Stealing Buddha's Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen Read Free Book Online Page A

off the dining table, I slunk off to my top-bunk bed. I hid there with a book, eating the sour shallots until my eyes teared up, thinking of the block of Breyers Neapolitan ice cream that Chu Cuong had left waiting in the freezer. He sneered at buckets of ice cream, preferring, he said, the balance of sugar and cream in Breyers All Natural.
    I didn’t know it then, but Vinh’s birth would signal the return of Rosa to her own family. She had grown up in a strict Catholic household, one of ten children—eight girls and two boys. Her parents were migrant workers who had come from Texas to follow the crop seasons in Michigan: sugar beets, cherries, blueberries, apples. They had settled in Fruitport, a small town near Lake Michigan. Most of Rosa’s siblings thought she was hoitytoity, going off to Grand Valley State instead of getting married. But apart from one college semester in Denmark—a place she would talk about for years as though she had just come back—she hadn’t gotten much farther than western Michigan. In Grand Rapids, working as a teacher after college, she got pregnant by a white guy who had no interest in marriage and children. So, alone, Rosa raised Crissy. Stung by her family’s criticism, she became an atheist, immersed herself into left-wing activism—as much as was possible in Grand Rapids—and made her own life and career.
    She was a strong woman, and we knew it in every word she spoke to us. But while her politics were liberal, when it came to what she called personal matters she was silent. On this she and my father never disagreed. Subjects such as Crissy’s father, my and Anh’s mother, and sex, especially sex, fell into the category of the taboo. Danger! Warning! Look away! We could watch cop shows and kung fu movies all day, but if a scene or a song referenced sex, then the whole production risked being shut down. We were even supposed to change the channel when people kissed on TV, as if seeing such an act would shift us into becoming bad girls.
    When Flashdance came out (which we weren’t allowed to see) my sisters and I fell in love with Irene Cara’s “What a Feelin’.” The lyrics seemed innocuous enough. Take your passion and make it happen! But I misheard the words and one day Rosa caught me singing, Take your pants off, and make it happen! She rushed over to the radio and snapped it off, saying that song was banned from then on. When I asked why, she said, “None of your business.”
    For the most part, though, she and my father weren’t consistent in enforcing their rules. It kept us kids off-kilter, a little paranoid, which was maybe their goal. Rosa herself loved to sing along to Rita Coolidge, proclaiming your love is lifting me higher, though the lyrics veered toward the obscene with quench my desire. And she couldn’t resist the lilting tempo of the Pointer Sisters’ I want a man with a slow hand. It was years before I understood what the song meant.
    On our own, out of earshot, my sisters and I had learned all the words to Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” and Air Supply’s “Making Love out of Nothing at All.” Anh and Crissy would play Chu Cuong’s Eagles records and sing right along to “Hotel California.” We learned what to watch and listen to in private, under cover, whenever our parents weren’t around. Such silence and secrecy became a natural part of our family, circling our household like an electric fence.
    If their equal sense of strength and will had brought my father and Rosa together, it also became a source of complication. They were two people struggling against the wall of the conservative norm that defined Grand Rapids, and sometimes they turned on each other. My father might appreciate Rosa’s posted list of household chores, divided up by person and day, but that same list could also send him into inexplicable fury. Rosa wanted to fit in