The Dim Sum of All Things

by Kim Wong Keltner

  Neither Vivien nor Shirley spoke Chinese very well but conversed with their mother in English or with a hunt-and-peck hybrid of Chinese and English words. They both considered Pau Pau superstitious, judgmental, and somewhat “backward.” But they always welcomed her cash handouts. Shirley especially longed for the material possessions and bragging rights afforded by hard work she herself was unwilling to do. Of her unmarried status she often said, “Why should I be made to suffer only because I haven’t met my male twin-ray yet? Vivien’s ex-husband bought her a BMW but I deserve something, too.” She whined to Pau Pau for months about her past life as a dethroned Aztec princess, citing this trauma as another reason why she needed a new car. When Pau Pau asked what kind she needed, Shirley replied, “I’m not materialistic like my sisters. Bai-gnoh a brand new VW Beetle.”

  In contrast, Lindsey’s mom was proud of having earned her own way from a young age. Lillian started working in a Chinatown curio shop when she was ten years old, and kept that job all through City College, when she met Lindsey’s dad, Earl. He used to say that when they met, Lillian looked like a Chinese Jacqueline Kennedy. Because she always supported herself and her sisters never did, Lillian now considered her sisters lazy spendthrifts who couldn’t even discern good quality. It galled her that they wanted QVC jewelry fakes and Volkswagens instead of perfect clarity gems and Mercedes-Benz automobiles. Having watched her sisters grow up as such, she wanted to make sure Kevin and Lindsey were not as spoiled. When they were small, she made sure they were both responsible for weekly chores, and also sent them to Chinese school. She wanted them to be the perfect combination of qualities: well-educated with good manners like upper-class Americans, but with humility and toughness like the Chinese. On principle, she thought all Chinese-Americans needed to know how to speak their mother tongue, and she was disappointed that neither of her kids had absorbed much Cantonese. However, she wasn’t too upset, because she knew she would be even more mortified if it turned out that either spoke with even a trace of a Chinese accent. She wanted her children’s Chinese and American balance to be just right, and she hardly ever approved of how their ratios were rising or falling at any given moment. But for the most part, she was proud of them. Neither Kevin nor Lindsey was a doctor or a lawyer, but she appreciated that neither of them was drug-addicted or blatantly stupid, which, in this day and age, was a relief.

  Lindsey noticed some familiar faces a couple of tables away and waved to a group of people that her parents always referred to as their “Oakland relatives.” She had always been unclear about how they were connected to them, and no one ever had a straight explanation. To make things even more confusing, practically all Chinese people they knew were given automatic titles of Uncle or Auntie, even neighbors and the lady who owned the local Laundromat. Lindsey could never figure out who was specifically related by blood, but she wanted to know what linked her to the Oakland folks so she could determine whose names she should bother learning and whose she could just blow off.

  As she scooted her chair in a bit, she asked, “Pau Pau, how are we related to those people again?”

  “They your aunties, uncles, and cousins,” Pau Pau said, pausing to maneuver her tongue around the dark green meat of a melon seed.

  “But how, exactly?”

  “They from Oakland!” Pau Pau said, seeming exasperated by Lindsey’s ignorance.

  “I know they live in Oakland—”

  “Then what you ask for? Waste my time!” Pau Pau was significantly irritated now. Like a great blue heron striking at its prey with a sharp, swordlike beak, Pau Pau’s two forefingers, with precision and surprising strength, poked her granddaughter’s upper arm, delivering a punishing little jolt that caused Lindsey to immediately cease her questioning. She sat quietly for a moment, embarrassed and contrite.

  Kevin snapped open the bottle of whiskey on the table and mixed Seagram’s Seven with 7 UP.

  “Want one?” he asked, spooning crushed ice into his glass.

  Lindsey nodded, but then spied Pau Pau giving her the dirtiest look ever. “Uh, no thanks,” she corrected.

  “We got here too early,” Kevin complained. “The speeches haven’t even started yet. And geez, this Chinese music is the worst.” Taking a swig from his glass, he leaned back on the legs of his chair, which suddenly slipped out from underneath him, sending him and his drink crashing into a vellum-screened partition.

  “Ai-ya!” Pau Pau screamed. “Gum lun jun!” She scolded him for his clumsiness as he picked himself up. Lindsey and her cousins howled with laughter, but no one else in the huge crowd seemed to notice. Even Pau Pau was chuckling now. Her amused expression reminded Lindsey of the look she had when watching the Three Stooges.

  The longest speeches by the oldest guys with the biggest ears and lengthiest eyebrows followed next. Lindsey couldn’t understand what the patriarchs were saying, but a couple of tables away, a woman was translating for her Caucasian son-in-law, and Lindsey intermittently heard snippets such as “community service,” “scholarship,” and “earthquake retrofit.” Her eavesdropping was interrupted when the elderly man at the microphone said “Dupont Gie,” and her ears perked up. She knew that gie meant “street” and that long ago, Grant Avenue had been called Dupont. She found it remarkable and charming that the old-timer used the former name, and even more shocking to her was the fact that she understood anything at all from the Chinese speech.

  She scanned the room, which was a sea of black-haired heads dotted with the occasional dishwater blond of a Hoarder married to a distant relative. The Great White Nerds were sparsely sprinkled through the crowd, looking liked trapped albino mice.

  She began to wonder: Why were all the white guys with Asian women always so geeked-out? How come she never saw a fine-ass hottie with one of her Chinese sisters? Buddha knows there are lots of beautiful Asian women. The discrepancy in attractiveness was a greater mystery to her than the identity of the gelatinous, wormlike substance on her appetizer plate.

  Lindsey didn’t want to be part of one of those interracial couples where the woman was attractive enough but the white guy was inevitably:

  a. overweight

  b. bald

  c. spore-like

  d. a and c only

  e. all of the above

  She saw so many of these aesthetically mismatched couples that she worried people might think Asian girls would settle for any old homely boor as long as he was white. On the contrary, she knew Chinese girls like her were the pickiest of all. And proud of it!

  She suddenly remembered her cousin Stephanie and the white husband she had bagged a few years ago. It was a point of some anxiety for Lindsey that her cousin was fourteen months younger than she but had already met and married someone. Over the din of the echoing voice amplified by the microphone, she called across the table, “Hey Brandon, where’s your sister?”

  Brandon, a post-college do-nothing slacker, was his usual sulking self with his parka hood still fastened around his big pimply head. “I dunno. Maybe she’s late because she’s pregnant and can’t waddle down here. She’s lucky she could get out of it. Wish I could. These dinners are always so boring.” With arms folded over his chest, he squinted his eyes, then closed them as if willing himself elsewhere.

  Finally the speeches were over, and the food came rolling out of the kitchen on stainless steel carts: shark fin soup followed by honey-drizzled prawns and walnuts, sizzling cubed steak and bok choy, snow peas and scallops, salted chicken with a pinkish brown dipping sauce that looked like calamine lotion, and crispy, fatty Peking duck.

  The food at these banquets was always the same. Objectively speaking, the food was a delectable twelve-course meal that was expertly prepared; any gourmand would be impressed by the delicate flavors of the various dishes. However, to Lindsey and her cousins, who had all eaten countless feasts such as these, the meal was simply as they expected. They had been spoiled for years by the routine of flawlessly cooked delicacies.

  Lindsey spre
ad some hoisin sauce on a steamed bun, handed it to her brother, and then prepared one for herself. At a Chinese banquet it was always polite to serve others first. She glanced over at her mom and Pau Pau, who were busy scrutinizing a jade ring that Auntie Vivien had recently purchased from a mail-order catalog. Her mother and Pau Pau seemed to be debating the jade’s quality, and they sounded like they were arguing, but Lindsey was never sure with Cantonese. To her it always sounded like shouting and scolding. Alongside Vivien, Auntie Shirley was flicking her fingertips in the air and chanting softly, requesting any negative energy pockets to burst immediately.

  A whole steamed fish arrived at the table. The pearly eyeball stared at Lindsey as Pau Pau came over and urged her to try the flesh from the tender cheek area. After the top layer of fish meat had all been eaten, her cousin Brandon wielded a serving spoon in an attempt to flip over the fish and access the filet underneath.

  “Stop!” Kevin said. “Don’t flip it over—it’s bad luck!”

  “Why?” Brandon asked.

  “It’s like flipping over the fishing boat, dummy. Here, go like this.” Kevin grabbed the spoon from his cousin’s hand and deftly airlifted the lattice of spiky bones away from the flaky meat.

  “Hey, want some jup from the yuer?” Kevin offered a spoonful of fish gravy to his sister.

  Lindsey nodded. “I like the way you incorporate any Chinese word you know into your sentences,” she commended him.

  “Yeah, you like my Chinglish? Here, have some bock fahn.” He scooped white rice into her bowl.

  “Why do you want the rice in that small bowl? The plate’s bigger,” Brandon interjected.

  Kevin scoffed at him. “Are you even Chinese? You can’t pick up fahn on the plate, you need the woohn, so you can use your fai-jee.” He gestured to a pair of chopsticks, then teased, “That is, unless you need a fork…”

  As Brandon pouted, everyone else giggled, knowing that Brandon was always clumsy with the traditional Chinese utensils. He often stabbed or skewered his food, unlike everybody else, who had all long ago mastered the art of precisely tweezing slippery mushrooms or stubborn cashews. Even his little sister, Cammie, had absorbed the unspoken knowledge that using a fork at a banquet was only for the smallest children and non-Chinese guests.

  As Lindsey glanced around at the smattering of Hoarders, their bumbling way with chopsticks made them all targets for ridicule, as if they all wore training wheels on their heads. She watched some greige guys struggle as they tried to steer food into their mouths. Piping-hot sea cucumber blobs slid through their chopsticks and landed on their StaPrest crotches.

  “What’s with those dudes?” Brandon asked, scrutinizing them.

  Lindsey said, “Yeah, I know—like all Asian women can only hook up with computer toads.”

  “No, I mean, what do you think they’re doing here?”

  “They’ve cast our maidens under their white devil spell,” Kevin joked.

  “Let’s go kick their asses,” Brandon suggested.

  “Some of them might be nice guys. You never know, sometimes those nerds come in handy when your server crashes,” Kevin replied.

  Lindsey listened and kept her big yap shut at first. But then she blurted, “Why can’t they just be cuter?”

  After a moment, her brother said, “Well, Mike’s not bad.”

  Obsessed as ever, she first thought of Michael at work, but then Brandon said, “Yeah, Steph’s white guy.”

  He was referring to Stephanie’s husband, Mike. Lindsey thought for a second. It was true. Her cousin was married to a surfer type whose personality hinted at evolution beyond the turtle stage. She would have to investigate this aberration, because it created a loose thread in her Hoarder Theory. She scanned the nearby tables, but Stephanie and her husband hadn’t shown up.

  It was the end of the meal, and a spooky gray tapioca “soup” was served for dessert.

  As Lindsey waited for the Chinese exodus to begin, she looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Against a backdrop of the moon’s glow filtered through shadowy, blue-gray fog, low brick rooftops were silhouetted against neon-lit pagodas and the ominous dark presence of Old St. Mary’s Church. Across the way, she stared at an empty balcony with cracked Art Nouveau tiles and black calligraphy strokes painted on a tattered sign. She realized it was the second floor of a crumbling yellow temple that she walked by all the time but hardly ever looked up to see, maybe because the glistening crackle-skinned ducks in the street-level shop windows were too distracting. She reminded herself to look up next time and search for the sooty, lantern-lit overhang, but then she noticed that an ornate wooden awning skirted the building and shielded the temple from the world below. Mesmerized, she was now comforted that only the Empress of China allowed such a peek into the deserted temple. She slid back in her chair, reached out and touched the window’s heavy curtain, and she had a vague memory of playing within these same fabric folds with her cousins when she was small. She had been to Empress of China a thousand times before to celebrate weddings, birthdays, her grandparents’ golden anniversary, and at least twenty of these very same Association dinners, and now she savored the feeling of being here again. As plain as it was, the gold curtain against her fingertips was a comforting sensation, like napping in the backseat of a car and half-waking to find the thick, bright sheen of her mama’s coat draped over her. Gazing at the view now, she felt like a little kid clinging to a coat hem of spring-hued silk shantung, seeing something she wasn’t supposed to see. She watched as shopkeepers below rolled aluminum doors over their storefronts and switched off their flickering strobe lights. Chinatown was taking off her makeup and getting ready for a night’s slumber. In an hour or so all the restaurant guests would return to their own neighborhoods and the streets would be deserted. All that would remain would be a dark and sleepy Chinatown, wrapped in a flimsy nightgown of moonlight.

  Now Back to the Michael We Really Care About

  There were signs that this was not just a friend thing. With each day that passed, Lindsey wore less and less to work, having learned over the years that boys were dopes who really responded to seeing skin.

  When she saw Michael Friday morning, she let the cashmere cardigan slip off her shoulders as if by accident. She nonchalantly positioned her back to the hallway, knowing that if he wanted to get his caffeine, he’d have to see her butt protruding slightly into his path on the way to the break room. On cue, her satin bra straps made a cameo appearance when her sweater drifted down the smooth skin of her well-exfoliated arms.

  “Good morning,” he said, stopping in his tracks.

  Lindsey smiled even before she turned around.

  “Oh, hi,” she replied casually. He could have been the one-armed design intern for all she seemed to care. But inside, she was devastatingly pleased.

  Today he wore a blue shirt, and she wanted to get close enough to inhale the clean laundry smell of the slightly wrinkled broadcloth. Sometimes when she was away from him for a few days she tried to tell herself that he wasn’t really that gorgeous, that she had just built him up in her head and he was only a regular-looking guy. But while he may not have been movie-star handsome, her heart was a melted scoop of ice cream dripping in his hand. She wanted to lick him.

  “In case you’re wondering, I’m free for lunch today,” she piped up unexpectedly, embarrassing herself with this sudden advertisement of availability. She wondered if it showed on her face, all the times she had imagined them together, um, doing it.

  A smile quickly overcame his clean-scrubbed face.

  “Um, great. Okay.” He nodded agreeably and disappeared to retrieve his coffee.

  Lunch with her crush! Now she was getting somewhere.

  But wait. Was that, “Great, I wanna have lunch with you, too” or was that “Ooo-kay. Great. As if!”

  She didn’t know. She pondered for a moment, then paced around and misfiled faxes, replaying the conversation in her head a hundred times at high speed until the film reel in h
er mind got so tangled up that she couldn’t focus anymore.

  For the next two hours she busied herself with no-brainer tasks, but around midmorning, her boss, Howard, stopped by the front desk to chat.

  “Hey, Lindsey! Isn’t it time for the Autumn Moon Festival? I want to know all your family’s authentic customs. What are you doing to celebrate?” He looked at her a little too intensely.

  Lindsey found the role of twenty-four-hour, on-call cultural educator to be exasperating. Plus, he had picked a rotten time to be ethnically sensitive. She had four callers on hold and she was late for the FedEx pickup. Plus, she really needed to go to the bathroom. She wanted to say, “Howard, could you please package up these documents and run them down to the FedEx office? Oh, and put these four calls into voice mail yourself, because my tampon is totally leaking.”

  But she didn’t say that. Instead, she chitchatted about mooncakes, quickly distributed the calls, and quietly bled through the white cotton panel of her undies as Howard yammered on about his love for Sam Woh’s.

  She was sure her boss was trying to build some kind of cross-cultural bridge, reaching out, as it were. He bragged about eating at this Chinese restaurant that he thought was for locals only, but as far as she was concerned, no actual Chinese person, or real San Franciscan, ate at Sam Woh’s. “Only tourists go there!” her mother would say, laughing her ass off at the thought. That is, if her mother ever laughed (or had anything but a really flat ass).

  Later, after having darted to the bathroom in the nick of time to avoid a major menstrual meltdown, Lindsey tried to catch glimpses of Michael in the hall, wondering if they would be lunching together or if he thought she was insane. But she didn’t see him. A pant leg would saunter by and her heart would do a half-skip. Not him. The elevator doors would spring open with a bing! But he would not be inside. She would hear the hallway door click, but he would not emerge.