The Dim Sum of All Things

by Kim Wong Keltner

  As a result, Lindsey always felt safest in her clunky black boots. Even on hot summer days, she always wore socks. And not just anklets. Mostly she wore tight knee highs that threatened to cut off the circulation in her calves. She was reluctant to risk the casual slippage of a flimsy, cotton-acrylic sock. She liked to keep her left foot under tight control, like a kidnapper who keeps a sack over the head of his victim. She often thought of the ingenious burlap hood sported by the Elephant Man.

  Lindsey changed into her nightgown and performed her regular bedtime routine of teethbrushing and haircombing. As she scooted under the sheets, she unconsciously paused to rub the little toe, perhaps for good luck, and with the hope that someday it might decide to grow. She lay in bed and quickly fell asleep.

  Back in college, while watching Lindsey dilute her latte with extra milk, her friend Mimi had once joked that Lindsey liked her coffee white and weak, just like her men. In Mimi’s opinion, all the dudes Lindsey dated were duds, and the particularly pasty-looking ones were called Milk Duds.

  But it wasn’t like Lindsey never dated Asians. She had recently gone out with a few Chinese guys, but only because Pau Pau liked to play matchmaker. Every few months or so, Pau Pau would announce that a young man, a grandson of a friend, would be picking her up for a date. How humiliating! But what could she do? She was living rent-free, and these arranged “dates” meant so much to Pau Pau, who worried about her granddaughter’s marital status.

  Lindsey was already twenty-five, no spring chicken. She was no cherng-gai, if such a thing could be translated. Pau Pau schemed with her merry band of mahjong ladies, and together they cooked up ways to manipulate each other’s grandkids into forced social situations. Who knew how it all came about? Maybe like this:

  Pau Pau: Poong! I win! Now you all owe me $300 each.

  Somebody else’s Pau Pau: How about $100 and my grandson takes your granddaughter to dinner?

  Lindsey had gone on quite a few of these fake dates. Thus far she had met an actuary with a ricebowl haircut and an aversion to eye contact, an engineering student with an impressive aquarium, an electronics wizard with a massive collection of Star Wars action figures, and, her least favorite, the pudgy androgynous one. She hadn’t clicked with any of them, and there was no way she was going to let any of them peel off her jog bra and Hello Kitty undies. She wondered if she would ever find any guy—Chinese, white, or otherwise—whom she could even tolerate for a second date, let alone fall in love with.

  Pau Pau arranged for Mrs. Kwok’s grandson to take Lindsey out one evening. Kam was what Lindsey could only describe as a Gang Guy. He styled his hair in a gravity-defying rooster pouf and wore vinyl pants with a switchblade knife attached to a gold mesh belt.

  Lindsey took a deep breath as she climbed into Kam’s car, a custom-painted, bright purple Honda Civic that seemed lower to the ground than normal. Dangling from the rearview mirror, a plastic lantern with fake jade beads and red fringe hit her in the head as he swerved into traffic.

  She glanced at all the homemade, racing-inspired decals on the windows.

  “I like your stickers,” she said, trying to make conversation.

  “Cool, huh. Hey, you like kar-oke?” he asked, cracking his knuckles as he gripped the steering wheel.

  She wasn’t sure if he’d said “karaoke,” but she nodded nervously, afraid she’d get shot if she said no. Did Pau Pau know she was setting up her granddaughter with a mini-mafioso descended from the Pacific shores of ancient and majestic Cathay?

  They sped through several intersections and came inches away from sliding under a Peterbilt truck. When she asked why the car rumbled so loudly, Kam proudly straightened his skinny shoulders and explained that he made “specialized adjustments” to the engine and muffler. For several blocks neither of them spoke until Kam finally said, “Oh, that’s hecka sick.”

  “What?” Lindsey said.

  “That car was hecka tight, back there by the li-berry…”

  Lindsey looked over her shoulder just as they passed the Green Street library and spotted a fluorescent Honda race-car not unlike the one she was currently trapped in. To get a better look, she pressed the button to open the automatic window and was relieved by a gust of fresh air that diluted the macho stink that wafted from a bottle of “air freshener” glued to the dashboard.

  “Crose the win-dor! It leaves streaks,” Kam said, annoyed. He revved the engine as they waited at a stoplight. After a moment, he gunned the accelerator toward some pedestrians while she slid jerkily on the slippery, Armor-Alled seats.

  On Post Street, across from the heart of Japantown, Kam parked the car, got out, and walked toward a glassed-in storefront, leaving Lindsey in the passenger seat as if he had forgotten she was there. She unbuckled her seat belt and followed him inside, her nostrils instantly permeated with the smells of spilled beer, stale smoke, and popcorn.

  The cramped lobby was crowded with various video game machines and a Neoprint sticker booth. A corkboard listed karaoke room rates like a sleazy hotel, and single sheets of binder paper were tacked to the wall, showing the prices for sodas, snacks, and individual cigarettes. The guy behind the counter looked Lindsey up and down while he and Kam talked in Cantonese for several minutes.

  “Come on,” Kam ordered, and she followed cautiously, her eyes darting around to locate alternative exits should her situation at any time require an escape route. The hall was strangely quiet, and she imagined sinister happenings somewhere on the premises. Everywhere she looked, Magic Marker signs announced No Smoking or Drinking, but meanwhile, guys with cigarettes dangling from their mouths hoisted cases of beer down the halls, disappearing into private rooms. The doors resembled those of her high school classrooms, and through the small windows Lindsey could see the spinning light from disco balls. She prayed there would be no hot tubs in her evening’s future.

  They entered a room where a party was already in progress.

  “Kam!” a bunch of drunken guys yelled. They were all very H.K. (Hong Kong) with shiny shirts and ostentatious yellow-gold wristwatches. Girls in midriff-baring nylon tops sat and puffed on ultra-thin cigarettes, tapping their feet, all in similar white heels. Lindsey sat on the edge of a sticky, brown banquette and absorbed the fact that no one here cared about her presence. She did not exist. A girl in a sheer, sequined tank top wailed a tuneless song in Chinese. Compared with the silence in the hallway, the volume was deafening. Lindsey wondered if anyone would hear her scream if she tried.

  On a low glass coffee table, Styrofoam cups filled with Coke and cheap rum balanced atop thick binders filled with laminated pages of song selections.

  “Pick one!” said a girl in size zero spandex jeans who had finally noticed Lindsey. Lindsey flipped through the pages, carefully touching only the edges to avoid the smudges and stains. A group of girls looked on.

  “How about this one?” Lindsey asked, pointing to a De-peche Mode song. All the girls frowned, as if she had just revealed herself as someone who was not to be trusted. No one addressed her for the remainder of the evening.

  She endured two more hours of off-tune caterwauling, passing the time by counting dots on the acoustic ceiling panels. Kam eventually offered to drive her home so he could return to enjoy the company of his friends without her.

  Climbing out of the grape Honda, she politely thanked him.

  “I had a good time,” she said.

  Kam nodded and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Hey, you tink I can have money for gas?” he asked. “I gotta buy premium, you know.”

  Mooncakes at the White House

  Lindsey knew it was time for mooncakes by the pregnant October moon that reflected golden light in the blue-black ocean like spilled milk. Her favorite fattening treats would only be available for the next couple of months, and she looked forward to gorging herself.

  “Go buy four boxes, for gift to mahjong ladies,” Pau Pau reminded her in the morning, so after work Lindsey walked to Eastern Bakery on Grant
Avenue.

  Inside, old men nursed Styrofoam cups of tea. A few of them sat and dozed over single servings of coffee-crunch cake or peanut rolls. The well-trafficked linoleum flooring crackled under Lindsey’s feet as she stood in line and stared at the different varieties of seasonal confections.

  Compared with somewhat healthier baked goods like scones, muffins, or knishes, mooncakes were distant relatives—perhaps squat, Samoan cousins. A compact, oily hockey puck giddy with cholesterol, a mooncake was a hunkered-down, indolent lard-ball of nutty vanilla smoothness, consisting of buttery flesh made of sweetened lotus seed or black bean paste. Both fillings were rich, and tasted precious, like translucent edible amber, or creamy ebony. Floating inside, suspended in cushioned fat molecules, was a dried, salty, orange-yellow egg yolk, sent from the moon goddess to clog human arteries.

  Solid and greasy, the fire-colored yolk suggested Halloween, and its tangy chalkiness mingled on the taste buds as the perfect complement to the sugary paste stuffings. The delicacies were covered with a chewy, glistening pastry shell and embossed with Chinese characters and floral shapes. They were packaged in crinkly pink paper with red Chinese letters.

  Lindsey ordered two boxes of double-yolked lotus paste mooncakes and two boxes of black bean ones. She steered clear of the fruit and nut varieties, and she got the willies when she spotted the kind with chopped ham. She remembered that, as a child, she had once upset Pau Pau by spitting out a mouthful onto the shag carpet. She shuddered at the memory, then ordered a single, plain lotus cake for herself before heading home.

  That evening Lindsey sat at the kitchen table chewing on a fatty cube of pork. She wondered if Michael was still at work, perhaps scattering confetti from the three-hole punch for her to discover in the morning. She wondered if he really liked her or was only messing with her to stave off boredom.

  Pau Pau brought heavy porcelain bowls to the table: steamed rainbow trout with a delicate soy and scallion broth with hot peppers, sweet glazed pig’s feet, and Lindsey’s favorite—a mélange of shrimp, tofu, bean paste, and a smattering of other ingredients with Chinese names she could never remember. The dish, like many of Pau Pau’s invented recipes, appeared on no restaurant menu anywhere in the city. She tried to watch and take mental notes as her grandmother worked, wondering if the combinations and flavors could ever be duplicated by another.

  Lindsey’s mother and aunts never cooked any Chinese food whatsoever. They preferred Shake ’n Bake chicken, pastas with sauces based on Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, and tuna casseroles with cornflake toppings. Lindsey’s parents had raised her on SpaghettiOs, fish sticks, Swanson frozen entrées, and the vast assortment of Oscar Mayer luncheon loaves. Now she was the only one who ate her grandmother’s food.

  “We’ve been eating that stuff for a lot longer than you, and we’re sick of it,” one aunt had said.

  “If we want Chinese food, we can just go to a restaurant,” another added.

  When Lindsey asked her mother to come over so the three of them could eat together, Mrs. Owyang always declined, saying, “You go ahead and eat with her, that food is bad for my blood pressure and gallstones.”

  Her mom hardly ever came to visit. She claimed she was too busy at work, had to clean her house, or just didn’t have time to dawdle. Nonetheless, it had been her idea that Lindsey should live with Pau Pau. Gung Gung had purchased the building in the late sixties, and at one time or another several relatives had taken advantage of any available units. By the late nineties, everyone had found their own places to live, and Pau Pau was left alone when Gung Gung passed away.

  “Why don’t you move into one of the apartments?” Mrs. Owyang had suggested after Lindsey had returned from college to find she could hardly afford a decent San Francisco apartment. It had seemed like a good alternative, but even the discounted rent of the ground-floor studio had eaten up more than half her monthly paycheck.

  “Ai-ya, you can live upstairs with me!” her grandmother had insisted for weeks. “You don’t have to pay! Nice room, and I won’t bother you.”

  Lindsey eventually gave in, which pleased her mother and aunties immensely. They were glad because Lindsey’s presence meant they could go about their business, unfettered by guilt or the inconvenience of running errands such as driving Pau Pau to Kaiser for checkups. Lindsey could do all that now.

  After dinner, she pulled on a pair of jeans and her lime-green cardigan.

  “I’m going out for a while,” she hollered as her grandmother wiped down the sink and rinsed the small pink melmac cup that was her dentures’ home away from home.

  “Ai-ya!” Pau Pau gestured to Lindsey’s sweater. “Yook sheern!” She shook her head and told Lindsey to change out of the offending garment. “This color no good on Chinese!” she explained. “Don’t you know? Makes look yellow, sick.”

  Lindsey went to her room and changed into a black wool V-neck sweater instead. When she reappeared, Pau Pau was even more upset by her color choice. “Ai-ya! Someone die? Gee whiz!” She threw back her head, exasperated. “You are so young! Should wear bright color! And so cold…” Pau Pau sprang up and retrieved a scarf from her own bedroom and wrapped it tightly around Lindsey’s pale neck.

  “See? See? Gow la…” Pau Pau was satisfied that her granddaughter was now protected against the fog rushing over the steeple of St. Brigid’s Church, which was visible through the kitchen window.

  “Okay, bye.” Lindsey yanked on her boots and beat it out of there in a hurry. Once out of sight at the bottom of the three flights of stairs, she loosened the bright blue fabric that reeked of Chinese herbs. She shoved the scarf in her backpack and rubbed her neck with her fingers, sniffing her hands to make sure she didn’t smell like an old Chinese lady.

  She was stuck in the 1980s and she knew it. She loved a-Ha and Wang Chung, but not because they sounded particularly Chinese. Rummaging around in her car’s cassette box, she selected a tape of Malcolm McLaren’s Madame Butterfly remix and sped off toward Mimi Madlangbayan’s house.

  Thankfully, her best friend also remained trapped in the eighties. Mimi still wore feather earrings, shoulder-baring Flashdance tops, and spandex stirrup pants. When she answered the door, she was wearing a plastic bag on her head, her follicles soaking in Manic Panic hair dye.

  Her father, Mr. Madlangbayan, peered down from the top of the stairs. Recognizing his daughter’s childhood friend, he beckoned her up to the kitchen.

  “Stay for dinner, we’re having dog!” He cackled uproariously.

  “Uh, he’s kidding,” Mimi said. She hated her dad’s favorite joke, and she rolled her kohled eyes, slamming the door as Lindsey scooted in.

  Mimi spent the next hour fussing with her hair as Lindsey helped herself to a complete set of manicuring supplies. She had pampered all her fingers by the time her friend emerged with blond roots at the crown of her long, straight black hair, tipped with fire-red highlights at the ends.

  “Wanna do yours?” Mimi asked.

  “No, but can I borrow your baby-blue cashmere sweater?”

  “Yeah, let me find it.” She threw open the door to her overstuffed closet and began to sift around. From under heaps of dresses and racks of shoes, she yelled out, “Hey, I ran into Tracy yesterday, and she said she saw Steve E. with his new girlfriend.”

  Lindsey digested this factoid, noting that Mimi still said her ex-boyfriend’s name with affectionate, slightly tortured propriety.

  “What’s she look like?” Lindsey asked.

  “One guess.” Mimi poked her head out and raised an eyebrow that had been plucked to within a sixteenth of an inch of its life.

  “I dunno, what?”

  “She’s Filipina.”

  “I knew it,” Lindsey thought to herself. “I always knew he was a Hoarder.” She fell back on the mattress and mentally reconstructed the details of past interactions she had had with Steve E., combing for clues and analyzing how his Hoarderness could have slipped past her radar.

  From the cl
oset, Mimi said, “Yeah, I guess because I don’t speak Tagalog or have an accent I wasn’t Filipina enough for him, but now he’s got the real thing. I hear she cooks him homemade ponsit. Is that depressingly subservient or admirably Martha Stewartish?” She emerged with the sweater and tossed it on the bed.

  Lindsey shrugged. She was surprised to hear Mimi talk regretfully about “not being Filipina enough.” Mimi usually downplayed her Asian descent as much as Lindsey avoided talking about her own Chinese background. Although they had been friends for a long time, they hardly ever shared conversations about their experiences as Asian-Americans; they talked mostly about guys, clothes, and pop culture. They each mentally compartmentalized their Asian identities, associating them only with their parents and family. Despite their closeness as friends, they kept their Asian selves separate from each other and had habitually avoided the topic throughout childhood, their teen years, and up to the present.

  While Mimi embarked upon an entire reorganization of her hundreds of shoes, Lindsey lay on the bed and thought back to a conversation she had had with Steve E. at a party a few months ago. “Yeah, I should have known,” she told herself, recalling their discussion about vacations. “Any white guy who’s traveled alone to Manila and can’t wait to go back has Hoarder written all over him. Hunh. How did I miss that?”

  “Do you think Steve would have liked me more if I had an accent?” Mimi asked, now relacing a high-heeled sneaker at the edge of the bed.

  “Um, yeah, but that’s twisted,” Lindsey said. Mimi looked down at the shoelaces in her hand.

  “No, not the laces,” Lindsey said. “Steve is twisted. A sick, fetishist puppy from the inner circles of Hell.” She looked up and noticed that Mimi was suddenly near tears. Lindsey sat up and patted Mimi’s shoulder. She switched to a more sympathetic tone of voice and said, “Baby, you’re perfect the way you are.”