No Good to Cry by Andrew Lanh Read Free Book Online Page A

important.”
    â€œI’ll decide that.”
    So, frustrated, idling in front of the house, I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. “Let’s just spin around the block, Hank. You gotta give me more. I want to know who this family is.”
    At the end of the block, I pulled up to a curb and sat back, waited. “I got all day.”
    A sheepish smile. “ Mi ga waits for no man, Rick.”
    â€œI’ll sacrifice the pleasure.”
    â€œOkay. I asked Grandpa, but he turned away. Nothing, not even his usual dismissal of folks he finds fault with. You know that he has Pop’s biases—big time. So I asked Grandma, who was reluctant but—you know Grandma. She wants to like everyone. I kept at her. She told me that Buddha said, ‘ So nguoi o phai nauoi cho an .” You can’t put blame on good and decent people.
    I laughed out loud. “Which tells us nothing.” I quoted Buddha back at Hank. “ Dau xuoi duoi lot .” Good beginnings make excellent endings. I punched him on the shoulder. “So begin.”
    He scowled. “You and Grandma—a goddamned road show.”
    â€œI like that idea, but—start.”
    â€œMinh Loc Tran—Mike— is an embarrassment for the Vietnamese community, that is, for folks like Grandma who believe in decency and…and the rightness of things. I mean, the way he was treated. Not that he did anything embarrassing. You see, Mike Tran and his family are a whopping success story. He’s an American dreamer who made his dreams come true.”
    I watched his face closely. “Okay, this sounds like good news—and bad.”
    He sucked in his breath. “Here’s the story. A hard-working man, come up from nothing. You see, Mike Tran is half-black, Rick. Bui doi , but with an added cruel twist. Born in Saigon to a woman who went with a black guy, he was a leper twice over in the old country. There’s taboo—and then, well, there’s big-time taboo that chills the Vietnamese soul. Not only a mongrel but also a black mongrel.” Hank had trouble looking into my face. “Not his fault, of course—not any baby’s fault—but that’s not the embarrassment to the Vietnamese I’m talking about. I mean, for the Vietnamese living here in America. In Hartford.” He paused.
    â€œGo on, Hank.”
    â€œYou see, back when America was flying in all the half-American children in the 1980s—that Operation Amerasian Homecoming airlift that tried to right a wrong—a time when thousands of mixed-blood kids ended up here…” He stopped, nodded toward me.
    â€œYes,” I half-bowed, “I know. I’m one of that gang.”
    â€œAnyway, in Vietnam, under the Commies, packs of half-American kids roamed the streets, begging for food, sleeping in alleys, beaten, forbidden to go to school because they were…the product of collaborators.”
    I bit my lip. “I remember, Hank. I don’t need a history lesson.”
    â€œI know, I know. But the sad thing was that so many Vietnamese families, desperate to leave poverty and Communism, sort of adopted these orphan kids, bought them, forged papers, brought them into offices, and said, ‘This is my dead sister’s boy.’ Not only the white-blood ones, but—others. Yes, he’s black as the night, but he got our ancient blood coursing in his veins. And so many like Mike Tran, then Tran Loc Minh, scrounging for crumbs, suddenly found a new family and the whole crowd—mommy, daddy, lots of children—was welcomed into America. So Minh’s family was delivered to Hartford and given an apartment on Huntington. The father was given a job on an assembly line at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, food allowances, furniture, money. The Tran family—a father, a mother, and three other children, all Pure Blood. Capitalized. The mother spoke some English and was hired to