Stealing Buddha's Dinner (26 page)

We handed our cards to Rosa, who said she would mail them. She looked them over, reading our messages, and I remembered how, when I was in first grade, she had intercepted a letter I had tried to send Jenny Adams.
Dear Jenny,
I had written.
I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.
Rosa had laid the open letter on the dining table in front of me and lectured me about being a mean and bad little girl.

I never found out if my mother got the cards. She doesn't remember. She didn't write back. For the first few weeks Anh and I waited in suspense and terror, as if everything we knew— our family, our house on Florence—might possibly break apart at the arrival of a response. The years of silence surrounding our mother had built within us a wall of fear: now that it had cracked, what else might? I half expected my father to react somehow—to talk to us. But he went about his business, working at the feather company, smoking at night, and watching television.

As the months passed without word, the subject of our mother seemed to slip back into the well of the unspoken. We went back to our regular lives. A year passed, then another. It was easy to go on. We had, after all, everything we had always known. We had a mother and a father, siblings, uncles, and Noi. The woman who had written from Pennsylvania remained a blank face, a gap on the page. How could we miss her if we did not know her?

After Crissy, Anh, Phuong, Vu, and I moved out and left for college, my parents began to change. By small degrees their voices softened; they asked not what grades we got but what classes we were taking. I chalked it up to living alone with Vinh and Noi. My father and Rosa had always looked after my brother with special care, perhaps because he was the only child equally theirs. He was, too, a mellower soul than the rest of us. Instead of hoarding toys and candy he shared them, wanting everyone to enjoy what he enjoyed. I decided he took after Noi—no other way to explain how our household had produced or sustained such a kind and mild creature. Perhaps he rubbed off on my parents, or perhaps the years of dealing with us girls had worn them down. Whenever I came home my father inquired if I had enough to eat. He made sure to supply me with plenty of my favorite Kung-Fu ramen, and he'd sauté an extra-large dinner of shrimp with scallions and garlic. “You want to eat something?” was his way of asking how I was doing. “You want McDonald's?” he'd ask. “Burger King? Pizza? Chinese food?”

The summer after my first year at the University of Michigan I took classes and worked at the front desk of a dormitory. My father and Rosa decided to go on a brief East Coast vacation with Anh and Vinh. They planned to see Boston and Cape Cod, then stop by Niagara Falls on the way back home.

Oh, yes, Rosa mentioned, they planned to visit my mother, too.

It had been eight years of silence since that letter from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

“Also,” Rosa said, “your sister and brother.”
Sister and brother?
I repeated. It took me a minute to figure out she didn't mean Anh and Vinh. Rosa didn't know how old this other sister and brother were, only that they had been born before Anh and me. “So,” she said, cheerfully, as though she hadn't just dropped a thunderbolt, “we'll swing through Ann Arbor to pick you up.” The matter-of-fact tone had resumed, a way to erase all the years since the letter.

When I told my supervisor that I needed a week off to go to Boston, he shook his head. Summer positions made no room for vacation time, he said. If I left I'd have to leave the job for good. He had a thicket of wavy blond hair and small steely eyes and wore leather jackets in eighty-degree weather. I remember how distraught he was when news reports announced Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson's separation. “Not Burt and Loni!” he kept lamenting.

I called my father to tell him that I would lose my job if I went to Boston. “So what?” he said. “I'll give you some money.” I waited for him, my stepmother, and sister to press me, convince me, tell me I was being ridiculous.
Quit your job now,
I wanted them to say.
We'll be in Ann Arbor in two weeks. You're coming with us.
But they didn't say anything more.

Had we been closer I wouldn't have hesitated to quit; I would have been comforted, sheltered by my family; I would have needed to be with them. But instead I felt the opposite. My parents might have softened a little, but it was too late, and not yet enough. I couldn't fathom meeting my mother with them. So they set off on their trip, me staying behind in Ann Arbor and nursing a strange feeling of regret and neglect. I told myself I needed to see my mother on my own, though the idea terrified me. Seeing her at all, in truth, terrified me, and I knew what I was really doing: avoiding, taking the coward's way into hiding.

A few weeks later I called Anh in East Lansing, where she went to MSU. We had been distant through most of our high school years and it would be a long while before we made up that lost time. We spoke like awkward colleagues. “How was it?” I asked vaguely.

“Okay,” she said. “It was weird. It was fine.”

The next summer, I met my mother.

She lived in Somerville, Massachusetts, and I had come to Boston to attend a wedding. We had agreed to meet in the lobby of a hotel in Newton, where I was staying. A few minutes before eleven in the morning, I saw them through the glass revolving doors: my half-sister and her husband. I went out to them in the broad summer sunlight.

When my mother's letter from Pennsylvania arrived in 1985 no one had mentioned the existence of a half-sister and a half-brother. But my parents had known all along, of course. Nho and Huy were several years older than Anh and I, and my father had met them way back when he was dating my mother in Saigon.

My half-sister Nho had long, permed hair and a broad face, as planed as mine but with sharper features. We smiled a lot, not quite looking at each other fully, as we walked to her burgundy Plymouth Horizon in the parking lot. In mostly unbroken silence her husband Binh, round, with a boyish smile, drove us to Somerville. They lived in a subsidized apartment complex— clusters of identically squat, bleak-looking brick buildings surrounded by parking lots. Two jungle gyms, clamped to the ground, highlighted the desolation.

I followed Nho and Binh to their apartment, passing through dim hallways that echoed our scuffles like an abandoned school. When we reached the door to their apartment it opened, and I knew the woman standing on the other side was my mother. We stood eye to eye. I could see in her face my sister Anh: softer features, blurred edges, a mushroom nose, a delicacy tempered by a strong, stubborn mouth. In size she was more like me: too short, the kind of person others called
tiny.
Except she was, at age forty-seven, pregnant for the last time.
She's six months,
Rosa had warned me over the phone right before I left, though the belly seemed hardly larger than a paunch.

She leaned forward and hugged me, a quick kiss hello as if we had only last seen each other a few months ago. “Look at you,” she said, holding me at arm's length. She made a clicking noise with her tongue. “You're late. Almost twenty years I wait, and you're late.”

She fluttered to the kitchen, insisting on pouring me an enormous plastic cup full of ice and Pepsi. Like Noi, she wore a tunic over flowy pants and soft slippers on her feet. But unlike Noi, whose silvery hair still fell to her knees when she unwound her bun each evening, my mother wore an obvious wig. It looked vaguely 1960s prom, too big for her head, and I wanted to ask her what had happened to all of her hair.

She lived with her boyfriend in a one-bedroom apartment upstairs but spent most of her time down here, with Nho, Binh, and their kids, Steven and Nancy, who were eight and six years old. They peered at me shyly, their eyes as wondering and mischievous as I imagined Anh and mine had been at their age. They shared a room with a red bunk bed. Like every corner of the apartment, the bedroom was crammed with household items: fans, cleaning supplies, folding chairs, stacks of blankets, towels, and clothes. In the living area a black leather sofa hunkered near an entertainment console decked out with a large TV, stereo system, and stacks of Vietnamese CDs. The pink window blinds over the windows were drawn, casting a dusky hue over the room.

We decided to all squeeze into the Plymouth and drive to Chinatown for dim sum. As Binh drove, switching between light rock and oldies stations on the radio, I looked out at the bright blue-skied day in Boston. The giant cranes of the Big Dig moved as if in time to the music in the car. My mother clasped my hand with hers. It was bony, the skin slippery. A solid jade bracelet enclosed her wrist. She would have to break it to remove it, or coax it off in a bath of warm water and soap.

“Agh,” she sighed, “you should see how surprised I was when I came back and all of you—gone!” She spoke in such a deadpan manner that for a moment I thought she was joking.

“You just left. Poof! Gone. I'm so surprised.” She lifted her hands and let them fall. “No note, no nothing. You all just suddenly left. And then I'm so sad.”

I let out a small breath. “What did you do?”

“I cry,” she said, still deadpan, as if delivering a punch line. “I cry for days and days.”

As we walked through Chinatown, she told me that my father had sent her several packages when she lived in Saigon: aspirin, Band-Aids, toothbrushes and toothpaste, a little money. All that time he had known her address and she had known ours. Surely he had written her about Anh and me. How old we were getting. How well we were getting along in America. Maybe he told her how we couldn't get enough of Tom and Jerry cartoons, or Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street. My mother didn't remember. Only that, after a few years, the packages stopped coming.

In between relationships with Nho's father and my own father, she had had a brief affair with an American soldier in Saigon. He left long before she gave birth to their son, whom she named Huy. Years later, it would be Huy's status as a half-American child that would secure their entry into the United States. After they arrived at the women's center in Pennsylvania in 1985, they found sponsors in Somerville, Massachusetts. My mother must have kept my father and Rosa updated on her whereabouts, for she said they had sent her a few checks over the years.

“I'm very thankful to them,” she said quietly.

Throughout my childhood my father was someone I mostly tried to avoid. He was moody, with an unpredictable temper, and nobody wanted to be in range when he got angry. But sometimes, when he had too much drink on Christmas Day, he would get sentimental and start talking about Vietnam. I seized these chances to ask how we had left in 1975. I even couched the question in safe terms: it was for a school report. My father told the story a little differently each time—hours shifted; the cook on the ship might morph into the captain. Once he said we went all the way to the airport before deciding we would have better luck getting out by boat. There were only two occasions when I felt brave enough, and my father seemed jovial enough—the drunkenness at that safe area before he became belligerent—to ask what happened to my mother. The first time, my father said she was with us. Then a bomb went off and she panicked, got lost in the crowd, and we had to get on the ship without her. The second time, he said she was stuck at her mother's house across the river, that the bridges to our house had been bombed or guards had refused to let people cross. When my father told these stories a stern look settled over his face and I knew not to pursue the questions. I understood why we had left her behind—we knew a lot of families in similar situations, with relatives stranded in Vietnam, waiting for sponsorship papers—but I wanted to know what it had been like, being him, making that choice. I wanted to know what thoughts had flown through his mind. Guilt, sorrow?

How often did he think about that night? Did he miss her? Did he love her?

This is what my mother said:

The week before April 29, Anh had been staying with her and Nho and Huy at her mother's house. But Anh wouldn't stop crying and whining—she wanted bananas, and no one had any. Frustrated, my mother brought Anh to Noi's place across the river, where Noi had been taking care of me. My mother had no idea what lay ahead, that it would be nearly twenty years before she would see us again. She knew that almost everyone in Saigon was talking about leaving, but she thought it was just talk. Rumors, not plans. Days later we were running toward a ship at the harbor while she was at home, waiting out the shelling, hoping her neighborhood would be spared.

A few days after the official surrender she thought it would be safe enough to go back to Noi's house. She found the place empty, the furniture, cooking pans, everything taken away by neighbors and looters. Outside, the man who lived next door told her—
eh, didn't you know?
—we had left for America. He urged her to check if we had left a note. But she had already searched every crevice. She started walking back home, slowly, looking back just in case she'd spot us there after all. The neighbor repeated his information that we had fled the country, calling it after her. There was nothing left for her to do but return to her mother's house and wait.

At the China Pearl, sassy old waitresses pushed their dim sum carts around the tables, calling out the names of dishes in a bored tone. The restaurant had two stories full of packed family tables at peak brunch hour. Puffs of steam rose every time a waitress lifted the lid of a steaming basket of dumplings. Nho and Binh took charge, scooping up several plates of shrimp rice rolls, Nancy and Steven's favorite dish. They loved to watch the waitress pour a squiggle of soy sauce on the wide, flat noodles that threatened to slip from their chopsticks. I hadn't eaten dim sum since my family had taken a summer trip to Toronto and Niagara Falls more than ten years ago. I remembered how we had all boarded the
Maid of the Mist
to see the falls up close, the spray hitting us full in the face. In Toronto, my father had thrown a fit when my sisters and I begged him to let us ride the elevator to the top of the CN Tower. He had a fear of heights, and if he wouldn't go up there, then none of us would. Then we went to a dim sum restaurant somewhere in Chinatown. I remember my astonishment at having the choices rolled right by us, on display, there for the taking. My father and Noi made all of the selections, mindful of how each plate added up when the waitress stamped the bill on our table. I remember how much my father loved the steamed chicken feet, which none of us kids would taste, and how Noi slipped morsels of shrimp dumpling, blushing pink and expertly halved, onto my plate. Before heading home, we stopped at an Asian market and loaded up on produce that was hard to get in Grand Rapids—soursop, guava, green papaya. Rosa covered the boxes of fruit with our jackets, hiding them on the floor of the backseat, and when we got close to customs control at the border she ordered us to pretend to be asleep.