Buddha Baby

Buddha Baby
Wok This Way
Something Scuzzy This Way Comes
How She Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Broccoli Beef
Po-Mo, Slo-Mo, Lacto-Ovo
Digging Up Dirt
Jook Singin' in the "Rain
And Penguins Js Practically Chickens
Even Asian Girls Get the Blues
Fellowship of the Ming
Permanent Records
Keeping Up With the Ahchucks
Lion Dance With a Stranger
Mulan Rouge
Opalescent
Where's the Beef Chow Fun?
The Electric Shipley Temple Acid Test
Slowly She Turned, Step by Step, Inch by Inch
The Family Jewels
Altoids, Androids, and Tofoysters
Teletubbies in the Fog
China Mary, Why Ya Buggin'?
A Bird in the Hand
Velvet Hyacinth Sky
Feet on the Ground
Buddha Baby Got Back
Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor of Buddha Baby

Buddha Baby

By Kim Wong Keltner

Buddha Baby

The Dim Sum of All Things

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buddha baby.
Copyright © 2005 by Kim Wong Keltner. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

FIRST EDITION

Interior text designed by Elizabeth M. Glover

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Keltner, Kim Wong.

Buddha baby / by Kim Wong Keltner.—First ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-06075322-1 ISBN-10: 0-06-0753226 (alk. paper)

1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Chinese American women—Fiction. 3. Chinese American families—Fiction. 4. Chinatown (San Francisco, Calif.)— Fiction. 5. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3611.E48B83 2005

813'.6—dc22 2005002203

05 06 07 08 09 wbc/rrd 10 987654321

Parents of the Year: Larry and Irene Wong, a.k.a. my parents, are better than chicken soup. They are turkey
jook
for my sleep-deprived soul. It would blow my cover as a cool person to enumerate all the things they do for me on a daily basis, so instead I'll just offer my eternal gratitude to them for never forcing me to go to summer camp.

Best Production Team: Many thanks to Erika Tsang, Pam Spengler-Jaffee, May Chen, and Jamie Beckmann at HarperCollins. Their professionalism and sparkling personalities make me wish I shared an office with them, but then I suppose we'd be laughing all the time and not getting any work done.

Ace-in-the-hole: My agent, Agnes Birnbaum at Bleecker Street & Associates, is a class act. Having her in my corner helps me sleep at night.

Secret Weapon: Rolf Keltner is the one who bails me out when the sled flips over and the ice weasels are circling. Winner of the Strong Man Competition, he pulls me inside the Tauntaun to keep me warm long enough to get the shelter built.

Best Brothers: Rick and Mark, who've always shown me to keep my eye on the ball, and taught me how to kill someone with my bare hands should the need arise. Incidentally, Mark is a doctor, and assures everyone that no Asian males were harmed in the writing of this book.

Special thanks to: Jennifer Almodova, who deserves many pink cashmere sweaters; Barbra Lewis, who's always got my back; Mabel Maney, a great friend and swell American; and Jill Minkus, whose participation in Catholic hijinks is most definitely noted on the Permanent Record. Belated thanks also to Julie Felner for early copyediting on
The Dim Sum of All Things
.

Right about here is where the orchestra starts playing, but I also want to thank Letitia and Angie Wong for being the best sisters, my cousin, Garren Chew for being my Chinatown expert, Michelle Kim for her brains and beauty, Robert Martin for being my eyes on the street, and Dacher Keltner for inspiration.

And finally, of course, the Buddha statue goes to Lucy.

Lindsey Owyang was about to learn a thing or two about Chinese people, Catholic nuns, and taxidermy. She didn't know it yet, but this spring would be a season of unusually warm winds, blasts from the past, and stone-cold foxes. She was just a Chinese-American girl with two part-time jobs, a tendency to daydream, and a penchant for Hello Kitty toys, but as the days grew longer and the beach water slightly warmer, she would find herself prying nettles from her family tree and testing her mettle as she struggled to make her peace with Chinatown & country.

She had been born and bred in San Francisco, raised on Cocoa Puffs and Aaron Spelling productions. As a kid she never wore silk slippers or mandarin-collared pajamas, but rather was more often outfitted in checkerboard Vans and an "I'm With Stupid" T-shirt. Confucian proverbs eluded her, but she was well versed in the spunky aphorisms of great philosophers such as Fonzie and Fred Sanford, whose Nick-at-Nite reruns taught her handy phrases such as "Sit on it, Malph," and "Bring me some ripple, Dummy."

In high school she was more interested in
Tiger Beat
than tiger balm, but her parents did occasionally attempt to blend Chinese and American cultures together by preparing meals such as
bok choy
with cut-up hot dogs, or macaroni salad with
pai don
, Chinese preserved eggs. When she played Monopoly, she passed Go as she ate
nian goh
, and cranking up the stereo after school, she danced to Bow Wow Wow while she munched on
cha siu bows
.

Her hair was straight and black, and she had a slight build with
chow mein-
noodly limbs. Pale and sun phobic, she was fairer than most white people, but her bridge-deficient nose and single-lidded eyes shaped like sideways teardrops proclaimed to the world that she was a descendant from the Middle Kingdom. China was a place she knew little about, but her face, her coloring, and her name led strangers to assume she knew more about her ancestors' country than she actually did. At any random moment, whether toiling as a retail drone, squeezing her butt into jeans at Old Navy, or ordering a venti mocha frappuccino at Starbucks she might be asked for detailed explanations about Ming emperors, imperial porcelain from Jingdezhen, or the secrets of Yo-Yo Ma's success.

Socially, she had spent her youth dodging the inconvenience of her Asianness, but in the last three of her twenty-eight years she was forced to wake up and smell the
bock-fa
oil. She faced her Chinese identity head-on, like a person in the center of a dodgeball game who eventually got smacked in the face with the big, red rubber ball that was her Chinese self. She was by no means absolutely comfortable with her ethnicity 24-7, but she was on her way. If you looked on a street map of San Francisco you could spot Lindsey where the avenue to nowhere met the cross street of somewhere. She wasn't a complete dope, nor was she burning a path to success like the next Connie Chung.

*

Cosmopolitan
told her she should be a dynamic, career-climbing, late-for-Pilates, bright, young thing. However, on this particular Saturday night, Lindsey was a mattress-slouching, tube-sock-wearing lazy girl with rug burns.

She had lain down to take a short nap at four, but now it was almost six. Sitting up in bed, she rubbed a prickly swath on the back of one leg, the result of a pillow fight turned ouchy when she'd fallen off the mattress and skidded across the carpet. She pressed the small pink welt with her finger, then pulled the blankets up to get a bit warmer. Wearing only a negligee and a pair of white-and-gold tube socks, she looked like a cross between Jodie Foster in
Taxi Driver
and one of the Bad News Bears.

Except, of course, she was Chinese.

Across the hallway she could hear the sound of an electric razor and running water. She smiled to herself, knowing that the guy who loved her was just a few steps away.

His name was Michael Carrier and he was a white guy. She'd become smitten with him three years ago and interracial hijinks had ensued. But alas, a twist.

Michael had come into Lindsey's life during the
Age of Hoarders
. By her own definition, a
Hoarder of All Things Asian
was a nerdy white guy in beige clothing whose good-guy demeanor camouflaged an insatiable hunger for Asian flesh. Hoarders came in many guises, such as co-workers offering to explain 401k plans or mall trawlers loitering around the Asian food court, and Lindsey had been hyper-vigilant about avoiding them. She knew a Hoarder's appetite was not satisfied by take-out dishes of sweet 'n' sour pork, but rather, he was fixated on the idea of Asian girls themselves as tasty dishes on the city's take-out menu. Lindsey knew that behind a Hoarder's innocuous facade, all he had on his mind was an evening of sweet-and-sour porking.

And into this paranoid world of hers, Michael Carrier had traipsed. She had initially suspected he was a Hoarder, but was surprised to find that not only was he not a pervo-goat in sheep's clothing, but he was, in fact, a Secret Asian Man. He was, as it turned out, one quarter Chinese. His non-whiteness was not readily apparent to the naked eye, and he'd grown up culturally removed from his Asian heritage. But his slice of life was not made completely of Wonder Bread, she'd learned. Blending easily into the Caucasian population, in his thirty years he'd been called lots of names, but not the same ones as Lindsey: chump instead of
chink
, jerk rather than
Jap
, geek but
not gook
. Asians had called him
round-eye, straight nose, haole, and gwei-lo
.