Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen Read Free Book Online Page A

own special offerings, like fried corn on the cob or Shanghai noodle burritos. Some buffets take a pan-Asian approach, with California rolls, pad Thai, chewy parcels of bulgogi. Some rely on incentives, like all-you-can-eat king crab legs for an additional four dollars. Others go for broad ethnic variety, adding spaghetti with marinara, Swedish meatballs, quesadillas, hot dogs, chicken fingers, Tater Tots, a bin of mixed romaine with ranch, Italian, and Thousand Island dressings parked next to the dessert puddings.
    Dessert, of course, is a crucial part of any buffet. You need the soft-serve ice cream with the “fixins” bar of chocolate and caramel and sprinkles. You need your grocery store cookies, cannoli, brownies, orange jelly rolls, slices of sheet cake and red-dye cherry pie. You have to have your syrup-soaked fruit cups, your red and lime Jell-O, your Jell-O mixed with Cool Whip.
    All this and so much more for just $5.99 at lunch and $8.99 at dinner (not including tax and drinks).
    Most customers don’t leave tips, maybe a dollar or some change, though they do make as many trips as possible to the chafing dishes, hauling food like it’s a sport. The same people who tell their children to eat every bite on their plates at home will heap on the sweet-and-sour, take a couple of bites, and move on to a fresh plate. When presented with a buffet, a kind of determination tends to come over people. Maybe you know what I mean. Maybe you start to feel, as I have, like the food is free, that the whole of it is yours. That you ought to claim more and more, even if you don’t eat it. You wonder if you can sneak some leftovers home—you’re paying for this, after all. You find yourself getting caught up in the allure, the expanse, dizzied by the promise, the challenge of all you can eat, all you can get, all you can demand. In your haste you might spill food on the tables, grab at the serving spoons and drop them wherever you like. Doesn’t matter. Eat now, forget tomorrow. Ask for more fried shrimp, more white-meat chicken. You must exercise your right for endless refills, bottomless cups of soda pop. You must do whatever it takes to get your money’s worth.
    When you see these restaurants, especially in the many areas of the United States referred to as fly-over country, when you’re driving past them, glad to be heading somewhere else, somewhere better, no doubt, you may feel sadness and amazement and pity, and you may wonder: How did that restaurant happen? Are actual Asian people running it? How did those poor souls end up here in the middle of nowhere?
    My family was one of those you might have wondered about. In 1989, if you had driven past the Golden Dragon restaurant in La Porte, Indiana, and perhaps decided to stop in and check out the place, why not, you’re hungry, you might risk it, you would have seen my parents replenishing the buffet, unloading ribs and wings, wiping the tables, stacking plates. Interchangeably waiters, busboys, cooks—my parents ran the place in tandem. They weren’t Chinese, and neither had any training as a cook. But it didn’t matter because the customers didn’t know the difference.
    I was five years old then and had no idea what it meant to run a restaurant, to be one of the few Asian families within a wide radius. In a year my father would be dead and not long after that the rest of us would be in a different small town in a different midwestern state.
    But the Golden Dragon was the first buffet I remembered. We had moved to La Porte because my parents had heard of a family with jobs available at their restaurant. That was how it worked in the community—relying on friends of friends who were trusted, even if unknown, simply for being Vietnamese.
    The town was about twenty miles away from a nuclear power plant in Michigan City, where we had gone once to see that great lake. Sam and I were fascinated by the cooling towers, and by