Stealing Buddha's Dinner (12 page)

Kindergarten was the last good time I had in school.

The next year, I had to join Anh in bilingual education class. Three times a week we were excused from our regular classrooms to meet Mr. Ho and Miss Huong in a conference room near the principal's office. They hovered over a growing band of newer Vietnamese students, most of them older than Anh and I, some who'd had their ages changed on their green card paperwork so they could start school at a lower grade. They studied their work-books intently. By comparison, Anh and I were completely Americanized. We also knew English as well as any of the white kids, but we kept that fact between ourselves. We were girls who did what we were told, and if Rosa said we needed bilingual education then we went along. I remember mimeographs from English language guide books, the purple ink smudging my hands. Mr. Ho and Miss Huong led us through exercise drills:
How are you? I am fine, thank you. Thank you for the directions. Teacher, may I please use the bathroom?
I felt silly, a fraud, but I chanted the words anyway, pretending to learn.

My regular first-grade teacher, Mrs. Sikkema, had hair like a shower cap and a sour, pinched face. She always assessed homework with a drawing of a ghost.
Good job!
And then a loopy Casper, smiling. Anh, now happily ensconced in gentle Mrs. Hanley's second grade, had warned me about Mrs. Sikkema's grouchiness. When the time came for me to slink off to bilingual ed she would throw a cold look my way, and all the other students would look, too. That's when I became friends with Loan, the other Vietnamese girl in first grade. At recess we stuck together, for it was during one of these breaks that we first encountered a group of kids yelling at us while they pushed their eyelids into slits. Lowering our heads to conceal our faces and eyes, we hurried away. We played with Corinne and Lucy, a freckled, curly-haired girl who had lost half of her left arm to an accident. The playground had huge cement tubes to crawl through and balance on, and sometimes the four of us sat huddled together inside, looking at the graffiti the older kids had scrawled on the walls: a litany of names, hearts, and stars.

Once, out of nowhere, a pale girl with frizzy pigtails tied with pink ribbons challenged me to a fight on the playground. She appeared toward the end of recess as I was jumping off a swing. Wearing a tight jumper and a hooded coat, she faced me squarely, her eyes gray as the sky. She might have been a third- or fourth-grader. I had never seen her before. “Come on,” she said, balling up her hands into fists. “Let's fight.” I looked at Corinne and Lucy, who stood frozen. Pigtails' friends took a couple of steps forward and one of them halfheartedly pointed to Corinne and said, “I guess we should fight, too.”

It had rained earlier that day, and the whole playground still smelled like worms. I thought about what it would feel like to get punched for real—not the fake way my sisters did—and how muddy my coat would get.

“Come on,” Pigtails said, her fists at chin level.

“Okay,” I replied. In spite of my terror, I had a clear sense that running away wouldn't work here. “Let me tie my shoes first,” I said. I knelt down, scrunching myself up so Pigtails wouldn't see how slowly I tied and untied the laces. All of the girls waited. I kept tying the laces, drawing the moments out until the end-of-recess bell rang.

Corinne, Lucy, and I raced back to first grade and didn't speak of the incident. For months I kept a low profile at recess, afraid that the girl with the pigtails would seek me out, but I never saw her again. She had grown bored, I hoped, had moved on to someone else or forgotten me. Or perhaps I had gotten my wish and become invisible to her.

The first Tet festivities I remember happened that school year. The Vietnamese Community Center organized a day of festivities at the Marriott Hotel, a precursor to today's “celebration of diversity and multiculturalism.” My stepmother, never one to be left out, got into the spirit by volunteering Anh and me to help showcase Tet at Chamberlain Elementary. She also signed me up to perform a traditional spring dance with seven other girls at the Marriott. When I complained, she told me that it was my duty. “It's your custom,” she reminded me. “It's the way Vietnamese do things.” She added that my father would be proud of me for dancing, a surefire way to get me to agree.

In the music room at Chamberlain we practiced dancing with the instructor, a young woman who was a friend of Miss Huong's. Loan and I were partners in the dance, and we giggled as we circled each other, tapping lightly on the paper drums that hung around our necks. Miss Huong didn't like it when I held the drum up to my chin, pretending to be a Saint Bernard like the ones I had seen in cartoons. She made Loan and me learn to pause, do a semi-curtsy, then weave around the other girls. The drums were yellow, and striped with red to mimic the Vietnamese flag. The real flag, my stepmother reminded me, not the evil Communist flag.

Rosa had a lot to say about Communists. They became a great tool for keeping us kids in line. “If you don't behave,” she would warn, “the Communists are going to come get you. You know what they do? They march down the street, hundreds and thousands of them, and they take everyone from their houses.” I would shiver, hearing her descriptions. “If the Communists take over we'll live in a police state,” she said.

“What's a police state?” I asked.

“It's when you can't even go outside because they might shoot you.”

I vaguely understood that “the Communists” were the reason we had ended up in America, in Michigan. I knew that Communists had warred against the good guys—people like us. But no one explained why or what it all meant. In our household, the “why” question got me exactly nowhere. “Why are the Communists out to get us?” “Because they're bad.” “Why are they bad?” “Because they're Communists.” “Why?” “Because I said so.”

Tet was a great holiday because it was all about food, firecrackers, and cash. My father and uncles would throw strings of snaps on the ground and hand out sparklers, rousing the ire and suspicion of the Vander Wals, which only goaded them on. But the first thing we did when we woke up was race to Noi and yell,
Chuc mung nam moi!
Happy New Year! As soon as we said it she would hand us little red envelopes stamped in gold and filled with fresh twenty-dollar bills.

Noi spent days preparing for Tet, and long before we got up she would have arranged a feast before Buddha. First, the labor-intensive
banh chung,
green sticky rice cakes steamed in banana leaves, tied with strips of bamboo and embellished with red ribbon.
Banh chung
could take two days to make: the sticky rice, the green beans mashed into a paste, the marinated pork. All of these had to be folded together in the right proportion for each cake, encased in banana or bamboo leaves, and tied into square bundles. As the cakes steamed, the green of the leaves seeped into the rice, turning it a lovely shade of celadon.
Banh chung
was a symbol of Tet—its painstaking effort, its presentation as a gift. When we ate these cakes we were supposed to honor the beginning of a new year of hopes and good wishes.

Everyone loved
banh chung
except me. Oh, I loved the packaging of it. I loved opening the smooth bamboo leaves to reveal the green glutinous rice beneath. But I never needed much more after the first bite—the rice clotted the roof of my mouth, the dusty bean paste got in the way of the treasured pork. Usually I gave the rest of my
banh chung
to Anh, who could eat them one after the other without stopping. I had a more fickle palate, easily bored, and wanted the crisp, oil-edged taste of
cha gio
(with plenty more ready to be fried in the kitchen), fresh
goi cuon
summer rolls, egg pancakes stuffed with herbs and bean sprouts, shrimp chips, fried shrimp, pickled carrots and shallots, fresh
bun
noodles topped with seasoned beef, coriander, and a fine sprinkling of peanuts, and doughy white
banh bao
balls stuffed with sweet Chinese sausage.

The Tet of 1981 seemed to last for days. Noi sewed matching
ao dais
for me and Anh out of a silky red fabric and white flowy pants. Rosa made us wear them to school, though we desperately did not want to, knowing how the other kids would stare at us. But it was Tet day, and there would be an assembly in the gym so that all the kids in the school could learn about the lunar new year. So we resigned ourselves: we would be on display.

Noi had made an extra pile of
banh chung
for Anh and me to take to school. The cakes appeared glimmering on a tin platter in the morning, tied with extra curled red ribbons, and well wrapped in plastic to keep them from drying out. Because we were dressed in our
ao dais
our teachers assumed we would be spending the morning preparing for the assembly. We didn't correct them. The feeling of being set apart in our outfits had united us. Alone we were self-conscious, but together we were emboldened. So instead of going to bilingual class, or to the gym where boys were practicing the dragon dance, Anh and I decided it would be a good time to eat the rice cakes. We found an empty bench in a hallway and balanced the tray between us. We had the whole pile, yet we still chose our cakes carefully. Noi always took care to shape all of her portions into equal sizes, if for no other reason than to minimize squabbling. But we always felt that some pieces were bigger than others, or heavier, indicating more pork and rice within. Anh took a large bite right away, but I liked to take my time, finding more pleasure in the unwrapping. I liked that first glimpse of green, glossy rice, the leaf color soaked right through it. The musty, Saigon Market smell of the bean paste filled my nose as I bit into the cake. For a while we sat there, happily chewing away. The day was shaping up to be a good one— money, more food at home, excused from class, and an entire tray of treats to ourselves. It was like Baldwin Street all over again, just my sister and me hanging on to precious bundles of saved food.

Then Mrs. Hanley walked by and stopped short. “Oh, girls,” she said. “These are for everyone.” And just like that, she took the
banh chung
away from us. We knew then that they would be going to the Land of Sharing, of white people looking and declining. The cakes would grow crusty and stale under the recoiling gazes of our classmates. They would be ruined by the staring.

At the assembly, after the usual Pledge of Allegiance (me murmuring “one nation, under Buddha, for witches' stands”), a surprise song burst from the speakers: Neil Diamond singing,
On the boats and on the planes, they're coming to America! Never looking back again, they're coming to America!
My stepmother, who loved Neil Diamond, often sang this at home, calling out, “This song is about you! It's about boat people! You're a refugee, honey!” while she swayed to the thundering drumbeats. I was mortified that someone had created such a song and I wanted him to shut up. I especially hated the way he drew out the word
Today!,
his voice growing softer with each repeat. Sitting with the other Vietnamese kids in the school gym, I stared down at my feet—my brown loafers looked so clumsy and ugly with my
ao dai
—and wished the record player would explode.

Finally the music subsided and I could look up to concentrate on the dragon song. A group of boys set the long dragon costume over their heads and began rollicking across the gym floor. The other students sat cross-legged around the perimeter, watching the dragon's face shining with flecks of gold and green, red tassels flying. Its huge eyes and wide, grinning smile had an almost sinister look. The dragon circled the gym to the tune of the dragon song, loud with cymbals and bass, playing on a boom box that sat on the stage with the principal and several of the teachers. In spite of my discomfort, I loved the spectacle of the dragon, the fear and joy in its face, the way its head cocked to and fro in time to the beats. Someone had decorated the wall behind them with little paper roosters and the words “
Chuc mung nam moi
—Happy New Year” in yellow letters cut out of construction paper.

When the show was over, Mr. Ho called up all of us Vietnamese kids to the stage. This was a surprise, but I followed directions, lining up with Anh and Loan in a timid row while the white kids stared at us from the court lines. Mr. Ho made some speech about the Vietnamese people and thanked everyone at Chamberlain for being so welcoming. Miss Huong appeared then with a bundle of red roses in her arms. She faced us kids and beckoned right at me. I didn't move until Anh gave me a sharp nudge. Then I stumbled forward, and Miss Huong handed me the roses, telling me to give them to Mrs. Bailey, the principal. As I did so, feeling like a first-grade, first-class idiot, Rosa snapped a picture from somewhere in the back of the gymnasium. Later, Anh and I helped pass out Botan rice candies while our classmates milled around peeking at the
cha gio
that some of the parents had set up on tables. I saw our piles of green sticky rice cakes there, uneaten, and did not dare take another.

That weekend I put on the red
ao dai
again and danced at the Marriott Hotel while a group of mostly Vietnamese watched us with soft, misty-eyed faces. Loan and I had gotten into an argument the day before—something about who was a better dancer and who had the nicer
ao dai.
At the Marriott we met each other with cold eyes. We went around each other with our precise steps, tapping the drums at even intervals. As the high-pitched voice of the singer blared from the speakers, singing something about the beautiful arrival of spring, we danced and swayed and stepped as we had been taught, more or less in unison. Loan and I glared at each other as we pivoted, faced each other, and pivoted again. “Shut up,” she muttered as she swept past me. “You shut up,” I replied.

But as soon as the dance ended and people burst into applause, we couldn't help smiling. We looked at each other. We were nearly the same, two Vietnamese girls, friends and dance partners. At the reception, we made up over plates of
cha gio,
doughy dumplings stuffed with Chinese sausage, and
gio lua,
a peppery, bologna-like meat that resembled, in color and texture, the back of an old man's hard-worked hand. We could have been twins, we decided. We liked all the same foods. We talked about pizza and hamburgers and ice cream. We both liked Blue Moon flavor, as well as Superman, orange sherbet, and mint chocolate chip.