Stealing Buddha's Dinner (28 page)

On my first night at Co Nga's I stood for ten minutes in front of her house wondering how I could possibly cross the street to check out the shoe store on the other side. The flow of mopeds, cars, and bicyclists never waned and never stopped beeping. There were men bearing impossible bundles with their bicycles—stacks of ice, long pieces of plastic pipe, a huge turtle floating in a fish tank. After a while, a little boy approached me and told me he'd help me cross. He was maybe seven or eight years old, but when he took my hand and led me into the path of the oncoming traffic, I followed him. We moved steadily across the street, pausing and meandering as the motorcycles bent to make room for us.

In the mornings Co Nga served us bowls of
pho
redolent with star anise and heaped with bean sprouts and herbs. She set out plates of mangosteen, branches of lychee and longan fruit, and sliced watermelon. I loved to strip away the pebbled skin of a lychee and pop the translucent eyeball into my mouth, sucking the flesh away from the varnished pit. I couldn't get enough of the crunchy, cold watermelon; it tasted sweeter and deeper—more thoroughly watermelon—than any I had ever tasted in America. In the evenings Co Nga steamed enormous shrimp with their heads on and stewed fish in spicy sauces with coriander, chilies, and
nuoc mam.
She sautéed slices of beef with lemongrass and vegetables and cooked up a pungent
canh chua
fish soup with tomatoes. Worried that I would only like American food, she also made a heap of broad-cut french fries every night.

A few years back Co Nga had taken in an old, dying uncle. She fed and washed him, helped him up and down from the little bed near the kitchen where he slept all day. He was ancient, with a long wispy beard, and he had lost most of his vision. When he sat at the table he didn't appear to be aware of us at all. Co Nga cooked him a watery rice porridge—
chao,
something Noi always made for me when I was sick—and I couldn't help watching him eat it. He leaned into the bowl, dragging his beard along the surface of the gruel as he took great sloppy slurps. Two or three times a meal he would pause to release a huge slow-motion sneeze.

One day in Saigon, Noi, Chu Anh, and I visited the house where we had lived up until April 29, 1975. The cab dropped us off at the entrance to one of the city's many neighborhood mazes of concrete walls divided into houses. The narrow road twisted back and forth, and Noi said that it would lead eventually to the temple she had walked to almost every day. On Sundays, she had gone to a bigger, grander temple nearby.

Our house was anonymous-looking, just a square of space separated into rooms. The man who lived there now invited us in to look around. He appeared to be a bachelor, with old towels and blankets draped over a worn wooden sofabed. The television was tuned to a soccer match. I stood in the dim light, taking in the cement walls, the cooking pots and hot plate in one corner, the curtain in front of the bedroom. Noi pointed to a corner and said something about a desk full of papers and pictures that had once been there. She recalled the day a calendar had jumped off the wall and she knew it was another sign from her son Quan. He had often spoken to her here.

Chu Anh walked around, shaking his head. “I can't believe we lived like this,” he said. In Atlanta, where he works as an engineer, he drives home to a quiet house in a named subdivision.

I tried to imagine the years my father and uncles and grandmother spent here, having no idea that they would one day flee it, leaving everything behind. I tried to picture the stories my father and uncles had told me. Was this where the cat with the pet rat slept on languid afternoons? Where did the angry chicken hang out? I tried to imagine my sister and me, so little and so demanding—my sister's feet stamping the concrete floor, Noi feeding us mashed bananas as she contemplated our future. The dingy, gray rooms held no resonance for me, no meaning. This home was not my home to remember.

Walking back to the cab, we passed a gaggle of boys lounging in a grotto. They were playing cards and smoking, and they eyed us with curiosity. Above them hung an old magazine picture of Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat. It was only then that I could see my father here—I could see him in these boys' faces. I could see him burning his moped down the alleyways, taking the turns too sharply, maybe racing somewhere to see my mother.

I went there the next day, to see my mother's mother—my other grandmother, my
ngoai.
She lived across the river in an outlying district of Saigon, where cars stirred up clouds of red dust. Her house occupied a square in a row of barracks facing identical rows, all of the doors opened to the air. As I walked down the dirt lane, peering at the faded numbers etched near the doorways, an old woman pushed a food cart past me, crying out,
Chicken!
to the mostly empty road.

My grandmother
ngoai
lived with one of my aunts, who looked like a rounder, plumper version of my mother. Hammered gold bracelets jangled on her arms as she reached out to take hold of me. Her daughter—one of my cousins—was maybe four years old and amused herself by sticking her head into the sack of rice sitting in the corner of the kitchen. “You are an American girl,” my aunt said to me in Vietnamese, with teasing and pride in her voice. She sat me down in the living room, facing the altar to the ancestors, and brought out glasses of Coke, cups of jasmine tea, freshly fried shrimp chips, and a tray of soursop and lychees. From her end of the sofa, my grandmother lifted her head toward me. A frail, bony creature with thick glasses and a broad, flattened mouth, she was only a few years older than Noi but looked almost as ancient as Co Nga's uncle. She reached out a gnarled, shiny hand and laid it on mine. She said my name out loud and smiled, exposing a maroon-red mouth. For a moment I panicked, thinking it was blood, until I realized that it was the stain of the betel nut she chewed.

She and my aunt knew almost no English and I knew only rudimentary Vietnamese so we couldn't say much. I had come too late in the morning, and the sun was getting too intense, the dust rising. So we spent an hour just looking at each other, and smiling, and I drank too much Coke just to have something to do.

Before the trip I had felt ready to go, secure with my travel grant money, but now I think I could never have been ready. I could not have prepared myself for the feeling of being a tourist in the country where I was supposed to have grown up, of being a foreigner among people who were supposed to be mine. Every girl I passed on the street was my theoretical double, a person I might have been, a life I might have had. Sitting with my aunt and grandmother, I did not feel a rush of love. I felt regret, exhaustion. I felt like an outsider, and I knew I would always be just that. I would fly back home to the United States and perhaps never see them again.

Before I left I slipped them an envelope full of American money, as my uncle and I had discussed. Still, I walked away from their house feeling a profound sense of failure. I did not want to imagine years of deprivation and wondering, my mother staring out the window season after season, finding imaginary shapes in the red earth. I didn't know how to think of her walking home, her whole body shaking with grief. How long she must have waited to get word on our whereabouts. How many times she must have imagined our growing up—she had known me for only eight months, my sister only two years. How did she picture us, becoming American as TV, changing into people beyond her recognition?

When I think of my childhood I think of contrasts: the melting chocolate of a Mr. Goodbar against the cool crumble of SweeTarts. I think of drifts of snow reaching the windows, then green summer days casting out beyond Jennifer Vander Wal's backyard. I think of my father standing outside smoking, a skinny, solitary figure in his beige sweater with brown stripes; I think of him coming home with pockets full of candy and gum. I think of the mother I didn't know walking down a sunburnt lane in Saigon while my stepmother drove her black Ford Tempo through Grand Rapids to get to work. I think of my face in the mirror, flat and sallow, wishing to become the same as all the beautiful, bright-eyed girls in my books and school.

In the fall, leaves crackled as I walked to Ken-O-Sha Elementary, the days growing shorter and colder. In the winter, Noi's jasmine tea fragranced the air. I looked into the amber liquid to read the leaves scattered at the bottom of the cup. Noi's knitting needles flashed as she created cardigans out of intricate stitch patterns and cables. Then warm weather would seep back— the spring giving way grudgingly, often making us wear jackets well into May—and I would return to long afternoons plotting out my next episodes of candy, ice cream, and fruit. In the summer, we ate chilled globes of canned lychee from china cups. We slept in the basement to escape the upstairs heat, jumping heedlessly on my uncles' Eames lounges and feeling, for brief moments, thrilled to be alive, kids, with all the MTV we could want. Sometimes, a tornado siren would blare through the neighborhood and my father would go out to see the storm. I would creep back upstairs, too curious not to look, and always would be surprised by the stillness of the air, the yellowness of the sky. I had nightmares of funnel clouds aiming right at us. But somehow, in real life, they missed us even as my father waited on the front porch with a glass of cognac in his hand.
Why don't you go to the basement?
I asked him once.
Because I have to protect,
he said.

After a good rain, toadstools would crop up all over the yard on Florence Street and Noi would pull up each one. I think she must have pictured my sister and me stealing away with them, putting that foreign substance in our mouths. She never acknowledged the neighborhood children when they laughed at her squatting in the yard, their cheeks puffed with derision. She pulled up the toadstools to save us.

When I think of Grand Rapids I think of how much time I spent trying to make real the dream of the blond-haired girl with a Betty Crocker mother and a kitchen to match. Cocooned in my own silence, I dreamed of the day when I would be a grown-up at last. Then, I thought, I could eat whipped cream and SpaghettiOs every day and say whatever I wanted. Spurning my own reflection for what it could never give me, I thought I could make myself over from the inside out.

In truth, everything that was real lay right in front of me: oranges after dinner; pomegranates in winter; mangoes cubed off their skin. Birthday cakes decorated in my own hand while my stepmother taught me the words to
“Cumpleaños feliz.”
We had
sopa
and rice, sloppy Joes and fast food, curries and stew, soups and stir-fries, noodles and ramen, steak and french fries. Even on the nights Rosa made dinner, Noi cooked for my uncles and the ancestors. She had the rice cooker going before we came home from school, so we could eat something right away if we were hungry. And when I scorned her food, reaching for Jays potato chips or Little Debbie snack cakes, she did not scold my wayward desires. She knew I would return, night after night, asking permission to go to sleep. I returned to her in meditation, trying to keep my back straight, trying to stop the erosion of language I myself had started. I returned to her when I woke early in the morning to the sound of her wooden mallet grinding shrimp and pork for
cha gio.

I've watched her countless times rolling them out for a party or for Tet. She sat on the dining room floor, mixing the ingredients with her hands. She grated a mound of carrots, her fingers flying. She knew just how much fish sauce and black pepper and mung bean noodles to use. When the mixture was ready I tried to help shape some
cha gio:
a forkful of the filling on a triangle of
banh trang
spring roll wrapper; the left and right corners folded in; a quick roll and it all came together, smooth and slim, sealed with a dab of egg yolk. When I formed
cha gio
that were lumpy and bloated Noi laughed, unrolled them, and showed me again. Later, I would watch Noi pluck the
cha gio
from the frying pan and lay them in a cloth-lined colander. I could count on the first anticipated bite, the sweet and peppery flavors of shrimp and pork and fish sauce weighed against the delicate crunch of the fried wrapper. In the middle of the night I would eat the leftovers cold, by the light of the open refrigerator door. They tasted even sweeter then, the texture of wood-ears and noodles more distinct; I ate slowly, trying to memorize the flavors, trying to know what my grandmother has always known: this amount of pepper, that amount of fish sauce. She had always been there to show me this world without measurements.

My father and Rosa remarried each other fifteen years after their first wedding, in the same Grand Rapids courthouse. They had both stayed on in the Ada house after the divorce, amicably enough to keep Thanksgivings and Christmas holidays their usual mix of food-gorging, boredom, and unanchored tension. No wonder we always kept the TV at top volume, playing a parade of action-adventure movies. Possibly it had taken a nearly empty house, save for Vinh, for my parents to reach their détente.

Each year now they renovate another part of the house—a wall torn down or replaced, old carpet changed to tile. They purchase huge statues of Buddhas and goddesses, some as tall as six feet. The female Buddha, with her regal, painted dress, governs the front of the house. My father swears that she's become a good luck shrine, and that total strangers will stop by to pay their respects to her. At night, my father and Rosa often sleep on different ends of the same sofa sectional, their feet meeting at right angles to each other. The TV will keep blaring. All the land around the house has been built up with office buildings, but they refuse to leave their tucked-away plot where the willow branches fall away with each summer storm. They even refuse to install air-conditioning, swearing that the swimming pool is good enough. When we first moved in, the ceiling of the swimming pool room had been unfinished—just exposed beams and insulation—and my father resolved to finish the job. Balancing on home-built scaffolding, he pieced together rows of cedar planks. I remember how peaceful he seemed, working alone. Later, in the snowy months of the year, Noi would jog lightly around the pool for exercise. Under the blue tarp, the water grew moldy and green.