‘You come to dinner?’ she asked.
‘Tonight? Gee, no, I can’t. See, I just-’
‘We have com tay cam.’
‘-just bought-’
‘You remember what is com tay cam – or maybe forget all about your mother’s cooking?’
‘Of course, I know what it is, Mom. Chicken and rice in a clay pot. It’s delicious.’
‘Also having shrimp and watercress soup. You remember shrimp and watercress soup?’
‘I remember, Mom.’
Night was creeping over the coast. Above the rising land to the east, the heavens were black and stippled with stars. To the west, the ocean was inky near the shore, striped with the silvery foam of incoming breakers, but indigo toward the horizon, where a final blade of bloody sunlight still cleaved the sea from the sky.
Cruising through the falling darkness, Tommy did feel a little bit like a god, as Jim Shine had promised. But he was unable to enjoy it because, at the same time, he felt too much like a thoughtless and ungrateful son.
His mother said, ‘Also having stir-fry celery, carrots, cabbage, some peanuts – very good. My Nuoc Mam sauce.’
‘You make the best Nuoc Mam in the world, and the best com tay cam, but I-’
‘Maybe you got wok there in car with phone, you can drive and cook at same time?’
In desperation he blurted, ‘Mom, I bought a new Corvette!’
‘You bought phone and Corvette?’
‘No, I’ve had the phone for years. The-’
‘What’s this Corvette?’
‘You know, Mom. A car. A sports car.’
‘You bought sports car?’
‘Remember, I always said if I was a big success some day-’
‘What sport?’
‘Huh?’
‘Football?’
His mother was stubborn, more of a traditionalist than was the Queen of England, and set in her ways, but she was not thickheaded or uninformed. She knew perfectly well what a sports car was, and she knew what a Corvette was, because Tommy’s bedroom walls had been papered with pictures of them when he was a kid. She also knew what a Corvette meant to Tommy, what it symbolized; she sensed that, in the Corvette, he was moving still farther away from his ethnic roots, and she disapproved. She wasn’t a screamer, however, and she wasn’t given to scolding, so the best way she could find to register her disapproval was to pretend that his car and his behaviour in general were so bizarre as to be virtually beyond her understanding.
‘Baseball?’ she asked.
‘They call the colour “bright aqua metallic.” It’s beautiful, Mom, a lot like the colour of that vase on your living-room mantel. It’s got-’
‘Expensive?’
‘Huh? Well, yeah, it’s a really good car. I mean, it doesn’t cost what a Mercedes-’
‘Reporters all drive Corvettes?’
‘Reporters? No, I’ve-’
‘You spend everything on car, go broke?’
‘No, no. I’d never-’
‘You go broke, don’t take welfare.’
‘I’m not broke, Mom.’
‘You go broke, you come home to live.’
‘That won’t be necessary, Mom.’
‘Family always here.’
Tommy felt like dirt. Although he had done nothing wrong, he felt uncomfortably revealed in the headlights of oncoming cars, as though they were the harsh lamps in a police interrogation room, and as though he was trying to conceal a crime.
He sighed and eased the Corvette into the right-hand lane, joining the slower traffic. He wasn’t capable of handling the car well, talking on the cellular phone, and sparring with his indefatigable mother.
She said, ‘Where’s your Toyota?’
‘I traded it on the Corvette.’
‘Your reporter friends drive Toyota. Honda. Ford. Never see one drive Corvette.’
‘I thought you didn’t know what a Corvette was?’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes, I know,’ making one of those abrupt hundred-eighty-degree turns that only a mother could perform without credibility whiplash. ‘Doctors drive Corvette. You are always smart, Tuong, get good grades, could have been doctor.’
Sometimes it seemed that most of the Vietnamese-Americans of Tommy’s generation were studying to be doctors or were already in practice. A medical degree signified assimilation and prestige, and Vietnamese parents pushed their children toward the healing professions with the aggressive love with which Jewish parents, of a previous generation, had pushed their children. Tommy, with a degree in journalism, would never be able to remove anyone’s appendix or perform cardiovascular surgery, so he would forever be some-thing of a disappointment to his mother and father.