by Loan Le
“Will restaurants let us do that?” We’re not exactly the Los Angeles Times. Who cares about what someone from La Quinta says about their establishment?
“I’m sure I can spin something,” she tells me confidently. “It’s basically free publicity for the restaurants.”
“Okay, yeah, it’s not a bad idea,” Linh says. “Do you have someone in mind?”
“Good question.” She points both fingers at me. “Bảo, I’d want you on this beat.”
In what way does any of this sound good or helpful to the newspaper? Me who’s been delegated to proofreading duties. Me who consistently gets Bs on his English Lit essays.
“Why me?”
“Because you’re better than you think you are, as much as it pains me to say.” Ali watches me closely; there’s a gleam in her eyes telling me she likes that she can shock—and disturb—me with her compliments. “And Linh, you can help, too.”
Her eyes shift to me. “Um…”
“Hear me out: Bảo puts words to the scene, rates the food, describes it. Since he grew up in restaurants like you and knows food, he should hypothetically be capable of doing this—”
“Hey!” I interject.
“—and you can sketch the environment. Or paint it. I’ve watched you sketch for years, Linh. You’d be perfect for this. The newspaper desperately needs your talent. It needs something entirely new.” Her voice has taken on a tone I’ve never heard from Ali before—something more earnest. She’s turning a bit softer, gifting me a glimpse of her normal self, and of their friendship.
Linh looks away, deep in thought. She said she was taking three APs just earlier, not to mention juggling after-school work at the restaurant. I’m brought back to last week, seeing her in that alley alone, looking overwhelmed, looking lost. Something inside had pulled me toward her then. I just knew I needed to see if she was all right.
That feeling rises again, and the words are out before I can stop them. “I’ll do it.”
The girls look at me—Ali, triumphantly and maybe even a little approvingly; Linh just confused.
I know there’s a lot against me. It’ll take away some of my weekends, most likely. But as long as my parents don’t find out who I’m working with, this project might work. “And for what it’s worth, Linh, I know you’d be awesome for this, too.”
“I don’t know if I can do this. It’s not just the workload—it’s the fact that I haven’t done something like this, let alone had my work published in a newspaper. What if I just think I’m good and it turns out I’m not?” Her question comes out quietly, laced with uncertainty.
“Yeah, no,” Ali counters immediately. “I don’t think anyone could think that. I’ve seen what you’ve done ever since we were twelve.”
“And the flyers. They’re great!” I interject. “If anything, it’s another chance to show just how good you are.”
“Linh,” Ali says. “You have two people here saying you can do this!”
“How—” She pauses. She’s aiming that half-said question at me. I read her mind like that night. We’re part of a long history; we might not be directly involved like our parents, but nothing can change the fact that our families and our restaurants are considered rivals.
So I keep my answer simple. “We can make it work.” We have worked together and it turned out great. Because it wasn’t anyone’s family against someone. It was just me and Linh then. I want to believe that can happen again.
After a few beats, Linh looks away. “Let me think about it some more.”
“That’s not a no, so yay!” Ali claps her hands together and hugs her, then turns to do the same to me before remembering herself. Linh still appears unsure, maybe a bit exhausted in her thoughts, but she still musters a smile.
When we’re alone, Linh says, “Ali only asks for help when she absolutely needs it. So you’ve earned some Ali points.”
“That’s good, because I was in the negative for a while.”
Linh heads off to her art class. When the last of my classmates walks in, Ali closes the door, game face on. The lights dim abruptly, freaking some kids out, but it’s only Rowan being complicit in whatever torture Allison has cooked up for today. Turns out I don’t really care about that. Linh and I might get to be partners.
I open the chocolate milk carton and sip from it. Partners.
CHAPTER TWELVE LINH
Of course, when I was walking with Bảo, I didn’t mean to give the chocolate milk to him. I didn’t finish it at lunch, felt guilty throwing it away—my parents’ voices reprimanding me—so I carried it for my next class. Then I saw Bảo at his locker, and before I even knew it, my legs were carrying me across the hallway and suddenly: chocolate milk. If Ali saw that, she would’ve never let me live it down.
I dip my brush into a jar of water, washing it of cadmium yellow. Yamamoto’s voice is on background as she talks to the class, weaving in between each student to check on their work.
Bảo has snuck his way into my brain for the last few days. I turn into a mess every time I see him, which is more than I can ever remember. There’s a theory that we’ve talked about in my psychology class called red car syndrome, where you hear or see something once, like a red car, and suddenly you see red cars everywhere. I don’t remember seeing Bảo so many times in the hallway—or maybe I’ve trained myself to see past him—but I’ve turned a corner several times before pivoting in the opposite direction. Just the other day at work, while my dad was passing along details on where to meet Quyền Thành, which happens to be today, I was sneaking looks at the window, hoping to catch sight of Bảo through his. My mom wondered aloud if I should dress up for the interview.
“Linh.”
Could we really work together?
Had Ali planned to pair us the moment the idea came to mind, or was it after I told her about Bảo and Phở Day? I make a note to bring it up later.
“Linhhhh.”
But the question is: How are we ever going to do this?
“Linh!”
Yamamoto is right by my ear. I yelp and my brush falls out of my hand and clatters on the floor. Classmates, now busy packing up, snicker. Yamamoto stands before me, arms akimbo, but while other teachers would be pissed off, she only appears amused, a stampede of questions probably in her mind.
“You know, I’ve seen you get lost inside your brain before, but never like this. I mean, you were far gone,” she says teasingly.
Blushing, I hurriedly fold up my tarp and place my canvas on a tabletop by other day-old canvases. Just a bunch of fruits in baskets and flowers—beginning paint classes. I wash my brushes with an odorless thinner—I hate the citrus kind—before wiping them dry, then running them under water with some linseed soap. The usual next step is futile. I wash my hands until most of the paint has disappeared. I’ve stopped worrying about the rest on my fingers; it all eventually just fades. The bell rings and I push my way out into the hallway.
Inside my jeans pocket, my phone buzzes. I have a half hour until I have to meet with Quyền Thành, learn about the fascinating world of engineering.
“Hey, lady,” my best friend says casually at my locker. But I know her better and read the gleam in her eyes. She wants to talk about Bảo. I don’t think she’d ever been more excited than after hearing me tell her about Phở Day. “Wow, I didn’t know he had it in him,” Ali had said in mock surprise.
“How was art class?”
I roll my eyes at her. “Is that the question you really want to ask?”
“No, but I’m a journalist. I have to throw out questions to warm you up. But now that you mention it: What do you think? Are you going to work with Bảo?”
“Ali.”
“C’mon, it’ll be fun.”
“Wouldn’t use that word.”
“What would you use?”
“Full of dread. Confused. Perplexed—”
“That’s a synonym.” She waits for me to switch out my textbooks, smoothly catching one that jump
s out at her. She reads the title before shelving it. “Psychology—well, that’s saying something.”
“My question is: How the hell will this work? Our families hate each other. We know nothing about each other. I feel like I’m breaking several rules just by agreeing to this—”
She holds up two hands, telling me to slow down. “I already worked out the first question. I’ll just find restaurants that are a little farther outside the radius of where your parents tend to go. Aren’t you always telling me that your parents or people they know never eat out because your mom—”
“—says she can make anything at home.” Evie and I used to beg our parents to take us to McDonalds for Happy Meals.
“Exactly.” She signs the number two. “Second, I’m well aware of this feud. I don’t get it, but I’m not supposed to. But it’s your families who despise each other. What about you? For once, let’s just remove the whole family situation—if it’s just you and Bảo standing across from each other, would you say that you like him?”
“It’d be very easy to like him.”
She smiles knowingly. After a few seconds of delay, my words catch up to me. My face warms up. “Seems like you already do like him.” She pauses dramatically. “Maybe even more than that.”
I close my mouth, reaching out to shut my locker door that dangled between us. The afternoon rush around us seems more muted than it usually is, the crowd flowing naturally around us.
Like him.
My phone buzzes again. Fifteen minutes until the meeting.
I don’t have time for this right now.
Ali nods in agreement, like she’s just read my mind. “Things like this don’t really wait for you to catch up. Like the way you end up drawing something you never intended to draw. Just think about it: When you like an art piece, how much of it is thinking and how much of it is feeling?”
There are artists and fans interested in artwork on an intellectual level; they consider the message of the piece, the intention of the artist, the connotations of the time and place of its creation. Yamamoto’s one of those artists, which makes all of her lessons interesting. But I’m different from that—in art that I like, in the pieces I create. It’s always a memory or feeling that I start with. Ali knows this by now.
“You’re using way too many art metaphors today.”
“How else will I actually get through to you?” Ali nudges me by the shoulder and we walk outside together, heading to her car. She’d told me she would drop me off at a nearby Starbucks.
A jock runs by, jostling me as he tries catching up with his teammates off to practice. The buses full of students depart one by one, leaving little trails of smog. Everything’s moving, but, somehow, inside me is still.
“Why don’t you just feel things out?” she asks me finally as she unlocks her Nissan, and we slide into our seats. “There’s so much in your life that you can’t control, Linh, as much as I totally want things to be different for you. So maybe you can use this chance to do something for yourself. Forget everyone—your family, Bảo—this is about you. No rules but your own.”
I buckle my seat belt. A reminder pops up on my phone: ten minutes until my coffee with Quyền. Without words I show it to Ali, who brushes the notice away, saying there’s no reason to worry.
“I thought you didn’t like Bảo,” I finally say.
“I said that I didn’t know if I liked him or disliked him. But he has an eye for words. I think he’s better than he realizes.” She makes a right but too widely, and she needs to adjust before straightening in the lane. “You know, I feel like I can write a whole human-interest piece about you, Bảo, and your families.”
“I strongly disapprove.”
“Can you imagine the headline?” To my horror, she releases her hands from the steering wheel, doing what I’ll now call the Banner Move. “Two students from rival families and restaurants? Like Romeo and Juliet—”
A car honks at us and her hands snap back onto the wheel.
“Just drive.”
* * *
As I walk into the restaurant after an exhausting half hour with Quyền Thành, I try to gather enough enthusiasm to convince my parents they didn’t waste a favor on me. Even though they did.
Quyền Thành had shown up before me. She sat straight-backed, on a stool no less, her badge from the firm proudly pinned to her chest. She was on her laptop looking focused as she sent off e-mail after e-mail. She wore a gray business suit—which I won’t mention to my mom because then she’ll despair, “I knew it! You should have worn one to make an impression.” While Quyền was petite and smaller than me, the strength of her handshake took me by surprise. Her eyes, framed by black thick-rimmed glasses, were strikingly clear and I felt that she was somehow scanning my body for answers.
I had questions that I looked up the night before, pulled off some college website about informational interviews. She had clear, precise, straightforward answers; I had to wonder if she was used to doing this type of favor.
She was a mechanical engineer but she was “told that I liked art,” and knew tons of friends who were “into that thing, but it’s not really My Thing.”
Our meeting was interspersed with inconvenient pauses, long sips of cold coffee, and me finding it hard to maintain eye contact because I was afraid she’d see the truth about how little interest I really had in engineering.
By the end of it, though, she smiled sympathetically. She even hugged me as I thanked her for her time.
“I know I bored you.”
“No, I—”
“You’re sort of easy to read.”
I hate my face. But Quyền Thành just laughed. “Trust me: You’re not the only one who’s had to suffer through hearing about my work. As much as I love what I do, I know it’s not for some people.” She was being so nice that I wish I could have pretended to feel something. But as Ali mentioned, that’s not the way I work—I either have to feel something…
Or I don’t.
“Some advice. I don’t think I’d enjoy this career as much as I do if it wasn’t mine. And what I mean by that is it’s something I can claim as my own. If my parents were forcing me to be a physicist, I would not be okay. So, do you have something that’s yours?”
I don’t nod or answer, still hesitant to prove how I’ve wasted her time. But maybe she saw something in me because she merely nodded, saying, “Good. Then protect it.”
We parted and she promised not to say anything to her parents.
Back in the restaurant, my parents don’t jump on me right away about the coffee interview. Instead, Mẹ is wrangling a box free from tape. Ba is sitting in a corner booth that my mom banished him to. While his back is better, he’s still wearing his back brace and looks completely miserable, like a dog in his flea cone. I set down my backpack and slip into Mẹ’s booth, inching closer for a look at what’s inside the box. It’s a flower vase, cerulean with specks the color of the jade bracelets she and just about every woman in my family wear. When I was younger, I thought it was something every Việt woman had to wear, some rite of passage.
“Whoa.” It’s handmade, that’s for sure. “That’s so cool. Where’s it from?”
“Dì Vàng.” Mẹ sighs. My aunt always seems to evoke that kind of sigh from my mom. She hands over the vase; I weigh it, feel the slight bumps alternating with smooth curves. I took a pottery class once in freshman year but couldn’t control the speed of my spin, or get the clay into the shape that I wanted. But Dì Vàng does this for a living, which is mind-boggling to think about, something I can only dream of.
She likes sending my mom things, and I know Mẹ likes them, as much as she doesn’t approve of her sister’s career choice, since she displays them everywhere: the mantel under the TV, the nightstand in my parents’ bedroom. I have an elephant-shaped piggy bank that Dì Vàng made for my fifth birthday and hand-delivered when she was last in America.
Since the Vietnam War, and especially after the fall of Saigon,
which was what forced our family to scatter, most of my extended family relocated to Washington, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas. It wasn’t exactly cheap to fly over here, and the government has strict rules, so my aunt must have made the right friends to be able to visit for a little while. I imagined how cool it’d be for her to live permanently nearby and how she could teach me more about her art.
I’d asked my mom why Dì Vàng didn’t want to just move here.
Mẹ just waved her hand. Her usual gesture and non-answer. “I’ve tried to convince her, but she says she’s happy there.” Then my mom turned her attention to something seemingly more important, ignoring my question.
She and Ba tell childhood stories about Vietnam all the time, but they often conflict with each other: the good times, when Mẹ talks about running carefree along the beach with her friends, the sun rising behind them, or when Ba would play soccer with American soldiers stationed nearby. Then there are the dark days—funerals, saying goodbye to family members, losing everything on their way here. It’s something I can’t ever understand.
“Aren’t you supposed to be working?” Ba says grumpily from his booth. Mẹ and I roll our eyes, then pack up the vase again ever so carefully. “Ah, your coffee meeting!” she suddenly remembers. “How was it? Isn’t Quyền Thành so nice?”
“She was really nice. Really helpful.” I pick at the flap of the box the vase came in. I wonder if she can pick up on the dullness in my voice.
Mẹ nods approvingly. “Perfect. It’s all working out.”
Just like Phở Day. Just like anything that doesn’t make them worry too much.
As I’m tying up my hair, readying myself for my shift, Ali’s words from earlier came back to me.
There’s so much in your life that you can’t control.… So maybe you can use this chance to do something for yourself.