Stealing Buddha's Dinner (14 page)

One of the last Vietnamese events I remember attending happened a few months after the dance hall party. It was right after Tet, which had fallen on a school day. Though we'd had permission to stay home for the holiday, all of us kids had gone to school. We had recently moved to Ada, a suburb of Grand Rapids, and Tet had felt worn-down, fractured; some unnamed tension disturbed the joy of red envelopes,
cha gio,
and bean cakes. But that weekend, perhaps out of restlessness, Anh and I went along with our father and Noi to a party in southeast Grand Rapids. I remember I wore a mustard-colored shirt, handed down from Crissy, that still maintained an aura of her coolness, and Anh fretted over her curling-iron curls. At the party our father and Noi joined their own friends and Anh and I stood together, feeling out of place. The fact was clear: the other Vietnamese kids had been united all that time we had stayed at home. They had shared holidays and birthdays and board games. They knew each other, had grown up together, and had no need for us. They sat in a group, laughing and speaking a flurry of mixed Vietnamese and English. And at the center of them all was the daughter of Thanh Saigon Market, Tiffany née Truoc. She had grown taller, more willowy, and more beautiful than ever. She was almost tall enough not to be considered “so short,” which is the comment Anh and I were used to getting at school—“You're so short!” followed by some tall person trying to use our head as an armrest. Tiffany-Truoc also had the benefit of a wealthy father, and thus a Swatch watch, Forenza sweater, and stone-washed Guess jeans. She flaunted them as she flaunted her own curtain of hair, shiny as a Vietnamese lady singer's. Seeing Tiffany hold court, I realized that Anh and I had missed out on an entire system, a structure, what Rosa called
community.

“Let's just eat,” Anh murmured as we approached the long buffet tables. I thought of previous holiday parties, when we could choose from half a dozen different kinds of
cha gio
or
banh chung,
all cooked by different women who watched anxiously to see whose would be eaten first. Every time, no one's dishes could compare to Noi's. The other
cha gio
were all wrong—too thin or too thick, rolled too loosely, too much noodle, not enough shrimp, too pasty, too bland, too soggy. I once saw a woman in a canary-yellow
ao dai
repeatedly check on the trays she had brought: still there. Meanwhile, Noi's
cha gio,
stacked in golden pyramids, disappeared. She had brought them again this time, the wrinkle and fry of them as familiar to me as my books. I heaped several on a plate, moving on to pickled vegetables, noodles, shrimp chips, and puff pastry shells stuffed with ground pork. Anh headed straight for the doughy balls stuffed with Chinese sausage and the square cakes of
banh chung
tied with string. We sat down in a corner of the living room, just the two of us.

Instead of digging in I looked at three girls approaching the buffet. They seemed to be about my age, and they were making jokes to each other I couldn't understand. Their talking made my cheeks burn. Why hadn't I practiced my Vietnamese? Why hadn't I kept up? Each day I struggled to remember even simple words to communicate with Noi; now all I had were her
cha gio.
I worried that the girls at the buffet were snickering at me and Anh and calling us Twinkies—yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Was that what I had longed to achieve, after all? I remembered the defiant guys of Y White, their name a statement instead of a question. A demand. I wondered what had happened to them, if they were singing their own songs now or if they had broken up and drifted away.

Sitting next to me, Anh was unwrapping a
banh chung
cake, peeling the banana leaf away to unveil the familiar mass of glutinous rice the color of pale jade. She lifted it to her mouth and bit off a corner. As she chewed she held out the cake to me, raising her eyebrows to ask if I wanted a bite. I said okay. The heft of it surprised me, as always, as I grasped the cake between my fingers. I leaned in to smell the mung bean paste, which reminded me of dark, still moments in Noi's bedroom just after her evening meditation. It occurred to me then that I was in a place that none of my friends from school would ever understand or even know. It occurred to me that I had always had choices: to go to parties or not. To call my friend Loan or not. To keep up my Vietnamese or not. To tell my friends at school,
My father threw a party once and hired a lady singer and a band called Y White.
I bit into the rice cake, its sticky sweetness scenting my tongue. It tasted like a secret long kept, old and familiar and unspeakable.

Jennifer's mother played the piano and made chocolate chip cookies and Kool-Aid pops.

Holly's mother baked Jiffy muffins and packed pizza lunches and thermoses of Campbell's chicken noodle soup.

The imperfect mothers, like Mrs. Harrison next door, worked all the time. We hardly ever saw her, but knew that the other mothers gossiped about how she had married and divorced a black man. The kids, Janie and Linc, mostly kept to themselves. With their brown skin and deaf cat, they were as freakish as we were. We liked the Harrisons because they didn't care about their lawn, either, and didn't care if we played in their backyard in the winter, stepping onto their property just to see our footprints in new snow.

Down the street, Kim and Becky Doornbos's mother stayed inside all day long. Kim had long blond hair like Marcia Brady and Becky was strawberry blond. Becky was the bratty sister, while Kim spoke in whispers. They weren't allowed to leave the vicinity of their property and only desperate boredom led Anh and me to play with them. There was something eerie about the Doornbos girls. They were odder-looking than we were, which was saying something. One time, Becky got stuck on the swing set rings, her thick knees refusing to slip out, and she hung there upside down, screaming and smiling at the same time. Kim just gazed at her. Mrs. Doornbos came running out, her hair still in pink curlers. “Kim, you dummy,” she rasped. “Help her out!”

Then there was Tara's mother, who introduced me to beef Stroganoff and showed me that I had no manners.

Tara was Anh's friend from school, but when she invited Anh to spend a day at her house during holiday break, Rosa insisted that I had to be invited as well. I was seven years old then and still followed my sister everywhere. That early afternoon Tara and her mother picked us up in their blue Cherokee. They had matching honey-brown bob haircuts and down jackets. Their car had no dog smells, no Burger King wrappers on the floor, no sticky cans of 7UP rolling around in the back. As we drove to Studio 28 to see a showing of the
Cinderella
movie, Tara and her mother sang along to a tape of Disney songs. At the theater, Tara's mother bought us pop, bags of popcorn, and M&M's. The generosity shamed me. On the rare occasion that my parents took us to a movie they smuggled candy and cans of RC and Vernors in Rosa's massive purse.

After Cinderella had been whisked away in the Prince's chariot we went to Tara's house, which rose up in a tower of blushing brick and white shutters. In the entryway a staircase curved into a balcony, and glossy hardwood floors led to the Christmas tree still lit up in their living room. The opened gifts were arranged under the tree: a spiffy new pair of boots, a doll propped up against ornaments.

Tara was an only child, and her bedroom was a fantasy explosion of stuffed animals and the color pink. She had the canopy bed I had dreamed about, with lacy hems dripping over the edges. She had a huge dollhouse, each room fitted up with colonial furnishings and wallpaper, with decorative pillows on the bed and portraits on the walls. Tara and Anh banished me to the hallway bookshelf so they could play house by themselves and listen to the radio.

While I sifted through Tara's fairy-tale books the sky outside the window seeped into dusk. A meaty smell floated up the stairs, and I had a sudden panicky feeling of being a stowaway, of being caught. But then Tara's mother called us all down to dinner. My sister and I traded nervous looks. We had never had dinner at a house like this, so fine with its real Christmas tree and white upholstered furniture, nothing sullied by dog hair or spills of Sunny Maid. Anh and I lingered at the entrance of the formal dining room, awed by the chandelier we later agreed must have been made of diamonds.

At home we sat wherever we could at the table, pushing old copies of the
Grand Rapids Press
out of the way, taking care only to avoid the spot reserved for our ancestors, whose spirits my grandmother fed three times a day. At Tara's house there were no hungry spirits to worry about, and certainly no clutter, so I slipped into the first chair I saw.

That's when Tara's father came into the room and stopped short when he saw me sitting at the head of the table. He said nothing, nor did Tara's mother a moment later when she brought out the dinner plates. Only her flat stare told me I had done something wrong. I hadn't yet learned the rules about fathers and mothers, head and foot, the king and his castle.

I concentrated on the food before me: egg noodles sinking in brown gravy, buoys of beef and canned mushroom. It looked just like the commercials for Noodle Roni and I picked up my fork and started eating. Tara's mother set a basket of rolls on the table and cleared her throat. She had had enough. “In this house,” she said, looking at me, “we pray before we eat.”

I wanted then, as I did countless times after, for years, to slide away and vanish, become as unseeable as my ancestors. The humiliation burned through, bad enough for me to confess it to my stepmother later at home.

“Sounds like beef Stroganoff,” she said.

I repeated the words to myself. “Is that fancy?”

“Well, it's not what poor people get to eat.”

Then Rosa laughed at the idea of me sitting at the head of the table. “Don't you know you're not supposed to sit there? Don't you know you're supposed to wait until other people start eating?”

“Why didn't you tell me?” I demanded, but she just told me to be quiet now. I wanted to say:
Isn't it a mother's job to teach lessons on good manners? How am I supposed to know how to be a decent girl unless my mother shows me?
But Rosa was already moving, gathering her files for work, picking up the phone to make a call. She was way too busy, she said, to worry about things like that.

The lessons she preferred were more about hunger than manners. “Do you know how many children are starving in Africa? ” she'd ask when one of us kids wouldn't finish a meal. “Think of the starving refugee children.
You
were a refugee,” she'd add pointedly.

A few years later, just as I was about to enter fifth grade, the public school teachers went on strike. To show her support, Rosa refused to let any of us kids go to school until the teachers had returned. I called my best friend Holly, who confirmed that everyone had shown up on the first day except for me.

“Who's going to teach them?” I asked Rosa.

“Scabs,” she hissed.

I pictured dry purplish scabs, like the ones that formed over my skinned knees, pacing in front of a chalkboard.

Anh and Crissy were thrilled about missing school, and Vinh seemed glad enough to stay at home with his Transformers and
He-Man
reruns, but I felt uneasy: the first days were foundational; friendships for the whole year could be cemented. I told Rosa that I needed to get back to school, but she said no way, José. “No one in our house is going to cross the picket lines.”

Rosa loved a good strike. Her great hero was César Chávez, whom I learned about when she announced that we were all boycotting lettuce, grapes, and everything made by Campbell's. She wore buttons on her blazers: “Lettuce Stick Together” and “Down with Grapes.” Campbell's and grapes: those were her enemies, and for a long time not a single grape appeared in our household, unless smuggled in by our uncles and grandmother. Rosa spoke of the fruit—picked in California by underpaid and exploited migrants—with such resentment that for years, even after the migrants had won a bit of victory and Rosa stopped boycotting, I still looked at grapes with apprehension. César Chávez had organized the migrant workers in California, a move that must have taken Rosa straight back to her own childhood, when her parents' wages depended on the seasons and the sums doled out by farms and orchards up and down the coast of Lake Michigan. Rosa explained how the workers had no say and no power, and that only unions ensured that they would be paid fairly.

César Chávez appealed to my sense of justice, stirred from reading
The Grapes of Wrath.
It was one of my favorite books for its descriptions of dust, greasy food, and soulful characters. The biscuits were “high” and “bulbous”; Ma Joad “[lifted] . . . curling slices of pork from the frying pan.” I found myself charmed by Tom Joad, a good man in spite of the years he'd done in prison. I felt his hunger when he came back from a day of picking peaches and shouted, “Leave me at her,” while reaching for his dinner plate. The way he wolfed down his three hamburger patties and white bread with drippings drizzled on top. “Got any more?” he asked Ma. She kept the whole family going, but she didn't have any more food for Tom that night, not when wages were so little and store prices so high. They had seen families making their way eastward, back out of California, to go home to die in the dust they had tried to escape.

So my heart beat a little faster when Rosa decided to take Vinh and me to the picket line in front of Fountain Street Elementary School in downtown Grand Rapids. Against the backdrop of the old brick school and a sky-blue day, a small group of women clustered about the sidewalk, holding up signs. “Who are they?” I asked Rosa.