Stealing Buddha's Dinner

by Bich Minh Nguyen

  Chu Cuong and Chu Dai were also the ones who drank extravagant amounts of Sprite, shunning the two-liters of RC and Squirt we usually had in the house. They let us kids keep the cans for the deposits—ten cents in Michigan, which added up fast for candy purchases. Chu Cuong would toss his empty pop cans into the backseat of his blue Thunderbird and wait until they piled up, a shimmering mosaic of silver and green. Then after we collected them in trash bags he’d ferry us to Meijer’s bottle return center. Carrying the sacks across the parking lot, he was like a vision of a Vietnamese Santa.

  Next door, the Vander Wals’ oldest daughter, Jennifer, was almost my age. She was blond with matching socks and unscuffed shoes. When summer emerged we found ourselves face to face across the strip of grass that separated our driveways, just bored enough with our siblings to become friends with each other.

  Jennifer introduced me to the concept of homemade, which I only associated with American food, when she gave me half of a cookie her mother had baked. Nestlé’s Toll House, she called it, and I thought, You name your cookies? But it was like no cookie I had ever had. It was crumbly and rich, the chocolate chips bearing no resemblance to the pinpoints found in Chips Ahoy. In our house, cookies came from Keebler, Nabisco, or, more frequently, the generic company whose label shouted “COOKIES” in stark black letters. Once in a while, at my father’s request, Rosa brought home Voortman windmill cookies, or the cream-filled pink and yellow wafers that were as dull to me as graham crackers.

  The concept of homemade cookies struck me as suspect and impossible. “What do you mean, your mom made them?” I demanded.

  Jennifer tried to explain the flour and sugar and Crisco, her mother’s big mixing bowl and cookie sheets. I had thought all American food came from a package and some mystical factory process. The idea that a person could create such a thing at home was a revelation. And then, a desire.

  I wondered how many more layers of discovery stood between me and true Americanness. I decided that even if Rosa wouldn’t let me change my name, I could change myself anyway. I could keep secrets: from my white friends at school and from my family at home. At school I was good, as neat with my homework as any other girl and just as well behaved. At home I stole food, sulked in my grandmother’s closet, and in fits of unexplained rage threw Rosa’s clean clothes down the laundry chute.

  It was exhausting, this secrecy, this effort to be normal, and I took to wandering the house at night when everyone else was asleep. I liked being invisibly in-between, a shadow dissolving into itself. My father and stepmother believed in silence and fear; they made strict rules to contain their possible unraveling. In truth, I had a thousand questions about my face and my race, but it was so much easier to deny them than to speak out loud and court the embarrassment and shame that always lay in wait for me. As I stood at the living room window, the street lamps seemed to cast an eerie glow over the neighborhood. I wrapped myself in the yellowed nylon curtains my stepmother had hung and wondered what it would be like to live in any other house.

  5

  Toll House Cookies

  EVERY SUMMER MORNING JENNIFER VANDER WAL, MY next-door neighbor, friend, and enemy, would ring the doorbell and ask if I wanted to go play. I always did, and we would spend our daylight hours running from her house to mine, riding bicycles, and listening for the ice cream truck to roll through the neighborhood. Jennifer and I worked a trade-off. She had a basement of dreams, a trove of Legos, construction paper, and crayons— the full Crayola 64, not the pallid Kmart version my parents bought. I could offer video games, Days of Our Lives, and MTV. Barbie dolls, too, or at least the knockoff version, Cindy, whose shiny breasts Jennifer’s parents had forbidden from their house.

  Summer arrived when the ChemLawn truck pulled up in front of Jennifer’s yard. Her father, Cal, was a music teacher and spent warm days fixating on his garden. He pruned and weeded in his pressed shorts, knee-high black socks, and Hush Puppies. A Dutch gardener, Rosa called him, rolling her eyes.

  Jennifer’s mother, Linda, was a soft-fleshed woman with a singsong voice. She gave occasional piano lessons but spent most of her time cleaning. Her kitchen was so clean it looked like no one ever cooked there. But Linda did cook, of course. She served lunch at noon and dinner at six o’clock, and in the afternoon she baked Toll House cookies, stashing them in a glossy blue jar. Linda’s fears were all about stains—Kool-Aid, grass, chocolate milk. She fretted over dirt, lined the hallways with plastic runners. Sometimes, like a Cheer commercial come to life, she hung bright towels on a clothesline in the backyard.

  Jennifer was one year younger than I, but she was taller, bigger, her manners mimicking an adult’s. She had her father’s deep-set blue eyes and her mother’s efficient, can-do demeanor. She had a habit of running her hands inside the waistband of her shorts, and she licked the space below her lower lip compulsively, so that a pink swath formed there. I liked this about her, this glimpse of lack of control. On Sundays she wore frilled dresses to church and had to stay indoors. Once, Vinh and I sat in the backyard with a box of Lemonheads and stuffed tufts of grass through the chain-link fence that divided our backyard from the Vander Wals’. There was something satisfying about seeing the grass fall on the other side. Part littering, part disappearing.

  My father and Jennifer’s father hated each other. The hatred was immediate and visceral, plain as the view up Sycamore Street to 36th, where Jennifer and I were not supposed to walk. It drove Cal crazy that his immaculate property had to sit next to ours. Every few days his lawn mower cut a clear boundary between their emerald grass and our lazy thatch. The Vander Wals’ driveway was smooth, ending at a two-staller with a fiberglass automatic door. Our driveway was splotched with oil. When my stepmother’s ’71 Toyota—avocado-green, almost the exact shade of the vinyl siding on our house—died in the driveway, it stayed there for years. The garage was packed with boxes, tools, broken bicycles, all the junk my parents couldn’t bring themselves to throw away.

  Once in a while, after my father got home from his shift at North American Feather, he would drag out the old lawn mower that always took a dozen tries before it coughed to life. He would work shirtless, singing Vietnamese songs whose words I never learned.

  When I think of Jennifer, I think of cloudless afternoons ripening toward sunset and dinner. As the hour approached I would always ask what her mother was making. She would go to the kitchen to find out. “Shake ’n Bake,” she’d report. “Pot roast.” “Macaroni Helper.” Once I ducked under their dining room window to listen to the sounds of their dinnertime. They must have prayed before each meal, but I only remember the ting of forks against plates, the soft slur of a serving spoon carving out a heap of scalloped potatoes.

  Jennifer was afraid of Noi’s food. Pho, stewed beef and eggs, shrimp curry, noodle dishes with nuoc mam and coriander. “No, thank you,” was her polite reply every time Noi offered her something to eat. Jennifer kept her hands behind her back as she shook her head.

  One summer day she showed up in my backyard with two of her friends from vacation Bible school. I was playing on the swing set, which was the envy of the neighborhood. It was solid and sturdy like the ones on a playground, and if you were brave you could sail right out of your swing and try to land standing on the grass.

  Jennifer and her friends matched, all pleated shorts and flower barrettes, all various heads of blond, and I dared them to swing as high as they could and jump off. They refused. “My mom will kill me if I get my clothes dirty,” one of the girls said.

  “I got mud on my Sunday clothes and got in big trouble,” Jennifer put in.

  “By the way, girls,” said the one with pink socks folded down at the ankle, “Aren’t you glad the Lord is always with us?”

  Quick as my father’s temper igniting, I said, “I don’t believe in the Lord.”

  She dropped to her knees, eyes closed, and clasped her hands together. The other girl pointed to the sky, whispering, “She’s praying to God for you.”


  A silence fell over us. At last the girl in the pink socks opened her eyes and stood.

  “I’m going to pray for you every night,” she promised.

  Solemnly the other girl asked me, “Were you baptized?”

  “No, she wasn’t,” Jennifer answered, and that’s when I knew the whole scene had been orchestrated for my benefit. These girls hadn’t come to my yard to play; they had come to save me.

  I could see my grandmother checking on us through the window in the kitchen, where she must have been starting dinner. Maybe salty shrimp with scallions, my sister’s favorite. I said the only thing I could say, because now it was a matter of pride: “There is no God.”

  The girl who had prayed for me covered her face. “You can’t say that! You can’t say that!” And she began to cry.

  That summer Jennifer turned seven and her parents threw her a big birthday party. My sister and I showed up early and hung out in the backyard, where Cal Vander Wal’s rock and flower garden sloped down the hill to a patio set up for party games. Pink and purple balloons bobbed from the lawn chairs and hung from the clothesline. I was excited for the ice cream and cake, and the party favors Jennifer had promised. Then Jennifer’s friends, the ones from her real life—church and Clearbrook Christian School—appeared. They floated toward us, dressed in white like the birthday girl. A few months later, when I first heard that song from The Sound of Music —girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes —I recalled with bitter and astonished poignancy that moment on the hill. It seemed to replay itself, forever in slow motion, in my mind. Later, when my birthday rolled around, Jennifer brought me a little white box with a blue adhesive bow. When she put it in my hands I saw that it was nothing but a piece of paper folded into a cube. I opened it:

  Every immigrant knows the dual life, marked by a language at home and a language outside. For me it was also the face I saw in the mirror. It was the smell of rice simmering in its cooker. The statue of Buddha in Noi’s bedroom. None of these made sense when I played with Jennifer, but the second I came home they were mine all over again.

  I remember being invited into Jennifer’s kitchen—I was not allowed just to walk in, the way she did in our house—and gazing with wonder at the cleared countertops, the sink uncluttered with dishes, everything clean as a whistle, as Jennifer’s mother might have said. I called her Mrs. Vander Wal; Jennifer called my stepmother Rosa. “She can’t possibly be your real mom,” Jennifer had said to me once. I refused to admit to her how much I didn’t know.

  Linda Vander Wal smiled her soft-cheeked smile. She had light, painted-on eyebrows, her one vanity. She opened the freezer door and removed a tray of homemade Kool-Aid popsicles, giving one to Jennifer, one to her brother Paul, and one to me. This event happened but two or three times a summer. Never mind that these popsicles didn’t even taste that good—you could suck out all the juice, leaving a pale block of ice. I would hold the plastic popsicle holder and eat the frozen Kool-Aid as if it were the only delicacy I would ever have. From the kitchen I could see the living room piano and curvy-armed sofa. I’d hardly ever stepped foot in that room, the showpiece of the house, used only when “company” came over. It was for grown-ups, Jennifer said. Off the path of the plastic runners, it glimmered like a vision of candy in a fairy tale.

  For years my father and Jennifer’s father maintained their silent hatred—the curt hello, the briefest nod, the distance in their faces. My sister and I absorbed this feeling, too. “I’d like to beat him up,” Anh would say about Cal, gritting her teeth. “I wish Dad would punch his lights out.”

  One late afternoon in the summer of 1983 Jennifer and I were playing hopscotch in her driveway while our younger brothers pulled each other around in a wagon. It was almost time for Linda to call out dinnertime, and I was filled with a quiet, tenebrous feeling that I would recognize years later as a sense of responsibility. I didn’t know what it meant then, only that it hit me hardest when I came home in the evenings and Noi dished me up a bowl of canh chua, or beef and noodles. Falling asleep on one of the reject pillows from North American Feather, I would feel as though I’d forgotten something important.

  Cal Vander Wal was working on the tulip beds in front of his house; my father was picking some Vietnamese herbs he had planted in our backyard. Those days, Rosa was either working or at night school, and I felt a sense of suspended time when I stepped inside our house. There were no bedtimes or bath times, no order to the evenings.

  In Jennifer’s driveway her brother Paul stood up in the wagon. Jennifer screamed even before he crashed onto the pavement. In an instant Cal was there, yelling at Vinh, and suddenly here was Linda and my father and Anh barreling into view. My father and Cal faced each other—my father shirtless, Cal standing tall in his starched short sleeves and knee-highs—and they were shouting. The sound of their voices blurred. Who do you think you are? Shut up. You better tell him— You better watch it—

  And then my father lunged. He was much smaller than Cal, but he had spent his youth in Saigon, gambling and running away from the police. Cal, for all his time spent outdoors, was spindly and wan. But in the second that my father might have struck, fulfilling my sister’s treasured wish, he stopped. It must have taken every restraint within him, and I realized then how much my sister’s wish was my own, how much I’d wanted the crack of fist against face, Cal falling into his prized green lawn. I wanted something to be smashed and broken—the paradigm unspoken that ran between us like the chain-link fence in the backyard.

  That was when the balance between friendship and enmity broke for good, and Jennifer and I began competing with possessions: puffy stickers, Trapper Keepers, neon socks. This would go on for years, following the waves of Cabbage Patch dolls, rubber bracelets, and paint-splattered clothing. I would brag about the Sheena Easton, Prince, and Madonna songs she wasn’t allowed to listen to at home, and Jennifer would show off her well-stocked toy box and trays of colored pencils.

  My heart ached when Jennifer’s parents finished the rest of their basement and created a new room and next-door bathroom just for her. “Too bad,” she said, “you’ll always have to share a room with Anh.”

  The bedroom had fawn-colored carpeting and pink floral wallpaper, a white dresser with brass pulls. A new desk, too, with drawers for paper and pencils and markers. Jennifer even had her own matching bookcase. There were pictures and photographs in her room, Precious Moments figurines, Bible study notebooks. Everything gleamed, right down to the glass eyes on her stuffed animals, and Jennifer had dominion over it all. “Be careful,” she said when I looked at her books. On a sheet of poster board she had stenciled flowers and curlicues, making a sign for her door: THE JENNIFER ZONE.

  I was glad when she and her family flew off to Florida for a Disney World vacation. I had endured her gloating for weeks: the prospect of Epcot; how their hotel had two different swimming pools. While they were away, carpenters were finishing work on their screened-in back porch. The house was unlocked in the afternoons, and on the day before the Vander Wals’ return, Anh and I broke in.

  I don’t remember how the idea formed, or who suggested it, but it was instant agreement and action. We didn’t know what we were after. But we knew where we were headed, down the basement steps to the Jennifer Zone. As we moved in swift silence, I felt a heady, dizzying rush, the thrill of the trespass.

  In Jennifer’s room my sister opened the dresser drawers and balled up the clothes. She opened the closet and pushed every dress off its hanger. I went to Jennifer’s desk and crumpled papers in my fist, then gently put them back. I threw her markers into the trash. Anh found a canister of baby powder and sprinkled it all over the room, dusting Jennifer’s clothes and shoes, pulling back the bedcovers to get at the pillows and sheets. When she handed me the can I doused the desk drawers, the toy animals and dolls on the bed. We seemed to work in tandem, our focus methodical—there was so much, I realized, we could do.

  At last Anh hissed that we should get out of
there. We crept up the stairway and into the kitchen. Instead of hurrying out, I went toward the living room. Anh grabbed my shirt and shook her head—the workers were on the back porch, too close. But I had only one more thing to accomplish: I lifted the lid of the ceramic blue cookie jar. As I pulled out two cookies one of the workers said, “Did you hear something?” Anh and I flew out of the house and I put a cookie in my mouth. It was thick and heavy, Toll House chocolate chip.

  The next night we got into the oversized T-shirts we used as pajamas and went to bed early. All day we had traded furtive glances, and I felt closer to her than I had in a long time. Together we had delivered payback for the funny looks, the polite no-thank-yous that signified, You’re different. You’re strange. You people. We had shown the Vander Wals they couldn’t mess with us.

  At the same time, though, the rush of satisfaction was edged with guilt. I did not hate Jennifer, who was my summer friend. But I hated, more and more, how I felt around her: how I dreamed of Shake ’n Bake; how she shook her head at the chilled lychees that Noi brought out to us on the hottest afternoons.