Buddha’s Candor
Houston TX, circa 1966
In the days before Panda Express, the lunchtime line for Happy Buddha restaurant snaked along Hinton Street like a reticulated python, stretching for blocks even on the rainiest of Wednesdays. Customers would leave the establishment looking not unlike the smiling gold idol that was perched along the edge of the cashier’s counter, which only fueled the frenzy.
Auntie Wah, the owner’s wife, had bought the 6-inch statuette for the restaurant from a local pawn shop. Not that Auntie Wah was known for being particularly devout as a Buddhist. Her signature fashion piece was a pair of apricot-sized gold earrings – “32 carat, real Peruvian gold, just a little something from Mayor Cutrer for blessing their town with such heavenly chicken dumplings” – that glimmered underneath her five-inch perm. Her eternally crimson mouth was famous for its split-second morphs from smile to smirk. Ah Long, the staff manager, speculated that Auntie Wah had probably picked the idol up on a whim because she thought it paired well with the dark red carpet.
Even the restaurant’s English name had been pasted across the storefront as an afterthought. Its real name was 宝宝樓, pronounced in Cantonese as “Bobo lau.” Waitresses were trained to explain to inquiring customers that the restaurant’s Chinese name meant “treasured house.” No one ever asked though, and the first two syllables of the name were often handled clumsily by customers to sound like the name of a certain clown, somewhat diminishing the “luckiness” of the original moniker. Reasoning that the Chinese name was not a battle worth fighting, the owners stamped the name “Happy Buddha” on top of business cards, flyers, chopstick wrappers, and newspaper ads. “宝宝樓” became a secret name of affection among staff workers, a name in small black letters that would barely register in the peripheral vision of customers whose cultural appetites were already dazzled by the smoke that rose from the sizzling stir-fry.
Besides the generous portions of 50 cent lo mein, customers were lured to Happy Buddha restaurant by the shyly smiling hostesses who stood at the front of the restaurant. Eternally smooth-faced, the women wore loose black slacks and silk cheongsam tops, which hung loosely in the chest area, but wrapped nicely around their slender waists. Loud and gossipy in Cantonese, these women would soften their words as they caught sight of gwai-los (foreigners) at the doorway, foreigners whose bulging wallets were the sustenance of their families. The women spoke this way not from any conscious desire to whore themselves out for the establishment, but rather to soften the grating additives that they heard in their own English. Still, customers were reminded of the cinematic Suzie Wong when these women spoke – their sentences sultry and melodious like the rustling of rickshaw wheels from a Technicolor dreamland, far, far away, beyond the granite pastures of Houston, Texas.
However past the smiling waitresses and stone-faced bus boys, past the elaborate horse scroll paintings and embroidered table mats, and behind a dingy two-way door, was a boy from Hong Kong who washed dishes at the back of the restaurant every day, from 4 pm to 11 pm. His feet, which hadn’t even seen their tenth year, stood patiently on top of a cheap orange stool as his hands – raw from the hot water – dipped in and out of the frothy soap suds, clanging metal spoons against china plates as plastic soda cups were pushed against green-glazed bowls.
Thick lips, straight black bangs – the boy’s face could have passed for that of a girl’s. His heavily-lidded eyes were as round as his pre-pubescent cheeks, which were almost chipmunk- like in their puffiness. His lips clenched together, the boy gave the impression that he was using all of his concentration and finger strength to scrape off the grains of white rice that were clinging to the bottom of the serving bowl.
But a look into his eyes told a different story. Not quite dreamy, but not quite blank – his eyes appeared occupied, but distant to anyone who might have bothered to look at him in that moment.
He might have been thinking about the worksheets that were still sitting in his backpack, ones that his mother would shriek about in the morning when she found out that he had gone to bed without touching them. He might have been thinking about Nina Aranda’s curly hair, which was unlike anything he had ever touched before. He could have possibly been thinking about Mrs. Alberson, his English teacher, who had tilted her head when she came to the name “Gee, Chung-Kai” on the roster – which admittedly stood out among the Malcolms, Jeremiahs and Rosas of the classroom. Her orange manicured fingers had tapped the clipboard twice before using her purple pen to scratch a thin, wobbly line across the troubling letters.
“What’s your English name?”
He had looked into his teacher’s pretty blue eyes, and blinked, willing his voice to make a sound, any sound, to not disappoint those light blue eyes. He heard the girl behind him snicker.
“What’s wrong, China boy? Say somethin’.”
Mrs. Alberson smiled and hushed the heckler, her purple pen making squeaky noises as it etched out roman letters. She showed her clipboard to him.
Charlie.
…
Tap. Tap. Taptaptap – thud.
“Come on! You’re gonna be late China boy!”
Charlie could see Nina standing at his window, but he let his eyelids fall back down anyway, his body trying to absorb what little seconds of sleep that were left in the morning.
“Dammit Charlie, if you don’t get up right now, I’m going to school without you.”
Even though this was a game that they played every morning, Charlie never got tired of hearing Nina threaten him with a voice that reminded him of the spiced coffee that Mrs.
Alberson was fond of bringing to class every morning.
It seemed to Charlie that all of the women in his life enjoyed smiling at him as they cussed at him for being late. Smiling with her teeth but not her eyes, Auntie Wah would cuss him out breathlessly in front of customers, telling him things in Cantonese like “get to the kitchen, you stupid worthless boy.” Mrs. Alberson was the opposite – her eyes would be crinkled with kindness as her paprika-tinted lips asked him why the “hell” he had fallen asleep by the tire swings again. Only Nina cussed at him with soft eyes and a warm smile.
Two inches taller than him, Nina greeted him with a quick brush on the head when she saw him emerge from the door.
“You had a speck in your hair.”
She always found some sort of excuse to touch Charlie’s hair – some days it was a tuft of hair was sticking out messily, other days she was merely swatting away imaginary mosquitoes that had been hovering close to Charlie’s scalp. Charlie suspected that she marveled over the softness of Charlie’s ebony hair just as the novelty of touching Nina’s curls never left Charlie.
Today, like most other days, Nina did most of the talking on their way to school. “And I told my papi that it would be okay because I still had some birthday money left over from Tio Robert. A few food stamps for beer wasn’t going to kill anyone.”
They passed by Woolworth’s latest store front, which was artfully plastered this week with Bazooka gum wrappers and advertisements for the latest flavor of Fizzy’s soda candy.
“Wait, can we go back for a second? I wanna grab something for my brothers real quick.”
She rummaged through her jumper pockets, which they both knew were empty. “Do you have any coins on you, Charlie?”
Charlie took a quarter from his pocket and pressed it into her palm. “Thanks Charlie. You’re the best. I’ll pay you back soon, I promise.”
He watched as Nina entered the store, circling the aisles a few times before quietly slipping a moon pie into her book bag.
She emerged a few minutes later, her skinny knees trembling slightly as her left hand calmly touched Charlie’s shoulder.
“Okay! Got what we needed – sorry, hope I didn’t make you wait too long.”
He smiled at her, wishing that he had the words to tell that he understood – he had seen how skinny her little brothers were the last time he came by her house. Their kind of skinny was different from his kind – he always got fed at Happy Buddha, his body just never absorbed any of it. Nina’s brothers on the other hand, were only plump at the beginning of every month when the government checks came in.
Only half the class was seated when they arrived at Ms. Alberson’s classroom. Charlie immediately laid his head down on his wooden desk.
“Shoot, forgot to ask you earlier - are you done with your homework yet, Charlie?” He could feel Nina’s concern drilling into the back of his head.
“Shoot, shoot. Miz Alberson is going to check homework any minute now. You can’t get another zero. Here, give me your worksheet.”
She copied over her answers in a messy imitation of his usual scrawl, finishing just as Ms. Alberson walked into the classroom, mug of cinnamon coffee in hand and a tune at the top of her lips.
Charlie looked at Nina with grateful eyes.
“Why I always gotta look out for you, China boy?”
…
Charlie would lose Nina three years from now, when the heat of puberty would rise and bring a stuttering fog into their friendship. It would happen one summer afternoon, when Nina would tell Charlie that she didn’t feel well and needed to lay down. “No, not my house,” she would tell him. “I want to lay down at your house.” And Charlie, a suppressed flurry of hormones and anxiety, would bring her to his room and shut the door, checking the doorknob twice to make sure it was locked.
Nina would sit on his bed as he stood at his dresser, fidgeting with the discolored buttons of his second-hand radio. “Come lay down with me,” Nina would tell him, but Charlie would continue to stand there stupidly in the same spot, grazing her body only with his eyes.
Nina would still call Charlie occasionally after that incident, but a few weeks into August, Charlie would see Nina holding her red tape player as she sat next to another boy on the granite steps of Woolworth’s – their sun-kissed moreno bodies close to each other as they listened to Anne Murray croon the lyrics of “Danny’s Song” into the warm summer air.