Loan and her family almost never came to these parties, and I learned later that her father, who had opened his own grocery, had a rivalry with Thanh. The next year, when I transferred to Ken-O-Sha in time for third grade, Loan and I lost touch altogether. I took up with Marybelle, a new Vietnamese friend I had met at the Vietnamese parties. Named for the woman who had sponsored her family, Marybelle had a fierce-faced father who owned both a red Fiero and a bronze Firebird; her pretty, model-thin mother worked in alterations at Roger’s Department Store. But I never stopped wondering about Loan. I remembered how unhappy and grim her family had seemed, and the memory prevented me from calling her at home. I wondered what she did on Saturday nights instead of coming to the parties.
Rosa was nearly as left out, with no clear purpose there, and no one to talk to. As soon as the men settled down with cards she knew she was on her own. I saw her once, as I came upstairs for more shrimp chips, standing at the edge of the kitchen doorway, watching my father play poker. He was losing, as he always did when he drank too much. Rosa had a look on her face that I only saw sometimes when she was around my father—part timid, part passive. It was the same look she had when she asked him what she should wear to an event. It was unsettling to me—it was not the stepmother I knew. She would not have dared to interrupt the poker game and demand we go home any more than I would have.
We went on like this for a couple of years until suddenly, we didn’t. Maybe it was Anh wanting to stay home to talk on the phone with friends and boys and me wanting to copy her. Maybe it was the increasing tension of the parties themselves, Rosa’s growing disapproval and my father’s irritation at the disapproval. Noi had shifted her social life to her Buddhist temple gatherings on Sundays, and gradually there seemed to be no good reason to go to parties anymore. So my father went alone. I rather enjoyed his absence, the way it felt a little easier to breathe when he was away. I never realized how much on edge I felt—perhaps we all felt—when he was at home, usually moody, prone to a fit of yelling if someone so much as changed the volume of the stereo. I got the feeling that the person he was at the parties was the person he preferred to be—young, as he had been in Vietnam, surrounded by laughter and friends, drinking and smoking away his troubles.
At home I watched TV, slowly eating a pudding snack to try to make it last through as much as possible of the NBC Saturday night lineup, which included, at various times, Gimme a Break!, Diff ’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, The Golden Girls, and 227. Or I played our Intellivision video games—Lock ’n’ Chase (a poor man’s Pac-Man), skiing, and poker. I spent hours honing my blackjack skills, facing the crudely pixellated dealer who laughed evilly when the house won. I coaxed Anh to play Rubik’s Race with me, or Monopoly or Life. If I was super bored I played with the doll heads that someone had given us, so we could practice cosmetology and hairdressing. The dolls were life-sized busts, with plastic faces and thick heads of sandy blond hair, and they came with palettes of makeup and brushes. Anh could give her doll curls, pinned-up French braids, complicated eye shadows, and inventive lipstick tints. My doll always ended up looking the same. Eventually I would retreat to my books, eavesdropping on my sisters’ phone conversations. The house would feel dim and closed-down. Rosa would be working at the dining room table and all of us would go to bed long before my father came home.
In the fall of 1986, when I was twelve years old, my father got the idea to throw a dance hall party. A fabulous one that would draw people from all over, that would have everyone talking for weeks. He’d taken Rosa to a few such parties at rented VFW halls or the Ramada Inn, where DJs mixed ballroom tunes with Barbra Streisand ballads. A band might play, led by mellow-voiced Vietnamese singers crooning beneath a disco ball. These were cover-charge, cash-bar parties, with big dance floors where my father could show off his smooth moves, spinning Rosa around while other couples just watched. For that was his ace in the hole, the one thing that could always soften Rosa into a smile. The Vietnamese Arthur Murray, she sometimes called him, then she’d shake her hips, saying, “Cha-cha-cha!”
Together with a friend he rented out a dance hall and managed to book a semi-famous Vietnamese lady singer who agreed to travel from Chicago to Grand Rapids for the event. The cover charge and cash bar would, my father planned, net a tidy profit. I was nervous about the party—nothing would be worse than a low attendance—and about the task my father had given me and Anh: to go around picking up the empty cans of pop and beer so we could return them later for the ten-cent deposits.
It had been nearly two years since the last Vietnamese party I’d attended and I felt like a stranger; I hated my big new braces and weird hair that never would feather properly the way Anh’s did. And I recognized almost none of the people who were arriving except Marybelle, the only Vietnamese kid I really knew besides my sister and the one other Vietnamese girl in my class at school.
We staked out a spot in the back to check out the women in their shiniest ao dais and men in their dark suits. Some of the younger women had exchanged traditional dress for American outfits—satin cocktail dresses, panty hose, and high-heeled pumps. They gathered at the round tables and started drinking. They threw back their heads to blow cigarette smoke into the air, and laughed raucously at nothing. All night, Anh and I maneuvered around them with our plastic trash bags, gingerly collecting empty cans of Budweiser. The semi-famous singer wouldn’t arrive until later, so everyone danced to the DJ’s moody Vietnamese rhumba and tango songs. People paused to watch my father. He moved with such ease, a sense of gliding. He whirled Rosa around, passing other couples without ever grazing them. He danced as if they were alone on the floor. Women lined up to take a turn with him, which seemed to make Rosa both jealous and proud.
To please the younger crowd, my father had hired a local group of Vietnamese guys to be the opening act for the lady singer. The guys of Y White, in their late teens and early twenties, rode the new wave with their billowy black pants, white collared shirts buttoned to the neck, and spiky gelled hair—buzzed in the back, mop-floppy in front. Y White played covers of Erasure, New Order, and Depeche Mode. My favorite was their rendition of “Oh L’amour.” As the slow opening notes gave way to drums someone in the band flicked on a strobe light. Then all the guys began dancing, their white shirts glowing as their arms flailed in staccato motions. All the kids got on the dance floor then and I watched, straining to remember who they were. I thought I saw Thanh Saigon Market’s pretty daughter until she blended into the crowd.
After Y White finished their set, word went around that the lady singer had finally arrived with her entourage. She floated onto the stage in a sequined red ao dai, looking like one of the graceful ladies on the scroll calendars from the Saigon Market: super sleek hair swinging around their waists; impossibly smooth faces heavy with makeup; bodies reed-thin, clad always in bright silk. When the semi-famous lady singer sang, her mouth curved into a pretty oval shape and her head tilted just so to convey the melancholy of the music. She sang operatically, sorrowfully, but with a glint in her eye. She was as flawless and unreal as a heroine in a soap opera, and the spotlight never strayed from her. When she lifted her arm in time to a high-pitched note her dress threw out sparks of light. The crowd cheered and clapped. It was the one great moment of my father’s brief career as a party maker.
From a table at the back I tried to catch the lady singer’s notes, to understand what she was saying. I couldn’t. The drawn-out syllables soared toward the rotating disco ball and out of my reach. I felt alone, distant from the other Vietnamese kids who had formed an intimidating group at their own table. I tried to picture what my friends from school were doing at that instant. Probably Holly Jansen was asleep, her face like porcelain in the moonlight. Holly’s mother would have tucked her into bed, which I imagined involved pulling the covers tight to strap her in. I could never explain to her, or to any of my friends from school, what happened at Vietnamese parties. They would have been scandalized by the alcohol, the late
hours. To them the Vietnamese lady singer would have seemed funny-sounding—abnormal rather than beautiful. She didn’t belong in my friends’ world, I told myself. She only made sense here, in this hidden-away place, this undercover club with its coded foreign language.
Later, after the lady singer had departed in a cloud of admiration, after all the guests had drifted off, my father and his friend sat at a table and counted the cash. My sister and I walked around collecting the last cans. My uncles had taken Noi and Vinh home a while ago, but Anh and I had to stay to help with cleanup. Crissy never came to these kinds of parties, and no one ever made her. I figured she was fast asleep at home—it was past two in the morning by the time the party wrapped up—and I envied that. I envied the ease with which she could say, No, I won’t go, and have it be final. She had a choice. She could pass as normal and I could not.
My father spent a long time counting and recounting the night’s earnings. I heard him trade words with his friend, his voice rising in anger. As we drove home in silence it was clear that the party had been a financial bust. The cost of hiring the lady singer had been so high that in spite of the good turnout he hadn’t broken even. After that night my father no longer talked about making money by throwing parties or opening a club. He retreated. At home he did woodwork in the garage, weeded the garden, or fiddled with the car engine. At night he played pool at Anazeh Sands or poker at his friends’ houses.
The dance party had left me with a vague feeling of loss I couldn’t shake. It magnified at school, when Holly might ask what I did over the weekend and I would say, nothing. I told myself there was no point in socializing with the other Vietnamese kids, who went to different schools and whose parents knew each other better. The parties always went on too long anyway, ending with us kids falling asleep and pissing off our parents by clamoring to go home. Surely I could find contentment in my familiar books, markers, and construction paper while Anh hung out with her friends. That was the kind of social life I needed to cultivate: weekend afternoons at Holly’s house or Tammy’s house or Mindy’s house. School-sponsored Saturdays at the Woodland Skating Rink, where I, gawky with my glasses and braces, never once skated during “couples only,” when the DJ played songs like Billy Ocean’s “Suddenly” and REO Speedwagon’s “In My Dreams.” I liked the darkness of the rink and even though I could never skate very well or fast, I cherished the freedom of movement, of trying to fly beyond people’s range of vision.
One of the last Vietnamese events I remember attending happened a few months after the dance hall party. It was right after Tet, which had fallen on a school day. Though we’d had permission to stay home for the holiday, all of us kids had gone to school. We had recently moved to Ada, a suburb of Grand Rapids, and Tet had felt worn-down, fractured; some unnamed tension disturbed the joy of red envelopes, cha gio, and bean cakes. But that weekend, perhaps out of restlessness, Anh and I went along with our father and Noi to a party in southeast Grand Rapids. I remember I wore a mustard-colored shirt, handed down from Crissy, that still maintained an aura of her coolness, and Anh fretted over her curling-iron curls. At the party our father and Noi joined their own friends and Anh and I stood together, feeling out of place. The fact was clear: the other Vietnamese kids had been united all that time we had stayed at home. They had shared holidays and birthdays and board games. They knew each other, had grown up together, and had no need for us. They sat in a group, laughing and speaking a flurry of mixed Vietnamese and English. And at the center of them all was the daughter of Thanh Saigon Market, Tiffany née Truoc. She had grown taller, more willowy, and more beautiful than ever. She was almost tall enough not to be considered “so short,” which is the comment Anh and I were used to getting at school—“You’re so short!” followed by some tall person trying to use our head as an armrest. Tiffany-Truoc also had the benefit of a wealthy father, and thus a Swatch watch, Forenza sweater, and stone-washed Guess jeans. She flaunted them as she flaunted her own curtain of hair, shiny as a Vietnamese lady singer’s. Seeing Tiffany hold court, I realized that Anh and I had missed out on an entire system, a structure, what Rosa called community.
“Let’s just eat,” Anh murmured as we approached the long buffet tables. I thought of previous holiday parties, when we could choose from half a dozen different kinds of cha gio or banh chung, all cooked by different women who watched anxiously to see whose would be eaten first. Every time, no one’s dishes could compare to Noi’s. The other cha gio were all wrong—too thin or too thick, rolled too loosely, too much noodle, not enough shrimp, too pasty, too bland, too soggy. I once saw a woman in a canary-yellow ao dai repeatedly check on the trays she had brought: still there. Meanwhile, Noi’s cha gio, stacked in golden pyramids, disappeared. She had brought them again this time, the wrinkle and fry of them as familiar to me as my books. I heaped several on a plate, moving on to pickled vegetables, noodles, shrimp chips, and puff pastry shells stuffed with ground pork. Anh headed straight for the doughy balls stuffed with Chinese sausage and the square cakes of banh chung tied with string. We sat down in a corner of the living room, just the two of us.
Instead of digging in I looked at three girls approaching the buffet. They seemed to be about my age, and they were making jokes to each other I couldn’t understand. Their talking made my cheeks burn. Why hadn’t I practiced my Vietnamese? Why hadn’t I kept up? Each day I struggled to remember even simple words to communicate with Noi; now all I had were her cha gio. I worried that the girls at the buffet were snickering at me and Anh and calling us Twinkies—yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Was that what I had longed to achieve, after all? I remembered the defiant guys of Y White, their name a statement instead of a question. A demand. I wondered what had happened to them, if they were singing their own songs now or if they had broken up and drifted away.
Sitting next to me, Anh was unwrapping a banh chung cake, peeling the banana leaf away to unveil the familiar mass of glutinous rice the color of pale jade. She lifted it to her mouth and bit off a corner. As she chewed she held out the cake to me, raising her eyebrows to ask if I wanted a bite. I said okay. The heft of it surprised me, as always, as I grasped the cake between my fingers. I leaned in to smell the mung bean paste, which reminded me of dark, still moments in Noi’s bedroom just after her evening meditation. It occurred to me then that I was in a place that none of my friends from school would ever understand or even know. It occurred to me that I had always had choices: to go to parties or not. To call my friend Loan or not. To keep up my Vietnamese or not. To tell my friends at school, My father threw a party once and hired a lady singer and a band called Y White. I bit into the rice cake, its sticky sweetness scenting my tongue. It tasted like a secret long kept, old and familiar and unspeakable.
9
Down with Grapes
THE WORLD IS FULL OF MOTHERS.
Jennifer’s mother played the piano and made chocolate chip cookies and Kool-Aid pops.
Holly’s mother baked Jiffy muffins and packed pizza lunches and thermoses of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup.
The imperfect mothers, like Mrs. Harrison next door, worked all the time. We hardly ever saw her, but knew that the other mothers gossiped about how she had married and divorced a black man. The kids, Janie and Linc, mostly kept to themselves. With their brown skin and deaf cat, they were as freakish as we were. We liked the Harrisons because they didn’t care about their lawn, either, and didn’t care if we played in their backyard in the winter, stepping onto their property just to see our footprints in new snow.
Down the street, Kim and Becky Doornbos’s mother stayed inside all day long. Kim had long blond hair like Marcia Brady and Becky was strawberry blond. Becky was the bratty sister, while Kim spoke in whispers. They weren’t allowed to leave the vicinity of their property and only desperate boredom led Anh and me to play with them. There was something eerie about the Doornbos girls. They were odder-looking than we were, which was saying something. One time, Becky got stuck on the swing s
et rings, her thick knees refusing to slip out, and she hung there upside down, screaming and smiling at the same time. Kim just gazed at her. Mrs. Doornbos came running out, her hair still in pink curlers. “Kim, you dummy,” she rasped. “Help her out!”
Then there was Tara’s mother, who introduced me to beef Stroganoff and showed me that I had no manners.
Tara was Anh’s friend from school, but when she invited Anh to spend a day at her house during holiday break, Rosa insisted that I had to be invited as well. I was seven years old then and still followed my sister everywhere. That early afternoon Tara and her mother picked us up in their blue Cherokee. They had matching honey-brown bob haircuts and down jackets. Their car had no dog smells, no Burger King wrappers on the floor, no sticky cans of 7UP rolling around in the back. As we drove to Studio 28 to see a showing of the Cinderella movie, Tara and her mother sang along to a tape of Disney songs. At the theater, Tara’s mother bought us pop, bags of popcorn, and M&M’s. The generosity shamed me. On the rare occasion that my parents took us to a movie they smuggled candy and cans of RC and Vernors in Rosa’s massive purse.
Stealing Buddha's Dinner Page 10