Somewhere in the Unknown World Page 17
I could hear the rapper ask, “Who are you talking to, Akiem?”
Akiem answered, “My girlfriend.”
The rapper informed him that I was already dating their mutual friend and that Akiem better back off.
Akiem laughed in response.
I found myself doing the same.
Laughter brought me love.
* * *
Laughter brought Saymoukda new life.
In 2015, Saymoukda got pregnant. On a hot August day, she and Akiem were working in their shared studio in downtown St. Paul. He was recording music. She was reviewing notes for a play. They’d just learned weeks before that Saymoukda was three and a half months pregnant.
That day, the summer sun filtered into their warehouse and dust motes floated in streams of light around the pair. Outside, embedded into the circles cut from concrete, there were thin trees with leaves of dark green reaching in the direction of the sunshine.
It was a surprise when Saymoukda felt sudden cramps across her middle. At first, she didn’t want to disturb Akiem, so she shifted positions, went from standing to sitting, to lying down, first on her back and then on her sides. It didn’t matter what she was doing; the cramps were steady and grew stronger and stronger. She texted a friend. The friend assured her everything was fine. She tried to believe the friend. She started bleeding. The bleeding grew worse. The cramps grew more painful. Finally, Saymoukda told Akiem. He suggested positions she’d already tried. In her heart, the truth dawned slowly.
It took her body all afternoon to realize what was happening. It was around four in the afternoon when the truth slipped out into the toilet, a dark glob of blood the size of an egg, or an avocado pit. Saymoukda held her hands over her middle, her legs shaking on the toilet seat. She wanted to scoop it out. She wanted to bury it. Instead, she flushed the toilet. The sound of the water flowing into the bowl, the swirl, the twirl, the lifting of the blood of the baby, the whole of it, is a sight and sound she will never forget.
* * *
In 2017, Saymoukda got pregnant again. She found out when she missed a period. Her mother and father were not home. They had returned to Southeast Asia. It was their first time back. On the Internet they shared a photograph of the two of them standing in front of the dam where they’d first met.
In the photograph, they look healthy. Her father is balding. He has on sunglasses, so his eyes are hidden. He stands beside her mother, his left shoulder behind her right. He’s still broad and strong-looking. Her mother stands beside him. Her own shoulders are less broad, the skin of her arms sagging in the sleeveless shirt she wore that day. Her eyes, hidden behind an even darker pair of round sunglasses, must have been piercing and direct: deep, dark, and unafraid. Her father is smiling in the picture and the space in between his two front teeth shows itself, like an open door to a closet. They look like tourists, not two people visiting a piece of their personal history.
When Saymoukda saw the photograph, she thought: Mom and Dad are older than that dam behind them.
While her mother and father were in Laos, Saymoukda messaged them from Minnesota to share news of the pregnancy.
When her parents received the message, they visited a temple on a mountain. They climbed its high stairs, holding to the railing made of concrete, the long run of a dragon’s back. They stood underneath a tree of golden leaves, foil-covered coins, and bowed their heads low, held their hands together at their chests, to ask for a kind soul for their grandchild, a healthy spirit. A gentle wind blew just then and gold-foiled leaves started flying down. The coins jingled. Her dad opened his hands. A single leaf fell right into his upturned palms. For Saymoukda’s parents, lifelong Buddhists, this meant that the baby would enter into the world on the fallen leaves of gold and land gently into the hold of those who loved him. A monk at that same temple gave Saymoukda’s parents a name for their grandchild: Akara, one who was full of knowledge and compassion.
When her parents returned, the family discovered that Saymoukda’s mother had cancer. Chemotherapy was an option, so they took it. As Saymoukda’s body changed with the pregnancy, she watched her mother’s change, too. Every day she grew fuller with life as her mother diminished. Saymoukda’s hair grew thick and lustrous. Her mother’s thinned and fell out. These changes were not lost on either of them, but both held on for the promise of a next generation.
The October before her mother was put into hospice, Akiem and Saymoukda were scheduled to close on their first house together. On the morning before the closing, Saymoukda started to feel contractions. Akiem wanted to go to the hospital, but she did not. Saymoukda wanted to go to the bank. They needed a cashier’s check for the closing scheduled for the next day. The bank didn’t open until 9:00 a.m. It was only 8:40.
In the empty parking lot of the bank, they sat waiting in their car. The sun was brilliant, and the leaves, already turned, glistened in colors like sandstones on the trees. Saymoukda kept calm by doing deep-breathing exercises. She thought about funny things but found she could not laugh. She thought about sad things but discovered she also could not cry. By the time a security guard unlocked the doors to the bank, Saymoukda was hunched over in pain.
Akiem supported Saymoukda on their walk into the bank. He held her firmly by his side as she requested a cashier’s check from the teller, a young, unsuspecting woman. Every few minutes, the contractions came coursing through her body, causing Saymoukda’s breath to grow short.
The teller smiled and asked, “Are you okay?”
Saymoukda nodded. “Yes, we are just excited about this check.”
At half past nine, Akiem and Saymoukda were on their way to Woodwinds Hospital.
By eleven, Saymoukda was officially in a room. The pain would not stop but the baby would not come. She requested an epidural. Akiem stood beside her and read the baby monitor again and again. The day slipped into night. The night turned into a new day. The morning and then the afternoon passed. Saymoukda insisted that her parents come only once the baby had been delivered.
It was one p.m. the next day when the doctors finally told Saymoukda to push. She pushed. She pushed for the miscarriage she had experienced and had not yet surfaced from; she pushed for her mom and dad, the life they could have lived in Laos, and the one they had created in America; she pushed for that little girl who was afraid to grow up, for the old woman she hoped to one day become, for this little baby who was on his way into her life, and for the woman not yet old who was now sick and would die.
Akara was born, healthy and not so happy, at three p.m. His face was round. His head of hair was curly and wet against his scalp. His eyes were fiercely closed and his fists raised high above his head. Saymoukda called her mother and father, and all she could do was cry. In the background, Akara cried with her. On the other end of the receiver, she heard her mother’s cry in response.
At five p.m., Akiem went to the closing by himself with the check Saymoukda had insisted they get the day before and secured the keys to their little house.
* * *
Two years later, in that little house, on December 20, 2019, at 5:57 a.m., before the winter solstice, Saymoukda’s birthday, and Christmas, Sanouthith passed away. A beloved sister, her husband, and her daughter were at her side. There was no laughter, only tears.
For much of Saymoukda’s life she had been preparing for her mother’s burial. She did not know that she was also preparing for the birth of a new generation. Saymoukda could not have known that the stories of her refugee past, the moments of her youth, her ability to find laughter on the edges of her tears would be the foundations of her art and her life.
—SAYMOUKDA DUANGPHOUXAY VONGSAY In loving memory of Sanouthith Vongsay December 12, 1952–December 20, 2019
13
Revival
WHEN MR. TRUONG bought the building in the early 1980s, it had seen better times. The two-story brick structure on the corner of Avon Street and University was built in 1922. While its façade of red brick looked good enough
, inside, the interior was old and crumbling. The musty smell of dust and mildew was heavy in the air; old windows let in gusts of cold wind. The wooden windowsills were rotten with mold.
When his family of immediate and extended relatives expressed concerns about the state of the building, Mr. Truong insisted, “This is a good location for a restaurant.”
The old man was not wrong. The building was located on what had once been the busiest street in Minneapolis and St. Paul: University Avenue. On one end stood the Cass Gilbert State Capitol Building with its gilded horses, and near the other end, on the banks of the Mississippi River, on the border of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the sprawling University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus. However, the old business corridor, like the building Mr. Truong had purchased, had seen better days.
The streets were littered with trash. Along the sides of the buildings, there were empty syringe needles and used condoms containing traces of what looked like clotted cream. Up and down the avenue, there were sex shops and XXX theaters. The police sounded their sirens through the stretches of night, from dusk until dawn. The men, women, and children who traveled the streets early in the mornings and late at night looked over their shoulders, walked with their chin tucked low and shoulders high. There were some who could barely walk straight, so drunk or high or both that they had to hold the sides of the buildings and the light poles for support, zigzagging up and down the avenue. Sometimes, their heavy heads led and their feet could not follow and they fell flat onto the crumbling sidewalks, snores rising from the crumpled bodies. It was one of the roughest parts of St. Paul. The local people called the area Frogtown—for the frogs that had once lived in the long-ago swamps in the area and the guns that continued to croak through the night.
Mr. Truong recognized something that his oldest son, Hai, was still too young to see: that the neglected and abandoned avenue was not without hope or humanity. Perhaps he knew what the boy would discover in time: University Avenue and the refugee experience had a great deal in common. Both could not escape the hard times, both would survive.
University Avenue had been grand in the early 1900s. In 1913, Henry Ford had two plants on either end of the avenue building Model Ts. During World War I, Moses Zimmerman had operated the largest horse brokerage in the region and was the largest supplier of horses and mules to the US government. In the 1920s, the avenue was home to the largest streetcar network in the country, with more than five hundred miles of track. In 1939, Louis Armstrong played on the stretch, at the Coliseum. For a time, the avenue was home to two of the finest restaurants in Minnesota, the Criterion and the Blue House.
But like all else, the street was not immune to change or the forces of the world. World War II ended the era of the streetcar and ushered in the age of buses and family cars. Cars and buses made it easy for wealthier families who could afford them to move farther away. Working-class people moved in. When Interstate 94 was built, whole neighborhoods were demolished. The corridor was full of abandoned buildings that had once serviced those who could pay for their goods. By the time Mr. Truong bought the old building, the people he was able to attract to the restaurant were other poor folk—many of them new Americans like himself, immigrants and refugees, whose old countries and wars that had brought them to America were often absent from the history books and the consciousness of the American public.
Without meaning to Mr. Truong had put forth one of the biggest questions of his son Hai’s professional life: Was it ethical to make money from people without money?
The older Mr. Truong was not concerned with such philosophical questions. He, like many of the small-business owners, refugees, and immigrants slowly moving to St. Paul and setting up shop on University Avenue, was struggling with more elemental questions: How do I keep my family alive and build something that can be ours in this new country? They were leading a wave of small mom-and-pop businesses opening along the avenue: car repair shops, groceries, and small restaurants. They were able to operate by cutting corners where they could. They all hoped to garner customers by sharing their skills, their favorite things from their home countries and home tables, to run businesses by putting to work their whole families, including kids like Hai.
As the eldest son in the family, Mr. Truong was responsible for the family’s well-being. He rallied the extended family for the work of renovating the dilapidated building. Mr. Truong made an executive decision to move the door from its place in the corner to the very front of the building. When questioned, his response was simple: “Easier to see from the University Avenue, easier to call the people in.” The family set to work in the kitchen, scrubbing the decades of scum off the floors and the walls, scaring the rats out into the back alleys with pots and pans and knives. Mr. and Mrs. Truong got everything they needed for the restaurant from secondhand retailers: tables and chairs, plates and bowls, spoons and forks—all except chopsticks and Chinese soup spoons with their short handles and deep, flat bowls, because these things, like the new refugees and immigrants who used them, were new to Minnesota and no past retailers had ever used them before.
As the oldest grandchild and son in the family, Hai followed Mr. Truong closely on his days off from school and over the weekends. His job was to relay information to the younger generation and provide immediate support when needed. The restaurant was the most important family endeavor the Truongs had ever embarked on. Hai understood the stakes were high. He knew the family’s livelihood depended on the restaurant’s success and that the leading force of it was his father. He worked hard to support Mr. Truong with jobs big and small, from helping carry furniture and arranging it, to prepping ingredients for the test recipes his father wanted to try.
Mr. Truong set an easy menu, one the family knew well. He wanted to cook the foods that they’d grown up loving. For appetizers, he chose items like fresh rice-paper-wrapped spring rolls, fried egg rolls, crispy chicken wings, and small bowls of wonton soup with the available green vegetables (broccoli instead of the mustard greens from the old country and the familiar but milder American green onions and cilantro). For entrées, he wanted to have bun noodle bowls containing soft fermented rice noodles with fresh vegetables to recall spring and summer, even across the cold winter. He filled them with lettuce, carrots, bean sprouts, an assorted variety of fresh herbs like mint and cilantro, grilled meats with crispy edges, all mixed with a light dressing of nuoc Cham (fish sauce), sugar water, garlic, a small taste of fresh chili, all balanced with lime juice. He wanted to serve pan-fried pork chops seasoned with lemongrass, brown sugar, and fish sauce, a fried egg, pickled radish and carrots, and thin slices of cucumber on plates of broken rice. These were everyday dishes the family loved.
Most important, though, he and the whole family agreed, they had to serve pho. It was the national dish of Vietnam, the everyday person’s food, and the most common among the noodle soups connecting the Southeast Asian refugee groups coming into the area: the Laotians, the Hmong, the Cambodians, and the Vietnamese all loved their pho. While the family was confident that with exposure and education, more established Minnesotans would grow to love the flavorful, comforting dish, they knew that without the patronage of the other refugee groups, the restaurant couldn’t survive in a landscape where who they were and the foods they ate remained foreign and questionable.
The family had their own special recipe, their special blend of spices. While pho, rice noodles in a rich broth, usually made of long-simmered beef bones, seasoned with charred onions, ginger, spices such as cinnamon, star anise, black peppercorn, and coriander, is fairly typical, theirs would not be. Their dish would be garnished with a variety of meats from tripe to meatballs, from fresh, thinly sliced beef to pieces of soft-boiled tendon. Each bowl would be topped with sliced green onions and cilantro and accompanied with a side of fresh bean sprouts, sprigs of Thai basil, wedges of lime, and slices of jalapeño peppers. They were confident that most Vietnamese folks would love what they had to offer.
However, the
reality was that they were not dealing with a predominantly Vietnamese clientele. While most Vietnamese eat their pho with the vegetables, not disturbing the broth, dipping their meats into a combination of hoisin sauce and sriracha hot sauce in a side dish on the table, the refugees who came from Thailand, influenced by the Thai palette, liked to add in additional condiments such as sugar, fish sauce, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, sriracha sauce, hot chili and garlic oil, and sliced chili peppers in vinegar. Some asked for crushed roasted peanuts in their noodle dishes. Thankfully, the Truong family were fast learners, able to accommodate the different communities who came to their establishment.
By 1984, the restaurant was ready for its grand opening. After consulting with Mrs. Truong and his brothers, Mr. Truong announced that the restaurant would be named after the infamous Caravelle Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. While he had never been inside the grand hotel, he had admired it from the outside. The hotel was an impressive ten-story building built in 1959 by a Vietnamese architect who’d been trained at École Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Hanoi. In the 1960s the hotel housed only the wealthiest political officers, businessmen, and great foreign powers in the country: the Australian embassy, the New Zealand embassy, and the Saigon bureaus of NBC, ABC, and CBS. When Saigon fell in 1975, the Caravelle was taken over by the government and renamed Doc Lap Hotel, or Independence Hotel. It was not until 1998, long after the Truongs’ Caravelle Restaurant was born on their corner of University Avenue, that the hotel was relaunched once again as the Caravelle. For Mr. Truong, the naming of the restaurant was a victory, both personal and historical.
The Caravelle Restaurant did well for the Truongs. It successfully attracted the array of Southeast Asian refugees who were settling in the area and many of the people who worked with them: refugee resettlement workers, teachers, local churches who’d sponsored families, and others. The restaurant was the first place of work for many of the children as well as the place that fed them. In fact, after the restaurant closed for the day, when the family was too exhausted to go home, too aware that soon a new workday would dawn, Mr. and Mrs. Truong’s five children used to study and sleep in their father’s basement office, a darkened room in an unfinished space. They took their pencils and pens to its walls. They wrote misspelled American swear words for fun. They drew pictures of each other. They played games like hangman and tic-tac-toe on the darkened walls. The Truong children all became young men and women in that place. The restaurant allowed Mr. and Mrs. Truong to send all their children to college. It became part of the positive change that city planners and the residents of Frogtown had been hoping for, but could not have designed: the resurgence of University Avenue.