“It’s got no reason.”
“What?”
“The song. It goes, ‘Short people got no reason to live.’ ”
“You know this?”
“I heard it on a TV show.”
Her father was astounded. “They play it on TV? This is the trouble we are in. This is the trouble!”
“I don’t think the song is for real.”
“I heard it myself. What do I say to you and Van all the years ago, and even now? I say you have to fight them back. This is why you listen to me.”
Before he could keep going, a middle-aged blond woman walked onto the stage. She introduced herself as Janine, a local-chapter ambassador from the Daughters of the American Revolution, there to lead them all in singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A rustle of fabric and the bounce of auditorium chairs as everyone stood up. Janine, facing the U.S. flag and the state of Michigan flag beside her, launched into it.
Her bombs were bursting in air when Van appeared at the end of the row of red seats. She scooted by, ducking under people’s voices.
“Hey.” Linny couldn’t stop herself from glancing her sister over head to toe. Van wore a cardigan-and-slacks uniform, straight out of a Talbots catalog. It fit in better in this town than her own vividly printed wrap dress.
Van said, “Traffic.”
The word, reminding Linny of Gary, sent an unexpected shiver through her. What would Van say if she knew about him? But the anthem was over and Linny clapped, watching her hands blur together in their movement.
The circuit court judge presiding over the ceremony had a comb-over and a wide face like a baseball mitt. “Today,” he said, opening his arms, “America embraces you. America welcomes you to her shores. You have come from far and wide to pledge allegiance to this country, forsaking all other nations. You will find that this is indeed the land of freedom, the land of hopes, and the land of dreams. From Plymouth Rock, to the plains of Nebraska, to the miracle of the Grand Canyon, to the beaches of California, you will find the glory and the spirit of all that is this great land of America.”
Linny didn’t remember any of this speech-making from her mother’s naturalization ceremony twenty years ago. It had taken place in a courtroom, just a small group of mostly Vietnamese who, like her mother, were among the first wave of refugees to reach for citizenship. Thuy Luong had thought it a matter of pride and duty, since her husband refused to apply, and because she thought it would give Linny and Van an extra sense of security; she didn’t want her daughters to be alone as Americans. Linny remembered feeling special when her mother told her that she and Van were already citizens just by being born in the States.
She also remembered that some of the people in the courtroom had wept, and how that had made her think of a school history lesson on Ellis Island. Her teacher’s description of huddled masses yearning to be free and the wonderful giant melting pot of America seemed out of place here. Somehow Linny understood: that moment, her mother, the Vietnamese voices—these made up a different kind of island.
Her father, at the time, hadn’t wanted to hear anything about it. “You think it’s so special being the normalized citizen,” he had said, as if it were a taunt. “Why not all people in America have to take the tests?”
Linny’s mother called him jealous. When she cast her first vote, for the 1984 presidential election, she brought Linny and Van with her. “The three of us can do this, but your ba cannot,” she had explained. “And it’s all because we’re citizens.” Her mother had tugged Linny close as if to emphasize the divide between them and her father.
When Mr. Luong’s patent for the Luong Arm got rejected—Van had insisted he hadn’t filled out the forms correctly—he claimed it was because he wasn’t a citizen. “So become one,” Mrs. Luong had said. But in his stubborn way, he had clung to the opposite, taking it as a challenge. It had taken him this long to uncurl that resolve.
In the Ford auditorium Van whispered, “Look who’s here.”
“Who?”
“The Oortsemas.” She nodded to the far left, several rows forward.
“I wonder why.”
“For Dad, I guess.”
Dirk and Paula Oortsema had been Mr. and Mrs. Luong’s sponsors back in 1975. They had said they decided to help bring refugees to Michigan after their pastor gave a series of moving sermons about the plight of the Oriental boat people. Dirk Oortsema steered Mr. Luong toward carpentry jobs and ESL classes, while Paula Oortsema gave Mrs. Luong baby clothes and formula and showed her how to cook tuna noodle casserole. Linny’s mother had often said she had tried to forget those first few months. Everything had seemed too sharp—the cold, the language, the confusion of all those aisles in the grocery store. She had wished for dullness.
The Luongs found some comfort in a community center life skills class, where they learned how to open a bank account, cash a check, apply for jobs, and read bus maps. It was also there that the Luongs found their new friends, including Rich and Nancy Bao. But there was still so much they didn’t know. When they first got a car, procured through Mrs. Luong’s shrewd Vietnamese bargaining skills and hoarded savings, they hadn’t known they needed a scraper for winter days. When a storm left a coating of ice on the windshield, Mr. Luong decided it would melt more quickly if he tossed boiled water on the glass. It had burst like gunfire. Linny didn’t remember that but her mother had insisted it was true, telling the story only when Linny’s father wasn’t around.
In Linny’s first memory of the Oortsemas, she and Van were given matching white leatherette Bibles. Dirk and Paula liked to stop by every month or so, and they always had little gifts or candy for the girls. “Hi, there, Din,” Dirk Oortsema would say at the apartment door, his barrel-shaped body blocking out the light. “How you doing, buddy?”
Paula took Linny and Van aside, kneeling down and holding their hands. “Girls,” she said, “would you like to go to Sunday school?” Her voice made it sound like she was offering up Disney Land.
But even Van wasn’t convinced by the idea of school on a Sunday, and they never did end up going. The Oortsemas didn’t force the issue, though every once in a while Paula would say, “I just want what’s best for my girls.” She had been successful, at least, in introducing the gifts of Christmas to the household.
“Nice people,” Mrs. Luong always said about the Oortsemas. “They try very hard. Nice people.”
Linny said, “I’m not her girl, but she can bring me presents.”
Perhaps because the Oortsemas had three boys, Paula doted on Linny and Van. She liked to bring them barrettes and hair ribbons, and clothes donated by her church. Only she didn’t call them donations. She called them “presents from church.” Mrs. Luong always smiled when she accepted the clothes, but later Linny would see them tossed into bags. Her parents weren’t quite willing to throw such things away, since that seemed wasteful, so they just stuffed them into closets for years. Van refused to sift through the bags, but Linny dug through with a will, searching for anything that she thought her friends would like, or anything with a brand-name label. She made the clothes over into her own, enough so that even her parents forgot that they had ever belonged to anyone else.
In the auditorium Linny said, “I guess it’s nice of the Oortsemas to be here. I haven’t seen them since the funeral.”
“I have. They came over to meet Miles once. Dad invited them.”
“Really?”
The judge asked the candidates for naturalization to stand up and raise their right hand. Mr. Luong stared straight ahead while repeating the oath of citizenship, promising to renounce allegiance to other nations, support and defend the Constitution, and take these obligations freely, without any mental reservation.
Linny remembered gazing up at her mother, squinting at the overhead lights. Mrs. Luong’s face had seemed expressionless as she spoke the words.
Her father repeated them loudly, as if in competition with the others standing near him.
“And now
,” the judge said, smiling, “I pronounce you to be citizens, with all of the rights and obligations contained therein, of the United States of America.”
The audience applauded, and someone in the back let out a loud whistle. “If you’ll please take your seats,” the judge called out, “we will now have each individual citizen come to the stage and be presented with a certificate of naturalization.”
There were over forty new citizens and the judge announced their names in no particular order. “Haruki Watanabe of Japan! Feyza Sercan of Turkey! Kim Hyoun of Korea! Henrick Van der Berg of the Netherlands!” Each person shook the judge’s hand and crossed the stage to where other volunteers from the Daughters of the American Revolution handed them miniature plastic American flags.
Van muttered, “This is unbelievable.”
“It’s like a pageant,” Linny said with a laugh.
“Manjit Singh of India! Dinh Luong of Vietnam!”
He bolted out of his seat. On stage he shook the judge’s hand, then threw out a big grin to the audience, as if he were on a game show. The judge towered over him, actually bending down a little, which made Linny cringe. But her father didn’t seem to notice. Suddenly she understood that he was looking to the back of the room. He was smiling at someone in particular. She turned around, scanning the faces.
Van nudged her, for their father had moved on to shake hands with the DAR women, waving his plastic American flag. He took his sweet time exiting the stage, still smiling, and Linny swiveled around again, this time aiming for the back row of the audience, where Nancy Bao was waiting.
9
Van
When Dinh Luong declined to attend his wife’s citizenship ceremony, he said, “You don’t need me there for you to be normalized.” It was dinnertime, and he slurped at his bowl of pho, using chopsticks to push the noodles into his mouth. For years he said normalized instead of naturalized, and Van didn’t know if he meant it as a joke.
“Shameful!” Thuy Luong said in Vietnamese. “How will it look? Bad enough that you’re not getting your own citizenship. You have to face up to this the same as the rest of us. This is the way things have to be.”
It was not a new argument between them. Van played with the corner of her vinyl place mat, curling the corner like a book page and watching it slowly lie flat again. Linny, seven years old, kept her focus on an episode of Gilligan’s Island.
“Afraid of the test,” Mrs. Luong baited him.
Instead of answering, her husband dipped his chopsticks into her soup bowl, taking a piece of beef. Mrs. Luong turned to her daughters. “Who was the first president of the United States?” she asked in English. “Van, answer.”
“George Washington.”
“Correct.” Her mother returned to Vietnamese. “So simple. That’s all it takes to be a citizen in this country.”
Mr. Luong replied, “What is the Sixth Amendment?”
Van and Linny didn’t know. They shrank from their father’s sharp gaze. Van’s mother pretended not to hear the question. On the TV, the Skipper was scaring Gilligan out of his rope hammock.
“Nobody knows, huh?” Van’s father smiled triumphantly. “They asked Sem that question. He failed the exam. You know what we are? No one. We have no citizenship. Refugees aren’t belonging anywhere.”
He stood up from the table. “In America, we don’t belong until we make them see it. It’s not a piece of paper with citizen on it.”
Van’s mother had heard it all before. She was flexing her fingers, stretching them out. Often in the evening she asked her daughters to massage her hands. She would change into a comfortable tunic and flowy pants as soon as she got home, then lie on the sofa and hold out her hands. “Just for a minute,” she’d plead, closing her eyes with a sigh.
The three of them, Van, Linny, and her mother, knew Mr. Luong wanted only to return to what he called his real work. He had promised them, too many times to count, a future of riches, thickets of hundred-dollar bills falling forth from his inventions. This was when they were still in the two-bedroom apartment, where he had claimed the girls’ room as his work space. For a while Van and Linny had slept there surrounded by his papers and tools but soon got edged out to the living room sofa bed, which Van made and unmade for them every day. Linny slept easily, but Van would sometimes stare out the window, keeping track of the construction on the prison. Late into the night Van could hear her father humming Vietnamese folk songs, his voice filled with hope.
“Why now?” Van had asked when he called to say he wanted to apply for citizenship. This was nearly three years ago, the fall of 2000, not long after she and Miles had moved into their new house. Their days then had seemed to promise order and contentment. When her father called Van had been sitting in front of her laptop in the TV room, waiting for Miles to return from work so they could go out to dinner.
“Basically, my inventions have to be made in the USA. I was talking to my friend Jerry. He’s this big American guy, works at this company here—”
“But they’re already made in the USA because you live in the USA.”
“I mean really made in the USA. Jerry said permanent resident is not enough anymore. People want to know you’re for real. So I have to prove it.”
“So you need to be seen as legitimate,” Van supplied, channel-surfing with the sound on mute.
“Legitimate,” her father repeated the word. “That’s it.”
Van couldn’t help saying, “After all this time it’s your friend Jerry who convinces you.” How many times had she presented similar arguments to her father and he had waved them away? She felt a buzz of meanness come over, a hardness that reminded her, as such moments always did, of law school. “Well, U.S. citizenship definitely confers legitimacy.”
She expected her father to snap at her. Maybe say, You helping or not? Or even, I don’t need your talk. Instead, her father said, “Why you the lawyer, Van? What for?”
She should have guessed he would lob something at her out of nowhere, make her remember her place. It had been this way since she was a child: he would change direction on her, make her sorry to have spoken. And it always worked. For years now she had wanted to ask if he realized how much she did for him, that she had even gone to law school at Michigan just so she could be closer to home. But she’d never yet had the nerve to say it.
When she was in eighth grade he had made her go to the local library to find out how to apply for a U.S. patent for the Luong Arm. The process appeared to be more intricate than a green card application, and a librarian had directed her to the Detroit Public Library, one of the few places in the state that housed a complete directory of patents.
“See, you have to make sure the patent you want isn’t just overlapping with one they’ve already given,” Van had tried to explain to her father.
“So call and you ask,” he’d said.
“I can’t. You have to go look in the directory. There are millions and millions of patents.”
He actually drove her to the Detroit library that summer, dropped her off while he visited an old friend from the refugee camp who now lived in Hamtramck. Van had looked helplessly at the huge binders stamped United States Patent and Trademark Office, with lists, descriptions, and photos of inventions dating back to 1790. At last two kind librarians showed Van how to get an application form mailed to her father, then helped her comb through the directories. As far as they could figure out in the few hours Van was there, no patent seemed to match exactly the one he wanted for the Luong Arm, which was a good sign. But the application process was really complicated, Van said again to her father. The librarians had told her it was very difficult to get a patent, and that most people were rejected the first time they tried. Her father would have to submit notes, sketches, and pictures of the prototype. And the application fee was several hundred dollars. Somehow, though, probably after a good night gambling with his friends, he managed to mail in the application and fee. When it came back to him, a rejection due to insuffi
cient information, he had been enraged. It’s because I’m not a normalized American, he had said. But Van was sure he had probably just ignored half of the application instructions. Since then, though, he had refused to reapply for the patent and, until now, had refused citizenship.
With two clicks Van had a naturalization application open on her computer screen. “All right,” she said to her father, falling back on her role as the obedient daughter. “We’ll make you a citizen.”
In the auditorium of the Gerald R. Ford Museum Linny laughed when she said, “It’s like a pageant.”
Van wondered, Who is the winner? Out loud she said, “It’s not funny.”
After the ceremony ended and everyone was filing toward the glassed-in lobby, Van said, “You have to live here at least five years as a permanent resident, and most people are here for years before that on a visa. Citizenship isn’t something that happens in a snap. It takes years, and money. Who do you think paid Dad’s application fee? And that judge! Acting like all these people just got here. ‘Welcome to America!’ God!”
When Linny looked at her Van fell silent. She was not the kind of person to talk so loudly, and she felt overheated in her wool cardigan, disheveled next to her sister’s sleek wrap dress. But Linny cast her gaze beyond her, raising an eyebrow. “Look.”
Their father was talking to Nancy Bao, whom Van had spoken to a few years back but hadn’t seen since Mrs. Luong’s funeral. Nancy had the same tight skin and close-cropped permed hair, though the features of her face seemed to have spread out a little. “So what?”
“So, what is she even doing here?”
They watched their father and Nancy receive sugar cookies from the DAR ladies. Their father had always bent himself solicitously toward Nancy, as though she were some sort of patron he was hosting. A Vietnamese host had to do just about anything—go into debt for lobsters and crab, if need be—to make a guest happy. Mr. Luong had never behaved that way toward his wife, Van couldn’t help thinking. Was that what Linny was so agitated about?
Bich Minh Nguyen Page 12