Stealing Buddha's Dinner (20 page)

At Grandma and Grandpa's house I walked on tiptoe, feeling like a delinquent, waiting for a chance to relax. When everyone else was outside I studied the rosaries over the doorways, the giant reproduction of
The Last Supper
over the dining table, and the western scenes of Conestoga wagons printed on the living room upholstery. In the hallway leading to the bedroom, I memorized, out of pure boredom, the “footprints in the sand” story that had been framed on the wall.
And the Lord said, My son, during your times of suffering, when you could see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.

I remember being caught in the hallway, looking at that footprints story, by Tía Ana, the youngest sister. It was her graduation party—this must have been the summer of 1984, when I was nine going on ten—and she was in such a good mood that she invited me into her room, where a bunch of cousins were helping her get ready. Ana wore a smocked, strapless white dress she kept adjusting. “How are my
chichones
?” she asked cousin Eva, who was a year older than Crissy and had a dimpled smile. Winking, Ana remarked that there would be a lot of boys at the party. Like her sisters, she had plump arms and lots of coarse, curly hair. I thought she was beautiful and happy, reaching out to claim the summer day as her own.

Rosa had been the first in the family to go to college. Most of the kids at Fruitport High didn't go, and Rosa herself never thought of it until a counselor approached her one day with the suggestion. Back then, Rosa later told me, no one thought about Mexicans going to college. The goal, after high school, was to get married. Men sought factory jobs. Women sought to be wives and mothers. A car, a house, and a family were the signs of success—a good, decent life. But the thought of college excited Rosa, who loved school and dreamed about traveling the world. She applied to a new college, Grand Valley State, located just twenty miles away in Allendale, Michigan, and the school offered her a scholarship. It was only then that Rosa told her parents about her plans.

Being the first to go, Rosa opened the way for her siblings to follow. Only one sister pursued it as far as Rosa did and eventually moved to Colorado, the only one in the family to leave Michigan. Others made it a semester or two before dropping out and returning home to marry and work. The fact was that a college education set Rosa apart. She was perceived as being “too big for her britches,” a phrase she frequently applied to me, followed by, “Who do you think you are?” I wonder what the family thought when she arrived with her half-white daughter born out of wedlock, her new Vietnamese husband, two Vietnamese step-daughters, and her new half-Vietnamese son.

As much as I hadn't bargained for a whole new family, I did want to be accepted into the group. But as the visits to Rosa's family accumulated, so did my sense of self-consciousness. I was too ugly, my body too small, my face too stubborn. I was too aware of being Vietnamese. I was the quiet one in the corner with my books, the one who refused to be like the others. I couldn't conceal it, either. I didn't want to sit outside slapping mosquitoes and watching the men drink beer. I didn't want to fetch kitchen supplies for the women or listen to them laugh and comment, as I grew older, on my non-
chichona
status. My stepmother and her sisters had big curves and often talked about them, nudging and laughing, using a flurry of Spanish words that I supposed referred to various body parts, grown-up acts.

It didn't take long for my loneliness, though it was mostly self-imposed, to devolve into resentment. I resented the aunts and uncles who couldn't tell my sister and me apart. I resented long holidays in Fruitport, looking for a place to hide out with my books. I resented, then buried in guilt, being told to love people I did not know.

When my books had been read and reread, when all of the kids were as bored as can be—the TV always under the authority of uncles watching baseball or football—some of us would walk down the road to the little convenience store half a mile away. I loved and loathed this store. Loved because it was the only purveyor of candy and joy to be found. Loathed because it was called Kountry Korner. The store had bars over its windows and dusty shelves of chips and beer. The dimness of the place made me shiver, and I never took much satisfaction out of choosing a Milky Way or shoestring red licorice. Why, oh, why, I wondered, couldn't it have been called Country Corner? There was no need to use
K
s instead of
C
s. I voiced this complaint once, walking there with Crissy, Anh, and cousin Becca, and everyone snickered at me, exchanging glances. Crissy twirled a finger around her ear to say,
Crazy.

One of my most vivid memories of Fruitport is caught in a photograph: me and Anh in our matching calf-length hooded jackets that Noi had knitted for us out of pink and blue yarn. It is a cold, rainy Easter, the sky like steel behind us. The hem of Anh's maroon dress peeks out from her jacket and she is smiling, having found dozens of Easter eggs in the hunt some of the grown-ups organized. I am so small beside her, six or seven years old, a mere spot of knitted jacket, the hood pulled tight over my head so that only my glasses seem to jut out; my fists are jammed into the patch pockets. My face is stubborn and sad—its usual expression, with an undercurrent of anger at the whole day. I thought of Easter as a mellow form of Christmas, with the Easter Bunny instead of Santa, and baskets of fake grass and chocolate eggs instead of stockings and presents. I didn't care for hard-boiled eggs—no matter how dyed or painted, they were merely eggs, and not my idea of treasure (unless they were well deviled with mustard and paprika). I wanted plastic shells instead, purple and pink opening to reveal M&M's or chocolates wrapped in pastel-colored foil. I believe I found only one or two eggs in that hunt. I was too slow, and my glasses kept getting blurred with drizzle. I could see the grown-ups laughing at me, and I couldn't even blame them. All I wanted was to go home, back to my slice of solitude on the top bunk.

But we kept going back to Rosa's family, of course. Every year the drives grew more silent and tense. My father enjoyed himself about as much as Rosa did at Vietnamese parties. Once in a while, his attention elsewhere, he would miss the highway exit. Rosa would point this out and set him off shouting that he knew how to drive. Had he been permitted to stay in Grand Rapids, he could have met up with his friends at Anazeh Sands for billiards. After a few rounds, which my father would win if he didn't drink too much, they'd end up at someone's house with a deck of cards and a fresh bottle of Hennessy. Rosa knew all too well how my father preferred to spend his weekends, and she wanted to put a stop to it, for he always drank too much and always came home broke. His coats smelled of Winston cigarettes and the metallic tinge of winter air.

For years we went to Fruitport every Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. We could put it off if Chu Cuong or Chu Dai won a turkey at a bowling tournament, but then we would have to go the day after. No getting around it. I figured it was better to go when the abundance of food hit its peak, when we could be sure to have Grandma's flour tortillas and spicy rich tamales. She made everything from scratch, rolling out each tortilla before dawn. Rosa reheated them directly on the stove's gas burner, over a low flame. With the tips of her fingers she kept flipping the tortillas until they were heated through, then dropped them onto a plate and glossed them up with margarine. I loved that first taste of tortilla: it felt like a flattened pillow between my teeth, an initial bite and chew not unlike that of juice-filled bubblegum.

The tamales encompassed hours of work. Grandma recruited her daughters to soak the corn husks and help her mix together spicy red beef and hand-ground, tender masa. The tamales were prepared and folded by hand in a process as rigorous as making
cha gio,
and steamed until the packages turned tawny. It seemed that the more work it took to make a dish, the better it tasted. We only ate tamales on holidays, and I was aware each time not to take too many. Though I longed to pile my plate with them, quickly unrolling the husks to cram the meat-filled treats into my mouth, I knew that greed was a sin in Rosa's family. If I took three tamales rather than two, a
tía
might glance at my plate and wonder out loud why a little girl like me had eyes bigger than her stomach.

Besides tamales and tortillas, each holiday included a giant turkey that was sometimes cooked for half a day in a pit, a vat of mashed potatoes with gravy boats nearby, Stove Top stuffing, Pillsbury crescent rolls, canned corn soaked in butter, canned string beans mixed with cream of mushroom soup and baked with Durkee fried onions, frijoles, arroz con pollo, pumpkin empanadas, and mashed sweet potatoes covered with mini-marshmallows toasted under the heat of the broiler. One of the
tíos
was married to a white woman who always brought instant pistachio pudding mixed with plenty of Cool Whip and canned pineapple tidbits. The dessert side of the table held a collection of homemade and store-bought pumpkin pies. I didn't like the texture or the cloying spices in the pumpkin pie, though I would deign to eat a piece if it was smothered in Cool Whip. Mostly I concentrated on the various Jell-Os studded with canned fruit, and the store-bought apple and cherry pies. Cherry was my favorite. I loved fresh cherries above all other summer fruits for their redness, the sweet-tart juice, the danger of their stain. I often begged Rosa to take us cherry-picking in the summer, but she didn't care for cherries as much as blueberries.

I always wished dinner could last longer, for when it was over I had no more purpose in Fruitport. I sometimes got invited to play hide-and-seek or checkers or Monopoly with Anh and cousin Becca. If not, I would retreat to whatever corner or chair I could find and reread the books I had brought. I guarded them, always paranoid that someone would take away my well-worn copy of
Harriet the Spy
or
The Girl with the Silver Eyes.
At Christmas I sat through the gift exchange with little interest. Anh and I always received random pieces of plastic jewelry, and I never had much luck with the “grab bag” of toys the grown-ups passed around to the kids, save for the time I drew out a ten-pack of Carefree gum. After a while, Grandpa would pick up his guitar and serenade the family with beautiful old songs. His voice softened me and made me feel something like homesickness.

It was always late when we finally drove home. In the backseat of our successive cars—the blue Ford Econoline van that my father had carpeted, the maroon Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, the tan Mitsubishi Vista—my siblings and I would fall asleep. But once in a while, a wave of alertness washed over me and I would stare out the window, trying to keep my eye trained on a single pine tree as we sped by it. Usually everyone else would be asleep, too, including Rosa in the passenger seat, her head slumped over to one side. My father didn't listen to the radio when he drove, and I could never see his expression in the rearview mirror.

Rosa took offense at how much I resisted Fruitport. To her, it translated to a dislike of her family, simple as that.
You're getting too big for your britches,
she said. “You need to” began many of her sentences. You need to learn more Spanish. You need to play with your cousins. You need to get a better attitude. To which I defended myself once with, “I like tamales and tortillas,” and she just stared at me, baffled.

I couldn't explain to her that it wasn't dislike; it was unfamiliarity. Her family didn't know me as I didn't know them. It was too much for me to synthesize white American culture, Mexican-American culture, and my own Vietnamese culture all at the same time. I couldn't explain, either to Rosa or myself, that in wanting to belong everywhere I ended up belonging nowhere at all. “You don't understand” was my standard phrase, a useless catchall to convey what I didn't know how to say. “We're all in this together,” Rosa insisted, but it took me years to comprehend what she meant.

I can see the route we always took back home, my father exiting off I-131 at 36th Street toward our neighborhood. Our house lay at the intersection of Sycamore and Florence, and I had nightmares about cars sailing down Sycamore's hill and smashing in our front door. But everything outside was still when my father parked at the curb. On a whim he had bought an old motorboat off the classified pages in the
Grand Rapids Press.
He had talked about spending summer days cruising the small orb of Gun Lake and maybe even Lake Michigan someday, but the motor needed to be repaired and he never did get around to it. Covered with a bright blue tarp, the boat shared the driveway with Rosa's broken-down Toyota. In the summer, Vinh and I might sit in the red vinyl captain's chair, pretending to steer ourselves toward an undiscovered island. Inside the house, Noi had left the lights on for us. Rosa put away some leftovers she had brought back—only once or twice did they contain tamales—and I carried my books down the hall. We were all of us silent at such times, lost in our own thoughts that aimed us in different directions.

MY SISTER ANH AND I ATTENDED CATHOLIC SCHOOL
for four days in the fall of 1982. St. Joseph's Elementary had old stone halls that arched into echoes when I and the other third-graders followed Sister Wendy down to the library. Much to my disappointment, the younger nuns wore regular clothes. I only saw black-clad figures and wimples, the fabric stirring slightly, on the older nuns, the administrator nuns. My frame of reference for them was
The Sound of Music,
and I kept hoping that these nuns would break into song. But there were no wayward Marias in this lot.

Like many immigrant parents, mine believed in education as a ticket, a necessity, and the only way forward. Rosa believed in it more than anyone; she'd devoted her whole career to it. But therein lay one of her many contradictions. She worked in public schools, and had thrown off the mantle of her Catholic upbringing years ago, but she also believed that St. Joseph's would provide us with better learning and discipline, the latter of which Anh and I both needed, being prone to temper tantrums.