Short Girls

Up until Linny was eight years old, the Luongs lived in an apartment complex near a freeway and a construction site that turned out to be a correctional facility. Linny remembered waiting at the school bus stop, which was right next to the city bus stop, and watching the prison go up in rounds, studded with tiny window slits. Often in the mornings she, Van, and their mother would wait at their stops together. Linny always hoped that her mother’s bus would carry her off to her sewing job at Roger’s Department Store before the pencil-yellow school bus loaded with their classmates rumbled up to the curb. Back in the apartment Mr. Luong would be dawdling, or sketching out some design idea, or convincing a friend to give him a ride to whatever tiling or construction job he might have lined up for the day. The work was too easy for him, he said; he had studied civil engineering in Vietnam (no degree, Mrs. Luong sniffed).

Linny’s mother often said they would have been able to buy a house sooner if he hadn’t spent so much time “being the bum” with his inventions. Van was seven when their mother said she was old enough to be in charge, and accepted the full-time job at Roger’s. When Linny had recalled this, the night of Van and Miles’s rehearsal dinner, Miles had been shocked, exclaiming that he couldn’t imagine leaving a seven- and a six-year-old home alone. Van had laughed it off, but Linny had wondered then what else Van had never told him.

Van had managed the two of them well, Linny thought. They would ride the school bus home together and Van would fish out the key to their apartment from the zippered inside pocket their mother had sewn into all of her jackets. Then they’d spend the rest of the day reading and watching television, snacking on crackers and apples and chocolate mints, whatever was in the kitchen, until Mrs. Luong returned. Those early evening hours between Linny and Van made up the closest years of their sisterhood, when they pretended to live in the apartment by themselves. Linny was Laverne and Van was Shirley, both of them sassy and in control, just back from shifts at the beer factory.

Two years later, Mrs. Luong’s scrupulous savings allowed the family to move out of the apartment and into the little ranch house in Wrightville. That was when Mr. Luong started cutting back to part-time construction work, something his wife resented at every step. “Your father,” she would say to the girls, “he always prefers the fake work.”

But he had invented the Luong Arm in that apartment by the freeway. Linny believed she could trace it back to the way she and Van used to climb on the kitchen counters to reach boxes of cookies or graham crackers. She recalled one day in particular—her father sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the Oriental Market wall calendar beside the refrigerator—when Linny slipped into the room to get some Halloween candy. She was seven then, and she boosted herself onto the counter with one hand while her other hand opened a cupboard and located the bag of sweets. When she turned around her father was looking at her with a shining interest he rarely had. A few months later, at dinner, he presented the prototype of the Luong Arm, demonstrating it by grasping a bag of chips from the top shelf of a cupboard.

When he wasn’t around, Linny and Van practiced using the Luong Arm and Linny boasted that she had given him the idea. “No you didn’t,” Van said. “He got the idea from me.” When they finally worked up the nerve to ask him, he simply said, “It was my idea.”

Linny’s mother never used the Luong Arm. She tolerated her husband’s talk about it, mostly meeting his enthusiasm with nods and silence. But she raised her voice when he spent money on infomercial items that he called research and she called a waste of money. She had been especially furious when, that Christmas, he gave her a Tidie Drier, a contraption that somehow promised to fast-dry her hair as well as her hand-washed underclothes. He said he was on the lookout for the next big thing in sewing machines too, but Mrs. Luong told him to leave her out of his plans. Long before they occupied two different floors of the same house, they had each retreated to their own work.

Roger’s was going out of business now, done in at last by the shopping malls, and Linny sometimes wondered where all of the Vietnamese ladies who’d worked there would end up. Before Mrs. Luong died, she had considered leaving Roger’s to work at her friend’s nail salon. Don’t do it, Van had urged her. It’s just too stereotypical, even worse than sewing. Linny had to agree. But their mother had said, It’s a good job. Don’t be so stupid.

After her death, Linny and Van both worried about what their father would do to get by. He received a minor life insurance sum, but they suspected, in one of their rare longer phone conversations, that he’d soon spent most of that on his inventions or drinking and playing cards. He had never been one to submit to steady work, even though, as he’d bragged, he was the best person around for setting complicated tile patterns just right. He also refused to talk about money matters. When Van decided she was going to send him monthly checks, Linny said that was good since she couldn’t afford it herself. She made a joke about how it was the duty of the oldest to take care of the parents. What else am I here for? Van had thrown back sarcastically, sounding a lot like their mother.

On the day of his citizenship ceremony, Dinh Luong sat alone in the ivory-paneled auditorium of the Gerald R. Ford Museum. He wasn’t truly alone—surrounded by families, other ethnic-looking people also about to take the oath—but to Linny he seemed to be set apart, nearly invisible. As though he were still hovering over his studio desk in the basement or laying out pieces of tile before grouting. When Linny was a girl she would feel nearly abandoned by that faraway look on his face, and would sometimes barrage her father with questions about his work just to make him come back to life.

“I don’t know,” Linny said, instantly irritated. She hurried past a South Indian family to get to the seats her father had saved with an umbrella. The auditorium, its high ceiling rippled with lights trained on the wide wooden stage, reminded Linny of her high school’s production of Our Town.

“But she’s never late.” He looked uneasy in a gold-buttoned navy blue sport jacket Linny recognized from years ago. He tapped his knee with the program, his eyes searching the auditorium. “A lot of people will be coming to the party tomorrow, so you have to cook a lot of food. Van has to help clean,” he added, which Linny knew meant, You and your sister need to clean the entire house. “You know, your ma never thought I’d be a citizen.”

Before he could keep going, a middle-aged blond woman walked onto the stage. She introduced herself as Janine, a local-chapter ambassador from the Daughters of the American Revolution, there to lead them all in singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A rustle of fabric and the bounce of auditorium chairs as everyone stood up. Janine, facing the U.S. flag and the state of Michigan flag beside her, launched into it.

“Hey.” Linny couldn’t stop herself from glancing her sister over head to toe. Van wore a cardigan-and-slacks uniform, straight out of a Talbots catalog. It fit in better in this town than her own vividly printed wrap dress.

The word, reminding Linny of Gary, sent an unexpected shiver through her. What would Van say if she knew about him? But the anthem was over and Linny clapped, watching her hands blur together in their movement.

The circuit court judge presiding over the ceremony had a comb-over and a wide face like a baseball mitt. “Today,” he said, opening his arms, “America embraces you. America welcomes you to her shores. You have come from far and wide to pledge allegiance to this country, forsaking all other nations. You will find that this is indeed the land of freedom, the land of hopes, and the land of dreams. From Plymouth Rock, to the plains of Nebraska, to the miracle of the Grand Canyon, to the beaches of California, you will find the glory and the spirit of all that is this great land of America.”

Linny didn’t remember any of this speech-making from her mother’s naturalization ceremony twenty years ago. It had taken place in a courtroom, just a small group of mostly Vietnamese who, like her mother, were among the first wave of refugees to reach for citizenship. Thuy Luong had thought it a matter of pride and duty, since her husband refused to apply, and because she thought it would give Linny and Van an extra sense of security; she didn’t want her daughters to be alone as Americans. Linny remembered feeling special when her mother told her that she and Van were already citizens just by being born in the States.

She also remembered that some of the people in the courtroom had wept, and how that had made her think of a school history lesson on Ellis Island. Her teacher’s description of huddled masses yearning to be free and the wonderful giant melting pot of America seemed out of place here. Somehow Linny understood: that moment, her mother, the Vietnamese voices—these made up a different kind of island.

Her father, at the time, hadn’t wanted to hear anything about it. “You think it’s so special being the normalized citizen,” he had said, as if it were a taunt. “Why not all people in America have to take the tests?”

Linny’s mother called him jealous. When she cast her first vote, for the 1984 presidential election, she brought Linny and Van with her. “The three of us can do this, but your ba cannot,” she had explained. “And it’s all because we’re citizens.” Her mother had tugged Linny close as if to emphasize the divide between them and her father.

When Mr. Luong’s patent for the Luong Arm got rejected—Van had insisted he hadn’t filled out the forms correctly—he claimed it was because he wasn’t a citizen. “So become one,” Mrs. Luong had said. But in his stubborn way, he had clung to the opposite, taking it as a challenge. It had taken him this long to uncurl that resolve.

Dirk and Paula Oortsema had been Mr. and Mrs. Luong’s sponsors back in 1975. They had said they decided to help bring refugees to Michigan after their pastor gave a series of moving sermons about the plight of the Oriental boat people. Dirk Oortsema steered Mr. Luong toward carpentry jobs and ESL classes, while Paula Oortsema gave Mrs. Luong baby clothes and formula and showed her how to cook tuna noodle casserole. Linny’s mother had often said she had tried to forget those first few months. Everything had seemed too sharp—the cold, the language, the confusion of all those aisles in the grocery store. She had wished for dullness.

The Luongs found some comfort in a community center life skills class, where they learned how to open a bank account, cash a check, apply for jobs, and read bus maps. It was also there that the Luongs found their new friends, including Rich and Nancy Bao. But there was still so much they didn’t know. When they first got a car, procured through Mrs. Luong’s shrewd Vietnamese bargaining skills and hoarded savings, they hadn’t known they needed a scraper for winter days. When a storm left a coating of ice on the windshield, Mr. Luong decided it would melt more quickly if he tossed boiled water on the glass. It had burst like gunfire. Linny didn’t remember that but her mother had insisted it was true, telling the story only when Linny’s father wasn’t around.

In Linny’s first memory of the Oortsemas, she and Van were given matching white leatherette Bibles. Dirk and Paula liked to stop by every month or so, and they always had little gifts or candy for the girls. “Hi, there, Din,” Dirk Oortsema would say at the apartment door, his barrel-shaped body blocking out the light. “How you doing, buddy?”

Paula took Linny and Van aside, kneeling down and holding their hands. “Girls,” she said, “would you like to go to Sunday school?” Her voice made it sound like she was offering up Disney Land.

But even Van wasn’t convinced by the idea of school on a Sunday, and they never did end up going. The Oortsemas didn’t force the issue, though every once in a while Paula would say, “I just want what’s best for my girls.” She had been successful, at least, in introducing the gifts of Christmas to the household.

Perhaps because the Oortsemas had three boys, Paula doted on Linny and Van. She liked to bring them barrettes and hair ribbons, and clothes donated by her church. Only she didn’t call them donations. She called them “presents from church.” Mrs. Luong always smiled when she accepted the clothes, but later Linny would see them tossed into bags. Her parents weren’t quite willing to throw such things away, since that seemed wasteful, so they just stuffed them into closets for years. Van refused to sift through the bags, but Linny dug through with a will, searching for anything that she thought her friends would like, or anything with a brand-name label. She made the clothes over into her own, enough so that even her parents forgot that they had ever belonged to anyone else.

The judge asked the candidates for naturalization to stand up and raise their right hand. Mr. Luong stared straight ahead while repeating the oath of citizenship, promising to renounce allegiance to other nations, support and defend the Constitution, and take these obligations freely, without any mental reservation.

The audience applauded, and someone in the back let out a loud whistle. “If you’ll please take your seats,” the judge called out, “we will now have each individual citizen come to the stage and be presented with a certificate of naturalization.”

There were over forty new citizens and the judge announced their names in no particular order. “Haruki Watanabe of Japan! Feyza Sercan of Turkey! Kim Hyoun of Korea! Henrick Van der Berg of the Netherlands!” Each person shook the judge’s hand and crossed the stage to where other volunteers from the Daughters of the American Revolution handed them miniature plastic American flags.

He bolted out of his seat. On stage he shook the judge’s hand, then threw out a big grin to the audience, as if he were on a game show. The judge towered over him, actually bending down a little, which made Linny cringe. But her father didn’t seem to notice. Suddenly she understood that he was looking to the back of the room. He was smiling at someone in particular. She turned around, scanning the faces.

Van nudged her, for their father had moved on to shake hands with the DAR women, waving his plastic American flag. He took his sweet time exiting the stage, still smiling, and Linny swiveled around again, this time aiming for the back row of the audience, where Nancy Bao was waiting.