Pioneer Girl (7 page)

“You have industry secrets?” I asked.

He picked up a couple of the Hoover documents and started to reshelve them. “To be honest, it's not really my thing. But I hear that Rocky Ridge has some material. Most of it on display, but apparently some is still boxed up.”

“Papers?”

“Mostly clothes and trinkets and stuff like that, but supposedly a few papers and letters too. There isn't much money to keep up the place, and it's more or less run by volunteers.”

“Their website looks pretty good.”

“That's fairly new. I think the heirs of the
Little House
enterprise are providing a little more support these days. They used to keep their money pretty tight. I think technically it's the Laura Ingalls Wilder–Rose Wilder Lane Museum but you know how no one calls it that.”

I didn't, but kept that to myself. “So how do you know there are more papers there?”

“I don't—it's just what I've heard from a few other people who've been through here. Just a rumor.”

“Aren't you guys interested in bringing whatever it is here?”

Ron glanced at a booklet he was holding, frowned, and set it back on the cart. “This doesn't belong in this section,” he muttered. “You scholars are never as neat and tidy as I think you're going to be. You know, we've tried to see about getting some more of Rose's things here but there's not much urgency about it in Missouri. Actually, no one's even confirmed that there are any real documents left. Bit of a biddy brigade over there.”

I glanced at the clock. Nearly five. “I guess I should get going,” I said.

“If you're coming back tomorrow, I'll save everything for you again right here,” Ron offered.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem.” He kept on with the Hoover items and I gathered up my notes. Conscious of Ron's presence, I tried to straighten the letters I hadn't yet read, keeping them in chronological order.

As I left the library, Rose's words—
a boy, again
—swam in my head. Maybe it had to do with the missing people in my own life—my father, and now Sam. Maybe it was simply the scholar's thrill of excavation that had eluded me throughout my grad school career. Somehow it had popped up here, in this relic of a presidential library in the middle of a literal cornfield. Either way, I knew I had to keep looking. And then I had to find a way to get to Rocky Ridge.

D
on't
was my mother's favorite way to begin a sentence. Don't forget to wash all the vegetables. Don't forget to scrub the sinks, mop the floor. Don't leave the kitchen without disinfecting the countertops. And don't forget there are a thousand ways to do these things wrong.

Those ways—the mistakes in waiting—seemed to come at me as I parked in front of my mother's house in Franklin, Illinois. Iowa seemed so much farther than hours away; it didn't seem possible that it was evening there, too. Already, my reflection in the car window seemed smaller.

I was born small, my mother liked to say, on a Saturday night, the contractions deepening right before the dinner rush at the Golden Dragon in La Porte, where my parents had started working a few months earlier. We had only one car, so Ong Hai drove my mother to the hospital, where he and Sam dozed off in the waiting room; at the restaurant, another waiter had agreed to drop my father off after his shift. But by the time he showed up, at ten-thirty, I had already arrived. My father recognized me in the nursery right away—the only Asian baby, with a shock of black, black hair. The nurse let him bring me into the room where my mother was sleeping. She woke up, she said, at the smell of oyster sauce and grease emanating from his clothes.

My mother would tell this story sometimes as proof of my early and innate sense of bad timing. Sam, after all, had been born on a sleepy Sunday morning in a town where everyone went to church. No disruption in schedule, no disruption in pay. He'd been an easy baby too, with little fussing or crying, content to spend hours playing with toy cars or watching television, while I apparently threw up a lot, screamed for no reason, and refused to sleep through the night.

Ong Hai neither verified nor disputed these reports. He tended to take the line of neutrality where things concerned my mother and me. And it was hard to make him mad or even frustrated. “Your ma,” he would say, shaking his head, his only way of criticizing her. “You kids.” His gentle nature had a way of making Sam and me listen; we wanted to gain his quiet favor and approval. I remembered long days, just the three of us, hanging out in a patch of backyard, walking to a playground, counting the tiger lilies we passed. My mother would be gone from breakfast to late at night, sometimes working two different restaurant jobs. She smelled too of frying oil and soy sauce. Even though she showered as soon as she got home, the odor lingered in the sofa cushions she'd sat in, the fibers of all her clothes. In later years, when Sam and I could fend for ourselves after school, that smell would become Ong Hai's as well. Whatever place we lived would retain the scent of their restaurant hours.

After La Porte, the towns blurred together—Elgin, Waukesha, Aurora, Kankakee. I didn't realize until I was in high school that the one midwestern state we avoided was Michigan, where my father had died.

Sometimes I thought I didn't remember his death at all. Sometimes I thought I didn't remember him. In my mind he was a still-life figure: smiling at my brother and me as we clutched matching balloons; holding us, one in each arm, while on a carnival ride called the Scrambler. The active memories were hazed over, influenced by too many images of old-reel home movies from television shows. Slow-motion details appeared in dreams, in unexpected moments when I was TAing a class or opening the cupboard to search out something for dinner. Then I would see my father again, standing in one of the buffets he and my mother managed; offering me a chopstick bite of shrimp; already starting to clap while Sam leaned forward to blow out the candles on his fifth birthday cake.

Ong Hai said my father was the kind of guy who made friends wherever he went. He had a big laugh—I thought I remembered that too—and he was always up for trying something new: foods, shows, cities. One of his dreams was to visit every state in America. He had plans to build a restaurant franchise, eventually importing Asian goods to American grocery stores under his own label. He could have done it, Ong Hai said. He was a natural in business. His only weakness was his kindness; he would help anyone out, even to his own detriment. Sometimes he lost money on ventures simply because he'd been too nice, too trusting. In La Porte, he loaned money to friends but never got repaid; he gave other people his business ideas.

When we offered our respects to the urn with my father's ashes, we lit red candles and incense, we bowed to his photograph, and we set out plates of fruit. But none of these helped me keep a true image of him. I don't remember my mother getting the news of his death, or seeing her or Ong Hai crying, or me or Sam crying, though we must have. I don't remember the words
death
or
died
being uttered in either Vietnamese or English. I just remember always knowing he was gone.

Somehow, my father's being an immigrant made his death seem that much more tragic. To have escaped a war, to have fled his own country, to have started over, to have come such a distance, only to have his life cut short, drowned in a strange river far from home—it seemed unbearably unfair.

All the same, Sam and I grew up being careful to say little, if anything, about him. It wasn't that we were afraid of hurting our mother—she was no delicate flower. We were afraid, or at least I was, of enraging her. My father was a topic that required so much respect that almost no one, at any time, would be worthy of it. And I more than anyone else knew the depth and capacity of her anger. Before the fight that had led to Sam walking out that first time, she seldom turned on him or Ong Hai, though there was one time when Sam bounced a ball that knocked over one of the candles on our father's shrine, almost toppling the urn. My mother very nearly raised her hand to smack his face. I had never seen her do that to him, though I'd been the recipient of a few such slaps myself.

We could go weeks in peace, she and I, then suddenly break down over the way I said I needed to do homework. “Don't you talk that way to me!” she'd yell, and we'd be off. Then the next day all would be calm again, my mother offering to teach me how to cable-knit with a new ball of acrylic yarn, me pretending to learn.

“You are alike,” Ong Hai sometimes remarked, and I didn't know whom that irritated more.

I could never deny, however, that I had inherited some of my mother's neuroses. In the same way that she would never stop looking for a better job opportunity, and would never think to miss a day of work just because she was sick, I wouldn't go to sleep until I had memorized every date in a history book's chapter on the Depression, preparing for an exam. School became my domain of control: story problems were solvable, grades were attainable, and results and right answers were on every page. Literature became my favorite because of all the symbols and metaphors, easy to manipulate into the thesis statements my teachers so desired. In math, you could have a right answer or a wrong answer. In literature, you could have the best answer. Whenever I developed a formula for interpretation, coerced a few images into defining an entire story, or text, as my teachers said, it was a little bit like winning a game show.

Whenever Ong Hai says my mother and I are alike he means it as a compliment. He means tenacity, determination. And perhaps he means to remind me that I am beholden to her. That, I've always known. I could only vaguely ever imagine what she and my father and Ong Hai had gone through to come to the United States, though sometimes I thought I recognized it in her saving face.

I'd always looked to Ong Hai as the benevolent contrast, the one who would sympathize when I pouted after a punishment, the one who would sneak me a piece of fruit if, after refusing a dinner of leftovers, I was sent to bed hungry. My mother must have known these things too, but it was in her power to let them go. Her silence always made me hold my breath—for its rarity, its way of preceding fury, its promise of more scolding to come. She was, like a lot of Asian people, disconcertingly blunt. Anyone she saw, including me and Sam, might be deemed too thin or too fat, too ugly, too tired-looking, too slutty, or simply stupid-looking. By the time I got to middle school I was in the habit of checking my appearance in the mirror not out of vanity but out of worry, paranoid about what my mother might target next.
She can't help it
, was what I told my friends when they expressed their shock at some of my stories.
That's how those old-school Asian people are
. I never admitted how her watchful assessments seeped into my own consciousness, and how much effort it took simply not to listen.

And I never wanted to end up like her, working that hard, moving so much, finding solace only in a few hours of television and sewing each night. Every fellowship, stipend, or loan, every research gig, even Ong Hai's secret help—each windfall was a form of deliverance from that fate.

What I hadn't expected was that I would be so unremarkable in grad school. Forget being a star—I wasn't even close to a gleam. When a few classmates dropped out after the first year, I both envied and pitied them. I didn't dare think about doing the same, as it would have been an admission of failure to my mother. Instead, I chose Edith Wharton as my dissertation subject because I'd read
The Age of Innocence
so many times and hadn't yet grown to hate it. I told myself that maybe everyone took their vocational cues this way. Maybe everyone felt like an imposter and this was why my classmates drank so much. Me, I wasn't so good at that, not since my first semester in Madison, when after two glasses of wine at a reception I bit into a cherry tomato and the juice shot out onto a professor's sweater. He didn't notice, just kept on talking about Cixous, but another student stared at me in horror. I never drank that much again.

By the time I turned in the prospectus for my dissertation, grad school had become one big ruse that I had backed myself into and couldn't get out of. So I kept on with it, forced my way through the diss as fast as possible, and decided that this was how all academics felt, that everyone slogged through the semesters and lived for summers and sabbaticals.

It had taken being away from all that, hiding out in the Herbert Hoover Library, in a place that felt as far from civilization as the Ingallses' house on the prairie had been from a city, to understand what so many of my peers must have already known. At one point, I looked up at the library's old schoolhouse clock and realized I'd been reading Rose's journals for five solid hours. I had fallen headlong into her world. Was that what research was supposed to feel like? Was it supposed to render a person spellbound, the archival stuff so vivid that one's own life faded in comparison?

I hadn't wanted to go back to Franklin, to that shadow of a life.

—

I
n the kitchen Ong Hai was making two different kinds of banh mi. The counters were crowded with plates of pickled carrots, daikon, leeks, grilled pork and shrimp. He would layer these together, fleck them with jalapeños, coriander, mint, and Thai basil, then dash a split baguette with Sriracha-fish-sauce mayonnaise.

“Are you trying these out for the café?” I asked.

“Now you're back, you can be the taste tester. How's your friend?”

I'd almost forgotten the lie I'd told. I wanted to confess, tell him about Rose, show him the photograph I'd stolen from the Hoover Library, but my mother was within earshot in the living room, the television casting its ghostly light onto the walls. So all I said was that I'd spent some time doing research at a library near Iowa City.

Ong Hai pointed at the plates. “Try,” he said.

I popped a slice of daikon in my mouth. Its vinegary crunch even tasted translucent. “This banh mi could change the whole business.”

“Hope so, or your ma is going to start talking about going back to the buffets,” Ong Hai said.

“It hasn't even been a year and a half yet.” I'd read somewhere that more than 60 percent of restaurants didn't make it past that mark, but had figured my mother's pride alone would make her hold on longer.

“Well, at least things look a little prettier now, thanks to you.”

“Did
she
say that?”

“Doesn't say it, maybe, but I think she thinks it. And there's more to do.”

He was pulling me in, pulling me back.
But what about my own work?
I wanted to say. How had my mother managed to disparage my contributions to the café and then enlist me for more without uttering a single word?

“It's all for Sam anyway, right?”

“What does it matter? He's your brother.” As usual, I was proving way too petty to be the Buddhist Ong Hai was. Changing the subject, he said, “You know who loved banh mi? Your ba. I bet he would have talked about making a franchise. What do you think? Like a Viet Chipotle place except with banh mi.”

“Works for me,” I said.

“Here, try the pork and shrimp.”

We turned our focus back to food, our favorite subject, talking about how to layer the ingredients toward a better balance. I took pictures, jotted down some notes. Ong Hai sliced the baguette on the diagonal. I'd buy this every day, I said, after the first bite. He chewed slowly and decided it wasn't bad at all, then told me to eat the rest and decide for sure.

This habit, of being incapable of eating without sharing, was so ingrained that it had become mine as well. I had irritated every roommate I'd ever had by asking and reasking if they were sure, really sure, they didn't want some ice cream or toast or pancakes or croissants. They called me a food pusher.

When Ong Hai brought half a sandwich to my mother I took the moment to slide past them, down the hall toward the bedroom that I still refused to think of as anything other than temporary, borrowed space. Opening my overnight bag, I pulled out the Laura Ingalls and Rose Wilder biographies I'd found at Defunct Books in Iowa City. It was comforting to return to them, get lost even in these scholarized accounts of the pioneer life, especially when it came to Rose's involvement—as collaborator, editor, writer—in shaping Laura's descriptions of crops and holidays, fried potatoes and chicken pie.