

They reach the Nguyens’ home in the wee hours of morning, and the rest of the family rouses from sleep to welcome Pham. He’s instructed to greet Granduncle, the patriarch, first, according to custom. The family prepares tea to welcome Pham formally. When talk turns to his planned cycling trip, everyone tries to dissuade him not to go. Grandaunt says: “Don't do it. There's nothing out there but jungle and bandits. You’ll die” (72). By the time they retire to bed, Pham begins to wonder if they are right.

After breakfast the next morning with Grandaunt’s three sons, Pham gets his bicycle fixed at a roadside repair shop. The old man who runs the shop gets it in perfect order in about 20 minutes, despite bent rims, a flat tire, broken brakes, etc. Pham lets the old man ride it around the block since he’s clearly enamored with the foreign bike. At the end of the day, Viet takes Pham for a ride around the city on his motorbike. Due to heavy traffic congestion, there’s a ban on trucks on the city streets until 6 pm, when they can then enter to make their deliveries. There are few traffic lights and no rules to regulate the flow, and Pham is nervous the whole time.

Finally, they stop at a bar, where they meet a friend of Viet’s named Binh. Over beer and peanuts, they talk about Pham’s bike trip. Binh is a tour operator who has organized group bike tours and has one coming up. He invites Pham to join them, but Pham prefers to be alone. Like Pham’s family, Binh thinks this is a bad idea. Pham tells him he’s read of other Americans who have done it. Binh hesitates before saying that Vietnamese cannot do it; they don’t have the stamina. Westerners are stronger. 

This one-page chapter details a memory from when Pham was four years old. He and his sister Chi were playing outside when a large green army truck pulled up. Soldiers got out—Westerners with blond hair and large builds. They smiled at him and taught him games, then swung him through the air like an airplane. A black man emerged from the truck. The boy had never seen a black person, and Chi told him the man’s skin was chocolate. So, Pham ran up and bit the man but only tasted salt. The soldier yelled, and then gave him a piece of gum to chew instead. 

Pham describes Grandaunt’s three sons. Hung, the youngest, is a bit of a playboy. Pudgy and extravagant, he enjoys blowing money on alcohol and other hedonistic pursuits. He is a filmmaker who makes decent money filming weddings and making portraits. His wife and daughter live in America, having joined his mother-in-law, who was a refugee from the war. Immigration laws only allow immediate relatives to join family members in the US, so he had to stay behind. He hasn’t seen them in four years and worries that his daughter won’t remember him, and his wife will become independent and no longer need him.

Khuong, the middle son, is a dutiful child, hardworking with a good career as an academic; Pham describes him as more sophisticated than his brothers. The oldest son, Viet, has a master’s degree in chemistry and started his own soda business, which at its peak had 30 employees. Since then, both Pepsi and Coca-Cola have entered the market, nearly bankrupting him. He is fun-loving and pumps Pham for sexual slang, enjoying the explanations of wordplay.

Pham spends most of his time in Saigon drinking and bonding with the three brothers. They spend every other day getting drunk, either at home or in a bar. During his second week, they all go to Snake Village, where the specialty is poisonous snakes. At their table, a bartender removes a cobra from a basket, knocks it unconscious with a mallet, and proceeds to slice into the skin, exposing its still-beating heart. He then surgically removes it and plops it into a shot glass of rice wine, the heart pumping out blood into the liquid. One by one, they go around the table like this, each downing a shot glass, until it is Pham’s turn. He passes, but the brothers and other patrons prod him on, insisting it’s good for his libido. Finally, he accedes and drinks up. Feeling the heart on his tongue, he spits it on the floor and alcohol rushes into his nose. Everyone around him erupts with laughter.

Just as often, Pham and his relatives drink at home, sitting around in a circle and sharing a bottle of Johnnie Walker. The women make them snacks but otherwise stay out of the way. There are Thuy and Hanh, the brothers’ siblings, and Mo, Viet’s wife. Hanh’s life is especially difficult. Her husband was a soldier in the South Vietnamese army exposed to Agent Orange. He died 11 years earlier. Their only daughter is now 15 and suffers from mental and physical disabilities. Pham becomes fond of all of them, but has a special affection for Hung, the brother who is his age. Hung introduces him to Son, a larger-than-life figure of extreme contradictions. “Together,” Pham writes, “Hung and Son show me every vice, depravity” (86).

Chapter 13 returns to the story of Pham’s family fleeing Vietnam, picking up after Pham and his siblings had made their way back to the beach in Phan Thiet, lying in wait for their parents. Their mother arrived first, then in the dark of night their father and an aunt joined them to wait for the boat that would pick them up. Midnight came and went, and Pham’s parents worried that something had gone wrong. His father wanted to abort the plan, worried that dawn would catch them on the road, but his mother insisted they were coming.

Finally, the fishing boat appeared as a shadow on the water. Using a flashlight, Pham’s father gave the prearranged signal to show their location, and the boat flashed back. They all ran across the beach toward the water. Pham fell down and Chi picked him back up, held his hand, and carried his bag. Once in the water, they had to swim to reach the boat, about 50 yards offshore—they carried the youngest boys, but Pham had to swim with the others. He felt himself falling behind and tried to yell for help but swallowed some seawater instead. The boat’s captain, Tai, came to help him; Pham held on as Tai swam toward the boat.

The family huddled in the fish hold just behind the bow. The boat was small, about 30 feet long, and Pham’s father was angry that the captain had brought two others along who were not part of the plan. He didn’t know if they were trustworthy, but Tai told him they were his cousins. A faint glow peeked through the eastern horizon as the crew threw out a net to pretend they were fishing. They’d already started the engine, and the pilot slowly rotated the boat away from the net. Nevertheless, the propeller stuck in the net and the engine died. The crew dived into the water with their knives to cut it free, but the net was so strong and wrapped so tightly they were unable to cut through it.

Just then they spotted a patrol boat rounding the coast and coming into view. Pham’s mother remembered that she had grabbed a kitchen knife when packing their things, so she gave it to the crew. The patrol boat was nearing, so everyone lay down flat on the bottom of the boat, out of sight, while two crew members stood on the engine house, fussing with the net to look like they were really fishing. The patrol boat then turned away from them, heading toward shore, and the crew finally cut the propeller free. Slowly, they began moving in the direction of the sunrise. Ironically, the delay caused by the net likely saved them; if they had started earlier, the patrol boat would have spotted them making for the open sea and given chase.

By afternoon, they had lost sight of land and were on their way. It was sunny and fairly calm, but the women and children all got seasick, while the men seemed to be enjoying themselves. Then a freighter appeared and began coming closer. The crew assumed it must be either Vietnamese or Russian, so Pham’s father told his mother to quickly make a Japanese flag. She unpacked a sheet and a red dress, cut a circle from the dress, and pinned it to the sheet. With the freighter coming directly toward them, Pham writes, “all we could do was sit and wait” (93).