Stealing Buddha's Dinner (5 page)

IN SAIGON WE LIVED IN THREE SMALL ROOMS SET IN A
maze of concrete blocks. Here Noi raised four sons who, one by one, left to serve their mandatory years in the armed forces. Cuong, who repaired ships at the naval headquarters, and Anh at the nearby army communications base had lucky assignments. My father was lucky, too, having a friend who got him a position as a tank gunner. Quan was the one who became a ground soldier, sent to the countryside south of Saigon. He was killed two years later. The news devastated Noi. In the space of a few days her beautiful black hair, long enough to reach her knees, faded gray. One night, months after they buried his ashes, she had a dream that Quan was calling out for help. The next day she insisted that the family go to the cemetery, and when they got there they found that his headstone had fallen.

My grandmother was born in 1920, just outside Hanoi. As a girl she attended a French academy and had her teeth dyed lacquer-black, a traditional rite of beauty. When she married at twenty her husband had a burgeoning import business, selling everything from potatoes to jewelry to cigarettes. These were the good years, when Noi wore shimmering gold bracelets up and down her arms. She had a nanny for each child, silks for her
ao dai
s. But as the country sped toward partition, the North Vietnamese government targeted the educators, writers, business-people. My grandfather's contacts fell away; his company failed. Slowly they sold off their silks and jade. My grandmother's bracelets, hidden carefully under long-sleeved blouses, became gold bartered for groceries.

One day my grandfather was taken away: interrogated, held in jail for weeks, stripped and beaten, ordered to reveal the anti-Communist ties he didn't have. My grandmother never speaks of this, his absence, the tension of each unknowing day. But my uncles say that when he was released he was a changed person. Not just broken, but brokenhearted. Just before the partition of Vietnam in 1954 the family fled south. It meant Noi leaving behind her four brothers and sisters, and it would be forty years before she would see them again.

Saigon meant freedom, a way to start over. They moved into one of the small cinderblock neighborhoods crowding the city and opened a store in the front room, selling odds and ends— stationery, games, candy. But my grandfather grew melancholy and depressed; he couldn't bring himself to begin anew. The store floundered, and each morning he woke up later and later. One fall day in 1959 my grandmother took a break from the empty store and went back to check on him. He had died, folded up in their bed. She said it was a heart attack or some kind of illness. My uncle Chu Cuong said it was sadness. He was nine years old then, my father eleven.

Noi began selling
pho
and noodle dishes on the street corner in the early mornings and evenings. She spent longer hours meditating and visiting the neighborhood temple. Her sons grew up, and in between school classes learned to make money by gambling. My father prowled the billiards halls; Chu Cuong mastered foosball. Years later, in a bar in the United States, a man asked him to be his teammate in some national foosball championship game. Chu Cuong declined, but appreciated the American lesson: if you can make money on a game like that, he said, you can make money on anything.

What happened between my grandfather's death and my family's flight from Vietnam: too much, is what my father says, and with never enough money. He, my uncles, and Grandmother dispute each other's memories. Instead of talking about the war they fixate on domestic details: Noi's pet chicken that went crazy with rage at the color red; the neighborhood cricket fights and how to catch a winning cricket; the family cat that brought them birds for dinner and kept as a companion a little white rat.

Toward the end of the war, my father broke his arm during an explosion—a minor injury that he stretched out for at least a year—and an army friend supplied him with ample leave passes. Hanging out in Saigon one hazy monsoon day, he met my mother. She was sitting in a restaurant, and he walked over and said hello. Later he took her to the movies; they sat in parks and traded stories about their families. He brought her home to meet Noi. They went out dancing. They fought and made up and fought again. She stayed with her family and he stayed with his. They went on together long enough to have my sister, then me. The city was beginning to crumble, its future grim and foreseeable by the end of August 1974. My father brought my sister and me to Noi. Eight months later we'd be gone.

Before Florence Street, before Rosa, my father shopped for American groceries while Noi minded my sister and me at the Purple Cow ice cream parlor in Meijer Thrifty Acres. That's when I fell in love with ice cream. I was awed by the store: its enormity, the towering shelves, everything brightly boxed and labeled. It was its own city of happiness, a free-for-all, and nothing symbolized joy more than the Purple Cow herself, presiding over the ice cream counter. She was cardboard and wide, life-sized, her eyes drowsy, mouth in mid-moo.

The Vietnamese word for ice cream is
ca lem
and it's what I hear in my mind whenever I think of ice cream, the syllables colluding with the pleasure of that first lick of sweet cold. Probably this is because I spoke the word so often, begging Noi for more
ca lem, ca lem.
My favorites were chocolate or Superman—a neon tie-dye of fruit flavors—stuffed into nutty-brown sugar cones that dripped ice cream onto my clothes.

Meijer and the Saigon Market, both on 28th Street, became the epicenters of our lives, splitting our existence between two cultures. The Saigon Market meant home, familiar faces and foods, our own language, a general store for all things Vietnamese. Here my father plotted parties with his new friends while my grandmother and her friends gathered donations to start a Buddhist temple. It's strange to think how young my father was then, barely thirty years old.

Those early days seem a profusion of moments without structure. They return to me in vivid collage: the fizz of 7UP pouring out of a green bottle; the smell of the wild roses in the backyard; the day I watched a work crew install a stop sign at the end of the street. Probably we would have gone on like this for a long time, oblivious and drifting, without Rosa to tell us hard facts: words like
school, dentist,
and
English
—realms we needed to enter.

When Rosa bought ice cream she went for the giant plastic buckets that Noi could reuse as water pails and planters. She favored butter pecan, chocolate swirl, and mint chocolate chip. In our new household, ice cream had clear purposes: to appease, to distract, to mark happiness. Anh, Crissy, and I all had bowls of ice cream when Rosa came home from the hospital in March 1979 with our new brother, Vinh.

I do not recall Rosa or my father ever speaking of the pregnancy, no doubt because she had become pregnant before she and my father got married. Since that was associated with sex, and out-of-wedlock sex at that, it fell into the category of the unmentionable. I only learned of Vinh's imminent arrival when Crissy pointed to a squalling newborn on a TV show and said, “Mom's having a baby, too.” I was four and a half years old when I held him for the first time, sitting on the edge of my parents' bed with Crissy and Anh, the idea of
brother
still incomprehensible. Vinh had had plenty of hair, black as mine, yet I felt no connection to him. Everything had happened too fast.

The fact of a son in the house pleased not only my father but Rosa a great deal, something I wouldn't understand until much later. She was still in the early stages of enthusiasm then, eager to solidify us into a family. She wanted my father's friends to be her friends, his community to be hers. When he took her to parties she stayed in the kitchen with the other wives, trying to learn Vietnamese and get in on their conversations. She spoke the language the way white people sometimes spoke to us: too loud, enunciating each word slowly. Rosa's communications with Noi were comical. Trying to help Noi cook, she would hold up a bag of sugar and ask, “How much?” The words emerged as a shout, causing Noi to giggle uncontrollably.

Crissy made a point to learn as little Vietnamese as possible. She resented how her life had been changed around, and she hated sharing anything, especially a bedroom. She often referred to us as “Viennese” or “Vietmanese.” Nonetheless, Anh and I looked up to Crissy. She had dark silky hair with natural waves, and to us everything she did, wore, and said was the coolest. Whatever she liked, we liked: Madonna, puffy lettering, Dr. Scholl's. When she wanted a dog we wanted one, too, and rejoiced when my father and Rosa relented. Crissy picked her out from the pound: a dirty-white Lhasa apso mix she named Mimi.

To celebrate Vinh's birth my father and Rosa threw a big party. Noi spent days in the kitchen, preparing piles of
cha gio
that she cooked in an electric fryer set up in the garage; shrimp cakes; platters heaped with
goi cuon,
fresh shrimp and vegetable spring rolls;
banh xeo,
delicate pancakes stuffed with meats, herbs, and bean sprouts; beef satay marinated in fish sauce, sugar, and lemongrass; mounds of vermicelli and rice for stewed shrimp; saucers filled with chilies swimming in
nuoc mam.
There were pasty dough balls stuffed with spiced pork and Chinese sausage; shrimp chips dyed in pastel colors, salty styrofoam that vanished on the tongue; pickled radishes, carrots, and cauliflower; heaps of dried coconut curls; dried persimmons, flat brown, each resembling a giant eye; nubs of sugared pineapple and papaya; green bean cakes; red bean cakes. And always, the teardrop crunchy-tart pickled shallots that came in small cans labeled “pickled leeks.” I would eat them even after my tongue burned from the brine. Noi never minded when I sneaked into the kitchen to grab the first shrimp chips, fresh from the deep fryer, a few
cha gio
cooling in a towel-lined colander, and extra pieces of the rich, salty-sweet Chinese sausage, blood red and shot through with white speckles of fat.

Anh and I were waitresses for the party, roles we would have for as long as parties lasted in that household. We fetched drinks and napkins while my father's friends beckoned to us, snapping their fingers. We were not the indulged little girls on Baldwin Street anymore, holding out our arms for a new toy or stick of gum. Now we were old enough to be useful, to wash dishes and do what we were told. Someone might want an extra beer or bean cake; another might need a dirty plate whisked away. Our heads were patted, cheeks pinched, shoulders grabbed while my father's friends assessed us out loud as good, thin, delicate, or clumsy.

The long hair we'd had on Baldwin Street had been clipped into the same bowl-shaped haircuts, later amended to Dorothy Hamill style, and for the party we wore identical patchwork dresses trimmed with rickrack. Anh and I liked to pretend we were twins. We had the same habit of finding hilarity at random moments— a stumble on the sidewalk, a glimpse of gaping-mouthed tennis shoes. But our similarities seemed to end there. She was lively and I was shy. She charmed everyone with her quick smile and perfect vision, while I had to wear horn-rimmed glasses too big for my face. Rosa had been the one to notice my poor eyesight, and these first glasses she'd chosen would set the precedent for the rest of my childhood—bulky plastic frames from the sale rack at the eye doctor's. I looked like a sorry version of my sister, and Rosa introduced us to the guests as “the pretty one and the smart one.”

In the living room, people passed baby Vinh around as if he were an objet d'art, and in a way he was—multiracial, a child for the next century. When they finished admiring him they praised Anh and Crissy's pretty faces. I didn't mind slipping into the background. I was perpetually worried about breaking my glasses or being teased. I had discovered that adults liked to ask children questions only to laugh at their answers, and I hated being the butt of a joke, having to stand there and take it as a proper child should.
You're too shy, how are you going to get a husband?
someone might ask, setting the room into laughter.

Stealing a bowl of pickled leeks off the dining table, I slunk off to my top-bunk bed. I hid there with a book, eating the sour shallots until my eyes teared up, thinking of the block of Breyers Neapolitan ice cream that Chu Cuong had left waiting in the freezer. He sneered at buckets of ice cream, preferring, he said, the balance of sugar and cream in Breyers All Natural.

I didn't know it then, but Vinh's birth would signal the return of Rosa to her own family. She had grown up in a strict Catholic household, one of ten children—eight girls and two boys. Her parents were migrant workers who had come from Texas to follow the crop seasons in Michigan: sugar beets, cherries, blueberries, apples. They had settled in Fruitport, a small town near Lake Michigan. Most of Rosa's siblings thought she was hoitytoity, going off to Grand Valley State instead of getting married. But apart from one college semester in Denmark—a place she would talk about for years as though she had just come back—she hadn't gotten much farther than western Michigan. In Grand Rapids, working as a teacher after college, she got pregnant by a white guy who had no interest in marriage and children. So, alone, Rosa raised Crissy. Stung by her family's criticism, she became an atheist, immersed herself into left-wing activism—as much as was possible in Grand Rapids—and made her own life and career.

She was a strong woman, and we knew it in every word she spoke to us. But while her politics were liberal, when it came to what she called
personal matters
she was silent. On this she and my father never disagreed. Subjects such as Crissy's father, my and Anh's mother, and sex, especially sex, fell into the category of the taboo. Danger! Warning! Look away! We could watch cop shows and kung fu movies all day, but if a scene or a song referenced sex, then the whole production risked being shut down. We were even supposed to change the channel when people kissed on TV, as if seeing such an act would shift us into becoming
bad girls.