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Incense smoke mixes with the scent of campfire.
I should’ve stopped at a store to buy a change of clothes before coming here, but I was already running late and I really hate being late.
Now, as I stand before Buddha, clasping three sticks of incense between my palms, I’m regretting my poor decision making skills.
I’m not particularly spiritual or religious, but from a purely let’s-not-be-an-asshole standpoint, it strikes me as somewhat rude to show up to a holy place after having spent the past 4 days camping, climbing and sweating in the same homeless and hole-y outfit.
It’s also somewhat rude to visit a myriad of uncles and aunties you haven’t seen in over 10 years smelling like campfire and dirt.
I stare deep into Buddha’s blank eyes, hands pressed into prayer. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.
Hot California air fills my lungs and washes through my body.
Buddha wouldn’t judge me for this. If anything, he’d be proud of my lack of materialism, I reason. Need not, want not. Something like that, right?
I bow three times to the gold-plated statue and place one of the incense sticks into the altar before me. I walk over to the smaller altar to the right and repeat the process. I do it a third time in front of the last altar on the left.
I’m done with my prayers. I look around the room.
I haven’t been here in over 10 years.
It’s filled with over 50 statues of various Buddhas and Boddhisatvas.
Their eyes burrow into my soul.
Yet it doesn’t feel too judgmental.
I feel like me and the Buddhas have a great understanding going on between us. I don’t commit heinous crimes or wrongdoings, and they allow me to live my fairly inoffensive life— lifetime after lifetime after lifetime.
I leave the room and walk through the hallway back to the dining area, passing countless other statues, paintings, scrolls and writings filling every nook and cranny in the house.
I remember coming to this home as a child, somewhat afraid of these immobile beings. I knew they were important, but I didn’t understand anything about them— only that they were completely foreign.
Really, everything in this house was foreign.
Besides all the Buddhist imagery everywhere, there were all the uncles and aunties who lived in this house— people
I wasn’t sure how they were related to me or whether they were related to me at all— people
I didn’t understand because they didn’t speak English and instead stubbornly spoke Vietnamese to me despite my obviously blank and dumb face as if they hoped that if they kept speaking to me in Vietnamese I might suddenly understand what they were trying to say— people
I received great kindness from and who fed me delicious foods I could only ever find in the Vietnamese markets and definitely never at school— people
I simultaneously feared and loved because they were foreign and familiar.
In addition to serving as something of a temple, this house was also the base for a sweatshop of Vietnamese snacks.
One of my earliest memories is of this kitchen—the half-dozen middle-aged Vietnamese women would cover the floor with newspaper to keep it clean, and then bring out all the ingredients they needed to make whatever Vietnamese snack they’d be mass producing that day— some kind of bánh— bánh bèo, bánh bột lọc, or my favorite, bánh nậm. Or maybe some kind of chè, Vietnamese desserts. They would bring out large tubs of mung bean pastes, ground shrimp and veggie fillings, sticky rice doughs, sweet chopped corn and bean syrups, and of course piles of fresh banana leaves which they would use to wrap the snacks in.
For hours, these women would sit or squat on the floor, their nimble and weary hands mixing ingredients, assembling foods and wrapping up finished products. By the end of the day, they’d have several large cardboard boxes filled to the brim with these sweet and salty snacks which they would sell to restaurants and cafes to resell or to individuals for parties and special events.
As they worked, I would sneak in mouthfuls of mung bean paste—the Vietnamese equivalent of eating raw cookie dough.
My mother would slap my hand and warn me that I’d get a tummy ache if I ate too much.
It never stopped me from trying anyway.
As far as I was concerned, I was fully capable of eating buckets of mung bean paste if she would just let me.
And yet— even as natural as this scene seemed to me, I understood on a subconscious level that this was never a scene I’d see on TV or a scene any of my classmates or friends could ever understand.
So I never told anyone about the summers and winters I’d spent here.
What was the point in describing the 5th dimension to people who existed only in 2D?
“Did you finish praying to Buddha?” my dad asks me in Vietnamese.
At least, that’s what it translates to in my mind.
He may have been asking me about the fishing conditions in Alaska for all I knew.
Either way, I say yes and take my seat next to him at the table.
Also at the table is my mother’s sister’s husband, and another older couple I refer to as aunty and uncle, though, again, I’m not really sure if we’re actually related or if I just call them aunty and uncle.
They continue their conversation in Vietnamese and I try my best not to look bored even as my eyes glaze over. I catch bits and pieces of their conversation, but not much.
At one point my dad brags that I’ve been studying and know how to read and write in Vietnamese these days.
A bold face lie, dad, a bold face lie.
Throughout the conversation, my mother’s sister and her husband bring out various snacks for us. Sliced oranges, donuts, and jackfruit. After that comes the chè, a sweet and syrupy bean-based dessert.
And then the big question—
Would anyone like to have some sầu riêng?
Durian.
My potentially-unrelated-by-blood aunty and uncle both decline—they can’t eat durian very well. My mother also passes for the same reason.
My dad, ever the gracious and gregarious guest, says he would love to have some.
I, ever the meek and mute child, also agree to partake.
It’s been a while since I’d had durian.
My mother’s sister’s husband brings out three small plates and three spoons—a set for my dad, me and himself. He scoops out a generous dollop of durian for each of us.
If you’ve ever had fresh durian, you would understand why I describe it as a dollop—the same word you would use to describe an overflowing spoonful of sour cream flung gently into a bowl.
Regardless of how you describe it, we can all agree that it’s got a strong flavor.
It’s the reason why my mother and aunty and uncle are not be able to eat it—despite having been raised in Vietnam.
Even with a lifetime of training, it’s not an easy fruit to enjoy.
I don’t particularly love durian, but I am able to eat it fairly easily. I finish my dollop but politely decline offers for a second helping.
Chop, chop, chop.
I finish dicing the potatoes and slide them off my cutting board into the cast iron pan.
Next comes the carrots, then the broccoli, then the peppers and the tomatoes.
I season everything with salt, pepper, garlic powder, some ginger and a bit too much cayenne pepper. Later, I’ll cook the eggs separately and combine everything together.
It’s somewhat of a meager meal, in my opinion—I’d run out of onions and fresh garlic, as well as spinach—three key ingredients to my breakfast stir fry.
It’s only 6:43am, but I’ve already been awake for over an hour.
Everyone else is still snuggled deep in their sleeping bags.
I can’t help it.
Then sun rises, the light hits my eyes, the sometimes-sweet-sometimes-musky air of nature fills my lungs, and I am wide awake.
I’d only slept for 5 hours— and I love it.
I love sleeping with the moon and rising with the sun. I love the peacefulness of the morning, that moment before anyone else has even begun to stir. It’s gentle and sweet and somehow intimate.
One by one, everyone else wakes up. Eight people and two dogs.
We’re all sore from the past few days of climbing, but no one mentions it. We’d planned to do a half-day of climbing today, but I can already tell that it’s not going to happen. Everyone seems far too comfortable lounging about on crash pads, talking and bantering gently as the sun rises higher and higher in the sky.
We have a slow breakfast and I’m happy.
We eventually pack up, and caravan out. Everyone else has at least one other person or animal in their car, but I’m alone. The others are returning to the Bay, but I have to stop in Stockton to visit my family.
Even after over 10 years of not seeing these people, I have the occasional obligation to see them, if for no other reason than to see them.
After the temple-sweatshop, I drive my dad over to another relative's home.
This one is a modern, two-story cookie-cutter house located in an idyllic suburb. It’s tastefully decorated. The walls are mostly bare save for the occasional family photo placed in the bookshelves.
There are no Buddhas here to judge me.
A large group of uncles and aunties are already here, talking and laughing merrily.
They come in to hug me, and I try my best to deter them without being too rude, or to go in for a side hug rather than anything full-frontal.
I’m highly conscious now of my campfire-sweat-dirt odor, and don’t know how to explain the fact that I’ve spent the past 4 days being horrendously dirty on purpose.
It’s a hard concept to explain to this particular audience—
Guys, I know you risked your lives to leave our poor rural village of less than 500 people back in Communist Vietnam in the aftermath of the
War and endured terrible things like forced labor and torture in the re-education camps so that we could enjoy
Luxuries like electricity and hot showers and air conditioned office jobs, but it turns out all I want to do is romp about in the countryside just like the ones you abandoned because today they’re filled with
Landmines, chop wood just like you used to for the Viet Cong when they
Imprisoned you, and pretend I’m homeless just like you used to be in the streets of Hong Kong because you couldn’t make it to America from Vietnam and instead spent years working in
Sweatshops and fish markets.
No matter how I play this over in my head, it somehow never plays out very well.
So I don’t bother trying to explain.
As they re-introduce their selves to me and tease me for not remembering their countless names, they lead me into the backyard where everyone is sitting. No one mentions my scent or my clothes, not to my face at least.
Good folks, these people.
They sit me down and, like proper Vietnamese hosts, continue to feed me because really I’ve only had four meals today and no day is complete without at least five if not six.
And I, like a proper Vietnamese guest, accept their offers.
And also, they made fresh bún bò Huế and I am never one to turn down a delicious bowl of homemade noodle soup.
These uncles and aunties are far more Westernized, speak a fair amount of English, and are overall more jovial and outgoing compared to the ones at the previous house. They smoke and drink as they eat their soup. They talk loudly as they chew with their mouths open.
I relax. It’s a familiar scene.
And just like that, all the aunties and uncles suddenly decide it’s time to leave.
They get up and gather up their things to drive off somewhere. I’m slightly thrown off as one moment we were having jolly conversation and the next, they’ve gotten awfully riled up about something—
“Are you going to the casino?”
My dad looks at me. He tries to play it off for a moment but then realizes he’s been caught.
“We’re on [holiday]!” He says the sentence in Vietnamese, but the world [holiday] in English.
I laugh.
It’s fine, I can drive home now. I say my goodbyes to the aunties and uncles and wish them good luck and lots of fun at the casino. They’re embarrassed they’ve been caught, which surprises me.
Did they really think that I didn’t know? That all these years— this is what they did back in in the day when they would dump all their kids into one house (Can you imagine a 4-bedroom house filled with 20 kids aged of 5-16? Pandemonium!), leave us money for pizza, and then head out together only to return hours later, rowdy and drunk?
Aren’t we Vietnamese? Isn’t excessive gambling our national past time? Isn’t this the reason why I knew how to add before I knew how to write my name— because I needed to add to 21 when we used to play Blackjack during Lunar New Year, a habit I started when I was just 5 years old?
Let’s be real, dad.
I’m Vietnamese too and your child. I love gambling as much as any other Vietnamese person. Even though, as a math major, I know the odds are literally against me as I stand at the Blackjack and Roulette tables in Vegas, it’s hard for me to walk away. Because of you, I’d rather spend a night at the casinos than in the clubs.
As we part ways, the aunties and uncles repeatedly assure me that it’s just once in a while, it’s so rare for the family to get together these days; it’s just a [holiday].
I laugh again and wave them off as I get into my car.
The 2-hour trip back to the Bay is exhausting. In total, I’ll have spent over 5 hours driving today on just as many hours of sleep.
But I love the drive anyway.
The windows are rolled down. The hot, dry California air blows through the car. My eyes squint in the sun.
I could get my sunglasses, roll up the windows, and turn on the AC—it’d be more comfortable for sure.
But I love this feeling.
It reminds me of all those kitschy movies from the 80’s and 90’s that always end with the hero/heroine driving through the desert with the top down and the wind blowing through their hair.
Those kitschy movies where at the end of the movie, you’re not 100% positive how the character’s life will turn out, but at least now they’re free from the troubles that burdened them in the beginning of the movie. Even though nothing is promised to them, they’re filled with a profound sense of freedom and greater strength than ever before, so you’re sure that, even though life isn’t guaranteed to be good or easy, it’ll all work out somehow.
And here I am. Driving through California alone in my car under the hot summer sun. It’s filled to the brim with all the essentials I need in my life—climbing and camping gear, food, music.
The memories of yesterday.
A lifetime of traditions.
The sun is so bright, and I’m sweating in the hot wind blowing through the car windows.
But I love it.