“You were fresh off the boat once,” Leticia says.
“Don’t remind me,” I say. For an instant I get that outsider, stand-quiet-by-the-wall feeling I had in kindergarten, before I learned English. Before I learned to be like everyone else. I close those old feelings out.
“My cousin from Vietnam is coming here on Friday,” I say.
“To visit?”
“No. To stay.”
“Just her? No mom or dad?”
“Her dad’s sick. As soon as he gets better they’ll come, too.”
“She staying with you?”
“Yeah.”
“An FOB in your very own house is okay, but you can’t bring yourself to tutor in the ESL classes? You’re crazy, Girl.”
“I suppose you’re the picture of sanity? Like you’re afraid to go to a retirement place and read to some little old lady?” Leticia laughs and crosses her eyes at me.
“Maybe we’ll have to work on different projects—you in ESL and me at the retirement home,” I tell her.
“Maybe. But I’d still rather come up with something together. Woodsy said we could find our own project.”
“But what?”
“Maybe it will come to us in a dream, like Josh says happens with inventors sometimes.”
“I don’t like dreams,” I say.
“All the more proof you’re crazy. I love dreams. It’s like a free movie in my own cozy little theatre.”
“There’s nothing cozy about my dreams,” I say.
***
Saturday morning as I’m getting ready for Vietnamese school, Mom comes into my room. She is dressed in red, for luck.
“No mall today,” she says.
“But, Mom . . .” Her face hardens and I only think what I want to say. Saturday afternoon is my only time to be free. She agreed that as long as I’m getting all As, I can go to the mall on Saturdays with my friends. What that means is, after Vietnamese school in the morning, I come home and help clean house, and then, around three or so, I can go to the mall. I look forward to Saturday afternoons all week long.
“Your cousin arrives today. We must meet her.”
“But there will be lots of people to meet her,” I say.
“No one her age but you,” my mother says.
And that is that. I go with my brother and mother to meet Lan. Auntie Mai, Uncle Hoi, and my three cousins wait at our house, the women preparing food and the men watching TV, I suppose.
Khanh has made a big sign with Lan’s name on it which he holds up as people begin pouring through the gates from flight 1721. My mother stands on tip-toe, straining to see over the crowd in front of us. I doubt that she will recognize Lan, based on the only picture we have of her, taken at the age of two.
When it seems there can be no one left on the plane, a timid-looking girl walks through the gate and sees Khanh’s sign. Her face breaks into a smile and she moves toward us, hesitant.
My mother calls, “Lan! Lan!” and the girl nods yes.
“Auntie Le?”
My mother runs to embrace Lan, crying. Lan, too, is crying.
“Come, we’ll get your luggage,” Khanh says, gently taking Lan’s arm. I can hardly believe she is sixteen. She looks more like about twelve, she’s so thin and frail.
On the way home, in response to my mother’s questions, she tells of her trip. First she flew from Saigon to Bangkok, then from Bangkok to Hong Kong. Her plane was late arriving in Hong Kong, so she missed her connection. Finally she got another flight out of Hong Kong to Hawaii and from there to Los Angeles. It’s been over twenty-eight hours since she left home.
I flew to San Francisco once, with Auntie Mai. That took about an hour.
“Twenty-eight hours?” I say, not certain I’ve heard correctly.
“Better than ten months,” Khanh says, surprising me with a reference to the silent subject of our trip out of Vietnam.
When we get home, Auntie Mai has food waiting for us. There is a meat and noodle soup, rice with fish sauce and vegetables, and sweet cakes. My mother introduces Lan to everyone, then carries her two suitcases into my room. As she sets them on my bed, I get a hint of the changes that are about to occur in my life. Where did I think she was going to sleep, anyway?
In the dining room, Aunty Mai stands behind Lan, rubbing her back. They are talking about Lan’s mother and father.
“How much we miss our sister,” Auntie Mai says, “and how happy we are to have her only daughter with us.”
“And your father?” Uncle Hoi asks.
Lan shrugs her shoulders. “About the same,” she says.
I sneak a look at Lan. I wonder what it’s like to have a father—even one who’s been sick much of her life. I put bowls and chopsticks on the big table and Auntie Mai calls the men to come eat. After they are seated and everything is on the table, Auntie Mai pours tea for everyone and the rest of us sit down. The talk is lively, and I see that even though Lan is quiet, she has somehow brought energy to the rest of the family. Except me. I don’t feel so lively because I’ve lost my Saturday at the mall.
When the phone rings, Khanh picks it up. “No talk now,” he says, and slams down the receiver. Anger rises within me. I hate that he controls my telephone calls. And I hate that he’s so rude to my friends. It’s not fair!
I sit picking at my food. I really wanted pizza tonight. That’s what I’d be munching out on if I were with my friends.
Lan is eating like she’s starved, telling my mom how much she likes the soup, how it tastes exactly the way her mom’s does. My mom is beaming at Lan. Usually at dinner Mom is always urging me to eat more of whatever she’s cooked. Sometimes it seems like an obsession with her. But tonight she doesn’t even notice that I’m not eating much.
After dinner Lan shows the pictures she’s brought with her, and answers over and over again that she doesn’t know for sure when her parents will come to the United States, but it will be as soon as her father is well enough to travel.
Uncle Hoi asks, “Does Hung still run the factory? How much do eggs cost? Is old Doctor Phu still alive?” Question after question which she answers in her soft voice, the rhythms of her Vietnamese speech untouched by America. I listen longer than I expected to, then say good-night to everyone.
“Lan must be very tired now. We will have time for more questions tomorrow,” my mother says, taking Lan by the hand and leading her to my room. Mom helps Lan unpack, making space in my chest of drawers for Lan’s things. She hangs up two dresses, one skirt, and two blouses, and a traditional ad dai dress, then kisses us both on the cheek.
“You’re lucky to be like sisters now,” she says as she leaves the room.
I get pajamas from my drawer and take them into the bathroom to change and brush my teeth. When I come back, Lan is sitting on the bed in a thin white nightgown. Her clothes are folded carefully on top of the chest of drawers. I crawl into my bed and scrunch up on the far side, next to the wall. Lan scrunches up on the other side.
“Goodnight, Cousin,” she says.
“Goodnight, Lan.”
Even though Lan and I are not touching, I feel crowded in my bed. And I feel cheated out of a precious Saturday. I concentrate very hard on not dreaming as I drift off to sleep.
Monday morning Khanh takes us to school. Khanh never has time to take me to school, but now that Lan is here he suddenly has time. Lan is wearing a light-weight dress that comes to below her knees. It is dark grey and has long sleeves. She looks as FOB as they come.
Even my mother, who is not at all style conscious, told Lan this morning that we’d better get her some more clothes soon. I’ve been asking for money for weeks for this great pair of pants I saw at J. Crew, but now it’s Lan who’s going to get new clothes.
“Come with us to the office,” Khanh tells me. “I’ll get her started enrolling, then you wait with her and walk her to class when she gets her program.”
“Khanh! Bancroft has a fit if anyone comes in late.”
“You wait until she’s finished and walk with her to class. And meet her after school and ride the bus with her,” Khanh says, in a tone that allows no argument. So I stay until Lan is officially enrolled, and then I walk with her to the orientation center where she will be tested and then placed in “appropriate” classes.
It is already 8:30 by the time Lan is settled. No use going to first period and risking Ms. Bancroft’s anger. The trouble is, she won’t take my homework if it’s late, so besides a cut she’ll drop my homework grade. All because my brother insists I babysit for Lan. If I lose my A in that class, it will be all his fault. But he won’t see it that way.
During lunch Leticia and I go see Mr. Wong and get set up with a tutoring schedule. Because I am fluent in Vietnamese, I am assigned to a class for the very beginning Asian students. Leticia, because she’s taken Spanish, is assigned to a class that’s mostly Hispanic kids. We’ll be tutoring during our lunch period, on Tuesdays and Thursdays for six weeks.
Instead of meeting Leticia and Candice after school and hanging out with them until the bus comes, I have to go to Lan’s last class and wait for her to be finished. I stand outside the door, looking in at the thirty-five or so kids who have no idea if Twinkie is a put-down or a compliment, but then, I’m wondering about that myself.
Lan has a worksheet on her desk and seems to be deep in concentration. She is one of the last to leave her desk after the bell rings. I walk in to get her.
“Hello. Hi,” she says, proud that she has learned a greeting.
“Hello,” I say, smiling back.
Lan begins talking to me in Vietnamese, racing on about her classes, asking questions. I don’t answer. It’s not that I mean to be rude, but I’ve never spoken Vietnamese at school. It’s like crossing a boundary or something. The words won’t come from my mouth. It’s not until we get to my front yard that I begin to respond to the questions she asked back at school. It’s weird, I know, but that’s how I am.
My mother greets us, her face open and not hard. Lan follows her to the kitchen and I go to my room, to sit at my desk and study, as I always do on school days. I open my calculus book and begin working through the day’s problems. It is not until the last equation is finished that I notice the unfamiliar sounds of easy talk and laughter coming from the kitchen, mingled with the everyday sounds of food preparation.
In the week before Tet, Lan and Mom become more and more of a team in the kitchen, preparing elaborate dishes with ingredients that can only be found in a special Vietnamese market near downtown Los Angeles. Some of these, the special rice cakes that have to be wrapped in banana leaves and boiled for a day, are only for Tet. But a lot of the cooking gets eaten the day it’s prepared. My mother gives Khanh a list before he goes to work in the mornings. They’re always two days ahead in their planning, so they don’t have to wait for Khanh to get home from work before they start in the kitchen. Auntie Mai and Uncle Hoi just happen to drop by at dinner time more often these days. My mother doesn’t even ask me to help with the cooking anymore. Not that I want to, but it seems kind of strange to me that she doesn’t even ask.
In bed one night, in the dark, Lan says, “Cooking with your mother helps me not miss my mother so much. That’s something we always did together. And Auntie Le and my mother do things exactly the same way. It’s funny. They hold a knife the same way, and they stir things with the same quick movements.”
Lan laughs, but I think it is to keep from crying. For the first time I think how lonely it must be for her here. And I wonder what happened that I stopped cooking with my mother.
Just after midnight at the beginning of Tet, my mother comes into my bedroom and calls to Lan, “Get up. It is time.”
I look up sleepily, wondering what’s going on. My mother leads Lan out the back door and around to the front, being sure that Lan is the first to step through our doorway on this day.
“For luck,” my mother says as Lan climbs back into bed.
Over the three days of Tet, we pay special attention to the memory of our ancestors, setting out favorite foods beside their pictures. (The only picture that gets cigarettes is my father’s.) We dress in our traditional clothes and go to a big Tet festival at the Vietnamese Center. Lan and I get money from our family. Nothing is very different from last year, except somehow it seems that my family has become even more Vietnamese since Lan arrived.
At the Center I take good luck leaves from a special tree so I can put them under my pillow. I hope they will protect me from the dream of darkness.
***
At school it turns out that I am assigned to tutor two new students in the ESL class. Lan is one of them. The other is a boy, Dat. They both ask about a million questions in Vietnamese, and I answer in English, drawing pictures to try to help them understand.
“Tell me in Vietnamese,” Lan pleads, as I’m trying to get across the meaning of “today,” as in “How are you today?”
Later, at home, I explain, in Vietnamese of course, that for me, school is only for English, home for Vietnamese. Except for Vietnamese School on Saturdays. At that school I only speak Vietnamese.
“I don’t understand,” Lan says.
“I don’t either, exactly.”
One day, just as I am going into the ESL class, Candice walks past me and yells, “Hey, Twinkie.”
I wave and walk into the room where Dat and Lan are waiting for their tutoring session.
“What is Twinkie?” Lan asks.
Dat proudly pulls a Twinkie from his backpack.
“Twinkie,” he says with a grin.
“But why are you Twinkie?” Lan says to me.
“Home,” I tell her, meaning I will explain in Vietnamese when we get home today.
She shrugs and turns to Dat. “American ways are strange,” she says.
Later, when I try to explain to her, yellow on the outside, white on the inside—a joke—my words sound hollow. Lan says to me what she often says when I try to enlighten her about my double life. “I don’t understand.”
A few days later, as I’m leaving the ESL room, I hear some boys in the hallway making jokes about FOBs.
“Don’t breathe,” one of them says as he gets near the door. “That’s the T.B. ward in there.”
Another one makes a fake, racking cough noise. I look back inside, at the kids who are trying so hard to learn English, who’ve come here with hope in their hearts, and I am suddenly very, very sad. And then I feel an anger rising hot within me, for them, and for me, and for all of the put downs people endure. And I suddenly know in my heart what the “No Put Down” sign in Peer Counseling really means.
When I see Leticia and Candice after school I say to them, “I don’t want to be called Twinkie anymore.”
“Are you taking all that stuff Woodsy says seriously?” Leticia says.
“I’m taking me seriously,” I say.
“Okay,” she says.
“I don’t get it,” Candice says.
“I’m just telling you, no more Twinkie for me. I’m more than a Twinkie. And I’m not calling you White Girl anymore, either. You’re more than just a white girl.”
They both look puzzled. We walk to the bus together, but no one says anything.
Saturday, over pizza, Leticia says, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Whoa,” Candice says with a laugh.
“No, really. The Twinkie stuff. I hate to lose a joke, but sometimes Oreo doesn’t seem so funny anymore either.”
“I don’t care about White Girl,” Candice says.
“Yeah, but that’s not saying you’re one thing on the outside and something else on the inside,” Leticia says.
“But I think it’s still a put down, because it says you’re only a stereotype,” I tell Candice.
“Maybe,” she says, “But it doesn’t bother me.”
“Think about it,” I say.
“No thinking today. It’s Saturday.”
“Let’s go check out that new video place,” Leticia say
s.
“Why? Are you mad at Albert again?” I ask.
“No, but it never hurts to look around,” she says.
We wander down there, but it’s filled with junior high boys.
“Man, where are the real guys?” Leticia says.
We go into a few shops, try on some clothes, check out Tower Records, get a frozen yogurt, and then it’s time for me to meet Khanh out in front of Nordstrom’s. My one afternoon of freedom is over until next week.
When I get to the spot where I always meet Khanh, it is Auntie Mai instead, who is waiting for me in her car. She smiles as I get in and hands me a peanut butter cup.
“Did you have fun?” she asks.
“I always have fun with Leticia and Candice,” I say. “They make me laugh.”
“Why don’t you invite your cousin to join you next time? I think she needs to laugh, too.”
I don’t know what to say. Even though I see Lan at school, she is part of my home life, my Vietnamese life.
“I don’t think she knows English well enough to get along with my friends,” I say.
“She is learning fast,” Auntie Mai says.
“I know,” I say, thinking of how much more quickly she catches on to things than Dat does. I’m not sure if she’s smarter, or if she studies more than he does, or what.
We ride along in silence for a while, then Auntie Mai says, “It is a lonely time when people first come to a strange new country. I know it was very difficult for Lan to leave her mother.”
“Then why did she?” I ask. I don’t plan for it to come out mean-sounding, but it does.
“She came for the same reason we all come,” my aunt says. “To find a chance for a better life.”
We ride the rest of the way home without talking. I feel a barrier between us, but I don’t know how to get past it. I really don’t want to start taking Lan to the mall with me on Saturdays. It would change everything.
When we pull into the driveway at my house, Auntie Mai stops the car and turns to me.
“What happened to my sweet little Trinh?” she asks, then answers her own question, “America.”
Monday morning, as usual, Khanh comes in and pokes me in the arm, hard, and says in a mean voice, “Wake up, you lazy.”
Beyond Dreams Page 13