Stealing Buddha's Dinner (19 page)

The Ingallses were the epitome of American. They memorized the Declaration of Independence, knew an inexhaustible number of hymns and American folk songs, and took pride in being “free and independent.” They had big, “Westward Ho!” ideas about migration, property, and ownership. They built homes everywhere they landed, frying up salt pork in their iron skillet in hand-built hearths across the plains. They had such confidence in the building, such righteous belief in the idea of home, in the right to land, in the life of farming.

As I grew older, I had an increasingly uneasy time reading the books. The Ingallses were a pious group; they loved church, knew the Bible inside and out, and sometimes reminded me uncomfortably of the Vander Wals and all the other hard-core Christians I had encountered in Grand Rapids. Then there was the issue of racism. Not just Ma Ingalls's hatred of Indians, which persisted no matter what Pa said. In
Little House in the Big Woods
the family sings a song about “a little darky.” In
Little Town on the Prairie
Pa and a group of men folk put on blackface and perform a vaudeville show for the town. “Look at those darkies' feet,” they sing, prancing around stage. “Those darkies can't be beat!” I knew that people like me would also have been considered outcasts, heathens, and strangers; we didn't even count.

In a way, it makes sense that I would become enamored with a literature so symbolic of manifest destiny and white entitlement. I didn't have any nonwhite literature, anyway, to know what else I could become. My favorite books, the ones I gravitated to, were as white or as Anglo as a person could get. Though my relationship with the Ingalls family and other white characters grew complicated, I had a strong reserve of denial, an ability to push away the unpleasant parts. For I had created, if somewhat unknowingly, a group portrait of protagonists—girls I wished I could be. Girls as capable as Laura Ingalls, as talented as Jo March, as smart and privileged as Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy.

Harriet Welsch spent all of her time taking notes on people. She listened at windows and doors and hid in dumbwaiters, putting together profiles of people in her neighborhood—the rich and ridiculous Agatha K. Plumber, the cat-loving Harrison Withers, the always-hungry delivery boy at the Dei Santi grocery who could eat pounds of cheese, bread, and tomatoes in one sitting. Harriet wanted to be a writer, and had stacks of notebooks filled with her uncensored, critical thoughts about everyone she met or saw. As the only child to rich parents, Harriet had her own room and bathroom. She had a governess, Ole Golly, to look after her, and a cook to feed her cake and milk every day after school. In short, Harriet had an envied life, and part of that came from her freedom to write. I tried to capture that same independence. Because Harriet loved tomato sandwiches, describing how her mouth watered at the thought of the creamy mayonnaise and ripe red tomatoes, I tried to like them, too. When I wrote like Harriet, I took pleasure in the release of opinions and the scrawling of thoughts that could not be said out loud for fear of getting laughed at, teased, or in trouble. These entries ranged from hating my sister for taking the last Chicken Coop drumstick to wondering if unicorns existed somewhere, and if they did, what it would be like to have one.

I kept a pure diary of unfettered thoughts—in which the risk of another reader isn't present—for about a week, which was about the time it took my sisters and stepmother to locate and read what I had written. Rosa frequently searched our bedroom dressers to read our diaries, which she herself had given us for Christmas, not even pretending to conceal her intentions. She believed that everything we did and wrote was hers, since we lived under her roof; she was worried that if she didn't monitor us we would become wayward and bad. She often spoke vaguely of “bad girls” and how important it was not to become one of them.

Anh and Crissy were often bored enough to dip into my diary, too, and enjoyed laughing at my fanciful unicorn dreams and bitter thoughts about clothes and dinners I couldn't have. I knew I had to either stop keeping a diary altogether or find a way to keep a truly private one. The former wouldn't hold—I was too restless and introverted—and the latter proved impossible. In such a small house, no hiding place could go undiscovered. I slid the diary between shirts in my dresser, pushed it inside my pillowcase, tucked it under the fitted sheet that nestled against the wall. Inevitably Anh, Crissy, or Rosa would find the diary or catch me pulling it out. My next stop was to foil them.
Stop reading my diary and go away!
I wrote in block letters on the first full page. I filled the next several pages with fake entries—dull ramblings about sledding and snow, descriptions of what my dolls were doing with their afternoons. Then I turned the book upside down and flipped to the back to write my real entries. But my stepmother and sisters were as persistent as I was. Harriet, I knew, would have understood my pain; when her classmates discovered her notebooks they ostracized her.

But at least Harriet had a pretty bedroom all her own. Her house was big enough to have a library and a grand sweeping staircase. After her spy route Harriet would go to her favorite soda fountain and order a ten-cent egg cream. She had the kind of wealth and privilege I wished that I could take for granted. Her father worked in television and used the word
fink
a lot. Her mother was slender and attractive and left a romantic trail of perfume when she went off to a party, while Harriet stayed at home with the wise, intuitive Ole Golly, who quoted Whitman and Wordsworth and knew how to cook lobster thermidor.

It was a wonderful suspension of self to pretend to be Harriet and immerse myself in her New York life. But I knew she was as out of reach as Laura Ingalls. I could never have a socialite mother like Mrs. Welsch, or an expert in domesticity like Ma Ingalls, or even someone like Mrs. Quimby, who worked a part-time job and sympathized with her daughter's desires and frustrations. Certainly a mother as upstanding and goddesslike as Marmee March was out of the question. Reading these books was the same as reading fantasy. Girls like Jennifer Vander Wal and Holly Jansen could legitimately pretend to be Anne of Green Gables or Jo March, but a Vietnamese girl like me could never even have lived near them. Nonetheless, drawn to what I could not have, I kept seeking out landscapes in which I could not have existed. Deep down, I thought I could prove that I could be a more thorough and competent white girl than any of the white girls I knew. I gave my dolls and stuffed animals names like Polly, Vanessa, Elspeth, and Anastasia. I pursued all the British books on the library's Literature shelf, working to understand the language and cadence of
Great Expectations, The Return of the Native,
and
Pride and Prejudice,
though I often came away feeling moody and dissatisfied, a cloud coming over the landscape of my imagination. I spent several months trying to speak in a British accent—modeling it on Julie Andrews's in
Mary Poppins
and Hayley Mills's in
Pollyanna
—and used it at home whenever my sisters spoke to me. I made myself over into the whitest girl possible. No doubt this contributed to the quick erosion of my Vietnamese. I thought if I could know inside and out how my heroines lived and what they ate and what they loved—Harriet in New York, Laura in Dakota, Jo March in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Bennet in England—I could be them, too. I could read my way out of Grand Rapids.

MY STEPMOTHER GOT HER HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION
photo taken a year after she started college. In the picture, her face is framed by a coiffed 'do that curves in big commas at her jawline. Her lips and cheeks have been shaded pink in the style of the time and you can tell she's the kind of girl who wears cat-eye glasses strung on a chain around her neck.
What was it like?
I used to ask Rosa about growing up in Fruitport, going to high school in the sixties and having nine brothers and sisters. If she felt like answering, she'd describe a life that I had imagined only from books: feeding chickens, washing dirty clothes with a handheld scrub board, having no electricity or running water for years. She'd had a formal picture taken in her senior year of high school but couldn't bear how she looked in her handmade, made-over outfit. So after she had attended a year at Grand Valley State she sat for the real portrait, the image of herself she wanted to capture.

The drive from Grand Rapids to Fruitport takes about forty-five minutes, but when I was a kid it seemed to last an entire day. Nothing in the landscape changed—just the same birch and pine trees planted in the median, the same green exit signs pointing the way to the towns like Nunica and Holland. I knew that Lake Michigan lay just beyond Fruitport, tantalizingly near yet nowhere in sight. My siblings and I clamored to go to the beach at P. J. Hoffmaster State Park and my father dreamed about speed-boats, but we only visited the lake during summer trips to see Rosa's family. Vinh's birth had brought her back into the fold, and just like that our family grew. Crissy jumped in with open arms—they were her blood, after all—but Anh and I hesitated, overwhelmed by the great number of people we were suddenly supposed to claim as our aunts, uncles, and cousins. My father appeared to endure the visits with unusual quietude. Noi and my uncles almost always stayed home. We were, from the beginning, divided.

Rosa's parents, Juan and Maria, had both grown up in Texas—Juan in San Antonio, Maria in Brownsville. They met on the migrant trail, working their way up to Michigan for the cherry and sugarbeet seasons. Maria had entered a convent at thirteen, but left three years later, when her mother died in childbirth, to take care of her six younger siblings. As the oldest, her role as matriarch began early. After she and Juan married and began to have kids he took a job as a
toquero
in Saginaw. He drove truckloads of fruit and vegetables from the farms to the distributors, and his easy translations between English and Spanish, along with his affable manner, made him an ideal go-between to negotiate wages and terms. Rosa was still a little girl when the family settled in Fruitport, where her father started working at a foundry. Finally, the family began building their house. There were ten kids now and they spent that first year in the basement, the only part of the house that was done. They had no electricity yet, so the days stretched out dark and dank. They used hurricane lamps and propane heaters. Maria cooked over the portable gas stove she had used for years in the migrant camps. Slowly Juan finished the rest of the house, a long ranch style on a few acres of wooded land. It had electricity and a real bathroom—no more bathing on Saturdays in a tin tub with water pumped by hand and heated on the stove. But washing clothes was still a dreaded chore: scrub the dirtiest clothes on the tin scrub board; put the rest of the clothes through the washer-wringer, twice; clip everything to dry on the clotheslines outside; carefully iron and fold. Rosa's mother sewed almost all of her children's clothes, and what she couldn't make herself she bought at secondhand stores.

In the summers, Grandma and Grandpa, as Anh and I were instructed to call them, threw huge barbecues, cooking slabs of meat on giant grills fashioned out of oil drums. The men of the family would gather around the grill with cans of Budweiser. The smoke obscured their expressions but not their big laughs, the jokes they told in Spanish that I wished I could understand. Rosa kept trying to teach us the language through immersion techniques.
Buenas noches, Ándale,
and
Cállate la boca
had become part of our vocabulary. Though I generally considered myself pretty quiet, I heard that last one a lot. I tried to keep these phrases under wraps from my friends. They thought I was different enough with the whole Vietnamese thing; adding Mexican American to the mix just put me over the edge.

Rosa's family was enormous: I now had dozens of cousins, and all these
tías
and
tíos
to keep track of. As with the Vietnamese parties, the women, men, and kids generally split into their own groups, each having its own leader. The kids played tag and hide-and-seek in the summer and went sledding in the winter. The men drank beer and watched the Tigers or the Lions. Grandpa, a man of graceful movements and gentle laugh, played the guitar, and often sang lonesome Mexican songs he had learned growing up in San Antonio. It was said that all quartz watches stopped when he put them on his wrist. In the kitchen the women's voices rose and fell against each other, gossiping and quarreling like competing birds. Grandma was the terrifying matriarch, and her word was the word: if she declared that the arroz con pollo didn't need more salt, then it didn't.

I sussed out the nice aunts and uncles. The mean ones pinched our cheeks too hard and laughed, using Spanish phrases I didn't understand. The nice ones smiled at us and asked if we had gotten enough to eat; one aunt even made me a big floppy doll for Christmas. It took me a long time to realize that the doll was supposed to look like me, with black yarn hair and brown eyes. I named her Pollyanna.

I never embarked on a trip without a supply of books. They were my safety blanket, my stay against boredom, conversation, and interaction. Rosa's family, like my father's friends, had clear expectations about the role of children. Be seen but not heard, and do what you're told. Kids were servants and gofers, and if an adult told you to fetch a napkin or find his shoes, then you had better do it or suffer consequences: get yelled at in front of everybody, or worse, spanked with a belt. I saw kids get in trouble every time; they shouted too loudly when they won a game of checkers, they got in a fight with someone they accused of cheating, they rolled their eyes, showing “attitude,” or they simply didn't eat everything on their plate.

I tried to keep a low profile. In school, I stayed safe by being good. At home, I stayed safe by being alone. The downside was a feeling of loneliness that I couldn't shake; I didn't, after all, want to be left out. I wanted to be a regular kid, too—jump rope (though I never could Double Dutch the way Anh could), play games, draw hopscotch lines in the dirt of the driveway. It just seemed that I could never do anything without getting in trouble or inviting ridicule. I began to realize that the problem was not my voice—I seldom spoke among Rosa's family—but my face. I wore a frown without meaning to. There was an impudence, a defiance in my expression. It drove Rosa and my father insane with anger sometimes. When I had no voice to explain why I didn't do my chores, my face, instead of showing submission, showed the opposite.
Don't you look at me like that,
my father often shouted.
You're cruisin' for a bruisin',
Rosa would add. Try as I might, I couldn't keep my rebellious feelings contained under a shell of trained impassivity. The thick, plastic-rimmed glasses Rosa had chosen for me didn't help my cause, either. I looked pathetic and trollish, and inspired irritation rather than pity. All the kids seemed too old or too young or too noisy for me; I wanted to be back at home with Noi, sharing a can of lychees and putting together a jigsaw puzzle. We could have the whole house to ourselves.