The Dim Sum of All Things

by Kim Wong Keltner

  After the commotion died down, mourners made a single line down the aisle to pay their last respects. The older Chinese stopped in front of the body, and each bowed three times slowly before moving aside.

  “Lindsey, go help pass out the envelopes with coins,” her mother instructed. “And make sure people know they have to spend it right away or it’s bad luck.”

  She did as she was told.

  Afterward, a stretch limousine led a circuitous route through various parts of the city as a caravan of family members and other mourners followed behind in their own cars.

  “Why are we driving in such a roundabout way?” Lindsey asked.

  “We go through Chinatown, then past the On Lok senior home, then past his old house in the Avenues where he used to live,” her dad explained. “So his spirit will know the way to come back if he needs to.”

  When they finally made it out to Colma, it was cold and overcast at the cemetery. Auntie Vivien wore her black-cat-eye sunglasses, and Auntie Shirley chanted “Om” with her arms outstretched and palms facing up. Kevin and Brandon wore the white gloves of pallbearers, and Cammie sat on the grass and played with pale roses she had picked out of the flower arrangements. Stephanie and Mike were not there, since their baby was due any day now, and it was bad luck for them to be around death. Lindsey stood near her parents and Pau Pau, whose face was plain and unreadable.

  Lindsey and her cousins had hardly known Uncle Bill. Over the years, they’d seen him only occasionally at family gatherings and had never made any effort to talk to him. They knew nothing of his life. Now everyone seemed spaced out, anxious for the service to end so they could get on with their weekend.

  Except for Lindsey. As she stood and watched the seatbelt-like straps lower the coffin into the rectangular pit, she felt guilty. Why hadn’t she stayed and talked more with Uncle Bill that day at On Lok? She remembered the touch of his dry, fragile hand on hers and tried to recall what they’d talked about. She remembered how Uncle Bill had always given her rice candies as a child. He would slip the small squares into her hand and bring his index finger to his lips and say, “Shhhh…” When she’d grabbed the candy greedily, he’d always laughed.

  Lindsey ruminated about how she had never expected Gung Gung to die either, and now Uncle Bill was gone too, and all their stories were gone with them.

  Auntie Shirley distributed single flowers among the group, and everyone took turns throwing stems and fistfuls of dirt onto the casket. They threw in the black wreath that Lindsey had bought, and heaped in an arrangement of white chrysanthemums for good measure.

  Finally Vivien said, “Well, I’ve got an open house in the Marina, see you all later.”

  They all mumbled appropriately serious good-byes, and everyone dispersed into their respective cars. Pau Pau paired up with Shirley for a ride back home, and as Lindsey and her immediate family climbed into their own vehicle, Kevin and Mr. Owyang talked about the upcoming March Madness basketball games.

  In the car, Lindsey’s eyes and nose were leaking, and she soon ran out of tissues. Mrs. Owyang fished a small packet of Kleenex from her purse, then tossed it in the backseat to her daughter, hitting her in the forehead by accident.

  Never one to divulge much emotion herself, her mom seemed somewhat irritated by Lindsey’s inability to suck up her tears. She sighed and looked at her kid in the reflection of the visor mirror. In a scolding manner, she asked, “What’s wrong with you, eh?”

  Lindsey didn’t reply. She dealt with her face, then feigned sleep for the duration of the ride back to the city.

  When she bobbed awake, Lindsey found that they were parked in front of the On Lok senior center. Her dad said they were there to retrieve the remainder of Uncle Bill’s belongings. They all got out of the car and went inside.

  Loitering in the lobby, the fluorescent light panels and smell of rubbing alcohol were so familiar to Lindsey that it seemed only a week ago that she had been here to drop off Uncle Bill’s medicine. She got a Coke and some Twizzlers out of the vending machine and stood eating in the hallway until her mom beckoned to her from the doorway of Bill’s old room.

  “Help carry some things,” her mom said, gesturing to a large moving box filled with various items. As Mrs. Owyang talked with the attendant, Lindsey put down her soda and rifled through the box’s contents. She found several asthma inhalers, recent copies of TV Guide, a few mismatched socks, and a brittle, woven cup made of bamboo, with a tiny, latched lid.

  “Hey, Mom, what is this?” she said, holding up the dusty trinket.

  Mrs. Owyang waved her hand and frowned. “Not now,” she said, speed-reading a stack of paperwork. Kevin and Mr. Owyang came in and hoisted away several heavy boxes of clothes and bedding.

  Lindsey chewed on a red licorice rope and held it dangling between her lips as she reached deep into the box and pulled out a cylindrical item wrapped in limp tissue paper. She unraveled it and found a small ream of white silk, damaged with water stains and mildew. An embroidered border of elaborate stitches showed frolicking children with tiger booties and topknot hairstyles. With symmetric uniformity, Chinese calligraphy characters spread eight-deep in a horizontal expanse across the fabric. As Lindsey took in the graphic beauty of black brushtrokes upon the supple silk threads, she gazed at the jumble of pictographs resembling candle wicks, bridges, and rooftops. They all just looked like lines and squiggles to her, but then, unexpectedly, a few characters jumped out with immediate clarity. She suddenly noticed, in the fifth to left row, several words that her brain immediately translated into a series of familiar pictures. She recognized the top of a fisherman’s hat. As her eyes scanned downward, she was both surprised and relieved to then find three strokes bisected into the form of a lamppost. She squinted and held her breath when she then discovered two rectangles like double doors, followed by a boxy lantern with a ribbon to each side. She traced her finger over the brushtrokes and looked again to make sure she was seeing correctly. She wasn’t hallucinating. It was her Chinese name.

  Holding the silk in her hands, she felt the lightness of the fabric as she regarded the full weight of her discovery. This was her family’s scroll, and her name was written on it. While this fact was sinking into her thick head, her dad popped back into the room.

  “Hurry up,” he said. “The game’s on TV pretty soon.”

  Lindsey stood motionless, the scroll still suspended loosely in her grip. Mrs. Owyang took her stack of forms and manila folders out to the car, and Kevin carried out the remaining suitcases.

  “Don’t be such a snoop,” her brother said, cocking his head toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Lindsey rewrapped the silk in its disintegrating paper cover and placed it in the last cardboard box. She lifted the cumbersome load and waddled out to the car, where they crammed the last of Uncle Bill’s possessions into the trunk and then headed home.

  One Thousand Saturdays

  Several nights after Uncle Bill’s funeral, Lindsey drove to Mimi’s, desperate for some boy advice. Mr. Madlangbayan answered the door, poking his head out mischievously.

  “Oh, hi,” Lindsey said, startled. “Is Mimi here?”

  He looked to the left and then to the right with a big grin. “Saint Bernard tonight, tastiest meat of all!”

  “Dad!” Mimi yelled and swung open the door.

  “Ah haha!” he whooped and headed upstairs.

  “You’re just in time,” Mimi said. “How does it look?” She swung her tresses, and Lindsey noticed that at least three full inches were missing from the length.

  “What’s gotten into you?” she asked as Mimi led her into the bathroom with a basin full of her hair trimmings.

  “It’s the new me. I’m through with Steve E., and this is the amount of hair I grew when we were together. I’ve cut it off to prove I’m done with him.” She snipped some stray strands, and as they detached from her head, she scooped the cuttings into the trash.

  “I forgot to tell you.” Mimi
whipped around and flashed her eyes at Lindsey. “Monday night at El Rio I met this Asian guy named Duan, and he’s the most amazing rocker. He looks exactly like David Lee Roth!”

  Lindsey kicked off her sneakers. “How’s that work? Are you kidding?”

  “He’s got bleached-blond hair and it’s all huge like how I love it, and he’s so cute. He’s in a Van Halen cover band.”

  “So are you gonna go out with him?”

  “I want to, but I’ve never dated an Asian guy before.”

  Mimi began to reshuffle some records in her collection. She said, “Usually, Asian guys smoke too much, and I hear they have small dicks.”

  “Oh, come on, that’s just a cliché,” Lindsey said. “For instance, not all Chinese girls are bowlegged and flat-chested. Actually, I wish mine were smaller so I could fit into my grandmother’s cheongsams.”

  Lindsey inspected some new high-heeled Candies that sat in a box at the edge of the bed. She slipped her toes into the red leather mules and decided they weren’t her style. “Besides,” she said, “my brother doesn’t smoke, and…well, I’ve never seen his, uh, wang, so I can’t verify.”

  Mimi was flipping through her old LPs but looked up excitedly. “Does wang mean ‘penis’ in Chinese?”

  “No!” Lindsey yelled, even though she didn’t know for sure.

  Mimi placed Diver Down on the turntable and stood for a second, soaking in the first sublime notes of the “Cathedral” guitar solo.

  Lindsey snapped on the television and channel-surfed until she found Fast Times at Ridgemont High playing on cable in Spanish. She turned the volume down since they both knew all the dialogue by heart anyway, and while she rifled through various moisturizers and perfumes and tested their fragrances, Mimi experimented with a curling iron, singeing her newly cut layers into thick rolls like two cannoli on each side of her head. Their conversation veered off onto several different tangents, and eventually Lindsey gave her friend the lowdown on her China trip, the funeral, and the toaster.

  Mimi sprayed her whole head with Aqua Net, then said, “Oh, God, you need to snag that sweetie if he actually went into the Sanrio store and got that for you.”

  The next day, after taking a shower and handwashing a couple of bras in the bathroom sink, Lindsey called Michael.

  “Hello,” he answered after one ring.

  “Hi, it’s me. I just wanted to say hi.”

  In the background, she could hear him lower the volume on his stereo.

  “I’m glad it’s you. How are you?” he asked.

  She felt her lower intestines flutter with nerves. “I’m fine. I love my toaster. Thanks a lot.”

  They talked for a while, exchanging pleasantries, and tried their best to regain the sense of familiarity they once had. He asked if she wanted to go for a drive on Saturday afternoon and she agreed. After she hung up, she screamed into her pillow for no apparent reason, except that she was anxious, had low blood sugar, and perhaps was just a little happy.

  He picked her up at about four o’clock in the afternoon, and they headed over the Bay Bridge.

  “So, what was China like?” he asked.

  She talked about the crowds of bicyclists pouring over the Shanghai streets like a huge swarm of wheeled bees, and described the no-nonsense ways of the city people who clothed their children in bright, bottomless pants for convenient defecation. She mentioned the industrial diesel smells, the choking soot, and the stiff legs that resulted from riding in a tour bus for hours. She told him about the amazing Buddhas carved into the mountainsides, and talked about the breathtaking marble boat at the Summer Palace.

  She did not mention the snapshots on the wall of the modest Toisanese dwelling, nor did she describe how she finally extracted Pau Pau’s life story by gathering slow drips of information like golden droplets of sap through tough, unyielding bark.

  They passed El Cerrito, Hercules, and several other towns. After a while, they exited off Highway 80, and soon there were no billboards advertising Jack in the Box, Marie Callender’s, or casinos.

  Gazing at the sky mottled with thin, opaque clouds, she said, “Tell me about growing up in Hawaii.”

  “Hmm…” Michael thought for a second. “My parents were sort of bohemian types. They meditated and made bad sculptures, and they dumped me off at my grandmother’s grocery store for her to baby-sit me.”

  Lindsey listened, and Michael went on, “I’ve been thinking a lot about back then, trying to remember things. She took me to the beach a lot, and I learned to swim when I was pretty small. I vaguely remember, she used to make this sweet, sticky dessert. I think it was only for special occasions. It had beans or something in it, and she’d make me peel this dried fruit…”

  Lindsey felt a small jolt inside her. “Was it for Chinese New Year?” she asked.

  Michael thought for a moment. “I can’t really remember,” he said. “All I know is that it looked weird, but I really liked it…”

  She was certain that Michael was talking about neen-goh, and she wanted to tell him all about how she loved it too, and how she still made it with her grandmother. But she hesitated for a moment. She had never talked about Chinese food with someone who wasn’t in her family. She stared straight ahead and screwed up her courage.

  “It’s got red beans and rice flour, right?” she said.

  Michael furrowed his brow and said, “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Did it look all fatty and gray, like some kind of melted human brain after an alien abduction?”

  He swiveled his head with sudden surprise. “Yeah, it did. How do you know?”

  “That’s neen-goh! It’s a special Chinese New Year treat,” Lindsey said. She found herself rambling on about the ingredients and how Pau Pau mixed everything together and boiled it. She described the other kinds of goh and was surprised by how easy it was to talk about Chinese food after all. Michael listened attentively and interjected enthusiastically when any details triggered his memory. As she mentioned the ingredients of certain dim sum items, he remembered things like the bitter taste of turnip squares, the dusty purple hue of taro, and the bright yellow centers of tiny, glistening custards.

  Lindsey couldn’t stop talking. She hadn’t realized she had such extensive knowledge of gelatinous dumplings in their various forms, but now she was thrilled to be divulging such details to Michael’s receptive ears.

  “This is so wild,” he said. “It’s just like in Spellbound, and you’re Ingrid Bergman trying to help me with my amnesia.” He glanced over at her and smiled. He veered the car slightly to the right to give a wide berth to two great blue herons who were taking flight from a culvert, spreading their capelike wings and straining for a gust of wind to help them get airborne. Lindsey watched the giant birds aloft over the wetlands, their reedy legs tucked beneath their taut, feather-lined bellies. Soon after, Michael turned the car onto a grass field in the Antioch fairgrounds.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  He jumped out and opened the passenger side door for her. They walked toward a building usually reserved for auctioning livestock, and they entered a room where an antique glass show was in progress. The large hall was lined with elaborate displays of shimmering aquamarine, amber, and violet pieces that included Mason jars, candlesticks, Pyrex pipettes, and bell-shaped cloches for miniature Victorian greenhouses.

  They approached the tables and discovered one-hundred-year-old bottles that had been dug from the trash dumps of California. Some had once contained medicines, sarsaparilla, or elixirs; others had intriguing names embossed into their glass panels: Balm of One Thousand Flowers, Indian Cholagogue, Dr. Kilmer’s Kidney Cure, and Ocean Weed Heart Remedy. There was bear’s grease, macassar oil, and mustache dye for the men, and complexion powders, vegetable compounds, and magnolia cream for the ladies.

  They handled the bottles, drawn in by the beauty of thick, heavy milk glass; iridescent, paper-thin vials of opium powder; hand-turned, crude-necked pints of lemon extracts; and dazzling, lo
psided eyewash cups. Onion bulbs of dark-green glass pockmarked with seed bubbles sparked their imaginations, and they touched the glob tops of old rum bottles found off the coast of Florida, discarded, perhaps, by real pirates. They ran their fingers gently across cracked lips which held corks that smelled of licorice and crystallized honey.

  “There’s a lot of old S.F. stuff here,” Michael said. “I figured you’d like it.”

  Lindsey approached a display and touched a few items. Like brittle bones dug from sandy soil beneath San Francisco’s rotted piers, most of the soda and bitters bottles she held were corroded and flaking, but some were as perfect as the day they were first sold. She came to a table of embossed drugstore bottles and found a slope-shouldered vial from 24th Street and Mission, toothpowder from LeFevre’s pharmacie Francaise on the old Barbary Coast, and an eye salve from Lucky Baldwin’s chemist shop.

  Most of the items were high-priced, but Lindsey looked for a souvenir she could afford. They came to a display of Owl Drugstore items, and she chose a pocket-size bottle of clear flint-glass, embossed with a one-winged grandfather owl clutching a mortar and pestle in its talon.

  Walking to the car, Michael reached for her hand, and she gladly held his. The sun was already setting, showing its age by its readiness to retire so early in the evening. As they sped out of the Antioch area, rose-gold light backlit the lush, leafy trees while they headed northeast up the Garden Highway. Along the lazy Sacramento River, fishing boats churned through the still waters. Salmon occasionally flipped, creating concentric rings of bubbles that rippled out like pebble-size planets encircling specks of liquid sun.

  As they made their way through the overgrowth of berry bushes, Mother Nature’s flowering foliage was disheveled and tangled, rustling in the wind like wild curls that had lost their tidy bonnet during an active day of romping through garden paths. Edwardian farmhouses peeked out from behind canary palms and weeping willows, cloaked behind slightly opened shutters. The porches and outbuildings were strewn with shovels and pitchforks that could have been laying there for days, or perhaps years.