Catfish and Mandala Read Online Free Page B

beneath my blanket, a jumble of nerves, high with adrenaline, sick with uncertainties, knotted with fear. I could be camping on the road already if it weren’t for my mother.
    â€œBAD! Bad day to go on a trip!” she pecked at me day before yesterday, flapping her Chinese calendar in my face, chasing me from the bathroom to the kitchen.
    â€œLook, Mom, I don’t believe in your Chinese calendar,” I told her delicately.
    She made angry egg-eyes, scolding me in front of the family altar atop the refrigerator, her favorite place to win arguments. “I know these things. I picked our escape date from Vietnam, didn’t I?” She regularly pulled proof of her sixth sense. How she had seen a ghost in her dream and begged it not to take the soul of her youngest son, who was deathly ill. How she had predicted which job my father would land. How she had fathomed the good spirits residing in each house they had ever rented or bought. She knew she could spook me.
    I caved in. “Yes, Mom. You’re right, Mom.”
    â€œGood. Because if you go this day, you will get hurt. Many omens. You wait two more days, the chart is okay, suitable for a Horse-sign like you. Next week is even better.”
    â€œI’ll wait two days.”
    â€œNext week better.”
    â€œTwo days.”
    â€œNo patience, that’s you.”
    Patience I have aplenty. Courage is what I need. If I don’t leave now, I never will. In the face of parental opposition, my determination wanes by the day.
    My father has said “Good” to me twice in my life. This time is not one of them. The first “Good” was for making Phi Beta Kappa during my senior year in Aerospace Engineering at UCLA. I showed him the glowing congratulatory letter from the national honor society, then threw it away, too poor to afford the initiation banquet and too proud to request a fee waiver.

    He awarded me the second “Good” for landing a cushy engineering post at a major airline. That job was doomed from the start. I graduated out of college and right into a recession. Desperately hungry for work after mailing out a hundred resumes, I hooked one interview. During the office tour, my would-be boss, a turtle-chinned, red-faced thirty-five-year-old-timer, Paul, waxed on about the company’s expansion overseas and his getting an M.B.A. in international business to keep abreast of it all.
    â€œI like you,” Paul said, walking round behind me and putting a hand on my shoulder, which I didn’t like. “I like you people. Orientals are good workers. Good students, too. Great in math, the engineering stuff.” He smiled at me, reassuring, beaming. “Oh, I think you’ll do just fine here. We won’t have any trouble at all.”
    When I finally resigned, I was no longer a “good Oriental.” I even left behind in my desk three files titled “Stuff Paul Rejected Because He Doesn’t Know Any Better,” “Stuff Paul Rejected Because He Didn’t Want to Jeopardize His Promotion,” and “Stuff Paul Rejected Because They Didn’t Originate from Engineers but from Mechanics Who Have More Practical Experience on the Subject.” I heard later that the files were discovered. Eventually, after a few more escapades with the mechanics, supervisor-bossman Paul was moved “laterally” into a cubicle labeled “independent contributor” on the third floor, where they put troublemakers out to pasture.
    Giving up this job and burning my bridges, my father believed, were the undoing of me, and nothing I had done since elicited a “Good” from him. “You don’t do that. You do job best you can. You get promotion. You get new job. You say, ‘Thank you very much, sir’ and you go. Think about future. You are Asian man in America. All your bosses will be white. Learn to work.”
    Yes, Father. Okay, Father. I will, Father.
    I can’t be his