Once Upon a Wish (43 page)

After talking with social worker Steve Baisch about his desire to visit Paris, France, for a culinary experience, Tien and Lillian got a visit from Dr. Portale, who was a master of breaking bad news in the best way possible—with just the right amount of sympathy and the necessary amount of truth.

“There’s no way you’ll be able to go to Paris,” Dr. Portale said gently. It hadn’t been long since Tien had started dialysis, and his body was still very weak from its fight to hush lupus. “It’s too far and you’re really in no condition to travel. If you’d like to go somewhere, the furthest you can go is a couple of hours away.”

“Ooooh, maaaaan!” Tien said, smiling, trying to roll with this news, as Lillian rubbed his head, lips pressed together. He was alive and responding well to dialysis, so nothing, aside from bad news about his health, could bring Tien down. “That’s okay, I’ll think of something else!”

A few months later, volunteers from the Make-A-Wish Foundation called with the next best thing. “We know you wanted to travel to Paris, but since you can’t, we want to bring Paris to you,” they said.

Tien smiled the same smile that snuck across his face with every thought of Paris lights and the city’s smells and food. He didn’t know exactly what that meant—all he knew was that Paris was coming to him.

Tien had been on dialysis for six months, long enough to return to fourth grade and run and laugh through life the same way his friends and classmates did. He had gone from being wheeled into dialysis every day to walking in, went from pausing on the landing of his stairs at home to racing up and down them. He wasn’t well enough to travel to a country across the world, but he was finally well enough to experience it.

A couple of weeks after talking to Make-A-Wish volunteers, Tien was touring Paris through the sights and scents of its most delectable food, living the dream that had lived in his imagination for so long—the dream that had started as a very young child and continued through his long hours in dialysis. He was suddenly in the place he had visited through his brother’s and sister’s stories, the place from which Yune had sent healing prayers when Tien went into kidney failure. His dream, his wish, was finally coming true.

Paris was still 5,000 miles away, but its heart and soul were in the very kitchen where he worked with French-born Chef Roland Passot, owner of the area’s La Folie and Left Bank restaurants, as
he prepared food for the annual Make-A-Wish Foundation Wine & Wishes fundraising event on Treasure Island.

Tien was finally standing beside a true French chef, a master of foie gras and frog legs, soufflés and escargot: the country’s finest cuisine. Knee-deep in Chef Passot’s white coat, its sleeves rolled up high, tall, white hat proudly atop Tien’s head, he was finally a chef, and finally, in his mind, in Paris.

The evening, a black-tie affair, brought in dozens of the area’s finest restaurants, which displayed hundreds of exquisite samplings, from uniquely prepared starters, to meats, salads, cheeses, and desserts, such as French macarons and puff pastries. Tien and his family strolled slowly from vendor to vendor as though roaming the streets of France, tasting the country’s most delicious food from sidewalk cafés selling crêpes or sandwiches to people on the go.

But helping Chef Passot add the final touches to plates during Wine & Wishes was just the beginning. Another two visits to Paris awaited.

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The second of three visits came a few days later as Tien, once again, stood beside the chef, this time, the experience taking him to the heart of French cuisine, the place it all begins—a true French kitchen.

A sleek, black town car had swung by the Hotel Sofitel San Francisco Bay, where Tien and his family were staying for the night. They had checked into the hotel—the fanciest Tien had ever seen—and enjoyed macarons and a rich, flowing chocolate fondue that welcomed them to their room.

The town car, following dancing lights of red and blue from four police cars leading the way, took them to a place that would
reveal how these and other of life’s most delicious foods were made—Chef Passot’s Left Bank restaurant. The closest Tien had ever come to a police escort was riding in the back of an ambulance on his way to the hospital; and the nicest restaurant he’d ever been to would not come close to the restaurant he was about to experience.

In the middle of Left Bank’s kitchen, Tien stood in awe as the hustle and bustle of a busy, French restaurant came to life before his eyes with the infectious chaos of knives chopping, pans clinking, flambés firing, shouts of dinner orders echoing. Tien watched as food in every form, from raw ingredients to pans sizzling to perfect plate placement, made its way from the loud kitchen to the dining area, where guests sipped on wine, enjoyed one another’s company, and pleased their taste buds with dishes that originated halfway around the world.

Standing over a hot griddle as food on plates carried by the careful hands of prep chefs and waiters flew by, Tien remained focused on the task he was given—flipping crêpes. Left Bank’s industrial kitchen had different demands than his kitchen at home, where he had spent every Sunday morning cooking crêpes with his father from the time he was six years old.

Tien had hung a sign on the kitchen door every weekend announcing “Crêpe Day Sunday” to the rest of the family, and he and Bruno spent hours making dough from scratch, flipping and filling them with jam or eggs and cheese. They laughed together as Tien learned to keep the crêpes from flipping onto the floor, and now, beside Roland Passot, the chef watched as Tien perfected the flip—quickly adjusting to the fifteen seconds it took to cook each side as opposed to the two minutes it took in his kitchen at home.

They flipped and stuffed crêpes together, fulfilling the orders of customers ordering any kind of crêpe imaginable from the special,
one-night-only, “Tien Menu.” Not only was Tien a chef, but also he was a chef with his own menu. He smiled more than he had smiled in months as a long table filled with police and firefighters sat and indulged in his creations.

Touched by the spirit of this young, bright, and healthy child, the officers and firefighters passed around a hat to collect money for Tien—half of which he used to buy board games for himself, the other half he spent on buying games for the children in the pediatric ICU at UCSF. Three days a week, he was still one of those children, but on that night, he was a chef in Paris.

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Tien’s tour through France continued two months later in a limo to the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, where he witnessed a very different French restaurant culture from that of the pleasantly chaotic kitchen of Left Bank. The quiet, laid-back style of restaurant or bakery he imagined existing in Paris existed in the kitchen of the Culinary Institute, where Tien got to quietly learn from one of its students the art of making croissants and baguettes.

He helped make dough from scratch for the baguettes, which he rolled out and placed in a machine that molded and folded it into perfectly shaped bread. Fresh from the oven, Tien and his family gathered around a large, wooden table in the main dining area and enjoyed a feast that included Tien’s fresh-baked baguettes and other French-inspired foods, such as steaks they could slice like butter, mini quiches, delicious vegetable creations, and traditional desserts like crème brûlée.

Tien left the last trek of his trip to Paris with a bag of baguettes—the way he had always imagined people in France carrying the long, skinny bread from boulangeries to their homes or offices.
Just like them, Tien was heading home. His trip to Paris was over, but through the three experiences that allowed Paris to come to him, the city would live inside of Tien forever.

Tien returned to the fourth grade, maintained good grades, and signed up for his school’s end-of-the-year play, where he auditioned and got the part of the grandfather in a play about the Oregon Trail.

On the night of the play, Dr. Portale gave his “okay” to let Tien leave dialysis a few minutes early as long as everything looked alright. Twenty minutes before Tien’s dialysis session was over, Dr. Portale looked at the numbers, checked his blood pressure, looked at the anticipation on Tien’s face, smiled, and set him free.

Lillian drove Tien back to Berkeley, straight to his school, where volunteers were able to quickly paint an old man’s beard across Tien’s excited face and send him onstage. It wasn’t the circus—he wasn’t tumbling or twirling or flipping or turning cartwheels—but he was back on stage; back in the spotlight, back where he belonged.

The audience, many of them the parents of Tien’s friends, cheered wildly at the end of the play, loudly in celebration of Tien’s return. He smiled and bowed with the rest of his classmates, then returned home to start his summer vacation.

Tien spent the next six months going to dialysis three days a week, living in between his old, “normal” world and his new world, a world he had learned to adjust to, to live in, because there was no other choice. He no longer had working kidneys, but he was alive.

One day after treatment, Lillian and Tien ventured into San Francisco as they did every other day of dialysis and enjoyed a little piece of France—crêpes in a small, quaint restaurant. Just like
every other customer in the restaurant, Tien enjoyed every bite, but now he knew what went on beyond the swinging doors of the kitchen. It was another life back there, another culture, one that the Make-A-Wish Foundation had let him become a part of.