The Dim Sum of All Things

by Kim Wong Keltner

  Just then, Karen and Pau Pau entered the kitchen, both stinking of Chinese ointment. Karen’s hunched shoulders and slightly bowed head struck Lindsey as a calculated, manipulative act. Kevin came in and kicked Lindsey’s shoe to let her know that she had better be on her best behavior.

  “Ready to go?” he asked, and Karen snapped to attention.

  Pau Pau tried her darnedest to get them to stay for Jell-O, but she couldn’t convince Kevin, who always seemed to have somewhere else to go. She made a big fuss about their taking leftovers and prepared a packet of loose herbs and tea for Karen.

  Feeling envious and irritable in general, Lindsey said good-bye and spent the rest of the evening sulking in her bedroom, wondering when Michael Cartier might be returning from Hawaii.

  Finally, after everyone left, she went into Gung Gung’s old room to look for a coat she had transferred over the summer from her own overstuffed closet.

  Pau Pau still kept the room tidy, and the chenille bedspread was always clean and cozy-looking. A large portrait of Gung Gung wearing what appeared to be a kind of army uniform leaned up against the wall on top of the dresser.

  As Lindsey opened the closet door, she found a dozen of her grandfather’s old suits and Arrow shirts neatly lined up. Pau Pau had had them cleaned two years ago, and now they hung there, still waiting for someone to wear them. Boxes of old blankets crowded the floorspace below the coats.

  Lindsey recalled one day in the fourth grade when she was playing hooky from Chinese school. It was a day that, for some reason, she had not gone to the movies with Kevin and Brandon but instead had decided to stay and watch cartoons here at Pau Pau and Gung Gung’s apartment. She had been dozing during a Pepé Le Pew vignette when she heard the front door swing open. Quickly jumping up, she’d turned off the television and darted into Gung Gung’s room, where she’d scrunched herself deep inside the closet. She’d slouched her body into a cardboard box and flipped a quilt over her head.

  As her luck would have it, Gung Gung had headed straight for his wardrobe. Between errands and meetings he would sometimes stop home to change into a different sportcoat. Lindsey had felt her heart pounding inside her school uniform. Through a crinkle of the blanket, she’d watched Gung Gung tapping his foot, wearing his trademark brown wingtips from Florsheim.

  The coat sleeves had passed over her head, one by one, back and forth, as he’d searched for just the right jacket. As each soft sleeve had brushed over her crown, she’d felt like she was in a car wash, with those fabric octopus arms swaying back and forth over the windshield that was her forehead.

  She remembered that afternoon with fondness. Snapping back into the present, she found her red peacoat and pulled it off the hanger.

  But she stayed in Gung Gung’s room for a while longer. In a stack of papers on the dresser, she sifted through a few vintage copies of Chinatown News with Gung Gung’s photo on the cover, and she scanned a newspaper article about a park cleanup he had helped organize. She found snapshots of her mom and dad’s wedding, and one of Gung Gung and Pau Pau on a Christmas day about forty years ago. She discovered a faded photograph of Gung Gung posing in his Galileo High School football uniform, with a caption that read, “Sam Gin, a.k.a. Chinese Lightning.” She also came across a diploma from George Washington University. Lindsey had had no idea that her grandfather had attended either of these schools.

  Lindsey placed all the pictures and documents back as neatly as she found them. Closing Gung Gung’s bedroom door, she took her coat to her room and trimmed the fuzzy, worn-out patches with her Brookstone sweater shaver.

  Round-Eye Round Up

  Michael returned to work the following Monday. He wasn’t the least bit suntanned, and Lindsey noticed his chin was stubbly and his lips were slightly chapped. She had a way of unconsciously staring too long at his mouth.

  “Hey,” she said, standing up and resting her arm on the reception desk. He walked over and placed his hand on hers, and her heart leaped at this apparent sign of affection.

  He took a deep breath and said, “My grandmother died.”

  His words swished around inside Lindsey’s smallish head like brandy in a snifter. She tried to think of an appropriate reply, but just then several telephone lines began to ring.

  “Are you free after work?” he asked.

  She nodded and watched the red lights blinking urgently on her console.

  “Okay, I’ll see you later,” he said, heading for his office.

  After work, they walked down Kearny Street and tried to decide on a restaurant where they could have a bite and talk.

  “How about Chinese?” he asked.

  She broke into a slight panic. Her standard reply to non-Asians had always been, “I don’t like Chinese food,” and she usually suggested Italian instead. But she looked at Michael’s somber face and dejected demeanor, and she didn’t have the heart to argue with a guy who had just lost his granny. She nodded her head in agreement.

  “Well, why don’t you pick a place around here,” he said. “I don’t know a lot about Asian food. Well, except Top Ramen.”

  “Oh, you should talk to my friend Steve about ramen. He knows all there is to know…” She spoke without thinking and immediately regretted her words. Mimi had always advised her that it was bad date etiquette to mention other guys, especially in any positive way.

  Michael hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Oh, is he your…boyfriend?”

  An invisible mini-Mimi dressed in a devil costume sat on Lindsey’s shoulder and poked her in the neck with a tiny pitchfork. “See! Now look what you’ve done!” said a small voice in her head, but she ignored the imaginary chidings.

  “Umm, no,” Lindsey said slowly. “I don’t…have a boyfriend.”

  Good save.

  “Oh, okay, um, just checking,” he said with a small smile, his eyes crinkling in that way she especially liked.

  She could not have been more delighted that Michael wanted her company, but as they passed from the financial district into Chinatown, she walked slightly ahead of him and looked at the pavement, worried that everyone could see her raging hormones shooting Fourth of July fireworks every which way. She tried her hardest to appear as though she were simply assisting a tourist in whom she had no romantic interest.

  But she wasn’t fooling anyone. As they navigated the narrow streets, the inhabitants and shopkeepers of Chinatown glowered at them. Michael was oblivious, but she was sensitive to the steely gazes that followed them down the alleys. On one corner a teenage boy even said, “Diu nay, bock-gwai,” under his breath, but she pretended not to hear and certainly did not point out to Michael that the teenager had just said, “Fuck you, white devil.”

  Even the waiter at the hole-in-the-wall restaurant scowled at Michael, and then eyed her disapprovingly because she should have known better than to flaunt herself in public with a non-Chinese. He tossed the menus onto the greasy table and sashayed back into the kitchen, where other Chinese heads soon poked out to look them over.

  “What should we get?” Michael asked, scanning the menu.

  She skimmed through the selections and said, “Darn, I don’t think there’s lamb kidneys at this restaurant.”

  Michael smiled, then stretched his arms wearily. “Hey, I feel kind of bad about that day, after Fort Point, you know.”

  The waiter clunked down a hot pot of tea and ambled off again. Lindsey poured a bit of tea in each cup, swirled it around, and dripped the liquid onto the restaurant’s carpet.

  “What are you doing?” Michael asked.

  “Sanitizing the teacups,” she replied, now ready to pour.

  He looked at her with a puzzled expression, then studied the red, flocked wallpaper with gold double-happiness characters.

  “You know, that smell in your grandmother’s closet—”

  “Sorry about that,” Lindsey said, interrupting.

  “No, it’s okay. It’s just that when I stepped in that stuff, I had this weird flashback…about my
grandmother, the one who just passed away.”

  She sipped her tea and listened.

  “I used to live in Honolulu, and she took care of me till I was about seven. But then we moved back to Metairie, in Louisiana, where I was born.”

  “On the lam?”

  “No, nothing that exciting. After we left I hardly ever saw her, maybe three or four times after that. I’m such a jerk—I never even wrote to her. Well, she couldn’t read English, but I guess that’s not even the point. But, anyway, when I stepped in that goo in your closet, it suddenly reminded me of her. It was the exact smell of this same gunk she used to have.”

  He pulled a photo from his shirt pocket and handed it to Lindsey. The picture showed a woman with a polka-dotted apron, her face slightly in shadow, holding a small boy with chipmunk cheeks.

  “What’s this thing you’re eating here?” she asked.

  “It’s a Spam sandwich, but that’s not what you’re supposed to notice,” he said.

  She looked up. “Oh?”

  “Look again.”

  She inspected the picture some more, looking for any remarkable detail. She looked up at Michael, who had been attentively watching the expression on her face.

  “What does Spam taste like?” she asked.

  “You’re supposed to notice that my grandmother is Chinese!” he said.

  Lindsey looked at Michael closely. She searched his face for any Chinese detail: a slanted eye, a yellow undertone in his skin, or a certain shape of the nose. She saw nothing, but thought to herself, “Please, God, don’t let us be second cousins or something.”

  “So, what are you thinking?” he asked.

  She was thinking about how polite his table manners were, and how strange it felt to be actually getting to know him instead of just obsessing about the person she had imagined him to be. She was slowly absorbing the revelation that he was one-quarter Chinese.

  “I’m thinking, where do I fit into the picture?” she said. She meant it to sound cute, but it came off sounding a bit accusatory.

  He looked at her and thought for a moment. “Well, I don’t know. Help me to understand better what it means to be Chinese, since I suppose I’ve avoided that part of myself. Maybe you can be my cultural guide.”

  At the words “cultural guide,” she got agitated. She had been insecure that her last phrase sounded like she was too eager to take over his life, and now she interpreted his comment to mean that she was now responsible for leading him in a seminar on Chinese culture.

  “Well, there’s no guidebook or anything,” she said, her ears feeling hot.

  “Um, yeah, I realize that,” he said, pulling back from the table. He had been leaning forward, closer to her, but now he leaned back into the chair as far as possible.

  The waiter eyeballed them from the kitchen.

  “I guess we should figure out what we want,” Michael said, fumbling with the menu.

  “Okay,” she said. “Don’t order anything with sweet-and-sour sauce, or egg rolls, or any of that tourist stuff.”

  “All right. What about this?” He pointed to a section that listed “chop suey.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “You’ve never tried it? Isn’t it supposed to be a famous dish?”

  “I think in the gold rush days, Chinese cooks picked scraps out of the garbage and fed it to surly miners. They called it ‘chop suey,’ and foreigners have been ordering it ever since. I wouldn’t trust it.”

  “Go ahead and order for us, then. I’ll eat anything,” he suggested agreeably.

  She raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were a semi-vegetarian.”

  “It’s just a cover so I don’t get lambasted at work by the militant vegans,” he replied, brushing her hand with his.

  She smiled and relaxed. When the waiter returned, she ordered potstickers with meat, pork with pickled greens and smoked tofu skins, sauteed pea leaves with garlic, and steamed rice.

  When the waiter brought the food to the table, he thrust a fork in Michael’s face and dropped it on the table with a loud clank. As they ate their dinner, Lindsey noted with keen interest that Michael used the chopsticks instead. He didn’t drop one sliver of tofu, poke feebly at rice grains, or stab clumsily at veggies. She was both surprised and relieved. Perhaps this manual dexterity was a small proof of his Chinese genetics.

  After they finished their meal, Michael broke open his fortune cookie.

  “Was this the favorite dessert of a Tang Dynasty emperor or something?” he asked.

  She crunched the golden pieces. “No, these cookies were invented in Golden Gate Park by the Japanese gardener. They probably eat them in China now, though.”

  As they left the restaurant, Michael offered Lindsey a mint, and they walked through Chinatown, back toward the financial district. At one point, near a stoplight with no cars around, they jaywalked, and he took the opportunity to hold her hand, but she gently and ambivalently loosened her palm from his, worried about getting stares.

  They passed the Buddha Bar and the Li Po, with its cave-like entrance and lantern hanging above the door.

  “Do you want to get a drink?” he suggested.

  Before she could answer, she happened to spot Pau Pau’s friend with the lopsided wig who had called her fat on the bus. Although the old woman was lost in thought and unaware that she was being observed, Lindsey shifted her weight to obscure her face behind Michael’s shoulder, just in case.

  “Um, no thanks,” she replied nervously, her eyes following the woman until she passed from sight.

  Lindsey never drank in Chinatown because she believed spies lurked everywhere.

  Once in the third grade, Lindsey had thought it would be funny to get back at Gilbert Soohoo for breaking the arm off her Superstar Barbie. After recess, she’d placed three sharp thumbtacks on his chair, and as the class had settled down and taken their seats, Gilbert had bounded down the aisle and plopped down hard on his fleshy rump.

  “YOW!” he’d screamed as the sharp tacks had pierced through his uniform pants.

  Gilbert’s grandmother had picked him up early from school, and the Chinatown gossip switchboard had worked so fast that Pau Pau was screaming at Lindsey even before she’d gotten to the top of the stairs that afternoon. From that day on, she’d been convinced that all details of a Chinese kid’s bad behavior were accurately and efficiently spread by a swift-acting Chinese rumor-mill. The appropriate elder was immediately notified of any wrongdoing, and the kid encountered hard-core smackdown so fast there was no time to revel in devious delight.

  So now, as an adult, she still kept her eyes peeled. She couldn’t risk going into a bar because anyone could be watching her at any given moment.

  Lindsey and Michael kept walking. A few moments passed before they heard a loud jabbering voice behind them that directed Cantonese expletives at their backs and sent panicked shivers up Lindsey’s spine. She turned and looked fearfully over her shoulder, half-expecting to get slapped by a Chinatown spy. Instead, an old woman in a peasant-style quilted jacket elbowed past them, yelling into a tiny cellphone mouthpiece attached to her ear. Lindsey sighed with relief.

  Several blocks later, Michael and Lindsey were near the old Hotaling warehouse. One-story brick structures quietly nestled in the shadow of the skyscrapers above, and she relaxed now that they were no longer among Chinese eyes. No one was disdaining them or noticing them at all, since most of the businesspeople had already deserted the office high-rises. The sky was now cloaked in cobalt, and the air was crisp and smelled slightly of charcoal.

  “These buildings are some of the only ones that survived downtown after the earthquake,” Michael said. He pointed out a few structures and elaborated on the details of their history.

  As they meandered down a quiet alley, they exchanged furtive glances and were keenly aware of how their hands almost touched as they walked.

  On one side of the street, a line of black hitching posts in the shape of
horses’ heads stood at attention. Near an antiques store with an old-fashioned gaslight, Michael stopped and put his arms around her. He kissed her, and she pressed against him, suddenly not caring at all if anyone was watching. Their mouths together, she took scant notice when her purse dropped into a slimy puddle.

  Egg Fool Young

  Lindsey drove out to her parents’ house, which was one of the identical bungalows built in the Sunset District during the 1940s. After she parked and went inside, she walked into the living room and sat down in her dad’s La-Z-Boy recliner and looked around, noticing the house was spic-and-span as always. Everything was pretty much the same as when Lindsey and Kevin were growing up, with just a few changes.

  The house was a 1960s time capsule. There was gold-speckled linoleum, dinner plates with starlike atoms, and well-kept sofas with sparkly interwoven metallic threads. Everything that could be vinyl, was vinyl: the ottoman, sidechairs, tablecloth, and matching place mats. They still had one of those gigantic televisions with massive dials, fabric-covered speakers, and enormous antennae that resembled rabbit ears. The now-vintage hi-fi stereo was perched on a retro banquette near a rotary dial princess telephone.

  Last Christmas, under the collapsible silver tinsel tree they reused every year, Kevin had wrapped a new flat-screen television and set of cordless phones for their parents. The new contraptions were now propped nearby, but Mr. Owyang preferred his original appliances. He seemed to believe that design and civilization had reached its apex somewhere around 1968, and now the world was collapsing into an orgy of useless gadgetry that could never surpass what had peaked before.

  Lindsey wandered into the kitchen and scrounged around in the refrigerator for something to snack on. She wasn’t actually hungry, but being in her parents’ house always made her feel like eating.

  When she was small, her parents fed Lindsey and Kevin vats of egg noodles with bits of hot dogs, and the four main food groups were frozen, canned, store-bought, or pimento loaf. Fruit was either cling peaches or Del Monte fruit cocktail in heavy syrup. And aside from these “natural” foods, everything else was made better with ketchup: eggs, sandwiches, tacos, and fried chicken. For years Lindsey’s standard school lunch had been two slices of any variety of luncheon loaf on white bread with ketchup and Miracle Whip. When her school tried to kick off Nutrition Week twice a year, she conceded to eating vegetables when her mom packed her a Ziploc of sweet pickles and cocktail gherkins.