TWO DAYS AFTER ARRIVING IN FORT SMITH, WE RAN out of food and needed to buy more, and that meant we would have to shop in an American grocery store. My father had not taken a job yet and had no income, but he did have a hundred dollars, courtesy of a generous stranger at the San Francisco airport. The good people at Our Redeemer Lutheran had also had the foresight to register our family for food stamps, so when it came time for us to go shopping, the problem wasn’t money—the problem was we didn’t speak English.
At the end of our street, there was a small grocery store, and since we had no transportation, it was the only place we could go to buy food. My father took the older children along with him the first time, and they got to watch as he tried to find all the items on the grocery list my mother had given him. In the marketplace back in Vietnam, nothing was packaged, and everything was easy to recognize; the chicken had feathers, and the pork had a head. But in America all the food was hidden behind boxes and bags and jars, and the only way to guess what was inside was by the image on the label. We heard about one Asian family who was frustrated and confused when it bought a can of Crisco shortening only to discover the can did not actually contain the fried chicken pictured on the label. I can’t even imagine what the family thought the first time it saw a jar of Gerber baby food.
My father had to point to the things he wanted, and the clerk would gather them for us and set them on the counter. My father could read a few words of English, and he tried his best to read some of the labels instead of just pointing. Sugar came out “shoo-gah,” and flour sounded like “fla-wah,” but the clerk understood well enough to give us most of the right things. We needed pork, too, but my father didn’t know that word; instead he tried his best to pronounce “pig” and “meat,” but the clerk just looked at him blankly. Bruce was the artist in the family, so the grocer gave him a sheet of brown butcher paper and a pencil and Bruce drew a picture that vaguely resembled an animal with a curly tail. The clerk shouted, “Oh! Pork!” and everyone learned a new word that day.
We bought sugar, flour, and eggs so my mother could bake things, but the flour was different in America, and everything she baked came out coarse and grainy. Not that it mattered to us kids—we ate everything she made and asked for more. My mother had to learn to cook with American ingredients and spices, but she picked it up quickly and continued to employ her supernatural ability to make any amount of food stretch to feed a family of ten. My father couldn’t wait to try out his brand-new rice cooker, but when he went to plug it in, he discovered that Singapore used a different voltage and his rice cooker would not work in America—a fact the merchants back in Singapore had somehow forgotten to mention. Oh well. At least he could listen to his boom box.
Oops.
My mother’s biggest struggle was loneliness. She felt isolated in America. In Soc Trang her house was also a place of business, and every morning she rolled open the big double doors and neighbors wandered in and out all day—there was no separation between her home and her community. But in America people kept their doors closed and locked, and they only opened them if someone came by to visit—and no one wanted to visit a woman who couldn’t speak a word of English.
For the first few days after our arrival, we wondered if the Lutheran church had abandoned us because no one had contacted us in almost a week. Then a Vietnamese man from the church stopped by one day and asked, “Where have you been?” We didn’t understand; we hadn’t gone anywhere. As it turned out, people from the church had been visiting us every day, but because our bodies were still adjusting to the new time zone, we had been sleeping all day and staying up all night. We were all asleep every time they came to visit, so when no one answered our door after they knocked several times, they just left whatever they brought us and went home.
That explained why mysterious things kept showing up on our doorstep—like a large bag of candy. We had no idea what the candy was for, and until my father got an explanation, none of us were allowed to touch it, so he just set the bag in the entryway and left it there. A couple of days later we heard the doorbell ring, and everyone ran to the door to greet our first evening visitor. When my father opened the door, there was a group of children wearing costumes and hideous masks more frightening than any owl we had ever seen, and they were holding out paper sacks and shouting something. Anh and Hon burst into tears and started screaming, and my father just stood there, staring at them—and then he shut the door. Crazy American kids!
A few minutes later the doorbell rang again. This time when my father opened the door, the group of costumed children spotted our bag of candy in the entryway and rushed into the house uninvited, which made Anh and Hon scream even louder. Each of the children grabbed a handful of candy, shoved it into his sack, and ran out the door again, and no one in my family could figure out what was going on—except for Bruce. Bruce hurried back to one of the bedrooms and found a square cardboard box with some of our belongings in it. He dumped everything on the floor and got my father to help him cut two eyeholes in the box, and then he put it over his head and ran out the door.
Bruce ran across the street while Yen, Nikki, and Thai followed at a distance, and the rest of us peeked through the blinds to see what would happen. A few minutes later Bruce came back with a handful of chocolate bars and a grin on his face.
He proudly held them out to my father. “Dad! Look at this!”
My father counted them. “Do it again,” he told him, and three houses later we all had big smiles and chocolate-covered faces.
That was our first Halloween, and Bruce went dressed as a box. His costume may not have been fancy, but Bruce had a knack for figuring things out and getting the things he wanted, and those skills would come in handy for him later on. We thought Halloween was a wonderful American custom, and the next night we waited by the door for more costumed children to come—but to our disappointment no one did. Our costumes didn’t improve much over the years; they were usually just paper plates with faces drawn on them and tied around our heads. Somehow I don’t think the neighbors had much difficulty guessing who we were.
Our Redeemer Lutheran continued to be generous to us by dropping off donated items for the house: first mattresses, then a couch, then end tables, and even a small black-and-white TV with rabbit-ear antennas. My brothers and sisters preferred the carpet to the mattresses and ignored them. They wanted to spread out and use the second bedroom, but not as long as the evil owls were roosting there, so they asked my father if they could remove the glow-in-the-dark stickers from the walls.
“No,” he told them. “Don’t touch anything—this is not our house.”
That feeling ran deep for my father: “This isn’t our house; this isn’t our country; this could all be a mistake, so be careful—they can always send us home.”
There were houses on both sides of us and one across the street. There was a boy who lived in the house across the street who was flying a kite one day and came over to ask if Bruce could play with him. My father said no—he was afraid that Bruce could get into a fight with the boy and we would all be sent back to Vietnam. What an ironic reversal: when we were wealthy back in Soc Trang, the poor neighbor children were afraid to play with us—now we were the ones who were afraid.
Though we were not allowed to play with the neighbors, there was always someone to play with in a family of eight children. Our house had a deep backyard and there was plenty of room to run and kick a ball. When we first arrived in Fort Smith, I was too young for kindergarten, so while my brothers and sisters were in school each day, Anh and Hon and I were free to play in the backyard. One day I was squatting under a large tree, picking up nuts from the ground, when an insect buzzed in front of me and I swatted it. Unfortunately the insect turned out to be a wasp, and when it stung my hand, my entire arm immediately began to swell up. The Vietnamese folk remedy for a bee sting is to roll a hardboiled egg on the skin to draw out the poison, but when my mother saw that my arm had swollen so large that it was about to rip my shirtsleeve, she knew I was way beyond the egg method. She rushed me to Sparks Hospital, just a few blocks from our house.
My allergic reaction was so serious, I had to spend two nights in the hospital; my mother stayed by my side as much as she could. I enjoyed the hospital because I got to eat Jell-O and drink Coke whenever I wanted. The first English word I ever learned was Coke, which didn’t turn out to be very useful but did come in handy when I was thirsty. When the hospital brought my meals, I didn’t have much of an appetite—probably because of too much Coke and Jell-O—so I just picked at the food on my tray and left most of it. When I was finished, my mother ate everything that was left—not because she was hungry but because just a few months ago she was starving to death, and it was unthinkable to let good food go to waste. When the nurse came back for the tray, she would always say, “My, what a good eater you are,” then make a note in my chart that my appetite was returning nicely. I lost five pounds in that hospital, but my mother gained ten to make up for it.
For my family, adjusting to life in America was no harder than it would have been on any other distant planet. That was what America was like to us: a different planet. The terrain, the climate, the flora and fauna, the weird aliens who lived there, and their incomprehensible language—everything was strange and new to us, and we were going to have to learn to do everything in a completely different way.