Stealing Buddha's Dinner

by Bich Minh Nguyen

  Saigon meant freedom, a way to start over. They moved into one of the small cinderblock neighborhoods crowding the city and opened a store in the front room, selling odds and ends— stationery, games, candy. But my grandfather grew melancholy and depressed; he couldn’t bring himself to begin anew. The store floundered, and each morning he woke up later and later. One fall day in 1959 my grandmother took a break from the empty store and went back to check on him. He had died, folded up in their bed. She said it was a heart attack or some kind of illness. My uncle Chu Cuong said it was sadness. He was nine years old then, my father eleven.

  Noi began selling pho and noodle dishes on the street corner in the early mornings and evenings. She spent longer hours meditating and visiting the neighborhood temple. Her sons grew up, and in between school classes learned to make money by gambling. My father prowled the billiards halls; Chu Cuong mastered foosball. Years later, in a bar in the United States, a man asked him to be his teammate in some national foosball championship game. Chu Cuong declined, but appreciated the American lesson: if you can make money on a game like that, he said, you can make money on anything.

  What happened between my grandfather’s death and my family’s flight from Vietnam: too much, is what my father says, and with never enough money. He, my uncles, and Grandmother dispute each other’s memories. Instead of talking about the war they fixate on domestic details: Noi’s pet chicken that went crazy with rage at the color red; the neighborhood cricket fights and how to catch a winning cricket; the family cat that brought them birds for dinner and kept as a companion a little white rat.

  Toward the end of the war, my father broke his arm during an explosion—a minor injury that he stretched out for at least a year—and an army friend supplied him with ample leave passes. Hanging out in Saigon one hazy monsoon day, he met my mother. She was sitting in a restaurant, and he walked over and said hello. Later he took her to the movies; they sat in parks and traded stories about their families. He brought her home to meet Noi. They went out dancing. They fought and made up and fought again. She stayed with her family and he stayed with his. They went on together long enough to have my sister, then me. The city was beginning to crumble, its future grim and foreseeable by the end of August 1974. My father brought my sister and me to Noi. Eight months later we’d be gone.

  Before Florence Street, before Rosa, my father shopped for American groceries while Noi minded my sister and me at the Purple Cow ice cream parlor in Meijer Thrifty Acres. That’s when I fell in love with ice cream. I was awed by the store: its enormity, the towering shelves, everything brightly boxed and labeled. It was its own city of happiness, a free-for-all, and nothing symbolized joy more than the Purple Cow herself, presiding over the ice cream counter. She was cardboard and wide, life-sized, her eyes drowsy, mouth in mid-moo.

  The Vietnamese word for ice cream is ca lem and it’s what I hear in my mind whenever I think of ice cream, the syllables colluding with the pleasure of that first lick of sweet cold. Probably this is because I spoke the word so often, begging Noi for more ca lem, ca lem. My favorites were chocolate or Superman—a neon tie-dye of fruit flavors—stuffed into nutty-brown sugar cones that dripped ice cream onto my clothes.

  Meijer and the Saigon Market, both on 28th Street, became the epicenters of our lives, splitting our existence between two cultures. The Saigon Market meant home, familiar faces and foods, our own language, a general store for all things Vietnamese. Here my father plotted parties with his new friends while my grandmother and her friends gathered donations to start a Buddhist temple. It’s strange to think how young my father was then, barely thirty years old.

  Those early days seem a profusion of moments without structure. They return to me in vivid collage: the fizz of 7UP pouring out of a green bottle; the smell of the wild roses in the backyard; the day I watched a work crew install a stop sign at the end of the street. Probably we would have gone on like this for a long time, oblivious and drifting, without Rosa to tell us hard facts: words like school, dentist, and English—realms we needed to enter.

  When Rosa bought ice cream she went for the giant plastic buckets that Noi could reuse as water pails and planters. She favored butter pecan, chocolate swirl, and mint chocolate chip. In our new household, ice cream had clear purposes: to appease, to distract, to mark happiness. Anh, Crissy, and I all had bowls of ice cream when Rosa came home from the hospital in March 1979 with our new brother, Vinh.

  I do not recall Rosa or my father ever speaking of the pregnancy, no doubt because she had become pregnant before she and my father got married. Since that was associated with sex, and out-of-wedlock sex at that, it fell into the category of the unmentionable. I only learned of Vinh’s imminent arrival when Crissy pointed to a squalling newborn on a TV show and said, “Mom’s having a baby, too.” I was four and a half years old when I held him for the first time, sitting on the edge of my parents’ bed with Crissy and Anh, the idea of brother still incomprehensible. Vinh had had plenty of hair, black as mine, yet I felt no connection to him. Everything had happened too fast.

  The fact of a son in the house pleased not only my father but Rosa a great deal, something I wouldn’t understand until much later. She was still in the early stages of enthusiasm then, eager to solidify us into a family. She wanted my father’s friends to be her friends, his community to be hers. When he took her to parties she stayed in the kitchen with the other wives, trying to learn Vietnamese and get in on their conversations. She spoke the language the way white people sometimes spoke to us: too loud, enunciating each word slowly. Rosa’s communications with Noi were comical. Trying to help Noi cook, she would hold up a bag of sugar and ask, “How much?” The words emerged as a shout, causing Noi to giggle uncontrollably.

  Crissy made a point to learn as little Vietnamese as possible. She resented how her life had been changed around, and she hated sharing anything, especially a bedroom. She often referred to us as “Viennese” or “Vietmanese.” Nonetheless, Anh and I looked up to Crissy. She had dark silky hair with natural waves, and to us everything she did, wore, and said was the coolest. Whatever she liked, we liked: Madonna, puffy lettering, Dr. Scholl’s. When she wanted a dog we wanted one, too, and rejoiced when my father and Rosa relented. Crissy picked her out from the pound: a dirty-white Lhasa apso mix she named Mimi.

  To celebrate Vinh’s birth my father and Rosa threw a big party. Noi spent days in the kitchen, preparing piles of cha gio that she cooked in an electric fryer set up in the garage; shrimp cakes; platters heaped with goi cuon, fresh shrimp and vegetable spring rolls; banh xeo, delicate pancakes stuffed with meats, herbs, and bean sprouts; beef satay marinated in fish sauce, sugar, and lemongrass; mounds of vermicelli and rice for stewed shrimp; saucers filled with chilies swimming in nuoc mam. There were pasty dough balls stuffed with spiced pork and Chinese sausage; shrimp chips dyed in pastel colors, salty styrofoam that vanished on the tongue; pickled radishes, carrots, and cauliflower; heaps of dried coconut curls; dried persimmons, flat brown, each resembling a giant eye; nubs of sugared pineapple and papaya; green bean cakes; red bean cakes. And always, the teardrop crunchy-tart pickled shallots that came in small cans labeled “pickled leeks.” I would eat them even after my tongue burned from the brine. Noi never minded when I sneaked into the kitchen to grab the first shrimp chips, fresh from the deep fryer, a few cha gio cooling in a towel-lined colander, and extra pieces of the rich, salty-sweet Chinese sausage, blood red and shot through with white speckles of fat.

  Anh and I were waitresses for the party, roles we would have for as long as parties lasted in that household. We fetched drinks and napkins while my father’s friends beckoned to us, snapping their fingers. We were not the indulged little girls on Baldwin Street anymore, holding out our arms for a new toy or stick of gum. Now we were old enough to be useful, to wash dishes and do what we were told. Someone might want an extra beer or bean cake; another might need a dirty plate whisked away. Our heads were patted, cheeks pinched, shoulders
grabbed while my father’s friends assessed us out loud as good, thin, delicate, or clumsy.

  The long hair we’d had on Baldwin Street had been clipped into the same bowl-shaped haircuts, later amended to Dorothy Hamill style, and for the party we wore identical patchwork dresses trimmed with rickrack. Anh and I liked to pretend we were twins. We had the same habit of finding hilarity at random moments— a stumble on the sidewalk, a glimpse of gaping-mouthed tennis shoes. But our similarities seemed to end there. She was lively and I was shy. She charmed everyone with her quick smile and perfect vision, while I had to wear horn-rimmed glasses too big for my face. Rosa had been the one to notice my poor eyesight, and these first glasses she’d chosen would set the precedent for the rest of my childhood—bulky plastic frames from the sale rack at the eye doctor’s. I looked like a sorry version of my sister, and Rosa introduced us to the guests as “the pretty one and the smart one.”

  In the living room, people passed baby Vinh around as if he were an objet d’art, and in a way he was—multiracial, a child for the next century. When they finished admiring him they praised Anh and Crissy’s pretty faces. I didn’t mind slipping into the background. I was perpetually worried about breaking my glasses or being teased. I had discovered that adults liked to ask children questions only to laugh at their answers, and I hated being the butt of a joke, having to stand there and take it as a proper child should. You’re too shy, how are you going to get a husband? someone might ask, setting the room into laughter.

  Stealing a bowl of pickled leeks off the dining table, I slunk off to my top-bunk bed. I hid there with a book, eating the sour shallots until my eyes teared up, thinking of the block of Breyers Neapolitan ice cream that Chu Cuong had left waiting in the freezer. He sneered at buckets of ice cream, preferring, he said, the balance of sugar and cream in Breyers All Natural.

  I didn’t know it then, but Vinh’s birth would signal the return of Rosa to her own family. She had grown up in a strict Catholic household, one of ten children—eight girls and two boys. Her parents were migrant workers who had come from Texas to follow the crop seasons in Michigan: sugar beets, cherries, blueberries, apples. They had settled in Fruitport, a small town near Lake Michigan. Most of Rosa’s siblings thought she was hoitytoity, going off to Grand Valley State instead of getting married. But apart from one college semester in Denmark—a place she would talk about for years as though she had just come back—she hadn’t gotten much farther than western Michigan. In Grand Rapids, working as a teacher after college, she got pregnant by a white guy who had no interest in marriage and children. So, alone, Rosa raised Crissy. Stung by her family’s criticism, she became an atheist, immersed herself into left-wing activism—as much as was possible in Grand Rapids—and made her own life and career.

  She was a strong woman, and we knew it in every word she spoke to us. But while her politics were liberal, when it came to what she called personal matters she was silent. On this she and my father never disagreed. Subjects such as Crissy’s father, my and Anh’s mother, and sex, especially sex, fell into the category of the taboo. Danger! Warning! Look away! We could watch cop shows and kung fu movies all day, but if a scene or a song referenced sex, then the whole production risked being shut down. We were even supposed to change the channel when people kissed on TV, as if seeing such an act would shift us into becoming bad girls.

  When Flashdance came out (which we weren’t allowed to see) my sisters and I fell in love with Irene Cara’s “What a Feelin’.” The lyrics seemed innocuous enough. Take your passion and make it happen! But I misheard the words and one day Rosa caught me singing, Take your pants off, and make it happen! She rushed over to the radio and snapped it off, saying that song was banned from then on. When I asked why, she said, “None of your business.”

  For the most part, though, she and my father weren’t consistent in enforcing their rules. It kept us kids off-kilter, a little paranoid, which was maybe their goal. Rosa herself loved to sing along to Rita Coolidge, proclaiming your love is lifting me higher, though the lyrics veered toward the obscene with quench my desire. And she couldn’t resist the lilting tempo of the Pointer Sisters’ I want a man with a slow hand. It was years before I understood what the song meant.

  On our own, out of earshot, my sisters and I had learned all the words to Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” and Air Supply’s “Making Love out of Nothing at All.” Anh and Crissy would play Chu Cuong’s Eagles records and sing right along to “Hotel California.” We learned what to watch and listen to in private, under cover, whenever our parents weren’t around. Such silence and secrecy became a natural part of our family, circling our household like an electric fence.

  If their equal sense of strength and will had brought my father and Rosa together, it also became a source of complication. They were two people struggling against the wall of the conservative norm that defined Grand Rapids, and sometimes they turned on each other. My father might appreciate Rosa’s posted list of household chores, divided up by person and day, but that same list could also send him into inexplicable fury. Rosa wanted to fit in with my father’s crowd, but resented their drunken parties.

  One of Rosa’s rules was that we had to ask permission for snacks. We could not, for instance, grab a wafer cookie without first clearing it with her. We couldn’t ask Noi because she would say yes to any food we wanted and would bring us fruit twice a day anyway. Nor could we ask our father, who had been used to indulging us with candy and chips. “But Dad said I could” didn’t fly with her. Invoking the price of groceries, she would deny my requests about half the time, depending on whether or not she believed I was truly hungry, or if I had finished my last meal. She continually invoked taxes and bills, words that echoed throughout my childhood.

  So I began stealing food.

  I would bring a book with me, pretending to be on my way to the basement to do some reading. If Rosa was in the living room she couldn’t see the kitchen but could hear everything, so I had to move silently. More often than not she would be working at the dining table, in full view of the kitchen. I would wait for her to go to the bathroom or become otherwise distracted, then hoist myself up onto the counter, open the cupboard, reach for the cookies—I knew exactly where they were, of course—and take away a handful, hiding them behind my book. All done in a matter of seconds. In the summer, I tucked popsicles into the waistband of my shorts, shielding the evidence with another book. I honed my method over the years so that I could slide in and out of the kitchen with nearly entire meals carried between my shorts and T-shirt. I brought my spoils up to my bunk bed, where they could be hidden under the sheets if necessary. If Crissy and Anh were there and in a tattletale mood I would retreat to Noi’s closet. I sat there often, peaceful among her ao dais, hand-knitted sweaters, and sensible shoes, reading, writing notes to myself, and eating my contraband.

  Ice cream was the one thing nearly impossible to steal, though I could swipe spoonfuls at a time, but luckily my uncles swooped in to provide. They gave Anh and me plenty of change so we could chase down the ice cream trucks that crawled through the neighborhood. Even from far away I could discern their carousel tunes, and perked up like a dog detecting its master’s whistle. Depending on my mood I would choose a Drumstick, coated in chocolate and nuts, or a red, white, and blue Bomb Pop that had a gumball suspended at its tip. Anh usually selected an orange Push-Up or a Creamsicle. We would ride away on our bicycles, steering with one hand and eating ice cream with the other, feeling victorious. Crissy was usually too busy with her friends to bother with the ice cream truck, but she never missed out on the Dairy Cone, our beacon on 28th Street between the Witmark Merchandise Store and the Saigon Market.

  The Dairy Cone had a plastic sky-blue awning and walls covered in faded photographs of delectable desserts that instantly replaced the love I had nursed for the Purple Cow. The words parfait, turtle sundae, upside-down banana split made my heart thrill. On the rare times that Rosa took us to the Dairy Cone she only
let us order the standard soft-serves—chocolate, vanilla, or twist, thirty-nine cents each. Duly the blond teenage girl behind the counter would hold the plain cone to the machine and pull the lever, extracting a steady flow of ice cream in rhythmic swirls. I had no complaints about the soft-serve, but the bigger items on the menu beckoned. All along the counter sat buckets of cherries and sprinkles, and vats of chocolate, caramel, and strawberry sauce.

  Chu Cuong and Chu Dai took us to the Dairy Cone once or twice a week all summer long, and urged us to order anything we wanted. Crissy and Anh favored banana splits, mainly for the sheer excess and the fuchsia-colored maraschino cherries. I alternated between sundaes and parfaits, contemplating the different interplays of ice cream, hot fudge, and nuts. I especially loved the airy whiteness of whipped cream billowing out of a can, a sophisticated leap from the Cool Whip we had with pumpkin pie on holidays. Sitting at the Dairy Cone’s picnic table under the fluorescence of 28th Street, I would carve out each mouthful of ca lem with a pink plastic spoon. I could never eat fast enough to avoid the puddles of melted cream at the bottom of the dish. But my uncles didn’t mind or call me greedy. They didn’t worry about things like that. They ate what they liked and however much suited them, and no one could tell them otherwise. In the basement they had set up leather recliners and a stereo system and they had all kinds of records and tapes, from Van Morrison and the Rolling Stones to Lionel Richie and ABBA. (I especially admired how regally the ABBA ladies stood in their slinky white clothes, spotlit, defying the dark crowding close on the Super Trouper album.) Chu Cuong and Chu Dai bought what they desired, dined when they chose, and came and left at any hour. Theirs was a freewheeling, independent life, or so it seemed, and I couldn’t wait to be grown up so I could be like them, eating whatever I wanted and doing whatever I wanted, without permission.