Thirty

ALLIED GARDENS

AFTER SIX MONTHS IN FORT SMITH, WE HAD TO MOVE from our rent-free home on Seventeenth Street that the Lutherans had generously provided, but on our father’s paycheck we could not afford to rent another house. Instead we took an apartment in a complex called Allied Gardens. Today Allied Gardens is called Allied Gardens Estates, a beautiful gated community of well-maintained apartments and manicured hedges and lawns—but when we moved there, it was a bit different. Most of the units at Allied Gardens were Section 8 housing, a government-subsidized program that made housing available to the poor by limiting the rent to no more than one-third of the renter’s income. Based on my father’s income at the time, we were able to move into a four-bedroom apartment for just over a hundred dollars per month.

Allied Gardens was made up of separate C-shaped apartment buildings, each of which had two floors and six individual apartments. Our apartment was on the ground floor and was about the same square footage as the house we just left—close to 1,100 square feet. Unlike our house, the apartment had no carpet; the floor was covered in square vinyl tiles, and instead of trying to sleep on the cold, hard floor, we threw down mattresses and slept on those.

The apartment had a gas stove, and my mother completely covered the top of it with aluminum foil, either to keep it clean or to keep from seeing how dirty it was. The cabinets above the stove were so caked with grease from thousands of previous dinners that we had to use a butter knife to scrape it off. The bedrooms were not much better. At night my brothers and I had a favorite game: whack-a-cockroach. The rules were simple: sit on the floor in the dark, holding one of your flip-flops, then switch on the lights and smash as many cockroaches as you could before they disappeared into the woodwork. No matter how many times we switched the lights off and on, there were always more cockroaches—hours of fun for the entire family.

Because Allied Gardens was so affordable, it attracted other low-income families and soon became a minority ghetto. There were Hispanics, blacks, Caucasians, and even a few Laotians. Each group occupied its own building, not because Allied Gardens segregated them but because each ethnic group preferred it that way. Like us, they were all looking for community, and community was easier to find among people they knew and understood. All six units of our building were occupied by Vietnamese families, and their children became our friends and playmates.

A Vietnamese neighbor owned a TV and a VCR, and all the Asians at Allied Gardens used to squeeze into his tiny apartment to watch the same kung fu movies over and over again—everyone’s favorite was The Way of the Dragon, where Bruce Lee beat up Chuck Norris in the Roman Colosseum. We couldn’t afford our own VCR, so we used to peek through the neighbor’s window to try to watch his—another ironic reversal of our lives in Vietnam.

All the kids had nicknames, and it wasn’t always clear how they originated. Some were obvious enough; Bruce was called Crab because he ran so slowly, and another boy was called Rabbit because he ran so fast. But a boy who lived upstairs was called Fat Dog, and none of us ever knew why. Fat Dog had a hot temper and used to pick fights, which wasn’t hard to understand, considering the nickname he had to live with.

There was a boy in another building who was missing a leg, but none of us ever had the courage to ask him how he lost it. Since he was from Laos, it wasn’t hard to figure out. During the Vietnam War, more bombs were dropped on Laos than on Germany and Japan combined during World War II, and children at play often discovered the unexploded ordnance. Mercifully, that boy was never given a nickname.

With buildings divided by ethnic group, conflict was unavoidable. It would start with some kid throwing dust; then dust turned into rocks, and before long it escalated into an all-out fistfight. Once a little Vietnamese boy was beaten up on the playground, and when his older brother heard about it, he ran back to his apartment and grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen. He was just heading out the door when an adult Vietnamese neighbor spotted the knife and yelled to him, “Where are you going with that? Put it back right now!” The boy obeyed even though the neighbor was a stranger to him; Asian culture is authority-based, and the boy recognized the man’s authority over him simply because of his age. It was a good thing he did because there was no telling what would have happened if he had returned to the playground with that knife.

An ethnically diverse apartment complex was a great place to begin learning about different people and cultures. There was a mailman who used to come by each day, dressed in his regulation blue shorts and shirt, carrying a leather shoulder bag full of letters. He was a nice man, and we always looked forward to his coming, and all the kids used to swarm around him and tug at his clothing until he finally laughed and handed out bubble gum to everyone. But one day when we tugged at him, he turned and shouted, “Stop it! Go away!” I didn’t understand. I thought he liked it when we tugged at him. Why did he get angry this time, and more important, why didn’t he give us any gum? I knew I was missing something, but I didn’t know what it was.

What I was missing was the fact that it was a different mailman, but I couldn’t tell because to me all Caucasians looked the same. That was an educational moment for me. The truth is, all Caucasians do look the same to Asians, and all Asians look the same to Caucasians—at least at first. It takes time to develop the sensitivity to subtle facial differences that allows us to distinguish one person from another within our own ethnic group; and when we take our first good look at a different ethnic group, we’re starting all over. Prejudice begins with ignorance, and whenever one culture first meets another, there is ignorance. At Allied Gardens, the Caucasians didn’t like the Vietnamese because their food smelled funny, and the Vietnamese didn’t like the Laotians because they were dirty. I’m not sure who the Laotians didn’t like, but I knew one mailman who didn’t like me.

My parents allowed us to roam free—not that they had much choice. My father was always at work, and my mother was responsible for eight children, and the youngest two required her full attention. The rest of us just came home from school, dropped off our books, and ran out to play. There was a playground with a swing set and a merry-go-round for the younger kids, and we played kickball endlessly. We played hopscotch on the sidewalks and roller-skated on the streets, using cheap metal skates my mother bought at a flea market. They were the kind that clamped onto your shoes with a key, and if you jumped the curb the wrong way, they could rip the soles right off your shoes. My feet were too small for skates, so I used a pair of plastic Playskool buses; I discovered that if I took out all the passengers, I could just fit my feet into them, and I skated after my brothers and sisters just as fast as my two little buses would go.

We played until midnight if there was no school the next day, and in the summers we played all day because there was nothing else to do. There were no camps, no programs, no babysitters—just dozens of kids and room to run, which was all we needed to have fun.

My family lived at Allied Gardens for two years. We were surrounded by children very much like us, even when they came from different countries. Most of us were new to America, so no one could laugh at anyone else’s manners or customs. No one felt stupid because all of us were ignorant, and no one owned anything to envy because no one had any money. Allied Gardens was our own little Vietnamese hamlet, and we were safe and comfortable inside our familiar minority bubble.

But when we stepped out of that bubble, things were different.