Stealing Buddha's Dinner

by Bich Minh Nguyen

  Those days on the ship, people jostled each other to keep the small space they had claimed among the thousand or so on board. There was not enough rice or fresh water, and all around us children screamed and wailed without stopping. My father says that my sister and I did not cry the entire trip, and I’d like to believe it. I’d like to think we gave them something—a little peace, maybe. My father, uncle, and grandmother didn’t talk much, worrying about Chu Cuong, if he had made it out safely, where he was at that moment. One morning, the word apples swept around the ship. My father hurried to collect our family’s portion and brought back half an apple for Noi. She fed it to my sister and me, taking none for herself.

  Then another word: fire. Somewhere belowdecks one had started in a room near the ammunitions hold. This ship is going to blow up, someone said. In the rising hysteria my father, grandmother, and uncle quietly sat down with Anh and me, preparing to accept whatever would happen. They waited. But the ship stayed on course. Below, workers had managed to extinguish the fire.

  Late at night my father slipped away from the deck and made friends with the crewmen. He had always been a charmer, the popular kid surrounded by friends, the smooth talker who could dance any woman around the room. Now he worked his way into the kitchen and struck a deal with one of the cooks, listening to the guy’s long stories of home and teaching him how to play poker in exchange for a little powdered milk for my sister and me.

  At Subic Bay in the Philippines we transferred to a U.S. ship headed for Guam. There, at a refugee camp, we awaited entry papers into the United States. For the next month my father looked for anyone he might know from his neighborhood in Saigon. He joined groups of boys who dared each other to climb the skinny, arching coconut trees and knock down the fruit. It was a small risk for some flavor, a taste that would remind them of home.

  One day, a couple of weeks into the waiting, my father got into the usual long line for rice and noticed a man, far ahead, wearing yellow pants. They were brighter than the day, tinged with chartreuse in a lava-lamp pattern, and the man was standing a little outside the line, his left leg askance as if striking a pose. My father recognized those pants. They were his own, a favorite pair, ones he had often worn when he went out at night.

  My father stepped out of the line and walked toward the man in the yellow pants, who turned around. It was Chu Cuong. He had been in the camp all this time, wondering if the family had been able to get on a ship. He had worn the pants every day, always making sure to stand a little apart from everyone else, just in case. He was glad, he said, that he wouldn’t have to wear those pants all over America, looking for us.

  From Guam we flew to Arkansas and the refugee camp at Fort Chaffee. We were in America at last, but there was little to tell from behind the barbed-wire, chain-link fence. There were no trees to climb, and not a coconut in sight. The days strung themselves into months of waiting: standing in meal lines; playing cards; hoping for sponsors; sitting around the tents and barracks talking about what they had heard America was like. The optimists said easy money, fast cars, girls with blue eyes; others said cold, filled with crazy people. My father and uncles traded English words for cigarettes. Chu Anh in particular knew more than most; he’d always excelled at school and had gotten in two years of college before he’d had to join the army.

  My father made friends with one of the American soldiers guarding the camp and brought back a few bars of chocolate for Noi. She spent her time minding my sister and me and talking to women who spent their hours crying, longing to go back home. Later, a group of Vietnamese in the camp organized a campaign to get sent back to Saigon. They were fools, my father said, and did they think they would return to a better life in Vietnam, greeted by the North Vietnamese? Even he, an impatient man, knew all he could do was wait to see which city we would be given. Only after we left Fort Chaffee did he realize how much time he had wasted in the camp. He had felt almost safe there among his fellow Vietnamese. He had forgotten to think ahead, imagine us living among white people who spoke only English and looked at us strangely. He had forgotten to prepare.

  Every afternoon my father went to look at the names posted at the camp’s central office. When at last our Nguyen appeared, buried in the list of Nguyens, my father brought back three options: sponsors in California, Wyoming, and Michigan. To make such a swift decision with little information to go on, my family relied on vague impressions volunteered by friends of friends in the camp; they relied on rumors. California: warm but had the most lunatics. Wyoming: cowboys. Michigan was the blank unknown. My father would have chosen California, where he heard many other Vietnamese were going. But my grandmother, the head of the family, hesitated. Back in Saigon, she had met a woman whose son had studied at the University of Michigan on a scholarship. Such a possibility had grown in her mind until it became near legend, too symbolic to refuse. And here it was right in front of her.

  The night before we left for Grand Rapids my father and uncles pooled their money—thirty-five dollars—to throw a party for their friends who were still waiting for sponsors. They had only five dollars remaining after buying beer and cigarettes but figured, so be it. They wanted a proper farewell to the people who knew them, and to toast the lives they had foregone. We are I came of age in the 1980s, before diversity and multicultural awareness trickled into western Michigan. Before ethnic was cool. Before Thai restaurants became staples in every town. When I think of Grand Rapids I remember city signs covered in images of rippling flags, proclaiming “An All-American City.” A giant billboard looming over the downtown freeway boasted the slogan to all who drove the three-lane S-curve. As a kid, I couldn’t figure out what “All-American” was supposed to mean. Was it a promise, a threat, a warning?

  Of the two hundred thousand people who populate Grand Rapids, the majority are Dutch descendants, Christian Reformed, conservative. My family was among the several thousand Vietnamese refugees brought to the area, mostly through churches participating in the federal resettlement effort. My father and uncles and grandmother were grateful for a place to go—how could they be anything less?—and preferred to overlook how the welcoming smile of our sponsor gave way to a scowling face behind a drugstore cash register: Don’t you people know how to speak English? Why don’t you go back to where you came from?

  Grand Rapids brings to mind Gerald Ford, office furniture, and Amway, created here in 1959 by Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel. The company is now headquartered just east of the city in the town of Ada. My stepmother Rosa, whom my father married in 1979, would one day move us there in an effort to keep our family together. DeVos and Van Andel have poured millions of dollars into Grand Rapids and the Republican Party. Their names are emblazoned everywhere on buildings and in the Grand Rapids Press, a reminder of what and whom the town represents, as if the sea of blond—so much I could swear I was dreaming in wheat— could let a foreigner forget. In school hallways blond heads glided, illuminated in the lockers creaking open and slamming shut, taunting me to be what I only wished I could be. That was the dilemma, the push and pull. The voice saying, Come on in. Now transform. And if you cannot, then disappear.

  In 1983 the construction of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel’s glass tower marked the city’s first skyscraper, reaching twenty-nine stories. I remember the breathless chronicle of the building in the newspaper, and the opening of restaurants too fancy to dare consider. It would be years before I stepped foot inside the velvet green lobby, years before my father and stepmother ate an anniversary dinner—the only one I ever knew them to celebrate—at the 1913 Restaurant, where they ate chocolate mousse that arrived in an edible shell that cracked open when they tapped it. When I drive Highway 131 skirting downtown, I can’t help seeing pride and forlornness in the mirrored obelisk of the Grand Plaza jutting up from the landscape of brick buildings left over from the nineteenth century furniture boom. The Grand River cuts throug h the city on its way to Lake Michigan, a swath for salmon and waste, a gleaming opacity beneath the lit-u
p bridges at night.

  My family ventured into downtown only a few times a year, for the Festival of the Arts (known simply as Festival), the Hispanic Festival where Rosa volunteered, Fourth of July fireworks, and the city’s Celebration on the Grand. Crowds of families would set up blankets and lawn chairs on the Indian mounds at Ah-Nab -Awen Park, waiting for fireworks to rain over the river. We’d hurry to join them, my father’s mood darkening as he drove around for a parking space, circling the elephantine Calder sculpture that anchors the downtown business area. I had love-hate feelings for the Calder: it represented Grand Rapids, being part of the city’s logo, yet it was also real art—something greater than the ordinary life I knew.

  Throughout my childhood I wondered, so often it became a buzzing dullness, why we had ended up here, and why we couldn’t leave. I would stare at a map of the United States and imagine us in New York or Boston or Los Angeles. I had no idea what such cities were like, but I was convinced people were happier out on the coasts, living in a nexus between so much land and water. Gazing at the crisscrossing lines of Manhattan or the blue vastness of the oceans, I would feel something I could only describe as missingness.

  In the town of Holland, about half an hour’s drive from Grand Rapids, the annual spring Tulip Time Festival brings all other activities to a halt. The citizenry work double-time to get their front-yard tulips in order. There are contests, prizes, prestige to be had. There’s a parade. People line up early with their lawn chairs to wait for girls in braids and wooden clogs to come clopping down the streets.

  Once, in second grade, a substitute teacher gave a geography lesson by asking students to name the places they wanted to visit. She had a large globe beside her, spinning it absently as she talked. I was the first student she called on. Tongue-tied by shyness, I couldn’t think of what to say. “Holland,” I blurted out.

  Brightly the teacher said, “Here or overseas?”

  I must have stared at her dumbly, for she repeated the question, “This Holland or the one overseas?” Perhaps she thought I didn’t understand. But I was amazed that of all the places in the world, she thought that I would choose the town of Holland. Wasn’t it enough that I would choose the country?

  “Not here,” I said. “Not this one.”

  In 1975 we were new in America and two years away from the arrival of Rosa. Before she swept us up and out of Baldwin Street, we lived in a house of splintery wooden floors that slanted in different directions. We huddled close as if in a cave. Our Vietnamese mixed with the American voices rising from the old television my father had brought back to life. Our cave had feather smells and rice smells, tricycles in the house, bare feet. My sister and I played all day in our pajamas, even going outside in them, though no farther than the curb so our grandmother could watch us from the porch. In the cave we ate spring rolls and drank 7UP, tore open packages of licorice and Wrigley’s spearmint gum. My sister and I fell asleep with plastic phones and floppy dolls from the bins at Blessed Christian Reformed Church. We held on to oranges and plums, desserts from Noi, saved so long we forgot to eat them.

  When Christmas rolled around we had a genuine fake tree with lights and a star. Anh and I had no idea what the word Christmas meant; to us it was, and remained for years, glitter and gifts. We had to put together the pieces of America that came to us through television, song lyrics, Meijer Thrifty Acres, and our father, coming home from work each day with a new kind of candy in his pocket. We couldn’t get enough Luden’s wild-cherry-flavored cough drops, or Pringles stacked in their shiny red canister, a mille-feuille of promises. My father’s mustache was nothing like Mr. Pringles’s, which winged out jauntily. Mr. Pringles was like Santa Claus or Mr. Heidenga—a big white man, gentle of manner, whose face signaled a bounty of provisions.

  So we hoarded our Pringles cans, rolling them on the floor, making them into piggy banks with pennies donated by our uncles. The Pringles glowed by window light, their fine curvatures nearly translucent. So delicate, breaking into salty shards on our tongues. These were blissful days, or so they seemed to me. I did not know we were poor, or refugees, or that we had been born in another hemisphere. I didn’t know that a kind of apprehension gathered around my father each evening, making him check the corners of every room, the spaces behind open doors. I wonder what he thought about—he doesn’t say, can’t remember. Did he wake up gasping with shock, gripping the sword, forgetting where he was? Did he dream of Saigon? Did he think ahead to what he would have to tell my sister and me, one day, if we asked about our mother? How would he explain the choice he had had to make?

  Back in the chill of the rental house that cost one hundred precious dollars a month, the only future he could see lay in work, in whirls of processed feathers. For the beauty of a Pringle could only go so far, and must be paid for. My uncles felt it, too. When they slept all day after working all night, or played the same melancholy Simon & Garfunkel song over and over, my grandmother told me not to bother them with questions about what all the words meant.

  Too much to ask, and too much to do. English to learn, streets to navigate, work to manage, food to buy, friends to find. And so my father and uncles and grandmother rose, always in darkness, toward this new life.

  2

  Forbidden Fruit

  WHEN MY FATHER WORKED AT THE NORTH AMERICAN Feather Company he always came home with down in his hair, a fine scattering like the Michigan snow that seemed to fall without stopping those first winters in America. When he tossed me into the air to make me laugh he smelled like factory feathers and old brass. The scent lingered even when the days began to brighten, the gray cloud cover over Grand Rapids slowly lifting.

  My father made fast friends with the other Vietnamese refugees who had landed in Grand Rapids. They cobbled together seeds and ingredients, information on weather and how to send letters to family in Vietnam. Some people drove across the state to Canada, where Chinese groceries in Windsor sold real jasmine rice, lemongrass, and the fleshy, familiar fruits that had no English translation. Now Noi could plant cilantro, mint, ram rau. She grew more at ease in our neighborhood and started taking my sister and me to a nearby park. We never saw any other children around. Shielded by “Beware of Dog” signs, the other houses looked empty, shut tight against us. Still, Noi fixed our hair in side ponytails and dressed us in corduroy jumpers that came in a grocery bag from Mr. Heidenga’s daughters. She stood sedately, watching us play on the jungle gym and swings. Under her puffy nylon jacket from Goodwill she wore the jade green ao dai she had sewn.

  On good days, when he was in a happy mood, my father let us walk with him to Meijer to get groceries and choose any kind of candy we wanted. So we introduced ourselves to Smarties, Hershey’s chocolate bars, candy necklaces, and pink-tipped candy cigarettes. On summer days Noi took us to the farmers’ market. Anh and I held hands as we trailed her, looking up at the canvas canopy and the swaying silver scales. Noi bargained wordlessly, pulling dollar bills from a little lacquer purse with a wooden handle. Her arms filled with brown sacks. At home she would unveil grapes and nectarines, tomatoes and greens, taut bulbs of onion.

  The allure of the fruits—their roundness, aliveness—enchanted my sister and me, but the choicest pieces went first to a plate that lay before the golden statue of Buddha in the living room. This was the altar for him and for our dead relatives, to whom my grandmother paid respect every morning and evening. My father had built a shelf for the Buddha, who sat perpetually smooth, peaceful, eyes closed, his palms facing up. The fruit made a solemn offering, and for two whole days, sometimes longer, it had to remain there untouched between Noi’s candles and stems of incense. I was in awe of this process. Did Buddha and the ancestors know the fruit was there for the taking? Did they prefer apples or bananas or plums? Once in a great while Noi put an entire pineapple on the altar and I wondered how they would eat it. I always expected the fruit to disappear, and when it did not I marveled at the ancestors’ lack of hunger, their self-control.

&nbs
p; I tried to work up the nerve to pluck off just one grape, but I feared my dead relatives would tell on me. Buddha might snap open his eyes and let my grandmother know that his food had been disrespected. The thought kept me at bay, circling the altar like a nighttime prowler. The fruit might as well have been protected behind glass, the dusty grapes turning into jewels.

  When at last Noi took up two pieces of fruit for my sister and me—peaches and plums in the summer, apples and pears in the fall, oranges in winter—we held on to them like lifeboats. We kept them in our laps, smoothing the varnish of the apples until they bruised, cradling the mottled green pears in our arms. We loved to sniff peaches, tickling our faces with their fuzz. Hours would pass like this, our admiration steady, our anticipation covering the afternoons. At last Noi would pull the fruit away from us and carve them into wedges—plums were the only fruit we ate with the skins still on. We could never get enough. The fruit seemed dearer to us than candy, and I believed that the transformation from globe to glistening slices involved some kind of magic. It would be years before either my sister or I ever bit into a whole apple.

  Later, Noi found pomegranates, mangoes, persimmons, and coconuts at the newly opened Saigon Market. All of these were set upon the altar before making their way to our mouths, and it was a lesson in patience and desire. We were eating gifts every time.

  On the New Year’s Eve between 1977 and 1978 my father and Uncle Chu Anh were hanging out in a rec room of an apartment complex off East Beltline. It was a Vietnamese party, everyone dancing to Donna Summer and Debby Boone and sharing bottles of Martini & Rossi Asti Spumante. My father was sitting at a table with a group of guys and a pack of cards when he saw two women pausing at the doorway. One had curly black hair, and it took him a moment to realize that she wasn’t Vietnamese. But she didn’t look white, either. “Look at that,” one of the guys said with a low whistle.