Stealing Buddha's Dinner (3 page)

In 1983 the construction of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel's glass tower marked the city's first skyscraper, reaching twenty-nine stories. I remember the breathless chronicle of the building in the newspaper, and the opening of restaurants too fancy to dare consider. It would be years before I stepped foot inside the velvet green lobby, years before my father and stepmother ate an anniversary dinner—the only one I ever knew them to celebrate—at the 1913 Restaurant, where they ate chocolate mousse that arrived in an edible shell that cracked open when they tapped it. When I drive Highway 131 skirting downtown, I can't help seeing pride and forlornness in the mirrored obelisk of the Grand Plaza jutting up from the landscape of brick buildings left over from the nineteenth century furniture boom. The Grand River cuts throug h the city on its way to Lake Michigan, a swath for salmon and waste, a gleaming opacity beneath the lit-up bridges at night.

My family ventured into downtown only a few times a year, for the Festival of the Arts (known simply as Festival), the Hispanic Festival where Rosa volunteered, Fourth of July fireworks, and the city's Celebration on the Grand. Crowds of families would set up blankets and lawn chairs on the Indian mounds at Ah-Nab -Awen Park, waiting for fireworks to rain over the river. We'd hurry to join them, my father's mood darkening as he drove around for a parking space, circling the elephantine Calder sculpture that anchors the downtown business area. I had love-hate feelings for the Calder: it represented Grand Rapids, being part of the city's logo, yet it was also real art—something greater than the ordinary life I knew.

Throughout my childhood I wondered, so often it became a buzzing dullness, why we had ended up here, and why we couldn't leave. I would stare at a map of the United States and imagine us in New York or Boston or Los Angeles. I had no idea what such cities were like, but I was convinced people were happier out on the coasts, living in a nexus between so much land and water. Gazing at the crisscrossing lines of Manhattan or the blue vastness of the oceans, I would feel something I could only describe as missingness.

In the town of Holland, about half an hour's drive from Grand Rapids, the annual spring Tulip Time Festival brings all other activities to a halt. The citizenry work double-time to get their front-yard tulips in order. There are contests, prizes, prestige to be had. There's a parade. People line up early with their lawn chairs to wait for girls in braids and wooden clogs to come clopping down the streets.

Once, in second grade, a substitute teacher gave a geography lesson by asking students to name the places they wanted to visit. She had a large globe beside her, spinning it absently as she talked. I was the first student she called on. Tongue-tied by shyness, I couldn't think of what to say. “Holland,” I blurted out.

Brightly the teacher said, “Here or overseas?”

I must have stared at her dumbly, for she repeated the question, “This Holland or the one overseas?” Perhaps she thought I didn't understand. But I was amazed that of all the places in the world, she thought that I would choose the town of Holland. Wasn't it enough that I would choose the country?

“Not here,” I said. “Not this one.”

In 1975 we were new in America and two years away from the arrival of Rosa. Before she swept us up and out of Baldwin Street, we lived in a house of splintery wooden floors that slanted in different directions. We huddled close as if in a cave. Our Vietnamese mixed with the American voices rising from the old television my father had brought back to life. Our cave had feather smells and rice smells, tricycles in the house, bare feet. My sister and I played all day in our pajamas, even going outside in them, though no farther than the curb so our grandmother could watch us from the porch. In the cave we ate spring rolls and drank 7UP, tore open packages of licorice and Wrigley's spearmint gum. My sister and I fell asleep with plastic phones and floppy dolls from the bins at Blessed Christian Reformed Church. We held on to oranges and plums, desserts from Noi, saved so long we forgot to eat them.

When Christmas rolled around we had a genuine fake tree with lights and a star. Anh and I had no idea what the word
Christmas
meant; to us it was, and remained for years, glitter and gifts. We had to put together the pieces of America that came to us through television, song lyrics, Meijer Thrifty Acres, and our father, coming home from work each day with a new kind of candy in his pocket. We couldn't get enough Luden's wild-cherry-flavored cough drops, or Pringles stacked in their shiny red canister, a mille-feuille of promises. My father's mustache was nothing like Mr. Pringles's, which winged out jauntily. Mr. Pringles was like Santa Claus or Mr. Heidenga—a big white man, gentle of manner, whose face signaled a bounty of provisions.

So we hoarded our Pringles cans, rolling them on the floor, making them into piggy banks with pennies donated by our uncles. The Pringles glowed by window light, their fine curvatures nearly translucent. So delicate, breaking into salty shards on our tongues. These were blissful days, or so they seemed to me. I did not know we were poor, or refugees, or that we had been born in another hemisphere. I didn't know that a kind of apprehension gathered around my father each evening, making him check the corners of every room, the spaces behind open doors. I wonder what he thought about—he doesn't say, can't remember. Did he wake up gasping with shock, gripping the sword, forgetting where he was? Did he dream of Saigon? Did he think ahead to what he would have to tell my sister and me, one day, if we asked about our mother? How would he explain the choice he had had to make?

Back in the chill of the rental house that cost one hundred precious dollars a month, the only future he could see lay in work, in whirls of processed feathers. For the beauty of a Pringle could only go so far, and must be paid for. My uncles felt it, too. When they slept all day after working all night, or played the same melancholy Simon & Garfunkel song over and over, my grandmother told me not to bother them with questions about what all the words meant.

Too much to ask, and too much to do. English to learn, streets to navigate, work to manage, food to buy, friends to find. And so my father and uncles and grandmother rose, always in darkness, toward this new life.

WHEN MY FATHER WORKED AT THE NORTH AMERICAN
Feather Company he always came home with down in his hair, a fine scattering like the Michigan snow that seemed to fall without stopping those first winters in America. When he tossed me into the air to make me laugh he smelled like factory feathers and old brass. The scent lingered even when the days began to brighten, the gray cloud cover over Grand Rapids slowly lifting.

My father made fast friends with the other Vietnamese refugees who had landed in Grand Rapids. They cobbled together seeds and ingredients, information on weather and how to send letters to family in Vietnam. Some people drove across the state to Canada, where Chinese groceries in Windsor sold real jasmine rice, lemongrass, and the fleshy, familiar fruits that had no English translation. Now Noi could plant cilantro, mint,
ram rau.
She grew more at ease in our neighborhood and started taking my sister and me to a nearby park. We never saw any other children around. Shielded by “Beware of Dog” signs, the other houses looked empty, shut tight against us. Still, Noi fixed our hair in side ponytails and dressed us in corduroy jumpers that came in a grocery bag from Mr. Heidenga's daughters. She stood sedately, watching us play on the jungle gym and swings. Under her puffy nylon jacket from Goodwill she wore the jade green
ao dai
she had sewn.

On good days, when he was in a happy mood, my father let us walk with him to Meijer to get groceries and choose any kind of candy we wanted. So we introduced ourselves to Smarties, Hershey's chocolate bars, candy necklaces, and pink-tipped candy cigarettes. On summer days Noi took us to the farmers' market. Anh and I held hands as we trailed her, looking up at the canvas canopy and the swaying silver scales. Noi bargained wordlessly, pulling dollar bills from a little lacquer purse with a wooden handle. Her arms filled with brown sacks. At home she would unveil grapes and nectarines, tomatoes and greens, taut bulbs of onion.

The allure of the fruits—their roundness, aliveness—enchanted my sister and me, but the choicest pieces went first to a plate that lay before the golden statue of Buddha in the living room. This was the altar for him and for our dead relatives, to whom my grandmother paid respect every morning and evening. My father had built a shelf for the Buddha, who sat perpetually smooth, peaceful, eyes closed, his palms facing up. The fruit made a solemn offering, and for two whole days, sometimes longer, it had to remain there untouched between Noi's candles and stems of incense. I was in awe of this process. Did Buddha and the ancestors know the fruit was there for the taking? Did they prefer apples or bananas or plums? Once in a great while Noi put an entire pineapple on the altar and I wondered how they would eat it. I always expected the fruit to disappear, and when it did not I marveled at the ancestors' lack of hunger, their self-control.

I tried to work up the nerve to pluck off just one grape, but I feared my dead relatives would tell on me. Buddha might snap open his eyes and let my grandmother know that his food had been disrespected. The thought kept me at bay, circling the altar like a nighttime prowler. The fruit might as well have been protected behind glass, the dusty grapes turning into jewels.

When at last Noi took up two pieces of fruit for my sister and me—peaches and plums in the summer, apples and pears in the fall, oranges in winter—we held on to them like lifeboats. We kept them in our laps, smoothing the varnish of the apples until they bruised, cradling the mottled green pears in our arms. We loved to sniff peaches, tickling our faces with their fuzz. Hours would pass like this, our admiration steady, our anticipation covering the afternoons. At last Noi would pull the fruit away from us and carve them into wedges—plums were the only fruit we ate with the skins still on. We could never get enough. The fruit seemed dearer to us than candy, and I believed that the transformation from globe to glistening slices involved some kind of magic. It would be years before either my sister or I ever bit into a whole apple.

Later, Noi found pomegranates, mangoes, persimmons, and coconuts at the newly opened Saigon Market. All of these were set upon the altar before making their way to our mouths, and it was a lesson in patience and desire. We were eating gifts every time.

On the New Year's Eve between 1977 and 1978 my father and Uncle Chu Anh were hanging out in a rec room of an apartment complex off East Beltline. It was a Vietnamese party, everyone dancing to Donna Summer and Debby Boone and sharing bottles of Martini & Rossi Asti Spumante. My father was sitting at a table with a group of guys and a pack of cards when he saw two women pausing at the doorway. One had curly black hair, and it took him a moment to realize that she wasn't Vietnamese. But she didn't look white, either. “Look at that,” one of the guys said with a low whistle.

The two women were Rosa, a second-generation Mexican-American, and Shirley, a daughter of German-Jewish immigrants by way of the Dominican Republic. They had become friends while teaching ESL classes in downtown Grand Rapids, and had been invited to the party by a Vietnamese guy Shirley had met at the community education center. My father didn't waste time. He got to Rosa first, asking her to dance to what happened to be one of her favorite songs, “You Light Up My Life.” Shirley fell into step with Chu Anh, and together the four of them drew the stares of the crowd. I wonder if my father was wearing his favorite olive-patterned shirt, collars set wide against the tawny lapels of his one sport jacket. Maybe Rosa wore a mauve-colored chiffon dress, puffed at the shoulder and tight at the wrists, that floated out when my father, an expert dancer, twirled her around the room. I wonder if he saw in her face a familiar expression of unease, of knowing what it was to live in this pale city in which they had ended up, by chance, by way of survival.

After a while he suggested they ditch the party and go get something to eat. Rosa agreed, but when they walked out into the freezing air he realized he had no idea where to go. So he took her to the only restaurant he could think of, the one in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. Mr. Heidenga had put us up in this same hotel our first few nights in Michigan, while he found us a place to live. Meal after meal my grandmother had requested plain bowls of the white rice she craved. The cook didn't know how to make it, and Noi longed to go back into the kitchen and fix it herself. My sister remembers restlessness, a vague feeling of expectation. She remembers my father ordering us as much tapioca pudding as we wanted.

My father and Rosa do not remember what they talked about that New Year's Eve, but something between them was decided that night. Soon, Rosa would be standing in our house on Baldwin, laughing at the fruit on the altar. It belonged in the kitchen, she said, not the living room. She picked up an orange from the altar and Noi shook her head. Without English to explain, my grandmother gently pulled the fruit out of Rosa's hand and set it back on its plate. Rosa understood then. “It's your custom,” she would say later, year after year, Tet after Tet. “It's the way Vietnamese do things.”

She roamed through the house, looking through the cupboards to see what we ate, surveying the room that Anh and I shared with Noi. We slept in a rattling steel-framed bunk bed that had come with the house—Noi on the top bunk, Anh and I on the bottom. At dinner Rosa sat down at the kitchen table with us and ate Noi's
pho,
trying to pick up the slippery noodles with her chopsticks. They splashed back into the broth until Rosa cut them with a spoon against the side of the bowl. Rosa had a large chest, bigger than any I'd seen even on television, and when she leaned over to eat I caught my first real-life glimpse of a woman's cleavage.