Stealing Buddha's Dinner (7 page)

So I listened carefully, enviously, while the kids in Thanh's basement transformed themselves into true Americans. Most of their parents had factory jobs, too, but that didn't stop them from buying nice clothes and tennis shoes and toys, whatever it took to assimilate. Rosa wouldn't have that, either. She believed in
pinching pennies,
as she put it, and my longing for a Jenny Adams wardrobe was useless against her rules about clothes. Rosa favored reds and burgundies, claiming they were best for our skin types, and she forbade me and Anh from wearing yellow. “Never, never, never,” she said. “Girls with your skin color look sallow in yellow. ” When we shopped we hit the discount stores. Her favorite was Burlington Coat Factory, which in spite of its name mostly sold clothes. They were piled in giant bins or stuffed tight into circular hanging displays. On principle alone Rosa purchased only what was on sale, her eyes lighting up at the word
clearance.
When I went to school in blue corduroys and a pink sweater stitched with a picture of a stallion rearing up, I avoided sitting next to Jenny Adams with her flowered dresses and polished Mary Janes.

While the other girls in Thanh's basement learned to dress like Jenny, I found comfort in the girl whose parents were as stubborn as mine: Loan, who remained Loan, which carried a lovely double syllabic.
Lo-an.
We went to the same school during first and second grade, and became the best of friends. Bitch and Loan, some of the kids said on the playground.
Hey, bitch, can you loan me some money?

At home, I kept opening the refrigerator and cupboards, wishing for American foods to magically appear. I wanted what the other kids had: Bundt cakes and casseroles, Chee•tos and Doritos. My secret dream was to bite off just the tip of every slice of pizza in the two-for-one deal we got at Little Caesar's. The more American foods I ate, the more my desires multiplied, outpacing any interest in Vietnamese food. I had memorized the menu at Dairy Cone, the sugary options in the cereal aisle at Meijer's, and every inch of the candy display at Gas City: the rows of gum, the rows with chocolate, the rows without chocolate. I knew the spartan packs of Juicy Fruit as well as the fat pillows of Bubble Yum, Bubbalicious, Hubba Bubba, Chewels, Tidal Wave, the shreds of Big League Chew, and the gum shaped into hot dogs and hamburgers. I knew Reese's peanut butter cups, Twix, Heath Crunch, Nestlé Crunch, Baby Ruth, Bar None, Oh Henry!, Mounds and Almond Joy, Snickers, Mr. Goodbar, Watchamacallit, Kit Kat, Chunky, Charleston Chew, Alpine White, Ice Cubes, Whoppers, PayDay, Bonkers, Sugar Babies, Milk Duds, Junior Mints. Bottle caps, candy cigarettes, candy necklaces, and wax lips. Starburst, Skittles, Sprees, Pixy Stix, Pop Rocks, Ring Pops, SweeTarts, Lemonheads, Laffy Taffy, Fun Dip, Lik-m-Aid, Now and Later, Gobstoppers, gummy worms, Nerds, and Jolly Ranchers. I dreamed of taking it all, plus the freezer full of popsicles and nutty, chocolate-coated ice cream drumsticks. I dreamed of Little Debbie, Dolly Madison, Swiss Miss, all the bakeries presided over by prim and proper girls.

When Rosa cooked on some weekend nights she kept to a repertoire of sloppy joes made with ketchup, tacos with ground beef flavored with spices from the cupboard, meat loaf tinged with cumin, Mexican rice, goulash, pot roast cooked in a pressure cooker until the meat was soft and stringy, and her specialty dish of
sopa
—ground beef, stewed tomatoes, and egg noodles cooked in a skillet until the noodles burned. These were sensible, no-waste foods. But she wasn't immune to convenience, sometimes buying boxes of instant mashed potatoes or scalloped potatoes, whose hard slices looked just like plastic before they got baked in seasoning mix and milk. Rosa would also consent to a few cans of Beefaroni, frozen Banquet pot pies, and boxes of brandless macaroni and cheese. I was always begging her to buy the boxed lasagna kit from Chef Boyardee. I loved to assemble the lasagna, careful to spread the sauce and cheese so each layer contained equal allocations. If no one was looking I would eat a cold half spoonful of the sweet, beef-tinted sauce. I loved to sniff the grated cheese and let a pinch of it dissolve on my tongue. It was a sharper, smellier smell than the Colby and generic singles Rosa occasionally bought; usually, though, we just wore down the brick of government cheese she got a few times a year from the surplus pile at the Hispanic Institute. She drew the line at Hamburger Helper. Despite my private opinion, she believed she didn't need such a helper and certainly not at those prices.

As with clothes shopping, sales trumped all. I believed she would have fed us Cracker Jacks and Ding Dongs every day if they had been on permanent markdown. She also had clear preferences, like olive loaf instead of bologna, orange Faygo instead of Crush, raisin cookies instead of chocolate chip. She sprinkled wheat germ on grapefruit and bought maple sugar oatmeal over peaches and cream. These small differences accumulated within my growing stockpile of shame and resentment, as if Rosa herself were preventing me from fitting in and being like everyone else. I wrinkled my face at her
sopa
and the mound of rice she served with shards of dry chicken. I scowled at almost everything we ate, even Noi's
pho,
shrimp stews, and curries. I wanted to savor new food, different food, white food. I was convinced I was falling far behind on becoming American, and then what would happen to me? I would be an outcast the rest of my days.

But Rosa did not want to be like the Vander Wals next door. She called their midwestern dinners bland, sticking out her tongue for emphasis. She might cook a pot roast, but it was different— richer, she insisted, with
real
flavor. White American food was as repugnant to her as tulips and the Dutchness and conservatism they represented. Not that I understood this then. I didn't know that Rosa might have felt oppressed in this cold climate, suffocated and isolated. I hadn't arrived at that point yet. I was still in the stage of longing: all I wanted was to sit at the dinner table and eat pork chops the way my friends did. Because I could not, because our household did not, I invested such foods with power and allure.

Rosa had put an end to my father's bringing home candy and gum and Pringles, but when he got a craving he pursued it. He loved Jell-O parfait from the deli aisle, sweet gherkins, braunschweiger, Chicken in a Biskit, two-liter bottles of pop, and cream-filled wafer cookies dyed pink and orange. (I tried to pit him against Rosa's shopping, encouraging him to consider French onion dip to accompany the bargain bag of Jays, or better yet Tato Skins for their “baked potato appeal,” as the commercials promised.) He was fond of gadgets and purchased the first microwave oven on our street. I bragged about it to all of my friends. The microwave was so American in its efficiency and sleekness, with its green digital display and buttons that beeped whenever I touched them. In a flash I could make my favorite snack of instant cocoa and baked potatoes.

One thing the whole family could agree on was fast food. Like the Chicken Coop, which offered up tubs of fried chicken with delicate, super-crispy coatings that smelled of butter, herbs, and fat. Happy were the evenings my father brought home an extra-large bucket, with sides of coleslaw, biscuits and honey, and mashed potatoes and gravy. Anh and I liked the drumsticks for their portability and ease, and because kids on Shake 'n Bake commercials always looked so happy crunching on them. Crissy only ate the white meat of the breast. My father, uncles, Noi, and Rosa reached for the thighs where the meat was darkest and juiciest. When at last only bones remained, cleaned by my father and Noi, Anh and I picked up the little fried bits left at the bottom of the bucket. We tipped it back into our wide-open mouths to catch every last crumb.

The Chicken Coop napkins were printed with laughing roosters and somber psalms.
Upon the wicked He shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and a horrible tempest: this shall be the portion of their cup.
The words turned translucent from the grease on our hands. When I asked Rosa what such sayings meant she snapped, “They mean nothing,” and threw the napkins away.

In the fall of 1982 Burger King launched a campaign to make the Whopper America's number one hamburger. My father happened to love the char-grilled taste of Whoppers—the tomato and onion, creamy with mayonnaise and ketchup; the thin slices of pickle. Burger King was a family treat, and any car ride toward it meant blissful calmness; no one dared to fight and ruin the experience. One day my father heard that Burger King was running a fantastic promotion: to celebrate winning a national taste test they were giving away free Whoppers for one day only. All you had to do was step up to the counter, say, “Whopper beat the Big Mac,” and you'd get a free Whopper Junior, one per person. To the Burger King my family urgently repaired, wondering if we would get there in time, and if the place would run out of burgers. There was quite a line at the restaurant, which created an audience for each person's statement. My father spoke the words proudly, having rehearsed them in the car. Rosa went next, then Crissy and Anh, then me. I froze. Suddenly it felt like everyone was staring at me, and I lost the ability to speak. For one terrible minute I was the stupid, funny-looking girl to mock and deride.

My father nudged me, then made a
tsk
-ing clicking sound. It was the noise he made when he was getting angry. I knew how swiftly that noise could escalate into a shout, his red-faced temper taking over. He would hurl keys, plates, shoes—anything nearby—against a wall. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my sisters looking intently away, as if already separating themselves from me, freeing themselves from tangential blame. I leaned forward and whispered, “Whopper beat the Big Mac.”

My father clapped, and I got my burger. He ordered fries and pop for everyone, and as we claimed a table I saw how happy he was. He was practically cackling, as though being here with our free Whoppers signified some true victory.

Noi was the holdout. She might go along with us to Burger King, and would even accept a few fries, but her disdain for the place was as visible as the paper crowns Anh and I wore while we ate. Noi had little use for American food. She would have preferred to avoid it completely, but she couldn't ignore the way I started pushing her beef and onion sautés around my plate. I hadn't stopped liking her food—
cha gio
and pickled vegetables still held an iron grip on my heart—but now I knew what real people ate. And in my mind I used that term:
real people.
Real people did not eat
cha gio.
Real people ate hamburgers and casseroles and brownies. And I wanted to be a real person, or at least make others believe that I was one.

The closest Noi came to cooking American food was making french fries her way, wedge-cut, served with vinegar and lettuce, and thin steaks pan-fried with onion and garlic. These, along with a bowl of my favorite
mi
soup—shrimp-flavor Kung-Fu ramen— made lunches and dinners to dream about. Still, I knew that no one at school had homemade french fries, or ramen. No one at school knew how I really ate. They didn't know how much time I spent thinking of dinner, of stolen popsicles, of ways for a Whopper to rise up and beat, once and for all, the Big Mac.

For I realized that the other kids scorned Burger King. McDonald's was the cool thing, and at recess girls clapped hands with each other and sang,
Hamburger, filet-o-fish, cheeseburger, french fries, icy Coke, thick shakes, sundaes, and apple pies.
They even had birthday parties in the McDonald's playroom, where each girl got her own Happy Meal with a Strawberry Shortcake figurine. The Whopper had a long way to go to beat the Big Mac. In the gaze of my classmates I understood the satisfaction of symmetrical yellow arches. Even the hamburgers were tidier, more self-contained; no one at McDonald's spilled onion and ketchup with each bite. The very word
McDonald's
rolled more easily off the tongue—a sturdy lilting name, nothing there to make fun of, against the guttural, back-of-the-throat emphasis of
Bur
ger. Once in a while Chu Cuong and Chu Dai alleviated my fast food sorrow by taking my siblings and me to McDonald's. Despite my father and Burger King's campaign, Chu Cuong had developed a fondness for the Big Mac, and he always ordered dessert: apple or cherry pies, deep-fried, gorgeously oblong and brown and burning hot as they slid out of their thin cardboard sleeves.

Chu Cuong and Chu Dai were also the ones who drank extravagant amounts of Sprite, shunning the two-liters of RC and Squirt we usually had in the house. They let us kids keep the cans for the deposits—ten cents in Michigan, which added up fast for candy purchases. Chu Cuong would toss his empty pop cans into the backseat of his blue Thunderbird and wait until they piled up, a shimmering mosaic of silver and green. Then after we collected them in trash bags he'd ferry us to Meijer's bottle return center. Carrying the sacks across the parking lot, he was like a vision of a Vietnamese Santa.

Next door, the Vander Wals' oldest daughter, Jennifer, was almost my age. She was blond with matching socks and unscuffed shoes. When summer emerged we found ourselves face to face across the strip of grass that separated our driveways, just bored enough with our siblings to become friends with each other.

Jennifer introduced me to the concept of homemade, which I only associated with American food, when she gave me half of a cookie her mother had baked. Nestlé's Toll House, she called it, and I thought, You name your cookies? But it was like no cookie I had ever had. It was crumbly and rich, the chocolate chips bearing no resemblance to the pinpoints found in Chips Ahoy. In our house, cookies came from Keebler, Nabisco, or, more frequently, the generic company whose label shouted “COOKIES” in stark black letters. Once in a while, at my father's request, Rosa brought home Voortman windmill cookies, or the cream-filled pink and yellow wafers that were as dull to me as graham crackers.