While the Baos held court in the living room, Mr. Luong stayed in the basement with some friends, a group of them laughing through the Vietnamese music floating up the stairs. He sounded happy, already drunk, and Linny told herself to relax a little. Why not let him celebrate, and even celebrate with him?
She was pouring herself a vodka and cranberry when she saw the person she’d wondered would stop by: Tom Hanh. The last time she had seen him he had been lighting a stick of incense and offering a prayer for Mrs. Luong. Linny had barely said hi to him then.
Tom headed straight over to her. She could tell that neither of them knew whether to hug or shake hands or what, so they just looked at each other.
“Are your folks here?” she asked, casting for conversation.
“They’re visiting my brother in LA. I promised them I’d come here to represent the family.”
He was so close to what she remembered—the laid-back gait, quick smile, eyes that put people at ease—from when they were fifteen. They fell into talk about his family and from there he followed her easily to the kitchen and helped her transfer a fresh batch of cha gio into a colander lined with paper towels.
“My mom said you were living in Chicago.”
“Yeah.”
“You got away to the golden city. I’m still just here.”
Linny plucked rolls of crisp cha gio out of the oil, using chopsticks as her mother had. “Do you want to leave?”
“I sort of let myself get settled. Oldest son, parents still live here—you know. And I’m a dentist now. Typical Vietnamese career path. I fell for the whole thing.”
They laughed. It was true that, in high school, all the Vietnamese families seemed to push pharmacy, engineering, or dentistry careers on their children. Families won bragging rights over this, over whose children and grandchildren could get themselves into the most sensible, dependable, reliable practice.
“How about you? I heard Van was a lawyer.”
“Yeah, she is. I’m a cook, kind of.”
“Kind of?” The spring rolls were still too hot, but Tom picked one up with his fingertips and took a bite. Steam puffed out, a tendril of mung bean noodle curling from the fried lumpia wrapper. “These are your mom’s,” he said. “I remember them.”
“You do?”
“She brought them to some of the parties. They’re the best. They used to make my mom jealous.”
Linny was suddenly nervous, recalling the image of her father and Nancy Bao in that old Cutlass. She opened a cupboard and pretended to look for something, seeing instead the same melamine tumblers, printed with fading orange slices, that her mother had bought years ago. “Are you still going to all those parties? I mean, are people still throwing them every weekend?”
“It’s tame now compared to what it was. The community has changed a lot. It’s bigger, but I know fewer and fewer people. A lot of my parents’ friends have left for California or Florida or even back to Vietnam. People are spreading out to farther-away burbs here too. I live in downtown Grand Rapids, in one of those conversion buildings.” Just yesterday Linny had wondered, while driving past the once-abandoned furniture warehouses from the late 1800s, who was buying all those new lofts and condos.
A woman shrieked Tom’s name. The voice, and the woman bearing it, were immediately recognizable: Lisa Bao herself, grown and high-heeled, hugging Tom Hanh in the Luongs’ kitchen. Linny was next, enveloped in Lisa’s perfume and brassily dyed and highlighted hair.
“Oh my god, I almost didn’t even come to this party!” she said. “I haven’t seen you forever. Where’ve you been at? You’ve never even met my husband.” Lisa pointed toward a heavier-set Vietnamese guy with spiky hair, a gold and diamond watch flashing at his wrist as he poked through the bottles of liquor near the buffet.
Then Lisa gave Linny her full attention, lowering and raising her eyes to take in Linny’s outfit, hair, makeup, shoes. It happened in an instant and was what Linny called the Asian Once-over—the assessing look so many Asian American girls had to give each other upon meeting or passing on a street. A way of gauging cred and territory, Linny thought, as if to determine which of them was going to be the alpha Asian girl. Whenever Linny got the Asian Once-over she gave it right back.
“I didn’t know you’d gotten married,” she lied, although her father had informed her of the news six years ago.
“You missed it. It was a huge wedding at the Amway Hotel. Tom was there, weren’t you?” Lisa gave him a smile. She preened, smoothing down her shiny camisole over dark-wash jeans. “Of course, that was ages ago. What are you up to, Linny? Is it you or your sister who’s a lawyer?”
“That’s Van. I work at a catering business. As a cook.” She decided to keep it vague. No need to reveal the truth of cheesy bean enchiladas and sausage manicotti.
“You need to meet my two boys,” Lisa declared. “Nick and Landon. They’re playing outside.” Linny looked out the kitchen window. In the backyard, a small band of children ran around as if in a game of old-fashioned tag, while another group sat with their Game Boys on the teak bench Mrs. Luong had placed near the maple tree. “There they are, in the Pistons jerseys. Nick is five and Landon is four. My boys are obsessed with basketball. The doctor says they’re both on track, so we’re starting the medication soon.”
“Are they all right?”
“They’re doing the growth hormone medications. Didn’t your dad tell you? He’s so hilarious about it. A journalist at the Press is covering the whole thing for a series of articles. It’s kind of like reality TV, but in a newspaper. Growth hormones are the new Lasik.”
Mr. Luong interrupted the moment, coming up the stairway to the kitchen. His voice, fueled by alcohol, boomed as he greeted Tom and Lisa, slapping Tom on the shoulder and telling Lisa he wanted to talk to her about her boys. Lisa threw Linny a conspiratorial rolling of her eyes, and in Lisa’s face she understood: people thought her father was ridiculous. It didn’t help that he’d paired dress pants with a short-sleeve shirt printed with bluebirds. But he was all smiles, his face bright red. He started walking through the house, clanging a glass with a chopstick. “Attention! Listen up!” he yelled out in Vietnamese. “I have an announcement!”
Someone in the crowd said, “Are you going to be a grandfather?” and Linny cringed for her sister.
Ignoring the question, Mr. Luong went on to say something that Linny strained to understand. “Yesterday I became a true American citizen” was what she thought she heard, but couldn’t piece out the rest except the word American a few more times.
“Now,” he said, switching suddenly to English. “Please go downstairs to my studio, please!”
“I better go check on my boys,” Lisa said. She gave Linny a big I’m-a-confident-Asian-American-girl smile. “It’s so nice to see you again! Don’t forget to go say hi to my husband.”
Linny waited for the rest of the party to file into the basement. She and Tom took places near the foot of the staircase, on a step so she could see her father standing proudly in front of his office desk, a metal behemoth from Steelcase that could by now be called vintage. Behind him were the curtain-covered shelves Linny and Van had peeked at the night before. Mr. Luong had managed to tidy up his work space—probably he just shoved all the papers under the futon—and the printed sign of Luong Inventions, canopied with Christmas lights, looked almost business-like.
He started speaking in Vietnamese again, stepping away from the desk to show off the new and improved Luong Arm and the Luong Eye. Failing to catch his words, Linny glanced over the crowd. Her father’s friends hadn’t changed that much over the years. Sure, they were grayer-haired as he was, and most had potbellies, but they still drank their favorite Courvoisier or Hennessy V.S.O.P. and laughed too loudly, as if their status depended on it. There was Phuong Trinh, whom her father had said still worked second shift at a napkin factory, and who was as languid-limbed as ever. Linny had never seen anyone smoke a cigarette with such slow movements, as if each drag co
st him something. Co Ngoc, her mother’s best friend who still ran the same nail salon where Linny’s mother had collapsed, maintained a posture bolstered by years of meditation. And Rich and Nancy Bao still looked like they owned the place, any place. Nancy’s sharp face had widened slightly, but her permed hair would forever be dyed black. Off to the side, Van stood with a couple of their mother’s old sewing friends from Roger’s. She had her arms firmly crossed, a stance Linny recalled her mother having whenever she got mad at Mr. Luong.
Linny’s father positioned himself at the curtained-off shelves. With a guttural proclamation—something like the Vietnamese version of “Aha!”—he yanked away the curtain to reveal the three dark varnished shelves bearing one of Van’s school dictionaries, a small alarm clock, and a new picture frame that still contained the stock image of a woman smiling in a field of wildflowers.
Linny leaned toward Tom. “What’s he doing?”
“He said we have to watch closely.”
Mr. Luong stepped around the desk to join the audience. He fished a remote control from his pocket, aimed it at the shelves, and began to laugh when, with a mechanical whirring sound, they slowly began to move. The shelves jutted out like planks on a halved Ferris wheel, lowering and rising, returning to lie flush against the wall.
Mr. Luong faced his audience, his friends, his party. “This,” he said, projecting his voice, “is my new invention, the Luong Wall.”
Everyone began to clap but he held up a hand. He declared something then that Linny didn’t understand except for the word television. Linny was embarrassed to have to ask Tom to translate. Before he could explain, a man at the front of the group—Na Dau—started shouting rah-rah sounds, pumping both fists in the air. Then the rest of the crowd clapped and whistled, her father grinning and laughing, loving it all. He stretched out his arms as if to embrace all the cheers of his friends.
Looking around the room again, Linny caught her sister’s eye. Van seemed troubled and for a moment Linny considered crossing the space between them. But Tom was there, leading her back up the stairs, and as they stepped into the kitchen he let his hand rest for a moment on Linny’s shoulder. He said, translating before she even had to ask, “Your dad’s auditioning for a reality TV show, next month, in Detroit.”
Past eleven, Linny and Tom headed out to the backyard, where Mrs. Luong had once maintained a garden of herbs, vegetables, and flowers—nothing too showy—until incipient arthritis from years of sewing began catching up to her. Now only perennials wavered up through thickets of weeds, bordering the teak bench she had purchased on clearance. Mrs. Luong had loved to sit there, counting down the minutes of twilight.
The bench looked now like a kind of plea against abandonment, probably one of the last things Mrs. Luong had done for the yard before she died. Linny and Tom sat there now, sipping beers beneath the black branches of the maple tree that she and Van had climbed when they were kids. She would almost climb it again, except that it was too cold. In Michigan, the end of April always felt more like winter than spring. The whole month was a tease, usually delivering a last blast of snow before giving in to the warming months.
Inside the house, the party had just begun winding down. It would move on, Linny knew, to someone else’s place, someone else’s stash of alcohol and cards. Before bringing Tom outside, Linny had set out the last of the plates of orange slices, pineapple, and moon cakes and hidden the rest of the Courvoisier from Na Dau. She waved good-bye to Lisa with her growing boys and Rolexed husband. Mr. Luong had been holding court in the living room while Van fetched and gathered drink cups, keeping her head down.
Linny kept bringing the conversation back to the reality TV show. “Do I really want to see my dad on a reality show? Does anybody?”
“He might be good on TV.”
“You mean because he’s strange? Nonsensical? A clown?”
“I get the sense that your dad could be absentminded or brilliant or both. In any case, he’s not a fool.”
“Or he’s just faking it.”
“Well, this party was a good idea. When I heard about it I figured it would be about the only time I’d get to see you again, until the traditional wedding invitation came in the mail.”
“Not likely.” As Linny spoke, a little beeping noise emanated from the cell phone in her pocket. She knew it would be Gary, because she was still ignoring his voice mails. Let him worry, she decided. Let him wonder if she was ever coming back. At that moment she couldn’t have felt more far away from him.
“When we were fifteen,” Tom said, “you just disappeared. Why? I’ve always wanted to know.”
Linny could revive the exact feeling she’d had back then, how her sense of humiliation, even fear, had clouded everything for her. “I guess it was stupid,” she admitted. “It was about my dad and Nancy Bao.”
“What do you mean?”
“The way they were in the car, when we were taking a walk. They were together. You didn’t see?” Tom looked so mystified that Linny almost wanted to laugh. “I thought you saw them. It was weird—it was a big deal to me. I didn’t know how to handle it.”
But Tom had had no idea. He hadn’t been looking at anything but Linny.
“I still don’t know the whole story,” she said, meaning her father and Nancy.
“Are you sure there is one?”
And Linny wasn’t. Somehow, as she sat beside him, the events beyond the yard seemed unable to consume her the way they often did when she was alone in her apartment in Chicago. Why had she always marked such a delineation between past and present, the apartment and the house, Wrightville and Chicago, with her mother and without?
In high school she had fantasized about traveling the world and, if she returned to visit Wrightville at all, doing so with style and righteous contempt for the provincial folks left behind. After Mrs. Luong died, home started to seem like merely a protected space for her father, the one arena where everyone would accommodate him. No wonder he no more wanted to leave it than Linny wanted to stay.
Of all the guys Linny had known or been with, only Tom could sit so easily under this maple tree. Its leaves and branches held lifetimes of glances, taking in all the staring-up that Linny, her mother, and sister had done. Tom had been raised in the suburban Midwest too, a place where no one on the coasts expected Asians to be. As a fifteen-year-old, Linny hadn’t understood. As a twenty-seven-year-old, Linny knew: she didn’t have to explain all the allusions and worries to Tom. She didn’t even have to explain her family, her father, the history they both saw from a second-generation perspective.
When Linny’s parents first started looking for a house they could afford, her father had insisted on being in Wyandotte, near the Baos and his other friends. But Paula Oortsema convinced Linny’s mother to buy the house on Garland Street, in the better school district Wrightville offered. They turned out to be the only Asians in the neighborhood, though one of Linny’s friends from down the street had said that an Oriental family, the Chens, used to live around the corner. Oriental was the word everyone used back then, until suddenly it changed and Linny and Van, especially Van, had to keep correcting their parents. You can’t say Oriental anymore, Mom. You have to say Asian. The one other nonwhite family in the neighborhood was black, and Linny and Van used to play with Candace, the girl their age, until the family moved away suddenly, their house looking abandoned overnight. In fact, families seemed to move away a lot. After Linny started taking classes at the community college and got her own apartment, the neighborhood seemed quieter, more stagnant, whenever she came home. Now her father was surrounded by retirees and widows; at night the familiar flashes of television shows illuminated the houses.
Maybe if the Luongs had moved a little farther west of town, into the heart of where the other Vietnamese families had settled in Wyandotte, things would have been different. Where Tom and Lisa had immersed themselves in the Vietnamese community, Linny and Van had become outsiders. It started with Linny becoming best frien
ds with the popular girls at school, and with Van shying away from the Vietnamese parties so she could stay home with her books and TV. Had they even known what choice they were making? One day Linny was a Vietnamese girl with a jade bracelet, the next day she was trying on clothes at the mall, standing on tiptoes to try to match her tall blond friends. She lost her grasp of Vietnamese as easily as she did the valences and chemical elements she was supposed to memorize in school. It happened so quickly she could hardly recall what it had felt like to know any other language but English. And the less she knew, the more she stayed away. She became, in the words of Mrs. Luong complaining on the phone to her friends, “just like a white girl.”
With Tom, Linny realized that so much of this was already known between them. She didn’t have to work the flirtations she’d exerted with every other guy. Tom didn’t flirt with her, either; he talked. When they heard whoops and shouts coming from the front lawn, Tom read her mind by wondering if anyone had brought illegal fireworks to set off.
Around midnight Linny walked him toward where he’d parked down the block. They had exchanged e-mail addresses and numbers, agreed to trade a home-cooked dinner for a dental checkup. She almost held his hand but too many people stood in the front yard saying good-byes. The streetlamp gave everything away, and already Linny could spy a few women glancing at them, assessing, storing, and building the next day’s gossip. No doubt Tom Hanh was talked about for still being a bachelor, the target of endless setups.
He didn’t give Linny a kiss good-night and she didn’t angle for it. She sensed that they both agreed: in this crowd, it was better just to give a little wave and say they would see each other soon. Linny turned around and headed back to the house quickly so she wouldn’t have to watch him leave. It always gave her a pang of misplaced regret to see people drive off and that wasn’t how she wanted to think about Tom. She wanted to stay up a while longer, take in the last of the party’s merriment.
Bich Minh Nguyen Page 15