The good immigrant student bich minh nguyen

Praise for Stealing Buddha’s Dinner “A charming memoir . . . Her prose is engaging, precise, compact.” —The New York Times Book Review “[D]eftly crafted . . . Far from being a memoir or what could be described as fitting into the kitschy ethnic-lit genre, her story is at once personal and broad, about one Vietnamese refugee navigating U.S. culture as well as an exploration of identity. . . . [S]he pays equal attention to the rhythm and poignancy of language to build her story as she does the circumstances into which she was born.” —Los Angeles Times “Nguyen . . . succeeds as an author on many levels. She is a brave writer who is willing to share intimate family memories many of us would choose to keep secret. Her prose effortlessly pulls readers into her worlds. Her typical and not-so-typical childhood experiences give her story a universal flavor.” —USA Today “Hilarious and poignant, her words will go straight to your heart.” —Daily Candy “Nguyen brings back moments and sensations with such vivid clarity that readers will find themselves similarly jolted back in time. She’s a sensuous writer—colors and textures weave together in her work to create a living fabric. This book should be bought and read anytime your soul hungers for bright language and close observation.” —Star Tribune (Minneapolis) “It’s the premise that makes the book relevant not only to anyone who’s ever lusted after the perfect snack, but anyone who’s ever felt different. Clever turns of phrase make Nguyen’s book read quickly, and children of the ’80s will be able to reminisce about pop culture along with her. The story resonates with anyone who’s ever felt like an outsider.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is beautifully written. Nguyen . . . surely knows how to craft and shape sentences. She understands the evocative possibilities of language, is fearless in asserting the specificities of memories culled from early childhood and is, herself, an appealing character on the page. I believe Nguyen is a writer to watch, a tremendous talent with a gift for gorgeous sentences.” —Chicago Tribune "The story of how one young girl could absorb all these cultural influences and assimilate drives Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and Nguyen makes the journey both fiercely individual and universal.” —Detroit Free Press “Nguyen is a gifted storyteller who doles out humor and hurt in equal portions. Stealing Buddha’s Dinner [is] a tasty read. This memoir, which is also a tribute to ‘all the bad [American] food, fashion, music, and hair of the deep 1980s,’ feels vivid, true, and even nostalgic.”

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—The Christian Science Monitor “[A] pungent, precisely captured memoir.” —Elle “[Nguyen] makes the inability to fit in the springboard for a gracefully told remembrance that mixes the amusing and the touching to wonderful effect. She writes with Zen-like wisdom.” —The Hartford Courant “The author’s prose is lovely and her imagery fresh. And in her re-creation of a world populated by Family Ties [and] Ritz crackers . . . she has captured the 1980s with perfection. . . . This debut suggests she’s a writer to watch.” —Kirkus Reviews "’I came of age before ethnic was cool,’ the author writes in her carefully crafted memoir of growing up in western Michigan as a Vietnamese refugee in the early 1980s....What seems most to have caught her eye and fired her imagination, then as now, was food, which not only provides the title for each chapter of the memoir but also serves as a convenient shorthand for the cultural (and metaphorical) differences between Toll House cookies and green sticky rice cakes, between Pringles and chao gio, between American and Vietnamese. It’s a clever device and —like the book itself—leaves the reader hungry for more.” —Booklist “Only a truly gifted writer could make me long for the Kool-Aid, Rice-a-Roni, and Kit Kats celebrated in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner. In this charming, funny, original memoir about growing up as an outsider in America, Bich Nguyen takes you on a journey you won’t forget. I can hardly wait for what comes next.” —Judy Blume "At once sad and funny, full of brass, energy, and startling insights, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is a charmer of a memoir. Bich Nguyen’s story ranges from the pleasures of popular culture to the richness of personal history, from American fast foods to traditional Vietnamese fare. It is an irresistible tale.” —Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Origin and The Language of Baklava “Bich Nguyen’s Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is an irresistible memoir of assimilation, compassion, family, and food. Who would have thought that SpaghettiOs, Nestlé Quik, and Pringles could seem as wonderfully exotic to a Vietnamese refugee as shrimp curry and spring rolls seem to the average Midwesterner, but that’s part of the tasty surprise of this wonderful debut.” —Dinty W. Moore, author of The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still “Frank, tender, unsettling, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen moves the reader with each event and image. Bich’s grandparents ‘gathered up the family and fled Vietnam to start over on the other side of the world’ in 1975. Her own and her family’s subtle and brutal collisions in Grand Rapids, Michigan, are rendered true and palpable by the writer’s candid imagination. In fiction and nonfiction, the reality of a character’s life lies in how it is experienced. Nguyen’s immigrant childhood resonates, as she captures the experience of two cultures’ clashing smells, religions, hairstyles, clothes, habits, and, especially, foods. As she writes it, her grandmother’s gathering toadstools in their backyard garden sets them apart

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from their neighbors absolutely but also ineffably. America’s foundational story is the immigrant’s tale, and, with its new citizens, the country continuously remakes itself. Similarly, Nguyen’s unique writerly vision, her innovative and pungent voice, reinvents and renews this venerable theme.” —Lynne Tillman, judge for the PEN/Jerard Fund Award

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STEALING BUDDHA’S DINNER Bich Minh Nguyen (first name pronounced Bit) teaches literature and creative writing at Purdue University. She lives with her husband, the novelist Porter Shreve, in Chicago and West Lafayette, Indiana. Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, her first book, was the recipient of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award. She is currently at work on a novel, Short Girls.

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group

(USA) Inc. 2007 Published in Penguin Books 2008 Copyright © Bich Minh Nguyen, 2007

All rights reserved Portions of this book were published as the selections “A World Without Measurements” in

Gourmet; “Toadstools” in Dream Me Home Safely: Writers on Growing Up in America, edited by Susan Richards Shreve (Houghton Mifflin, 2003); and “The Good Immigrant Student” in Tales Out

of School: Contemporary Writers on Their Student Years, edited by Susan Richards Shreve and Porter Shreve (Beacon Press, 2001).

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Table of Contents

About the Author Title Page Copyright Page Dedication

1 - Pringles 2 - Forbidden Fruit 3 - Dairy Cone 4 - Fast Food Asian 5 - Toll House Cookies 6 - School Lunch 7 - American Meat 8 - Green Sticky Rice Cakes 9 - Down with Grapes 10 - Bread and Honey 11 - Salt Pork 12 - Holiday Tamales 13 - Stealing Buddha’s Dinner 14 - Ponderosa 15 - Mooncakes 16 - Cha Gio

Author’s Note Acknowledgements

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1

Pringles

WE ARRIVED IN GRAND RAPIDS WITH FIVE DOLLARS and a knapsack of clothes. Mr. Heidenga, our sponsor, set us up with a rental house, some groceries—boxed rice, egg noodles, cans of green beans—and gave us dresses his daughters had outgrown. He hired my father to work a filling machine at North American Feather. Mr. Heidenga wore wide sport coats and had yellow hair. My sister and I were taught to say his name in a hushed tone to show respect. But if he stopped by to check on us my grandmother would tell us to be silent because that was part of being good. Hello, girls, he would say, stooping to pat us on the head.

It was July 1975, but we were cold. Always cold, after Vietnam, and my uncle Chu Cuong rashly spent two family dollars on a jacket from the Salvation Army, earning my grandmother’s scorn. For there were seven of us to feed in that gray house on Baldwin Street: my father, Grandmother Noi, Uncles Chu Cuong, Chu Anh, and Chu Dai (who wasn’t really an uncle but Cuong’s best friend), and my sister and me. Upstairs belonged to the uncles, and downstairs my sister and I shared a room with Noi. My father did not know how to sleep through the night. He paced around the house, double-checking the lock on the front door; he glanced sideways out the taped-up windows, in case someone was watching from the street. When at last he settled down on the living room sofa, a tweedy green relic from Mr. Heidenga’s basement, he kept one hand on the sword he had bought from a pawnshop with his second paycheck. My father had showed my sister and me the spiral carvings on the handle. He turned the sword slowly, its dull metal almost gleaming, and let us feel the weight of the blade.

On Baldwin Street all of the houses were porched and lop-sided, missing slats and posts like teeth knocked out of a sad face. Great heaps of rusted cars lined the curbs, along with beer bottles that sparkled in any hint of sunlight. I spent a lot of time staring at the street, waiting for something to happen or someone to appear. Chu Anh got a job working second shift at a tool and die plant, and sometimes he and my father would meet each other on the street, coming and going from the bus stop.

My sister was also named Anh, but with an accent no one pronounces anymore. A year older than I, she was the ruler of all our toys. We amassed a closet full of them, thanks to the bins at our sponsor’s church. We had so much, we became reckless. We threw Slinkies until they tangled and drowned paper dolls. Someone gave us tricycles and we traveled the house relentlessly, forgetting our uncles sleeping upstairs. We didn’t know that they had to get up in the middle of the night, or that our father competed for pillows and comforters from the reject pile at work. We didn’t know that we were among the lucky.

I remember bare feet on old wood floors; shivering after a bath. Noi knitted heavy sweaters from marled-colored rayon my father bought at Kmart. Puffs of

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steam rose from the kitchen stove where she cooked our daily rice. One blizzard morning, Noi let my sister and me run outside in our pajamas and fuzzy slippers. The snow fell on my face and for a moment I laughed and waved. Then a gust of wind sent me tumbling into a snow-bank and I screamed so much, Noi thought the weather had turned into an attack. She snatched us up and ran inside. We had been living on Baldwin Street for almost a year when Mr. Heidenga invited us to dinner at his family’s massive, pillared house in East Grand Rapids. The Heidengas had a cook, like Alice on The Brady Bunch, and she must have fed us—me, my sister Anh, and the Heidenga daughters, all sequestered together in the kitchen. But I don’t remember eating anything. I only remember staring, and silence, and Heather Heidenga— who might have been Marcia, with that oval face —opening a canister of Pringles. Anh and I were transfixed by the bright red cylinder and the mustache grin on Mr. Pringles’s broad, pale face. The Heidenga girl pried off the top and crammed a handful of chips into her mouth. We watched the crumbs fall from her fingers to the floor.

Mrs. Heidenga swished into the kitchen to see how we were doing. Later, my father would swear that she served them raw hamburgers for dinner. Mrs. Heidenga was tall and blond, glamorous in a pastel pantsuit and clicking heels. When she touched her daughters’ hair her bracelets clattered richly. Nicole Heidenga, who was younger than her sister but older than mine, waited for her mother to go back to the dining room. She shoved her hand into the can of Pringles and said, “Where’s your mom?”

Anh and I made no answer. We had none to give. We had left Vietnam in the spring of 1975, when my sister was two and I was eight months old. By then, everyone in Saigon knew the war was lost, and to stay meant being sent to reeducation camps, or worse. The neighbors spoke of executions and what the Communists would do to their children; they talked of people vanished and tortured—a haunting reminder of what my grandfather had endured in the North. My father heard that some Americans were going to airlift children out of the country, and he wondered if he could get Anh and me on one of those planes. Operation Babylift it was called, and over the course of April would carry away two thousand children. But on April 4 the first flight crashed at the Tan Son Nhut air base, killing most on board. My father decided he had to find another way, though time was running out for Saigon. Americans were fleeing. Wealthy Vietnamese worked bribes to get any route out. Masses of would-be refugees mobbed the airport.

On the morning of April 29 the last helicopters rose from the roofs of the American Embassy. The North Vietnamese were closing in, firing rockets at the downtown neighborhoods, where looters were still smashing in windows. Tanks would be rolling into the presidential palace by the next day. Chu Cuong, who was based at the naval headquarters, called Chu Anh at the army communications center. Two dozen ships had been waiting at the Saigon River for the past month, preparing for the end. Now it was time. I’m getting on a ship, Chu Cuong said. You

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get the family on any one you can. Go now. He had been to the United States for training missions— there’s a photograph of

him confident and grinning in hip-slung bell-bottoms, his hair windblown while the Statue of Liberty rises up behind him—and he was certain that we would all be able to meet up there. We’ll find each other, he said casually, as if America were a small town.

Chu Anh went straight home and sat down, dazed. He was known as the level- headed practical one, and he wasn’t so prepared to abandon everything and throw our fate into an old Vietnamese warship. My father argued with him. There’s no other way, he pointed out. This is our last chance.

We headed toward the Vietnamese naval headquarters, Chu Anh driving a motorbike while holding Anh in one arm, and my father on his own bike, with Noi on the back holding fast to me. They drove through the twenty-four-hour curfew and the thundering of shells. All around us people were running, dropping suitcases and clothes, trying to flag down cars.

At the Saigon River my father and uncle abandoned their once fiercely protected bikes only to see thousands of people already gathered at the headquarters gates, where guards patrolled with automatic rifles. They began searching for another way to the docks, pushing through the screaming crowd. A full panic had hit the city, the kind that sent people racing after airplanes on the runway, that made people offer their babies to departing American soldiers.

It was almost dusk—no lights came on—by the time my father spied a passageway blocked by a roll of barbed wire. He motioned to Chu Anh, who still wore his soldier’s boots, to step down on the wire so the rest of the family could get past it. How this happened—quickly, almost easily—my father doesn’t understand. Had no one else seen the passage? Did no one see us go? Sometimes, he says, he dreams it didn’t happen at all.

As we ran to the docks a guard grabbed my father and swung him around, pushing the barrel of an M-16 at his stomach. What are you doing here? Go back, he ordered.

My father just looked at him. Chu Anh and Noi were moving ahead with me and Anh. Shoot me if you have to, he said. But my family is going. He backed away, turning to run. The guard didn’t shoot.

Most of the ships were already gone. The river was filling up with rowboats and dinghies, whatever means people could find. We climbed onto one of the last ships in line, using a ladder that someone pulled up the second my father touched the deck.

We left that night out of luck, drive, fear pushed into fearlessness. And by further luck the ship inched forward down the long river, everyone holding their breath for the gunfire they expected but which never came. As we reached the ocean the U.S. Seventh Fleet appeared in the distance to guide us toward the Philippines.

Those days on the ship, people jostled each other to keep the small space they had claimed among the thousand or so on board. There was not enough rice or

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fresh water, and all around us children screamed and wailed without stopping. My father says that my sister and I did not cry the entire trip, and I’d like to believe it. I’d like to think we gave them something—a little peace, maybe. My father, uncle, and grandmother didn’t talk much, worrying about Chu Cuong, if he had made it out safely, where he was at that moment. One morning, the word apples swept around the ship. My father hurried to collect our family’s portion and brought back half an apple for Noi. She fed it to my sister and me, taking none for herself.

Then another word: fire. Somewhere belowdecks one had started in a room near the ammunitions hold. This ship is going to blow up, someone said. In the rising hysteria my father, grandmother, and uncle quietly sat down with Anh and me, preparing to accept whatever would happen. They waited. But the ship stayed on course. Below, workers had managed to extinguish the fire.

Late at night my father slipped away from the deck and made friends with the crewmen. He had always been a charmer, the popular kid surrounded by friends, the smooth talker who could dance any woman around the room. Now he worked his way into the kitchen and struck a deal with one of the cooks, listening to the guy’s long stories of home and teaching him how to play poker in exchange for a little powdered milk for my sister and me.

At Subic Bay in the Philippines we transferred to a U.S. ship headed for Guam. There, at a refugee camp, we awaited entry papers into the United States. For the next month my father looked for anyone he might know from his neighborhood in Saigon. He joined groups of boys who dared each other to climb the skinny, arching coconut trees and knock down the fruit. It was a small risk for some flavor, a taste that would remind them of home.

One day, a couple of weeks into the waiting, my father got into the usual long line for rice and noticed a man, far ahead, wearing yellow pants. They were brighter than the day, tinged with chartreuse in a lava-lamp pattern, and the man was standing a little outside the line, his left leg askance as if striking a pose. My father recognized those pants. They were his own, a favorite pair, ones he had often worn when he went out at night.

My father stepped out of the line and walked toward the man in the yellow pants, who turned around. It was Chu Cuong. He had been in the camp all this time, wondering if the family had been able to get on a ship. He had worn the pants every day, always making sure to stand a little apart from everyone else, just in case. He was glad, he said, that he wouldn’t have to wear those pants all over America, looking for us. From Guam we flew to Arkansas and the refugee camp at Fort Chaffee. We were in America at last, but there was little to tell from behind the barbed-wire, chain- link fence. There were no trees to climb, and not a coconut in sight. The days strung themselves into months of waiting: standing in meal lines; playing cards; hoping for sponsors; sitting around the tents and barracks talking about what they had heard America was like. The optimists said easy money, fast cars, girls with blue eyes; others said cold, filled with crazy people. My father and uncles traded English words for cigarettes. Chu Anh in particular knew more than most; he’d

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always excelled at school and had gotten in two years of college before he’d had to join the army.

My father made friends with one of the American soldiers guarding the camp and brought back a few bars of chocolate for Noi. She spent her time minding my sister and me and talking to women who spent their hours crying, longing to go back home. Later, a group of Vietnamese in the camp organized a campaign to get sent back to Saigon. They were fools, my father said, and did they think they would return to a better life in Vietnam, greeted by the North Vietnamese? Even he, an impatient man, knew all he could do was wait to see which city we would be given. Only after we left Fort Chaffee did he realize how much time he had wasted in the camp. He had felt almost safe there among his fellow Vietnamese. He had forgotten to think ahead, imagine us living among white people who spoke only English and looked at us strangely. He had forgotten to prepare.

Every afternoon my father went to look at the names posted at the camp’s central office. When at last our Nguyen appeared, buried in the list of Nguyens, my father brought back three options: sponsors in California, Wyoming, and Michigan. To make such a swift decision with little information to go on, my family relied on vague impressions volunteered by friends of friends in the camp; they relied on rumors. California: warm but had the most lunatics. Wyoming: cowboys. Michigan was the blank unknown. My father would have chosen California, where he heard many other Vietnamese were going. But my grandmother, the head of the family, hesitated. Back in Saigon, she had met a woman whose son had studied at the University of Michigan on a scholarship. Such a possibility had grown in her mind until it became near legend, too symbolic to refuse. And here it was right in front of her.

The night before we left for Grand Rapids my father and uncles pooled their money—thirty-five dollars—to throw a party for their friends who were still waiting for sponsors. They had only five dollars remaining after buying beer and cigarettes but figured, so be it. They wanted a proper farewell to the people who knew them, and to toast the lives they had foregone. We are I came of age in the 1980s, before diversity and multicultural awareness trickled into western Michigan. Before ethnic was cool. Before Thai restaurants became staples in every town. When I think of Grand Rapids I remember city signs covered in images of rippling flags, proclaiming “An All-American City.” A giant billboard looming over the downtown freeway boasted the slogan to all who drove the three-lane S- curve. As a kid, I couldn’t figure out what “All-American” was supposed to mean. Was it a promise, a threat, a warning?

Of the two hundred thousand people who populate Grand Rapids, the majority are Dutch descendants, Christian Reformed, conservative. My family was among the several thousand Vietnamese refugees brought to the area, mostly through churches participating in the federal resettlement effort. My father and uncles and grandmother were grateful for a place to go—how could they be anything less?— and preferred to overlook how the welcoming smile of our sponsor gave way to a scowling face behind a drugstore cash register: Don’t you people know how to

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speak English? Why don’t you go back to where you came from? Grand Rapids brings to mind Gerald Ford, office furniture, and Amway, created

here in 1959 by Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel. The company is now headquartered just east of the city in the town of Ada. My stepmother Rosa, whom my father married in 1979, would one day move us there in an effort to keep our family together. DeVos and Van Andel have poured millions of dollars into Grand Rapids and the Republican Party. Their names are emblazoned everywhere on buildings and in the Grand Rapids Press, a reminder of what and whom the town represents, as if the sea of blond—so much I could swear I was dreaming in wheat — could let a foreigner forget. In school hallways blond heads glided, illuminated in the lockers creaking open and slamming shut, taunting me to be what I only wished I could be. That was the dilemma, the push and pull. The voice saying, Come on in. Now transform. And if you cannot, then disappear.

In 1983 the construction of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel’s glass tower marked the city’s first skyscraper, reaching twenty-nine stories. I remember the breathless chronicle of the building in the newspaper, and the opening of restaurants too fancy to dare consider. It would be years before I stepped foot inside the velvet green lobby, years before my father and stepmother ate an anniversary dinner—the only one I ever knew them to celebrate—at the 1913 Restaurant, where they ate chocolate mousse that arrived in an edible shell that cracked open when they tapped it. When I drive Highway 131 skirting downtown, I can’t help seeing pride and forlornness in the mirrored obelisk of the Grand Plaza jutting up from the landscape of brick buildings left over from the nineteenth century furniture boom. The Grand River cuts throug h the city on its way to Lake Michigan, a swath for salmon and waste, a gleaming opacity beneath the lit-up bridges at night.

My family ventured into downtown only a few times a year, for the Festival of the Arts (known simply as Festival), the Hispanic Festival where Rosa volunteered, Fourth of July fireworks, and the city’s Celebration on the Grand. Crowds of families would set up blankets and lawn chairs on the Indian mounds at Ah-Nab - Awen Park, waiting for fireworks to rain over the river. We’d hurry to join them, my father’s mood darkening as he drove around for a parking space, circling the elephantine Calder sculpture that anchors the downtown business area. I had love- hate feelings for the Calder: it represented Grand Rapids, being part of the city’s logo, yet it was also real art—something greater than the ordinary life I knew.

Throughout my childhood I wondered, so often it became a buzzing dullness, why we had ended up here, and why we couldn’t leave. I would stare at a map of the United States and imagine us in New York or Boston or Los Angeles. I had no idea what such cities were like, but I was convinced people were happier out on the coasts, living in a nexus between so much land and water. Gazing at the crisscrossing lines of Manhattan or the blue vastness of the oceans, I would feel something I could only describe as missingness. In the town of Holland, about half an hour’s drive from Grand Rapids, the annual spring Tulip Time Festival brings all other activities to a halt. The citizenry work double-time to get their front-yard tulips in order. There are contests, prizes,

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prestige to be had. There’s a parade. People line up early with their lawn chairs to wait for girls in braids and wooden clogs to come clopping down the streets.

Once, in second grade, a substitute teacher gave a geography lesson by asking students to name the places they wanted to visit. She had a large globe beside her, spinning it absently as she talked. I was the first student she called on. Tongue-tied by shyness, I couldn’t think of what to say. “Holland,” I blurted out.

Brightly the teacher said, “Here or overseas?” I must have stared at her dumbly, for she repeated the question, “This Holland or

the one overseas?” Perhaps she thought I didn’t understand. But I was amazed that of all the places in the world, she thought that I would choose the town of Holland. Wasn’t it enough that I would choose the country?

“Not here,” I said. “Not this one.” In 1975 we were new in America and two years away from the arrival of Rosa. Before she swept us up and out of Baldwin Street, we lived in a house of splintery wooden floors that slanted in different directions. We huddled close as if in a cave. Our Vietnamese mixed with the American voices rising from the old television my father had brought back to life. Our cave had feather smells and rice smells, tricycles in the house, bare feet. My sister and I played all day in our pajamas, even going outside in them, though no farther than the curb so our grandmother could watch us from the porch. In the cave we ate spring rolls and drank 7UP, tore open packages of licorice and Wrigley’s spearmint gum. My sister and I fell asleep with plastic phones and floppy dolls from the bins at Blessed Christian Reformed Church. We held on to oranges and plums, desserts from Noi, saved so long we forgot to eat them.

When Christmas rolled around we had a genuine fake tree with lights and a star. Anh and I had no idea what the word Christmas meant; to us it was, and remained for years, glitter and gifts. We had to put together the pieces of America that came to us through television, song lyrics, Meijer Thrifty Acres, and our father, coming home from work each day with a new kind of candy in his pocket. We couldn’t get enough Luden’s wild-cherry-flavored cough drops, or Pringles stacked in their shiny red canister, a mille-feuille of promises. My father’s mustache was nothing like Mr. Pringles’s, which winged out jauntily. Mr. Pringles was like Santa Claus or Mr. Heidenga—a big white man, gentle of manner, whose face signaled a bounty of provisions.

So we hoarded our Pringles cans, rolling them on the floor, making them into piggy banks with pennies donated by our uncles. The Pringles glowed by window light, their fine curvatures nearly translucent. So delicate, breaking into salty shards on our tongues. These were blissful days, or so they seemed to me. I did not know we were poor, or refugees, or that we had been born in another hemisphere. I didn’t know that a kind of apprehension gathered around my father each evening, making him check the corners of every room, the spaces behind open doors. I wonder what he thought about—he doesn’t say, can’t remember. Did he wake up gasping with shock, gripping the sword, forgetting where he was? Did he dream of Saigon? Did he think ahead to what he would have to tell my sister and me, one day, if we asked

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about our mother? How would he explain the choice he had had to make? Back in the chill of the rental house that cost one hundred precious dollars a

month, the only future he could see lay in work, in whirls of processed feathers. For the beauty of a Pringle could only go so far, and must be paid for. My uncles felt it, too. When they slept all day after working all night, or played the same melancholy Simon & Garfunkel song over and over, my grandmother told me not to bother them with questions about what all the words meant.

Too much to ask, and too much to do. English to learn, streets to navigate, work to manage, food to buy, friends to find. And so my father and uncles and grandmother rose, always in darkness, toward this new life.

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2

Forbidden Fruit

WHEN MY FATHER WORKED AT THE NORTH AMERICAN Feather Company he always came home with down in his hair, a fine scattering like the Michigan snow that seemed to fall without stopping those first winters in America. When he tossed me into the air to make me laugh he smelled like factory feathers and old brass. The scent lingered even when the days began to brighten, the gray cloud cover over Grand Rapids slowly lifting.

My father made fast friends with the other Vietnamese refugees who had landed in Grand Rapids. They cobbled together seeds and ingredients, information on weather and how to send letters to family in Vietnam. Some people drove across the state to Canada, where Chinese groceries in Windsor sold real jasmine rice, lemongrass, and the fleshy, familiar fruits that had no English translation. Now Noi could plant cilantro, mint, ram rau. She grew more at ease in our neighborhood and started taking my sister and me to a nearby park. We never saw any other children around. Shielded by “Beware of Dog” signs, the other houses looked empty, shut tight against us. Still, Noi fixed our hair in side ponytails and dressed us in corduroy jumpers that came in a grocery bag from Mr. Heidenga’s daughters. She stood sedately, watching us play on the jungle gym and swings. Under her puffy nylon jacket from Goodwill she wore the jade green ao dai she had sewn.

On good days, when he was in a happy mood, my father let us walk with him to Meijer to get groceries and choose any kind of candy we wanted. So we introduced ourselves to Smarties, Hershey’s chocolate bars, candy necklaces, and pink-tipped candy cigarettes. On summer days Noi took us to the farmers’ market. Anh and I held hands as we trailed her, looking up at the canvas canopy and the swaying silver scales. Noi bargained wordlessly, pulling dollar bills from a little lacquer purse with a wooden handle. Her arms filled with brown sacks. At home she would unveil grapes and nectarines, tomatoes and greens, taut bulbs of onion.

The allure of the fruits—their roundness, aliveness—enchanted my sister and me, but the choicest pieces went first to a plate that lay before the golden statue of Buddha in the living room. This was the altar for him and for our dead relatives, to whom my grandmother paid respect every morning and evening. My father had built a shelf for the Buddha, who sat perpetually smooth, peaceful, eyes closed, his palms facing up. The fruit made a solemn offering, and for two whole days, sometimes longer, it had to remain there untouched between Noi’s candles and stems of incense. I was in awe of this process. Did Buddha and the ancestors know the fruit was there for the taking? Did they prefer apples or bananas or plums? Once in a great while Noi put an entire pineapple on the altar and I wondered how they would eat it. I always expected the fruit to disappear, and when it did not I marveled at the ancestors’ lack of hunger, their self-control.

I tried to work up the nerve to pluck off just one grape, but I feared my dead

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relatives would tell on me. Buddha might snap open his eyes and let my grandmother know that his food had been disrespected. The thought kept me at bay, circling the altar like a nighttime prowler. The fruit might as well have been protected behind glass, the dusty grapes turning into jewels.

When at last Noi took up two pieces of fruit for my sister and me—peaches and plums in the summer, apples and pears in the fall, oranges in winter—we held on to them like lifeboats. We kept them in our laps, smoothing the varnish of the apples until they bruised, cradling the mottled green pears in our arms. We loved to sniff peaches, tickling our faces with their fuzz. Hours would pass like this, our admiration steady, our anticipation covering the afternoons. At last Noi would pull the fruit away from us and carve them into wedges—plums were the only fruit we ate with the skins still on. We could never get enough. The fruit seemed dearer to us than candy, and I believed that the transformation from globe to glistening slices involved some kind of magic. It would be years before either my sister or I ever bit into a whole apple.

Later, Noi found pomegranates, mangoes, persimmons, and coconuts at the newly opened Saigon Market. All of these were set upon the altar before making their way to our mouths, and it was a lesson in patience and desire. We were eating gifts every time. On the New Year’s Eve between 1977 and 1978 my father and Uncle Chu Anh were hanging out in a rec room of an apartment complex off East Beltline. It was a Vietnamese party, everyone dancing to Donna Summer and Debby Boone and sharing bottles of Martini & Rossi Asti Spumante. My father was sitting at a table with a group of guys and a pack of cards when he saw two women pausing at the doorway. One had curly black hair, and it took him a moment to realize that she wasn’t Vietnamese. But she didn’t look white, either. “Look at that,” one of the guys said with a low whistle.

The two women were Rosa, a second-generation Mexican-American, and Shirley, a daughter of German-Jewish immigrants by way of the Dominican Republic. They had become friends while teaching ESL classes in downtown Grand Rapids, and had been invited to the party by a Vietnamese guy Shirley had met at the community education center. My father didn’t waste time. He got to Rosa first, asking her to dance to what happened to be one of her favorite songs, “You Light Up My Life.” Shirley fell into step with Chu Anh, and together the four of them drew the stares of the crowd. I wonder if my father was wearing his favorite olive-patterned shirt, collars set wide against the tawny lapels of his one sport jacket. Maybe Rosa wore a mauve-colored chiffon dress, puffed at the shoulder and tight at the wrists, that floated out when my father, an expert dancer, twirled her around the room. I wonder if he saw in her face a familiar expression of unease, of knowing what it was to live in this pale city in which they had ended up, by chance, by way of survival.

After a while he suggested they ditch the party and go get something to eat. Rosa agreed, but when they walked out into the freezing air he realized he had no idea where to go. So he took her to the only restaurant he could think of, the one in the

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lobby of the Holiday Inn. Mr. Heidenga had put us up in this same hotel our first few nights in Michigan, while he found us a place to live. Meal after meal my grandmother had requested plain bowls of the white rice she craved. The cook didn’t know how to make it, and Noi longed to go back into the kitchen and fix it herself. My sister remembers restlessness, a vague feeling of expectation. She remembers my father ordering us as much tapioca pudding as we wanted.

My father and Rosa do not remember what they talked about that New Year’s Eve, but something between them was decided that night. Soon, Rosa would be standing in our house on Baldwin, laughing at the fruit on the altar. It belonged in the kitchen, she said, not the living room. She picked up an orange from the altar and Noi shook her head. Without English to explain, my grandmother gently pulled the fruit out of Rosa’s hand and set it back on its plate. Rosa understood then. “It’s your custom,” she would say later, year after year, Tet after Tet. “It’s the way Vietnamese do things.”

She roamed through the house, looking through the cupboards to see what we ate, surveying the room that Anh and I shared with Noi. We slept in a rattling steel- framed bunk bed that had come with the house—Noi on the top bunk, Anh and I on the bottom. At dinner Rosa sat down at the kitchen table with us and ate Noi’s pho, trying to pick up the slippery noodles with her chopsticks. They splashed back into the broth until Rosa cut them with a spoon against the side of the bowl. Rosa had a large chest, bigger than any I’d seen even on television, and when she leaned over to eat I caught my first real-life glimpse of a woman’s cleavage.

After we ate, Anh and I ran back to our living room domain to watch television. It was a black and white, with antennae sprouting out and covered in tinfoil. Upstairs, my uncles played records on the hi-fi they’d saved up to buy. They could listen to the Carpenters, the Eagles, and Paul Simon until the grooves wore out. Anh and I divided our time among toys, television, and our uncles’ songs. We learned English this way, matching sound with word with meaning. Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near? We watched Wonder Woman, Police Woman, Happy Days, and Sesame Street. We sat close to the screen, shouting out dialogue and names. My favorite actress was Angie Dickinson, whose name seemed to match her flowing hair and tough, sassy work patrolling the streets.

I could feel Rosa watching us, her eyes taking in the scratched floors, the Salvation Army furniture, the wooden clock carved into the shape of Vietnam—the only decoration on the living room wall. Anh and I sat together in our beloved green chair and Noi brought us one apple each. We held them carefully, saving them, always saving them, while we switched from Bert and Ernie to Fat Albert.

Rosa brought us groceries and gifts—milk and mittens for Anh and me, shampoo and toothpaste, National Geographics for the uncles. She ate whatever Noi cooked, impressing us all with her effort to master chopsticks. She slid right into our lives. After dinner, she said that children should not be riding tricycles around the house. Those belonged outside. She asked us to please tidy up our toys. She said we shouldn’t be eating so much candy. Then one day she approached us while we were in the bathtub. Noi’s method was to scrub us down with a washcloth

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until we turned pink. She had been washing our hair with soap and Rosa tried to communicate with her that shampoo—a yellow bottle of Johnson & Johnson— would be better. Anh and I screamed with terror, hating the cold liquid on our scalps, until Rosa showed us the foamy bubbles and how they floated on the water. “See?” she said, one of the things she was always saying, as if she were literally opening our eyes. Rosa had been dating my father for about two months when she started talking about how Anh would be five years old in March and we had to have a party. I remember sitting at the Formica table in the kitchen while Rosa washed dishes, explaining to me what birthdays were. In August, she said, I would be four years old. Rosa said that in America everyone had birthdays. She described them in terms of Christmas and Tet, with presents and food and more presents. This sounded like a windfall, especially coming so soon after the money pleasures and moon cakes of Tet.

All of my legal records—from my original permanent resident alien card to my citizenship papers and driver’s license—list a birthday I don’t celebrate. Perhaps because his mind was distracted, or perhaps because in Vietnam death is remembered more than birthdays, my father forgot our birth dates when he had to write them down at the refugee camp in Guam. So he guessed. It was years before he and Noi agreed on the more likely days (sometime in early March for Anh, late August for me). Noi said what mattered was the year: Anh, born in the year of the buffalo, and I in the year of the tiger. El tigre, Rosa would say with a rrrr-ing sound whenever she caught me in a sour mood.

The first birthday cake I ever saw was from the Meijer bakery. It was oblong, covered in rosettes and pink and white frosting, a vision of wealth and excess. The sugar flowers quickened my heartbeat, hinting at a whole new concept of sweetness. A giant candle, shaped in the number five, sat in the middle of the cake, and Anh in her new red velveteen dress smiled for Rosa’s camera. She and my father had invited people I had never seen before, mostly friends of my father’s who wore their hand-sewn ao dais and best thrift store suits. The brightly wrapped gifts piled up around Anh. She discovered, to her dismay, that a few of the presents were for me, because our fair-minded father had insisted that gifts had to be given to both of us. This realization hit my sister hard. It may have been her first true American moment: she cried, stamped her foot, and shrieked angrily that it was her birthday and I shouldn’t be getting a thing.

Not long after, Rosa introduced us to her daughter, Crissy. She was eight, four and a half years older than I, pretty and petulant, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her denim jumper. She frowned and scrunched up her freckled nose. I was probably too young to be startled by the news of Crissy’s sudden existence, but she wasn’t too young to be upset about ours. Pissed off was one of the first phrases she taught me, followed by its fond abbreviation, P.O.’ed. I’m really P.O.’ed, she would say. What’s that? I’d ask. Pissed off. What does that mean? P.O.’ed.

It had always been just the two of them, Rosa and Crissy, in their Dutch Colonial apartment complex north of downtown. Now Rosa brought her daughter to the

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house on Baldwin Street and instructed us to play together. Crissy only warmed up to us when my father gave us an extra-large supply of Pringles and Hershey bars. She tantalized us with swear words, doling out only damn and hell, promising much better ones if she felt like telling. She taught us to race from the living room and jump onto the top of the bunk bed. Crissy and Anh could do this with ease, but on one of my failed tries I gashed my leg open on a piece of metal sticking out from the bed. I have no recollection of pain from that long bloody cut, but I do remember sitting in the living room with my grandmother’s pillow, leg propped up while I sipped my own treasured bottle of 7UP. The scar on my leg remains, barely faded, a reminder of the force with which Crissy and Rosa burst into our lives. That fall, Rosa, whom Anh and I had been instructed to call Mom, moved all of us away from Baldwin to a house on Florence Street, on the southeast side of town. And in January, just a little over a year after they had met, my father and Rosa, seven months’ pregnant with my brother Vinh, married at the courthouse in downtown Grand Rapids. So much snow fell that day that the roads grew impassable, and no one could make it to the house for the small wedding reception. Months later, Chu Anh and Shirley would also get married. In my green patchwork dress that exactly matched my sister’s, I would eat the maraschino cherries from my Shirley Temples and watch Chu Anh and Shirley dance in the Holiday Inn’s ballroom.

Our house on Florence Street was surrounded by similar ranches and split-levels. It had army-green vinyl siding, a narrow garage, and a blue front door with three diamond-shaped windows. Set into a hill, the house looked like a flat ranch from the front but exposed the basement in the back. A few years after we moved in, my father and Rosa had an addition built onto it. On the top floor my father cut a space for a doorway leading to a deck that he never got around to building. The door remains there still, threatening to open out onto nothing.

Anh, Crissy, and I shared a bedroom that had pear-green carpet patterned into almost-paisleys. Anh and I had another bunk bed, this one painted white, and I got the top bunk. That small space between bed and ceiling soon became my only privacy, filled with overdue library books. My sisters dominated every other spot in the room and I accepted this, already knowing that my role was to be out of the way, apart and observing. Living on Florence Street made me more aware of my footsteps and my voice—more aware of the construct of family. I knew, for instance, that it was strange that Crissy didn’t have a father, but I also knew better than to press anyone about it. My father and Rosa had in common a deadly stare, part frown, part rage, when they were met with talk they didn’t like, and this look always earned my silence. There were so many things that could never be spoken. Whenever one of us kids asked Rosa a question she didn’t want to answer, she’d reply, “Be quiet” or “It’s none of your business.” My father would just emit a grunting noise. Almost any question—from whether we could go see a movie to why all of Rosa’s family lived forty minutes away in a town called Fruitport— could yield such responses.

My father set up the Buddha and ancestor altar not in the living room but in

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Noi’s room, which lay across the hall from me, Anh, and Crissy. Buddha’s shift in place was one of many adjustments for me. No longer would Rosa tolerate tricycles in the house at any time. Our toy closet was no more. Rosa taught us how to make our beds and put clothes in dresser drawers. She drew up a list of chores and said we would have to take turns washing dishes. She checked on us while we brushed our teeth, to make sure we actually did it. I preferred Noi’s method, which was simply to ask, “Dang rang?” The simple phrase—Did you brush your teeth? —carried a trill and a rhyme, somehow making the task a little less awful. Now the rules of the house were governed not by my grandmother but by my new stepmother.

Uncle Chu Cuong and his friend Chu Dai, who had lived with us since our days in the refugee camps, were gloriously exempt, free and easy bachelors. They lived in the basement, which the previous owners had supplied with a padded wet bar and shiny silver wallpaper. Chu Dai plugged in the hi-fi and let music rise up the stairs. They always played my favorite, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” knowing how much I liked to repeat the rhymes. Slip out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan. Hop on the bus, Gus. I pictured guys as carefree as my uncles, elusive, unpinnable. Chu Cuong and Chu Dai were making good money at a jewelry plant, enough to buy all the records they wanted, plus a sage-green Chevy Maverick and a motorcycle.

Chu Anh was away at school. The year before, he had confessed to my father that he couldn’t take another moment working at the tool and die plant. He longed to go to college, he said. Chu Anh had always loved studying, and had trained to be an aeronautical engineer in Vietnam. “So go,” my father said.

“What about the family?” Chu Anh had asked, thinking about tuition, loans, groceries.

“Don’t worry,” my father said. “I’m not going anywhere.” Chu Anh enrolled in nearby Calvin College, but when he realized its Christian

Reformed affiliation was serious he applied for a transfer to the University of Michigan, located two hours away. Few things ever made my grandmother happier, and she cherished the photograph he sent home from Ann Arbor: Chu Anh standing near a snowdrift on campus, carrying a bundle of engineering books and wearing a light sweater, hipster pants, and steel-gray glasses. Such evidence made it easier to let another one of her sons go.

My father had been promoted to better hours and machinery at North American Feather, though he still came home smelling of dust, his hair speckled white. On weekends off, he worked on his 1972 pewter-gray Mustang, which had a black vinyl interior that scorched the skin on summer days. He had bought it not long before his fateful New Year’s Eve date with Rosa. He loved to drive around by himself, visiting friends who lived in Wyoming and Caledonia. He began shopping the secondhand stores more carefully. But nothing ever replaced that favorite shirt, shiny with a flaring collar, patterned all over with what looked like green olives stuffed with pimento. My father wore it whenever he went out wanting to look “sharp.” It was a word Rosa introduced to our vocabulary. “Lookin’ good!” she

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would croon. “Man, that is sharp.” It’s startling to see how fresh and happy they were in those early photographs—a late seventies couple with shaggy hair, boho hems, and big, dazed grins on their faces.

Outside, the hill in our yard was just steep enough for decent sledding, and the previous owners had left their swing set. Noi had plenty of space for a garden, and in the early morning she fed pieces of stale bread to the squirrels who approached without fear and ate from her hand. It was clear we had moved up a little, into a neighborhood where people mowed their lawns. I never loved being outside as much as I did on Florence Street. We could breathe easier, sleep without swords. Much of my world revolved around Noi’s ways and rituals, which included eating fruit every night after dinner. Only now do I think of the journey each piece made, from orchards and trees to stores and bins and farmers’ market baskets, to Noi’s hands and shopping cart, to the kitchen sink for washing and rewashing, to the wrought-iron plate that lay untouched beneath the Buddha, back through Noi’s hands into mine. In the evening, Noi unknotted the bun of her silver hair and let it pool around her like a cape. The apples and pears that Anh and I kept all day, waiting for just the right moment to eat, would be coaxed from us and whittled into symmetrical slices. The presentation meant a winding down into bedtime and made me feel warm, safe. Even then I loved order and disorder simultaneously, discretely. I loved to make detailed schedules planning every minute of my day (2:00- 2:30, Draw; 2:30-3:00, Get Anh to play Chinese checkers with me), even while I kept my bed covered in a shock of books and dirty clothes.

Crissy usually made faces at Noi’s fruit. She laughed at the way we sat cross- legged on the floor. I became self-conscious about our ritual, aware that it wasn’t something Crissy was used to—aware that it might not be normal. We were in Rosa’s house now, so the plate of orange wedges had to involve her, too. The moments Anh and I had always known with Noi—hoarding pieces of fruit while sharing the same green armchair to watch an episode of Police Woman—couldn’t happen on Florence Street, where Rosa switched off the television when the noise of it got on her nerves.

One evening Rosa got to the fruit first. She liked mealy Red Delicious apples, the kind Noi never chose. Rosa cut them up carelessly, not bothering to peel the skin or make each piece the same size. “Eat,” she said, setting the plate on the dining table. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”