Pioneer Girl (2 page)

“Hey.” Sam gave his first genuine smile, and Ong Hai reached forward and grabbed at his forearm.

“Too skinny,” he said. “You working?”

“Sure.”

“Then work less, eat more. That your SUV too? It's nice.”

To me, Ong Hai never aged. His hair had always been a floaty sheen of gray and he'd always worn the same round glasses. He favored old-man short-sleeved button-downs with patch pockets, yet he was as quick as my mother, could stand all day making pho and spring rolls.

My mother paused before setting a plastic bag of café leftovers on the counter. She didn't acknowledge Sam by voice—she wasn't going to make it
that
easy—but glanced at him while getting some plates from the cupboard. I took out the shrimp and tofu summer rolls, banana bread, containers of pho that were our dinner.

“Where you working?” Ong Hai asked Sam as I put the soup in the microwave.

“I've got a friend who has a computer business.”

“Lots of money with computers.”

“It's just selling them.”

“You tell your friend to feed you more food. Tomorrow, you come to the café. Maybe you'll eat more.”

The dining area next to the kitchen had the same oval wood table, the same candlestick-spindled chairs, that Sam and I had sat at throughout our childhood. Ong Hai brought forth chopsticks and paper napkins and my mother and I set out the dishes and food. This was the way we ate. Always had. Eating without talking, not bothering to cover up the sounds of our chewing. We ate with a swiftness that would have alarmed any non-Asian. Though my mother and Ong Hai knew to eat in a quiet American style out in public, at home they ate the old way, bringing their bowls close to their chins and sweeping food into their mouths. The sight was a strange comfort to me, as much as it was just to gather at the same table, the Lien family of Durango Road. This had never been a normal occurrence, not with restaurant schedules to keep.

As soon as we were done my mother jumped up to clean. I helped her, as was my eternal duty, while Ong Hai and Sam went to the living room TV. I could hear Ong Hai asking Sam if he liked the computer work.

“Sure,” Sam said. “It's all right.”

“Downtown Chicago?”

“Sort of. Nearby.”

I rinsed my mother's old coral-pink Fiestaware dishes. When I set the plates in the drying rack she rearranged them. She wiped down the counter, the sink, even the rice cooker, faintly printed with flowers, that we'd had for probably fifteen years. She didn't say anything and I wondered what would happen if I blurted out Hieu's name. If I had the nerve. Which I didn't.

In the living room the guys were watching a
Seinfeld
rerun. There almost wasn't enough space for all of us, suddenly packed in as if it were a holiday. I pulled up an ottoman near Ong Hai, and my mother brought her knitting bag to the recliner. We watched the same television, lifeblood and anchor of our household, beloved distraction and focal point. The room still had these giant, formal-looking window swags that a previous tenant, or maybe the owner, had installed. They were heavy, poly-satin burgundy edged with golden tassels, at once pompous and sad, and they seemed to lord themselves over us.

Ong Hai found a movie, a comedy about race-car driving, and as we let the flow of it get us through the next hours of that night, I thought about my mother, pouring Hieu's money—if it was true—into the Lotus Leaf Café. I had gone to college and grad school mostly on fellowships and grants. I'd never expected my mother to afford any of it, and she hadn't.

When my mother folded up her knitting and rose from her chair, she said, “Wake up early. We go at six.” Though she didn't look at Sam, she was speaking to him, for the first time since he'd arrived. Ong Hai got up too and gave a little pat on the head to me and Sam—his grandfatherly good night.

Sam picked up the remote control and searched the channels. It was ten o'clock, yet somehow the whole house, the whole neighborhood, seemed closed down.

I had imagined, many times, my brother returning to our lives, but hadn't factored in how much his absence, all those months adding up, would enshroud his homecoming.

“What do you need the money for?” I asked him.

He clicked over to
The
Daily Show
. “For one thing, I'm moving.”

“Where?”

“California.”

Of course. I didn't even need to ask why. Stereotypical sunlight and seacoast. As a kid he had often whined to our mother that we should live there—just pick a city. In high school, when one of his friends moved to the Bay Area, Sam was jealous for months.

“Why the urgency?”

He took a moment to answer. “If I don't go now, I might never go.”

I understood that, more than I could admit. But instead I said, “So you're going to disappear again?”

“You went off to school. You got away. It's my turn now.”

He didn't see how easy he'd had it. It wasn't personal, I told myself; this was traditional, a Confucian-influenced truth: the boy was entitled to more; the boy was subject to few verging on no obligations. Sam had always worked that system. He got our mother to buy the running shoes his friends wore and the electronics he coveted. He convinced her that he needed newer and better cell phones. He would take money from her purse and she would pretend not to notice.

Sam turned up the volume on the television, perhaps so no one else could hear us talking. “I'm not saying you owe me anything. But she sure as hell does.”

“When you saw her with Hieu—why were you following her?”

“I got bored one night.”

“I'm serious.”

“It's her own fault. She'd go out every once in a while and refuse to say anything about it. So I followed her. They were having dinner at a Thai restaurant and he gave her something in an envelope.”

“I've never known her to go anywhere other than her friends' houses.”

“I told you, she's been lying to everyone.” Sam stood up, turned off the TV.

“So that's it? That's all there is to say?”

He was already headed to the basement stairs, so certain his old space would be the way he'd left it that he hadn't even bothered to ask. Pausing for a moment, he said, “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. Welcome back home.”

—

I
n the morning Sam actually did get up early and follow me to the Lotus Leaf, driving that huge SUV. When we arrived our mother and Ong Hai were already in the kitchen, preparing the shrimp and vegetarian rolls and rinsing herbs for the pho. The morning breads, scones, and doughnuts had already been delivered, and I set to work arranging them on their trays.

Sam said he could run the cash register, no problem. He talked to customers in a friendly voice that was unrecognizable to me. If someone pronounced pho incorrectly, calling it
faux
, he didn't even correct them the way I always did.

The Lotus Leaf was supposed to be an American realization of what Ong Hai had started in Saigon: his old Café 88, a name he had chosen because the number was lucky. And look at the luck it brought, Ong Hai would say when he reminisced about it.
We had customers so loyal they wouldn't get their coffee and tea anywhere else. We met that nice American lady. We got lucky enough to make it to America.
If I attempted to point out all the bad luck—the fact of war, loss, displacement—he waved these away.
That's not good or bad luck; that's life
, he said.
Life is a temporary stop on the way home to death
. It was an old proverb he would repeat with disconcerting cheer.

The Lotus Leaf was also supposed to mean a bigger future for our family—for Sam. But that was because my mother had counted on him caring. Even after he left and she refused to speak about him, I knew she harbored hope. Ong Hai too had been patient, believing Sam could return any day, that the boy just needed some space to grow up. For me, away in grad school in Wisconsin, one month turned easily into another, and Sam's being gone didn't disrupt, really, what I'd already gotten used to. But surely for my mother every unreturned text, every phone call that wasn't his, must have felt like punishment or revenge.

Now that Sam was restored to his proper place, helming the money machine, my mother already seemed more relaxed, on her way toward glad. Maybe she imagined that we'd all head back home together, toward dinner and television again, and that slowly the summer would find a shape: our family, reunited, two kids in their twenties yet kids all over again, everyone under the same roof, working in the same place, eating the same meals. The last year could be erased or overlooked; Sam would be back in the basement room; questions wouldn't be asked and answers wouldn't be given. All very Vietnamese.

After lunch my mother went out for supplies and Sam ducked into the kitchen, where I figured he was asking for money from Ong Hai. A few minutes later Sam returned to the front with no discernible change in expression. I was cleaning off the tables and chairs and when I looked at my brother I wondered if I had long passed the point of being able to read him. Still, I knew enough to think,
Forget it
. That dream of a family-run café was nothing but a small-time, small-town wish. Money or no money, now that Sam knew how to be gone, he was never really coming back again.

I swept up crumbs from the floor. Sam folded his apron and left it on the counter. The café was empty, and it was a good time to take a break, eat a late lunch, have a cup of tea.

“I'm heading out. Ong Hai asked me to get a few things,” Sam said to me. “You gonna stay here all day?”

The question made me feel trapped. “Not necessarily.”

I straightened some of the paintings on the walls—a dramatic series of wilting daffodils by a local dude who'd walked in one day and asked if he could hang his work there for sale. Before that the walls had been empty, so it was all the same to my mother. That had been many months ago now, and it didn't look like any of the paintings had sold.

“Let me know what you find out,” Sam said.

I watched him drive the SUV out of the parking lot. I wondered whose car it really was. I should have guessed what he would do, should have guessed from his good-bye. I suppose I wanted to believe him in that moment, to think that he would go to the Asian market to pick up some extra rice-paper wrappers and maybe some fish sauce, and that he would be back soon, however briefly. I wanted to believe he would stay another day or two, enough to gather the rest of his things from the basement, enough to try to figure out how to get his hands on the mythical money.

Ong Hai came out from the kitchen and waved me over. He punched a couple of buttons on the cash register. The drawer popped open, revealing the empty spaces where the day's cash transactions had been. Sam had even taken the quarters.

“You saw him?” I asked.

Ong Hai shook his head. “He asked me for money. I told him no, not until he stays long enough to earn it.”

He didn't have to admit that he'd all but let Sam open the register in front of him and take the cash. He had too much of a soft spot for us kids; even when he said no, he never really could deny us. Not an ice-cream cone, not a toy, and not this.

It wasn't the right time to bring up Hieu, but I did anyway, using Sam as my shield. “Sam said that Mom's been getting money from Hieu.”

Ong Hai looked embarrassed, but he wasn't going to cross his own child, even for his grandchild. “That's her business, Lee.”

“He said she used that money for the café.”

I'd made Ong Hai uncomfortable, but he said nothing. We could hear my mother returning, the heavy back door slamming shut. There could be no hiding the cash register from her. Ong Hai and I had no words of explanation, no excuses, and my mother had no reaction. In spite of everything, just one day at the Lotus Leaf would have been enough for Sam to reclaim his spot as the favored one. He would have gotten his money if only he could just stay.

Somehow we got through the rest of that afternoon. I went home first, taking the same route, past nail salons and tanning salons, to the house on Durango Road. The basement showed no sign that Sam had ever been back. The frameless bed kept its blue plaid cover; the torchère floor lamp from the early nineties still leaned at an angle. Who knew how much damp the russet carpeting held? No doubt Sam had searched the whole place for any possible hiding spot.

I made sure to be back in my own room, door closed, by the time my mother arrived. No telling what she would do next, how her rage would vent itself.

That's when I saw what Sam had left for me.

For a long time after, I wondered at the gesture. Some days I still do. He couldn't have known what path he was pointing me toward, and yet maybe he had sensed there was something more to know. I have not asked him this; maybe one day I will.

Sitting on my worn copy of
The Age of Innocence
, the text that had been the center of my dissertation, was a scrap of paper where Sam had written down his new phone number. Stuck to it was a little golden spear: the pin my mother had kept for some forty-five years, an accidental gift from a woman named Rose.

W
hen my mother and Ong Hai landed here as refugees in 1975, their only plan had been to try to get somewhere warm. But then my mother met my father at the refugee camp while waiting in line for a meal, and that was that. They got married quickly so they could be resettled together, which turned out to be in a small town fifty miles west of Chicago. For the next eight years the three of them chased opportunity—a stint at chicken farming, a try at running a grocery. But mostly they worked at Chinese, or what people back then called Oriental, buffets.

My mother once said that everything was easier before Sam and I came along. Came along, as though we'd had a say in the matter. What she really meant, though, was me. Sam was the wanted child, the boy, born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1983. My arrival a year later, a surprise, no doubt, came soon after my family first moved to La Porte.

I was six years old when Hieu and my father took that fishing trip. They'd become friends in the refugee camp, and Hieu had followed us to the Midwest. To me and Sam he was Chu Hieu, Uncle Hieu, a bachelor who came over for dinner and weekends and holidays and who always brought us candy and toys. My parents had taken him in, Ong Hai said. Hieu looked up to my father, wanted to have a family like he did and learn how to run a restaurant too.

In later years, I couldn't hear the sound of his name,
hue
,
hew
, without thinking of my father, his death, what his last moments might have been. He had gotten up early to fish alone, using a pair of Hieu's waders. It may have been that he wasn't accustomed to them, or that he didn't expect the river to have such a current, calm as it must have seemed. The tow of it took him by force. When did it happen? How early had it been? How had Hieu found out? As many times as I had imagined this, couldn't stop myself from imagining, I had never dared to ask my mother or even Ong Hai. What I knew came from eavesdropping, bits of talk gleaned during the funeral and visitation, when my parents' friends, a surprising number of them, traveling from other towns where we had lived, showed up with food and money and tins of jasmine tea. I hadn't seen Hieu since then. No one talked about him, and I never knew where he'd ended up.

At the time of my father's death, he and Hieu had been making a plan to move us all to Naperville, Illinois, where a friend wanted to partner on a new venture. I didn't remember much from that year, except that my mother wanted to keep our part of that plan. Hieu had receded by then, unmentionable. I recalled how Sam and I sat in the backseat of the Mercury Marquis, surrounded by towels and bedding and pillows, the whole car rattling with cooking gear; Ong Hai was in the passenger seat, garbage bags of clothes stuffed around his feet, while my mother drove, keeping next to her the urn that held my father's ashes. I grew up keeping that urn in sight. Its place in every living room we had became a reminder, a kind of homing device, for all the ambitions he'd held. We were supposed to see them through.

We didn't last long in that Naperville business deal. Soon we were in other small suburbs, tracing a wide arc from Wisconsin to Illinois to Indiana, often near colleges, where the public schools were decent and the buffet business a sure thing. My mother picked up where my father had left off, and my brother and grandfather and I followed. Every time we drove past Chicago—the city skyline distant, cloud-covered—it seemed phantasmal to me. Fitting, I suppose, for a family on the lookout for the next thing.

So Sam and I grew up as American kids, though we might have looked to others like foreigners. That was our mother, we would have been quick to say. We learned early on to explain away her behavior—her fondness for clearance centers, her wariness of school sporting events, her absolute disbelief in compliments. She was one of those fresh-off-the-boat types, we would have said to our friends. Old-school, old-fashioned, old-generation. We called her a total immigrant, made fun of her accent—whatever got a laugh. We'd sell her out in a second if it would make anyone understand that we, Sam and I, were different. We didn't like weird food. In fact, the only way we liked Chinese food was the same way our friends did, deep-fried and covered in syrupy sauces. Once, in a bid to boost popularity, we told our classmates they could eat for free in whatever restaurant our mother was running. This backfired, of course, when she came around to demand payment from everyone. But at the very least, we made sure people knew that we were nothing like her. If they thought she was strange and scary, we agreed. We had never been to Vietnam and had no desire ever to go there. We'd much rather go somewhere like Australia or Fiji or Iceland.

It was a given that Sam, as the son, and firstborn at that, didn't have to wash dishes or get As or justify every dollar spent. I don't think I ever questioned this. The resentment I sometimes felt was directed toward our mother instead. I would have said that Sam was a good brother. He had no problem letting me play his
Legend of Zelda
and
Super Mario
games. He showed me how to roast marshmallows over the gas flame of our stove. As we got older, he would sign field trip permission slips for me, forging our mother's name.

In high school we drifted into different crowds, and there were days, weeks, when we didn't really say anything to each other. But there wasn't, I thought, any real animosity or rivalry. We watched the same sarcasm-driven sitcoms and action blockbusters and could always fall back on shared jokes about our mother. But mostly we got absorbed into separate circles. I took AP classes; he hung out with the skateboarders who sold weed out of their cars in the school parking lot.

By the time I left for the University of Illinois, Sam was already flunking out of his first stint at community college. But at least he stayed at home. My mother liked the idea of education just fine, especially since all of her friends did, but everybody knew that Vietnamese kids were supposed to live with their parents until they got married. College and grad school were just a temporary leave of absence.

That's probably why my mother never questioned my coming back. Didn't ask what happened to my roommates or why I didn't get another apartment in Madison. She didn't know that most of my cohort already had their plans set, from tenure-track and visiting assistant professorships to postdocs secured in hand. I was one of the walking losers, stuck in the wait-and-see, having to hear people say things like,
Something will turn up. Hang in there.
I told my mother and Ong Hai that a job offer could come in anytime and all I had to do was be patient, but I needn't have bothered. For my mother, home was the only answer.

We'd lived in worse towns. Franklin had an art museum and a farmers' market and neighborhoods of colonials butting up against McMansions. We stayed at the edge of the gentrification, though, in the grotty section overrun with strip malls and payday advance shops. And, as always, we were renters. First apartments, then duplexes, and finally a whole house: your standard middling ranch, bricked, carpeted, and vinyled, in a neighborhood where tricycles were left to rust in the winter, TV satellite dishes clung like bats to eaves, and empty houses still had
Beware of Dog
signs stuck to metal fences.

Being home was endurable only because of Ong Hai. He and I could have been retirement buddies: listening to NPR, sharing a pot of tea, playing cards, him telling stories about the eccentrics he'd known in Saigon. It was the antidote to my mother's thousand criticisms and complaints. Nothing was too minor for her to notice: from the way my ponytail sagged to the way I folded towels to the mealy state of tomatoes at the store. Hers was a lifelong habit of pointing out the loose threads on a stranger's shirt buttons, scorning the groceries in other people's carts. She would criticize a bride's makeup (but scold me for commenting on the duration of the wedding), find fault with every other restaurant—too expensive, too slow, too fast, music too loud, utensils too scratched. If I microwaved leftovers for two minutes she would say it should be two and a half. I chopped vegetables too loudly, too slowly. The lightbulbs I bought weren't the right wattage. My umbrella, drying on the back porch, stayed there too long.

In many ways my mother was a traditionalist, and that meant she had to defer to her father, the oldest in the family and therefore head of the household, even though the gesture was symbolic. This made for a tricky power balance that Sam and I had always used to whatever advantage we could. For me that meant making sure Ong Hai was on my side. He was the one who told my mother I should be allowed to go to homecoming and prom. He helped me with security deposits for apartments. And he had always given me money. Restaurant wages, was how he justified it, a supplement to whatever job or stipend or fellowship I had. A few hundred-dollar bills slipped into my book bag. Whether my mother knew about this, I never asked.

If it was true that she had been accepting—demanding?—money from Hieu all these years, then it went against her stance of self-reliance, what she called the
Ronald Reagan pull-up-your-bootstraps way
. Like a lot of Vietnamese immigrants from the older generation, she had a hatred of communism that defined all of her political views. Had my father been like that too? I didn't really remember my mother before his death, though a part of me wanted to believe that she had been sweeter then, softer, and that his dying had changed that. A part of me wanted to believe maybe she simply couldn't pull herself up and had had to turn to Hieu. And as always, the children didn't need to know about it.

Those first three weeks at home, before Sam's arrival and rupture, I worked at the Lotus Leaf during the day and tried to avoid revising my dissertation at night. I sent my CV to a bunch of colleges in the area, some I'd never even heard of before, asking if they needed any adjunct instructors in the fall—the higher education version of substitute teaching. My adviser, Valerie, had said I should use the summer to shape my chapters into articles and submit them to journals.
Your degree won't be fresh for long
, she warned. Meaning that the more distance that came between it and a decent job, the less viable I would seem. We had often met at coffee shops and when she crossed her legs I couldn't help looking at the surprisingly high heels she wore. They made a resolute kind of sound when she walked, which I guessed was the point. She was one of the younger professors, recently tenured, and she had a collection of scarves—cashmere in the winter, chiffon in the spring—that seemed intimidating. When she talked she leaned forward, sipping her coffee, and I would think,
Yes, I want to be like her. I can do this, I can write this, I can wear heels with a purpose.
Valerie was the one who'd asked what none of my other professors had broached: Was I sure Wharton was my thing? Ethnic lit, she reminded me, was hotter right now and might make me more marketable. What she meant was: Why was an Asian girl so interested in studying such white American lit? I didn't blame her for wondering. But I couldn't explain why I'd loved Edith Wharton—the escape, the very whiteness seeming like escape, the fact that her life was the opposite of mine. At least, I'd loved her until we spent so much time together. Now that she and I had crossed the finish line, I was almost as tired of her words as my own. Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska had begun to seem stilted and caricaturish, waxen figures of elegant misery and stifled longing. I would think of them sometimes while washing dishes at the café or handing change to a customer. I would see Archer sitting with his crate of imported books, dreaming of touching the wrist of his would-be lover. He would be too far away for anyone to approach, me least of all. I was becoming that sullen, dirty-haired daughter consigned to a lifetime of scrubbing out restaurant kitchens. The fact that I had no desire to leave the café early, hurry back to my desk to do what was supposed to be my real work, was an altogether new kind of despair for me.

Late at night, shut in the third bedroom with its twin bed and the ceiling light that looked like an upturned ashtray, I stared at my laptop screen. I e-mailed, read food blogs, edited the sentence structure of Wikipedia entries. I clicked the hours away, link by link, from news sites to recipes, celebrity gossip, celebrity babies, fashion bloggers who posed like flamingos in the middle of SoHo streets. I wondered if I had the guts to leave the way Sam had. My best friend from college had a two-bedroom condo in San Francisco where she worked for a pharmaceutical company, and she'd been saying I should move there too. Back in undergrad Amy and I had both applied to Stanford, she for med school, me for a literature PhD, but I hadn't gotten in. Now we could be roommates again, she said, and it sounded so simple, so
normal
. I could do that, I told myself: gather my things, sell my car, put a plane ticket on a credit card, and get the hell out of here. But then I'd feel guilty, start weighing Amy's offer against my grandfather's worries about the Lotus Leaf. He hadn't put any pressure on, but it was there: If I didn't help at the café, who would? If I didn't help, how would it last?

I had already started suggesting improvements, irritating my mother with every one. If they couldn't change the name of the café or the exterior—it was in a strip mall that had been designed to look like a village, albeit a cheap one, with forest-green awnings and false fronts—they could at least change the Lotus Leaf sign, which had calligraphic letters evoking gongs and Far East bamboo. They could replace the white-tiled floor and the plastic teal-green countertop and those black metal chairs with fan-shaped backs. One afternoon when my mother wasn't around, I threw out the artificial orchid plants and the credit union calendars. I ordered a chalkboard menu to replace the ugly whiteboard. I told Ong Hai about my ideas: add banh mi to the offerings; negotiate a new plan with the bakery that supplied our pastries, cutting back on bagels and upping the doughnuts; set up a display of Sriracha bottles because white people loved Sriracha now. Why not have a prettier-looking menu, font, and logo, start up the social media accounts that had become, for every other business, a requirement? He didn't disagree, he said, but what about the cost? Mainly, he knew as well as I did that my mother had to call the shots.