Stealing Buddha's Dinner (29 page)

The last foster brothers who stayed with us, Pina and Thien, had loved that swimming pool. They were from Cambodia, where they had lost two parents and a brother. Pina had a gentle manner and a quick, brilliant smile; people who knew him for five minutes remembered him forever. He and Thien called Rosa
Mom
but they hardly knew us. They stayed with us only a few months. Thien ran off, then Pina went after him. They ended up in California, we heard, but that was the last we knew of them for years.

So many mysteries floating through our household; so much chaos and silence, intertwined.

Back home for the holidays, my family gathers around platters of
cha gio,
fried shrimp, shrimp
à la plancha,
and
goi cuon.
We eat in the living room, where everyone is already drinking too much. “Have some more wines,” my father urges, holding out a bottle of red. I go help Noi in the kitchen, wondering how many
cha gio,
in a lifetime of
cha gio,
she has monitored with her chopsticks. She lives now with Chu Cuong, his wife, and their ten-year-old son, Anthony, taking care of him as she took care of my siblings and me.

The next day we will drive into southeastern Grand Rapids for dim sum, and I will be astonished by how much the city has changed: there are white people in the Vietnamese markets, white people eating bean curd and
banh bao.
The way to Florence Street is filled with new strip malls and subdivisions. The last time we saw the old house the orange door in the dining room wall was still there, unmet by a deck, unusable. I hope it stays that way, as much a signpost as a pair of yellow pants in a crowd.

When I think of Grand Rapids, I think of bitter winter days standing at the bus stop, shouting Air Supply songs into the clouds. I think of sitting in the plum tree with Jennifer Vander Wal, arguing about the existence of God. I think of my short family walking among the tall blonds of western Michigan, standing on tiptoes to see as much as we could.

I think of a letter I never read, postmarked in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

I think of Noi's blue bedrooms, and the calm I always felt when I walked by the statue of Buddha. Eyeing the plums and peaches heaped on the altar, I closed my eyes to give my respect to him, to the ancestors, and to the spirits of all our dead relatives.

I think of the magic held in a piece of fruit, a Bosc pear opened into luminous crescent moons. Noi and I would sit cross-legged while I did homework, watched TV, and worked on Noi's puzzle all at the same time. She murmured a little
oomph
of approval when one of us set a piece into place, admiring the perfection of the fit. Together we created landscapes of places neither of us knew: flower-filled meadows in Switzerland, vistas of the Rocky Mountains. The nights never felt cold or unwelcoming in Noi's room, no matter how much snow accumulated outside.

I think of escape—a last-minute decision, night in a falling city, a departure without a single message left behind. What it must have been for my father, taking Anh and me into his arms, pursuing a boat, a way out, knowing all the while that our mother would not know where we were. Perhaps he told himself that she might leave, too, or that we would be able to send for her. Perhaps he steeled himself to a choice that would never have been made differently: his children, their future, their lives came first. That I cannot imagine that moment, the panic and fear, the push to leave his country and aim for an unknown land, is perhaps his gift. It is my Americanness. What my father must have thought, what must have replayed in his mind for years—I cannot ever really grasp. In just a few minutes, in half a night, our lives changed. Our identities changed. We were Vietnamese, we were refugees, we were Americans. My father could not possibly regret it. I do not regret it. I am grateful for his unimaginable choice.

On a hill in a cemetery just outside Hanoi, my grandmother stood with her sisters at the spot where their parents' ashes were buried. They're matriarchs in this matrilineal country, the ones who survived and endured. I watched them from a distance, admiring the way they all held their umbrellas just so, their elbows bent in the exact same way, to create a scrim between their bodies and the sun. Noi's sisters couldn't stop marveling at how old Noi had gotten, and she couldn't stop marveling at them. They giggled and shouted about it all the way back to the youngest sister's house, where a feast awaited us: crepes stuffed with vegetables, fish heads and herbs floating in sweet and sour broth, beef stewed with eggs, shrimp dipped in
nuoc mam
spiked with lime and pepper, chicken tossed with cellophane noodles, fresh spring rolls bursting with bean sprouts, shrimp, and coriander, and always, for the American girl, a plate of fresh french fries. We sat in a circle on the floor, spreading the dishes out in front of us between our rice bowls and glasses of 7UP and Tiger beer.

I think of riding a train all through the night to the coast of Nha Trang. I stood at the open window just outside the compartment that Noi, Chu Anh, and I shared, sticking my head out a little to feel the breeze. I thought I could never look enough at the moonlight and how it skimmed the top of the rice paddies. Every hour or so the train would stop for no apparent reason, and it was then I could see stilted huts and, toward sunrise, the glow of cooking fires, the dim figures of women in conical hats working in the fields.

In Hanoi, I stood near the great Hoan Kiem Lake while the fire-orange blossoms of a
phuong vy
tree fluttered down on me. I tilted my head back to feel the tear-shaped petals on my face. They blurred as they fell, a vibrancy that not even the rain could tame. I picked up a few and sat on a bench to press them into the journal I had brought. I had scarcely written in it, having few words to convey where I was, this Vietnamese-born American girl returning for a visit. As I sat there, trying to press the color into the page and into my mind, memorizing the grace and strength of the thin branches, an elderly woman approached me. She had been watching, and she held out her hand to offer a few petals she had plucked. I thanked her in Vietnamese.
Cam on ba.
The woman wore a buttoned tunic over light cotton pants and carried a grocery bag. I watched her walk the path around this lake where, I had learned, a legendary turtle had once reclaimed a magic sword from an emperor. People say such a turtle still haunts the waters, and that whoever sees him will find good fortune. There are those who sit at the lake every day, waiting for the vision to rise from the early morning mist.

I THINK OF THIS MEMOIR AS AN HOMAGE TO CHILDhood
, suburbia, and all the bad food, fashion, music, and hair of the deep 1980s. It is also about an immigrant's dilemma to blend in or remain apart. This anxiety, which so many of my memories involve, became the logical grounding for the whole book. It required writing about tensions and conflicts, family and friends, literal and imagined homes—the moments that led me to figure out what kind of identity I wanted to have. A few other decisions I made in writing this memoir include: changing some people's names and identifying information; sticking to certain thematic frameworks, even if it meant cutting long paragraphs devoted to the bands Supertramp, Toto, and Styx; and owning up to my memories rather than others'. Although I did need to rely on stories from my father, uncles, and grandmother to depict our escape from Saigon, I generally tried to avoid turning my family into collaborators. The book, after all, can only represent the views of the author. I do not mean to speak for all of my family, or all Vietnamese immigrants, many of whom have had entirely different experiences with, and opinions on, assimilation, culture, and language. If memory is a shifting mirror, then writing is an effort to keep it stilled, if only for a while, to try to find a point of focus, some sense of understanding. This book is my articulation of memories and experiences as I believe them—call it one person's perspective on being Vietnamese and American, and on being a kid in America, growing up with all the wants, frustrations, and bright-colored packaging that make up the landscape of childhood.

Several brief passages in this book were adapted from essays previously published as: “A World Without Measurements” (
Gourmet
magazine); “Toadstools” (
Dream Me Home Safely
); and “The Good Immigrant Student” (
Tales Out of School
).

Many, many thanks to Molly Stern for her invaluable guidance, and to Laura Tisdel, Alessandra Lusardi, Kate Griggs, and Sonya Cheuse. I am grateful also to the wonderful Tim Seldes.

I thank the PEN American Center and the judges who selected
Stealing Buddha's Dinner
to receive the PEN/Jerard Fund Award. Thanks also the the University of Michigan and Purdue University for their past and present support.

I am deeply grateful to all of my family: for taking chances, for putting up with me, for feeding me well, and for being their own true selves.

Finally, I thank my husband, Porter Shreve. His constant support, encouragement, and infallible critiques helped me figure out what I really wanted, and needed, to write.