The rear parking area was crowded with employees’ cars and more than forty sizable delivery trucks.
“I was picturing a mom-and-pop bakery,” Del said. “Yeah, that’s what it was twenty years ago. They still have two retail outlets, but from here they supply breads and pastries to lots of markets and restaurants, and not just Vietnamese restaurants, in Orange County and up in L.A. too.”
“It’s a little empire,” she said as she parked the van, doused the headlights, and switched off the engine.
“Even though it’s gotten this big, they keep up the quality—which is why they’ve grown in the first place.”
“You sound proud of them.”
“I am.”
“Then why aren’t you in the family business too?”
“I couldn’t breathe.”
“The heat of the ovens, you mean?”
“No.”
“An allergy to wheat flour?”
He sighed. “I wish. That would have made it easy to opt out. But the problem was… too much tradition.”
“You wanted to try radical new approaches to baking?”
He laughed softly. “I like you, Del.”
“Likewise, tofu boy.”
“Even if you are a little crazy.”
“I’m the sanest person you know.”
“It was family. Vietnamese families are sometimes so tightly bound, so structured, the parents so strict, traditions so… so like chains.”
“But you miss it too.”
“Not really.”
“Yes, you do,” she insisted. “There’s a deep sadness in you. A part of you is lost.”
“Not lost.”
“Definitely.”
“Well, maybe that’s what growing up is all about—losing parts of yourself so you can become something bigger, different, better.”
She said, “The thing from inside the doll is becoming bigger and different too.”
“Your point?”
“Different isn’t always better.”
Tommy met her gaze. In the dim light, her blue eyes were so dark that they might as well have been black, and they were even less readable than usual.
He said, “If I hadn’t found a different way, one that worked for me, I would have died inside—more than I have by losing some degree of connection with the family.”
“Then you did the right thing.”
“Whether it was or not, I did it, and it’s done.”
“The distance between you and them is a gap not a gulf. You can bridge it.”
“Never quite,” he disagreed.
“In fact, it’s no distance at all compared to the light-years we’ve all come from the Big Bang, all the billions of miles we’ve crossed since we were just primal matter.”
“Don’t go strange on me again, Del.”
“What strange?”
“I’m the Asian here. If anyone’s supposed to be inscrutable, it’s me.”
“Sometimes,” Deliverance Payne said, “you listen but you just don’t hear.”
“That’s what keeps me sane.”
“That’s what gets you in trouble.”
“Come on, let’s go see my brother.”
As they hurried through the rain, between two rows of delivery trucks, Del said, “How do you expect Gi to be able to help you?”
“He’s had to deal with the gangs, so he knows about them.”
“Gangs?”
“Cheap Boys. Pomona Boys. Their kind.”
The New World Saigon Bakery operated in three eight-hour shifts. From eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, Tommy’s father served as the shift manager while also conducting corporate business from his front office. From four o’clock until midnight, the oldest of the Phan brothers, Ton That, was the chief baker and the shift manager, and from midnight until eight in the morning, Gi Minh filled those same positions.
Organized gangs, intent on extortion, were active around the clock. But when they used sabotage to get their way, they preferred the cover of deep darkness, which meant that Gi, by virtue of running the graveyard shift, had been on duty during some of the nastier confrontations.
For years, all three men had worked seven days a week, a full fifty-six hours each, because most of the bakery’s customers needed fresh merchandise on a daily basis. When one of them needed to have a weekend off, the other two split his time between them and worked sixty-four-hour weeks without complaint. Vietnamese-Americans with an entrepreneurial bent were among the most industrious people in the country and could never be faulted for failing to carry their own weight. Sometimes, however, Tommy wondered how many of Ton’s and Gi’s generation—former refugees, boat children highly motivated to succeed by early memories of poverty and terror in Southeast Asia—would live long enough to retire and enjoy the peace that they had struggled so hard to earn.