Somewhere in the Unknown World Read online

  The Caravelle and countless other ethnic restaurants and shops that opened up on University Avenue in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s turned the avenue from an abandoned, dying street into a vibrant enclave of diverse businesses that served their communities and attracted others. Individuals from the different refugee groups bought the old buildings and renovated them as they knew how, to make room for grocery stores, tailoring shops that made traditional clothes, bakeries that sold the breads they knew from different parts of the world, and butchers that catered to specific groups, such as halal meats for Muslims and a Mexican carnicería with common cuts for their dishes. Wealthier refugees bought the bigger buildings and rented them out as smaller spaces to industrious men and women who wanted to try their hand at working for themselves. A Hmong dentist bought an old car dealership and set up his office in there, then rented part of it to a Hmong restaurateur who wanted to open up a Thai restaurant. There was still room, so he rented out the remaining space to a Hmong chiropractor who wanted to have his own practice. Business developers saw what was going on, noticed the traffic that the newcomers were bringing in, and reinvested on the stretch, bringing box stores, a new public library, and housing initiatives.

  By the time Hai left for college, the University Avenue of his youth was gone. Like his father, Hai felt responsible for the trajectory of his family’s story. He was the first person in their family to gain a college education. While Mr. and Mrs. Truong had always said, “We want you to be happy,” Hai felt a need to show them how lives could be lived in America away from the endless demands of a family restaurant.

  After college, Hai found a job in the corporate world as an analyst. In his suit and tie, Hai made good money. His parents were proud. He represented the successful journey they’d taken after leaving their country, working hard in the restaurant business, raising children who wouldn’t have to work with their hands for a living. However, what they didn’t know and what Hai himself was only slowly realizing was, he was unhappy. Hai was drinking away the money he earned as fast as he was earning it. He was depressed. He missed the hustle and the bustle of a restaurant. One April Fools’ Day Hai told his boss that he was done with corporate America.

  It took Hai another ten years before he could tell his mother and father that he wanted to start a restaurant, and asked if they would help him.

  In their fashion, Mr. and Mrs. Truong went about teaching Hai everything they knew, all the places where the corners could be cut, who to hire and how to arrange work in a restaurant to make it efficient and cheap. While Hai understood where they were coming from, it wasn’t what he wanted. Hai wanted to build on the legacy that his parents had made in America, not just re-create it.

  Hai listened and learned from his parents knowing that what he would do would be different. From the beginning, Hai wasn’t just concerned about making a go in the restaurant business; he wanted his restaurant and his business to contribute actively to the lives of the people who worked for him, the people who ate his food, the community that had raised him. He wanted to rebrand pho and bun, the dishes from his youth, by using the best in what the local food producers had to offer rather than the most affordable ingredients. The more Mr. and Mrs. Truong heard of Hai’s ideas, the more skeptical they became. Where would he make money if he was going to invest it all back into the restaurant? Where did he want to place this restaurant with the best ingredients? Certainly not on University Avenue?

  That was exactly what Hai wanted. His parents were skeptical but they agreed if that was what he wanted to do with his life, they would help him. In fact, it was Mr. Truong who suggested that Hai buy the old Caravelle Restaurant from his aging aunt who had taken over the family enterprise and renamed it Pho Anh. Mr. Truong’s sister was getting too old to manage the operation. Her fingers, once straight and strong, were now bent and red. Beyond her age, there was talk of University Avenue changing in a big way once again. The city planners wanted a return to the old trolley; this time it would become a light-rail. She was afraid of what such a change would do. The aunt was eager to sell the place to her nephew for a fair price.

  Hai got married the same year he opened his restaurant, in 2007. He completely remodeled the place. One of the first things he did was to seal the door his father had made in the front of the restaurant; he opened the original door in the corner. Hai knocked down all the walls in the restaurant so he could see the structure for what it was, unmarred by the story of how new refugees had to survive with what had been there before them. He tore down the stained tiled ceiling and installed an authentic tin one. He secured a liquor license and made the bar himself out of expensive, solid wood, stocked with the finest selection he could afford, saving room for the local brews he knew were bubbling away nearby. Hai furnished the place with solid wood tables and chairs that he himself wanted to sit at and eat on. He demolished the old kitchen and had a brand-new one put in with ventilation and equipment of the highest quality. He was determined to open an eatery that would attempt to do what no refugee-owned restaurant on University had attempted: to attract people with money, individuals who could afford to make their food decisions based on their understanding of local and global economies.

  Hai hired the best people he could find, individuals who wanted to grow in the restaurant business, people who wanted to work competitively for competitive pay. In his kitchen, full of stainless steel, he tried recipe after recipe, following his dream of using the best local ingredients to create the most flavorful dishes without fear of not being authentic enough. He had stodged and dined at the finest restaurants in the Twin Cities and elsewhere looking for ideas, trying to satisfy his increasingly complicated tastes. Hai refused to cut corners. He used no instant soups or easy sauces. Hai gave the restaurant everything he had to give, he made it everything he loved about what a local restaurant could be: a place full of local brews, food made with local produce, operated by local people.

  Hai named his restaurant Ngon Bistro. He had traveled to France and, each time he had entered a bistro there, he was surprised to find that it was more familiar than different. The food reminded him of the Vietnamese food he’d grown up with in his home. He liked the bistros for their clean and their calm, the good food they prepared served with professionalism but no fanfare. Hai wanted to replicate that. At the same time, he didn’t want to lose himself or give up any part of his identity. Hai wanted to be Vietnamese and to stamp this restaurant with Minnesota, this state that had been his home since he was five years old. Of course, he was also focused on stamping Minnesota with himself, an ethnic Chinese Vietnamese boy who had been born far away, who’d come here as a refugee child, grown up with overworked parents, feeding people because he loved them.

  The one thing Hai did not change in the building was his father’s basement office. He couldn’t do it. Those old walls with the bad words, hand-drawn images, and the games he and his siblings had played together. Hai wanted a reminder of who he had been, who they had been, and what they had all been together: newcomers making a go at a new life.

  * * *

  All his life, Hai has had a tendency to let his mind block out all the mean things, the unsavory things, the undelicious elements of everything. He does not want to remember Vietnam despite the fact that he was already five when his family fled the country. All he remembers is that they were able to leave together. He has no desire to remember the early years of being in America when the family survived on public assistance.

  There are no details in his memory of the racial fights he was engaged in when the white kids didn’t like the fact that there was a sullen Vietnamese boy in their class with his head of dark hair and matching eyes. However, the faces of the few white kids who fought with him to even the odds, he’ll never forget. There was the boy with shaggy brown hair, holes in his jeans, and freckles across his nose; then another boy who was so tall and big he doubled the size of Hai himself, his hair cut like a man in the military, ears sticking out like butterfly wings on th
e sides of his head.

  Hai doesn’t want to remember the prostitutes positioned on the corners of old University Avenue. Instead, he focuses on the image of his wife standing outside their restaurant, declaring to the world, “This. This is my corner now.” Hai understands his predicament well as a refugee child, one who came here young enough to garner the skills to survive and to succeed but is also chased by the ghosts of old.

  While Hai grew up in the restaurant with Mr. and Mrs. Truong at the helm, he lived with his paternal grandmother. She, in fact, raised him.

  It started in the early 1980s when Mr. Truong was buying the building to house the restaurant. Hai was not part of the decision. It was an expectation so he complied.

  The boy and his grandmother moved all over the Cities in search of a neighborhood and a school that could accommodate their lives. They lived in a house in Minneapolis, then in a small apartment two blocks from the restaurant, and then in an old apartment on 7th Street on the east side of the city, flooded with refugees from Laos. Hai knew his cousins the same way he knew his siblings. He grew up living with his aunts and uncles whenever his grandmother found herself living with them—which happened every couple of years. In each place, Hai was the first son of the first son, so everyone loved him and treated him with a deference. And yet in those years with his grandmother, their lives were much like University Avenue: messy, always changing.

  Hai believes, like his father, that “the past is only useful if it allows us to move forward.”

  * * *

  Ngon Bistro became a success. White folk with money entered its doors enthusiastically. Other folk, curious, came and tasted from its menu. The food was good. The bar was excellent. The environment was different than the other establishments on the avenue. The restaurant stood out, and Hai along with it. Local newspapers came asking for the family’s story, Hai’s philosophy on food and business, the particular inspirations for his dishes, dishes not traditionally found in a Vietnamese family restaurant. In 2020, Hai was nominated for a James Beard Best Chef Midwest Award.

  When Hai and his wife were pregnant, Hai made a decision to keep his child close. Before the baby was born, Hai did everything he could to ensure that he’d have time to be with his child. Hai wanted to make sure that he would have the time to spend with his child outside of work, that he could keep his son close to him.

  When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, Hai was downstairs in his father’s old office. All of a sudden he felt the past reaching out its hands, not for him this time, but for Khanh, his son. Hai had looked and sounded different. Khanh did not look or sound different in the same ways but it was Hai’s blood and legacy that flowed through the boy’s thin body, his own complicated composition. Hai was 75 percent ethnic Chinese. Mr. Truong speaks two dialects of Chinese. While Hai could no longer speak Chinese, all his life he’d looked Chinese in a Vietnamese life. Each time he’d moved to a different school, he became an Asian boy in a pool of two or three. Now there was Khanh, who didn’t look Chinese or Vietnamese, or white, although his mother is white. Hai had believed that he had survived the race fights so Khanh wouldn’t have to. Would the boy have to fight? Would he even know how?

  Khanh had playdates. He had neighborhood friends. He had cousins who adored him, a life built around his needs. Unlike Hai. Hai, who had been Mr. Truong’s second-in-command, played his expected role as living companion to his grandmother and somehow managed to carve a life that was not so expected.

  Who had taught him how to fight? Was it his father whose life was lived in the restaurant, always balancing numbers and attitudes and needs? Was it his grandma who loved him but did not shower him with affectionate words or gestures, just her beloved rice cakes and pork steamed buns? Was it himself? A boy with hair in his face, looking and taking notes with his eyes? Or was it University Avenue? This place that had been old but was made new again and again by the people who came to the stretch, saw something of the future in the past, and did the hard work of making others believe? No. It was the restaurant itself, the old Caravelle and then the new Ngon Bistro, these places that proved they could provide what was necessary for a man, a family, a person to dream of better times, to live away from the past but remain part of it.

  In 2016, Hai wiped away his own tears. He traced the words he’d written on the darkened walls as a boy, the F, the U, and the K. Hai decided that no matter who was president, no matter the mood of the country, his son would survive because he had. Whether his father wanted to or not, Mr. Truong had never been able to shield his son from the demands of life in America, from the pressures of having to survive against all odds.

  —HAI TRUONG

  14

  Never Going Home Again

  MINNESOTA IS NOW just this place in my brain where there is snow on the ground, tall white men in white lab coats, their needles sinking deep into my legs, through skin and muscle. It is a wet, cold place full of even colder people: a man and a woman who chose to send their child on vacation far from them for years and never say anything on the phone like “I’m sorry” or “I love you” or “We sent you away because it was the only thing we could do.” Instead, they want to talk like this is normal, they want me to tell them, “I’m okay,” and “School is great,” and “I’m happy.”

  I was born to Cambodian refugee parents. I never thought that I myself would experience life as a refugee, someone who can’t return home because I am understood as a threat to who the locals are and want to be.

  The day my father told me that I was going on vacation with Grandma, Auntie, Uncle, and my cousins was one of the best days of my childhood. I had never been on vacation anywhere. Everyone had always said that it was too hard to take me and my wheelchair and my medications, that things could go wrong and too many places weren’t wheelchair accessible. But out of nowhere, my father told me the good news.

  I was a child with a round face, eyelashes so long that they fanned across my field of vision. I had a wide mouth full of teeth. I can see my face then: a child’s picture of happiness.

  My father’s face was thin. He wore thick glasses. A balding man with a scraggly beard, his mouth was a replica of my own except it was not smiling; he was grimacing, as if he was in pain.

  My mother didn’t say anything about the vacation. She had her back to me the whole day. All I saw were her rounded shoulders, sloping toward her arms, the curls at the back of her head the product of a perpetual perm. In the kitchen, she looked out the window. In the living room, she sat in front of me and looked at the television. Beside me, she looked away from me. All my life, when my mother spoke to me at all, she began with, “It is a pity.”

  I was a pity. Everyone in the community, my aunts, my uncles, and my cousins, all felt this way. Even my three older brothers, who joked and talked with me, thought it was pitiful that I was born the way I was.

  I was born with muscular dystrophy. I’ve known this since I was three years old.

  It would have been easier for everyone, including myself, if I had been born in Cambodia and had lived through Pol Pot and was made this way through war. But I was born after the war in a new country in a life that was supposed to be easier for everyone, only I wasn’t easy. I lived as a reminder of how life could be hard—even away from war.

  Refugees do not know the moment their lives are going to change forever.

  That day, the sun was coming in through the windows. My father and I were in the living room. I was in my wheelchair looking at the television screen. My father was seated at his usual place, at the end of the old sofa, on the edge of its sagging cushion. He was leaning toward me, his elbows on his knees, fingers laced together. He said, “Son, you’re going on vacation to California with your auntie, uncle, the cousins, and Grandma. Remember my sister and her husband who used to live here? They’re in California now.”

  The school year was nearly over and I knew the endlessly long summer days were coming.

  I asked, “Have you gotten me a plane t
icket?”

  My father answered, “You are going in a car, a van, Auntie and Uncle’s blue Plymouth.”

  I know I screamed with excitement. I reached for him, to hug him. He wrapped me in his arms and sniffed my hair, held me closer than he’d ever held me.

  * * *

  In the van, I was placed in the back row with some luggage around me. The food was beside me in a brown bag and a cooler. The adults packed food for the entire trip. The smell, the salt of the fish sauce, the sweetness of brown sugar, and the scent of garlic oil teased my nose the whole ride.

  There were three children on the trip. My older cousin was eight or nine. My younger one was five. I was seven. I could read already. I spent the majority of the drive reading to my little cousin. The drive to California took three days. It was a long time—even for a kid who had lots of experience sitting and being on wheels.