Stealing Buddha's Dinner (24 page)

Huynh was sixteen years old. He had fled Vietnam on a fishing boat while his mother and younger siblings remained in Saigon. For much of the past year he'd been stuck in a refugee camp in the Philippines, waiting for a sponsor. Now he was sleeping on our living room couch or the basement couch or anywhere my parents could find a place. Rosa worked him into our dish-washing rotation, assigned him to rake leaves, and enrolled him in bilingual ed classes at a big public high school downtown. He was one of us and yet he wasn't. Everything about him was strange to me: his accent, his tentative demeanor, his story of riding the sea with a small band of refugees, hoping not to capsize or be caught by pirates. He didn't talk much, and Rosa warned us not to bother him with questions.

Vinh, the sweet, easy one of us kids, befriended him instantly. Together they watched Saturday cartoons and after-school cartoons, and raced Hot Wheels. My sisters and I lurked, not knowing what to say to Huynh. I was ashamed of my inward thoughts: that I was glad I didn't have the heavy accent he had to work against; that I resented his presence, reminding me as it did of my own refugee status. I had almost convinced myself I wasn't an immigrant at all. Every time Tom Petty sang
You don't have to live like a refugee
on the radio, I looked for a different station. I wasn't exactly sure what the song was about, but it seemed taunting; in my mind, the word
refugee
had become embarrassing, synonymous with
foreign, weird.

Huynh didn't stay long enough with us for me to face my shame. He was miserable in Grand Rapids (that part I could understand) , where kids at school openly laughed at him and mocked his speech, and life on Florence Street was no great improvement from life with the widower who had sponsored him in the first place. One winter afternoon, about a month after he had come to live with us, he ran away, his footprints plain in the backyard of snow. He came back later, only to leave again. Back and forth he went, from us to the widower, until finally my parents let him go.

But Rosa was determined to make things work. In early 1986, when I was eleven and a half, she announced the arrival of Phuong and Vu, brothers from Saigon. They had been languishing in a refugee camp, Rosa said, after a harrowing boat ride from Saigon similar to Huynh's. It was our duty to welcome our new brothers, she reminded us. “It's time to give back,” she said, looking straight at me.

Phuong was about Crissy's age and Vu was about my age, though I couldn't be sure, because their paperwork had been changed so they could get a few more years of public schooling. They were quiet, shy, and rode a school bus together downtown. Vinh befriended Vu as he had Huynh. Phuong worked with my father on weekends, fixing up the house. Crissy, Anh, and I mostly stayed on the sidelines. We had been used to being the girls, so outnumbering Vinh that we made him one of us, even dressing him up as a doll sometimes. It was a disconcerting shift in power with two more boys in the house, and we girls didn't know what to make of it. My father and Rosa carried on as they always had, my father brooding, Rosa cheerful and pragmatic, telling our foster brothers to call her
Mom.

In the spring of 1986 my father stopped working at North American Feather. We all said he had quit, but I had to wonder if he'd been fired for showing up late too many times and getting into fights with his coworkers. We went out to Yen Ching on the day my father and Rosa decided that he would become an independent contractor. He would be good at it, for didn't everyone who stepped into the house admire the precision of his tiling, the careful grout, the shelves in the basement? He had an eye for clean lines and he had learned in Vietnam the basics of plumbing and electrical wiring. A fresh start, Rosa emphasized, was what he needed—what we all needed.

Which led, later that year, to the surprise announcement that we would be moving. I had seen my father and Rosa glancing at the real estate section of the
Press
but I wasn't prepared to hear that they'd actually bought a new house. It was located half an hour away, in Ada, a suburb east of town, notable for being the headquarters of Amway.

Rosa said we needed the extra space. She touted Ada as being “in the country,” which failed to thrill us kids. She had other reasons for wanting to move: there were too many kids now in our neighborhood, and the summer days of chasing after the ice cream man had given way to real adolescence for Anh and Crissy; the boys who lived up the block were increasing threats to their virginity. There was motivation, too, in getting my father away from southeast Grand Rapids and the heart of the Vietnamese community. Not that Rosa said any of this. I discerned the truth in her voice, in the way my sisters whispered on the phone to boys, and in the way my father would swing his car up to the curb far too late at night. Outside, weeds sprouted in the driveway cracks. The Vander Wals, too, had been trying to move for a while, a brown Century 21 sign stuck in their lawn for months.

My father never did get around to building the much-promised deck off the dining room at the Florence Street house. When he removed the doorknob and stuffed up the space with paper towels—afraid that one of us kids would open the door and fall to the ground below—we knew the deck would never happen. Though he talked about how great it would be to sit out there in the evenings and barbecue shrimp, when we moved to Ada the space remained, an unfulfilled promise.

Rosa called the new house in Ada a dream house, but I didn't know whose dream she was talking about. The only thing I liked about it was the driveway: it tunneled nearly a quarter of a mile through a canopy of oak and willow trees and crossed over a tiny creek that meandered by a small, scummy pond. I liked being set back from the road and hidden from view. The house itself was a dark-brown A-frame with a short wing protruding on either side. It looked like a sad imitation of a country cottage I had seen in one of the
Better Homes and Gardens
magazines Rosa sometimes bought. My parents praised the grove of woods that grew around the house, and Rosa boasted that the house stood on almost four acres. I didn't care about acres. I didn't like country houses any more than I liked the Kountry Korner on a dusty, lonely road in Fruitport. Inside, brown shag carpet spread out in every direction, and the dining room had been decorated with forestry wall coverings. Rosa saved her trump card for last: an enclosed swimming pool that jutted out the back of the house. It was an echoey room with a high, unfinished ceiling, more eerie than inviting. Rosa kept saying, “You can go swimming in the winter. Won't your friends be jealous?” But I had a feeling that we wouldn't be doing much of that, since my parents were always fretting about the cost of heat and electricity. “Every time you plug in that curling iron,” my father was fond of warning us girls, “it costs me five dollars.”

My parents had been able to buy the house only because it had been in foreclosure, and even then they'd had to use up all their savings and empty our college funds. It was news to me that such funds had ever existed. Chu Cuong and Chu Dai, spurred by the move, finally got their own apartment. They took with them their Eames chairs and zebra-patterned pillows, their tapes and ice cream and cans of pop. Just like that, after living with them my whole life and sitting near their room to hear their music, they were gone.

Moving to Ada didn't stop my father from going out at night and returning red-faced with drink. He simply drove farther to get to the parties. With no steady factory job to clock in and out of, he stayed out later, the headlights of his truck searching their way down the driveway long past midnight. He seemed to build his contractor business around his social life, taking leisurely months to tile a friend's kitchen or drywall a basement. Rosa retreated into her work at the Hispanic Institute. She sat on the board of several nonprofit organizations and spent evenings at committee meetings for literacy groups, La Raza, and United Way. She and my father almost bypassed each other, save for their late-night arguments that often sounded like muffled barks. In the morning I would sometimes find my father sleeping on the leather sofa in the living room.

All the vaunted house space didn't bring the family together. If anything, it gave us room to avoid each other more. Vinh and Vu might play fetch with our Lhasa apso, Lady (Mimi's successor) , and I'd walk past them to explore the little creek and pace up and down the driveway. Anh and Crissy squirreled themselves away to read
Cosmo,
talk on the phone, and try out new hairdos. Phuong often went to work with my father, or took extra vocational skills classes on his own. Somehow he and Vu fit right into our fractured family, becoming a part of the silent chaos. Outside, Noi put the gardens to order. I wished many times that I could be like her, so absorbed in work, blessedly solitary, unanxious about the rest of the world.

It was the spring of 1987 and I was finishing seventh grade at the City School, where Crissy and Anh had preceded me. It should have been my kind of place, a charter school for “gifted and talented” students. No sports or PE here, just academics, arts, and lots of kids who worried about their grades. But I didn't fit in even here. I was disorganized, unkempt, while everyone else carried hole punchers in their backpacks and big three-ring binders with at least twenty-five different color-coded tabs. Each semester all of the GPAs above 3.5 were printed out and posted on the walls: a long dot-matrix list on green and white paper, plain facts and fate. Seventh grade was still seventh grade—awkward, self-conscious—and even in the “smart school” cliques formed around the pretty ones.

Because my parents could not control each other they tried to control their kids. Crissy and Anh got the brunt of it, for they were the ones who wanted to attend the forbidden school dances and go out with friends on weekends. Any mention of boys was strictly off-limits. So Anh and Crissy did what they had to do: they sneaked out. They hid makeup and cigarettes in their purses. They used girlfriends as alibis in order to meet boys at Woodland Mall. When I heard them revving up Led Zeppelin or the Steve Miller Band while they curled their hair and applied fresh coats of mascara, I knew they were going someplace that I could not go. They pushed me out of the bathroom, spraying so much Aqua Net and White Rain that a film formed over the mirror.

It was that summer that my father discovered Ponderosa.

The steakhouse chain trumpeted low prices and the longest all-you-can-eat buffet in town: basins of macaroni and cheese, three-bean casserole, minestrone soup, pasta salad, mashed potatoes, stuffing, biscuits and gravy, Jell-O parfait, and all manner of deep-fried shrimp, chicken, and onions. The ribeye steaks— $7.99, including a baked potato and the full buffet—bore crosshatched grill marks and little plastic flags, stuck into them like yard signs, that declared “medium well.” That's how Rosa said we should always order steak. It was as tender as dough, with a smoky flavor that made me imagine great orange flames licking at the underside of the meat. The baked potatoes, wrapped in foil, had a bit of frothy innard peeping out, tinted yellow from the melting pat of margarine, and sprinkled with dried parsley. And after all that came the sundae bar, with a self-serve machine that pushed out soft vanilla or chocolate flavors that began melting as soon as they touched the bowls. There were tubs of hot fudge, caramel, and strawberry sauce, chocolate and rainbow-colored sprinkles, mini chocolate chips, nuts, and maraschino cherries.

Rosa's previous complaints about American food went out the window. We went to Ponderosa almost once a week, telling ourselves that we were saving money by eating all we could hold. I could leave plates of uneaten food without attracting a single lecture about the starving children in Vietnam. We traveled to and from Ponderosa as a family. There could be no fighting over the last piece of fried chicken when the buffet held plenty for all. Here, we could find a common ground.

But of course it couldn't last. We grew tired of the same rib-eyes and baked potatoes. We grew tired of looking at each other. I began to realize that the steak wasn't so much tender as it was fatty. And not so much char-grilled as it was artificially flavored. I began to eye the uniform grill marks with suspicion, and to chew slowly to discern the real flavor of beef. It occurred to me that it tasted nothing like the beef Noi sliced and stir-fried, dipped into
pho,
and seared with garlic. I noticed that the brick-colored floor of Ponderosa looked like the floor at Burger King. I grew impatient when dishes on the buffet took a long time to get refilled. The restaurant started to feel like what it was: a cafeteria. Even the soft-serve ice cream didn't taste good anymore. It was as unsatisfying as frozen yogurt, melting into inedible liquid, stained with fuchsia maraschino juice.

There was no one dinner that turned the tide. At some point, the savory bite of steak turned into a gristly lump. Margarine congealed on a collapsed, half-eaten baked potato, and the thought of my father taking home the leftovers and heating it all up in the microwave the next day filled me with sadness. Our visits to Ponderosa tapered off, until one day I realized we hadn't gone in weeks. I couldn't remember, either, when we had stopped eating at Yen Ching and Chi-Chi's. Around this time, I worked up the nerve to refuse traveling to Fruitport. I simply said, “I don't want to go.” To my surprise, Rosa didn't protest, and I walked away feeling off-kilter. Something had altered in my family and I didn't know how to identify it. The definition of family, of what it meant and determined, had been shifted—by my father, the arrival of my new foster brothers, and now by me.

It wasn't until after we stopped going to Ponderosa that the name of the restaurant struck me, a signpost instruction in my mind: Ponder Rosa.

In the mornings I would make my stepmother a cup of coffee with one spoonful of instant Nescafé, one spoonful of sugar, and one spoonful of Coffee-mate creamer. She was always rushing, late for work, a hundred meetings filling up her day planner. Her papers and files spilled across the dining room table. She would come home from work so exhausted she hardly had the energy, in the winter, to take off her boots, so I would do it for her. I remember the cold, stacked heel of the boots, which were a wine-colored leather, dirty with slush. At these times she seemed sadder than I ever imagined her being; great heaving sighs ran the length of her whole body, and she would collapse into bed. My father would be out somewhere—“working,” we said.