Stealing Buddha's Dinner (27 page)

I didn't speak of any of this at the China Pearl, where our table filled up with tin and bamboo steamers of shrimp
shumai,
the bright green of chives and scallions translucent through the delicate skins. We ate spareribs, shrimp balls, and sticky buns stuffed with red pork. We reached for barbecue pork buns, lotus seed buns, sesame balls, beef meatballs, more shrimp, and parfait cups containing Jell-O cubes and melon balls with paper umbrellas perched on top. Nho, Binh, and my mother kept the food coming, anxious to show their welcome through generosity. It was just what Noi would have done, I knew.

We didn't talk much, letting the noise of the restaurant—the clatter of tin baskets, the sharp calls of the waitresses, families seeming to shout as they talked—float between our conversation about Nancy and Steven and how they liked school. Almost every Asian family I had ever seen didn't know how to distinguish between talking and shouting. But we kept quiet, not yet knowing what to say to each other. Every once in a while Nancy, who had the same button-nose I'd had at her age, and almost the same bowl haircut, threw me an impish smile. She didn't look like a Nancy to me; it was such a severe, non-Vietnamese name.

I asked my mother about her baby. “It's a girl,” she said, patting the green shimmering polyester covering her abdomen.

Five children. It was strange to think of that number, when all my life I had assumed she had had only Anh and me. It was almost a retroactive comfort to know otherwise, and to think that she had not been so alone in Vietnam.

Our meal was done. Napkins stained with soy sauce, the table littered with empty teacups, dishes, and tin steamer pans. All around us Asian languages gathered and swelled. We rose and traveled in a body down the stairs and toward the exit. Out into the summer heat we started walking, passing butchers with glorious red-shellacked ducks hanging in the windows and clothing stores bursting with bolts of silk.

We stopped at a storefront display of watches, scarves, and rhinestone jewelry. “I buy you something,” my mother declared, already pushing toward the entrance.

I protested, unable to bear the idea of her spending what little money she had on me. “Let's buy something for the baby later on,” I said.

We found ourselves in the shop next door, a neon-lit bakery filled with dozens of varieties of bean cakes, rice cakes, and butter cookies behind slanted glass cases. A row of cream cakes—white genoise layered with fresh strawberries and fruit and covered with whipped cream—called out to us with their unmarred surfaces. I was drawn to a shelf of mooncakes pressed into different shapes: a dragon, a dollar sign, and Buddha. It was the fat happy Buddha, his face scrunched up in laughter. A map of his body in golden dough relief. Before I knew it my mother had ordered and paid for one. She put the cake in my hands. Buddha, wrapped in wax paper and tucked in a brown slip of a bag, felt heavier than I expected. The moon cake's thick outer crust protected a solid filling of green mung bean paste. I knew its pasty texture and sweet, dusty smell. At home, mooncakes always came around during Tet. I didn't care much for the flavor or feel of bean paste, but I could never resist taking one bite to see if I had changed my mind. The taste lingered, making my mouth feel dry. I preferred the sweetness of candy and caramelized sugar. I always wanted mooncakes to be something other than they were.

I carried that Buddha-shaped mooncake all over Chinatown. Every time I glanced at a shop window my mother offered to buy whatever I saw there. Watches, shoes, all manner of gold and jade jewelry. Her offers filled me with guilt and the fleeting wish to be a little girl again so I could accept her gifts and so erase all the years that divided us.

Nancy and Steven, walking ahead with Nho and Binh, glanced back at us with small, curious smiles. They held their parents' hands. Huy, my half-brother, the half-American, was supposed to meet us at the restaurant but had never shown up. I had a hundred questions to ask my mother. I wanted to know what it had been like to arrive in Boston, how they had gotten along those first unfamiliar weeks. Nho had been twenty years old then, Huy sixteen. My mother worked where she works still, at a small office products factory just a few miles from her apartment. She fills envelope boxes with their envelopes, sitting in a line of other women not unlike her—a little older, a little weary, but eager for company, gossip, and any reason to laugh. I wanted to know how she had met my father, and what kind of relationship they had had. I wanted to know when I was born and if she remembered the time of day or night. I wondered what she had thought about when she looked at me and Anh. Two more children. Two more girls.

Suddenly my mother said, “Rosa—she a good mother.” I couldn't tell if it was a question or a declaration. So I said, “Yes.”

“She good,” my mother repeated. There was no trace of sadness in her voice. “A very, very good lady. She good mother for you.”

“Yes,” I agreed.
I'm very thankful,
she had said earlier, and it finally dawned on me that she was thankful not for the money my parents sent but for the fact that they had raised me and Anh. They had taken care of us. Oh, we desired a million selfish things, but we had never really gone without. We were the fortunate ones. That's what my mother was pressing on me—what I hadn't ever fully seen.

The afternoon sun poured down, unfiltered by clouds. It was getting time for me to get back to the hotel so I could attend the wedding of two people I'd never see again. It seemed ages ago since I had been anywhere but here, walking slowly through Boston with my mother. So many questions, yet no voice and no time. What was I afraid of? Of starting to talk and being unable to stop? I looked in every store window, all the arrangements of sequined purses and fake flowers, to find the answer to what I was supposed to feel.

I remained a stranger or a ghost, something in between. Binh weaved expertly through traffic on the way to Newton, while in the backseat I struggled for conversation. In the end, I left without my mother ever knowing where I lived, or how I had chosen my apartment in Ann Arbor because it was located on Ingalls Street. She didn't know my major, or the hours I spent combing through the library stacks to find obscure research for my English papers. I didn't know how to describe these things. Our conversations were rudimentary.
Do you like school? Yes. Do you get good grades? Yes. That's good.
And then me saying:
Do you like Boston? Yes. Me, too.
It was as though we were practicing language conversations out of a workbook.

In the end, I realized that I had never had fantasies of meeting my mother. On soap operas I had seen people reuniting with great cries and splashing tears. They would run at each other at full speed across a giant meadow or parking lot or airport. I never imagined this for myself. Nothing about my mother spoke to my idea of fantasy. To me, growing up in Grand Rapids, fantasy meant ruffled canopy beds, pink teddy bears, a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies sitting on a desk beside a new pile of books. I had always known that whoever my mother was, she was not the stuff of fantasies. She was, on the contrary, the stuff of too much reality. And I had avoided that reality—my whole family had—for years. In the end, I realized how easy it had been for my father and Rosa to stay silent, to keep the walls of our family boundaries intact.

In the hypothetical, you think of how much you will have to say, how the questions will just flow and flow, trying to cover the years of separation. You think all you'll want to do is get to know the mother you have never met. But in the end you are left with an oil-stained bag containing a Buddha-shaped mooncake. I am left with that cake. And I could not eat it. I carried it back to my hotel and stuffed it into my suitcase. I brought it back to my Ann Arbor apartment before finally throwing it into the trash. Buddha's face had smudged against the paper, blurred with grease.

Two months later, Anh and I decided to send a gift of baby clothes to our mother. In the backs of our minds we awaited word of our new sister's arrival, but no news came. That Thanksgiving in Grand Rapids, I mentioned this to my father and stepmother. Though we had become a little more open with each other by then, less afraid to face the complications of our family, I was glad that they had never asked me about meeting my mother in Boston.
Oh,
Rosa said in a no-nonsense voice,
she lost the baby.
She had gone into premature labor in her seventh month, and the baby was dead before Anh and I had ever mailed her the clothes we had picked out from Baby Gap. It was just one of the things my parents shelved and didn't get around to telling us.

It was early May in Saigon, 1975, a few days after the city's fall, when my mother returned to the house where my father, Anh, and I had lived with Noi. I imagined her opening the door and feeling, instantly, the emptiness. The smell of it—notes of incense and jasmine tea. She stumbled back out in the narrow street. A man sitting in his doorway called out to her.
They're gone. They went to America.
She didn't believe him.
Maybe they left you a note,
he said. He was bored; the whole day lay in front of him. She went back into the house to look again for the note that wasn't there. She got down on her knees to examine the floor, but found only dust. She left our house slowly, the shock so clear on her face that the neighbor leaned forward to repeat the news to her —
They're gone
—as if she were hard of hearing.
They went to America.

In the end, I left my questions unanswered. I couldn't comprehend the loss, the nearly twenty years' absence, the silence and unknowing, the physical distance literally impossible to break. I didn't know what to say to make anything different. I didn't know what to do with so many years between us. In the end, my mother and her family drove me to the hotel in Newton, Massachusetts. I got out of the car. We hugged our good-byes. My mother assessed me up and down, as she had a few hours earlier, and pronounced me too skinny in the way that Vietnamese women do. When she touched me I felt the cool of her jade bracelet on my skin. They walked me to the door of the hotel and let me go, waiting until I had pushed beyond the revolving door into the lobby. I turned to see them once more—my half-sister and her husband, my niece and nephew, and my mother. They waved and smiled as if I were going down the jetway to an airplane and a long, long flight out of there. I walked to the bank of elevators. In the end, I left my mother all over again.

I WENT TO VIETNAM WITH NOI AND MY UNCLE CHU
Anh in the spring of 1997. My father wouldn't go because he was afraid of flying. “If you don't get on a plane you'll never get to see Vietnam again,” I said, stating the obvious. “Oh, I don't know,” he replied in an offhand way, which meant that he didn't care to discuss it. I had originally planned to go by myself—I had received a grad school travel grant—but when my father recruited his sensible brother to look out for me, I realized that I didn't want to go to Vietnam without Noi. We made a plan to start in Saigon and work our way north to Hanoi. There, Noi would be able to reunite with her siblings whom she hadn't seen since 1954.

The moment we arrived in Saigon, bleary and dazed after nearly twenty-four hours of travel, we encountered the fierce heat that would press on us for the next four weeks. It was May, and the air was thick with the humidity of the incipient rainy season. Just outside the airport, a throng of people waited for arrivals among cabdrivers smoking and honking their horns at nobody in particular. Then a small band of men and women—cousins, great-aunts and great-uncles my father had contacted—pushed forward to claim us. The women, dressed in bright
ao dai
s, waved stalks of gladioli at us as they swept us into a cab.

They lived in a neighborhood of muddied alleys, in a concrete home with a red-tiled roof, on the outskirts of Saigon. As guests, our duty was to sit on the hardwood sofa, sip jasmine tea, and nibble Pirouline wafers and fruit. Someone poured me a tall glass of 7UP with a slab of ice. I ate a piece of pineapple so sweet that I gasped.

I had no way to keep up with the frenzied pace at which Noi, Chu Anh, and my relatives were talking, so I just gazed around the room. I longed to explore the house, especially since I was certain I could hear pigs and roosters in the yard, and several cats wandered in and out at leisure. In the living room, the dark wood altar to the ancestors was a lot like Noi's at home, with a statue of Buddha presiding above all. Nearby, a television broadcast a Vietnamese soap opera. The cement floor had a long hairline fracture that led to a mahogany bed shielded by a bamboo screen. The windows had bars over them instead of glass, and the wide front door, like most I saw in neighborhoods in Saigon, lay open to passersby.

That first afternoon in Vietnam, a cat died while I was looking at it. She was bovine-looking, white with black spots, dozing under my second cousin's chair. After a while I realized that she was lying in an unusually still way. Curious, I got out of my seat and touched the cat with one finger.
“Con meo chet roi,”
I said without thinking.
The cat just died.
My cousin laughed and said that the cat was just lazy and slept a lot. Noi, from her spot on the sofa, looked at the cat and furrowed her brow.
“Chet cha,”
she exclaimed.

For days the dead cat unnerved me. One moment alive, sleeping like any ordinary cat—the next moment gone. She had passed from one form to another in front of my eyes. I thought of reincarnation, of ghosts hovering all around us. I wondered where the spirit of the cat would go.

The next few days we stayed with another relative who lived in a spacious two-story home in a busy urban area closer to downtown. Co Nga had a well-paying job at a bank, and even had an air-conditioning unit in one room on the second floor. That's where she insisted Noi and I sleep, and we gratefully accepted. After the heat of the days visiting Buddhist temples, calling on old friends and relatives, and walking around downtown, we were glad to lie on the twin beds and breathe cool air.