The Dim Sum of All Things

by Kim Wong Keltner

  She didn’t see anything she liked in the fridge, so out of habit she opened the freezer. At an early age she had become a connoiseuse of Swanson’s frozen entrées. She developed an addiction to salisbury steak and loved the apple pie portions bordered on five sides by the crenelated foil pan. She savored every compartment of the astronaut-like dinners and appreciated the aluminum partitions that prevented the lake of brown, all-purpose gravy from jumping its banks. Mmm…she could taste the freezer-burned mashed potatoes now. Closing the door, she sighed. She wished she had time to heat up a Hungry Man potpie.

  She saw a pink box on the counter and wondered if her parents had recently had guests over. When people came to visit, Mrs. Owyang went to Chinatown or Clement Street and bought take-out dim sum and pastries. She’d get gai-may-bows, which translated literally as “cocktail buns,” and she’d put them in the oven and pull them out at a perfectly timed moment as if she had baked them herself.

  Lindsey snagged a gai-don goh egg cupcake from the pink box and plopped back down into the La-Z-Boy. She set the lumbar panel to “vibrate,” and as she nibbled on the pastry she noticed the room was filled with plastic azaleas, polyester dendrobium orchids, plants with glass leaves, and an arrangement of fake jade fruits.

  “What is it with Chinese people and artificial flowers?” she wondered aloud.

  Her mom had just breezed in to dust the quartz crystal grapes and said, “They’re easy to take care of. No trouble. Smells nice, too, don’t you think?”

  Mrs. Owyang had stuffed every nook and cranny of the house with hidden air fresheners, so everything always smelled like a spring bouquet. Lindsey wondered if her mom actually believed she was fooling anyone into thinking the fresh scent was caused by living flora rather than the adhesive discs manufactured by the Glade chemical corporation.

  “We’ll be late. Go call your father,” her mom said.

  Lindsey dragged her clogs across the wavy, plastic runner that protected the hall carpet. As she passed her old bedroom and the den, she noticed the furniture seemed more Lilliputian than she remembered, and she noted that every chair and sofa was perfectly fitted with plastic jacket coverings. She speculated that Chinese DNA predetermined an affinity for easy-wipe surfaces.

  Lindsey approached the doorway of the master bedroom and watched from a short distance as her dad arranged the black suspenders that held up his gold-toe socks. She watched quietly as her dad fiddled with his silver shoehorn, cedar shoe trees, and his good shoes. Sometimes when she caught him alone like this she wanted to ask him about his childhood in Locke, near Sacramento. Once he mentioned how his parents had been fruitpickers and how hard their life had been back then. He said they’d worked ten-hour days sorting pears and asparagus, together making two dollars per day. He said he’d helped fold cardboard boxes after school and worked the orchards until he left for City College in San Francisco.

  Lindsey watched her dad comb Brylcreem into his dyed-black hair, and she recalled the story he once told her about being a busboy at the famous Trader Vic’s restaurant. The only meats he had ever eaten in Locke had been cow stomach, intestines, and other organs, so the food at the restaurant was very exotic to him. One evening he was clearing plates on the main floor when he stared too long at an uneaten, juicy New York Strip garnished with orange slices and teriyaki sauce. His dumbfounded face caught the eye of one of the dining room guests. He didn’t know she was the movie star June Allyson, but her complaint to the head waiter about his stupid expression promptly got him fired.

  Her dad rarely talked about his younger days, and lately Lindsey thought more frequently about asking him, but she was unsure of how to bring up the topic casually.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said.

  “Oh,” he looked up. “Is Kevin here, too?”

  “Yeah, I think I just heard his car,” she said. Her dad searched for his cuff links, and Lindsey told him she’d wait outside.

  On the sidewalk, looking up and down at the rows of identical stucco bungalows, Lindsey could guess which houses belonged to Chinese families. In front of the residences where plots of grass might be, there were paved squares of cement, painted green. A few places had “gardens” that consisted solely of wood chips or brick-colored bits of volcanic dog kibble. She studied some polyurethane stones that were slotted together like giant Lego toys, creating the illusion of a continuous border of river rocks.

  Urban living had apparently curtailed the Chinese tradition of lovingly tended gardens, transforming landscaped greenery into a no-hassle zone made possible by the Home Depot. Lindsey stared at the plastic stones and the green plot of cement that connected the Owyangs’ home and the adjacent house. Having just finished washing his car, the neighbor strolled over, noticing her admiring his handiwork.

  He smiled proudly. “Don’t have to mow!” he bragged. “Look classy, huh?”

  She nodded, and just then her parents emerged. Kevin transferred his car into the garage, and they all piled into the family sedan. They zoomed off toward the St. Francis Hotel.

  They were on their way to the Miss Teenage Chinatown Beauty Contest.

  When she was in high school, Lindsey’s parents had tried to encourage her to participate in this pageant. The qualified contestants required a 3.5 grade point average and competed in Chinese language recitation, artistic talent, and evening gown and swimwear modeling. The winners received cash prizes, scholarship money, and the chance to wave from a motorized cable car at the next New Year’s Parade.

  Lindsey wondered why so many Chinese parents endorsed this community event. She had adamantly refused to participate, because she did not see what cultural or educational merit justified prancing onstage in a bikini. Her parents seemed to believe that the chance to win a college scholarship was worth the public humiliation of a packed audience scrutinizing her teenage stretch marks. While Lindsey was definitely grateful she hadn’t been dropped down a well at birth, she certainly didn’t feel obligated to demonstrate her family loyalty by sashaying around in a teeny maillot while singing a Mariah Carey ballad.

  “Why are we going to this thing?” she asked from the backseat.

  Her mom, digging through the glove compartment in search of some Certs, replied, “I ran into CiCi Toy, the gossip columnist. She tricked me into buying a table.”

  Once inside the St. Francis ballroom, they filled out raffle tickets and flipped through the program of events. The pages were filled with advertisements for Chinese-owned businesses, as well as parents’ good wishes accompanied by glamour shots of the teenage girls posing with Little Bo Peep seduction.

  From a nearby table, an old man shouted every five minutes, “Where’s the food?” Lindsey could hear the old Chinese ladies at his table clucking their tongues, ruthlessly critiquing the contestants. They praised high foreheads and small mouths, and looked unfavorably on short hair, flat noses, or dark complexions.

  Speeches by minor local politicians soon began. District supervisors attempted to encourage voting in the Chinese community, but hardly anyone in the audience listened. Lindsey turned her attention to a plump woman in a white fur stole and too-tight strappy sandals with golden coils that squeezed her ham-hock feet. She was making the rounds between tables with Wellbutrin-induced shakiness and high, arched eyebrows that seemed tattooed in place.

  “There’s CiCi,” Mrs. Owyang said, and Lindsey craned her neck for a better look at the modern-day Chinese Hedda Hopper. Lindsey wondered why someone hadn’t told CiCi that she was too old for white satin stretchpants. Even worse, the outline of her thong was showing.

  Everyone enjoyed a roasted chicken dinner with julienned vegetables, and during dessert the “entertainment” began. A couple of girls wailed with canned emotion while lip-synching Celine Dion songs, but most contestants chose to sing the “I Will Never Be a Perfect Daughter” song from Disney’s Mulan. As one after another got up to sing the same family-oriented song, Lindsey quietly begged for just one girl to have the guts to perform something unique, l
ike a sweaty rendition of “Sugar Walls” by Sheena Easton, or maybe “Head” by Prince.

  Between the evening gown humiliation and the swimwear and heels humiliation, so-called guest singers performed. Any fool who gave a five-hundred-dollar donation to the event could appear on the program. It didn’t matter if a “guest star” had absolutely no talent whatsoever. As a result, the audience endured one “Greatest Love of All,” one “When I Fall in Love” duet, and one rousing version of Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana” sung with a heavy Cantonese accent.

  Eventually, with great fanfare, last year’s queen took the stage for her final royal duty and announced the names of the Third, Second, and First Princesses. The other twenty girls shifted their weight from foot to foot and stood helplessly with limp arms at their sides. A Friendship Princess blew exaggerated kisses from the stage as too-loud music blared from the speakers.

  After the curtain dropped, the hotel manager cut off the pounding techno mix too abruptly, and an awkward silence descended upon the crowd. Following a few eardrum-piercing screeches from the sound system, the ballroom filled with a Muzak version of the “Macarena.” As she and her family made their way toward the exit, Lindsey chewed her cheek to restrain herself from unleashing a litany of snide comments.

  Having spent the night at her parents’ house, the next morning Lindsey sifted through an old box of her baby pictures that her mom wanted her to organize. Spreading things out on the kitchen table, she came across a faded red envelope with her Chinese name written across the top and her American name below. It held a copy of her birth announcement.

  Like most Chinese-Americans, she had a separate Chinese name. No one ever addressed her directly as such, not even Pau Pau. Nonetheless, she was at least supposed to know what the name was, how to say it, and how to write the characters.

  Lindsey’s name was Owyang Gum Lan, with the last name always first, so people could immediately identify the clan or family name. The rest of her name meant Golden Flower, or so she had been told.

  Plucking a Post-it note and a pen from the kitchen counter, she wanted to see if she could remember how to write her Chinese name without copying the pictograph from the red envelope. As she touched the ballpoint onto the yellow paper, at first she faltered, stymied by the idea of how to create even the first stroke.

  She was tempted to peek but then recalled her trick from Chinese school. She visualized the characters as pictures, starting with two lines that resembled the top of a fisherman’s hat, followed by three horizontal strokes that she then bisected down the middle to look like a lamppost. When she came to the last part of the name, “Lan,” she drew boxes like double doors with a square lantern below. Scrutinizing her attempt, she sensed she wasn’t finished. Her eye thought the characters looked about right, but her wrist itched for something more. She stared at her unfinished name, and suddenly, what her brain couldn’t remember her hand instantly recalled. With a dash to the left and then to the right, her wrist kicked out two strokes on either side of the lantern like matching ribbons. There. That felt better.

  She compared her version to the characters on the red envelope and was pleased to see that she’d written everything correctly. Every little dot and dab was there. One missing stroke or swoop and she might have called herself a water buffalo.

  “Hey Dad, how did you choose our Chinese names?” she hollered over into the living room.

  Mr. Owyang looked up from his newspaper and thought for a long moment.

  “Every family chooses the names a different way. But ours are predetermined,” he replied.

  “How?”

  Her dad removed his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. He scratched his head and frowned, like he was straining to remember a simple answer he once knew, as if she’d asked him to name the capital of Mississippi or something.

  “Every eight generations the Chinese names are selected for the children ahead. The names are all words from an old Chinese poem, and every person born in the same generation has the same middle character.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “You mean Stephanie, Cammie, and I all have ‘Gum’ as a middle character, and it’s part of a poem?”

  Just then Kevin loped into the room and plopped down on the sofa.

  “No, Dummy, not on the Gin side. It’s only an Owyang thing. My middle character is ‘Ming,’ and in the poem it comes after Dad’s name, which is ‘Mun.’”

  He continued, “But it doesn’t matter with girls’ names. Only the boys’ names are selected from the poem. Right, Dad? Girls don’t count—right, Dad?”

  Mr. Owyang was now engrossed in the sports section of the Chronicle. After a moment he said, “Shoot, the Forty-Niners don’t look so good this year.”

  “Where’s the poem, Dad?” Lindsey asked. She wanted to know if her name, “Gum Lan,” was a part of the poem. She wanted to know if girls mattered or not.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” her dad replied distractedly. “It’s written on a scroll somewhere. I gave it to Uncle Bill to translate a long time ago. I think he has it.” He removed a mechanical pencil from his chest pocket and scratched his stomach. “Hey, Kevin, who do you think’s going to make it to the Superbowl?”

  Lindsey was frustrated by her father’s lackluster response regarding the poem, but she was used to being stonewalled by her parents’ apathy. As much as they proclaimed that their children should know more about Chinese culture, they didn’t seem very informed or excited about it themselves. Just as her mom knew nothing of the Eight Immortals at the antiques show, her dad never concerned himself with scrolls, poetry, or anything having to do with his own ancestors’ history. He did, however, have encyclopedic knowledge of the Giants’ lifetime batting averages and RBIs for the last twenty years.

  Party Like a Rock Star

  Lindsey saw little of Michael over the next week because he was feverishly fact-checking a piece about a spa that required guests to shave their nether regions. The hectic phones kept Lindsey occupied, but a few times a day she and Michael were able to catch sight of one another. They exchanged no words, but in small glances they shared the memory of their secret first kiss.

  As luck would have it, each time one of them stole a moment away from their tasks, the other seemed to be busy. Lindsey would saunter by his office and he’d be meeting with a hairy intern in sackcloth; likewise, Michael would stop by for a chat when Lindsey was on the phone patiently explaining to a caller that the magazine was not a wholesaler of vegan S&M gear. The week passed quickly, and it was already Friday night when Michael phoned Lindsey late from the office.

  She was at home in the bathroom bleaching her faint mustache and tweezing her eyebrows when she heard the ringing in the kitchen. Pau Pau was still out playing mahjong.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Do you know where I could buy a G-string made of tofu?”

  Lindsey smiled to herself, the bleach on her upper lip sticking to the side of her nose a bit.

  “I was hoping it was you,” she said.

  While Michael explained how tedious it was to research legal precedents for enforced crotch-shaving, Lindsey listened as she quietly wiped the white strip of foamy cream from her face and silently wondered if she should perform any hair maintenance “down there.”

  “Hey, do you want to go to a party with me tomorrow night?” Michael asked.

  Lindsey felt a jolt of giddiness, but then paused to collect her cool before replying.

  Michael added, “I mean, if you’re free. If you want to go…with me.” His slight stammering melted Lindsey’s heart, and her undies.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said, quickly reassuring him that she was definitely free the following night.

  When she hung up the phone she ran immediately to the bathroom mirror and checked her face for zits. She found one, but it was thankfully minor. Her mind raced with thoughts of the next night. The possibilities! Her eyes drifted downward, and she decided right then to trim her triangle.

  The next m
orning Lindsey awoke with her stomach all aflutter. Pau Pau was gone again, with just a pork hash casserole with pickled duck eggs on the stove as evidence of her having been there. Lindsey knew the first thing she had to do was to call Auntie Shirley.

  “Om Rama Shiva!” her aunt answered.

  “Hi, Auntie Shirley. It’s Lindsey.”

  “Don’t you know it’s my meditation hour?” she asked, and Lindsey could hear her aunt softly chanting under her breath, “Om Rama Shiva, Om Rama Shiva…”

  “Sorry to interrupt, but I had to tell you I have to cancel tonight.”

  The chanting stopped, and her aunt’s rhythmic incantations gave way to an exasperated whine. “But you’re supposed to pose for your aura portrait! How can I paint your essence when you don’t sit still long enough to let your colors speak to me?”

  “I’m sorry. I have somewhere to go tonight.”

  “Guys, hmmm?” Auntie Shirley made a purring sound. “That sounds so delicious. Oh, I know how it is when that kundalini unwinds…well, it’s been a while since a guy’s blown my chakra wide open!”

  Lindsey shuddered. Too much information.

  She said good-bye and hung up the phone. She straightened up around the house, groomed her nails, and moisturized her skin from head to toe. She was daffy with anticipation of her evening, and she was too excited even to eat anything. Midafternoon, when the doorbell rang, she was so jumpy that she tripped over a chair as she ran to the window. Peering outside, she recognized Auntie Shirley’s VW Beetle. A minute later the front door swung open, and any lingering notes of Pau Pau’s medicinal smells were quickly overpowered by the signature fragrance of aging hippies everywhere. Her aunt’s patchouli silently but fiercely announced, “Get out of my way, Tiger Balm, there’s a new stench in town!”