andrew x. pham

(Hardcover, 320 pages, Harmony, Random House, June 2008; ISBN-10: 030738120X). Read a sample chapter.

Book Description From Amazon.com

“Once wealthy landowners, Thong Van Pham’s family was shattered by the tumultuous events of the twentieth century: the French occupation of Indochina, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the Vietnam War.
Told in dazzling chapters that alternate between events in the past and those closer to the present, The Eaves of Heaven brilliantly re-creates the trials of everyday life in Vietnam as endured by one man, from the fall of Hanoi and the collapse of French colonialism to the frenzied evacuation of Saigon. Pham offers a rare portal into a lost world as he chronicles Thong Van Pham’s heartbreaks, triumphs, and bizarre reversals of fortune, whether as a South Vietnamese soldier pinned down by enemy fire, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese under brutal interrogation, or a refugee desperately trying to escape Vietnam after the last American helicopter has abandoned Saigon. This is the story of a man caught in the maelstrom of twentieth-century politics, a gripping memoir told with the urgency of a wartime dispatch by a writer of surpassing talent.”

One of the Ten Best Books of the Year, Washington Post Book World
One of the Los Angeles Times’ Favorite Books of the Year
One of the Top Ten National Books of 2008, Portland Oregonian
A 2009 Honor Book of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association

Editorial Reviews:

“Few books have combined the historical scope and the literary skill to give the ­foreign reader a sense of events from a Vietnamese perspective. . . . Now we can add Andrew Pham’s Eaves of Heaven to this list of indispensable books.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Searing . . . vivid–and harrowing . . . Here is war and life through the eyes of a Vietnamese everyman.”
—Seattle Times

From Publishers Weekly
“Starred Review. In a narrative set between the years of 1940 and 1976, Pham (Catfish and Mandala) recounts the story of his once wealthy father, Thong Van Pham, who lived through the French occupation of Indochina, the Japanese invasion during WWII, and the Vietnam War. Alternating between his father’s distant past and more recent events, the narrative take readers on a haunting trip through time and space. This technique lends a soothing, dreamlike quality to a story of upheaval, war, famine and the brutality his father underwent following a childhood of privilege (And that strange year, the last of the good years, all things were granted. Heaven laid the seal of prosperity upon our land. We were blessed with the most bountiful harvest in memory). For those not familiar with Vietnamese history, Pham does an admirable job of recounting the complex cast of characters and the political machinations of the various groups vying for power over the years. In the end, he also gracefully delivers a heartfelt family history. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.” –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine
All critics agreed that The Eaves of Heaven, written in short, eloquent vignettes that move back and forth in time, is one of the best memoirs of this period in Vietnam’s history written from the Vietnamese point of view. Indeed, it offers a much-needed perspective in the United States, which often thinks of “Vietnam” as a painful episode in its own history rather than another nation’s. But some reviewers, impressed by Pham’s ability to write in his father’s voice without sentimentality, went even further. They called The Eaves of Heaven a classic among memoirs and compared it with classic texts that address the timeless themes of violence and war. The Eaves of Heaven is a book that will greatly appeal to a wide variety of readers. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.”

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Martha Sherrill

“In 1802, a war hero named Hao Pham was awarded a vast tract of land in the fertile flatlands in the north of Vietnam. He’d won several battles that had led to the unification of his country. For this, he became the lord of a large manor with thousands of peasants and lived out his days in supreme comfort. A string of male descendants succeeded him, each becoming richer and more powerful than the last. Under French colonial rule, the Pham estates expanded further.

The Eaves of Heaven describes the gradual undoing of this vast and elaborate dynasty, the cataclysmic disintegration of a country, and the series of dramatic misfortunes that befell the great-great-great-grandson of Hao. Poised to inherit everything, Thong Pham instead lost it all, as Andrew X. Pham, his son, recounts in this gorgeously written book. But this is not ultimately a story of loss and upheaval, nor is it simply a retelling of Vietnam’s war-torn history from a Vietnamese point of view. Many other books have ably covered that ground. The Eaves of Heaven is something entirely new: an effort to recapture the moments of beauty and transcendence that emerged from these events.

Andrew Pham covered some of this ground previously in his acclaimed travel memoir, Catfish and Mandala, but in telling the life story of his own father, he seems to have risen to a new level of quiet and powerful storytelling. Aware that his father’s story, which he tells in his father’s voice, is strong enough to require no enhancements, he is restrained, never sensationalizing.

The Eaves of Heaven is built from a series of short vignettes — some sweet, some horrifying — which are not recounted in chronological sequence, but linked in a narrative that darts nimbly across time, lingering on haunting scenes of brutality and violence as well as of beauty and love. Around every corner there are startling discoveries and juxtapositions caused by the shuffled chronology: misery followed by a gentle love scene or sumptuously described food. (Andrew Pham once was a food critic, and his book can be painful to read if, like me, you don’t live within driving distance of a good Vietnamese restaurant.)

It’s the absence of chronology that gives Thong’s story its magic and depth, and allows it to be sustained by his observations of the ephemeral and the descriptions of unforgettable characters. Colorful personalities appear — cousins, aunties, half-siblings, stepmothers, neighbors — and reappear, sometimes to perish or be executed, victims of the crushing internecine and geopolitical conflicts that Vietnam endured for decades. The country becomes a character, too, like a person being slowly tortured and dismembered. When we encounter the orphan boy that the 9-year-old Thong and his cousin found in a barn during the Great Famine of 1944, it’s impossible not to think of him as a kind of human stand-in for Vietnam itself:

“One afternoon, when Tan and I were playing hide-and-seek, we found a boy bundled in a blanket beneath a pile of hay at the back corner of the barn. Shriveled and bloated with starvation, he looked like some sort of bug, all head and belly, big-eyed and heaving ribs, almost hairless, semi-conscious and possibly mute. He was past talking. It appeared he had crawled into the stable to die.”

The following year, there were so many dying people on the roadsides of the family estate that decaying body parts became a common sight and were transformed into macabre playthings.

“I remembered kicking a skull. There were many. My friends and I picked one that was detached from a body. It was round enough to roll like the grapefruits we once used. Bouncing across the dirt, it had no human feature. Ravens had picked the eye sockets clean.”

Deprivation and suffering finally trickled up to the aristocrats, causing Thong and his family to walk away from their ancestral homeland, taking only one suitcase each, after the Vietnamese communists had been given the northern half of the country by the Geneva Accords in 1954. In the South, living on the bleak outskirts of Saigon, the Phams were reduced to desperation, first running a dark and greasy noodle shop that failed, then a country inn that became a popular whorehouse. Thong’s father, once a dashing playboy with fine clothes and a nobleman’s languid manner, degenerated into a hopeless opium addict who never managed to rise from his lounge or emerge from his haze.

A bookish and unathletic boy who felt awkward next to his polished, debauched father, Thong found comfort in the classroom and dreamed of being a scholar and teacher. His mother encouraged him, and together they buried a champagne bottle in her private garden on the estate in the north — to be opened upon his passing of middle school graduation exams.

Thong’s mother is the nourishing spirit of the book, a refined woman who left behind a treasure of good feeling and noble ideas to help carry her son through. Just 31 when she died, she hovered over his life for years after, a kind of angel who guided Thong and kept him alive.

“Mother had taught me that the eaves of heaven had a way of turning in cycles, of dealing both blows and recompenses. For every devastating flood, there followed a bountiful crop. For every long stretch of flawless days, there waited a mighty storm just below the horizon.”

By the story’s end, Thong has witnessed cruelty, waste and government corruption, and has endured prison, torture, and the deaths and humiliations of one friend after another. All he has left are the things inside him: the books he’s read, the memories of the people he loves and hopes to see again, the strength and wisdom he’s gained from deprivation. He has lost everything, and yet so much remains. Copyright 2008, The Washington Post.”

“The ‘I’ of the first-person narration, belonging not the author but to his father; the Edenic lushness of Thong’s childhood memories, intermingled with the wrenching dramas to come: These are the devices of sophisticated fiction, drawing us in while keeping us precariously off balance.”
—The Boston Globe

“[A] work of radiance. In some ways, it resembles that supreme recollection of a world lost to history’s depredations, Speak, Memory, in which Vladimir Nabokov summoned up his pre-revolutionary Russian boyhood. . . . [A]s with Tolstoy’s war and peace, darkness, intrinsically formless, gets shape and vividness from the light playing through it. . . . brilliantly chilling . . .”
—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

“Thong Van Pham is constantly fleeing and rebuilding in the midst of war, watching world after world vanish, from the feudal estate of his childhood to the Hanoi of the ‘50s to the Saigon of the 70s. He and his son have done us the extraordinary service of bringing a few pieces of those worlds back again.”
—New York Times Book Review

“ . . . [A] gorgeously written book . . . [Pham] seems to have risen to a new level of quiet and powerful storytelling. . . . The Eaves of Heaven is built from a series of short vignettes — some sweet, some horrifying — which are not recounted in chronological sequence, but linked in a narrative that darts nimbly across time, lingering on haunting scenes of brutality and violence as well as of beauty and love. . . . It’s the absence of chronology that gives Thong’s story its magic and depth, and allows it to be sustained by his observations of the ephemeral and the descriptions of unforgettable characters.”
—Washington Post Book World

“[A] searing story . . . The remembered images of more tranquil, carefree times are what make the subsequent depictions of wartime terrors and devastation so heartbreaking. . . . Pham has a novelist’s eye for telling details . . .”
—Seattle Times

“There are some books that writers shouldn’t read . . . because they are so good they make you despair that you could ever write so well yourself. The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham, is such a book. Pham . . . is the best kind of memoirist. . . . He understands a memoir is not really about oneself but about a period, a time, a people. . . . As a memoir, The Eaves of Heaven accomplishes what few polemics do – it is a sweeping personal indictment of war, a reassuring and yet merciless affirmation of the human spirit.”
—Portland Oregonian

“Pham deftly paints a compelling portrait of life during three wars in Vietnam . . . This beautifully written books is essential for public and academic libraries.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“War-torn as it was, a lost world lives again in Thong’s recollections of the passions of his life: food, friends, family, romance. Personal tragedy and triumph, related with amazing perspective against an epic backdrop.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“World-shaping events that most Americans know merely through schematic maps and historical summaries take on a poignantly human immediacy in this story of one storm-buffeted man: Thong Van Pham, the author’s father. . . . By turns touching and searing, this slice of history—like Pham’s earlier Catfish and Mandala (1999)—deserves a wide readership.”
—Booklist, starred review

“Alternating between his father’s distant past and more recent events, the narrative takes readers on a haunting trip through time and space. This technique lends a soothing, dreamlike quality. . . Pham does an admirable job of recounting the complex cast of characters and the political machinations of the various groups vying for power over the years. In the end, he also gracefully delivers a heartfelt family history.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review.

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Chapter Excerpt:

The North
1940

Prologue
Ancestors

My family came from the Red River Delta, an alluvial plain of raven earth and limitless water. It was an exceptionally fertile country, though not a youthful land with treasures to be plundered. What riches it had, it yielded solely to sweat and toil. It had known centuries of peasant hands.

Generations beyond recall, my ancestors had tilled this soil where fortunes were made and reversed by countless successions of insurgencies, raids, and wars. The rise of our clan began with my great-great-greatgrandfather Hao Pham, a noted officer in King Nguyen Anh’s army. For his battlefield victories against rebellious warlords, he was awarded a vast tract of land after the king’s unification of Viet Nam in 1802. As was customary in the feudal order for the richest man in the area, he won the privilege of lord proctorship over all the villages within a day’s ride by horseback of his home. He assumed the post, raised a big family with three wives, and lived out his days in comfort. When he retired, his eldest son succeeded him, acquiring the same commission. Later, in the French colonial period, when the clan’s property had grown even larger, his grandson became domain magistrate. So it went from generation to generation, both land and titles passed as birthrights from fathers to the firstborn sons. By the time of my grandfather and father, ours grew to be one of the two richest clans in the province, our holdings spreading out to the horizon.

Still, it was a realm of rice paddies, mud houses, and shoeless peasants. It was a world before the arrival of electricity, banks, and refrigeration. In the whole province, there were only two cars. My uncle Thuan owned one, but kept it merely as a modern marvel. He was more comfortable astride a horse. In our village of a thousand souls, there was a single firearm—a double-barreled shotgun Uncle used to hunt birds. For weaponry, there were swords, spears, and martial arts. The only other technological intrusions into our village were two mechanical clocks; my father owned one, and my uncle owned the other. Prized collectibles, neither was used to tell the hour. For that, there were the crows of the cock, the height of the sun, and the length of one’s shadow. The average peasant owned three sets of clothes, brown or black pajamas, the same exact outfit in varying degrees of wear, with the newest reserved for holidays and temple visits. He rose before dawn and labored till dusk, and might expect to have a small amount of meat with his dinner. In the material sense, it was a simpler world. There was little, and yet everything, to be desired. Though perhaps as flatlanders we lacked imagination. Folks prayed for good health, good weather, and good crops. And that strange year, the last of the good years, all things were granted. Heaven laid the seal of prosperity upon our land. We were blessed with the most bountiful harvest in memory.

That summer, Uncle Thuan, the head of our clan, confessed to his third wife that he believed the wind of fortune was shifting, and that, at thirty-nine years of age, he felt disaster looming. Omens had shown themselves. First, the string of good years crowned by a historic crop signaled a grave imbalance in nature; another cycle was approaching. Second, a crow, that provincial harbinger of death, had alighted in his courtyard and stared into his audience hall. The scarecrows he had erected hadn’t prevented the cursed bird from paying him another visit. Last, he dreamt that the bamboo hedge encircling our ancestral estate was filled with voices speaking a foreign tongue; an evil had laid siege to our home. Within days of this nightmare, talk of war was rampant throughout the countryside. Disturbing reports came through his intelligence channels. The underground worlds were gathering their forces. A great storm approached, so warned his Nationalist informants; so concurred his Communist agents. Then, the colonial French suppressed and denied the rumor, which naturally made it a fact. The shadow of war had fallen upon the world. Dark days would sweep down from China. Within weeks, World War II would reach the Red River Delta on the heels of the Japanese army and mark the downfall of our clan.

The south
May 1956

1. Leaving Home

Right after my high school graduation in 1956, I found myself on a bus headed north to a small coastal town where a summer teaching position awaited me. Outside the windows, the ratty fringe of Saigon slipped away— dirt lanes and sewage creeks banked by weathered shacks and smoldering fires. Women stooped with age swept smooth the bare ground in front of their homes. Naked toddlers stood in doorways, knuckling sleep from their eyes. Fresh incense on roadside altars sent tendrils of prayers heavenward. Above the mottled tin roofs, early sun flicked through the foliage. A breeze carried the grassy scent of paddy water. I was twenty-one and striking out on my own for the first time. I had a suitcase with two pairs of slacks, three white shirts, underwear, a toothbrush, a bar of soap, and a comb. My first week’s wages would afford me another pair of trousers and a shirt. It wouldn’t be appropriate for the students to notice their new teacher’s meager wardrobe.

Passengers outnumbered seats on the bus, but the driver kept on picking up more people along the way, the ticket-man happily pocketing their fares. The bag-man roped the luggage together in a great camel-hump on the roof: bamboo cages of ducks and chickens, wooden crates, boxes, rucksacks, bundles of fresh vegetables. A number of people spent their whole trip standing or sitting on their valises crammed in the aisle. Some used the bus as a local shuttle service to nearby villages.

It was a Friday, so there were plenty of travelers, too many toddlers for a peaceful journey. Somewhere up front, a baby wailed relentlessly. A ruckus broke out at the rear. A rooster had gotten loose and half the bus erupted into flurries of hands, feathers, and screams. The owner leaped over two rows of seats, caught his rooster by the neck, and landed in the lap of a merchant woman. She said, “Thank you, Buddha, but what’s a granny like me to do with two roosters?” Trader-women hooted. A plump matron said, “I’ll take the big one, he’s not so bad looking.” Another chortled and said, “The feathery one has more stud potential.” They cackled, and the man, red-faced, crept back to his seat with his bird tucked safely in a sack. The women continued cajoling as though they were sitting at home. Their cheerful mood was infectious, and I felt rather buoyant, even though I was wedged between an old man, who squatted barefoot in his seat, and the window. But having the window was enough for me to consider this as a propitious beginning. Lightheaded with freedom, I felt as though I was flying on newly discovered wings.

It seemed so effortless, as if I had, by receiving a diploma, strolled through a magical portal, and left behind my whole family crowded in a shed of a house. The ease by which this job came to me made it seemed like destiny. Things had been difficult since we fled Hanoi two years ago, so I loved feeling that I was at last on the right path. All I did was answer the first ad I saw in the Saigon Daily. It was a math and science position at a private school. After a few letters, I was granted an interview. The principal came to my family’s noodle shop. Mr. Thinh Nguyen was a short, thick-bodied man in his late forties, with a small hump on his back, which he immediately explained was from a motorcycle accident. Despite this handicap, he was elegant in his movements and had the graceful glide-walk of a short-legged man. He smoked small French-style cigarettes made in Vietnam.

By our accents, we knew we were both northerners. As it turned out, he had studied in Hanoi and roomed not far from our old neighborhood. I told him my family were refugees, arriving two years ago under the Geneva Accord, which gave the Vietnamese Communists the northern half of the country. He said he had to leave his home a few years before then. Like most refugees, he didn’t talk about why he fled or what he left behind, and that was fine with me. Everyone had lost something. No one willingly chose an impoverished exile, dislocated from his birth-village and the spirits of his ancestors. I respected his silence and he did not press me for details of our plight. I appreciated the courtesy. Looking around at the rancid hovel in which my entire family lived and worked—the crude tables, the dirt floor, the windowless loft—I thought it would sound vaunted or, perhaps, blatantly false if I tried to explain who we once were, or spoke of our lineage. It wasn’t shame; we were beyond that.

As soon as we started talking about my academic records, he switched over to French. I liked it because I felt more comfortable in French when speaking with superiors and elders. French was more egalitarian than Viet. It was generous of him. Besides, it was natural for us to speak French, since it had been the official language of academia in Vietnam for longer than we had been alive. Generations of Vietnamese students spent lifetimes in classrooms speaking, writing, reading, and breathing French texts. So it did not seem ironic to me then that we sat there, two North Vietnamese exiles in a dark and greasy noodle shop on the edge of Saigon, conversing in French when neither one of us had ever set foot in France. We both had suits of Parisian cut and sported Western haircuts, and were more well-read in French poetry and European literature than most French soldiers. And yet, if we saw a Frenchman strolling toward us, we might, out of revulsion, cross the road to avoid him. The language had become a condition of our lives. It did not occur to us to scorn it or discard it from our tongues. It would have been impossible to try.

As the principal started talking about his school, his quaint town, and the fine French things he enjoyed, I thought of the manicured villas around our neighborhood in Hanoi; the fabulous bistros my father frequented with the whole family; the bouillabaisse, the croissants, and the ice cream. The best times of my life in Hanoi came flitting back into my head. Soon I was swimming in romanticism, drawing parallels between Hanoi and Phan Thiet, even though the most I’d seen of Phan Thiet until then had been little sketches on the labels of fish sauce bottles. As for the looks of the town or its people, I hadn’t a clue, although I imagined it to be some idyllic fishing village of white beaches lined with coconut palms, maybe with an ice cream parlor where I could enjoy a peach melba after a swim.

“Most of my teachers are moonlighting from the public schools. You won’t feel alone,” he said after we had chatted amiably for about an hour. “I only have three teachers on my permanent staff, and this position is for the only full-time science-math teacher for the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. It’s only three morning classes and the job comes with room and board. Do you think you’re ready to teach?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Congratulations, you’ve got the job. With your father’s permission, we’ll start you in your own classroom next week.”

My father was concerned, with good reason, that a job far from home might sidetrack me from my goal of a higher education. However, he disapproved of my recent involvement in students’ political demonstrations, some of which had turned violent. He knew that a summer out of town would keep me out of trouble. On top of that, we needed the money. Our pho restaurant, my father’s ill-conceived attempt to bring northern cooking to the southerners, was on the verge of collapse, taking with it the last bit of a mighty family fortune that went back many generations. We had lost everything in the fall of Hanoi. With financial catastrophe looming, he swallowed his protests and made me promise that I would write every week and return to attend Saigon University in the fall.

To escape, I would have promised him all the fish in the Saigon River.

On the 28th of July, two years ago, my family had fled Hanoi in a huge Dakota cargo plane. We were traveling with my stepmother’s parents and their other daughter, who was my age. The cargo hold was packed with refugees sitting on the baseboard of the plane and clinging to straps and netting. We landed at Saigon’s airport. Disoriented after a long and turbulent flight, we stumbled off the plane, anxious to get out of the cramped hold and put our feet on the ground again. Half the people were covered in vomit. We huddled in the shade of the plane, each toting a single allotted valise, and squinted at our new homeland. It felt like a foreign country.

The airport was three times larger than Gia Lam Airport in Hanoi. The tarmac sprawled in every direction. Buildings and gigantic hangars lined the long runway. Squadrons of warplanes and cargo carriers were parked in neat rows. The humid air was impregnated with the sting of fuel and engine exhaust. Convoys of trucks rumbled back and forth across the tarmac. Crews were unloading and refueling the cargo planes. They were flying nonstop around the clock, transporting refugees, French troops, and equipment out of the North. A somber mood of retreat permeated the scene.

A fat Chinese-Vietnamese man wearing a khaki colonial hat, a white short-sleeved shirt, khaki pants, and a pair of sandals took a list from the French sergeant, and then came forward to welcome us with open arms. He beamed a generous smile, which immediately put us North Vietnamese on guard. “Welcome to Saigon, misses and children. My name is Mr. Fourth,” he said.

It took us a moment to grasp his southern accent. Among other things, he got the “v” and “o” sounds mixed up with the “z” and “u.”

His phrasing sounded very odd. Older people flinched, as North Vietnamese commonly addressed a group by saying “Dear ladies, dear gentlemen.” I would later learn that “misses and children” was the southern way of saying “folks” and that South Vietnamese seldom called each other by their first names, but by the order of their birth. If a man was the firstborn, they called him “Second” because the title “First” belonged to the village headman. Accordingly, Mr. Fourth was the third-born in his family.

He had us board two buses to go to our temporary lodgings. Outside the airport, orchards and houses lined the busy, fume-choked road. Without rice fields, the land looked drier than in the North. We passed through a tin-shack slum. The air above the roofs wavered with heat. It was a sprawl of rust and decay. The streets were bare, unpaved. Mounds of putrid garbage stewed in the sun. There wasn’t a single tree to shoulder the searing heat. Women wore pajama-like clothes and wrapped checkered scarves on their heads. Most men went shirtless and shoeless, covering themselves with only a pair of shorts or a sarong that came halfway down their thighs. There were small groceries, motorbike repair shops, and fruit vendors with strange bright-colored fruits piled high in baskets and bananas hanging under the awnings. Closer to Saigon proper, there were more two- and three-story buildings, dwellings mixed in with shops and warehouses. Every sidewalk was teeming with kiosk-diners filled with shirtless men drinking. People ate right on the street, their backs to the thrumming traffic, their heads swimming in engine exhaust. It was a sobering sight because in Hanoi only the expensive restaurants and bistros put tables on the sidewalk. The cheapest vendors would be the ones putting low benches on the side of the road for customers. In Hanoi everyone was fully clothed; even laborers didn’t go outside shirtless, much less sit down to eat. Saigon seemed to me a very unruly, graceless city. It might have been uplifting to see the city center, but the bus took a meandering route, veering on the outskirts and turning onto one small street after another until we arrived in Saigon’s Chinatown.

Compared to Hanoi’s Chinatown, which spanned a few city blocks, Cho Lon was practically a city. It coexisted side by side with Saigon like an unattractive sibling; it was grimy, bustling, cacophonous. The buildings were crammed together, as if they grew on top of one another. Every door was a storefront with bins of goods, produce, and meats spilling onto the sidewalk. Upstairs were offices with placard billboards and living quarters with laundry hanging out the windows. The city generated its own breeze, a mixture of sewage, garbage, aromatic noodle soup, baked buns, dishwater, roast duck, and mildew.

It was, in fact, the powerhouse of South Vietnam. Cho Lon Chinese controlled the vast majority of trading houses, which also handled the shipping and warehousing of every conceivable commodity for domestic consumption and export.

The buses delivered us to a three-story hotel on a wide commercial street. Typical of the low-end Chinese establishments, it was a sad, dark, dingy place, manned by a humorless middle-age Chinese who couldn’t summon a greeting or a smile. The lobby was an eight-by-eight-foot space with a wooden bench and a board painted with the hotel rules in Chinese and Viet. It was devoid of decoration—not a single painting, poster, or potted plant. The windowless rooms were small and hot, with clumps of cobwebs in the corners. The ceiling fans did nothing but draw out the reek of mildew and cigarettes from the peeling walls. Stuffy air from the hallway oozed into the rooms through wooden screens above the doors. There was a communal bathroom on each floor. Surprisingly, there was one redeeming feature in the building: the toilet. It was a squat affair with a cast-iron water tank mounted up near the ceiling. Back in Hanoi, where there was no sewage system, we only had pit toilets filled with calcium oxide powder, the compost collected periodically by municipal workers using ox-drawn carts. A flush toilet, I thought, was surely a sign of civilization.

But Saigon held little prospect for us to make a new life. The first week, Father roamed about town looking for work only to return well after dark empty-handed. With the Chinese manager patrolling the hall to keep people from cooking in the hotel, Stepmother made do with greasy Chinese fare and low-grade rice from street stalls. We gathered on the floor and ate the lukewarm food Stepmother laid on the straw mat.

Father didn’t eat much. He sat slump-shouldered, shaking his head, talking in his quiet, defeated voice. “There’s nothing. It’s hopeless. They won’t hire me because I’m not Chinese.”

Stepmother said, “Can you look elsewhere?”

“The Chinese control everything; they own everything. Look around you; they even got the government contracts to house us northerners.” Father sighed. He had handled a fair amount of government transactions in Hanoi and knew how profitable it could be.

But it was easy to forget our dire situation because the ultimate entertainment center in Saigon sat directly across the street from the hotel. It was an ugly, enigmatic compound the size of three city blocks enclosed by a tall, corrugated sheet-metal wall, looking very much like a giant construction site. There was not even a single billboard over the gate to hint at what was within. A policeman guarded the entrance and enforced a single rule: No shirt, no entry. Bare feet, body odor, and rags, however, were acceptable. Men, women, and children of all ages passed through at all hours. The place bustled during the day, but at night, it turned into a raging carnival.

It was owned by Mr. Vien the Seventh, the biggest mafia boss in South Vietnam, who had his own army based in a forest between Saigon and Vung Tau. The establishment originally started as a casino, but it grew to provide every service, material good, and entertainment imaginable. It grew until it became true to its name—The Great World. Beneath the great span of its interlacing roofs were jewelers, gold dealers, pawnshops, clothing stores, exotic-medicine purveyors, herbalists, massage parlors, theater stages, private rooms for hourly rental, opium lounges, teahouses with hostesses, nice restaurants, little noodle stands, food stalls, candy shops, bakeries, and an amusement park with, among other rides, two merry-go-round carousels and our favorite, the bumper-car arena. It even had its own climate, controlled by fans and vents.

Allowance in hands, we followed other refugees into the Great World. We lost ourselves in the crowd of gamblers, drinkers, opium users, whores, pimps, crooks, businessmen, and entertainers. While my brothers and I stayed close to the amusement park area, wasting most of our money on bumper cars, my cousin Tan ran off alone to the gambling tables.

Even Father could not resist the draw of the Great World. Within a week, he abandoned his job search and surrendered himself to the familiar comfort of the pipe. Day after day, he woke up, got dressed as though he were going to an interview, and strolled across the street directly to the opium lounge inside the Great World.

It had begun—his last, irrecoverable descent. At night, phantom ants crawled up his legs and kept him awake. We children took turns kneeling at his bedside to massage his limbs, kneading the atrophied flesh to ease his ruined nerves. Rigorous at first, then more softly in tiny, gradual increments. Slowly, gently. Slowly, gently. The addict’s lullaby. It was like putting a child to sleep.

Excerpted from The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham. Copyright © 2008 by Andrew X. Pham. Excerpted by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.