Hapa Girl: A Memoir

9. The Little Things

At first, it was the little things that began to drive my father crazy. Not the big ones, not the staring or the shooting, if you can imagine, but the mundane, everyday details. For example, the food. He’d forgotten this aspect about life away from New York, how people could live without Chinese food. Later he’d kick himself, but by then it was too late. Our first few months in South Dakota we used to drive hours just to try a new Chinese restaurant. Sixty-five miles to Sioux Falls, 130 miles round-trip, just because he saw an ad in the yellow pages for Peking duck. Well, it was a duck all right, but not from Peking. Eighty miles round-trip to Iowa on a rumor of Szechwan-style chicken. Instead we’d find a tiny diner, run by a single family, the menu offering dishes we’d heard about in jokes but never imagined could actually exist. Egg foo young. Beef chop suey. Stir-fried rice made with mixed vegetables and Spam. The proprietors were always polite, overly so; they treated us like long-lost family, my father like a brother who’d been missing for years and then suddenly turned up on their doorstep—they were so surprised to see another Chinese face. They fawned over my brother and me. They gave us free egg rolls, extra spareribs, dessert on the house. And though we smiled and promised to return, praising their awful food, I could tell my father was lying as he forced their food down his throat without chewing. 9 The Little Things Once, during a faculty meeting shortly after my father had taken his post at the university, he was introduced to the resident China Hand. A short man of considerable girth, he’d never actually been to China, nor could he read or speak Chinese. But he’d been to Taiwan once on a grant from the Nationalist government, which had made him expert enough to self-publish an academic book on his travels. He liked “Oriental things” and had many good forgeries of famous paintings on the walls of his office. He also apparently liked Chinese women, and after a drink or two, or three, he would regale listeners with his tales of carousing with Asian prostitutes from his navy days. He wasn’t too pleased to meet my father, I could tell. He was no longer the expert. Still, he sidled up to my dad at a party at our house once, drink in hand, leaning close to his cheek, one thick hand on my father’s shoulder.“Tell me, Winberg, why is it,” the China Hand asked, his words slightly slurred, his breath spraying wetly against my father’s neck, “why it is that the Chinese could create five thousand years of continuous civilization and yet have such lousy food? You’d think they’d have learned how to fix a steak by now!” Later, after everyone else had gone home, we laughed together as a family, as though the man had been telling a joke, but even though my father opened his mouth and made a laughing sound, I could tell that he didn’t actually think it was funny. In New York he’d taken the food for granted. After six years of dining out with my grandparents, my uncles, our families, every weekend , he thought he’d never miss it. He was tired of the city, he’d told us. Worn out. All that MSG. The noise of Chinese restaurants. The smells. The crowds, the lines, the price for parking. Nothing was worth this, he said. But thirteen hundred miles away from Chinatown’s mitten crabs and sizzling prawns, Shanghai-style “little dragon” soup dumplings, pork baozi, lion’s head meatballs, braised greens, winter melon soup, smelly bean curd, red-cooked doufu, ma po doufu, gong bao ji ding, Buddha’s delight, eight treasure rice, Hainan chicken, steamed ginger-sauce fish, his body began to go into withdrawal. At first it was little things, barely noticeable. The way his mouth would suddenly go dry in the middle of the day. No matter how many 70 • Chapter 9 glasses of water he drank, he felt parched. And then his right hand began to tremble, just the thumb and first two fingers, his chopsticks fingers. I’d watch them shake at dinner, as we...