Stealing Buddha's Dinner (23 page)

As I sat in the Vander Wals' tree, Christianity seemed about as real as Agapaopolis. It seemed as distant from my person as blond hair and blue eyes. It also seemed manipulative, what with all that fire and hell. When Jennifer talked about the Lord it was with equal parts love and fear. Noi didn't fear, or even really love, Buddha. She didn't worship him; she gave him her respect. That showed in the way we slept with our heads facing him and in the fruit, incense, and candles set forth each day. When she bowed and chanted she wasn't praying out of fear, or to save herself, or to ask for something good to happen for her. The Christians were God's minions, but Noi was not Buddha's.

I bit into the plum. I was struck, as always, by the contrast of the yellow flesh, limned with the scarlet underside of the skin. I took small bites so as not to waste a drop of juice. Too soon, the fruit was gone and the pit lay in my palm. It was an eye, I realized. A wrinkled, wizened eye. I thought about how the spirits were always watching out for us. They were never too far away. I set the eye on a branch where I could face it, and it me. I sat there for a long time. I heard the sound of Linda Vander Wal's car leaving and then returning, bringing Jennifer back from Bible school. I listened to the car doors slam and the murmur of their voices, the screen door shutting them into their house. The daylight began to glow—that quiescent hour before the beginning of sunset—and I knew it was time to go home. I left the plum's eye in the plum tree. It was gone the next time I climbed up there. I imagined it carried off by the wind, or by my ancestors' spirits, coming to collect the meager offering I had left behind.

WHEN WE LIVED ON FLORENCE STREET, GOING OUT TO
dinner meant one of two places: Yen Ching or Chi-Chi's. We never went to Bob Evans, Big Boy, Perkins, Schelde's, or the Ground Round, all of which sounded
bland,
Rosa said.
Too American.
They were the kinds of places that served prime rib specials. My friend Holly knew all about it. In her basement we played waitresses with menus from Bill Knapp's, a white clap-board restaurant with “ye olde English” lettering, faux-wrought-iron sconces, and early-bird and family specials. I'd never been to Bill Knapp's, and trusted Holly's understanding of twice-baked potatoes and smothered chicken. We took imaginary customers' orders and balanced trays of plastic toys that we pretended were salads and steaks.

When it came to American restaurants, my parents seemed to approve only of the low and the high—fast food and expensive seafood. One to get, the other to dream about. When we drove past Charley's Crab downtown, its façade of broad windows lit up with a giant neon crab, all of it thoroughly out of reach, my father would murmur an
ahhh
sound. Good seafood was a link to Vietnam for my father, uncles, and Noi. In the Midwest, it was also a luxury.

Yen Ching still sits near Woodland Mall on 28th Street, with the same yellow and red exterior and pagoda-ish roof. Its sign bears the standard “Asian” font—choppy strokes to evoke kung fu and calligraphy—and the menu has chop suey for non-Asians to order. Back then it was a closed-off place, part of the separate world I kept from my friends at school. It was also like the feeling of having a secret lover. Yen Ching had a dark interior, glamorous red-fringed lanterns, silkscreen artwork on the walls, and Confucian calendars printed on the place mats. If you were born in the Year of the Tiger, the place mats said, you were bold and ferocious. Tigers made excellent matadors and race car drivers. Beethoven, Eisenhower, and Marilyn Monroe—all tigers!

If we were lucky we got to sit at one of the round tables with a lazy Susan in the middle, better for sharing the dishes of shrimp, chicken with snow peas, cashew chicken, sweet and sour pork, and Mongolian beef, plus egg drop soup and egg rolls for all. Crissy, who to this day will not touch a bite of seafood, could eat the entire platter of beef by herself, barely letting me snatch a spoonful of the sweet, soft meat and the strings of caramelized onion. I always sat next to Noi, who snapped up choice bits of pineapple, cashew, and chicken with her chopsticks and deposited them on my plate. She was comfortable in a place like Yen Ching, where the rice arrived perfectly steamed and the menu listed more than a dozen versions of shrimp and fish. She ate the way Vietnamese ate, with the rice bowl close to her mouth. The slurp of soup and suck of shrimp shells—these were the sounds of a good meal. I didn't think anything wrong with it until I noticed Crissy wrinkling up her whole face in disgust.

Crissy preferred Chi-Chi's and so did Rosa, though she'd grown up eating real tortillas handmade before dawn, frijoles simmered for hours, and pico de gallo spiked with fresh cilantro and bracing chilies. I liked Chi-Chi's for the buoyed feeling of family togetherness I felt whenever we went there, all of us trying to consume as much as possible of the free chips and salsa. Rosa lingered over the menu, pronouncing all the words emphatically. “Do you want a tos TAAHHdah,” Anh and I would mimic her, dissolving into giggles. “How about a FLOOUUta?” We had to choose from the dreaded children's menu, limited as all such menus were, with its meager assortment of tacos and burritos.

My father always liked the steak and chicken fajitas, which arrived sizzling in a cast-iron pan. The thin, wafery tortillas came from a plastic warmer made to look like a terra-cotta crock. Noi didn't care for Chi-Chi's, though she'd take a few bites of the dry Mexican rice. But surely she, too, was charmed by the restaurant's dimmed lighting, faux-stucco walls, and potted plants with giant fronds. The candles glowing in resin holders on every table made the place seem downright fancy. The waitresses, wearing big Mexican dresses that ruffled off the shoulder and down to the ankle in dramatic flounces, swooshed around us with their trays. I sometimes wished Rosa could give up her job at the Hispanic Institute and work at Chi-Chi's instead.

It was an arrangement that worked for a while—Yen Ching, Chi-Chi's, fast food. At home, Noi did most of the cooking and Rosa chipped in with
sopa
and tacos.
We can be a nice family,
I wrote in my diary, an uncertain declaration.

If I had to pinpoint a time, a year of change, I would begin in 1984. The year of
Like a Virgin
and
Purple Rain,
Crissy's first boyfriends, Brownie troop,
The Karate Kid,
and a new mini-air-hockey table purchased for our basement. And my father and Rosa, quarreling, expanding the fissures in the plate tectonics of our household.

That summer, the Kentwood Public Library gave out free lunch vouchers to Denny's anytime a kid checked out a book. The meal options were spaghetti, hot dog, hamburger, grilled cheese sandwich. To Rosa the vouchers were like gold. She never took us to the library, or out to lunch, as often as she did that summer. In fact she was around a lot more than usual, though it took me a while to notice the sighing, tired look on her face.

I thought I would never get tired of Denny's, but after only a few weeks I grew irritated at the watery spaghetti noodles and unwavering menu. Rosa kept us going there anyway, determined not to waste free food. She was keeping a closer eye on us now, scaring Crissy's boyfriend Kenny away from the house and monitoring what we watched on TV. She was often around when my father wasn't. At night when he came home—from work or from seeing his friends—we all seemed to scatter. It was a small house, but there was a lot of different music playing in different rooms. My uncles liked the
Born in the USA
album. Crissy was getting into Ratt, Van Halen, the Violent Femmes, and anything with a punk edge, which meant the rest of us kids were getting into it, too. At the same time, Anh danced on her own to “The Glamorous Life,” aspiring to be Sheila E. I liked dopey ballads and narrative videos on MTV: “Time after Time,” “Love Is a Battlefield,” “Beat It,” and “Legs.” I liked how Cyndi Lauper stared forlornly out a train window and how Pat Benatar swung her shoulders at a pimp in a bar. I pretended to dance my way down a street, breaking up a knife fight; then, under the supervision of ZZ Top and their trio of women, I would be transformed from a demure girl into a vampy coquette with stiletto heels.

Rosa was singing different songs: “You Don't Bring Me Flowers Anymore,” and Donna Summer's “She Works Hard for the Money.” My father, perhaps paying attention, perhaps not, didn't listen to any music at all.

For he and Rosa were, increasingly, at odds. It seemed that the more she talked about “outreach” and “community” at the Hispanic Institute, the more my father grumbled about North American Feather. He went alone to the weekend Vietnamese parties and spent all of his spare time at Anazeh Sands or some friend's dining room table, smoking, drinking, and playing cards. If he happened to win, then he would be in a good mood, but those days were few and far between. At home, he and Rosa glared at each other, fighting about the parties, the drinking, and most of all, the money he kept pulling from their account to finance his nights out.

In the top drawer of Noi's credenza, I hoarded the tens and twenties I had collected over a year of Christmas, Tet, and my birthday. I used to love opening that drawer just before bedtime, to see all that money fanned out before me. It meant more than candy from Gas City and treats from the ice cream truck. It might mean the new shirt and pair of shoes that Rosa wouldn't be willing to buy; it might mean so many books, if only I could persuade someone to take me to Schuler's Bookstore. Then one night I opened that top drawer and found only empty space.

Noi, who consoled me with oranges and tart raspberry-shaped candies, confronted my father the next day. He flew into a rage, which meant he'd lost all the money gambling. “That's
my
money!” he shouted. “I give you everything,” he added, wheeling about to point a finger at me. I looked down at my feet, feeling the truth and guilt of his statement, thinking of all he had given me. Life. Flight. Clothes and candy and pop and potato chips. A better existence. Silently I promised him never to say a word about the money again. In the future, I would slip my holiday and birthday bills into pages of my books, feeling so shameful and stealthy that I often forgot the hiding spots. Months later a twenty might fall out onto my lap. My cheeks would burn, remembering my father's words.

We went on like this. The Denny's coupons ran out. I kept playing waitress with my friend Holly. Every once in a while my family would eat at Yen Ching or Chi-Chi's, go home in good spirits, then fall back into moodiness. We said
shut up, be quiet, cállate la boca.
We tread lightly around my father.

Rosa tried to rein him in with house projects. She figured that if he was busy working he wouldn't have time to go out partying so much. She pointed out what a great job he had done when we first moved into the house on Florence. He had stripped away the silver disco wallpaper in the kitchen and painted the cabinets white. In the basement he laid new carpet—a pattern of burnt golds and reds they had picked out together at the Carpet Factory. They had torn down the black padded bar area and covered the walls with sensible wood paneling. The basement was part family area, part bachelor pad. On one side my uncles kept their stereo equipment, crates of albums and cassettes, and oversized zebra-striped pillows. They indulged in black leather Eames loungers from the Herman Miller store. On the other side of the basement, board games were scattered across the floor with
Highlights
magazines, Magic Markers, knock-off Barbie dolls, and volumes from Rosa's impulse purchase: a complete set of the 1979
World Book Encyclopedia.

My father had a natural talent with carpentry, Rosa kept saying. She encouraged him to install an aboveground pool in the backyard. It was the only one in the neighborhood, though the old couple on Sienna Street had a gorgeous in-ground number protected by a fence. They invited only the Vander Wals once or twice a season. From our bloated tub we could hear their polite splashes, and shouted to drown them out, swimming in circles to create a whirlpool. Rosa was making a little more money now, and my father, too, at North American Feather. So they decided they could afford an addition to the house, to create a new dining room on the first floor and family room in the basement. My father did all of the interior work, from the drywall to the tile. He had great plans for a deck off the dining room, and installed a windowed door, painted a summery shade of persimmon. Rosa scoured the furniture sales and bought a mahogany dining table with brass piping along the legs. The matching chairs had seat cushions upholstered in a leaf-green velvety fabric. The set had been done in a style that Rosa called “contemporary,” which seemed to describe every Vietnamese home I'd seen: puffy leather couches, brass lamps, and glass-topped tables accompanied the requisite lacquer wall hangings depicting fishermen and farmers in mother-of-pearl designs.

In our new dining room Noi arranged tall potted plants around the windows. When it would get too hot in the summer she would sometimes sleep on the cold green tile, laying only a sheet between her body and the floor. I tried it once, to keep her company, but couldn't last longer than twenty minutes. She laughed to see my discomfort. In Vietnam she had slept on solid wood bedsteads—no mattress. My parents, meanwhile, picked out a new waterbed for themselves. At the Waterbed Gallery they flopped right down on the test models, their bodies swaying with the suppressed waves beneath them. There was almost nothing Rosa would say no to, it seemed, in order to keep my father at home.

The addition to the house was complete by the fall of 1985, when Rosa announced that we would be getting a new brother. A foster brother, she explained, practically fresh off the boat from a refugee camp. He'd been staying with a Vietnamese widower in Kentwood, but Rosa (who knew everyone's business) felt that he needed a real family to get him acclimated.
Ours,
she emphasized, a kind of rallying demand for unity. The news sent me into a tailspin. I wondered how I was going to explain this to my friends at school. As it was, no one else lived with their grandmother and uncles; no one else had a stepsister and a half-brother.