Stealing Buddha's Dinner (4 page)

After we ate, Anh and I ran back to our living room domain to watch television. It was a black and white, with antennae sprouting out and covered in tinfoil. Upstairs, my uncles played records on the hi-fi they'd saved up to buy. They could listen to the Carpenters, the Eagles, and Paul Simon until the grooves wore out. Anh and I divided our time among toys, television, and our uncles' songs. We learned English this way, matching sound with word with meaning.
Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?
We watched
Wonder Woman, Police Woman, Happy Days,
and
Sesame Street.
We sat close to the screen, shouting out dialogue and names. My favorite actress was Angie Dickinson, whose name seemed to match her flowing hair and tough, sassy work patrolling the streets.

I could feel Rosa watching us, her eyes taking in the scratched floors, the Salvation Army furniture, the wooden clock carved into the shape of Vietnam—the only decoration on the living room wall. Anh and I sat together in our beloved green chair and Noi brought us one apple each. We held them carefully, saving them, always saving them, while we switched from Bert and Ernie to Fat Albert.

Rosa brought us groceries and gifts—milk and mittens for Anh and me, shampoo and toothpaste,
National Geographic
s for the uncles. She ate whatever Noi cooked, impressing us all with her effort to master chopsticks. She slid right into our lives. After dinner, she said that children should not be riding tricycles around the house. Those belonged outside. She asked us to please tidy up our toys. She said we shouldn't be eating so much candy. Then one day she approached us while we were in the bathtub. Noi's method was to scrub us down with a washcloth until we turned pink. She had been washing our hair with soap and Rosa tried to communicate with her that shampoo—a yellow bottle of Johnson & Johnson—would be better. Anh and I screamed with terror, hating the cold liquid on our scalps, until Rosa showed us the foamy bubbles and how they floated on the water. “See?” she said, one of the things she was always saying, as if she were literally opening our eyes.

Rosa had been dating my father for about two months when she started talking about how Anh would be five years old in March and we had to have a party. I remember sitting at the Formica table in the kitchen while Rosa washed dishes, explaining to me what birthdays were. In August, she said, I would be four years old. Rosa said that in America everyone had birthdays. She described them in terms of Christmas and Tet, with presents and food and more presents. This sounded like a windfall, especially coming so soon after the money pleasures and moon cakes of Tet.

All of my legal records—from my original
permanent resident alien
card to my citizenship papers and driver's license—list a birthday I don't celebrate. Perhaps because his mind was distracted, or perhaps because in Vietnam death is remembered more than birthdays, my father forgot our birth dates when he had to write them down at the refugee camp in Guam. So he guessed. It was years before he and Noi agreed on the more likely days (sometime in early March for Anh, late August for me). Noi said what mattered was the year: Anh, born in the year of the buffalo, and I in the year of the tiger.
El tigre,
Rosa would say with a
rrrr
-ing sound whenever she caught me in a sour mood.

The first birthday cake I ever saw was from the Meijer bakery. It was oblong, covered in rosettes and pink and white frosting, a vision of wealth and excess. The sugar flowers quickened my heartbeat, hinting at a whole new concept of sweetness. A giant candle, shaped in the number five, sat in the middle of the cake, and Anh in her new red velveteen dress smiled for Rosa's camera. She and my father had invited people I had never seen before, mostly friends of my father's who wore their hand-sewn
ao dai
s and best thrift store suits. The brightly wrapped gifts piled up around Anh. She discovered, to her dismay, that a few of the presents were for me, because our fair-minded father had insisted that gifts had to be given to both of us. This realization hit my sister hard. It may have been her first true American moment: she cried, stamped her foot, and shrieked angrily that it was
her
birthday and I shouldn't be getting a thing.

Not long after, Rosa introduced us to her daughter, Crissy. She was eight, four and a half years older than I, pretty and petulant, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her denim jumper. She frowned and scrunched up her freckled nose. I was probably too young to be startled by the news of Crissy's sudden existence, but she wasn't too young to be upset about ours.
Pissed off
was one of the first phrases she taught me, followed by its fond abbreviation,
P.O.'ed. I'm really P.O.'ed,
she would say. What's that? I'd ask.
Pissed off.
What does that mean?
P.O.'ed.

It had always been just the two of them, Rosa and Crissy, in their Dutch Colonial apartment complex north of downtown. Now Rosa brought her daughter to the house on Baldwin Street and instructed us to play together. Crissy only warmed up to us when my father gave us an extra-large supply of Pringles and Hershey bars. She tantalized us with swear words, doling out only
damn
and
hell,
promising much better ones if she felt like telling. She taught us to race from the living room and jump onto the top of the bunk bed. Crissy and Anh could do this with ease, but on one of my failed tries I gashed my leg open on a piece of metal sticking out from the bed. I have no recollection of pain from that long bloody cut, but I do remember sitting in the living room with my grandmother's pillow, leg propped up while I sipped my own treasured bottle of 7UP. The scar on my leg remains, barely faded, a reminder of the force with which Crissy and Rosa burst into our lives.

That fall, Rosa, whom Anh and I had been instructed to call Mom, moved all of us away from Baldwin to a house on Florence Street, on the southeast side of town. And in January, just a little over a year after they had met, my father and Rosa, seven months' pregnant with my brother Vinh, married at the courthouse in downtown Grand Rapids. So much snow fell that day that the roads grew impassable, and no one could make it to the house for the small wedding reception. Months later, Chu Anh and Shirley would also get married. In my green patchwork dress that exactly matched my sister's, I would eat the maraschino cherries from my Shirley Temples and watch Chu Anh and Shirley dance in the Holiday Inn's ballroom.

Our house on Florence Street was surrounded by similar ranches and split-levels. It had army-green vinyl siding, a narrow garage, and a blue front door with three diamond-shaped windows. Set into a hill, the house looked like a flat ranch from the front but exposed the basement in the back. A few years after we moved in, my father and Rosa had an addition built onto it. On the top floor my father cut a space for a doorway leading to a deck that he never got around to building. The door remains there still, threatening to open out onto nothing.

Anh, Crissy, and I shared a bedroom that had pear-green carpet patterned into almost-paisleys. Anh and I had another bunk bed, this one painted white, and I got the top bunk. That small space between bed and ceiling soon became my only privacy, filled with overdue library books. My sisters dominated every other spot in the room and I accepted this, already knowing that my role was to be out of the way, apart and observing. Living on Florence Street made me more aware of my footsteps and my voice—more aware of the construct of family. I knew, for instance, that it was strange that Crissy didn't have a father, but I also knew better than to press anyone about it. My father and Rosa had in common a deadly stare, part frown, part rage, when they were met with talk they didn't like, and this look always earned my silence. There were so many things that could never be spoken. Whenever one of us kids asked Rosa a question she didn't want to answer, she'd reply, “Be quiet” or “It's none of your business.” My father would just emit a grunting noise. Almost any question—from whether we could go see a movie to why all of Rosa's family lived forty minutes away in a town called Fruitport—could yield such responses.

My father set up the Buddha and ancestor altar not in the living room but in Noi's room, which lay across the hall from me, Anh, and Crissy. Buddha's shift in place was one of many adjustments for me. No longer would Rosa tolerate tricycles in the house at any time. Our toy closet was no more. Rosa taught us how to make our beds and put clothes in dresser drawers. She drew up a list of chores and said we would have to take turns washing dishes. She checked on us while we brushed our teeth, to make sure we actually did it. I preferred Noi's method, which was simply to ask,
“Dang rang?”
The simple phrase—
Did you brush your teeth?
—carried a trill and a rhyme, somehow making the task a little less awful. Now the rules of the house were governed not by my grandmother but by my new stepmother.

Uncle Chu Cuong and his friend Chu Dai, who had lived with us since our days in the refugee camps, were gloriously exempt, free and easy bachelors. They lived in the basement, which the previous owners had supplied with a padded wet bar and shiny silver wallpaper. Chu Dai plugged in the hi-fi and let music rise up the stairs. They always played my favorite, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” knowing how much I liked to repeat the rhymes.
Slip out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan. Hop on the bus, Gus.
I pictured guys as carefree as my uncles, elusive, unpinnable. Chu Cuong and Chu Dai were making good money at a jewelry plant, enough to buy all the records they wanted, plus a sage-green Chevy Maverick and a motorcycle.

Chu Anh was away at school. The year before, he had confessed to my father that he couldn't take another moment working at the tool and die plant. He longed to go to college, he said. Chu Anh had always loved studying, and had trained to be an aeronautical engineer in Vietnam. “So go,” my father said.

“What about the family?” Chu Anh had asked, thinking about tuition, loans, groceries.

“Don't worry,” my father said. “I'm not going anywhere.”

Chu Anh enrolled in nearby Calvin College, but when he realized its Christian Reformed affiliation was serious he applied for a transfer to the University of Michigan, located two hours away. Few things ever made my grandmother happier, and she cherished the photograph he sent home from Ann Arbor: Chu Anh standing near a snowdrift on campus, carrying a bundle of engineering books and wearing a light sweater, hipster pants, and steel-gray glasses. Such evidence made it easier to let another one of her sons go.

My father had been promoted to better hours and machinery at North American Feather, though he still came home smelling of dust, his hair speckled white. On weekends off, he worked on his 1972 pewter-gray Mustang, which had a black vinyl interior that scorched the skin on summer days. He had bought it not long before his fateful New Year's Eve date with Rosa. He loved to drive around by himself, visiting friends who lived in Wyoming and Caledonia. He began shopping the secondhand stores more carefully. But nothing ever replaced that favorite shirt, shiny with a flaring collar, patterned all over with what looked like green olives stuffed with pimento. My father wore it whenever he went out wanting to look “sharp.” It was a word Rosa introduced to our vocabulary. “Lookin' good!” she would croon. “Man, that is
sharp.
” It's startling to see how fresh and happy they were in those early photographs—a late seventies couple with shaggy hair, boho hems, and big, dazed grins on their faces.

Outside, the hill in our yard was just steep enough for decent sledding, and the previous owners had left their swing set. Noi had plenty of space for a garden, and in the early morning she fed pieces of stale bread to the squirrels who approached without fear and ate from her hand. It was clear we had moved up a little, into a neighborhood where people mowed their lawns. I never loved being outside as much as I did on Florence Street. We could breathe easier, sleep without swords.

Much of my world revolved around Noi's ways and rituals, which included eating fruit every night after dinner. Only now do I think of the journey each piece made, from orchards and trees to stores and bins and farmers' market baskets, to Noi's hands and shopping cart, to the kitchen sink for washing and rewashing, to the wrought-iron plate that lay untouched beneath the Buddha, back through Noi's hands into mine. In the evening, Noi unknotted the bun of her silver hair and let it pool around her like a cape. The apples and pears that Anh and I kept all day, waiting for just the right moment to eat, would be coaxed from us and whittled into symmetrical slices. The presentation meant a winding down into bedtime and made me feel warm, safe. Even then I loved order and disorder simultaneously, discretely. I loved to make detailed schedules planning every minute of my day (
2:00- 2:30, Draw; 2:30-3:00, Get Anh to play Chinese checkers with me
), even while I kept my bed covered in a shock of books and dirty clothes.

Crissy usually made faces at Noi's fruit. She laughed at the way we sat cross-legged on the floor. I became self-conscious about our ritual, aware that it wasn't something Crissy was used to—aware that it might not be normal. We were in Rosa's house now, so the plate of orange wedges had to involve her, too. The moments Anh and I had always known with Noi—hoarding pieces of fruit while sharing the same green armchair to watch an episode of
Police Woman
—couldn't happen on Florence Street, where Rosa switched off the television when the noise of it got on her nerves.

One evening Rosa got to the fruit first. She liked mealy Red Delicious apples, the kind Noi never chose. Rosa cut them up carelessly, not bothering to peel the skin or make each piece the same size. “Eat,” she said, setting the plate on the dining table. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”