Yacht People

by Andrew Lam

How you doing? How you doing tonight? Hot? Yeah, sure is hot. We’re having a tropical heat wave, folks. So hot, it reminds me of coconut trees and thatched-roof huts. Makes me think of myself as this impossibly handsome little boy playing with his dog, or, as so many of you are fond of putting it, playing with his food.

Yeah, as I was saying, I was playing with Next Week’s Menu, getting him to roll over in fish sauce and lemongrass, jump in the wok and play dead, when suddenly Mamma showed up with this bag and said, “Kids, we got to blow this joint!”

Well, actually Mamma didn’t say that, exactly. She said—now, listen, cuz this is from Vietnamese to English. O.K.? Like with a bamboo flute going off in the background, so hear me out: O, Filial First Son. From the sacred land in which our umbilical cords are buried, we must take leave due to communist cruelty. They put your honorable father in the reeducation camp. If we stay, they’ll send us to the New Economic Zone. We have no choice but to commit this forbidden sin. Please go bow to your ancestors, light incense, and beg for forgiveness before we leave. And, Filial First Son, don’t forget your toothbrush.

I was seven years old. I was like, “What? What’d I do now?”

I’m telling you, it’s just like Vietnamese mothers to make everything YOUR OWN GODDAMN FAULT! Think about it: The commies gonna fuck you up and send you to the New Economic Zone so you have to escape out to this big bad ocean, and somehow it’s you who have to beg for forgiveness? And from DEAD PEOPLE?

Grandpa, Great-grandma, oh, ancestors of eight generations back to the Chink dynasty, please forgive us. We can’t clean your graves no more. Clean them your lazy-ass selves. We got to go to America before the VC fuck us up the ass or put us in graves next to you all. So, O.K., goodbye.

We loaded up this fishing boat and moved the Mekong-Deltoids to Beverly Hills. Entire clan, that is. Vietnamese. Boat People. All climbing in this rickety fishing boat, and, when the next village saw us, half of them came along, too. Hell, it’s 21×6 feet, so why not? When Americans say maximum capacity 45, Vietnamese automatically add a zero to it. You know how it is: Tell us it’s a boat and we’ll find a way to fit.

What? Who said that? What did we do with the dog? I see you. You so fat you’re feeding me lines now? Well…thank you.

The dog? Hell, we tied a recipe with some lemongrass around his neck and sent him to our neighbor as a parting gift, you know, kinda like a Vietnamese version of meal-on-wheel. That’s right, don’t boo. You heard me. Seriously though, I really miss my Next Week’s Menu.

Yeah. Ahem.

Anyway…

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Andrew Lam (ZYZZYVA Winter ’98) is an editor at New America Media in San Francisco and a frequent contributor to NPR. Heyday Books published his memoir, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora