Roughly eleven months after purchasing a new home, Dr. Hoang Phan of Fort Washington, Maryland paid J&R Contractors $45,000 to attach a deck to his two-story brick Colonial. He requested a gazebo, twining steps, and sun-ray trim. The installation date was set for the 10th of July.

          The deck failed not long after installation.

          Word of it spread in late July, and though none of the local papers seemed interested in a story on the disaster, I set to work anyway, interviewing and gathering information.

          Prince George’s County police believed no foul play was involved. A detective had done some preliminary work and decided the case was not a case. The Department of Zoning and Construction complained of an investigation backlog—no free case officers for several months. The only proper investigation I could find was being conducted independently, non-professionally, by a strange man named Thong Vo. He was, I felt immediately sure, the entry-way into Dr. Phan’s story.

          It took me three weeks to track him down, and when I finally found him, he came to the door in a white t-shirt and briefs, waving me in as if we were old friends. His home was immaculate. His detective work, stored in the garage, had already yielded a fair amount of evidence: stacks of affidavits, informal interviews, photographs, ragged copies of work orders. When asked about the progress of the case, however, he admitted with a note of sadness, “No answers yet.”

          To avoid the possibility of “evidence tampering,” he wouldn’t let anyone examine anything in the garage too closely. He only let me glance at a few photos—some Polaroids of the wreckage of the deck, several shots of the breathtaking damage to the house itself. I wasn’t offended. I was happy to learn anything about Dr. Phan. I’d been unable to see him and as far as I knew, no one had. His wife and children weren’t speaking to the media, and no other members of his family could be located.

          The phone rang and Vo disappeared.

          When he returned, he said, “There is a phone call.”

          I offered to wait, but he said, “You leave now, ok?”

          Joan and Ray Carter, the Phans’ next-door neighbors, were the first to label the deck installation a disaster. Mrs. Carter, who agreed to meet with me late in the summer, was generally amiable but somewhat vague about the deck.

          “It certainly didn’t meet specifications,” she said.

          From our vantage point, a plush couch in the Carters’ living room, the ruins of the Phans’ home were just visible through the bay window. A giant sinkhole stretched across the property. I didn’t say anything, only gestured for her to continue.

          “He wanted one somewhat like ours, but I imagine enough different that we wouldn’t feel he was carbon-copying. And, then, of course, it was going to be, what, mahogany, which is so extravagant.

          “At any rate, it didn’t turn out very well. We have encouraged Mrs. Phan to pursue legal action.”

          Mrs. Carter was less than pleased to hear that Vo was spearheading the only investigation. She suggested he was more likely to have a garage filled with pornography than evidence.

          Penniless when they first arrived in the U.S., the Phans had become quite wealthy. For twenty-nine years Dr. Phan operated a medical practice in nearby northern Virginia. Ti Nguyen, a resident of Falls Church, VA, was a ten-year patient of Dr. Phan.

          “He help my family and many other families in the Vietnamese community,” Nguyen explained. “When I arriving here, he help me finding affordable health insurance and dental coverage. He always give us affordable care.”

          Current census statistics indicate that nearly 30,000 residents of Vietnamese origin live in Falls Church and the surrounding townships of Northern Virginia. Of those 30,000, around 26,000 are believed to have medical insurance, or roughly ninety percent. Twenty-five years ago, when the population was closer to 10,000, only around 1,500 Vietnamese had medical insurance—a woeful fifteen percent. Phan receives much of the credit for this upgrade.

          Three years after opening his practice, he approached two other Vietnamese physicians in the area, and together they created the CVD, the Council of Vietnamese Doctors (actually, for the first two years, it was known as the Strong Triad of Doctors, named jokingly after a popular Chinese comic book titled The Strong Triad, a childhood favorite of Phan; they changed the name in 1981 when the group expanded to include three other area physicians). The CVD met monthly in the bedroom-sized conference room of an Alexandria, VA Day’s Inn and devoted itself to providing proper health care to the mostly working class, immigrant Vietnamese community.

          One of its major aims—in addition to arranging health insurance for this population—was to develop a viable cure for “Asian” bronchitis, a lung condition not unlike cystic fibrosis, one that curiously afflicts only Asians and runs rampant in the Northern VA Vietnamese community. The lungs fill with mucus, fertile ground for bacteria which infects the lungs; the tissues swell closed, and eventually, as the lungs fail, the body weakens and folds in on itself.

          Not a single case has been effectively cured, as traditional antibiotics, other drug treatments, and various surgical procedures have proven useless, prompting some grumbling over Phan’s bold 1984 pronouncement: “Within 10 years, we will have a cure.”

          I am a forty-five year-old writer with little savings, no living family, and an on-and-off girlfriend, at the time off. I am too old to hope there’s much of anything waiting for me around the corner. I am resigned to my life. So the bills mounted, the abandoned work piled up, and I continued on with the story.

          Phan & Associates turned out to be an unusual medical practice. Just off the highway in a strip mall, it was bordered by a pizza joint on one side, a used-CD store on the other. The waiting room was far from sterile: people were eating, drinking, even smoking.

          When my number was finally called, I was taken to meet one of the elder members of the practice, Dr. Luong. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of him. I asked if he’d been to visit Phan in the hospital yet, and he shook his head. We sat in the office for a good while, and he was distant, as if hardly paying attention, and then suddenly he said, “He was Southern Vietnamese, so he was sloppy. I hesitated to join the practice at first. You listen to how they speak, the Southern Vietnamese—they slur their words together….”

          On a tour of the practice, he pointed to various rooms without telling me what they were for, and because we were walking so briskly, I didn’t have the time to do more than glance inside. I hoped to catch a glimpse of a body covered in a shell of acupuncture needles or some candle-lit ritual clouded with incense, but I saw only blank, white rooms, what one might find in any practice, and the tour was soon over. Luong had patients to see.

          Asking around afterwards only confirmed my impression. The interns uniformly described him as aloof and distant.

          “When he’s not listening,” said one, “we call him ‘Your Highness.’”

          Recently recovered pictures of Phan show a thin, smallish boy. He has full lips and slumped shoulders. I think he has lonely eyes. I feel a curiosity that cannot be satisfied. I want to understand him, and to understand what has happened to him, but there’s no way to make sense of either mystery.

          A week after our first meeting, Luong and I met again for lunch at a deli near the practice. He wore a navy blazer instead of clinical whites. The deli’s tables were small, their pink paint chipped; specials were printed on the windows in various colors, and of course I could read none of them. Inside was a metal bar with varieties of food under glass, some under lamps: grilled meats on skewers, amorphous seafood, rice piles, doughy buns, odd packages wrapped in dark-green leaves, brightly colored gelatins in greens and pinks.

          I asked Luong to identify various items, but he said, “You don’t want those. That food is no good.”

          The girl behind the service counter—certainly within listening distance—looked away. Did she understand? Luong ordered for both of us. For him: banh mi, Vietnamese sandwich, filled with roasted pork, cucumber, cilantro, and pickled radish and carrot. Because he thought me mildly overweight, he ordered me rice crepes and some type of gray, vegetarian meat substitute that looked like spoiled lunchmeat but was actually quite tasty.

          I said “Thank you” to the counter-girl, and she said “You’re welcome” in crystalline English.

          As we ate, Luong talked about the practice at length. Over the years, he and Phan had found that Western medical practices were frequently off-putting and even frightening to recent immigrants. The two were troubled by how impersonal Western medicine could be, how distant from everyday life, and they struggled to reconcile the notion of health care they’d known in Vietnam with the one they’d adopted in the U.S. They decided to change the practice to include Eastern medicine. A dual approach: that would be their legacy.

          Phan once had treated an elderly patient suffering from acute back pain. Whereas a Western doctor would have likely taken x-rays and, after finding nothing, prescribed painkillers and referred her to a back specialist, who would have taken x-rays, looked for disk or nerve problems, and prescribed heating pads, a topical ointment, perhaps back stretching exercises, Phan was able to deduce that the pain was caused by intense pressure to her colon, pressure exerted by stomach gas, a byproduct of an unbalanced diet. A quick review of her pantry revealed a cache of dried, salted fish. Once the fish was removed from Mrs. Le’s diet, the gas and back pain disappeared.

          Months later, the woman returned with similar complaints but swore she hadn’t touched the fish. Rather than scold her, Phan spoke with her son, who found several tins of fish hidden beneath a potted plant. Treat the cause, not just the symptoms. Luong laughed, and I smiled. We threw away our trash. The lunch hour was over.

          The bulk of Phan & Associates’ Eastern treatments are not currently recognized by any official American medical governing body, certainly not the American Medical Academy. There remains a sizable public stigma against such practices as herbal treatment and acupuncture. Some 75% of Americans believe them to be at best well-intentioned placebos. At worst they are outright quackery.

          I must admit I am one of the skeptics.

          Phan’s initial attempts to leave Vietnam in the 1960s met with failure, his applications for a student visa never clearing the government review boards. Like many dissident Vietnamese, he was forced to sneak out of the country, risking arrest and even death, departing early one morning on a small, maroon-colored rowboat. He was set to leave with his brother, cousin, sister, and Trinh Ha—the woman who would become his wife—but his family members “chickened out” (a rough translation from the Vietnamese; the strict translation is more like “were scared like rabbits”).

          After sixty-three days at sea, the two washed onto the shores of an uninhabited island. Their supplies were exhausted. No fish swam in the shallows, and no edible fruit grew on the indigenous trees and bushes, so they crawled onto a massive rock and waited motionless for hours. Phan became dizzy from breathing so slowly and quietly; finally a bird wandered close enough to capture by hand, and Ha, screaming in a mixture of desperation and exhilaration, fell on it like a net.

          Years later, both Phan and his wife would rarely talk about the experience. They were vegetarians before and after their time on the island, but that day Ha pinned the bird with the weight of her body, and Phan leaned against her as if embracing her, reached under her belly, and killed the thrashing bird by snapping its neck. In delirium they pulled the feathers from the skin, sucked the blood from their fingers, ate what bone they could crumble; it was horrible and necessary.

          As they slowly regained their strength, they began to make fires to cook what they captured. They learned to fashion makeshift nets from vines, and learned to hunt on the higher, rocky hills where the birds gathered in flocks.

          Phan married Ha in the loneliest of ceremonies on a hill above the beaches, and became the type of ardent provider he would remain for the rest of his life. A boy often characterized as over-talkative and “rather foolish” (again, a rough translation; the strict phrasing is “stupid as a buffalo,” which loses something in translation), Phan left the island a solemn and focused young man.

          Perhaps as miraculous as his survival on the high seas is the story of his eventual acclimation to the U.S. After only five years, he managed to gain acceptance to Johns Hopkins University’s esteemed medical program. Entering with only a limited command of English, he would graduate with the highest honors.

          Too good to be true? Those looking for darker spots need only glance at his unofficial marital record. Many believe him guilty of numerous infidelities, and his secretary allegedly receives $15,000 more a year in salary than any other medical-practice secretary in the MD/DC/VA area. Her five-year-old boy, some say, is a dead ringer for Phan.

          Says Luong, in his defense: “People don’t understand that in Vietnam, to many it is acceptable to have a mistress.”

          I was finally allowed to see Phan around mid-December. He was in a ward at the Arlington Memorial Hospital, his visits restricted. He seemed peaceful. The bruising and terrible discoloration that had apparently made it difficult to recognize him had now faded. In a coma for some time, he was not expected to ever regain consciousness. He’d suffered severe brain damage.

          I was saddened. At this point I still wasn’t sure why I was so fascinated with his case. I’d been investigating for nearly half a year, yet I couldn’t answer that basic question. Before the accident I knew next to nothing about the area’s Vietnamese community, next to nothing about Vietnam itself. Other than the war, of course. I didn’t know Phan or even know of him; I didn’t know anyone connected to him by less than six degrees.

          Based on the hospital’s projections, Phan would pass on sometime in the next few months. He lasted not quite one, dying in mid-January.

          The NCSDM (National Committee for Study of Domestic Mortality) reports 605 deck-related deaths in the U.S. in the last ten years. All are attributed to falls, whether precipitated by some type of horseplay, shoddy craftsmanship on the part of builders, or substandard, untreated timber.

          In early January, County Zoning and Construction finally assembled a panel of experts to study the Phan disaster. I was able to speak to panel-members periodically throughout the investigation, and by mid-January they’d determined to a high degree of certainty that no one besides the workers had trespassed on the site. There was no unanimous conviction, however, that conscious sabotage had occurred. Most were unwilling to speculate. They’d discovered, just as I had, that there simply wasn’t enough information.

          For his part, Vo didn’t think very highly of the panel.

          “Too little information? They all have PhDs? I find more than them!” he said.

          We stood waiting for the panel to finish a day’s deliberation. In the course of his investigation he’d become increasingly wild-eyed. I found myself admiring his intensity—a clear sign that I should end the story. But there was no chance of that. Vo and I, two ridiculous figures, were trudging on.

          By late January the panel had divided into two distinct schools of thought. The first chose to regard the incident as pure accident, the second as purposeful sabotage. Vo had his own explanation. In the course of his research—and he said this with a great and desperate excitement—he’d learned that Phan had once treated a man named Tung Chu. It so happened that Mr. Chu’s second cousin was Si Hoa, a notorious murderer back in Vietnam. He paused and then spoke quietly. Mr. Chu was unwilling to speak of his cousin, but Vo had learned that Hoa had killed nine people, escaped from prison, and disappeared three years ago.

          This was a terrible man, capable of anything. As a prison guard once told Vietnamese newspapers, “He’s so bad even his thoughts should be locked in a cell.”

          I was afraid to point out to Vo how hare-brained his theory was, afraid to mention that there was no reason to think Si Hoa was in the U.S., no reason to think that Hoa or Mr. Chu had any motivation to take some awful revenge on Phan.

          It was six months after the disaster and none of us had any concrete answers. It was becoming a distinct possibility that the case might never be solved.

          I met with Luong again in early February, in the midst of a snowstorm, the only one of its kind that year. Trucks were salting the parking lots, pushing snow into drifts on the sidewalks. The pizza place next-door was temporarily closed—broken heater.

          Phan was dead, and this was the most Luong could muster: “We founded this practice together twenty-nine years ago, and now, to proceed without him…it is a difficult step.”

          It was clear the death had taken its toll. He was haggard, clearly exhausted, and the practice wasn’t running smoothly. Long-time patients were bewildered, unwilling to switch to new doctors.

          “I had been seriously considering retirement,” Luong added slowly, as if thinking aloud, “I suppose that is not possible now.”

          A moment later he left to attend a meeting, saying he would be back if I wished to wait. I wandered the practice, looking for anyone I might speak with. The doctors were too busy. Most of the interns were hesitant to discuss Phan or Luong. I assured them they could remain nameless, but Luong was even more restless these days. I suddenly felt bad for him.

          As I wandered the halls, I spotted the secretary with whom Phan had allegedly fathered a child. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her anything, despite my curiosity. She wore all white—white blouse, skirt, heels, coat, purse, and on and on—and looked grief-stricken, her face empty.

          The other secretaries wouldn’t speak of the affair.

          “The practice, then,” I pushed, “the treatments.”

          Two sources confirmed that acupuncture was fairy common. The practice performed diet adjustment and herbal treatments. And there was something called qi kong. Also known as qi gong, it is supposedly the manipulation of qi or chi energy. Through a series of exercises, one may harmonize blood flow and breathing, effectively stabilizing the body’s qi.

          One young intern demonstrated the exercises, her breathing almost inaudible. As she moved, I could hear her tissues stretching, the joints quietly popping, her movements timed to her breathing. And while none of the interns were at this level, they believed that the skilled practitioner draws energy from the earth, the sun, the sea. A master is not only able to regulate his own health this way, he can supposedly adjust the health of others by “retuning” the energy imbalances that both cause and result from various illnesses, disabilities, and injuries.

          I was skeptical. Surely it increased flexibility, provided some exercise, strengthened the lungs, maybe improved circulation, all good for health, yes.

          The girl was warm and sweating, only moments after starting.

          Every week Phan & Associates ran public workshops, and apparently Phan had hoped to bring on board several masters to heal the very ill. Qi kong, he’d believed, was the future of the practice. That night, back at my apartment, I practiced the exercises the intern had shown me in a full-length bathroom mirror. As one might imagine, I didn’t see the supple movements of the girl. Nor did I see the ghost of Dr. Phan reflected back at me—his movements would be infinitely more graceful. My body was firmly forty-five years old, difficult, and unresponsive.

          Still I wanted to believe. I felt a trace of something, a vague warmth. Or was it the caress of the imagination? I liked the possibility, but it seemed too much like self-serving fantasy.

          By early March, the County panel had its explanation.

          A month’s worth of digging and analysis of the soil uncovered something curious: soda cans in the deck postholes, presumably left by the J&R workers. According to panelist and research entomologist Dr. Rachel Myers, any sugar-water mixture like soda would be a tremendous attractor to various insects, and it so happens a rare Australian species of termite is indigenous to the southern Maryland area (they are believed to have migrated from Australia sometime in the late 1800s, unknowingly carried by traders. In fact, in recent years, the Australian termite has become something of a problem in nearby Charles County, deforesting a sizable corridor of forest.

          The Australian termite is similar to the more commonly known American (originally Central American) termite in mating habits, territorial behavior, and body type, but is much larger and roams a larger territory. Its senses are also infinitely more acute: it can smell sugar, for instance, two parts in one billion (or from up to five to ten miles away). Unlike most other insects, it would have been quite capable of burrowing through miles of loose earth and devouring a deck’s wood supports. A colony of 300 can eat through several tons of medium-density wood in less than five days.

          Geologic digs conducted by panelist Dr. Cam Coetzer uncovered what he claimed was a clear path leading to the Phan house. Originating near the Potomac River, it measured roughly two square inches in diameter and stretched about seven miles, terminating at the edge of the sinkhole. According to Myers, the path’s width and “dig signature” and the make-up of stool samples found inside all indicate that the path was carved by Australian termites.

          How, then, did the house collapse? Dr. Andrea Whitmer, one of the most respected forensics experts in the area, a consultant for over two hundred criminal cases in the last five years, provided the final explanation. Her analysis revealed that not only had the timber of the deck been eaten away by something, but also the concrete foundation of the house itself. The termites had continued from the deck on to the house, a highly plausible scenario, according to Myers: in the Australian outback, termites frenzied by hunger have been known to burrow through solid quartz deposits. The porous, granular, relatively soft concrete would have posed little obstruction for them.

          Whether by termites or other agent, the foundation had been degraded by something, and degraded to the point that the basement collapsed, just slightly, but enough to weaken the house’s support base. The basement-located furnace tipped over and burst open, igniting nearby cans of paint, lawnmower fuel, canvas tarps, etc. The fire spread quickly, eventually making it to the gas line, resulting in a tremendous explosion which snapped two of the house’s central support beams. The house had too little redundancy to survive the loss. The walls buckled and the building fell.

          Dr. Phan, sleeping on the second floor, had almost no chance of escaping harm. He was crushed under a portion of the roof.

          The first ever qi kong treatment at Phan & Associates was performed in 1983 on a boy named Anthony Tran. A chronic bed-wetter at eight years old, he was found to have an energy blockage in his kidneys. Once the blockage was removed, the bed-wetting ceased. Could it have been the power of positive thinking, some placebo? According to those I spoke with, the boy was never told what he was being treated for, never told he was being treated at all. It was done at his home while he slept.

          In 1985, a master in California allegedly kept his dying mother alive for days after her aging body failed. He supplied his own energy to replace what she’d lost, and when his qi was depleted, a burly male nurse volunteered himself as a sort of battery, and the master—a sudden conduit—directed that energy along to her.

          Even more fantastical stories exist, stories of a master so advanced that he can sense his students and patients at all times; based in Fairfax, VA, he can feel the pain of an eighty year-old patient’s gout across the hundreds of miles to Abilene, Texas.

          To me the stories have the feel of tall tales, and I remain doubtful. But nineteen years after that first treatment of the bed-wetting boy, area believers, practitioners, and sympathizers hope that qi kong might provide a cure for Asian bronchitis, which increasingly wracks Northern VA’s Vietnamese community. Rumors abound that the condition has been completely cured this way back in Vietnam and China. Early attempts here have reputedly yielded some success, allaying symptoms, but treatment duration is still too short—not yet over spans of fifteen to twenty years—to determine if qi kong offers a permanent cure.

          But there is much hope. To treat all of northern VA’s Vietnamese community afflicted with the horrendous condition, is that what Phan had in mind?

          In April I was contacted by the panel’s Dr. Coetzer. They’d finally figured out how the sinkhole had formed. The shock of the gas explosion broke a fault-line through the rock shelf just below the Phans’ house. Beneath the shelf was a softer, lighter level of silt, then one of semi-free sediment, and then an aquifer, each layer too amorphous to support any weight. After the explosion, the house and surrounding land sank into the mush-stuff below.

          Coetzer’s study was backed by an official inquiry, and if I wanted, he said, I could find either one on file at the National Archives.

          I told him I wouldn’t need to—“The explanation sounds plausible enough to me,” I said then, but part of me wasn’t and still isn’t so sure.









Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis's work has appeared in McSweeney's, AGNI Online, New York Quarterly, Louisville Review, and Fiction International, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the co-editor of the Asian American Literary Review.