Buddha Baby (11 page)

"Don't be ashamed…"

She braced herself for bondaged nurses or Playmates fornicating with sheepdogs. What she saw was far worse:

"You know you want it… your deepest desire come true… A CURE FOR TOENAIL FUNGUS."

It was a video infomercial about a condition that infected the feet of one in nine Americans. As numerous examples of yellow, mangled toenails flashed onscreen, Lindsey covered her face with her hands. Repulsed, she turned off the VCR.

During a final pass with a broom, Lindsey's curiosity turned more serious. She realized she didn't know Yun Yun and Yeh Yeh at all. She knew they had lived in Locke, near Sacramento, but where had they each been born, how did they meet, and why did they get married? Did they love each other?

By late afternoon, she was closing the blinds in her grandfather's bedroom, and she spied something under the twin cot. She fished it out from against the wall, and found that it was a dusty photo album. Flipping through the sticky pages, she checked that it actually contained pictures, then she calmly slid it into a paper bag.

Poking her head into Yun Yun's room, she was relieved to find that her grandmother was taking a nap, eliminating the need for any potentially acerbic conversation. She tucked the album under her arm and headed out the door.

Back at home, Lindsey sat at the kitchen table and carefully slipped the photo album from the paper sack. She dusted it off and took a breath before opening the cover.

Flipping through the pages, she came to a few fuzzy snapshots of her dad as a teenager with backdrops revealing crates of fruit that looked like peaches and pears. In other photos, Yeh Yeh or Yun Yun sat unsmilingly in the foreground holding an already chubby Auntie Geraldine and baby Elmore. She didn't recognize any of the snapshots as being from their San Francisco house. She figured all these pictures had been taken in Locke. Thinking for another moment, she could have sworn Yeh Yeh had once mentioned growing up in the city. When had they moved?

Lindsey thought more about how little she knew of Yeh Yeh and Yun Yun. She had never given much thought to them as people in any context other than being her grandparents. For that matter, she hardly thought of her parents as regular people either. Other than the day-to-day interaction of family life, she never discussed with any of them their personal aspirations, political views, or how they felt about art, recycling, begonias, or anything.

Reflecting now, it seemed ridiculous that she knew so little about their hopes, desires, childhood dreams or disappointments. When she was a kid, her nuclear household had been like a small factory in which conversation was designated by and limited to one's role in the family. Any tangential conversation irrelevant to the smooth operation of cooking, shopping, cleaning, or getting to and from school or other sanctioned activities was considered superfluous and barely tolerable.

Enough toilet paper in the closet? Homework and dishes done? Car, fence, or broken zipper need fixing? These topics were all acceptable. Lindsey, Kevin, and their parents filled every evening with matter-of-fact conversation about pick-up and drop-off schedules, piano practices, SATs and hair appointments. The guys talked about sports and occasionally Lindsey and her mom talked about jewelry or the latest plot of
Murder, She Wrote
.

Never a peep was uttered about depression, existential angst, or subverting any dominant paradigm. Her mom and dad would freak out if they knew her liberal high-school and college curricula were teaching her that the American Dream was fraught with ennui, alienation, and personal malaise.

As Lindsey scanned through the photos she thought of the many Chinese immigrant families in which children as well as adults worked from sunrise to sundown, barely making ends meet. After all their toil, presumably there wasn't leftover time or patience for complaining or chitchatting about vague, personal dissatisfaction. Even though Lindseys parents were prosperous enough to have leisure time, still, a Chinese way about things—a cultural despondence—gripped them and pervaded their lives, each so separate beneath one roof. Like most Chinese families, they never talked about feelings. It was as if they were scared of the brutally honest things they might say if they ever got started. Or, perhaps, like everybody else in the rest of the country, they were just bored with each other and were more interested in watching
American Idol
.

Instinctively, each member of the Owyang family kept to themselves. Perhaps as children Lindsey and Kevin had absorbed through osmosis an invisible Chinese rule about not overstepping one's boundaries. Their parents never cursed or spoke out against injustice—in the world, workplace, or anywhere—and personal feelings of any kind were hardly expressed. Each Owyang unit was individually shrink-wrapped and bound in an airless sheath.

It was into this environment of unspoken thoughts that Lindsey had sometimes uttered a simple question and was met with either feigned deafness, confounded silence, or a dismissive, noncommittal response such as "not sure," or "some other time."

Over the last couple of years, she had asked a lot of questions and only received the vaguest answers.

"Where did you grow up?" she might have asked.

"Oh… in the valley."

She was left to wonder which—the San Fernando Valley, or near Sacramento, or in some random "valley" in China?

She had occasionally asked how Yeh Yeh and Yun Yun met, or where they grew up, and her parents provided no suitable answers. As unlikely as it seemed, it crossed Lindsey's mind that perhaps her father didn't even really know. Seeing as how she knew so little about her dad, it wasn't that outrageous to think that he, in turn, might also be uninformed about his own parents. Maybe he never asked and they never offered any clues. A generation closer to the old Chinese way of thinking, her dad had been steeped longer in the traditions of minding one's own business, not rocking the boat, and biding one's time. Maybe he didn't care to know, or else his curiosity had eroded like silt on a riverbank. Why dredge up mud when the water was clear now?

But to Lindsey the water was still murky. For a couple of years now she had been trying to gather bits of family information. She was like an early Californian panning for gold, believing in her right to discover buried secrets. However, the strong current of verbal reticence that invisibly gripped the nearly dried-up Owyang riverbed hardly ever yielded a shiny pebble of insight. She was exasperated that her quest for answers had turned up mostly sand and hardly any nuggets of truth. Everyone else acted like there was no value in what she was so diligendy searching for, and they discouraged her folly by throwing her off their scent with incomprehensible mumblings. Her elders routinely stonewalled her by turning up the volume on the radio or TV, and only occasionally flitted a morsel of information her way before fleeing to another room, stopping up their mouths with another chopstick-full of
jai
, or jabbing the words back between their teeth with another toothpick.

Whenever her tenacity appeared to have slackened, they seemed relieved. But Lindsey secretly took notes in her head, filing away all the bits and pieces of information she gathered over the years while listening to whispered conversations when no one thought she was paying attention. She had to piece snippets together and figure out in her own head what was real about the past. Details were like old pennies she saw in the street and could have left in the gutter, but she always decided to pick them up, quietly slipping them inside a mental pocket. Here is what she had sifted and sewn together thus far:

She knew that Locke had been a bustling, all-Chinese town once upon a time, and that her grandparents worked in the asparagus and pear fields. As a boy, her dad helped them fold cardboard boxes, then picked fruit with them as he grew older. Each adult had made a dollar a day back then, and Yun Yun sometimes augmented the family income with small sewing jobs for one of the white ladies who lived on the River Road. Lindsey once overheard her grandmother talking in Chinese about a woman's measurements, conducting her conversation in Zhongshan dialect, her guttural sounds interrupted by phrases such as "huge bazooms."

Lindsey had heard vague rumors that Yun Yun was from a broken home, and that she and Yeh Yeh had met in San Francisco before they moved to Locke, but she was unsure. Yeh Yeh sometimes referenced selling vegetables on the street long before he ever had his grocery store, and he once mentioned knowing Yun Yun as a young girl. But Lindsey could have been wrong. She had compiled a Frankenstein creature of stitched-together stories and hearsay, and some details were mismatched. But it was the best she could do, so far. Anyone who could possibly know anything acted like they were in the Witness Protection Program, as if the corroboration of information was so dangerous that the knowledge of it could still get themselves, their offspring, or future generations whacked, deported, or barred from American success should any hundred-year-old indiscretion be revealed.

Needless to say, Lindsey didn't understand why everything was so hush-hush. She was raised during the Oprah-Geraldo-Jerry-Springer era, when people routinely parlayed careers out of gabbing convivially about White House lap dances with un-deraged metrosexuals. She was used to E! Channel confessions and didn't get why anyone would want to keep secrets in this day and age when divulging your bullshit made you rich and a hero for at least fifteen minutes. Unlike old-school Chinese folks, Lindsey would hardly consider one person's disgrace a mark against Chinese people as a whole.

Sighing, she closed the album. She felt a little guilty for swiping it, but vowed to replace it when she returned to her grandparents' house for another round of cleaning. She was scheming about how to further excavate details of her grandparents' earlier days when the phone rang and interrupted her train of thought.

It was Michael. He told her the vegan
owsla*
had confiscated his phone and he was calling from a booth in the hallway of his ashram cellblock. He said that he convinced them he was an

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*This was the Psychic Food Ashram's term for their "peace officers" who roamed the dormitory halls in search of contraband items such as outside food that tasted too good. The enforcers took their name from a hierarchical group of rabbits in
Watership Down
because they thought themselves peaceful, vegetarian animals. Although one of the ashram's tenets was that eating meat created aggressive behavior, Michael said he found the
owsla
more intimidating than any carnivore he had ever met, especially when they searched his suitcase and ruthlessly confiscated a peanut butter sandwich that Lindsey had packed for him. They said commercial peanut butter possibly contained pork hormones and claimed they would throw it away, but Michael suspected they just ate it when no one was looking.

acolyte seeking spiritual guidance and was dedicated to ingesting only raw legumes and fruits that were free of bad vibes. No one trusted him yet, and in fact, he thought the phones were tapped because he kept hearing clicking noises. Or perhaps that was just his TMJ, which acted up when he didn't eat enough protein.

The ashram had recommended he begin his stay with a three-day fast. He said, "If I don't call you within two days just drive down here with a rib eye in a bag and throw it over the fence."

"You'll be fine," she said.