Would it have killed him to accept her invitation to dinner? She had made shrimp and watercress soup, com toy cam, and stir-fried vegetables with Nuoc Mom sauce – three of his favourite dishes when he was a child. Clearly, she had worked hard in the kitchen, hoping to lure him home, and he had rejected her, disappointed her. There was no excuse for turning her down, especially since he hadn’t seen her and his father for weeks.
No. Wrong. That was her line: Tuong, haven’t seen you in weeks. On the phone, he had reminded her that this was Thursday and that they had spent Sunday together. But now here he was, minutes later, buying into her fantasy of abandonment!
Suddenly his mother seemed to be all of the stereotypical Asian villains from old movies and books rolled into one: as manipulative as Ming the Merciless, as wily as Fu Manchu.
He blinked at the red traffic light, shocked to have had such a mean-spirited thought about his own mother. This confirmed it: He was a swine.
More than anything, Tommy Phan wanted to be an American, not a Vietnamese-American, just an American, with no hyphen. But surely he didn’t have to reject his family, didn’t have to be rude and mean to his beloved mother, to achieve that much-desired state of complete Americanisation.
Ming the Merciless. Fu Manchu, the Yellow Peril. Dear God, he had become a raging bigot. He seemed to have deceived himself into believing he was a white person.
He looked at his hands on the steering wheel. They were the colour of burnished bronze. In the rear-view mirror, he studied the epicanthic folds of his dark Asian eyes, wondering if he was in danger of trading his true identity for one that was a lie.
Fu Manchu.
If he could think such unkind things about his mother, he might slip up eventually and say them to her face. She would be crushed. The prospect of it left him breathless with anticipatory fear, and his mouth went as dry as powder, and his throat swelled so tight that he was unable to swallow. It would be more merciful to take a gun and shoot her. Just shoot her in the heart.
So this was the kind of son he had become. The kind of son who shoots his mother in the heart with words.
The traffic light changed from red to green, but he couldn’t immediately lift his foot off the brake pedal. He was immobilized by a terrible weight of self-loathing.
Behind the Corvette, another motorist tapped his horn. ‘I just want to live my own life,’ Tommy said miserably as he finally drove through the intersection.
Lately he had been talking aloud to himself far too much. The strain of living his own life and still being a good son was making him crazy.
He reached for the cellular phone, intending to call his mom and ask if the dinner invitation was still open.
Car phones for big shots.
Not anymore. Everybody’s got one.
I don’t. Phone and drive too dangerous.
I’ve never had an accident, Mom.
You will.
He could hear her voice as clearly as if she were speaking those words now rather than in memory, and he snatched his hand away from the phone.
On the west side of the Pacific Coast Highway was a restaurant styled as a 1950’s diner. Impulsively, Tommy swung into the lot and parked in the glow of red neon.
Inside, the place was fragrant with the aromas of onions, hamburgers sizzling on a grill, and pickle relish. Ensconced in a tufted red-vinyl booth, Tommy ordered a cheeseburger, French fries, and a chocolate milkshake.
In his mind’s ear, his mother’s voice replayed: Clay-pot chicken and rice better than lousy cheeseburgers.
‘Make that two cheeseburgers,’ Tommy amended as the waitress finished taking his order and started to turn away from his booth.
‘Skipped lunch, huh?’ she asked.
Too much cheeseburgers and French fries, soon you look like big fat cheeseburger.
‘And an order of onion rings,’ Tommy said defiantly, certain that farther north, in Huntington Beach, his mother had just flinched with the psychic awareness of his betrayal.