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

the fact that you could swim and lie on the beach within view of those thick hourglasses, the steam that lifted away from them in slow motion. Ever after I couldn’t help associating La Porte with those towers—vaguely menacing, yet something people seemed to take for granted.
    Sam and I used to go to the Golden Dragon with our grandfather for a late dinner. Late, because we could eat the dregs of the buffet for nothing, and with no customers around the restaurant felt like our own playhouse. We crawled under the tables, pretending to be on submarines, secret missions. We crammed our mouths with wonton strips and drank as much Sprite as we wanted. If any crab rangoons were left, we fought over them. Our grandfather shook his head at the very idea, sickening to him, of cream cheese flavored with fake crab, stuffed in a wonton, and deep-fried. Sam and I knew we were American because we loved those things the most. The oily crisp giving way to the salty ooze. Ong Hai would wrap up the chicken or beef dishes to take home and my mother and father would scrub down the stainless steel vats, preparing for the next day. At the time I thought we owned the place, that it was fancy,
ours
, and that by right of daughterhood I could think of myself as some kind of Golden Dragon princess.
    It took me until middle school, long after we’d left La Porte, to feel the abjection of my family’s livelihood, to understand what did and did not belong to me. By then I had started busing tables, and saw that buffets in other towns and states followed the same structure, the same skewed ratio of fried to nonfried.
    A lot of the customers assumed we didn’t speak English, and therefore we were invisible to them. If white people thought I couldn’t understand them, what might they say? As it turned out, people liked making jokes about eating dogs. They said no matter how much they ate they were going to get hungry again in an hour—a line I never really got. Sometimes they took on exaggerated Asian accents right in front of me, like Mickey Rooney doing yellow-face in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. “Five dolla, five dolla,” was a common phrase. “Ah, Grasshopper!” was another. “Bonsai!” And the yodeled, cringing cry of Long Duk Dong from
Sixteen Candles
, the thing I could never forgive John Hughes for: “Oh, sexy girlfriend!” It was all a joke, of course. Can’t you take a joke? It’s funny! Why get offended? Why be so sensitive!
    Even if I was tempted to say something, fling back some kind of retort, if I could come up with something to say, I never would. Always my reaction was to retreat, conceal the humiliation of my race. That was what Asian people were supposed to do, wasn’t it? Stay nice, slip from view.
    But then there were times people would want me to talk. They would ask me what I was. “What are you?” “Where are you from?” Answering “America” or “Here” was not sufficient. It didn’t matter that I had been born in La Porte. They wanted to know where I was
really
from, what I
really
was. They would take guesses. They might ask if I knew such-and-such Vietnamese person in a different city—was I related to them? Once in a while someone would try out a few words in mangled Chinese or Vietnamese and I would just nod and try to smile. Occasionally people would mention that their father or uncle had fought in the Vietnam War. And a few times, people asked what right I had to be in this country. That was when I started realizing that not everyone knew the basic history of the war, that there were those who viewed all of Vietnam as the enemy, the “Charlie” of so many fucked-up movies.
    In retrospect, most of the customers were forgettably normal, predictable, easy. A number of vets frequented the buffets and they were always kind, prone to leaving tips, lingering to chat with my grandfather. But of course I remembered