by May-lee Chai
“Fantastic!” I said. “Maybe you and Sitan could collaborate?”
Anita took the pencil off her ear and started writing on a paper napkin. “We could do just a small batch to begin. Maybe I’ll start small at home so I don’t ruin anything.”
“I bet anything you come up with the bakers could design a special icing for. Or a special shape.”
Anita nodded, enthused. “They’re real artists. James found two women, the Kasim sisters, who were trained by French pastry chefs before Pol Pot. I bet they could create something unique.”
“Great! I’ll let you explain to Uncle what you want to do. In the meantime, I’ll design a flyer with some coupons for today. When the after-school crowd comes, even if we don’t have enough donuts to sell them, we don’t want to turn anyone away empty-handed. I’ll give them a flyer so they’ll want to come back tomorrow.”
“You a business major, college girl?” Sitan asked. “They teach you all this stuff?”
“No, I have real experience. My mother tried everything with our restaurant in Nebraska. I learned from her.”
Then, high from our sugar break, we all set to work. Sitan cleaned up, Anita got a hold of the Kasim sisters, who agreed to come in to work on another batch, and I went over to the Copy Circle and started designing a flyer. All-New Flavor of the Month. Super Fly Flavor of the Week. Secret Flavor Preview! Delicioso Donut of the Day. Mekong Melt in Your Mouth. Naga Magic Eclair. Apsaras Heavenly Cream. I kept trying different combinations of words, wondering if I could find the perfect one that would entice customers. That would make the business a success. That would make Uncle proud of me. The way my plans were working out, I could almost imagine calling the reporter next week with the big reveal: the return of the lost daughter, the family reunion that should land us a story above the fold.
By the time I came back to the shop with a test batch of flyers, two of the bakers had arrived. Anita introduced me to the Kasim sisters. They were Cham Muslims who’d survived the Khmer Rouge, she said, even though most of their family had not. They’d been sponsored by a Catholic church in Fresno, but moved down here after discovering a cousin working in the Inland Empire. They were putting their aprons over their clothes, but still wore colorful checked krama scarves draped over their hair. They smiled at me as I greeted them in the kitchen.
I pulled on a white apron. “I’ll help. Just let me know what you need me to do.”
They tittered behind their hands. “Mademoiselle, you can watch and stay out of our way.”
They floured the counter and set to work, bringing the bowls of butter out of the refrigerator, and I realized they were going to make another batch of pastry, not donuts, which excited me. I’d wanted to raise the prices on the pastry, and now, with everything else sold out, this would be the perfect opportunity.
Even as the heat rose in the kitchen—despite the three fans blowing full-force and the back door open with another fan wedged in the jamb to suck out more of the hot air—the sisters did not seem to break a sweat. They conferred with each other, speaking in low voices, their black eyes fixed on the pastry dough that they rolled and shaped on the wooden cutting boards.
I helped Sitan wash the mixing bowls, the blades, the spoons, the icing bags and tips, and the chopping boards while Anita waited out front, serving coffee to all the new people who happened by, drawn by the newspaper article. She remembered to pass out my flyers urging customers to come back again to try our special flavors—changed daily! I’d written, figuring I was only exaggerating a little—while promising that a new batch of pastry would be ready by five.
I could just imagine Uncle’s face when he came in after his trip to the hospital, where he was still acting as a translator for a sick family. How excited he’d be to see the donut shop actually crowded with paying customers, people who appreciated his pastries, the throngs at the counter, the line out the door. How happy and surprised he’d be. I’d try to act modest, to defer all the compliments, to remember to share the praise with Sitan and Anita and the Kasim sisters. I’d tell him about phase two of the plan, how we’d use this week or two of special attention to plant the seeds for long-term customers. We’d keep building on the momentum, week after week, until we were the best donut shop in the city. I could get restaurant critics from bigger papers to come by. I’d issue invitations, we could sponsor events, maybe host late-nights when we stayed open just to launch a new flavor. We’d create a brand name. Uncle could afford to open a second location, and we could renovate the shop—spruce up the front so it didn’t have to look old and sad. We could make it look like Phnom Penh as Anita remembered it, before the war. We could add a pretty sign. Sitan would have his own franchise and maybe his girlfriend would come back and marry him. I could work here full time; I could move to California, establish residency; maybe I could get my sisters to go here for college, too. Even Sam might decide not to enlist straight out of high school, and instead move out to work here and find a friend.
But I was getting ahead of myself, drunk on dreams of happiness. That was dangerous, I knew.
I focused on washing the mixing bowl in my hands, letting the hot water slosh over the stiff dough, the soapsuds breaking down the flour and butter, and rubbing the sides with the scrubber until the metal gleamed. Still, I couldn’t help but feel I was rubbing a magic lamp, the kind with a cartoon genie that popped out to grant me wishes. My heart felt that light and free.
Business was booming the whole week after the newspaper article ran. Uncle was ecstatic, but not quite in the way I’d expected. “Everyone has read the article. Everyone. And everyone shared with me their own stories.”
“Father Juan showed it around the homeless shelter?” Anita smiled.
“And at the hospital the nurses and the doctors saw it. At the youth center, the battered women’s center, the free clinic, everyone read it. Everywhere I go, everyone wants to tell me what happened to them, too.” Uncle shook his head as though he couldn’t believe his good fortune.
He told us that from the hospice rounds to the food bank to the daycare center, all the other refugees wanted to tell him what had happened to their own families under the Khmer Rouge, how their children had died, or their parents, or their families. How they heard the dead crying in their dreams, weeping on the wind, wailing in the dead of night.
How horrible, I thought.
But Uncle was overjoyed. Everyone was talking to him, telling him their troubles, sharing what they hadn’t wanted to say before, when he’d seemed like a lucky man who’d escaped before the Khmer Rouge took over, like a man who wasn’t like them, a man who couldn’t possibly understand.
I’d wanted Uncle to see the donut shop as a success. I’d wanted him to see what a good businesswoman I was and be impressed and proud. Not this.
“There is so much suffering in the world,” Uncle said. “There is so much suffering among my people. But today I know I was spared for a reason. I will devote myself to helping them all.”
I hadn’t imagined Uncle’s survivor’s guilt could get any worse. I was wrong.
I was mopping up the sticky floor, sloshing suds of Pine-Sol across the tile. Hearing Uncle talk, I wondered if he even remembered that I was the one who’d written the press release, called the newspaper, found the reporter who’d written the story in the first place.
Was I somehow the one thing about the past that should remain forgotten?
Nursing my sense of martyrdom like a scab I couldn’t stop picking, I mopped furiously, attacking the grime that I had once mistaken for an actual pattern on the tile. Gradually the floor lightened by three shades, from a deep dusty dirt color to a pale vanilla.
Sitan emerged from the back, where he’d been washing the last of the trays. “I’m gonna head out. Congratulations, Uncle,” he said. “This has been the best week ever.”
“Funny how a little PR works magic,” I said bitterly.
“We should buy a tree,” Uncle said. “It’s almost Christmas. We should
celebrate.”
I looked around the front room, thinking about the needles that would fall all over the floor. “No space.”
“Oh, a tree! A live tree! Wouldn’t that be lovely?” Anita beamed. “We should put it in that corner. Right under the ‘Open’ sign.”
“Yeah! We could get some lights, really fix it up. It’s Lillian’s first Christmas. She’d like that.”
I sighed but didn’t argue. Thinking about a tree made me feel sour inside. Another reminder that I’d chosen to spend my Christmas away from my family. The rituals didn’t feel the same away from them. The twins always competed to see who could create the more lavish tree decorations, dividing the tree in half and draping shiny garlands and strings of popcorn, metallic balls and silvery icicles and clothespin angels through the thick green boughs. In Texas, Ma hadn’t celebrated Christmas when I was little, but as the twins entered junior high, they only remembered life in America. They couldn’t imagine celebrating without a tree, the same way they couldn’t imagine answering to anything but their American names—Jennifer and Marie instead of Navy and Maly—and Ma couldn’t deny them. One year they’d glued Chinese crispy noodles spray-painted gold onto construction-paper rings and enveloped the tree as though it were one of the “Chinese salads” they’d concocted to compete with the McDonald’s that had opened in the next town over. Sam was a good big brother to them, humoring their little-girl whims. He set up the ladder and held it tight as they put up the various angels at the very top—blonde angels with gossamer rings, pink-haired fairies, a red-headed mermaid, and one year a Cambodian devata, complete with gold tiara. Now my little sisters were teenagers, fifteen, and Sam would turn eighteen soon, old enough to enlist. Yet here I was in California. When would we celebrate Christmas together again as a family? I wondered if I’d been foolish to come here.
As it was so late in the season, just eight days before Christmas, we soon discovered that most of the tree lots had sold out long ago. Uncle drove us by all the grocery stores—Lucky’s and A&P and Kroger’s—but there were only a few spindly wreaths left, some shedding poinsettias, and no live trees, although the big Chinese grocery Lion’s had a few artificial trees, including a small counter model spray-painted pink. But Uncle insisted now that we should have a real tree.
One of the clerks at Lion’s took pity on us and said he thought some people were selling trees from their lawn in town. It was one of the small houses with lots of lights. That sounded like any house to me, but Uncle thanked him, and the four of us piled back into Uncle’s Toyota and took off through the back streets, following an array of Christmas decorations so bright that it seemed as though some people were personally trying to guide a jumbo jet into a safe landing in their driveway. I saw houses coated in fake snow and electric icicles and guarded by lit-from-within giant plastic snowmen. One intrepid family had sprayed their entire green lawn with what looked like shaving cream and spider webs, trying to mimic snow. Another had managed to string lights in the palm tree on their lawn. They’d also constructed a manger strung with blinking lights and accompanied by animated wise men who waved beside a pair each of donkeys, camels, zebras, and elephants. Their Bible references were decidedly mixed, combining the Nativity with Noah’s Ark, but Sitan was thrilled. He held Lillian up from her baby seat. “Look, Lillian, look! See all the animals!”
Finally we came upon a small house set far from the street, at the end of a cul-de-sac where the houses grew more sparse and the orange groves lined both sides of the street. Two spotlights shone upon a motley collection of pine trees tied to stakes on the crabgrass lawn. A dog barked furiously from inside the house. A hand-painted sign hung on the garage door: “Trees 4 Sale.”
“Looks like they just went up to Big Bear Mountain and chopped them down themselves,” Anita said.
“Is that legal?” I asked, but nobody cared.
We pulled into the driveway and got out to inspect the trees. There was one pine that wasn’t quite as spare and straggly-looking as the others. We pulled on the needles and they didn’t all fall off in our hands. A woman in a bathrobe emerged from the squat house and we asked, How much for the tree? She said forty, and I said twenty, and then she sold it to us for thirty. Sitan strapped it on the roof with bungee cords from the trunk, and we drove back to the donut shop with our Christmas tree.
That night we stayed up late decorating the tree with ornaments that we got from the Asian grocery, thirty percent off since they knew us. The bakers came in, and the Kasim sisters smiled to see our sturdy pine before the front window. They said they’d bake us an angel out of sugar-cookie dough, something special, and they hummed carols as they worked. After they finished their first batch, they came out from the kitchen and sang a song together in French while the cookies baked. I didn’t know the words, but the tune was nice, better than Rudolph or Frosty or all the other kids’ songs I was used to hearing blare from the loudspeakers at the strip mall.
Soon the donut shop filled with the scent of baking dough and sugar and pine tree. While the tree hadn’t seemed like much propped up on that woman’s lawn, it revived once we set it up and put a pan of water under the trunk.
“Those mountain pines are the best,” Anita said. “Just breathe in! Smells better than those sickly trees sitting out in those lots all month!”
Indeed, our possibly poached tree did smell wonderful, like mountain air and sunshine and a Southern California winter. Sitan held Lillian in his arms and helped her hang tinsel on the branches, then pulled the tinsel out of her mouth as she tried to eat it. Anita gave her some clothespin reindeer to hang instead.
Finally Uncle came out, handprints in flour on the knees of his khakis. He looked at the tree, he looked at Anita smiling and Sitan playing with Lillian, and he held up a sugar cookie. “Look what the Kasim sisters made for the tree!”
It was an Apsaras, a dancing girl with curvy hips and full breasts and gracefully extended arms. It was the sexiest-looking Christmas ornament ever.
“Those are awesome!” Sitan exclaimed. “I wanna eat one!”
“We can poke a hole in the tiara and hang this right here.” Anita pulled at a bare branch. “If they make a batch, we can cover the tree.”
“If they make a batch, we can sell these for five bucks a piece!” I said. “We can launch a whole new line of products. These are the homage to Cambodian culture we’ve been looking for. Get some icing, draw on a face, these would really sell.”
They looked at me as though I’d started barking like a dog.
“Yes, I mean, they’re beautiful for the tree. Sure,” I said. “But we shouldn’t waste them on the tree. We should sell these!”
Uncle looked a little startled. “It’s Christmas. This is supposed to be a religious holiday. Everything shouldn’t be about money.”
I wondered how on earth he could have lived in America all these years and still think that way. I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything, Anita put a hand on my arm.
“I know exactly what James is saying.” Anita took the cookie and held it to a branch. “This is a gift for the tree from the Kasim sisters. And we can hang it right here.” She smiled at Uncle gently, and he nodded. Then she turned to me. “And if they want to make any more, we can follow Nea’s idea. Later.”
I didn’t say anything more. There didn’t seem to be any point, since I clearly didn’t understand at all.
PART FOUR
If you see a tiger sleeping, don’t assume it’s dead.
—traditional Cambodian proverb
CHAPTER 10
The Gangster
Our Christmas tree with the sexy ornaments was a big hit. I was a little worried the next morning when a couple of cops came in for a coffee break—I was afraid they’d be able to tell we had a poached tree—but once they took a look at the Apsaras cookies, they didn’t even notice the pine tree underneath.
“You gonna sell these kind of cookies?” one asked.
“We might. Come back next week a
nd find out,” I said.
Since Uncle had worked through the night supervising the bakers, he slept through the morning rush, when all three of us were waiting on customers, Anita barely able to ring up each sale fast enough before another customer pushed to the front of the line clutching a pink box full of pastry. Then he didn’t come in for the noon rush either.
All week, we’d had great crowds, but Uncle never saw any of them. I wondered if this were part of his penance or if he were trying to avoid me, or if, perhaps, he really enjoyed his rounds more than standing behind the counter ringing up sales. I was pleased with the success, but I was already growing a little restless. The donut shop wasn’t as interesting as running our restaurant at home. I was more of a cashier than anything else here.
Still, every time I heard the bells on the door ring, I glanced up and peered over the crowd at the counter, hoping I’d spot Uncle coming in, but it was never him.
As our trays were depleted and we had to turn some customers away, I called out, “Come back tomorrow bright and early! We’ll have plenty more!”
Sitan laughed at me, but I said, “Hey, don’t let a potential customer get away. We need as many people as we can get.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.” He saluted me with a wink.
Then the bells rang again, and I looked up eagerly. This time it was a surly-looking Asian man in his early twenties, his hair shaved close on the sides, the top spiked high. He wore a white short-sleeved T-shirt and had dense tats on both arms. My first thought was, Gangster. He’s casing the place. I gave him a hard look, the kind that said, I remember what you look like, and he looked away, rubbing his arms as though he thought he could hide the tigers and snakes and dragons emblazoned there.
I tried to nudge Sitan, I wanted him to see, too, just in case, but Sitan was busy flirting with a nurse in scrubs as he rang up her bag of donut holes. Anita had disappeared, maybe she’d slipped into the back to take a bathroom break, maybe she was getting something from the kitchen. I hoped the gangbanger had seen her when he’d come in so that he knew we had a white person working in here, someone the cops would care about if he tried to rob us. I knew I shouldn’t think this way—the counselor I went to see in college would have labeled this a low self-esteem issue—but I thought it all the same. This is what I would call my survival instinct.