Stealing Buddha's Dinner (13 page)

We were the best of friends all that year and the next, when I no longer had Anh to accompany me to school. Rosa had transferred her to Ken-O-Sha Elementary, three blocks from our house, where I would be going, too, the following year. Until then, I enjoyed the cold, solitary mornings waiting on the corner for the bus to Chamberlain. I took to singing as loud as I could, trying to fill up the sky, shouting out the words to Peter, Paul & Mary's “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” Air Supply's “Here I Am,” and “Harden My Heart” by Quarterflash.

At school, Loan and I spent every recess together. Once, she invited me to go home with her. The bus ride was a lot longer than mine, wending halfway to downtown Grand Rapids. They lived in a drafty house with a tilted front porch that reminded me of the house on Baldwin Street. In the living room, someone had propped up a big picture of a crackling fire in front of the fireplace. Loan and I played board games with little enthusiasm; the house felt chilly and dim, and Loan's parents were tense and angry about something. Her mother slammed the oven shut as she prepared a dinner of Jeno's frozen pizza. It was such a small pizza and I didn't understand how it would feed Loan, her parents, and her brother. When they offered me a slice I said no. I said my father was going to pick me up any minute. I sat in the living room and waited, the smell of the sausage crumbles making my stomach growl. From the couch I could see how hunched Loan's father looked as he sat at the kitchen table.

Around this time, in 1982, the Vietnamese parties seemed to begin in earnest, or perhaps I just became more aware of them. There were well over four thousand refugees in the Grand Rapids area, most of them clustered in southside suburbs like Kentwood and Wyoming. Many of the men worked in factories, no matter what their training had been in Vietnam; my father, I learned years later, had once apprenticed with an optometrist in Saigon. While a number of Vietnamese were Catholic, most of the families we knew were Buddhist, and the first time I saw the familiar statue and pile of fruit in someone else's house I felt a rush of solidarity. It was a feeling that would grow complicated as I grew older, a feeling that I would want to tuck away for myself, for this separate Vietnamese world.

Back then, driving out to one of the parties felt like a production, though we only lived ten or fifteen minutes away from where most of the other Vietnamese people lived. Everyone went except Crissy, who always insisted on staying home, and all of us fussed with our clothing, even Noi. It was a little daunting to go to Thanh Saigon Market's huge house in a fancy subdivision, named for a rolling crest or hill. His soaring white-walled rooms were filled with leather furniture, bold brass light fixtures, and mahogany tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl. But soon Noi joined the women crowded in the kitchen, gossiping while they fried
cha gio
and
banh xeo
crepes. In the dining room, the men welcomed my father and poured fresh bottles of cognac, alternating them with cans of Budweiser while they played cards. If they ever needed something they would just shout toward the stairway to the basement, where the kids played Atari, Hungry Hungry Hippo, and ping-pong; like all good Vietnamese kids, we would drop any activity to do an adult's bidding. Woven between our games, we traded knowledge of TV and music. We eyed each other's clothes. We all watched
Sesame Street
and
The Electric Company.
We were all obsessed with
Silver Spoons, Solid Gold,
and music videos. My sisters and I had watched the beginning of MTV the previous year, after our uncles had ordered cable for their setup downstairs and my father had spliced the wire up to the living room. We especially loved Blondie's soft-lit “Rapture” and how the Go-Go's promised “Our Lips Are Sealed.”

Loan and her family almost never came to these parties, and I learned later that her father, who had opened his own grocery, had a rivalry with Thanh. The next year, when I transferred to Ken-O-Sha in time for third grade, Loan and I lost touch altogether. I took up with Marybelle, a new Vietnamese friend I had met at the Vietnamese parties. Named for the woman who had sponsored her family, Marybelle had a fierce-faced father who owned both a red Fiero and a bronze Firebird; her pretty, model-thin mother worked in alterations at Roger's Department Store. But I never stopped wondering about Loan. I remembered how unhappy and grim her family had seemed, and the memory prevented me from calling her at home. I wondered what she did on Saturday nights instead of coming to the parties.

Rosa was nearly as left out, with no clear purpose there, and no one to talk to. As soon as the men settled down with cards she knew she was on her own. I saw her once, as I came upstairs for more shrimp chips, standing at the edge of the kitchen doorway, watching my father play poker. He was losing, as he always did when he drank too much. Rosa had a look on her face that I only saw sometimes when she was around my father—part timid, part passive. It was the same look she had when she asked him what she should wear to an event. It was unsettling to me—it was not the stepmother I knew. She would not have dared to interrupt the poker game and demand we go home any more than I would have.

We went on like this for a couple of years until suddenly, we didn't. Maybe it was Anh wanting to stay home to talk on the phone with friends and boys and me wanting to copy her. Maybe it was the increasing tension of the parties themselves, Rosa's growing disapproval and my father's irritation at the disapproval. Noi had shifted her social life to her Buddhist temple gatherings on Sundays, and gradually there seemed to be no good reason to go to parties anymore. So my father went alone. I rather enjoyed his absence, the way it felt a little easier to breathe when he was away. I never realized how much on edge I felt—perhaps we all felt—when he was at home, usually moody, prone to a fit of yelling if someone so much as changed the volume of the stereo. I got the feeling that the person he was at the parties was the person he preferred to be—young, as he had been in Vietnam, surrounded by laughter and friends, drinking and smoking away his troubles.

At home I watched TV, slowly eating a pudding snack to try to make it last through as much as possible of the NBC Saturday night lineup, which included, at various times,
Gimme a Break!, Diff 'rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, The Golden Girls,
and
227.
Or I played our Intellivision video games—Lock 'n' Chase (a poor man's Pac-Man), skiing, and poker. I spent hours honing my blackjack skills, facing the crudely pixellated dealer who laughed evilly when the house won. I coaxed Anh to play Rubik's Race with me, or Monopoly or Life. If I was super bored I played with the doll heads that someone had given us, so we could practice cosmetology and hairdressing. The dolls were life-sized busts, with plastic faces and thick heads of sandy blond hair, and they came with palettes of makeup and brushes. Anh could give her doll curls, pinned-up French braids, complicated eye shadows, and inventive lipstick tints. My doll always ended up looking the same. Eventually I would retreat to my books, eavesdropping on my sisters' phone conversations. The house would feel dim and closed-down. Rosa would be working at the dining room table and all of us would go to bed long before my father came home.

In the fall of 1986, when I was twelve years old, my father got the idea to throw a dance hall party. A fabulous one that would draw people from all over, that would have everyone talking for weeks. He'd taken Rosa to a few such parties at rented VFW halls or the Ramada Inn, where DJs mixed ballroom tunes with Barbra Streisand ballads. A band might play, led by mellow-voiced Vietnamese singers crooning beneath a disco ball. These were cover-charge, cash-bar parties, with big dance floors where my father could show off his smooth moves, spinning Rosa around while other couples just watched. For that was his ace in the hole, the one thing that could always soften Rosa into a smile. The Vietnamese Arthur Murray, she sometimes called him, then she'd shake her hips, saying, “Cha-cha-cha!”

Together with a friend he rented out a dance hall and managed to book a semi-famous Vietnamese lady singer who agreed to travel from Chicago to Grand Rapids for the event. The cover charge and cash bar would, my father planned, net a tidy profit. I was nervous about the party—nothing would be worse than a low attendance—and about the task my father had given me and Anh: to go around picking up the empty cans of pop and beer so we could return them later for the ten-cent deposits.

It had been nearly two years since the last Vietnamese party I'd attended and I felt like a stranger; I hated my big new braces and weird hair that never would feather properly the way Anh's did. And I recognized almost none of the people who were arriving except Marybelle, the only Vietnamese kid I really knew besides my sister and the one other Vietnamese girl in my class at school.

We staked out a spot in the back to check out the women in their shiniest
ao dais
and men in their dark suits. Some of the younger women had exchanged traditional dress for American outfits—satin cocktail dresses, panty hose, and high-heeled pumps. They gathered at the round tables and started drinking. They threw back their heads to blow cigarette smoke into the air, and laughed raucously at nothing. All night, Anh and I maneuvered around them with our plastic trash bags, gingerly collecting empty cans of Budweiser. The semi-famous singer wouldn't arrive until later, so everyone danced to the DJ's moody Vietnamese rhumba and tango songs. People paused to watch my father. He moved with such ease, a sense of gliding. He whirled Rosa around, passing other couples without ever grazing them. He danced as if they were alone on the floor. Women lined up to take a turn with him, which seemed to make Rosa both jealous and proud.

To please the younger crowd, my father had hired a local group of Vietnamese guys to be the opening act for the lady singer. The guys of Y White, in their late teens and early twenties, rode the new wave with their billowy black pants, white collared shirts buttoned to the neck, and spiky gelled hair—buzzed in the back, mop-floppy in front. Y White played covers of Erasure, New Order, and Depeche Mode. My favorite was their rendition of “Oh L'amour.” As the slow opening notes gave way to drums someone in the band flicked on a strobe light. Then all the guys began dancing, their white shirts glowing as their arms flailed in staccato motions. All the kids got on the dance floor then and I watched, straining to remember who they were. I thought I saw Thanh Saigon Market's pretty daughter until she blended into the crowd.

After Y White finished their set, word went around that the lady singer had finally arrived with her entourage. She floated onto the stage in a sequined red
ao dai,
looking like one of the graceful ladies on the scroll calendars from the Saigon Market: super sleek hair swinging around their waists; impossibly smooth faces heavy with makeup; bodies reed-thin, clad always in bright silk. When the semi-famous lady singer sang, her mouth curved into a pretty oval shape and her head tilted just so to convey the melancholy of the music. She sang operatically, sorrowfully, but with a glint in her eye. She was as flawless and unreal as a heroine in a soap opera, and the spotlight never strayed from her. When she lifted her arm in time to a high-pitched note her dress threw out sparks of light. The crowd cheered and clapped. It was the one great moment of my father's brief career as a party maker.

From a table at the back I tried to catch the lady singer's notes, to understand what she was saying. I couldn't. The drawn-out syllables soared toward the rotating disco ball and out of my reach. I felt alone, distant from the other Vietnamese kids who had formed an intimidating group at their own table. I tried to picture what my friends from school were doing at that instant. Probably Holly Jansen was asleep, her face like porcelain in the moonlight. Holly's mother would have tucked her into bed, which I imagined involved pulling the covers tight to strap her in. I could never explain to her, or to any of my friends from school, what happened at Vietnamese parties. They would have been scandalized by the alcohol, the late hours. To them the Vietnamese lady singer would have seemed funny-sounding—abnormal rather than beautiful. She didn't belong in my friends' world, I told myself. She only made sense here, in this hidden-away place, this undercover club with its coded foreign language.

Later, after the lady singer had departed in a cloud of admiration, after all the guests had drifted off, my father and his friend sat at a table and counted the cash. My sister and I walked around collecting the last cans. My uncles had taken Noi and Vinh home a while ago, but Anh and I had to stay to help with cleanup. Crissy never came to these kinds of parties, and no one ever made her. I figured she was fast asleep at home—it was past two in the morning by the time the party wrapped up—and I envied that. I envied the ease with which she could say,
No, I won't go,
and have it be final. She had a choice. She could pass as normal and I could not.

My father spent a long time counting and recounting the night's earnings. I heard him trade words with his friend, his voice rising in anger. As we drove home in silence it was clear that the party had been a financial bust. The cost of hiring the lady singer had been so high that in spite of the good turnout he hadn't broken even. After that night my father no longer talked about making money by throwing parties or opening a club. He retreated. At home he did woodwork in the garage, weeded the garden, or fiddled with the car engine. At night he played pool at Anazeh Sands or poker at his friends' houses.

The dance party had left me with a vague feeling of loss I couldn't shake. It magnified at school, when Holly might ask what I did over the weekend and I would say,
nothing.
I told myself there was no point in socializing with the other Vietnamese kids, who went to different schools and whose parents knew each other better. The parties always went on too long anyway, ending with us kids falling asleep and pissing off our parents by clamoring to go home. Surely I could find contentment in my familiar books, markers, and construction paper while Anh hung out with her friends. That was the kind of social life I needed to cultivate: weekend afternoons at Holly's house or Tammy's house or Mindy's house. School-sponsored Saturdays at the Woodland Skating Rink, where I, gawky with my glasses and braces, never once skated during “couples only,” when the DJ played songs like Billy Ocean's “Suddenly” and REO Speedwagon's “In My Dreams.” I liked the darkness of the rink and even though I could never skate very well or fast, I cherished the freedom of movement, of trying to fly beyond people's range of vision.