Stealing Buddha's Dinner

by Bich Minh Nguyen

  One day Jennifer invited her best friends from school, Amy and Rachel, to play with us. They were also in the Agapaopolis chorus, and after a practice session—Jennifer loved to be the stand-in for Susie—we played four square in the Vander Wals’ driveway. As we bounced a basketball back and forth to each other we compared notes on Clearbrook Christian versus Ken-O -Sha Elementary. At Clearbrook, the girls informed me, everyone liked Dandy Bars and only Jell-O brand pudding cups would do. “We like Swiss Miss,” I lied, citing the cheaper brand that my stepmother sometimes bought. Rachel, a tall girl with a close crop of brassy curls, said, “What’s your favorite song? We like ‘There’s Always Something There to Remind Me.’”

  “I have the Thriller record,” I bragged, though really it was Anh’s, paid for with some of her birthday money. Jennifer had disobeyed her parents when she listened to it, admiring the glow of Michael Jackson’s white cuffs on the album cover. Her parents screened every element of media for possible dirtiness; they were suspicious of videos, music with good beats, and anything that might be associated with break dancing. Though my parents had their own worries about dirty music, they couldn’t help liking Michael Jackson and his excellent dance moves.

  “Wanna go listen to it?” I asked. “We can watch videos, too.”

  “Can we?” Amy asked, looking to her friends for guidance.

  “I have records we can listen to,” Jennifer said. I knew she meant the Christian ballads her parents collected for her. She always upped the moral ante around her Clearbrook friends. “Anyway, I want to practice Agapaopolis again.”

  “You should see the ‘Billie Jean’ video,” I said to Amy and Rachel. “It’s totally awesome.”

  “We’re not supposed to listen to that song,” Rachel said primly, sending the basketball in my direction. “It goes against the Lord.”

  I bounced it back. “How do you know?”

  “You just know, just like you know the power of the Lord.”

  “Not everybody knows,” Jennifer burst out contemptuously. “Some people aren’t even baptized and they’re going to hell.”

  I threw the ball with greater force, sending Amy scrambling after it. When she tossed it back I held the ball, pausing the game. I couldn’t stop myself from speaking. “If there’s a God he can strike me down right now,” I said. The girls shrank back and exchanged looks. They waited, perhaps for God to indeed strike me down. For just a moment I waited, too. The cloud puffs in the blue sky shifted a little. A breeze rippled the leaves of the Vander Wals’ birch tree, whose bark Jennifer and I had often peeled off to use as paper for our notes. I knew I would have to go home after this, leave Jennifer and her friends to their Kool-Aid and cookies, their dolls and their gossip, their Agapaopolis. Later, after Jennifer had had time to think the day over, she would tell me that God is forgiving. That He would give me so many chances to reach out to Him if only I just would.

  When the premiere of Agapaopolis arrived, I declined Jennifer’s invitation to come along to the church and watch. In spite of my curiosity to see the hated girl who played Susie, and to see the production whose songs I had practiced for weeks, I didn’t want to sit in the audience with the rest of the Vander Wal family, surrounded by other Christians. I would be too outnumbered, the obvious outsider, nonbeliever, the black-haired possible devil.

  Maybe because I was surrounded by so much Christianity, I often regarded Buddha as a stand-in for God. I prayed to him many times for things I wanted: Top 40 albums, new shoes, chocolate cake. I prayed for miracles, too: twenty-twenty vision, a pretty face, big bank accounts for my parents. Whenever God was cited—in the Pledge of Allegiance or on coins—in my mind I substituted the word Buddha.

  I prayed often during that Agapaopolis summer. As I ate ice cream sandwiches from Gas City or filched my favorite blue-hued Otter Pops from the freezer, I would pray for Rosa to realize she should buy me as many sweets as I liked. I prayed for prettier clothes, more money, my own bedroom filled with books and records and tapes. It was a summer of Laura Branigan’s “Solitaire, ” the Police warning us about every breath we took, and David Bowie murmuring “shhhh” to his little China Girl. Crissy was off with her forbidden friends while Anh and I roamed, restless, turning up the radio whenever WGRD played Culture Club and Duran Duran. We played four square, Life, and pickle with Jennifer and our brothers. We watched MTV, wishing we could be as cool as Martha Quinn. All the while I prayed, yet none of my prayers were answered. I woke up with the same blurry vision, the same flat face punctured by the two dimples I hated, the same shortness that made tall people’s elbows a constant danger.

  So I decided to take it one step further. It was time to tempt Buddha’s wrath and see what happened.

  One late afternoon when Noi was out watering the garden, I slipped into her room. The day had gotten sticky with humidity, and the brightness of the outdoors made everything inside feel dim. I could tell it was going to be one of those nights when my siblings and I would sleep in the basement to stay cool. I didn’t know where everyone was to make the house so empty: Vinh probably playing Transformers somewhere with Jennifer’s brother; Anh hanging out at a friend’s house; Crissy with her friends, maybe smoking in the parking lot behind Ken-O-Sha; my uncles at their jobs; my father at North American Feather; Rosa working downtown at the Hispanic Institute. For once, I was practically alone in the house.

  As I studied the altar, I realized that fruit was all that Buddha had to eat. Except for holidays it was the same thing day in and day out—lunch was dinner, dinner was breakfast. My father had tried to explain that Buddha believed in simplicity and having as few things as possible. So I guessed that he was okay with just fruit—maybe he even preferred it. I couldn’t comprehend that. Looking up at Buddha I wanted to ask, That’s all? I didn’t know what it was not to want.

  For I could hardly name all the different meals I wished to have. Dinners of sirloin tips and Shake ’n Bake. Beef Stroganoff and shepherd’s pie. Jeno’s pizzas and thermoses of SpaghettiOs. Great squares of Jell-O bouncing through the air as they did in the commercials; Bundt cakes; chocolate parfaits; rounds of crusty lattice-topped pies. I wanted all the dinners from Little House on the Prairie, all those biscuits and salt pork, grease seeping into the fried potatoes. I wanted every packaged and frozen dinner from the grocery store: Noodle Roni, Hamburger Helper, Hungry Man, Stouffer’s, Swanson, and Banquet. All the trays with separate compartments for Salisbury steak, whipped potatoes, and peas. I wanted to take it all, hoard it, hide it away. If I were a spirit, I would fill myself with meals culled from the city around me. People in their pretty houses would sit down to dinners of nothing. They would take their eyes off their plates for just one second and the food would be gone. They would open their refrigerators: empty. Their pantries would be cleaned out. Cupboards bare, the doors swinging open to emphasize the blank space. I would take from restaurants: Brann’s, Big Boy, Charley’s Crab—all the white American meals I longed to try. If I were a spirit, I would eat more than enough to get me through the night.

  In Noi’s room the shades were closed against the sun. The air smelled of her favorite sandalwood incense. I sat on the bed for a moment, listening to the quiet of the house. The heat pressed in on me and I shut my eyes, trying to meditate. But I could think of nothing but the altar. The burnished statue of Buddha rose above me. His always closed eyes, his gown of glimmering folds. He was nothing like the fat, happy Buddha statue we had in the basement. That Buddha, dyed a festive red, had an open mouth and eyes squished up in laughter. He sat with one knee raised, showing off his potbelly, not at all resembling this smooth Buddha with his face of radiant calm.

  I leaned in close to take in the gazes of my grandfather and great-grandmother. How far these pictures had traveled to come back to us. My father had said the spirits of our ancestors could find us anywhere. In between their photographs two trays held plums, nectarines, and bananas in near-pyramids of offering. An afternoon snack for my ancestors, a dinner for Bud
dha.

  With one fingertip I touched the stem of a plum, whose violet skin always looked dusty. For just a moment, I hovered over it. Then the fruit was lying in the flat of my hand. I looked up at Buddha. His eyes were still closed. Sometimes, when we wanted to scare each other, Anh and I talked about how one day Buddha’s eyes would fly open, shooting out beams of light. I waited a minute longer, until I heard the sound of the basement door opening and sliding shut. Then I ran out of the room, pushing the plum into my shorts pocket as I hurried out the front door.

  I crossed our yard to the Vander Wals’—Jennifer must have been at vacation Bible school—and shimmied up their plum tree. How many times had Jennifer and I sat up here among the leaves, dreaming up one of our clubs? In the full bloom of summer the leaf-thick limbs took us in and kept us hidden. I settled into my usual spot, where two sturdy branches seemed to create a lounge chair just right for my size. I pulled Buddha’s plum from my pocket and examined it as I had when my sister and I were little, marveling at the mystery of fruit. I looked for some answer in its skin but found nothing. The guilt I felt was the same as shame. I knew that this was where the test would end—me in the tree with the stolen plum. My father had said that Buddha had given up all possessions of his royal birth and become enlightened. Buddha never claimed to be a god. He could not be tested. He had no wrath. He granted no miracles or wishes. He asked me to prove nothing.

  As I sat in the Vander Wals’ tree, Christianity seemed about as real as Agapaopolis. It seemed as distant from my person as blond hair and blue eyes. It also seemed manipulative, what with all that fire and hell. When Jennifer talked about the Lord it was with equal parts love and fear. Noi didn’t fear, or even really love, Buddha. She didn’t worship him; she gave him her respect. That showed in the way we slept with our heads facing him and in the fruit, incense, and candles set forth each day. When she bowed and chanted she wasn’t praying out of fear, or to save herself, or to ask for something good to happen for her. The Christians were God’s minions, but Noi was not Buddha’s.

  I bit into the plum. I was struck, as always, by the contrast of the yellow flesh, limned with the scarlet underside of the skin. I took small bites so as not to waste a drop of juice. Too soon, the fruit was gone and the pit lay in my palm. It was an eye, I realized. A wrinkled, wizened eye. I thought about how the spirits were always watching out for us. They were never too far away. I set the eye on a branch where I could face it, and it me. I sat there for a long time. I heard the sound of Linda Vander Wal’s car leaving and then returning, bringing Jennifer back from Bible school. I listened to the car doors slam and the murmur of their voices, the screen door shutting them into their house. The daylight began to glow—that quiescent hour before the beginning of sunset—and I knew it was time to go home. I left the plum’s eye in the plum tree. It was gone the next time I climbed up there. I imagined it carried off by the wind, or by my ancestors’ spirits, coming to collect the meager offering I had left behind.

  14

  Ponderosa

  WHEN WE LIVED ON FLORENCE STREET, GOING OUT TO dinner meant one of two places: Yen Ching or Chi-Chi’s. We never went to Bob Evans, Big Boy, Perkins, Schelde’s, or the Ground Round, all of which sounded bland, Rosa said. Too American. They were the kinds of places that served prime rib specials. My friend Holly knew all about it. In her basement we played waitresses with menus from Bill Knapp’s, a white clap-board restaurant with “ye olde English” lettering, faux-wrought-iron sconces, and early-bird and family specials. I’d never been to Bill Knapp’s, and trusted Holly’s understanding of twice-baked potatoes and smothered chicken. We took imaginary customers’ orders and balanced trays of plastic toys that we pretended were salads and steaks.

  When it came to American restaurants, my parents seemed to approve only of the low and the high—fast food and expensive seafood. One to get, the other to dream about. When we drove past Charley’s Crab downtown, its façade of broad windows lit up with a giant neon crab, all of it thoroughly out of reach, my father would murmur an ahhh sound. Good seafood was a link to Vietnam for my father, uncles, and Noi. In the Midwest, it was also a luxury.

  Yen Ching still sits near Woodland Mall on 28th Street, with the same yellow and red exterior and pagoda-ish roof. Its sign bears the standard “Asian” font—choppy strokes to evoke kung fu and calligraphy—and the menu has chop suey for non-Asians to order. Back then it was a closed-off place, part of the separate world I kept from my friends at school. It was also like the feeling of having a secret lover. Yen Ching had a dark interior, glamorous red-fringed lanterns, silkscreen artwork on the walls, and Confucian calendars printed on the place mats. If you were born in the Year of the Tiger, the place mats said, you were bold and ferocious. Tigers made excellent matadors and race car drivers. Beethoven, Eisenhower, and Marilyn Monroe—all tigers!

  If we were lucky we got to sit at one of the round tables with a lazy Susan in the middle, better for sharing the dishes of shrimp, chicken with snow peas, cashew chicken, sweet and sour pork, and Mongolian beef, plus egg drop soup and egg rolls for all. Crissy, who to this day will not touch a bite of seafood, could eat the entire platter of beef by herself, barely letting me snatch a spoonful of the sweet, soft meat and the strings of caramelized onion. I always sat next to Noi, who snapped up choice bits of pineapple, cashew, and chicken with her chopsticks and deposited them on my plate. She was comfortable in a place like Yen Ching, where the rice arrived perfectly steamed and the menu listed more than a dozen versions of shrimp and fish. She ate the way Vietnamese ate, with the rice bowl close to her mouth. The slurp of soup and suck of shrimp shells—these were the sounds of a good meal. I didn’t think anything wrong with it until I noticed Crissy wrinkling up her whole face in disgust.

  Crissy preferred Chi-Chi’s and so did Rosa, though she’d grown up eating real tortillas handmade before dawn, frijoles simmered for hours, and pico de gallo spiked with fresh cilantro and bracing chilies. I liked Chi-Chi’s for the buoyed feeling of family togetherness I felt whenever we went there, all of us trying to consume as much as possible of the free chips and salsa. Rosa lingered over the menu, pronouncing all the words emphatically. “Do you want a tos TAAHHdah,” Anh and I would mimic her, dissolving into giggles. “How about a FLOOUUta?” We had to choose from the dreaded children’s menu, limited as all such menus were, with its meager assortment of tacos and burritos.

  My father always liked the steak and chicken fajitas, which arrived sizzling in a cast-iron pan. The thin, wafery tortillas came from a plastic warmer made to look like a terra-cotta crock. Noi didn’t care for Chi-Chi’s, though she’d take a few bites of the dry Mexican rice. But surely she, too, was charmed by the restaurant’s dimmed lighting, faux-stucco walls, and potted plants with giant fronds. The candles glowing in resin holders on every table made the place seem downright fancy. The waitresses, wearing big Mexican dresses that ruffled off the shoulder and down to the ankle in dramatic flounces, swooshed around us with their trays. I sometimes wished Rosa could give up her job at the Hispanic Institute and work at Chi-Chi’s instead.

  It was an arrangement that worked for a while—Yen Ching, Chi-Chi’s, fast food. At home, Noi did most of the cooking and Rosa chipped in with sopa and tacos. We can be a nice family, I wrote in my diary, an uncertain declaration.

  If I had to pinpoint a time, a year of change, I would begin in 1984. The year of Like a Virgin and Purple Rain, Crissy’s first boyfriends, Brownie troop, The Karate Kid, and a new mini-air-hockey table purchased for our basement. And my father and Rosa, quarreling, expanding the fissures in the plate tectonics of our household.

  That summer, the Kentwood Public Library gave out free lunch vouchers to Denny’s anytime a kid checked out a book. The meal options were spaghetti, hot dog, hamburger, grilled cheese sandwich. To Rosa the vouchers were like gold. She never took us to the library, or out to lunch, as often as she did that summer. In fact she was around a lot more than usual, though it took me a while to noti
ce the sighing, tired look on her face.

  I thought I would never get tired of Denny’s, but after only a few weeks I grew irritated at the watery spaghetti noodles and unwavering menu. Rosa kept us going there anyway, determined not to waste free food. She was keeping a closer eye on us now, scaring Crissy’s boyfriend Kenny away from the house and monitoring what we watched on TV. She was often around when my father wasn’t. At night when he came home—from work or from seeing his friends—we all seemed to scatter. It was a small house, but there was a lot of different music playing in different rooms. My uncles liked the Born in the USA album. Crissy was getting into Ratt, Van Halen, the Violent Femmes, and anything with a punk edge, which meant the rest of us kids were getting into it, too. At the same time, Anh danced on her own to “The Glamorous Life,” aspiring to be Sheila E. I liked dopey ballads and narrative videos on MTV: “Time after Time,” “Love Is a Battlefield,” “Beat It,” and “Legs.” I liked how Cyndi Lauper stared forlornly out a train window and how Pat Benatar swung her shoulders at a pimp in a bar. I pretended to dance my way down a street, breaking up a knife fight; then, under the supervision of ZZ Top and their trio of women, I would be transformed from a demure girl into a vampy coquette with stiletto heels.