I was thrilled when Laura slapped her sister Mary. She had a good reason. Mary was showing off her blond hair, letting Laura know that it was the prettiest of all and that no one cared for brown hair like Laura’s. It was a dull, dirt brown, Laura admitted, and knowing it “swelled her throat tight.” So she slapped Mary, and that’s when I thought, I could like this girl. The older Laura grew, the smarter, sassier, and more likable she became. She, too, has a blond-haired nemesis, Nellie Oleson, who sniffs at her and calls her “country folk.” And Laura never stints on food. The scraping of butter on a dry slice of toast merits her attention as much as a holiday feast of roasted jackrabbit, bread-and -onion stuffing, rich brown gravy, and dried-apple pie. She loves lettuce leaves sprinkled with sugar, cold cottage cheese balls, and the first spring chicken, fried and served with creamed potatoes and new peas. She glories in a birthday party where the hostess served oyster soup, fried mashed potato cakes, hot creamy codfish balls, and white cake with a whole orange for each guest. When she describes a barrel of lemonade, the “lemon slices floating thick” in cold, sweetened well water, I longed to try out the communal dipper, all the better to wash down Ma’s bread-and-butter sandwiches and Pa’s “boughten” treat of smoked herring.
Farmer Boy, which follows Almanzo Wilder’s boyhood in New York State, goes even crazier with food. Where the Ingallses count pennies and ration potatoes, the prosperous Wilders eat hearty piles of meat and beans every night. The breadth of their everyday breakfasts astound: thick oatmeal covered with cream, sausage cakes, pancakes and syrup, fried potatoes, jellies, preserves, and bread, and slices of apple pie with melted cheese. The lunch pail the Wilder children bring to school holds delectable bread and butter and sausages, fresh apples, doughnuts, and spiced apple turnovers. At dinner, Almanzo can count on ham or roast beef or chicken pie, mashed potatoes with gravy, baked beans with a bit of “quivering” salt pork, mashed turnips and stewed pumpkin, watermelon pickles and jelly and bread and butter, and bird’s nest pudding with spiced cream poured right over it. Then, after evening chores are done, the family sits cozily together munching apples, cider, doughnuts, and freshly popped popcorn. The girls do embroidery work or read from the newspaper; the boys grease their shoes and whittle. Mother Wilder knits jackets and caps. Her hands—like all good mothers’ hands—never cease moving. On Sundays everyone eats stacks of her pancakes, richly layered with butter and maple sugar, and looks forward to chicken pie after church. At Christmas, the family table includes roasted goose with “edges of dressing curling out,” a suckling pig with an apple stuck in its mouth, candied carrots, fried apples and onions, all manner of mashed parsnips, squash, and potatoes, and an assortment of fruit preserves and pickles and jelly to go with corn-bread and wheat bread and light white bread. Waiting for his serving, Almanzo laments: “Spoons ate up the clear cranberry jelly, and gouged deep into the mashed potatoes, and ladled away the brown gravies.” Then, of course, there are fruitcakes and pies—apple, mincemeat, custard, pumpkin, and vinegar. In my favorite Garth Williams illustration in Farmer Boy, Almanzo is cramming his mouth with a giant forkful of food while half a ham and a pie sit nearby, ready to be devoured. Almanzo is hungry on nearly every page of the book, and his hunger matches his ambition to be a better farmer, and thus breadwinner, than anyone else. And so he is depicted as the right companion for Laura. He knows how to raise the finest horses and grow the fattest pumpkins; he knows how to make buckwheat pancakes soaked in molasses and butter. He knows the value of food, and risks his life to go after a crop of wheat in the middle of the Hard Winter, to keep the town of De Smet from starving.
Laura was born in the Big Woods of Wisconsin in 1867, a few years before the Ingalls family began their migration westward. They lived in parts of Missouri, Kansas (Indian Territory), Minnesota, and Iowa before settling in Dakota Territory (De Smet, South Dakota) in 1879. Like her father, Laura has an itchy wandering foot, a desire to keep pushing on to see what lands lie beyond the horizon. But sensible, strict Ma, a former school-teacher, had long ago made her husband promise to settle down so her girls could get an education and become teachers, too. Ma and Mary frequently got on my nerves. They were so ladylike all the time, so disciplined about chore time. My dislike for Ma was cemented in her dislike of Indians, whom she called “howling savages.” I knew that if I had lived in De Smet she would never have let Laura consort with me. Still, I tried to keep in mind Ma’s good points. She was, for instance, a domestic goddess. She could stew rabbit and dumplings over an open fire in the middle of a prairie, braid straw hats, and sew complicated dresses and dolls with ease and expertise. During the Hard Winter of 1880 she contrives sustenance from their dwindling supply of flour, beans, and potatoes, saving a morsel of salted cod to break the monotony of plain brown bread. For dinner, which meant lunch, Ma might cook up a hot bean soup, flavored with a bit of salt pork. Then she’d drain the beans, lace them with molasses, and set them in the oven with the same salt pork to make baked beans for supper.
Ma had the cooking skills, but I preferred Pa Ingalls’s company. He could hunt birds, rabbits, and deer; he could make fish traps; he knew just what it meant to see that muskrats had built themselves an extra-thick home for winter. Pa has an intuitive understanding of geography, climate, and behavior. He gets along with Indians, too, and Little House on the Prairie makes clear that his friendship with the Osage chief Soldat du Chene is the only thing that saves the family and the other settlers in the area from being killed. While Mary is Ma’s daughter, Laura is Pa’s. Together they find fright and fascination in wolves and wild animals. They ponder buffalo wallows, watch the laying of westward train rails, and make fast friends with the tobacco-spitting “Tennessee wildcat” Mr. Edwards.
Every time the Ingallses move they have to break new sod and start a new farm from scratch. So the family has to rely, increasingly, on salt pork bought from a store in town. Salt pork is always described as fatty and white, “held down in brine.” It represents both failure and prosperity: a failure to produce a hardy, self-sustaining farm that included fresh pork; a prosperity that allowed the purchase of meat from the store. Bacon was one of my favorite foods; I liked it super crisp, the grease perfuming my hands. After I read the Little House books I began to pretend that bacon was salt pork and that I was Laura herself. She was short and small like me, and she savored every last touch of the salt on her tongue. Such a moment might be her only pleasure of the day. I imagined she secretly longed for meals to last and for the salt pork slices never to end, that she fantasized about frying a few slices just for herself in the middle of the day, watching the white fat darken.
But gluttony was a sin, and nothing was worse than wasted food, which was wasted work. A pioneer in a covered wagon had to keep a careful eye on the provisions, gauge how much to eat and how much to save for the rutted path ahead. The goal of settling was farming, creating an independent cycle of crops, livestock, and vegetable gardens. The Ingallses struggle against storms, bad weather, stubborn soil, even plagues of grasshoppers, always trying to pull ahead and usually getting pushed back. Which is why a long day of plowing the fields could be brightened by a spoonful of ginger flavoring the water jug. The troubles garnered by a too-small crop could be forgotten for an evening with a surprise pie made from green pumpkin.
In many ways, their pioneer life reminded me of immigrant life. As they search for new homesteads, they, too, experience isolation and the scramble for shelter, food, work, and a place to call home. In the opening scene of Little House on the Prairie the Ingallses say good-bye to their family in Wisconsin, and the finality is chilling. They don’t know if they will ever see each other again. Without mail or telephones, the rest of the family is left wondering for months what happened—if they survived, if they were okay, where they had ended up. The book’s quiet description of good-byes belies the great anxiety of westward migration. As the Ingallses travel in their wagon, looking for their last stop, they meet settlers from Norway, Sweden, Germany. �
��They’re good neighbours, ” Pa says. “But I guess our kind of folks is pretty scarce.” Yet these European immigrant families would one day cease to be foreign and become “our kind of folks.” Like the Ingallses, they would blend in, become American, eventually refer to their ancestry as something fond and distant. “Trust a Scotchwoman to manage,” Pa says admiringly of Ma. The children of European immigrants would be able to answer the question “Where are you from?” with “Out East,” or “Wisconsin,” or “Minnesota,” and no one would say, “No, I mean where are you really from?”
The Ingallses were the epitome of American. They memorized the Declaration of Independence, knew an inexhaustible number of hymns and American folk songs, and took pride in being “free and independent.” They had big, “Westward Ho!” ideas about migration, property, and ownership. They built homes everywhere they landed, frying up salt pork in their iron skillet in hand-built hearths across the plains. They had such confidence in the building, such righteous belief in the idea of home, in the right to land, in the life of farming.
As I grew older, I had an increasingly uneasy time reading the books. The Ingallses were a pious group; they loved church, knew the Bible inside and out, and sometimes reminded me uncomfortably of the Vander Wals and all the other hard-core Christians I had encountered in Grand Rapids. Then there was the issue of racism. Not just Ma Ingalls’s hatred of Indians, which persisted no matter what Pa said. In Little House in the Big Woods the family sings a song about “a little darky.” In Little Town on the Prairie Pa and a group of men folk put on blackface and perform a vaudeville show for the town. “Look at those darkies’ feet,” they sing, prancing around stage. “Those darkies can’t be beat!” I knew that people like me would also have been considered outcasts, heathens, and strangers; we didn’t even count.
In a way, it makes sense that I would become enamored with a literature so symbolic of manifest destiny and white entitlement. I didn’t have any nonwhite literature, anyway, to know what else I could become. My favorite books, the ones I gravitated to, were as white or as Anglo as a person could get. Though my relationship with the Ingalls family and other white characters grew complicated, I had a strong reserve of denial, an ability to push away the unpleasant parts. For I had created, if somewhat unknowingly, a group portrait of protagonists—girls I wished I could be. Girls as capable as Laura Ingalls, as talented as Jo March, as smart and privileged as Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy.
Harriet Welsch spent all of her time taking notes on people. She listened at windows and doors and hid in dumbwaiters, putting together profiles of people in her neighborhood—the rich and ridiculous Agatha K. Plumber, the cat-loving Harrison Withers, the always-hungry delivery boy at the Dei Santi grocery who could eat pounds of cheese, bread, and tomatoes in one sitting. Harriet wanted to be a writer, and had stacks of notebooks filled with her uncensored, critical thoughts about everyone she met or saw. As the only child to rich parents, Harriet had her own room and bathroom. She had a governess, Ole Golly, to look after her, and a cook to feed her cake and milk every day after school. In short, Harriet had an envied life, and part of that came from her freedom to write. I tried to capture that same independence. Because Harriet loved tomato sandwiches, describing how her mouth watered at the thought of the creamy mayonnaise and ripe red tomatoes, I tried to like them, too. When I wrote like Harriet, I took pleasure in the release of opinions and the scrawling of thoughts that could not be said out loud for fear of getting laughed at, teased, or in trouble. These entries ranged from hating my sister for taking the last Chicken Coop drumstick to wondering if unicorns existed somewhere, and if they did, what it would be like to have one.
I kept a pure diary of unfettered thoughts—in which the risk of another reader isn’t present—for about a week, which was about the time it took my sisters and stepmother to locate and read what I had written. Rosa frequently searched our bedroom dressers to read our diaries, which she herself had given us for Christmas, not even pretending to conceal her intentions. She believed that everything we did and wrote was hers, since we lived under her roof; she was worried that if she didn’t monitor us we would become wayward and bad. She often spoke vaguely of “bad girls” and how important it was not to become one of them.
Anh and Crissy were often bored enough to dip into my diary, too, and enjoyed laughing at my fanciful unicorn dreams and bitter thoughts about clothes and dinners I couldn’t have. I knew I had to either stop keeping a diary altogether or find a way to keep a truly private one. The former wouldn’t hold—I was too restless and introverted—and the latter proved impossible. In such a small house, no hiding place could go undiscovered. I slid the diary between shirts in my dresser, pushed it inside my pillowcase, tucked it under the fitted sheet that nestled against the wall. Inevitably Anh, Crissy, or Rosa would find the diary or catch me pulling it out. My next stop was to foil them. Stop reading my diary and go away! I wrote in block letters on the first full page. I filled the next several pages with fake entries—dull ramblings about sledding and snow, descriptions of what my dolls were doing with their afternoons. Then I turned the book upside down and flipped to the back to write my real entries. But my stepmother and sisters were as persistent as I was. Harriet, I knew, would have understood my pain; when her classmates discovered her notebooks they ostracized her.
But at least Harriet had a pretty bedroom all her own. Her house was big enough to have a library and a grand sweeping staircase. After her spy route Harriet would go to her favorite soda fountain and order a ten-cent egg cream. She had the kind of wealth and privilege I wished that I could take for granted. Her father worked in television and used the word fink a lot. Her mother was slender and attractive and left a romantic trail of perfume when she went off to a party, while Harriet stayed at home with the wise, intuitive Ole Golly, who quoted Whitman and Wordsworth and knew how to cook lobster thermidor.
It was a wonderful suspension of self to pretend to be Harriet and immerse myself in her New York life. But I knew she was as out of reach as Laura Ingalls. I could never have a socialite mother like Mrs. Welsch, or an expert in domesticity like Ma Ingalls, or even someone like Mrs. Quimby, who worked a part-time job and sympathized with her daughter’s desires and frustrations. Certainly a mother as upstanding and goddesslike as Marmee March was out of the question. Reading these books was the same as reading fantasy. Girls like Jennifer Vander Wal and Holly Jansen could legitimately pretend to be Anne of Green Gables or Jo March, but a Vietnamese girl like me could never even have lived near them. Nonetheless, drawn to what I could not have, I kept seeking out landscapes in which I could not have existed. Deep down, I thought I could prove that I could be a more thorough and competent white girl than any of the white girls I knew. I gave my dolls and stuffed animals names like Polly, Vanessa, Elspeth, and Anastasia. I pursued all the British books on the library’s Literature shelf, working to understand the language and cadence of Great Expectations, The Return of the Native, and Pride and Prejudice, though I often came away feeling moody and dissatisfied, a cloud coming over the landscape of my imagination. I spent several months trying to speak in a British accent—modeling it on Julie Andrews’s in Mary Poppins and Hayley Mills’s in Pollyanna—and used it at home whenever my sisters spoke to me. I made myself over into the whitest girl possible. No doubt this contributed to the quick erosion of my Vietnamese. I thought if I could know inside and out how my heroines lived and what they ate and what they loved—Harriet in New York, Laura in Dakota, Jo March in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Bennet in England—I could be them, too. I could read my way out of Grand Rapids.
12
Holiday Tamales
MY STEPMOTHER GOT HER HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION photo taken a year after she started college. In the picture, her face is framed by a coiffed ’do that curves in big commas at her jawline. Her lips and cheeks have been shaded pink in the style of the time and you can tell she’s the kind of girl who wears cat-eye glasses strung on a chain around he
r neck. What was it like? I used to ask Rosa about growing up in Fruitport, going to high school in the sixties and having nine brothers and sisters. If she felt like answering, she’d describe a life that I had imagined only from books: feeding chickens, washing dirty clothes with a handheld scrub board, having no electricity or running water for years. She’d had a formal picture taken in her senior year of high school but couldn’t bear how she looked in her handmade, made-over outfit. So after she had attended a year at Grand Valley State she sat for the real portrait, the image of herself she wanted to capture.
The drive from Grand Rapids to Fruitport takes about forty-five minutes, but when I was a kid it seemed to last an entire day. Nothing in the landscape changed—just the same birch and pine trees planted in the median, the same green exit signs pointing the way to the towns like Nunica and Holland. I knew that Lake Michigan lay just beyond Fruitport, tantalizingly near yet nowhere in sight. My siblings and I clamored to go to the beach at P. J. Hoffmaster State Park and my father dreamed about speed-boats, but we only visited the lake during summer trips to see Rosa’s family. Vinh’s birth had brought her back into the fold, and just like that our family grew. Crissy jumped in with open arms—they were her blood, after all—but Anh and I hesitated, overwhelmed by the great number of people we were suddenly supposed to claim as our aunts, uncles, and cousins. My father appeared to endure the visits with unusual quietude. Noi and my uncles almost always stayed home. We were, from the beginning, divided.
Rosa’s parents, Juan and Maria, had both grown up in Texas—Juan in San Antonio, Maria in Brownsville. They met on the migrant trail, working their way up to Michigan for the cherry and sugarbeet seasons. Maria had entered a convent at thirteen, but left three years later, when her mother died in childbirth, to take care of her six younger siblings. As the oldest, her role as matriarch began early. After she and Juan married and began to have kids he took a job as a toquero in Saginaw. He drove truckloads of fruit and vegetables from the farms to the distributors, and his easy translations between English and Spanish, along with his affable manner, made him an ideal go-between to negotiate wages and terms. Rosa was still a little girl when the family settled in Fruitport, where her father started working at a foundry. Finally, the family began building their house. There were ten kids now and they spent that first year in the basement, the only part of the house that was done. They had no electricity yet, so the days stretched out dark and dank. They used hurricane lamps and propane heaters. Maria cooked over the portable gas stove she had used for years in the migrant camps. Slowly Juan finished the rest of the house, a long ranch style on a few acres of wooded land. It had electricity and a real bathroom—no more bathing on Saturdays in a tin tub with water pumped by hand and heated on the stove. But washing clothes was still a dreaded chore: scrub the dirtiest clothes on the tin scrub board; put the rest of the clothes through the washer-wringer, twice; clip everything to dry on the clotheslines outside; carefully iron and fold. Rosa’s mother sewed almost all of her children’s clothes, and what she couldn’t make herself she bought at secondhand stores.
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