Stealing Buddha's Dinner

by Bich Minh Nguyen

  I remained a stranger or a ghost, something in between. Binh weaved expertly through traffic on the way to Newton, while in the backseat I struggled for conversation. In the end, I left without my mother ever knowing where I lived, or how I had chosen my apartment in Ann Arbor because it was located on Ingalls Street. She didn’t know my major, or the hours I spent combing through the library stacks to find obscure research for my English papers. I didn’t know how to describe these things. Our conversations were rudimentary. Do you like school? Yes. Do you get good grades? Yes. That’s good. And then me saying: Do you like Boston? Yes. Me, too. It was as though we were practicing language conversations out of a workbook.

  In the end, I realized that I had never had fantasies of meeting my mother. On soap operas I had seen people reuniting with great cries and splashing tears. They would run at each other at full speed across a giant meadow or parking lot or airport. I never imagined this for myself. Nothing about my mother spoke to my idea of fantasy. To me, growing up in Grand Rapids, fantasy meant ruffled canopy beds, pink teddy bears, a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies sitting on a desk beside a new pile of books. I had always known that whoever my mother was, she was not the stuff of fantasies. She was, on the contrary, the stuff of too much reality. And I had avoided that reality—my whole family had—for years. In the end, I realized how easy it had been for my father and Rosa to stay silent, to keep the walls of our family boundaries intact.

  In the hypothetical, you think of how much you will have to say, how the questions will just flow and flow, trying to cover the years of separation. You think all you’ll want to do is get to know the mother you have never met. But in the end you are left with an oil-stained bag containing a Buddha-shaped mooncake. I am left with that cake. And I could not eat it. I carried it back to my hotel and stuffed it into my suitcase. I brought it back to my Ann Arbor apartment before finally throwing it into the trash. Buddha’s face had smudged against the paper, blurred with grease.

  Two months later, Anh and I decided to send a gift of baby clothes to our mother. In the backs of our minds we awaited word of our new sister’s arrival, but no news came. That Thanksgiving in Grand Rapids, I mentioned this to my father and stepmother. Though we had become a little more open with each other by then, less afraid to face the complications of our family, I was glad that they had never asked me about meeting my mother in Boston. Oh, Rosa said in a no-nonsense voice, she lost the baby. She had gone into premature labor in her seventh month, and the baby was dead before Anh and I had ever mailed her the clothes we had picked out from Baby Gap. It was just one of the things my parents shelved and didn’t get around to telling us.

  It was early May in Saigon, 1975, a few days after the city’s fall, when my mother returned to the house where my father, Anh, and I had lived with Noi. I imagined her opening the door and feeling, instantly, the emptiness. The smell of it—notes of incense and jasmine tea. She stumbled back out in the narrow street. A man sitting in his doorway called out to her. They’re gone. They went to America. She didn’t believe him. Maybe they left you a note, he said. He was bored; the whole day lay in front of him. She went back into the house to look again for the note that wasn’t there. She got down on her knees to examine the floor, but found only dust. She left our house slowly, the shock so clear on her face that the neighbor leaned forward to repeat the news to her —They’re gone —as if she were hard of hearing. They went to America.

  In the end, I left my questions unanswered. I couldn’t comprehend the loss, the nearly twenty years’ absence, the silence and unknowing, the physical distance literally impossible to break. I didn’t know what to say to make anything different. I didn’t know what to do with so many years between us. In the end, my mother and her family drove me to the hotel in Newton, Massachusetts. I got out of the car. We hugged our good-byes. My mother assessed me up and down, as she had a few hours earlier, and pronounced me too skinny in the way that Vietnamese women do. When she touched me I felt the cool of her jade bracelet on my skin. They walked me to the door of the hotel and let me go, waiting until I had pushed beyond the revolving door into the lobby. I turned to see them once more—my half-sister and her husband, my niece and nephew, and my mother. They waved and smiled as if I were going down the jetway to an airplane and a long, long flight out of there. I walked to the bank of elevators. In the end, I left my mother all over again.

  16

  Cha Gio

  I WENT TO VIETNAM WITH NOI AND MY UNCLE CHU Anh in the spring of 1997. My father wouldn’t go because he was afraid of flying. “If you don’t get on a plane you’ll never get to see Vietnam again,” I said, stating the obvious. “Oh, I don’t know,” he replied in an offhand way, which meant that he didn’t care to discuss it. I had originally planned to go by myself—I had received a grad school travel grant—but when my father recruited his sensible brother to look out for me, I realized that I didn’t want to go to Vietnam without Noi. We made a plan to start in Saigon and work our way north to Hanoi. There, Noi would be able to reunite with her siblings whom she hadn’t seen since 1954.

  The moment we arrived in Saigon, bleary and dazed after nearly twenty-four hours of travel, we encountered the fierce heat that would press on us for the next four weeks. It was May, and the air was thick with the humidity of the incipient rainy season. Just outside the airport, a throng of people waited for arrivals among cabdrivers smoking and honking their horns at nobody in particular. Then a small band of men and women—cousins, great-aunts and great-uncles my father had contacted—pushed forward to claim us. The women, dressed in bright ao dais, waved stalks of gladioli at us as they swept us into a cab.

  They lived in a neighborhood of muddied alleys, in a concrete home with a red-tiled roof, on the outskirts of Saigon. As guests, our duty was to sit on the hardwood sofa, sip jasmine tea, and nibble Pirouline wafers and fruit. Someone poured me a tall glass of 7UP with a slab of ice. I ate a piece of pineapple so sweet that I gasped.

  I had no way to keep up with the frenzied pace at which Noi, Chu Anh, and my relatives were talking, so I just gazed around the room. I longed to explore the house, especially since I was certain I could hear pigs and roosters in the yard, and several cats wandered in and out at leisure. In the living room, the dark wood altar to the ancestors was a lot like Noi’s at home, with a statue of Buddha presiding above all. Nearby, a television broadcast a Vietnamese soap opera. The cement floor had a long hairline fracture that led to a mahogany bed shielded by a bamboo screen. The windows had bars over them instead of glass, and the wide front door, like most I saw in neighborhoods in Saigon, lay open to passersby.

  That first afternoon in Vietnam, a cat died while I was looking at it. She was bovine-looking, white with black spots, dozing under my second cousin’s chair. After a while I realized that she was lying in an unusually still way. Curious, I got out of my seat and touched the cat with one finger. “Con meo chet roi,” I said without thinking. The cat just died. My cousin laughed and said that the cat was just lazy and slept a lot. Noi, from her spot on the sofa, looked at the cat and furrowed her brow. “Chet cha,” she exclaimed.

  For days the dead cat unnerved me. One moment alive, sleeping like any ordinary cat—the next moment gone. She had passed from one form to another in front of my eyes. I thought of reincarnation, of ghosts hovering all around us. I wondered where the spirit of the cat would go.

  The next few days we stayed with another relative who lived in a spacious two-story home in a busy urban area closer to downtown. Co Nga had a well-paying job at a bank, and even had an air-conditioning unit in one room on the second floor. That’s where she insisted Noi and I sleep, and we gratefully accepted. After the heat of the days visiting Buddhist temples, calling on old friends and relatives, and walking around downtown, we were glad to lie on the twin beds and breathe cool air.

  On my first night at Co Nga’s I stood for ten minutes in front of her house wondering how I could possibly cross the street to check o
ut the shoe store on the other side. The flow of mopeds, cars, and bicyclists never waned and never stopped beeping. There were men bearing impossible bundles with their bicycles—stacks of ice, long pieces of plastic pipe, a huge turtle floating in a fish tank. After a while, a little boy approached me and told me he’d help me cross. He was maybe seven or eight years old, but when he took my hand and led me into the path of the oncoming traffic, I followed him. We moved steadily across the street, pausing and meandering as the motorcycles bent to make room for us.

  In the mornings Co Nga served us bowls of pho redolent with star anise and heaped with bean sprouts and herbs. She set out plates of mangosteen, branches of lychee and longan fruit, and sliced watermelon. I loved to strip away the pebbled skin of a lychee and pop the translucent eyeball into my mouth, sucking the flesh away from the varnished pit. I couldn’t get enough of the crunchy, cold watermelon; it tasted sweeter and deeper—more thoroughly watermelon—than any I had ever tasted in America. In the evenings Co Nga steamed enormous shrimp with their heads on and stewed fish in spicy sauces with coriander, chilies, and nuoc mam. She sautéed slices of beef with lemongrass and vegetables and cooked up a pungent canh chua fish soup with tomatoes. Worried that I would only like American food, she also made a heap of broad-cut french fries every night.

  A few years back Co Nga had taken in an old, dying uncle. She fed and washed him, helped him up and down from the little bed near the kitchen where he slept all day. He was ancient, with a long wispy beard, and he had lost most of his vision. When he sat at the table he didn’t appear to be aware of us at all. Co Nga cooked him a watery rice porridge—chao, something Noi always made for me when I was sick—and I couldn’t help watching him eat it. He leaned into the bowl, dragging his beard along the surface of the gruel as he took great sloppy slurps. Two or three times a meal he would pause to release a huge slow-motion sneeze.

  One day in Saigon, Noi, Chu Anh, and I visited the house where we had lived up until April 29, 1975. The cab dropped us off at the entrance to one of the city’s many neighborhood mazes of concrete walls divided into houses. The narrow road twisted back and forth, and Noi said that it would lead eventually to the temple she had walked to almost every day. On Sundays, she had gone to a bigger, grander temple nearby.

  Our house was anonymous-looking, just a square of space separated into rooms. The man who lived there now invited us in to look around. He appeared to be a bachelor, with old towels and blankets draped over a worn wooden sofabed. The television was tuned to a soccer match. I stood in the dim light, taking in the cement walls, the cooking pots and hot plate in one corner, the curtain in front of the bedroom. Noi pointed to a corner and said something about a desk full of papers and pictures that had once been there. She recalled the day a calendar had jumped off the wall and she knew it was another sign from her son Quan. He had often spoken to her here.

  Chu Anh walked around, shaking his head. “I can’t believe we lived like this,” he said. In Atlanta, where he works as an engineer, he drives home to a quiet house in a named subdivision.

  I tried to imagine the years my father and uncles and grandmother spent here, having no idea that they would one day flee it, leaving everything behind. I tried to picture the stories my father and uncles had told me. Was this where the cat with the pet rat slept on languid afternoons? Where did the angry chicken hang out? I tried to imagine my sister and me, so little and so demanding—my sister’s feet stamping the concrete floor, Noi feeding us mashed bananas as she contemplated our future. The dingy, gray rooms held no resonance for me, no meaning. This home was not my home to remember.

  Walking back to the cab, we passed a gaggle of boys lounging in a grotto. They were playing cards and smoking, and they eyed us with curiosity. Above them hung an old magazine picture of Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat. It was only then that I could see my father here—I could see him in these boys’ faces. I could see him burning his moped down the alleyways, taking the turns too sharply, maybe racing somewhere to see my mother.

  I went there the next day, to see my mother’s mother—my other grandmother, my ngoai. She lived across the river in an outlying district of Saigon, where cars stirred up clouds of red dust. Her house occupied a square in a row of barracks facing identical rows, all of the doors opened to the air. As I walked down the dirt lane, peering at the faded numbers etched near the doorways, an old woman pushed a food cart past me, crying out, Chicken! to the mostly empty road.

  My grandmother ngoai lived with one of my aunts, who looked like a rounder, plumper version of my mother. Hammered gold bracelets jangled on her arms as she reached out to take hold of me. Her daughter—one of my cousins—was maybe four years old and amused herself by sticking her head into the sack of rice sitting in the corner of the kitchen. “You are an American girl,” my aunt said to me in Vietnamese, with teasing and pride in her voice. She sat me down in the living room, facing the altar to the ancestors, and brought out glasses of Coke, cups of jasmine tea, freshly fried shrimp chips, and a tray of soursop and lychees. From her end of the sofa, my grandmother lifted her head toward me. A frail, bony creature with thick glasses and a broad, flattened mouth, she was only a few years older than Noi but looked almost as ancient as Co Nga’s uncle. She reached out a gnarled, shiny hand and laid it on mine. She said my name out loud and smiled, exposing a maroon-red mouth. For a moment I panicked, thinking it was blood, until I realized that it was the stain of the betel nut she chewed.

  She and my aunt knew almost no English and I knew only rudimentary Vietnamese so we couldn’t say much. I had come too late in the morning, and the sun was getting too intense, the dust rising. So we spent an hour just looking at each other, and smiling, and I drank too much Coke just to have something to do.

  Before the trip I had felt ready to go, secure with my travel grant money, but now I think I could never have been ready. I could not have prepared myself for the feeling of being a tourist in the country where I was supposed to have grown up, of being a foreigner among people who were supposed to be mine. Every girl I passed on the street was my theoretical double, a person I might have been, a life I might have had. Sitting with my aunt and grandmother, I did not feel a rush of love. I felt regret, exhaustion. I felt like an outsider, and I knew I would always be just that. I would fly back home to the United States and perhaps never see them again.

  Before I left I slipped them an envelope full of American money, as my uncle and I had discussed. Still, I walked away from their house feeling a profound sense of failure. I did not want to imagine years of deprivation and wondering, my mother staring out the window season after season, finding imaginary shapes in the red earth. I didn’t know how to think of her walking home, her whole body shaking with grief. How long she must have waited to get word on our whereabouts. How many times she must have imagined our growing up—she had known me for only eight months, my sister only two years. How did she picture us, becoming American as TV, changing into people beyond her recognition?

  When I think of my childhood I think of contrasts: the melting chocolate of a Mr. Goodbar against the cool crumble of SweeTarts. I think of drifts of snow reaching the windows, then green summer days casting out beyond Jennifer Vander Wal’s backyard. I think of my father standing outside smoking, a skinny, solitary figure in his beige sweater with brown stripes; I think of him coming home with pockets full of candy and gum. I think of the mother I didn’t know walking down a sunburnt lane in Saigon while my stepmother drove her black Ford Tempo through Grand Rapids to get to work. I think of my face in the mirror, flat and sallow, wishing to become the same as all the beautiful, bright-eyed girls in my books and school.

  In the fall, leaves crackled as I walked to Ken-O-Sha Elementary, the days growing shorter and colder. In the winter, Noi’s jasmine tea fragranced the air. I looked into the amber liquid to read the leaves scattered at the bottom of the cup. Noi’s knitting needles flashed as she created cardigans out of intricate stitch patterns and cables. T
hen warm weather would seep back— the spring giving way grudgingly, often making us wear jackets well into May—and I would return to long afternoons plotting out my next episodes of candy, ice cream, and fruit. In the summer, we ate chilled globes of canned lychee from china cups. We slept in the basement to escape the upstairs heat, jumping heedlessly on my uncles’ Eames lounges and feeling, for brief moments, thrilled to be alive, kids, with all the MTV we could want. Sometimes, a tornado siren would blare through the neighborhood and my father would go out to see the storm. I would creep back upstairs, too curious not to look, and always would be surprised by the stillness of the air, the yellowness of the sky. I had nightmares of funnel clouds aiming right at us. But somehow, in real life, they missed us even as my father waited on the front porch with a glass of cognac in his hand. Why don’t you go to the basement? I asked him once. Because I have to protect, he said.

  After a good rain, toadstools would crop up all over the yard on Florence Street and Noi would pull up each one. I think she must have pictured my sister and me stealing away with them, putting that foreign substance in our mouths. She never acknowledged the neighborhood children when they laughed at her squatting in the yard, their cheeks puffed with derision. She pulled up the toadstools to save us.

  When I think of Grand Rapids I think of how much time I spent trying to make real the dream of the blond-haired girl with a Betty Crocker mother and a kitchen to match. Cocooned in my own silence, I dreamed of the day when I would be a grown-up at last. Then, I thought, I could eat whipped cream and SpaghettiOs every day and say whatever I wanted. Spurning my own reflection for what it could never give me, I thought I could make myself over from the inside out.