Pioneer Girl (3 page)

—

A
s it happened, the day after Sam left us again was the day the chalkboard arrived at the café. I'd ordered it a week before, with a plan to install it secretly, figuring my mother would have a harder time objecting to it once it was in place. But she was standing right there when the UPS guy delivered the box and she said, “What is
that
?” like she'd just spotted some gross mold.

I tried to convince her that the chalkboard would bring some warmth to the place. “It'll be more like a cozy coffee shop.”

“Says who?” She stood, thick-legged, hair kept in a continual no-fuss bob, a small but solid tyrant. “How much did this cost?”

“Hardly anything.”

“Nobody said you could do this.”

“I'm trying to make the place look better.”

We were standing in the fluorescent-lit back room next to the kitchen, where my mother kept all the nonrefrigerated supplies. She folded her arms, ready for a fight, and said, “Oh, now you think the business is your business.”

I knew better than to challenge her, especially in the wake of Sam's fresh absence. But I couldn't stop myself from saying, “I'm just trying to help out here.”

“It's such a good thing you got the PhD, then.”

“Tran,” my grandfather intervened, emerging from the front with a yellow canister of Café du Monde in hand. He looked at the half-opened chalkboard box and said, “Maybe it's nice-looking, eh? Maybe we keep it here.”

“This is a restaurant, not a school. Have you ever had a Viet teacher? Do they make enough money? I don't think so. Vuong, Thi, Hanh,” she named some of her friends. “Their kids are engineers.”

“Can we just try it out for a while?” I said. “See how it goes.”

“You been here a few weeks and now you think you own the place. You think you're some hotshot, big degree, big decision maker now. You don't know anything about a restaurant.”

I looked at Ong Hai, who shook his head, silently advising me to back down.

“Whatever,” I said. “What do I care? It's your place.”

“Don't forget it,” my mother said.

When she left, Ong Hai said to me, “No sense fighting mean.”

“Sometimes it's hard not to.”

He smiled a little but said, “That's the trouble, Lee. You and your ma both think that.”

He urged me to go home early, since business had been slow. “Jennie will be here later,” he said. She was their one part-time employee, whose hours had been so reduced lately that she'd mentioned she might have to quit.

I knew Ong Hai just wanted to put some space between my mother and me, and he was right. When I looked at her now I thought about money, Hieu, and all my brother had claimed. Probably when my mother looked at me she thought of my brother too—his disappearance, my failure to fill his space. We both had reasons to stay away from each other.

—

I
knew that Sam's leaving me his new phone number, stuck through with that gold pin, was supposed to be a message, some sibling code that we were in this together. Maybe he thought I'd round up the money, call him when it all got figured out. But when I returned to the house that afternoon, twenty-four hours after Sam's second escape, his offering seemed just another mess he'd left behind. He had gotten away and I had not.

I went to put the pin back in my mother's room. It looked just as it had when Sam had searched it, what I used to think of as a widow's spare landscape. I wondered what would have happened if Sam
had
found a stash of money. Would he have taken it—would I have let him? Would he have slipped away without ever facing our mother?

I opened the bottom dresser drawer and reached for the ballerina box. I thought I knew my brother well enough, yet I didn't figure that the rest of the jewelry—the gold necklaces, the jade and gold bracelets—would be gone. The only thing left was the pin in my hand.

I turned it over and over, hating Sam, fearing my mother. I remembered myself at eight years old, imagining the pin as something more real than it was. Mostly I had known it—Sam and I both had—as the vestige of a story that didn't really belong to us. Still, it seemed wrong, somehow, to leave it in the dresser drawer by itself. So I didn't.

When my mother and Ong Hai came home that night I was hiding out in my room. Ong Hai knocked on my door and handed me a bag of leftover summer rolls and pastry, understanding. Soon enough I could hear their two televisions murmuring. I thought about telling Ong Hai about the jewelry but worried that he'd feel obligated to tell my mother. There was a good chance it'd be a while before she uncovered it herself. Sam's renewed absence and theft at the café were bad enough; knowing this could only cause more trouble for me.

Laughter rose from Ong Hai's TV show, while a blast of commercials came from the living room. He liked sitcom reruns and competitive reality shows; she preferred legal dramas, medical mysteries. It was a collapsing sort of moment, these sounds of made-up lives overlapping in my solitary room.

I set the gold pin back down on
The Age of Innocence
, where Sam had left it, as if to point out how old-fashioned both were. In my childhood imagination the image of the house sitting in a field of tall grass had seemed so important, come to life from a
Little House on the Prairie
book. In actuality it looked like something from a garage sale, which was probably the real reason Sam hadn't taken it.

The jewelry, the stories—they all referred to a gone time, long before my mother and grandfather fled the country of their birth and landed in the country of my birth.

Opening my computer, I checked my e-mail again, still wishing for a good-news message, a
Congratulations, this job is yours!
But nothing new had arrived.

I picked up Rose's pin once more. And it was then that I considered what had never seemed significant before: Hadn't Ong Hai always said that Rose was a reporter working on an article about Vietnam? If that was true, had she written the article? And if so, couldn't it be found?

I pulled up Google, my default page, and stared at the blinking cursor. I typed,
Rose article Vietnam
. Before I hit return I thought to add the year:
1965
.

I didn't expect anything to come up, but the third result listed the Rose Wilder Lane Papers in West Branch, Iowa. Rose. Born 1886, died 1968, daughter and only child of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Author of the once-popular, now-obscure novels
Free Land
and
Let the Hurricane Roar
. Alleged ghostwriter of the
Little House on the Prairie
books. And correspondent in Vietnam for
Woman's Day
magazine, 1965.

In the closet I had a collection of books and college papers kept through our years of moving. I didn't have a lot—my mother thought owning books a waste, especially when libraries were free—so I had cherished the ones Ong Hai had bought for me, like
The Great Brain
,
Anne of Green Gables
,
Superfudge
,
Sweet Valley High
. And my favorite: the
Little House on the Prairie
box set circa 1986, the spines wrinkled and softened by countless rereadings.
Little House in the Big Woods. Little House on the Prairie
.
On the Banks of Plum Creek
.
By the Shores of Silver Lake
.
The Long Winter
.
Little Town on the Prairie
.
These Happy Golden Years
. And the two outliers—
Farmer Boy
, about the childhood of Laura's future husband, Almanzo, and
The First Four Years
, a posthumously published account of the early, difficult years of Laura and Almanzo's marriage.

I slid out the copy of
These Happy Golden Years
, turning to that passage where Almanzo gives Laura a gold pin as a Christmas present.
On its flat surface was etched a little house, and before it along the bar lay a tiny lake, and a spray of grasses and leaves.

I hadn't read or thought about the description in so long. Now a shiver went through me as I wondered what
was
real. Could it actually be the pin my mother and grandfather had kept? Was it a call, or maybe a message, staring straight at me as it had all these years, though I'd never before noticed? Was this the same Rose?

I opened
The First Four Years
. It didn't belong to the original arc of the books and didn't read like it either. Here the language is spare, the feel of something private and unedited, a space where a storyteller's voice hasn't yet tempered the rawness of remembering hard times. Maybe because of this, I hadn't liked the book when I was a kid. The heartache, the deprivation, had little redemption: Laura and Almanzo lose their wheat crops to hail and heat, get themselves into terrible debt, have a baby boy who dies soon after being born, and lose their house in a fire. The only bright spot is the child who survives it all: Rose, described by Laura as her precious flower of December.

Surely, if the gold pin were real, if it had existed, Laura would have handed it down to her daughter.

Back at my computer it was easy enough to find the
Woman's Day
article from 1965. Titled “August in Vietnam,” it was Rose Wilder Lane's last publication before her death a few years later. She gives a genial tourist's view of the country, describing the “resilience” of the Vietnamese people, especially the women, whose skin seemed to her as “smooth as cream and yellow as gold.” It was a little too
Miss Saigon
for comfort, but I didn't care. I was looking for Ong Hai. Yet nowhere did Rose mention meeting a family in Saigon, a man and his daughter who served her coffee and fruit at Café 88.

I stepped into the hallway with my laptop, intending to talk to Ong Hai, but my mother called my name. She was knitting in front of the living room TV.

“What are you doing?” She sounded suspicious, as if guessing the trouble I was about to court.

“Just going to talk to Ong Hai.”

“He's asleep.”

“Are you sure?” But I realized his door was closed, his television off.

“What are you talking to him about?” Her gaze turned back to the screen, where good-looking med students were arguing with each other as a way to build up sexual tension. She made a little
tsk
ing sound and her needles clicked as they seesawed against each other, shaping a baby blanket. I had never learned how to knit and my mother had long since given up trying to teach me. Whenever I saw her at it, no matter what argument we'd just had, I couldn't get over the magic of being able to get a spool of yarn to build and bend into something like that.

“What are you talking to him about?” my mother repeated.

She didn't sound angry but I knew that was never more than a blink away. We could never have conversations the way parents and kids did on TV, all banter and affection. What would she say if I dared to admit what Sam had stolen, had left? What if I told her about Rose? What if I brought the name Hieu out into the open?

“Hold on,” she said before I could answer, nodding at her show, which was heading toward its sound-track-thundering denouement. She pulled out more yarn from a plastic grocery bag. She was always carrying things around in these plastic bags and tying the handles together too tight. Finally: “Hurry up—next show's coming on.”

There was nothing to say to her. My mother, who had once referred to a PhD in literature as a fake degree for a fake doctor, was so focused on the television, expectant and almost docile, that I suddenly wondered if
she
was the one who couldn't discern the real from the fake. It was startling and new to think of her this way—compliant, complacent, given over to a lifetime of watching. Someone getting older.

“Nothing,” I said, and she didn't pursue it.

I stayed up too late, rereading the
Little House
books, thinking about what was fact and what was imagined. What did it mean, anyway, to be based on a true story? How many times had Ong Hai told the story of Rose? How many times during the years of my
Little House
obsession had I pretended the pin was Laura's secret gift to me?

In a way, Rose had been part of the dream, the memory, that had pushed my mother and grandfather out of Vietnam, back when the city of Saigon was crumbling around them. They had taken only a few things. Photos, money. The jade and gold jewelry. And the gold pin. Maybe to my mother and Ong Hai it had been some kind of proof—that Rose had mattered, maybe, or that she and Ong Hai had mattered.

So much immigrant desire in this country could be summed up, quite literally, in gold: as shining as the pin Rose had left behind. A promise taken up, held on to for decades, even while Sam and I were reckless with our own history, searching for things we couldn't yet name. If this Rose was the same Rose of the
Little House
books, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, then she had defined a part of American desire that my mother understood just as well.

A
merica is mostly made up of small towns, and no matter where you go, mountains or seaside or flatness, you will always find, just off an interstate or county road or tucked into a strip mall on a commercial pass, a worn-out-looking Chinese buffet. It might be called the Golden Panda or New China or New Golden Panda Buffet, or just plain Asia Buffet—Oriental Buffet if it's a real backwoods area—the words spelled out in Kung Fu chop suey font or, depending on the economics of the neighborhood, utilitarian block lettering, sans serif. Some of the buildings will have a pagoda look to them, with faux-clay tiles and gold trim. Others will be more to the point: cement, windowless, cheap real estate. They will have rutted lots, signs that say
More Parking in Rear
. When you open the door an electronic two-tone bell will announce your arrival.

Inside, the lighting will be dimmed, concealing the fine layers of grease that have settled into the surfaces, settling even now into your hair, your clothes, your skin. But don't think about that. Look, instead, at all the Asian stuff! Dusty red lanterns; pictures of dragons and fishermen; paper place mats printed with the signs of the Chinese zodiac. Everywhere you look there will be plastic, vinyl, PVC: the plants in the corners, the seat of each chair, the amber-colored cups at the water dispenser, and, at the cash register, the little altruistic trays that tell you to go ahead, take a penny, leave a penny.

But remember what it is you came for. The goal, the crux, the mother lode: gleaming rows of inset chafing dishes where steam rises to meet the plastic roofs known as sneeze guards. The setup will tell you about the restaurant's ambitions. Are there two buffets, lined up like parallel stalwarts, dependable, traditional even, or do they form one line as in a middle school cafeteria? Are they perhaps angled, even perpendicular, in a nod to a newer, avant-garde style of enterprise? Are the buffets close to the kitchen, which is easier for the workers but more of a trek for some of the diners? Or do they take the center of the room, proud to claim the spotlight?

You might agree that one of the best things about a buffet is no waiting. The plates and bowls are always ready and someone will always take away the dirty ones. As experienced diners know, time can work for you at the buffet. Play it right and the span between walking in the door to biting into an egg roll is no more than two minutes. But what is your methodology? Do you move from left to right, appetizers to dessert? Do you pace yourself, dish by dish, or do you crowd as much as you can into each helping? How do you gauge your hunger to your greed? How do you figure the difference between eating and consuming?

You might choose to begin at the tureens of soup: wonton, hot and sour, yellow egg drop, thickened into goo. From there you might be distracted by mounds of fried rice, shining with oil (white rice available only upon request), sesame balls, and steamed buns—plenty of carbs for the rookies who fill up on them first. There will be piles of those cabbage-filled egg rolls, their skins turning obstinate under the heat lamps. The whole array of fried will be impressive: fried wonton strips, fried shrimp, fried chicken wings, fried crab puffs, fried dumplings, and the essential crab rangoon. All that happens even before the entrees: lo mein, spare ribs, Mongolian beef, sweet-and-sour pork, sweet-and-sour chicken, cashew chicken, almond chicken, sesame chicken, and, of course, the famous deep-fried nubs named after the mysterious General Tso. It's all gloriously American, brought in by food distributors, defrosted, reheated, refried, doused with the sweet, sweet, viscous sauces that arrive in giant plastic jars or frozen blocks almost arbitrarily labeled
Kung Pao
,
Garlic
, and
Szechuan
.

This is not to say that all buffets are alike. No, each has its own personality, its own special offerings, like fried corn on the cob or Shanghai noodle burritos. Some buffets take a pan-Asian approach, with California rolls, pad Thai, chewy parcels of bulgogi. Some rely on incentives, like all-you-can-eat king crab legs for an additional four dollars. Others go for broad ethnic variety, adding spaghetti with marinara, Swedish meatballs, quesadillas, hot dogs, chicken fingers, Tater Tots, a bin of mixed romaine with ranch, Italian, and Thousand Island dressings parked next to the dessert puddings.

Dessert, of course, is a crucial part of any buffet. You need the soft-serve ice cream with the “fixins” bar of chocolate and caramel and sprinkles. You need your grocery store cookies, cannoli, brownies, orange jelly rolls, slices of sheet cake and red-dye cherry pie. You have to have your syrup-soaked fruit cups, your red and lime Jell-O, your Jell-O mixed with Cool Whip.

All this and so much more for just $5.99 at lunch and $8.99 at dinner (not including tax and drinks).

Most customers don't leave tips, maybe a dollar or some change, though they do make as many trips as possible to the chafing dishes, hauling food like it's a sport. The same people who tell their children to eat every bite on their plates at home will heap on the sweet-and-sour, take a couple of bites, and move on to a fresh plate. When presented with a buffet, a kind of determination tends to come over people. Maybe you know what I mean. Maybe you start to feel, as I have, like the food is free, that the whole of it is yours. That you ought to claim more and more, even if you don't eat it. You wonder if you can sneak some leftovers home—you're paying for this, after all. You find yourself getting caught up in the allure, the expanse, dizzied by the promise, the challenge of all you can eat, all you can get, all you can demand. In your haste you might spill food on the tables, grab at the serving spoons and drop them wherever you like. Doesn't matter. Eat now, forget tomorrow. Ask for more fried shrimp, more white-meat chicken. You must exercise your right for endless refills, bottomless cups of soda pop. You must do whatever it takes to get your money's worth.

When you see these restaurants, especially in the many areas of the United States referred to as fly-over country, when you're driving past them, glad to be heading somewhere else, somewhere better, no doubt, you may feel sadness and amazement and pity, and you may wonder: How did that restaurant happen? Are actual Asian people running it? How did those poor souls end up here in the middle of nowhere?

My family was one of those you might have wondered about. In 1989, if you had driven past the Golden Dragon restaurant in La Porte, Indiana, and perhaps decided to stop in and check out the place, why not, you're hungry, you might risk it, you would have seen my parents replenishing the buffet, unloading ribs and wings, wiping the tables, stacking plates. Interchangeably waiters, busboys, cooks—my parents ran the place in tandem. They weren't Chinese, and neither had any training as a cook. But it didn't matter because the customers didn't know the difference.

I was five years old then and had no idea what it meant to run a restaurant, to be one of the few Asian families within a wide radius. In a year my father would be dead and not long after that the rest of us would be in a different small town in a different midwestern state.

But the Golden Dragon was the first buffet I remembered. We had moved to La Porte because my parents had heard of a family with jobs available at their restaurant. That was how it worked in the community—relying on friends of friends who were trusted, even if unknown, simply for being Vietnamese.

The town was about twenty miles away from a nuclear power plant in Michigan City, where we had gone once to see that great lake. Sam and I were fascinated by the cooling towers, and by the fact that you could swim and lie on the beach within view of those thick hourglasses, the steam that lifted away from them in slow motion. Ever after I couldn't help associating La Porte with those towers—vaguely menacing, yet something people seemed to take for granted.

Sam and I used to go to the Golden Dragon with our grandfather for a late dinner. Late, because we could eat the dregs of the buffet for nothing, and with no customers around the restaurant felt like our own playhouse. We crawled under the tables, pretending to be on submarines, secret missions. We crammed our mouths with wonton strips and drank as much Sprite as we wanted. If any crab rangoons were left, we fought over them. Our grandfather shook his head at the very idea, sickening to him, of cream cheese flavored with fake crab, stuffed in a wonton, and deep-fried. Sam and I knew we were American because we loved those things the most. The oily crisp giving way to the salty ooze. Ong Hai would wrap up the chicken or beef dishes to take home and my mother and father would scrub down the stainless steel vats, preparing for the next day. At the time I thought we owned the place, that it was fancy,
ours
, and that by right of daughterhood I could think of myself as some kind of Golden Dragon princess.

It took me until middle school, long after we'd left La Porte, to feel the abjection of my family's livelihood, to understand what did and did not belong to me. By then I had started busing tables, and saw that buffets in other towns and states followed the same structure, the same skewed ratio of fried to nonfried.

A lot of the customers assumed we didn't speak English, and therefore we were invisible to them. If white people thought I couldn't understand them, what might they say? As it turned out, people liked making jokes about eating dogs. They said no matter how much they ate they were going to get hungry again in an hour—a line I never really got. Sometimes they took on exaggerated Asian accents right in front of me, like Mickey Rooney doing yellow-face in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. “Five dolla, five dolla,” was a common phrase. “Ah, Grasshopper!” was another. “Bonsai!” And the yodeled, cringing cry of Long Duk Dong from
Sixteen Candles
, the thing I could never forgive John Hughes for: “Oh, sexy girlfriend!” It was all a joke, of course. Can't you take a joke? It's funny! Why get offended? Why be so sensitive!

Even if I was tempted to say something, fling back some kind of retort, if I could come up with something to say, I never would. Always my reaction was to retreat, conceal the humiliation of my race. That was what Asian people were supposed to do, wasn't it? Stay nice, slip from view.

But then there were times people would want me to talk. They would ask me what I was. “What are you?” “Where are you from?” Answering “America” or “Here” was not sufficient. It didn't matter that I had been born in La Porte. They wanted to know where I was
really
from, what I
really
was. They would take guesses. They might ask if I knew such-and-such Vietnamese person in a different city—was I related to them? Once in a while someone would try out a few words in mangled Chinese or Vietnamese and I would just nod and try to smile. Occasionally people would mention that their father or uncle had fought in the Vietnam War. And a few times, people asked what right I had to be in this country. That was when I started realizing that not everyone knew the basic history of the war, that there were those who viewed all of Vietnam as the enemy, the “Charlie” of so many fucked-up movies.

In retrospect, most of the customers were forgettably normal, predictable, easy. A number of vets frequented the buffets and they were always kind, prone to leaving tips, lingering to chat with my grandfather. But of course I remembered the rough patrons most. I let their words linger, reiterate themselves in so many moments of reflection.

I often wondered how my mother, with that proud lift of her chin, had been able to stand it. But she was pragmatic: If the money was good and the money was steady, what else mattered? It didn't make any difference, she said once, if all the customers were fools, so long as they paid. My grandfather seemed to agree. He made friends with the regulars, told them to call him Ong Hai. Mr. Hai, his first name. Soon, Sam—lingering on the edges of the restaurant, watching the rest of us toil—started calling him that too. But Ong Hai even took mockery in stride. He said you couldn't blame people for still learning, even if some of them were pretty slow at it. He traded jokes with customers, talked weather and snow and lake effect, smiled no matter what. When people complimented him on his English he thanked them with sincerity. Ong Hai became the name he answered to at work and at home. This is good business, is what he said. This is our American way.